It was 7.30 in the morning when Needham and Blomkvist made their way down the steps from Grane’s summer house to the Audi in the parking area by the beach. Snow lay over the landscape and neither of them said a word. At 5.30 Blomkvist had got a text message from Salander, as brisk and to the point as ever.
<August unhurt. We’ll keep our heads down a while longer.>
Again Salander had not mentioned her own state of health. But it was an incredible relief to hear about the boy. Afterwards Blomkvist had been questioned at length by Modig and Holmberg and he told them every detail of what he and the magazine had been doing over the past few days. They were not friendly or well disposed towards him, yet he got the feeling that somehow they understood. Now, an hour later, he was walking past the jetty. Up the slope a deer scampered into the forest. Blomkvist settled into the driving seat and waited for Needham, who came loping along in his wake. The American’s back was giving him trouble.
On the way to Brunn they found themselves in traffic. For several minutes nothing moved and Blomkvist thought of Zander, who was constantly on his mind. They had still not had any sign of life from him.
“Can you get something noisy on the radio?” Needham said.
Blomkvist tuned into 107.1 and got James Brown belting out what a sex machine he was.
“Give me your phones,” Needham said.
He stacked them next to the speakers at the back of the car. He clearly meant to talk about something sensitive, and Blomkvist had nothing against that — he had to write his story and needed all the facts he could get. But he also knew better than most that there’s no such thing as a leak without an agenda. Although Blomkvist felt a certain affinity with Needham and even appreciated his grumpy charm, he did not trust him for one second.
“Let’s hear it,” he said.
“You could put it this way,” Needham began. “We know that in business and industry there’s always someone taking advantage of inside information.”
“Agreed.”
“For a while we were pretty much spared that in the world of intelligence, for the simple reason that we guarded different kinds of secrets. The dynamite was elsewhere. But since the end of the Cold War, all that has changed. Surveillance in general has become more widespread. These days we control huge amounts of valuable material.”
“And there are people taking advantage of this, you say.”
“Well, that’s basically the whole point of it. Corporate espionage helps keep companies informed about the strengths and weaknesses of the competition. It’s a grey area. Something that was seen as criminal or unethical decades ago is now standard operating procedure. We haven’t been much better at the N.S.A., in fact maybe we’re even...”
“The worst?”
“Just take it easy, let me finish,” Needham said. “I’d say we have a certain moral code. But we’re a large organization with tens of thousands of employees and inevitably there are rotten apples — even one or two very highly placed rotten apples I was thinking of handing you.”
“Out of the kindness of your heart, of course,” Blomkvist said with a touch of sarcasm.
“O.K., maybe not entirely. But listen. When senior management at our place crosses the line and gets into criminal activities, what do you think happens?”
“Nothing very nice.”
“As you know, there’s a corrupt unit at Solifon, headed up by a man called Zigmund Eckerwald, whose job it is to find out what the competing tech companies are up to. They not only steal the technology but also sell what they steal. That’s bad for Solifon and maybe even for the whole Nasdaq.”
“And for you too.”
“That’s right. It turns out that our two most senior executives in industrial espionage — their names are Jacob Barclay and Brian Abbot — get help from Eckerwald and his gang. In exchange the N.S.A. helps Eckerwald with large-scale communications monitoring. Solifon identifies where the big innovations are happening, and our idiots pluck out the drawings and the technical details.”
“I assume the money this brings in doesn’t always end up in the state coffers.”
“It’s worse than that, buddy. If you do this sort of thing as a state employee, you make yourself very vulnerable, especially because Eckerwald and his gang are also helping major criminals. To be fair, at first they probably didn’t know their clients were major criminals.”
“But that’s what they were?”
“Damn right. And they took advantage too. I could only dream of recruiting hackers at their level of expertise, and the very essence of their business is to exploit information, so you can imagine: once they realized what our guys at the N.S.A. were up to, they knew they were sitting on a goldmine.”
“So they were in a position to blackmail.”
“Talk about having the upper hand. Our guys haven’t just been stealing from large corporations. They’ve also plundered small family businesses and solo entrepreneurs who are struggling to survive. It wouldn’t look too good if everything came out. So as a result the N.S.A. is forced to help not just Eckerwald and Solifon, but also the criminals.”
“You mean the Spiders?”
“You got it. Maybe for a while everyone stays happy. It’s big business and the money’s rolling in. But then a little genius pops up in the middle of the action, a certain Professor Balder, and he’s just as good at ferreting around as he is at doing everything else. So he finds out about this scheme, or at least part of it. Then of course everyone’s scared shitless and decides that something has to be done. I’m not entirely clear on how these decisions got made. I’m guessing our guys hoped legal threats would be enough. But when you’re in bed with a bunch of criminals... The Spiders prefer violence, so they draw our guys into the plan at a late stage, just to bind them in even more tightly.”
“Jesus.”
“I would never have gotten to know any of this if we hadn’t been hacked,” Needham said.
“Another reason to leave the hacker in peace.”
“Which is exactly what I’m going to do, so long as she tells me how she did it.”
“I don’t know how much your promises are worth, but there’s another thing I’ve been wondering about,” Blomkvist said.
“Shoot.”
“You mentioned two guys, Barclay and Abbot. Are you sure it stops with them? Who’s their boss?”
“I can’t give you his name unfortunately. It’s classified.”
“I suppose I’ll have to live with that.”
“You will,” Needham said inflexibly. At that moment Blomkvist noticed that traffic was starting to flow again.
Chapter 28
Professor Edelman was standing in the car park at the Karolinska Institute wondering what in heaven’s name he had let himself in for. He was embarking on an arrangement which would mean his having to cancel a whole series of meetings, lectures and conferences.
Even so he felt strangely elated. He had been entranced not just by the boy but also by the young woman who looked as if she had come straight from a street brawl, but who drove a brand new B.M.W. and spoke with chilling authority. He had barely been aware of what he was doing when he said, “Yes, sure, why not?” to her questions, although it was obviously both foolish and rash. The only grain of independence he had shown was to have declined all offers of compensation.
He was going to pay his own travel and hotel expenses, he said. He must have felt guilty. But he was moved to take the boy under his wing, his scientific curiosity was piqued. A savant who both drew with photographic exactitude and could perform prime-number factorization — how absolutely riveting. To his own surprise he even decided to skip the Nobel Prize dinner. The young woman had made him take leave altogether of his senses.