The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (15 page)

After Salander’s attack on Zalachenko, Björck had surreptitiously engaged Teleborian as an outside consultant to the Section.

The solution to the problem had been very simple. Karl Axel Bodin would disappear into rehabilitative custody. Agneta Sofia Salander would necessarily disappear into an institution for long-term care. All the police reports on the case were collected at SIS and transferred by way of the assistant head of Secretariat to the Section.

Teleborian was assistant head physician at St. Stefan’s psychiatric clinic for children in Uppsala. All that was needed was a legal psychiatric report, which Björck and Teleborian drafted together, and then a brief and, as it turned out, uncontested decision in a district court. It was a question only of how the case was presented. The constitution had nothing to do with it. It was, after all, a matter of national security.

Besides, Salander was obviously insane. A few years in an institution would do her nothing but good. Gullberg had approved the operation.

This solution to their multiple problems presented itself at a time when the Zalachenko unit was on its way to being dissolved. The Soviet Union had ceased to exist, and Zalachenko’s usefulness was definitively a thing of the past.

The unit procured a generous severance package from Security Police funds. They arranged for him to have the best rehabilitative care, and after six months they put him on a flight to Spain. From that moment on, they made it clear to Zalachenko that he and the Section were going their separate ways. It had been one of Gullberg’s last responsibilities. One week later he reached retirement age and handed the reins to his chosen successor, Fredrik Clinton. Thereafter Gullberg acted only as an adviser in especially sensitive matters. He stayed in Stockholm for another three years and worked almost daily at the Section, but the number of his assignments decreased, and gradually he disengaged himself. He then returned to his hometown of Laholm and did some work from there. At first he had travelled frequently to Stockholm, but he made these journeys less and less often, and eventually not at all.

He had not even thought about Zalachenko for months, until the morning he discovered the daughter in every newspaper headline.

Gullberg followed the story in a state of bewilderment. It was no accident, of course, that Bjurman had been Salander’s guardian; on the other hand, he couldn’t see why the old Zalachenko story should surface. Salander was obviously deranged, so it was no surprise that she had killed these
people, but that Zalachenko might have any connection to the affair had not dawned on him. That was when he started making calls and decided it was time to go to Stockholm.

The Section was faced with its worst crisis since the day he had created it.

Zalachenko dragged himself to the toilet. Now that he had crutches, he could move around his room. On Sunday he forced himself through short, sharp training sessions. The pain in his jaw was still excruciating, and he could manage only liquid food, but he could get out of his bed and begin to cover small distances. Having lived so long with a prosthesis, he was used to crutches. He practiced moving noiselessly on them, manoeuvring back and forth around his bed. Every time his right foot touched the floor, a terrible pain shot up his leg.

He gritted his teeth. He thought about the fact that his daughter was very close by. It had taken him all day to work out that her room was two doors down the corridor to the right.

The night nurse had been gone ten minutes; everything was quiet; it was 2:00 in the morning. Zalachenko laboriously got up and fumbled for his crutches. He listened at the door but heard nothing. He pulled open the door and went into the corridor. He heard faint music from the nurses’ station. He made his way to the end of the corridor, pushed open the door, and looked into the empty landing where the elevators were. Going back down the corridor, he stopped at the door to his daughter’s room and rested there on his crutches for half a minute, listening.

Salander opened her eyes when she heard a scraping sound. It was as though someone was dragging something along the corridor. For a moment there was only silence, and she wondered if she was imagining things. Then she heard the same sound again, moving away. Her uneasiness grew.

Zalachenko was out there somewhere.

She felt fettered to her bed. Her skin itched under the neck brace. She felt an intense desire to move, to get up. Gradually she succeeded in sitting up. That was all she could manage. She sank back onto the pillow.

She ran her hand over her neck brace and located the fastenings that held it in place. She opened them and dropped the brace to the floor. Immediately it was easier to breathe.

What she wanted more than anything was a weapon, and to have the strength to get up and finish the job once and for all.

With difficulty she propped herself up, switched on the night light, and looked around the room. She could see nothing that would serve her purpose. Then her eyes fell on a nurses’ table on the wall across from her bed. Someone had left a pencil there.

She waited until the night nurse had come and gone, which tonight she seemed to be doing about every half hour. Presumably the reduced frequency of the nurse’s visits meant that the doctors had decided her condition had improved; over the weekend the nurses had checked on her at least once every ten minutes. She could hardly notice any difference herself.

When she was alone she gathered her strength, sat up, and swung her legs over the side of the bed. She had electrodes taped to her body to record her pulse and breathing, but the wires stretched in the direction of the pencil. She put her weight on her feet and stood up. Suddenly she swayed, off balance. For a second she felt as though she would faint, but she steadied herself against the bed and concentrated her gaze on the table in front of her. She took small, wobbly steps, reached out and grabbed the pencil.

Then she retreated slowly to the bed. She was exhausted.

After a while she managed to pull the sheet and blanket up to her chin. She studied the pencil. It was a plain wooden pencil, newly sharpened. It would make a passable weapon—for stabbing a face or an eye.

She laid it next to her hip and fell asleep.

Blomkvist got up just after 9:00 and called Eriksson at
Millennium
.

“Good morning, editor in chief,” he said.

“I’m still in shock that Erika is gone and you want me to take her place. Her office is empty.”

“Then it would probably be a good idea to spend the day moving in there.”

“I feel extremely self-conscious.”

“Don’t be. Everyone agrees that you’re the best choice. And if need be, you can always come to me or Christer.”

“Thank you for your trust in me.”

“You’ve earned it,” Blomkvist said. “Just keep working the way you always do. We’ll deal with any problems as and when they crop up.”

He told her he was going to be at home all day writing. Eriksson realized that he was reporting in to her the way he had with Berger.

“OK. Is there anything you want us to do?”

“No. On the contrary . . . if you have any instructions for me, just call. I’m still on the Salander story, trying to find out what’s happening there, but for everything else to do with the magazine, the ball’s in your court. You make the decisions. You’ll have my support if you need it.”

“And what if I make a wrong decision?”

“If I see or hear anything out of the ordinary, we’ll talk it through. But it would have to be something very unusual. Generally there aren’t any decisions that are 100 percent right or wrong. You’ll make your decisions, and they might not be the same ones Erika would have made or even that I would have made. But your decisions are the ones that count.”

“All right.”

“If you’re a good boss, then you’ll discuss any concerns with the others.
First with Henry and Christer, then with me, and we’ll raise any problems at the editorial meetings.”

“I’ll do my best.”

“Good luck.”

He sat down on the sofa in the living room with his iBook on his lap and worked without any breaks all day. When he was finished, he had a rough draft of two articles totalling twenty-one pages focused on the deaths of Svensson and Johansson—what they were working on, why they were killed, and who the killer was. He estimated that he would have to produce twice as much text again for the summer issue. He also had to resolve how to profile Salander in the article without violating her trust. He knew things about her that she would never want published.

Gullberg had a single slice of bread and a cup of black coffee in Freys café. Then he took a taxi to Artillerigatan in Östermalm. At 9:15 he introduced himself on the entry phone and was buzzed inside. He took the elevator to the seventh floor, where he was received by Birger Wadensjöö, the new chief of the Section.

Wadensjöö had been one of the latest recruits to the Section around the time Gullberg retired. He wished that the decisive Fredrik was still there. Clinton had succeeded Gullberg and was the chief of the Section until 2002, when diabetes and coronary artery disease had forced him into retirement. Gullberg did not have a clear sense of what Wadensjöö was made of.

“Welcome, Evert,” Wadensjöö said, shaking hands with his former chief. “It’s good of you to take the time to come in.”

“Time is more or less all I have,” Gullberg said.

“You know how it goes. I wish we had the leisure to stay in touch with faithful old colleagues.”

Gullberg ignored the insinuation. He turned left into his old office and sat at the round conference table by the window. He assumed it was Wadensjöö who was responsible for the Chagall and Mondrian reproductions. In his day, plans of the warships
Kronan
and
Wasa
had hung on the walls. He had always dreamed about the sea, and he was in fact a naval officer, although he had spent only a few brief months at sea during his military service. There were computers now, but otherwise the room looked almost exactly as when he had left. Wadensjöö poured coffee.

“The others are on their way,” he said. “I thought we could have a few words first.”

“How many in the Section are still here from my day?”

“Apart from me, only Otto Hallberg and Georg Nyström. Hallberg is retiring this year, and Nyström is turning sixty. Otherwise it’s new recruits. You’ve probably met some of them before.”

“How many are working for the Section today?”

“We’ve reorganized a bit.”

“And?”

“There are seven full-timers. So we’ve cut back. But there’s a total of thirty-one employees of the Section within SIS. Most of them never come here. They take care of their normal jobs and do some discreet moonlighting for us should the need or opportunity arise.”

“Thirty-one employees.”

“Plus the seven here. You were the one who created the system, after all. We’ve just fine-tuned it. Today we have what’s called an internal and external organization. When we recruit somebody, they’re given a leave of absence for a time to go to our school. Hallberg is in charge of training, which is six weeks for the basics. We do it out at the Naval School. Then they go back to their regular jobs in SIS, but now they work for us.”

“I see.”

“It’s an excellent system. Most of our employees have no idea of the others’ existence. And here in the Section we function principally as report recipients. The same rules apply as in your day. We have to be a single-level organization.”

“Do you have an operations unit?”

Wadensjöö frowned. In Gullberg’s day the Section had a small operations unit consisting of four people under the command of the shrewd Hans von Rottinger.

“Well, not exactly. Von Rottinger died five years ago. We have a younger talent who does some field work, but usually we use someone from the external organization if necessary. Of course, things have become more complicated technically, for example when we need to arrange a telephone tap or enter an apartment. Nowadays there are alarms and other devices everywhere.”

Gullberg nodded. “Budget?”

“About eleven million a year total. A third goes to salaries, a third to overheads, and a third to operations.”

“The budget has shrunk.”

“A little. But we have fewer people, which means that the operations budget has actually increased.”

“Tell me about our relationship to SIS.”

Wadensjöö shook his head. “The chief of Secretariat and the chief of
Budget belong to us. Formally, the chief of Secretariat is the only one who has insight into our activities. We’re so secret that we don’t exist. But in practice, two assistant chiefs know of our existence. They do their best to ignore anything they hear about us.”

“Which means that if problems arise, the present SIS leadership will have an unpleasant surprise. What about the defence leadership and the government?”

“We cut off the defence leadership some ten years ago. And governments come and go.”

“So if the shit hits the fan, we’re on our own?”

Wadensjöö nodded. “That’s the drawback with this arrangement. The advantages are obvious. But our assignments have also changed. There’s a new realpolitik in Europe since the Soviet Union collapsed. Our work is less and less about identifying spies. It’s about terrorism, and about evaluating the political suitability of individuals in sensitive positions.”

“That’s what it was always about.”

There was a knock at the door. Gullberg looked up to see a smartly dressed man of about sixty and a younger man in jeans and a tweed jacket.

“Come in. . . . Evert Gullberg, this is Jonas Sandberg. He’s been working here for four years and is in charge of operations. He’s the one I told you about. And Georg Nyström you know.”

“Hello, Georg,” Gullberg said.

They all shook hands. Then Gullberg turned to Sandberg.

“So where do you come from?”

“Most recently from Göteborg,” Sandberg said lightly. “I went to see him.”

“Zalachenko?”

Sandberg nodded.

“Have a seat, gentlemen,” Wadensjöö said.

“Björck,” Gullberg said, frowning when Wadensjöö lit a cigarillo. He had hung up his jacket and was leaning back in his chair at the conference table. Wadensjöö glanced at Gullberg and was struck by how thin the old man had become.