The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (37 page)

She wondered if he was pulling her leg.

“Lisbeth, I’m wondering . . .”

He then said nothing for such a long time that Salander almost asked what he wanted. But she waited for him to speak.

“Would you be angry if I asked you a personal question? I want to ask you as a private individual, not as a doctor. I won’t make any record of your answer, and I won’t discuss it with anyone else. And you don’t have to answer if you don’t want to.”

“What is it?”

“Since you were shut up at St. Stefan’s when you were twelve, you’ve refused to respond when any psychiatrist has tried to talk to you. Why is that?”

Salander’s eyes darkened, but they were utterly expressionless as she looked at Jonasson. She sat in silence for two minutes.

“Why do you want to know?” she said at last.

“To be honest, I’m not really sure. I think I’m trying to understand something.”

Her lips curled a little. “I don’t talk to crazy-doctors because they never listen to what I have to say.”

Jonasson laughed. “OK. Tell me . . . what do you think of Peter Teleborian?”

Jonasson threw out the name so unexpectedly that Salander almost jumped. Her eyes narrowed.

“What the hell is this, Twenty Questions? What are you after?” Her voice sounded like sandpaper.

Jonasson leaned forward, almost too close.

“Because a—what did you call it—a crazy-doctor by the name of Peter Teleborian, who’s somewhat renowned in my profession, has been to see me twice in the past few days, trying to convince me to let him examine you.”

Salander felt an icy chill run down her spine.

“The district court is going to appoint him to do a forensic psychiatric assessment of you.”

“And?”

“I don’t like the man. I’ve told him he can’t see you. Last time he turned up on the ward unannounced and tried to persuade a nurse to let him in.”

Salander pressed her lips tight.

“His behaviour was a bit odd and a little too eager. So I want to know what you think of him.”

This time it was Jonasson’s turn to wait patiently for Salander’s reply.

“Teleborian is a beast,” she said at last.

“Is it something personal between the two of you?”

“You could say that.”

“I’ve also had a conversation with an official who wants me to let Teleborian see you.”

“And?”

“I asked what sort of medical expertise he thought he had to assess your condition and then I told him to go to hell. More diplomatically than that, of course. And one last question. Why are you talking to me?”

“You asked me a question, didn’t you?”

“Yes, but I’m a doctor and I’ve studied psychiatry. So why are you talking to me? Should I take it to mean that you have a certain amount of trust in me?”

She did not reply.

“Then I’ll choose to interpret it that way. I want you to know this: you are my patient. That means that I work for you and not for anyone else.”

She gave him a suspicious look. He looked back at her for a moment. Then he spoke in a lighter tone of voice.

“From a medical standpoint, as I said, you’re more or less healthy. But unfortunately you’re a bit too healthy.”

“Why ‘unfortunately’?”

He gave her a cheerful smile. “You’re getting better too fast.”

“What do you mean?”

“It means that I have no legitimate reason to keep you isolated here. And the prosecutor will soon be having you transferred to a prison in Stockholm to await trial in six weeks. I’m guessing that such a request will arrive next week. And that means that Teleborian will be given the chance to observe you.”

She sat utterly still. Jonasson seemed distracted, and he bent over to arrange her pillow. He spoke as if thinking out loud.

“You don’t have much of a headache or any fever, so Dr. Endrin is probably going to discharge you.” He stood up suddenly. “Thanks for talking to me. I’ll come back and see you before you’re transferred.”

He was already at the door when she spoke.

“Dr. Jonasson?”

He turned towards her.

“Thank you.”

He nodded curtly once before he went out and locked the door.

Salander stared for a long time at the locked door. And then she lay back and stared up at the ceiling.

That was when she felt that there was something hard beneath her head. She lifted the pillow and saw to her surprise a small cloth bag that had definitely not been there before. She opened it and stared in amazement at a Palm Tungsten T3 hand-held computer and battery charger. Then she looked more closely at the computer and saw the little scratch on the top left corner. Her heart skipped a beat.
It’s my Palm. But how . . . ?
In amazement she glanced over at the locked door. Jonasson was a catalogue of surprises. In great excitement, she turned on the computer and discovered that it was password-protected.

She stared in frustration at the blinking screen. It seemed to be challenging her.
How the hell did they think I would . . . ?
Then she looked in the cloth bag and found at the bottom a scrap of folded paper. She unfolded it and read a line written in an elegant script:

Salander laughed aloud for the first time in weeks.
Touché
. She thought for a few seconds. Then she picked up the stylus and wrote the number combination 9277, which corresponded to the letters
W-A-S-P
on the keyboard.
It was a code that Kalle Fucking Blomkvist had been forced to work out when he got into her apartment on Fiskargatan uninvited and tripped the burglar alarm.

It did not work.

She tried 52553, which corresponded to the letters
K-A-L-L-E
.

That did not work either. Since Blomkvist presumably intended that she should use the computer, he must have chosen a simple password. He had used the signature Kalle, which normally he hated. She free-associated. She thought for a moment. It must be some insult. Then she typed in 74774, which corresponded to the word
P-I-P-P-I
—Pippi Fucking Longstocking.

The computer started up.

There was a smiley face on the screen with a cartoon speech balloon:

She found the document [Hi, Sally] at the top of the list. She clicked on it and read:

Salander read his letter twice, staring in bewilderment at the Palm. After a period of computer celibacy, she was suffering from massive cyber-abstinence. And she wondered which big toe Blomkvist had been thinking with when he smuggled her a computer but forgot that she needed a mobile to connect to the Net.

She was still thinking when she heard footsteps in the corridor. She turned the computer off at once and shoved it under her pillow. As she heard the key in the door she realized that the cloth bag and charger were still in view on the bedside table. She reached out and slid the bag under the covers and pressed the coil of cord into her crotch. She lay passively looking up at the ceiling when the night nurse came in, said a polite hello, and asked how she was doing and whether she needed anything.

Salander told her that she was doing fine and that she wanted a pack of cigarettes. This request was turned down in a firm but friendly tone. She was given a pack of nicotine gum. As the nurse was closing the door, Salander glimpsed the guard on his chair out in the corridor. She waited until she heard the nurse’s steps receding before she once again picked up her Palm.

She turned it on and searched for connectivity.

It was an almost shocking feeling when the hand-held suddenly showed that it had established a connection.
Contact with the Net. Unbelievable
.

She jumped out of bed so fast that she felt a pain in her injured hip.
How?
She walked all the way around the room, examining every nook and cranny. No, there was no mobile. And yet she had connectivity. Then a crooked grin spread across her face. The connection was radio-controlled and locked into a mobile via Bluetooth, which had a range of ten to twelve yards. Her eyes lit upon an air vent just below the ceiling.

Kalle Fucking Blomkvist had somehow planted a mobile just outside her room. That could be the only explanation.

But why not smuggle in the mobile too? Ah, of course. The batteries
.

Her Palm had to be recharged only once every three days. A mobile that
was connected, if she surfed it hard, would burn out its batteries in much less time. Blomkvist—or more likely somebody he had hired and who was
out there
—would have to change the batteries at regular intervals.

But he had sent in the charger for her Palm.
He isn’t so stupid after all
.

Salander began by deciding where to keep the hand-held. She had to find a hiding place. There were outlets by the door and in the panel behind the bed, which provided electricity for her bedside lamp and digital clock. There was a recess where a radio had been removed. She smiled. Both the battery charger and the Palm could fit in there. She could use the outlet inside the bedside table to charge the Palm during the day.

Salander was happy. Her heart was pounding hard when she started up the hand-held for the first time in two months and ventured onto the Internet.

Surfing on a Palm hand-held with a tiny screen and a stylus was not the same thing as surfing on a PowerBook with a seventeen-inch screen. But she was connected. From her bed at Sahlgrenska she could now reach the entire world.

She started by going to a website that advertised rather uninteresting pictures by an unknown and not especially skilled amateur photographer named Gil Bates in Jobsville, Pennsylvania. Salander had once checked it out and confirmed that the town of Jobsville did not exist. Nevertheless, Bates had taken more than 200 photographs of the community and created a gallery of small thumbnails. She scrolled down to image 167 and clicked to enlarge it. It showed the church in Jobsville. She put her cursor on the spire of the church tower and clicked. She instantly got a pop-up dialog box that asked for her ID and password. She took out her stylus and wrote the word
Remarkable
on the screen as her ID and A(89)Cx#magnolia as the password.

She got a dialog box with the text [Error—you have the wrong password] and a button that said [OK—try again]. Lisbeth knew that if she clicked on [OK—try again] and tried a different password, she would get the same dialog box again—for years and years, for as long as she kept trying. Instead she clicked on the
o
in
Error
.

The screen went blank. Then an animated door opened and a Lara Croft–like figure stepped out. A speech bubble materialized with the text [WHO GOES THERE?]. She clicked on the bubble and wrote Wasp. She got the instant reply [PROVE IT—OR ELSE . . . ] as the animated Lara Croft unlocked the safety catch on her gun. Salander knew it was no empty threat. If she entered the wrong password three times in a row the site
would shut down and the name Wasp would be struck from the membership list. Carefully she entered the password MonkeyBusiness.

The screen changed again and now had a blue background with the text:

She clicked on (d) Talk and then went to the menu selection [Who’s online?] and got a list with the names Andy, Bambi, Dakota, Jabba, BuckRogers, Mandrake, Pred, Slip, SisterJen, SixOfOne, and Trinity.

Salander was not sure, but she suspected that Dakota was a woman. The other citizens online, including the one who called himself SisterJen, were guys. Hacker Republic had a total (the last time she was connected) of sixty-two citizens, of whom four were female.