The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Trilogy Bundle (177 page)

On the other hand, Ekström had remarkably little on the record about Zalachenko.

Blomkvist lit a cigarette and stood by the window looking out towards Djurgården.

Ekström was leading two separate preliminary investigations. Criminal Inspector Faste was the investigative leader in all matters dealing with Salander. Bublanski was working only on Niedermann.

When the name Zalachenko turned up in the preliminary investigation, the logical thing for Ekström to do would have been to contact the general director of the Security Police to determine who Zalachenko actually was. Blomkvist could find no such enquiry in Ekström's email, journal, or notes. But among the notes Blomkvist found several cryptic sentences.

The Salander investigation is fake. Björck's original doesn't match Blomkvist's version. Classify Top Secret
.

Then a series of notes claiming that Salander was paranoid and a schizophrenic.

Correct to lock up Salander 1991
.

He found what linked the investigations in the Salander slush, that is, the supplementary information that the prosecutor considered irrelevant to the preliminary investigation, and which would therefore not be presented at the trial or make up part of the chain of evidence against her. This included almost everything that had to do with Zalachenko's background.

The investigation was totally inadequate.

Blomkvist wondered to what extent this was a coincidence and to what extent it was contrived. Where was the boundary? And was Ekström aware that there was a boundary?

Could it be that someone was deliberately supplying Ekström with believable but misleading information?

Finally Blomkvist logged into Hotmail and spent ten minutes checking the half-dozen anonymous email accounts he had created. Each day he had checked the address he had given to Criminal Inspector Modig. He had no great hope that she would contact him, so he was mildly surprised when he opened the in-box and found an email from . The message consisted of a single line:

Plague pinged Salander at midnight and interrupted her in the middle of a sentence she was writing about her time with Holger Palmgren as her guardian. She cast an irritated glance at the display.

Salander disconnected from Plague and accessed the server he had directed her to. She spent nearly three hours scrutinizing folder after folder on Teleborian's computer.

She found correspondence between Teleborian and a person with a Hotmail address who sent encrypted email. Since she had access to Teleborian's PGP key, she easily decoded the correspondence. His name was Jonas, no last name. Jonas and Teleborian had an unhealthy interest in seeing that Salander did not thrive.

Yes
,
we can prove that there is a conspiracy
.

But what really interested Salander were the forty-seven folders containing close to 9,000 photographs of explicit child pornography. She clicked on image after image of children aged about fifteen or younger. A number of pictures were of infants. The majority were of girls. Many of them were sadistic.

She found links to at least a dozen people abroad who traded child porn with one another.

Salander bit her lip, but her face was otherwise expressionless.

She remembered the nights when, as a twelve-year-old, she had been strapped down in a stimulus-free room at St. Stefan's. Teleborian had come into the room again and again to look at her in the glow of the night light.

She knew. He had never touched her, but she had always known.

She should have dealt with Teleborian years ago. But she had repressed the memory of him. She had chosen to ignore his existence.

After a while she pinged Blomkvist on ICQ.

Blomkvist spent the night at Salander's apartment on Fiskargatan. He did not shut down the computer until 6:30 a.m. and fell asleep with photographs of gross child pornography whirling through his mind. He woke at 10:15 and rolled out of Salander's bed, showered, and called a taxi to pick him up outside Södra theatre. He got out at Birger Jarlsgatan at 10:55 and walked to Café Madeleine.

Modig was waiting for him with a cup of black coffee in front of her.

“Hi,” Blomkvist said.

“I'm taking a big risk here,” she said without greeting.

“Nobody will hear of our meeting from me.”

She seemed stressed.

“One of my colleagues recently went to see former prime minister Fälldin. He went there on his own initiative, and his job is on the line now too.”

“I understand.”

“I need a guarantee of anonymity for both of us.”

“I don't even know which colleague you're talking about.”

“I'll tell you later. I want you to promise to give him protection as a source.”

“You have my word.”

She looked at her watch.

“Are you in a hurry?”

“Yes. I have to meet my husband and kids at the Sturegallerian in ten minutes. He thinks I'm still at work.”

“And Bublanski knows nothing about this?”

“No.”

“Right. You and your colleague are sources and you have complete source protection. Both of you. As long as you live.”

“My colleague is Jerker Holmberg. You met him down in Göteborg. His father is a Centre Party member, and Jerker has known Prime Minister Fälldin since he was a child. He seems to be pleasant enough. So Jerker went to see him and asked about Zalachenko.”

Blomkvist's heart began to pound.

“Jerker asked Fälldin what he knew about the defection, but Fälldin didn't reply. When Holmberg told him that we suspect Salander was locked up by the people who were protecting Zalachenko, well, that really upset him.”

“Did he say how much he knew?”

“Fälldin told him that the chief of Säpo at the time and a colleague came to visit him very soon after he became prime minister. They told a fantastic story about a Russian defector who had come to Sweden, told him that it was the most sensitive military secret Sweden possessed, that there was nothing in Swedish military intelligence that was anywhere near as important. Fälldin said he didn't know how to handle it, that there was no-one with much experience in government, the Social Democrats having been in power for more than forty years. He was advised that he alone had to make the decisions, and that if he discussed it with his government colleagues then Säpo would wash their hands of it. He remembered the whole thing as being very unpleasant.”

“What
did
he do?”

“He realized he had no choice but to do what the gentlemen from Säpo
proposed. He issued a directive putting Säpo in sole charge of the defector. He pledged never to discuss the matter with anyone. Fälldin was never ever told Zalachenko's name.”

“Extraordinary.”

“After that he heard almost nothing more during his two terms in office. But he did do something extremely shrewd. He insisted that an undersecretary of state be let in on the secret, in case there was a need for a go-between for the government secretariat and those who were protecting Zalachenko.”

“Did he remember who it was?”

“It was Bertil K. Janeryd, now Swedish ambassador in The Hague. When it was explained to Fälldin how serious this preliminary investigation was, he sat down and wrote to Janeryd.”

Modig pushed an envelope across the table.

“This letter is referring to Holmberg?”

“No. Jerker asked Fälldin not to put in a name. He said that he couldn't know who would be going to The Hague.”

“You mean … ?”

“Jerker and I have discussed it. We're already out on ice so thin that we'll need paddles rather than ice picks. We have no authority to travel to Holland to interview the ambassador. But you could do it.”

Blomkvist folded the letter and was putting it into his jacket pocket when Modig grabbed his hand. Her grip was hard.

“Information for information,” she said. “We want to hear everything Janeryd tells you.”

Blomkvist nodded. Modig stood up.

“Hang on. You said that Fälldin was visited by two people from Säpo. One was the chief of Säpo. Who was the other?”

“Fälldin met him only on that one occasion and couldn't remember his name. No notes were taken at the meeting. He remembered him as thin with a narrow moustache. But he did recall that the man was introduced as the boss of the Section for Special Analysis, or something like that. Fälldin later looked at an organizational chart of Säpo and couldn't find that department.”

The Zalachenko club
, Blomkvist thought.

Modig seemed to be weighing her words.

“At the risk of ending up dead,” she said at last, “there is one record that neither Fälldin nor his visitors thought of.”

“What was that?”

“Fälldin's visitors' logbook at Rosenbad. Jerker requisitioned it. It's a public document.”

“And?”

Modig hesitated once again. “The book states only that the prime minister met with the chief of Säpo along with a colleague to discuss general questions.”

“Was there a name?”

“Yes. E. Gullberg.”

Blomkvist could feel the blood rush to his head.

“Evert Gullberg,” he said.

Blomkvist called from Café Madeleine on his anonymous mobile to book a flight to Amsterdam. The plane would take off from Arlanda at 2:50. He walked to Dressman on Kungsgatan and bought a shirt and a change of underwear, and then he went to a pharmacy to buy a toothbrush and other toiletries. He checked carefully to see that he was not being followed and hurried to catch the Arlanda Express.

The plane landed at Schiphol airport at 4:50, and by 6:30 he was checking in to a small hotel about fifteen minutes' walk from The Hague's Centraal station.

He spent two hours trying to locate the Swedish ambassador and made contact by telephone at around 9:00. He used all his powers of persuasion and explained that he was there on a matter of great urgency. The ambassador finally relented and agreed to meet him at 10:00 on Sunday morning.

Then Blomkvist went out and had a light dinner at a restaurant near his hotel. He was asleep by 11:00.

•    •    •

Ambassador Janeryd was in no mood for small talk when he offered Blomkvist coffee at his residence on Lange Voorhout.

“Well, what is it that's so urgent?”

“Alexander Zalachenko. The Russian defector who came to Sweden in 1976,” Blomkvist said, handing him the letter from Fälldin.

Janeryd looked surprised. He read the letter and laid it on the table beside him.

Blomkvist explained the background and why Fälldin had written to him.

“I … I can't discuss this matter,” Janeryd said at last.

“I think you can.”

“No. I can only speak of it with the constitutional committee.”

“There's a great probability that you will have to do just that. But this letter tells you to use your own good judgement.”

“Fälldin is an honest man.”

“I don't doubt that. And I'm not looking to damage either you or Fälldin. Nor do I ask you to tell me a single military secret that Zalachenko may have revealed.”

“I don't know any secrets. I didn't even know that his name was Zalachenko. I only knew him by his cover name, Ruben. But it's absurd that you should think I would discuss it with a journalist.”

“Let me give you one very good reason why you should,” Blomkvist said and sat up straight in his chair. “This whole story is going to be published very soon. And when that happens, the media will either tear you to pieces or describe you as an honest civil servant who made the best of an impossible situation. You were the one Fälldin assigned to be the go-between with those who were protecting Zalachenko. I already know that.”

Janeryd was silent for almost a minute.

“Listen, I never had any information, not the remotest idea of the background you've described. I was young. … I didn't know how I should deal with these people. I met them about twice a year during the time I worked for the government. I was told that Ruben—your Zalachenko—was alive and healthy, that he was cooperating, and that the information he provided was invaluable. I was never privy to the details. I had no ‘need to know.' ”

Blomkvist waited.

“The defector had operated in other countries and knew nothing about Sweden, so he was never a major factor for security policy. I informed the prime minister on a couple of occasions, but there was never very much to report.”