The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo Trilogy Bundle (53 page)

In Honolulu the programme came to life on an anonymous home page on a server that was officially located at the university. The programme was simple. Its only function was to send instructions to start another programme in another server, which in this case was a perfectly ordinary commercial ISP offering Internet services in Holland. The function of that programme, in turn, was to look for the mirrored hard drive belonging to Hans-Erik Wennerström and take command of the programme that showed the contents of his approximately 3,000 bank accounts around the world.

There was only one account of any interest. Salander had noted that Wennerström looked at the account a couple of times each week. If he turned on his computer and looked at that particular file, everything would appear to be normal. The programme showed small changes, which were to be expected, based on normal fluctuations in the account during the past six months. If during the next forty-eight hours Wennerström should go in and ask to have the funds paid out or moved from the account, the programme would dutifully report that it had been done. In reality, the change would have occurred only on the mirrored hard drive in Holland.

Monica Sholes switched off her mobile the moment she heard four short tones confirming that the programme had started.

         

She left the Zimmertal Hotel and walked over to Bank Hauser General, across the street, where she had made an appointment to see Herr Wagner, the general manager, at 10:00. She was there three minutes ahead of schedule, and she spent the waiting time posing in front of the surveillance camera, which took her picture as she walked into the department with offices for discreet private consultations.

“I need some assistance with a number of transactions,” she said in Oxford English. When she opened her briefcase, she let drop a pen from the Zimmertal Hotel, and Herr Wagner politely retrieved it for her. She gave him an arch smile and wrote an account number on the notepad on the desk in front of her.

Herr Wagner pigeonholed her as the spoiled daughter, or possibly mistress, of some bigshot.

“There are a number of accounts at the Bank of Kroenenfeld in the Cayman Islands. Automatic transfer can be done by sequential clearing codes,” she said.

“Fräulein Sholes, naturally you have all the required clearing codes?” he asked.

“
Aber natürlich
,” she replied with such a heavy accent that it was obvious she had only school-level German.

She started reciting several series of sixteen-digit numbers without once referring to any papers. Herr Wagner saw that it was going to be a long morning, but for a 4 percent commission on the transactions, he was prepared to skip lunch, and he was going to have to revise his pigeonhole for Fräulein Sholes.

         

She did not leave Bank Hauser General until just past noon, slightly later than planned, and she walked back to the Zimmertal. She put in an appearance at the front desk before she went up to her room and took off the clothes she had bought. She kept on the latex breasts but replaced the page-boy wig with Irene Nesser's shoulder-length blonde hair. She put on more familiar clothes: boots with stiletto heels, black trousers, a simple shirt, and a nice black leather jacket from Malungsboden in Stockholm. She studied herself in the mirror. Not unkempt by any means, but she was no longer an heiress. Before Irene Nesser left the room, she sorted through a number of bonds, which she placed inside a thin portfolio.

At 1:05, a few minutes behind schedule, she went into Bank Dorffmann, about seventy yards away from Bank Hauser General. Irene Nesser had made an appointment in advance with a Herr Hasselmann. She apologised for being late. She spoke impeccable German with a Norwegian accent.

“No problem at all, Fräulein,” Herr Hasselmann said. “How can I be of service?”

“I would like to open an account. I have a number of private bonds that I'd like to convert.”

Irene Nesser placed her portfolio on the desk in front of him.

Herr Hasselmann examined the contents, hastily at first, and then more slowly. He raised an eyebrow and smiled politely.

She opened five numbered accounts, which she could access via the Internet and which were owned by an apparently anonymous post-office-box company in Gibraltar. A broker had set them up for her for 50,000 kronor of the money she had borrowed from Blomkvist. She cashed in fifty of the bonds and deposited the money in the accounts. Each bond was worth the equivalent of one million kronor.

         

Her business at the Bank Dorffmann also took more time than expected, so now she was even more behind on her schedule. She had no chance to take care of her final transactions before the banks closed for the day. So Irene Nesser returned to the Matterhorn Hotel, where she spent an hour hanging around to establish her presence. But she had a headache and went to bed early. She bought some aspirin at the front desk and ordered a wake-up call for 8:00 a.m. Then she went back to her room.

It was close to 5:00 p.m., and all the banks in Europe were closed for business. But the banks in North and South America were open. She booted up her PowerBook and uplinked to the Net through her mobile. She spent an hour emptying the numbered accounts she had opened at Bank Dorffmann earlier in the day.

She divided the money up into small amounts and used it to pay invoices for a large number of fictional companies around the world. When she was done, the money had strangely enough been transferred back to the Bank of Kroenenfeld in the Cayman Islands, but this time to an entirely different account than the one from which it had been withdrawn earlier that day.

Irene Nesser considered this first stage to be secure and almost impossible to trace. She made one payment from the account: the sum of nearly one million kronor was deposited into an account linked to a credit card that she had in her wallet. The account was owned by Wasp Enterprises, registered in Gibraltar.

         

Several minutes later a girl with blonde page-boy hair left the Matterhorn by a door into the hotel bar. Monica Sholes walked to the Zimmertal Hotel, nodded politely to the desk clerk, and took the lift up to her room.

There she took her time putting on Monica Sholes' combat uniform, touching up her make-up, and applying an extra layer of skin cream to the tattoo before she went down to the hotel restaurant and had an insanely delicious fish dinner. She ordered a bottle of vintage wine that she had never heard of before though it cost 1,200 kronor, drank one glass, and nonchalantly left the rest before she went into the hotel bar. She left absurd tips, which certainly made the staff notice her.

She spent quite a while allowing herself to be picked up by a drunk young Italian with an aristocratic name which she did not bother to remember. They shared two bottles of champagne, of which she drank almost one glass.

Around 11:00 her intoxicated suitor leaned forward and boldly squeezed her breast. She moved his hand down to the table, feeling pleased. He did not seem to have noticed that he was squeezing soft latex. At times they were so loud that they caused a certain amount of irritation among the other guests. Just before midnight, when Monica Sholes noticed that a hall porter was keeping a stern eye on them, she helped her Italian boyfriend up to his room.

When he went to the bathroom, she poured one last glass of wine. She opened a folded piece of paper and spiked the wine with a crushed Rohypnol sleeping tablet. He passed out in a miserable heap on the bed within a minute after she drank a toast with him. She loosened his tie, pulled off his shoes, and drew a cover over him. She wiped the bottle clean, then washed the glasses in the bathroom and wiped them off too before going back to her room.

         

Monica Sholes had breakfast in her room at 6:00 and checked out of the Zimmertal at 6:55. Before leaving her room, she spent five minutes wiping off fingerprints from the door handles, wardrobes, toilet, telephone, and other objects in the room that she had touched.

Irene Nesser checked out of the Matterhorn around 8:30, shortly after the wake-up call. She took a taxi and left her luggage in a locker at the railway station. Then she spent the next few hours visiting nine private banks, where she distributed some of the private bonds from the Cayman Islands. By 3:00 in the afternoon she had converted about 10 percent of the bonds into cash, which she deposited in thirty numbered accounts. The rest of the bonds she bundled up and put in a safe-deposit box.

Irene Nesser would need to make several more visits to Zürich, but there was no immediate hurry.

         

At 4:30 that afternoon Irene Nesser took a taxi to the airport, where she went into the ladies' room and cut up Monica Sholes' passport into little pieces, flushing them down the toilet. The credit card she also cut up and put the bits in five different rubbish bins, and the scissors too. After September 11 it was not a good idea to attract attention by having any sharp objects in your baggage.

Irene Nesser took Lufthansa flight GD890 to Oslo and caught the airport bus to the Oslo train station, where she went into the ladies' room and sorted through her clothes. She placed all items belonging to the Monica Sholes persona—the page-boy wig and the designer clothes—in three plastic bags and tossed them into three different rubbish containers and wastebaskets in the train station. She put the empty Samsonite suitcase in an unlocked locker. The gold chain and earrings were designer jewellery that could be traced; they disappeared down a drain in the street outside the station.

After a moment of anxious hesitation, Irene Nesser decided to keep the fake latex breasts.

By then she did not have much time and took on some fuel in the form of a hamburger from McDonald's while she transferred the contents of the luxury leather briefcase to her travel bag. When she left, the empty briefcase remained under the table. She bought a latte to go at a kiosk and ran to catch the night train to Stockholm. She arrived as the doors were closing. She had booked a private sleeping berth.

When she locked the door to her compartment, she could feel that for the first time in two days, her adrenaline levels had returned to normal. She opened the compartment window and defied the no-smoking regulations. She stood there sipping at her coffee as the train rolled out of Oslo.

She ran through her checklist to be sure that she had forgotten no detail. After a moment she frowned and rummaged through her jacket pockets. She took out the complimentary pen from the Zimmertal Hotel and studied it for several minutes before she tossed it out of the window.

After fifteen minutes she crept into bed and fell asleep.

Millennium
's special report on Hans-Erik Wennerström took up all of forty-six pages of the magazine and exploded like a time bomb the last week of November. The main story appeared under the joint byline of Mikael Blomkvist and Erika Berger. For the first few hours the media did not know how to handle the scoop. A similar story just a year earlier had resulted in Blomkvist being convicted of libel, and it had also apparently resulted in his being dismissed from
Millennium
. For that reason his credibility was regarded as rather low. Now the same magazine was back with a story by the same journalist containing much more serious allegations than the article for which he had run into so much trouble. Some parts of the report were so absurd that they defied common sense. The Swedish media sat and waited, filled with mistrust.

But that evening
She
on TV4 led off with an eleven-minute summary of the highlights in Blomkvist's accusations. Berger had lunched with the host several days earlier and given her an advance exclusive.

TV4's brutal profile scooped the state-run news channels, which did not clamber on to the bandwagon until the 9:00 news. By then the TT wire service had also sent out its first wire with the cautious headline:
CONVICTED JOURNALIST ACCUSES FINANCIER OF SERIOUS CRIME
. The text was a rewrite of the TV story, but the fact that TT addressed the subject at all unleashed feverish activity at the Conservative morning newspaper and at a dozen of the larger regional papers as they reset their front pages before the presses started rolling. Up until then, the papers had more or less decided to ignore the
Millennium
allegations.

The Liberal morning newspaper commented on
Millennium
's scoop in the form of an editorial, written personally by the editor in chief, earlier in the afternoon. The editor in chief then went to a dinner party as TV4 started broadcasting its news programme. He dismissed his secretary's frantic calls that there “might be something” to Blomkvist's claims with these later famous words: “Nonsense—if there were, our financial reporters would have found out about it long ago.” Consequently, the Liberal editor in chief's editorial was the only media voice in the country that butchered
Millennium
's claims. The editorial contained phrases such as:
personal vendetta
,
criminally sloppy journalism
, and demands that
measures be taken against indictable allegations regarding decent citizens
. But that was the only contribution the editor in chief made during the debate.

That night the
Millennium
editorial offices were fully staffed. According to their plans, only Berger and the new managing editor, Malin Eriksson, were due to be there to handle any calls. But by 10:00 p.m. the entire staff was still there, and they had also been joined by no fewer than four former staff members and half a dozen regular freelancers. At midnight Malm opened a bottle of champagne. That was when an old acquaintance sent over an advance copy from one of the evening papers, which devoted sixteen pages to the Wennerström affair under the headline
THE FINANCIAL MAFIA
. When the evening papers came out the next day, a media frenzy erupted, the likes of which had seldom been seen before.

Eriksson concluded that she was going to enjoy working at
Millennium
.

         

During the following week, the Swedish Stock Exchange trembled as the securities fraud police began investigating, prosecutors were called in, and a panicky selling spree set in. Two days after the publication the Minister of Commerce made a statement on “the Wennerström affair.”

The frenzy did not mean, however, that the media swallowed
Millennium
's claims without criticism—the revelations were far too serious for that. But unlike the first Wennerström affair, this time
Millennium
could present a convincing burden of proof: Wennerström's own emails and copies of the contents of his computer, which contained balance sheets from secret bank assets in the Cayman Islands and two dozen other countries, secret agreements, and other blunders that a more cautious racketeer would never in his life have left on his hard drive. It soon became clear that if
Millennium
's claims held up in a court of appeals—and everyone agreed that the case would end up there sooner or later—then it was by far the biggest bubble to burst in the Swedish financial world since the Kreuger crash of 1932. The Wennerström affair made all the Gotabank imbroglios and Trustor frauds pale in comparison. This was fraud on such a grand scale that no-one even dared to speculate on how many laws had been broken.

For the first time in Swedish financial reporting, the terms “organised crime,” “Mafia,” and “gangster empire” were used. Wennerström and his young stockbrokers, partners, and Armani-clad lawyers emerged like a band of hoodlums.

         

During the first days of the media frenzy, Blomkvist was invisible. He did not answer his emails and could not be reached by telephone. All editorial comments on behalf of
Millennium
were made by Berger, who purred like a cat as she was interviewed by the Swedish national media and important regional newspapers, and eventually also by a growing number of overseas media. Each time she was asked how
Millennium
had come into possession of all those private and internal documents, she replied simply that she was unable to reveal the magazine's source.

When she was asked why the previous year's exposé of Wennerström had been such a fiasco, she was even more delphic. She never lied, but she may not always have told the whole truth. Off the record, when she did not have a microphone under her nose, she would utter a few mysterious catch phrases, which, if pieced together, led to some rather rash conclusions. That is how a rumour was born that soon assumed legendary proportions, claiming that Mikael Blomkvist had not presented any sort of defence at his trial and had voluntarily submitted to the prison sentence and heavy fines because otherwise his documentation would have led inevitably to the identification of his source. He was compared to role models in the American media who had accepted gaol rather than reveal their sources, and Blomkvist was described as a hero in such ludicrously flattering terms that he was quite embarrassed. But this was no time to deny the misunderstanding.

There was one thing that everyone agreed on: the person who had delivered the documentation had to be someone within Wennerström's most trusted circle. This led to a debate about who the “Deep Throat” was: colleagues with reason to be dissatisfied, lawyers, even Wennerström's cocaine-addicted daughter and other family members were put up as possible candidates. Neither Blomkvist nor Berger commented on the subject.

Berger smiled happily, knowing that they had won when an evening paper on the third day of the frenzy ran the headline
MILLENNIUM'S REVENGE
. The article was an ingratiating portrait of the magazine and its staff, including illustrations with a particularly favourable portrait of Berger. She was named the “queen of investigative journalism.” That sort of thing won points in the rankings of the entertainment pages, and there was talk of the Big Journalism Prize.

         

Five days after
Millennium
fired the first salvo, Blomkvist's book
The Mafia Banker
appeared in bookshops. The book had been written during those feverish days at Sandhamn in September and October, and in great haste and under the utmost secrecy it was printed by Hallvigs Reklam in Morgongåva. It was the first book to be published under
Millennium
's own logo. It was eccentrically dedicated:
To Sally
,
who showed me the benefits of the sport of golf
.

It was a brick of a book, 608 pages in paperback. The first edition of 2,000 copies was virtually guaranteed to be a losing proposition, but the print run actually sold out in a couple of days, and Berger ordered 10,000 more copies.

The reviewers concluded that this time, at any rate, Mikael Blomkvist had no intention of holding back since it was a matter of publishing extensive source references. In this regard they were right. Two-thirds of the book consisted of appendices that were actual copies of the documentation from Wennerström's computer. At the same time as the book was published,
Millennium
put the texts from Wennerström's computer as source material in downloadable PDF files on their website.

Blomkvist's extraordinary absence was part of the media strategy that he and Berger had put together. Every newspaper in the country was looking for him. Not until the book was launched did he give an exclusive interview to
She
on TV4, once again scooping the state-run stations. But the questions were anything but sycophantic.

Blomkvist was especially pleased with one exchange when he watched a video of his appearance. The interview was broadcast live at the very moment when the Stockholm Stock Exchange found itself in freefall and a handful of financial yuppies were threatening to throw themselves out of windows. He was asked what was
Millennium
's responsibility with regard to the fact that Sweden's economy was now headed for a crash.

“The idea that Sweden's economy is headed for a crash is nonsense,” Blomkvist said.

The host of
She
on TV4 looked perplexed. His reply did not follow the pattern she had expected, and she was forced to improvise. Blomkvist got the follow-up question he was hoping for. “We're experiencing the largest single drop in the history of the Swedish stock exchange—and you think that's nonsense?”

“You have to distinguish between two things—the Swedish economy and the Swedish stock market. The Swedish economy is the sum of all the goods and services that are produced in this country every day. There are telephones from Ericsson, cars from Volvo, chickens from Scan, and shipments from Kiruna to Skövde. That's the Swedish economy, and it's just as strong or weak today as it was a week ago.”

He paused for effect and took a sip of water.

“The Stock Exchange is something very different. There is no economy and no production of goods and services. There are only fantasies in which people from one hour to the next decide that this or that company is worth so many billions, more or less. It doesn't have a thing to do with reality or with the Swedish economy.”

“So you're saying that it doesn't matter if the Stock Exchange drops like a rock?”

“No, it doesn't matter at all,” Blomkvist said in a voice so weary and resigned that he sounded like some sort of oracle. His words would be quoted many times over the following year. Then he went on.

“It only means that a bunch of heavy speculators are now moving their shareholdings from Swedish companies to German ones. So it's the financial gnomes that some tough reporter should identify and expose as traitors. They're the ones who are systematically and perhaps deliberately damaging the Swedish economy in order to satisfy the profit interests of their clients.”

Then
She
on TV4 made the mistake of asking exactly the question that Blomkvist had hoped for.

“And so you think that the media don't have any responsibility?”

“Oh yes, the media do have an enormous responsibility. For at least twenty years many financial reporters have refrained from scrutinising Hans-Erik Wennerström. On the contrary, they have actually helped to build up his prestige by publishing brainless, idolatrous portraits. If they had been doing their work properly, we would not find ourselves in this situation today.”

         

Blomkvist's appearance marked a turning point. In hindsight, Berger was convinced that it was only when Blomkvist went on TV and calmly defended his claims that the Swedish media, in spite of the fact that
Millennium
had been all over the headlines for a week, recognised that the story really did hold up. His attitude set the course for the story.

After the interview the Wennerström affair imperceptibly slipped from the financial section over to the desks of the crime reporters. In the past, ordinary crime reporters had seldom or never written about financial crime, except if it had to do with the Russian mob or Yugoslav cigarette smugglers. Crime reporters were not expected to investigate intricate dealings on the Stock Exchange. One evening paper even took Blomkvist at his word and filled two spreads with portraits of several of the brokerage houses' most important players, who were in the process of buying up German securities. The paper's headline read
SELLING OUT THEIR COUNTRY
. All the brokers were invited to comment on the allegations. Every one of them declined. But the trading of shares decreased significantly that day, and some brokers who wanted to look like progressive patriots started going against the stream. Blomkvist burst out laughing.

The pressure got to be so great that sombre men in dark suits put on a concerned expression and broke with the most important rule of the exclusive club that made up the innermost circles of Swedish finance—they commented on a colleague. All of a sudden retired industrial leaders and bank presidents were appearing on TV and answering questions in an attempt at damage control. Everyone realised the seriousness of the situation, and it was a matter of distancing themselves as quickly as possible from the Wennerström Group and shedding any shares they might hold. Wennerström (they concluded almost with one voice) was not, after all, a real industrialist, and he had never been truly accepted into “the club.” Some pointed out that he was just a simple working-class boy from Norrland whose success may have gone to his head. Some described his actions as
a personal tragedy
. Others discovered that they had had their doubts about Wennerström for years—he was too boastful and he put on airs.