The Girl Who Played with Fire (23 page)
And yet he was in such a bad mood that he pulled over to the side of the road and turned off the engine. He had not slept for thirty hours and was feeling fuzzy. He got out to stretch his legs and take a piss. The night was cool and the stars were bright. He was not far from Järna.
The conflict he was having was almost ideological in nature. The potential supply of methamphetamine was limitless within a radius of 250 miles from Stockholm. The demand was indisputably huge. The rest was logistics—how to transport the product from point A to point B, or to be more precise, from a cellar workshop in Tallinn to the Free Port in Stockholm.
This was a recurring problem—how to guarantee regular transport from Estonia to Sweden? In fact it was the main problem and the weak link, since after several years he was still improvising every time. And
fuckups had been all too frequent lately. He was proud of his ability to organize. He had built up a well-oiled network cultivated with equal portions of carrot and stick. He was the one who had done the legwork, cemented partnerships, negotiated deals, and made sure that the deliveries got to the right place.
The carrot was the incentive offered to subcontractors like Lundin—a solid and relatively risk-free profit. The system was a good one. Lundin did not have to lift a finger to get the goods—no stressful buying trips or dealings with people who could be anyone from the drug squad to the Russian mafia. Lundin knew that the giant would deliver and then collect his 50 percent.
The stick was for when complications arose. A gabby street dealer who had found out far too much about the supply chain had almost implicated Svavelsjö MC. He had been forced to get involved and punish the guy.
He was good at dealing out punishment.
But the operation was becoming too burdensome to oversee.
He lit a cigarette and stretched his legs against a gate into a field.
Methamphetamine was a discreet and easy-to-manage source of income—big profits, small risks. Weapons were risky, and considering the risks they were simply not good business.
Occasionally industrial espionage or smuggling electronic components to Eastern Europe—even though the market had dropped off in recent years—was justifiable.
Whores from the Baltics, on the other hand, were an entirely unsatisfactory investment. The business was small change, and liable at any time to set off hypocritical screeds in the media and debates in that strange political entity called the Swedish parliament. The one advantage was that everybody likes a whore—prosecutors, judges, policemen, even an occasional member of parliament. Nobody was going to dig too deep to bring that business down.
Even a dead whore would not necessarily cause a political uproar. If the police could catch a suspect within a few hours who still had bloodstains on his clothes, then a conviction would follow and the murderer would spend several years in prison or some other obscure institution. But if no suspect was found within forty-eight hours, the police would soon enough find more important things to investigate, as he knew from experience.
He did not like the trade in whores, though. He did not like them at
all, their makeup-plastered faces and shrill, drunken laughter. They were unclean. And there was always the risk that one of them would get the idea she could seek asylum or start blabbing to the police or to reporters. Then he would have to take matters into his own hands and mete out punishment. And if the revelation was blatant enough, prosecutors and police would be forced to act—otherwise parliament really would wake up and pay attention. The whore business sucked.
The brothers Atho and Harry Ranta were typical: two useless parasites who had found out way too much about the business. Most of all he would like to tie them up with chains and dump them in the harbour. Instead he had driven them to the Estonia ferry and patiently waited until it sailed. Their little vacation was the result of some fucking reporter sticking his nose into their business, and it was decided that they had better make themselves scarce.
He sighed.
Above all he did not appreciate diversions like that Salander girl. She was utterly without interest as far as he was concerned. She represented no profit whatsoever.
He did not like Bjurman, and he could not imagine why they had decided to do what he wanted. But now the ball was rolling. Instructions had been issued, the contract had been awarded to a freelancer from Svavelsjö MC, and he did not like the situation one bit.
He looked out across the dark field, tossing his cigarette butt into the gravel by the gate. He thought he saw movement out of the corner of his eye and froze. He focused his gaze. There was no light except from a faint crescent moon and the stars, but he could still make out the contours of a black figure creeping towards him about a hundred feet away. The figure advanced, making short pauses.
The man felt a cold sweat on his brow. He hated the creature in the field. For a minute he stared spellbound at its steady approach. When it was close enough that he could see its eyes glimmer in the darkness he spun round and ran to the car. He tore open the door. He felt his panic growing until he got the engine started and turned on the headlights. The creature had come out to the road and at last he could make out features in the beam. It looked like an enormous sting ray slithering along. It had a stinger like a scorpion.
The creature was not of this world. It was a monster from the underworld.
He put the car in gear and screeched off. As he passed the creature he
saw it strike, but it did not touch the car. He did not stop shaking until several miles later.
Salander spent the night going over the research that Svensson and
Millennium
had compiled about trafficking. Gradually she was getting a good overview, even though it was based on cryptic fragments that she had to piece together from their various documents.
Berger sent an email to Blomkvist asking how the confrontations were going; he replied briefly that they could not run the man from the Cheka to earth. Salander took this to mean that one of the people who was going to be hung out to dry worked at Säpo, the Security Police. Eriksson sent a summary of a supplementary research assignment to Svensson with copies to Blomkvist and Berger. Svensson and Blomkvist replied with comments and suggestions. Blomkvist and Svensson exchanged emails a few times each day. Svensson described a confrontation he had had with a journalist, Per-Åke Sandström.
From Svensson’s emails she also saw that he was communicating with a person by the name of Gulbrandsen at a Yahoo address. It took her a while to realize that Gulbrandsen was a policeman and that their exchange was off the record, using a private email address instead of Gulbrandsen’s police address. So Gulbrandsen was a source.
The folder named
She recognized a phrase in the text that was a word-for-word quotation from Johansson’s dissertation. There the woman had been called Tamara, but Irina P. and Tamara had to be one and the same, so she read the interview section of the thesis with great interest.
The second document, [Sandström], contained the summary that Svensson had emailed to Blomkvist, showing that the journalist was one of several johns who had abused a girl from the Baltics, and also that he ran errands for the sex mafia in exchange for drugs and sex. Sandström, besides producing company newsletters, had written freelance articles for a daily newspaper indignantly condemning the sex trade. One of his revelations was that an unnamed Swedish businessman had visited a brothel in Tallinn.
Zala was not mentioned in either document, but Salander assumed
that since both were in a folder named
According to Svensson, the name Zala had turned up in nine cases related to drugs, weapons, or prostitution since the mid-nineties. Nobody knew who Zala was, but sources had variously indicated that he was a Serb, a Pole, or perhaps a Czech. All the information was secondhand.
Svensson had discussed Zala exhaustively with
source G
. (Gulbrandsen?) and suggested that Zala may have been responsible for the murder of Irina P. There was no saying what G. thought about this theory, but there was a note to the effect that Zala had been on the agenda a year earlier at a meeting with “the special investigative group on organized crime.” The name had cropped up so many times that the police had started asking questions, trying to establish whether Zala was a real person, and whether he was still alive.
As far as Svensson could discover, the name Zala had first appeared in connection with the holdup of a security van in Örkelljunga in 1996. The robbers had gotten away with more than 3.3 million kronor, but they had so dramatically botched their getaway that after only twenty-four hours the police were able to identify and arrest the gang members. The following day another arrest was made. It was Nieminen, a member of Svavelsjö MC, whose role had been to supply the weapons used in the holdup.
A week after the robbery in 1996, three more people were arrested. The ring thus included eight people, of whom seven had refused to talk to the police. The eighth, a boy of nineteen named Birger Nordman, had broken down and confessed everything he knew during questioning. The trial turned into a runaway victory for the prosecution. One consequence was (Svensson’s police source suspected) that Nordman was found two years later buried in a sandpit in Värmland after running away during temporary leave from prison.
According to G., the police believed that Nieminen had been the catalyst behind the whole gang. They also believed that Nordman had been killed on contract by Nieminen, who was regarded as dangerous and ruthless, but there was no evidence. While in prison he had apparently had dealings with the Aryan Brotherhood, a Nazi prison organization that in turn was linked to the Wolfpack Brotherhood and to ex-con Hell’s Angels clubs around the world, as well as to other cretinous violent Nazi organizations such as the Swedish Resistance Movement.
What interested Salander, however, was something else entirely. Nordman
had admitted to police that the weapons used in the robbery had come from Nieminen, and that he in turn had got them from a Serb not known to Nordman whom he named as “Sala.”
Svensson had taken him for an anonymous figure in the criminal scene and reckoned that “Zala” was a nickname. But he warned that they might be dealing with a particularly cunning criminal who operated under an alias.
The last section contained Sandström’s information on Zala, such as it was. Sandström had once talked on the telephone to someone using that name. The notes did not say what the conversation had been about.
At around 4:00 in the morning Salander shut down her Power-Book and sat on her window seat looking out at Saltsjön. She sat quietly for two hours, smoking one cigarette after another, thinking. She had a number of strategic decisions to make—and she had to do a risk assessment.
She had to find Zala and settle their accounts once and for all.
On Saturday evening the week before Easter, Blomkvist visited an old girlfriend on Slipgatan in the Hornstull neighbourhood. He had, for once, accepted an invitation to a party. She was married now and not remotely interested in Blomkvist as anything more than a friend, but she worked in the media and had just finished a book that had been in gestation for ten years, which dealt with the image of women in the mass media. Blomkvist had contributed to the book, which was why he was invited.
His role had been to do research on one question. He had chosen to examine the equal opportunity policies which the TT wire service,
Dagens Nyheter
, the TV show
Rapport
, and a number of other media ostentatiously promoted. Then he checked off how many men and women were in each company’s management above the level of editorial assistant. The results were embarrassing: CEO—man; chairman of the board—man; editor in chief—man; foreign editor—man; managing editor—man … et cetera, until eventually the first woman turned up.
The party was at the author’s house and the people there were mostly those who had helped her with the book. It was a high-spirited evening with good food and relaxed conversation. Blomkvist had meant to go home reasonably early, but many of the guests were old acquaintances he seldom saw. Besides, no-one jabbered on too much about the Wennerström affair. The party went on until around 2:00 on Sunday morning.
Blomkvist saw the night bus drive past before he could make it to the bus stop, but the air was mild and he decided to walk home instead of waiting for the next one. He followed Högalidsgatan to the church and turned up Lundagatan, which instantly awakened old memories.
Blomkvist had kept the promise he’d made in December to stop visiting Lundagatan in the vain hope that Salander might appear. Tonight he stopped on the other side of the street from her building. He longed to ring the doorbell, but he knew how unlikely it was that she would want to see him, let alone at this time of night with no warning.
He shrugged and kept walking towards Zinkensdamm. He had gone about sixty yards when he heard a door open and turned, and then his heart skipped a beat. It was impossible to mistake that skinny body. Salander had just walked out to the street and away from him. She stopped at a parked car.
Blomkvist opened his mouth to call to her when his voice caught in his throat. He saw a man get out of another of the cars parked along the curb. He moved rapidly up behind Salander. Blomkvist could see that he was tall and had a pony tail.
Salander heard a sound and saw a movement out of the corner of her eye just as she was putting the key in the door of the Honda. He was approaching at an angle behind her, and she spun around two seconds before he reached her. She identified him instantly as Carl-Magnus Lundin of Svavelsjö MC, who several days ago had met the blond hulk at Blomberg’s Café.