The Girl Who Played with Fire (67 page)

She studied the personnel files and chose employee Marcus Collander, who had just gone on vacation for two weeks. He had left the telephone number of a hotel in the Canary Islands. She changed the hotel name and scrambled the digits of the phone number where he could be reached. Then she entered a note that Collander’s last action while on duty had been to drop off one of the cars for servicing. She picked a Toyota
Corolla automatic, which she had driven before, and recorded that it would be back a week later.

Finally she went into the surveillance system and reprogrammed the cameras she would have to walk past. Between 4:30 and 5:00 a.m. they would show a repeat of the previous half hour, but with an altered time code.

At 4:15 she packed her backpack. She had two changes of clothes, two Mace canisters, and the fully charged Taser. She looked at the two guns she had acquired. She rejected Sandström’s Colt 1911 Government and chose Nieminen’s Polish P-83 Wanad, which had one round missing from the magazine. It was slimmer and fit her hand better. She put it into her jacket pocket.

Salander closed the lid of her PowerBook but left the computer on the desk. She had transferred the contents of her hard drive to an encrypted backup on the Net and then erased her whole hard drive with a programme she had written herself, which guaranteed that not even she could reconstruct the contents. She did not want to rely on her Power-Book, which would just be cumbersome to drag around. Instead she took her Palm Tungsten PDA with her.

She looked around her office. She had a feeling that she would not be coming back to the apartment in Mosebacke and knew that she was leaving secrets behind that she should probably destroy. But glancing at her watch she realized that she did not have much time. She turned off the desk lamp.

She walked to Milton Security, went into the garage, and took the elevator up to the administrative offices. She met no-one in the empty corridors and taking the car keys out of the unlocked cabinet in reception presented no difficulty.

She was in the garage thirty seconds later, and blipped open the door lock on the Corolla. She dumped her backpack in the passenger seat and adjusted the driver’s seat and the rearview mirror. She used her old card key to open the garage door.

Just before 5:00 she turned up from Söder Mälarstrand at Västerbron. It was starting to get light.

Blomkvist woke up at 6:30. He had not set his alarm clock and had slept for only three hours. He got up and switched on his iBook and opened the folder
to look for her reply.

Blomkvist felt a chill run down his spine. Hardly the answer he had hoped for. It felt like a farewell letter.
Salander alone against the world
. He went to the kitchen and started the coffeemaker and then had a shower. He put on a pair of worn jeans and realized that he had not had time to do laundry for weeks. He had no clean shirts. He put on a wine-red sweatshirt under his grey jacket.

As he made breakfast in the kitchen, a glint of metal on the counter behind the microwave caught his eye. With a fork he fished out a key ring.

Salander’s keys. He had found them after the attack on Lundagatan and put them on top of the microwave with her shoulder bag. He had forgotten to give them to Inspector Modig with the bag, and they must have fallen down in back.

He stared at the bunch of keys. Three large ones and three small. The three large keys were presumably to an entrance door, an apartment, and a dead bolt.
Her apartment
. Obviously not the apartment on Lundagatan. So where the hell did she live?

He examined the three small keys more closely. One was probably for her Kawasaki. One looked like it was for a safety-deposit box or storage cabinet. He held up the third key. The number 24914 was stamped on it. The realization hit him.

A P.O. box. Lisbeth Salander has a P.O. box
.

He looked up the post offices in Södermalm in the phone book. She had lived on Lundagatan. Ringvägen was too far away. Maybe Hornsgatan. Or Rosenlundsgatan.

He turned off the coffeemaker, abandoned his breakfast, and drove Berger’s BMW to Rosenlundsgatan. The key did not fit. He drove on to Hornsgatan. The key fit perfectly in box 24914. He opened it and found twenty-two items of post, which he stuffed into the outside pocket of his laptop case.

He drove on to Hornsgatan, parked by the Kvarter cinema, and had breakfast at Copacabana on Bergsundsstrand. As he waited for his caffè latte he examined the letters one by one. All were addressed to Wasp Enterprises. Nine letters had been sent from Switzerland, eight from the Cayman Islands, one from the Channel Islands, and four from Gibraltar.

With no pang of conscience he slit open the envelopes. The first twenty-one contained bank statements and reports on various accounts and funds. Salander was as rich as a troll.

The twenty-second letter was thicker. The address was handwritten. The envelope had a printed logo and the return address of Buchanan House, Queensway Quay, Gibraltar. The enclosed letter was on the stationery of a Jeremy S. MacMillan, Solicitor. He had neat handwriting.

The letter was dated January 24. Salander apparently did not pick up her mail very often. Blomkvist looked at the attached documentation for the purchase of an apartment in a building at Fiskargatan 9 in Mosebacke.

Then he almost choked on his coffee. The price paid was twenty-five million kronor, and the deal was concluded with two payments a year apart.

Salander watched a solid, dark-haired man unlock the side door of Auto-Expert in Eskilstuna. It was a garage, a repair shop, and a car rental agency. A typical franchise. It was 6:50, and according to a handwritten sign on the front door, the shop did not open until 7:30. She went across the street and followed the man through the side door into the shop. The man heard her and turned round.

“Refik Alba?” she said.

“Yes. Who are you? I’m not open yet.”

She raised Nieminen’s P-83 Wanad and held the weapon with two hands aimed at his face.

“I don’t want to haggle with you. I just want to see your list of cars rented out. I want to see it now. You have ten seconds to produce it.”

Refik Alba was forty-two years old, a Kurd born in Diyarbakir, and he had seen his fill of guns. He stood as if paralyzed. Then he concluded that if this crazy woman came into his garage with a pistol in her hand, there was not going to be much to discuss.

“It’s on the computer,” he said.

“Turn it on.”

He did as she told him.

“What’s behind that door?” she asked as the computer booted up and the screen began to flicker.

“It’s just a closet.”

“Open it.”

It contained some overalls.

“OK. Go into the closet, stay calm, and I won’t have to hurt you.”

He obeyed her without protest.

“Take out your mobile, put it on the floor, and kick it over to me.”

He did as she said.

“Good. Now close the door behind you.”

It was an antique PC with Windows 95 and a 280 MB hard drive. It took an eternity to open the Excel document with the car rental listing. The white Volvo had been rented on two occasions. First for two weeks in January, and then from March 1. It had not yet been returned. He was paying a weekly fee for a long-term rental.

The name was Ronald Niedermann.

She looked through the folders on the shelf above the computer. One of them had the label
IDENTIFICATION
printed neatly on it. She took the folder down and paged through to Ronald Niedermann. When he rented the car in January he had given his passport as ID, and Refik Alba had made a photocopy. She recognized the blond hulk at once. According to the passport he was German, thirty-five years old, born in Hamburg. The fact that Alba had made a copy from the passport showed that Niedermann was just a customer, not a friend.

At the bottom of the page Alba had written a mobile number and a P.O. box address in Göteborg.

Salander replaced the folder and turned off the computer. She looked around and found a rubber doorstop next to the front door. She picked it up and went back to the closet and knocked on the door with the barrel of her gun.

“Can you hear me in there?”

“Yes.”

“Do you know who I am?”

Silence.

He’d have to be blind not to recognize me
.

“OK. You know who I am. Are you afraid of me?”

“Yes.”

“Don’t be afraid of me, Herr Alba. I’m not going to hurt you. I’m almost finished here. I’m sorry for putting you to this trouble.”

“Uh … OK.”

“Have you got enough air to breathe in there?”

“Yes … what do you want, anyway?”

“I wanted to see whether a certain woman had hired a car from you two years ago,” she lied. “I didn’t find what I wanted, but it’s not your fault. I’ll be leaving in a few minutes. I’m going to put the doorstop under the closet door here. The door is thin enough for you to break your way out, but it will take a while. You don’t have to call the police. You’ll never see me again, and you can open up as usual today and pretend that this never happened.”

The chances of him not calling the police were pretty remote, but it did not hurt to give him the option to think about. She left the garage and walked to the Toyota Corolla around the corner, where she swiftly changed into Irene Nesser.

She was annoyed not to have found a street address for Ronald Niedermann in the Stockholm area, just a P.O. box address on the other side of Sweden. But it was the only lead she had.
So, to Göteborg
.

She made for the E20 and turned west towards Arboga. She turned on the radio, but she had just missed the news and got some commercial station. She listened to David Bowie singing “putting out fire with gasoline.” She didn’t know the name of the song, but she took the words as prophetic.

Blomkvist looked at the entrance door of Fiskargatan 9. It was one of Stockholm’s most exclusive addresses. He put the key in the lock and it turned perfectly. The list of residents in the lobby was no help. Blomkvist assumed it would be mostly corporate apartments, but there seemed to be one or two private residences among them. It hardly surprised him that Salander’s name was not listed, yet it still seemed unlikely that this would be her hideout.

He walked up floor by floor, reading the nameplates on the doors. None of them rang a bell. Then he got to the top floor and read
V. KULLA
.

Blomkvist slapped his forehead. He had to smile. The choice of name may not have been intended to make fun of him personally; it was more likely some private ironic reflection of Salander’s—but where else should Kalle Blomkvist, nicknamed for an Astrid Lindgren character, look for her than at Pippi Longstocking’s Villa Villekulla?

He rang the doorbell and waited a minute. Then he took out the keys and unfastened the dead bolt and the bottom lock.

The instant he opened the door, the burglar alarm device was activated.

Salander’s mobile began beeping. She was near Glanshammar just outside Örebro. She braked and pulled onto the shoulder. She took her Palm from her jacket pocket and plugged it into her phone.

Fifteen seconds earlier someone had opened the door to her apartment. The alarm was not connected to any security company. Its only
purpose was to alert her that someone had broken in or had opened the door in some other way. After thirty seconds an alarm bell would go off and the uninvited visitor would get an unpleasant surprise in the form of a paint bomb hidden in a fake fuse box next to the door. She smiled in anticipation and counted down the seconds.

Blomkvist stared in frustration at the alarm display by the door. For some reason he hadn’t even thought that the apartment might have an alarm. He watched the digital clock counting down.
Millennium’s
alarm was triggered if someone failed to key in the correct four-digit code within thirty seconds, and shortly thereafter a couple of muscular guys from a security company would come through the door.

His first impulse was to close the door and make a quick exit from the building. But he just stood there, frozen to the spot.

Four digits. Impossible to guess the code at random
.

25–24–23–22…

Damned Pippi Long…

19–18 …

What code would you use?

15–14–13 …

He felt his panic growing
.

10–9–8 …

Then he raised his hand and desperately punched in the only number he could think of: 9277. The numbers that corresponded to the letters
W-A-S-P
on the keypad.

To his astonishment the countdown stopped with six seconds to go. Then the alarm beeped one last time before the display was reset to zero and a green light came on.

Salander opened her eyes wide. She thought she had to be seeing things and actually shook her PDA, which she realized was irrational. The countdown had stopped six seconds before the paint bomb was supposed to explode. And a second later the display reset to zero.

Impossible
.

No other person in the world knew the code.

How could it be possible? The police? No. Zala? Inconceivable.

She dialled a number on her mobile and waited for the surveillance camera to connect and begin to send low-resolution images through.