Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest, The - Stieg Larsson [127]
She sat utterly still. Jonasson seemed distracted and 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 at once 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:
You’re the hacker, work it out! / Kalle B.
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 Bloody 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 Bloody 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:
First of all, this is only between you and me. Your lawyer, my sister Annika, has no idea that you have access to this computer. It has to stay that way.
I don’t know how much you understand of what is happening outside your locked room, but strangely enough (despite your personality), you have a number of loyal idiots working on your behalf. I have already established an elite body called The Knights of the Idiotic Table. We will be holding an annual dinner at which we’ll have fun talking crap about you. (No, you’re not invited.)
So, to the point. Annika is doing her best to prepare for your trial. One problem of course is that she’s working for you and is bound and fettered by one of those damned confidentiality oaths. So she can’t tell me what the two of you discuss, which in this case is a bit of a handicap. Luckily she does accept information.
We have to talk, you and I.
Don’t use my email.
I may be paranoid, but I have reason to suspect that I’m not the only one reading it. If you want to deliver something, go to Yahoo group [Idiotic_Table]. I.D. Pippi and the password is p9i2p7p7i. / Mikael
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