Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest, The - Stieg Larsson [153]
Only a woman who had killed a man in battle was allowed to give up her virginity.
CHAPTER 16
Friday, 27.v – Tuesday, 31.v
Blomkvist left the Millennium offices at 10.30 on Friday night. He took the stairs down to the ground floor, but instead of going out on to the street he turned left and went through the basement, across the inner courtyard, and through the building behind theirs on to Hökens Gata. He ran into a group of youths on their way from Mosebacke, but saw no-one who seemed to be paying him any attention. Anyone watching the building would think that he was spending the night at Millennium, as he often did. He had established that pattern as early as April. Actually it was Malm who had the night shift.
He spent fifteen minutes walking down the alleys and boulevards around Mosebacke before he headed for Fiskargatan 9. He opened the entrance door using the code and took the stairs to the top-floor apartment, where he used Salander’s keys to get in. He turned off the alarm. He always felt a bit bemused when he went into the apartment: twenty-one rooms, of which only three were furnished.
He began by making coffee and sandwiches before he went into Salander’s office and booted up her PowerBook.
From the moment in mid-April when Björck’s report was stolen and Blomkvist realized that he was under surveillance, he had established his own headquarters at Salander’s apartment. He had transferred the most crucial documentation to her desk. He spent several nights a week at the apartment, slept in her bed, and worked on her computer. She had wiped her hard drive clean before she left for Gosseberga and the confrontation with Zalachenko. Blomkvist supposed that she had not planned to come back. He had used her system disks to restore her computer to a functioning state.
Since April he had not even plugged in the broadband cable to his own machine. He logged on to her broadband connection, started up the I.C.Q. chat program, and pinged up the address she had created for him through the Yahoo group [Idiotic_Table].
Ping.
Blomkvist smiled.
Blomkvist logged in to I.C.Q. and went into the newly created Yahoo group [The_Knights]. All he found was a link from Plague to an anonymous U.R.L. which consisted solely of numbers. He copied the address into Explorer, hit the return key, and came to a website somewhere on the Internet that contained the sixteen gigabytes of Ekström’s hard drive.
Plague had obviously made it simple for himself by copying over Ekström’s entire hard drive, and Blomkvist spent more than an hour sorting through its contents. He ignored the system files, software and endless files containing preliminary investigations that seemed to stretch back several years. He downloaded four folders. Three of them were called [PrelimInv/Salander], [Slush/Salander], and [PrelimInv/Niedermann]. The fourth was a copy of Ekström’s email folder made at 2.00 p.m. the previous day.
“Thanks, Plague,” Blomkvist said to himself.
He spent three hours reading through Ekström’s preliminary investigation and strategy for the trial. Not surprisingly, much of it dealt with Salander’s mental state. Ekström wanted an extensive psychiatric examination and had sent a lot of messages with the object of getting her transferred to Kronoberg prison as a matter of urgency.
Blomkvist could tell that Ekström’s search for Niedermann was making no headway. Bublanski was the leader of that investigation. He had succeeding in gathering some forensic evidence linking Niedermann to the murders of Svensson and Johansson, as well as to the murder of Bjurman. Blomkvist’s own three long interviews in April had set them on the trail of this evidence. If Niedermann were ever apprehended, Blomkvist would have to be a witness for the prosecution. At long last D.N.A. from sweat droplets and two hairs from Bjurman’s apartment were matched to items from Niedermann’s room in Gosseberga. The same D.N.A. was found in abundant quantities on the remains of Svavelsj