Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest, The - Stieg Larsson [154]
On the other hand, Ekström had remarkably little on the record about Zalachenko.
Blomkvist lit a cigarette and stood by the window looking out towards Djurgården.
Ekström was leading two separate preliminary investigations. Criminal Inspector Faste was the investigative leader in all matters dealing with Salander. Bublanski was working only on Niedermann.
When the name Zalachenko turned up in the preliminary investigation, the logical thing for Ekström to do would have been to contact the general director of the Security Police to determine who Zalachenko actually was. Blomkvist could find no such enquiry in Ekström’s email, journal or notes. But among the notes Blomkvist found several cryptic sentences.
The Salander investigation is fake. Björck’s original doesn’t match Blomkvist’s version. Classify TOP SECRET.
Then a series of notes claiming that Salander was paranoid and a schizophrenic.
Correct to lock up Salander 1991.
He found what linked the investigations in the Salander slush, that is, the supplementary information that the prosecutor considered irrelevant to the preliminary investigation, and which would therefore not be presented at the trial or make up part of the chain of evidence against her. This included almost everything that had to do with Zalachenko’s background.
The investigation was totally inadequate.
Blomkvist wondered to what extent this was a coincidence and to what extent it was contrived. Where was the boundary? And was Ekström aware that there was a boundary?
Could it be that someone was deliberately supplying Ekström with believable but misleading information?
Finally Blomkvist logged into hotmail and spent ten minutes checking the half-dozen anonymous email accounts he had created. Each day he had checked the address he had given to Criminal Inspector Modig. He had no great hope that she would contact him, so he was mildly surprised when he opened the inbox and found an email from ressallskap9april@hotmail.com>. The message consisted of a single line:
Café Madeleine, upper level, 11.00 a.m. Saturday.
Plague pinged Salander at midnight and interrupted her in the middle of a sentence she was writing about her time with Holger Palmgren as her guardian. She cast an irritated glance at the display.
She sat up in bed and looked eagerly at the screen of her Palm.
Plague gave her the U.R.L. of the server where he kept Teleborian’s hard drive.
>
Salander disconnected from Plague and accessed the server he had directed her to. She spent nearly three hours scrutinizing folder after folder on Teleborian’s computer.
She found correspondence between Teleborian and a person with a hotmail address who sent encrypted mail. Since she had access to Teleborian’s P.G.P. key, she easily decoded the correspondence. His name was Jonas, no last name. Jonas and Teleborian had an unhealthy interest in seeing that Salander did not thrive.
Yes … we can prove that there is a conspiracy.
But what really interested Salander were the forty-seven folders containing close to nine thousand photographs of explicit child pornography. She clicked on image after image of children aged about fifteen or younger. A number of pictures were of infants. The majority were of girls. Many of them were sadistic.
She found links to at least a dozen people abroad who traded child porn with each other.
Salander bit her lip, but her face was otherwise expressionless.
She remembered the nights when, as a twelve-year-old, she had been strapped down in a stimulus-free room at St Stefan’s. Teleborian had come into the room again and again to look at her in the glow of the nightlight.
She knew. He had never touched her, but she had always known.
She should have dealt with Teleborian years ago. But she had repressed the memory of him. She had chosen to ignore his existence.
After a while she pinged Blomkvist on I.C.Q.
Blomkvist spent the night at Salander’s apartment on Fiskargatan. He did not shut down the computer until 6.30 a.m. and fell asleep with photographs of gross child pornography whirling through