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Blomkvist went on asking questions for another few minutes, but he was sure that he already had everything Janeryd could tell him. Three names.

Fredrik Clinton.

Hans von Rottinger.

And Evert Gullberg – the man who had shot Zalachenko.

The Zalachenko club.

He thanked Janeryd for the meeting and walked the short distance along Lange Voorhout to Hotel des Indes, from where he took a taxi to Centraal. It was not until he was in the taxi that he reached into his jacket pocket and stopped the tape recorder.

Berger looked up and scanned the half-empty newsroom beyond the glass cage. Holm was off that day. She saw no-one who showed any interest in her, either openly or covertly. Nor did she have reason to think that anyone on the editorial staff wished her ill.

The email had arrived a minute before. The sender was editorial-@aftonbladet.com>. Why Aftonbladet? The address was another fake.

Today’s message contained no text. There was only a jpeg that she opened in Photoshop.

The image was pornographic: a naked woman with exceptionally large breasts, a dog collar around her neck. She was on all fours and being mounted from the rear.

The woman’s face had been replaced with Berger’s. It was not a skilled collage, but probably that was not the point. The picture was from her old byline at Millennium and could be downloaded off the Net.

At the bottom of the picture was one word, written with the spray function in Photoshop.

Whore.

This was the ninth anonymous message she had received containing the word “whore,” sent apparently by someone at a well-known media outlet in Sweden. She had a cyber-stalker on her hands.

The telephone tapping was a more difficult task than the computer monitoring. Trinity had no trouble locating the cable to Prosecutor Ekström’s home telephone. The problem was that Ekström seldom or never used it for work-related calls. Trinity did not even consider trying to bug Ekström’s work telephone at police H.Q. on Kungsholmen. That would have required extensive access to the Swedish cable network, which he did not have.

But Trinity and Bob the Dog devoted the best part of a week to identifying and separating out Ekström’s mobile from the background noise of about 200,000 other mobile telephones within a kilometre of police headquarters.

They used a technique called Random Frequency Tracking System. The technique was not uncommon. It had been developed by the U.S. National Security Agency, and was built into an unknown number of satellites that performed pinpoint monitoring of capitals around the world as well as flashpoints of special interest.

The N.S.A. had enormous resources and used a vast network in order to capture a large number of mobile conversations in a certain region simultaneously. Each individual call was separated and processed digitally by computers programmed to react to certain words, such as terrorist or Kalashnikov. If such a word occurred, the computer automatically sent an alarm, which meant that some operator would go in manually and listen to the conversation to decide whether it was of interest or not.

It was a more complex problem to identify a specific mobile telephone. Each mobile has its own unique signature – a fingerprint – in the form of the telephone number. With exceptionally sensitive equipment the N.S.A. could focus on a specific area to separate out and monitor mobile calls. The technique was simple but not 100 per cent effective. Outgoing calls were particularly hard to identify. Incoming calls were simpler because they were preceded by the fingerprint that would enable the telephone in question to receive the signal.

The difference between Trinity and the N.S.A. attempting to eavesdrop could be measured in economic terms. The N.S.A. had an annual budget of several billion U.S. dollars, close to twelve thousand fulltime agents, and access to cutting-edge technology in I.T. and telecommunications. Trinity had a van with thirty kilos of electronic equipment, much of which was home-made stuff that Bob the Dog had set up. Through its