Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest, The - Stieg Larsson [202]
“It’s pretty cryptic.”
“What did she say?”
“She says: ‘Poison Pen is Peter Fredriksson.’”
Erika sat for ten seconds in silence while thoughts rushed through her head. Impossible. Peter isn’t like that. Salander has to be wrong.
“Was that all?”
“That’s the whole message. Do you know what it’s about?”
“Yes.”
“Ricky … what are you and that girl up to? She rang you to tip me off about Teleborian and—”
“Thanks, Micke. We’ll talk later.”
She turned off her mobile and looked at Linder with an expression of absolute astonishment.
“Tell me,” Linder said.
Linder was in two minds. Berger had been told that her assistant editor was the one sending the vicious emails. She talked non-stop. Then Linder had asked her how she knew Fredriksson was her stalker. Then Berger was silent. Linder noticed her eyes and saw that something had changed in her attitude. She was all of a sudden totally confused.
“I can’t tell you …”
“What do you mean you can’t tell me?”
“Susanne, I just know that Fredriksson is responsible. But I can’t tell you how I got that information. What can I do?”
“If I’m going to help you, you have to tell me.”
“I … I can’t. You don’t understand.”
Berger got up and stood at the kitchen window with her back to Linder. Finally she turned.
“I’m going to his house.”
“You’ll do nothing of the sort. You’re not going anywhere, least of all to the home of somebody who obviously hates you.”
Berger looked torn.
“Sit down. Tell me what happened. It was Blomkvist calling you, right?”
Berger nodded.
“I … today I asked a hacker to go through the home computers of the staff.”
“Aha. So you’ve probably by extension committed a serious computer crime. And you don’t want to tell me who your hacker is?”
“I promised I would never tell anyone … Other people are involved. Something that Mikael is working on.”
“Does Blomkvist know about the emails and the break-in here?”
“No, he was just passing on a message.”
Linder cocked her head to one side, and all of a sudden a chain of associations formed in her mind.
Erika Berger. Mikael Blomkvist. Millennium. Rogue policemen who broke in and bugged Blomkvist’s apartment. Linder watching the watchers. Blomkvist working like a madman on a story about Lisbeth Salander.
The fact that Salander was a wizard at computers was widely known at Milton Security. No-one knew how she had come by her skills, and Linder had never heard any rumours that Salander might be a hacker. But Armansky had once said something about Salander delivering quite incredible reports when she was doing personal investigations. A hacker …
But Salander is under guard on a ward in Göteborg.
It was absurd.
“Is it Salander we’re talking about?” Linder said.
Berger looked as though she had touched a live wire.
“I can’t discuss where the information came from. Not one word.”
Linder laughed aloud.
It was Salander. Berger’s confirmation of it could not have been clearer. She was completely off balance.
Yet it’s impossible.
Under guard as she was, Salander had nevertheless taken on the job of finding out who Poison Pen was. Sheer madness.
Linder thought hard.
She could not understand the whole Salander story. She had met her maybe five times during the years she had worked at Milton Security and had never had so much as a single conversation with her. She regarded Salander as a sullen and asocial individual with a skin like a rhino. She had heard that Armansky himself had taken Salander on and since she respected Armansky she assumed that he had good reason for his endless patience towards the sullen girl.
Poison Pen is Peter Fredriksson.
Could she be right? What was the proof?
Linder then spent a long time questioning Erika on everything she knew about Fredriksson, what his role was at S.M.P., and how their relationship had been. The answers did not help her at all.
Berger had displayed a frustrating indecision. She had wavered between a determination to drive out to Fredriksson’s place and confront him, and an unwillingness to believe that it could really be true. Finally Linder convinced her that she