Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest, The - Stieg Larsson [213]
She did not refer to Fredriksson. If she had done, all interest would have focused on him, and her real reasons would be drowned out by the sensation a case of sexual harassment would inevitably cause.
She gave two reasons. The principal one was that she had met implacable resistance from management to her proposal that managers and owners should reduce their salaries and bonuses. Which meant that she would have had to start her tenure at S.M.P. with damaging cutbacks in staff. This was not only a breach of the promise she had been given when she accepted the job, but it would undercut her every attempt to bring about long-term change in order to strengthen the newspaper.
The second reason she gave was the revelation about Borgsjö. She wrote that she had been instructed to cover up the story, and this flew in the face of all she believed to be her job. It meant that she had no choice but to resign her position as editor. She concluded by saying that S.M.P.’s dire situation was not a personnel problem, but a management problem.
She read through the memo, corrected the typos, and emailed it to all the paper’s employees. She sent a copy to Pressens Tidning, a media journal, and also to the trade magazine Journalisten. Then she packed away her laptop and went to see Holm at his desk.
“Goodbye,” she said.
“Goodbye, Berger. It was hellish working with you.”
They smiled at each other.
“One last thing,” she said.
“Tell me?”
“Frisk has been working on a story I commissioned.”
“Right, and nobody has any idea what it’s about.”
“Give him some support. He’s come a long way, and I’ll be staying in touch with him. Let him finish the job. I guarantee you’ll be pleased with the result.”
He looked wary. Then he nodded.
They did not shake hands. She left her card key on his desk and took the lift down to the garage. She parked her B.M.W. near the Millennium offices at a little after 4.00.
PART 4
REBOOTING SYSTEM
I.vii – 7.x
Despite the rich variety of Amazon legends from ancient Greece, South America, Africa and elsewhere, there is only one historically documented example of female warriors. This is the women’s army that existed among the Fon of Dahomey in West Africa, now Benin.
These female warriors have never been mentioned in the published military histories; no romanticized films have been made about them, and today they exist as no more than footnotes to history. Only one scholarly work has been written about these women, Amazons of Black Sparta by Stanley B. Alpern (C. Hurst & Co., London, 1998), and yet they made up a force that was the equal of every contemporary body of male elite soldiers from among the colonial powers.
It is not clear exactly when Fon’s female army was founded, but some sources date it to the 1600s. It was originally a royal guard, but it developed into a military collective of six thousand soldiers with a semi-divine status. They were not merely window-dressing. For almost two hundred years they constituted the vanguard of the Fon against European colonizers. They were feared by the French forces, who lost several battles against them. This army of women was not defeated until 1892, when France sent troops with artillery, the Foreign Legion, a marine infantry regiment and cavalry.
It is not known how many of these female warriors fell in battle. For many years survivors continued to wage guerrilla warfare, and veterans of the army were interviewed and photographed as late as the 1940s.
CHAPTER 23
Friday, 1.vii – Sunday, 10.vii
Two weeks before the trial of Lisbeth Salander began, Malm finished the layout of the 352-page book tersely entitled The Section. The cover was blue with yellow type. Malm had positioned seven postage-stamp-sized black-and-white images of Swedish Prime Ministers along the bottom. Over the top of them hovered a photograph of Zalachenko. He had used Zalachenko’s passport photograph as an illustration, increasing the contrast so that only the