Girl Who Kicked the Hornets Nest, The - Stieg Larsson [84]
He had played it safe. Murder suspect or not, she was his patient, and his job was to make sure she got well. So he filled out a “no visitors” form that had no connection whatsoever to the one that was set in place by the prosecutor. He prescribed various medications and complete bedrest.
But Jonasson also realized that isolation was an inhumane way of punishing people; in fact it bordered on torture. No-one felt good when they were separated from all their friends, so he decided that Salander’s lawyer should serve as a proxy friend. He had a serious talk with Giannini and explained that she could have access to Salander for one hour a day. During this hour she could talk with her or just sit quietly and keep her company, but their conversations should not deal with Salander’s problems or impending legal battles.
“Lisbeth Salander was shot in the head and was very seriously injured,” he explained. “I think she’s out of danger, but there is always a risk of bleeding or some other complication. She needs to rest and she has to have time to heal. Only when that has happened can she begin to confront her legal problems.”
Giannini understood Dr Jonasson’s reasoning. She had some general conversations with Salander and hinted at the outline of the strategy that she and Blomkvist had planned, but Salander was simply so drugged and exhausted that she would fall asleep while Giannini was speaking.
Armansky studied Malm’s photographs of the men who had followed Blomkvist from the Copacabana. They were in sharp focus.
“No,” he said. “Never seen them before.”
Blomkvist nodded. They were in Armansky’s office on Monday morning. Blomkvist had come into the building via the garage.
“The older one is Göran Mårtensson, who owns the Volvo. He followed me like a guilty conscience for at least a week, but it could have been longer.”
“And you reckon that he’s Säpo.”
Blomkvist referred to Mårtensson’s C.V. Armansky hesitated.
You could take it for granted that the Security Police invariably made fools of themselves. That was the natural order of things, not for Säpo alone but probably for intelligence services all over the world. The French secret police had sent frogmen to New Zealand to blow up the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, for God’s sake. That had to be the most idiotic intelligence operation in the history of the world. With the possible exception of President Nixon’s lunatic break-in at Watergate. With such cretinous leadership it was no wonder that scandals occurred. Their successes were never reported. But the media jumped all over the Security Police whenever anything improper or foolish came to light, and with all the wisdom of hindsight.
On the one hand, the media regarded Säpo as an excellent news source, and almost any political blunder gave rise to headlines: “Säpo suspects that …” A Säpo statement carried a lot of weight in a headline.
On the other hand, politicians of various affiliations, along with the media, were particularly diligent in condemning exposed Säpo agents if they had spied on Swedish citizens. Armansky found this entirely contradictory. He did not have anything against the existence of Säpo. Someone had to take responsibility for seeing to it that national-Bolshevist crackpots – who had read too much Bakunin or whoever the hell these neo-Nazis read – did not patch together a bomb made of fertilizer and oil and park it in a van outside Rosenbad. Säpo was necessary, and Armansky did not think a little discreet surveillance was such a bad thing, so long as its objective was to safeguard the security of the nation.
The problem, of course, was that an organization assigned to spy on citizens must remain under strict public scrutiny. There had to be a high level of constitutional oversight. But it was almost impossible for Members of Parliament to have oversight of Säpo, even when the Prime Minister appointed a special investigator who, on paper at least, was supposed