Girl Who Played with Fire, The - Stieg Larsson [220]
Despite the fact that she already knew every word by heart, Salander once again read through the material about herself that she had found in Bjurman’s files. She sat in the window seat and opened the cigarette case Miriam Wu had given her. She lit a cigarette and looked out towards Djurgården. She had discovered some things about her life that she had never known before.
In fact so much fell into place that she turned quite cold. Above all she was interested in the report filed by Björck in March 1991. She wasn’t certain which one of the many grown-ups who had talked to her was Björck, but she thought she knew. He had introduced himself with another name. Sven Jansson. She remembered every feature of his face, every word he said, and every gesture he made on the three occasions she had encountered him.
The whole thing was a disaster.
Zalachenko had burned like fury inside the car. He had managed to push open the door and roll out onto the pavement, but his leg got caught inside by the seat belt. People had come rushing up to smother the flames. A fire engine arrived and put out the fire. An ambulance arrived and Lisbeth had tried to get the medics to ignore Zalachenko and come and see to her mother. They had shoved her aside. The police arrived, and there were witnesses who pointed to her. She tried to explain what had happened, but it felt as if nobody was listening to her, and suddenly she was sitting in the backseat of a police car and it took minutes and minutes and minutes and finally almost an hour before the police went into the apartment and found her mother.
Agneta Sofia Salander was unconscious. She had brain damage. The first in a long series of small cerebral haemorrhages had been triggered by the beating. She would never recover.
Salander now understood why nobody had read the police report, why Palmgren had failed in his attempt to have it released, and why even today Prosecutor Ekström, who was leading the search for her, did not have access to it. It had not been written by the regular police. It had been put together by some creep in the Security Police. It had rubber stamps on it saying that the report was classified as top secret according to the law of national security.
Zalachenko had worked for Säpo.
It was no report. It was a cover-up. Zalachenko was more important than Agneta Salander. He could not be identified or exposed. Zalachenko did not exist.
It was not Zalachenko who was the problem—it was Lisbeth Salander, the crazy kid who threatened to crack one of the country’s most crucial secrets wide open.
A secret that she had not known anything about. She brooded. Zalachenko had met her mother very soon after he had arrived in Sweden. He had introduced himself using his real name. Perhaps at that time he had not yet been given a cover name or a Swedish identity, or he was not using it for her. She only knew his real name. But he had been given a new name by the Swedish government. That explained why Lisbeth had never found his name in any public records in all these years.
She got the point. If Zalachenko were accused of aggravated assault, Agneta Salander’s lawyer would start looking into his past. Where do you work, Herr Zalachenko? What’s your real name? Where do you come from?
If Salander ended up with social services maybe somebody would start digging around. She was too young to be charged, but if the gasoline-bomb attack were investigated in too much detail, the same thing would happen. She could imagine the headlines in the papers. The investigation would have to be conducted by a trusted person. And then stamped top secret and buried so deep that nobody would find it. And Salander would have to be buried so deep that nobody would find her either.
Gunnar Björck.
St. Stefan’s.
Peter Teleborian.
The explanation was driving her wild.
Dear Government… I’m going to have a serious talk with you if I ever find anyone to talk to.
She wondered fleetingly what the minister of health and social welfare would think about getting a Molotov cocktail tossed through the