Girl Who Played with Fire, The - Stieg Larsson [68]
Salander did not get home until 7:00 in the morning. She pulled out the neck of her T-shirt and sniffed. She thought about taking a shower but decided the hell with it, and instead left her clothes on the floor and went to bed. She slept till 4:00 in the afternoon, then got up and went down to Söderhallarna market and had breakfast.
She thought about Blomkvist, and about her reaction to suddenly finding herself in the same room as him. She had been annoyed at his presence, but she also discovered that it no longer hurt to see him. He had been transformed to a little blip on the horizon, a minor perturbation factor in her existence. There were worse disturbances in life.
But she wished she had had the guts to go up to him and say hello. Or possibly break his legs. She wasn’t sure which.
Anyway, she was curious about what he was up to. She ran a few errands in the afternoon and came home around 7:00 p.m. She booted up her PowerBook and started Asphyxia 1.3. The icon MikBlom/laptop was still on the server in Holland. She double-clicked and opened a copy of Blomkvist’s hard drive. It was her first visit to his computer since she had left Sweden more than a year before. She noticed with satisfaction that he still had not upgraded to the latest MacOS, which would have meant that Asphyxia would have crashed and the hacking would have been terminated. She realized that she would have to rewrite the programme so that an upgrade would not interfere with it.
The volume on the hard drive had increased by almost 6.9 gigabytes since her previous visit. A large part of the increase was due to PDF files and Quark documents. The documents did not take up much room but the bitmaps did, despite the fact that the images were compressed. Since he had returned as publisher he had apparently archived every issue of Millennium.
She sorted the files on the hard disk by date with the oldest at the top and noticed that Blomkvist had spent a great deal of time over the past few months on a folder named , apparently a book project. Then she opened Blomkvist’s email and read carefully through the address list in his correspondence.
One address made Salander jump. On January 26 Blomkvist had got an email from Harriet Fucking Vanger. She opened the message and read a few concise lines about a board meeting to take place at the Millennium offices. The message ended with the information that Vanger had booked the same hotel room as last time.
Salander digested the information. Then she shrugged and downloaded Blomkvist’s mail, Svensson’s book manuscript with the working title The Leeches and the subtitle Society’s Support for the Prostitution Industry. She also found a copy of a thesis entitled “From Russia with Love” written by a woman named Mia Johansson.
She disconnected and went into the kitchen to put on some coffee. Then she sat on her new sofa in the living room with her PowerBook. She opened Mimmi’s cigarette case and lit a Marlboro Light. The rest of the evening she spent reading.
By 9:00 she had finished Johansson’s thesis. She bit her lower lip.
By 10:30 she had finished Svensson’s book. Millennium would soon be making headlines again.
At 11:30 she was reading the last of Blomkvist’s emails when she suddenly sat up and opened her eyes wide.
She felt a cold shiver go down her spine.
It was a message from Svensson to Blomkvist.
In an aside Svensson mentioned that he had some tentative ideas about an Eastern European gangster named Zala who might get a chapter all to himself—but acknowledged that there was not much time till the deadline. Blomkvist hadn’t answered the email.
Zala.
Salander sat motionless until the screen saver went on.
Svensson put aside his notebook and scratched his head. He gazed at the single word at the top of the page in his notebook. Four letters.
Zala.
He spent three minutes deep in thought, drawing labyrinthine rings around the name. Then he went and got a cup of coffee from the kitchenette. It was time to go home to bed, but he had discovered that he enjoyed working late at