Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The - Stieg Larsson [203]
He turned off the lamp and shut his eyes. Salander lay down next to him.
“Wennerström is a gangster.”
“I know.”
“No, I mean, I know that he’s a gangster. He works with everybody from the Russian mafia to the Colombian drug cartels.”
“What do you mean?”
“When I turned in my report to Frode he gave me an extra assignment. He asked me to try to find out what really happened at the trial. I had just started working on it when he called Armansky and cancelled the job.”
“I wonder why.”
“I assume that they scrapped the investigation as soon as you accepted Henrik Vanger’s assignment. It would no longer have been of immediate interest.”
“And?”
“Well, I don’t like leaving things unresolved. I had a few weeks…free last spring when Armansky didn’t have any jobs for me, so I did some digging into Wennerström for fun.”
Blomkvist sat up and turned on the lamp and looked at Salander. He met her eyes. She actually looked guilty.
“Did you find out anything?”
“I have his entire hard disk on my computer. You can have as much proof as you need that he’s a gangster.”
CHAPTER 28
Tuesday, July 29–Friday, October 24
Blomkvist had been poring over Salander’s computer printouts for three days—boxes full of papers. The problem was that the subjects kept changing all the time. An option deal in London. A currency deal in Paris through an agent. A company with a post-office box in Gibraltar. A sudden doubling of funds in an account at the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York.
And then all those puzzling question marks: a trading company with 200,000 kronor in an untouched account registered five years earlier in Santiago, Chile—one of nearly thirty such companies in twelve different countries—and not a hint of what type of activity was involved. A dormant company? Waiting for what? A front for some other kind of activity? The computer gave no clue as to what was going on in Wennerström’s mind or what may have been perfectly obvious to him and so was never formulated in an electronic document.
Salander was persuaded that most of these questions would never be answered. They could see the message, but without a key they would never be able to interpret the meaning. Wennerström’s empire was like an onion from which one layer after another could be removed; a labyrinth of enterprises owned by one another. Companies, accounts, funds, securities. They reckoned that nobody—perhaps not even Wennerström himself—could have a complete overview. Wennerström’s empire had a life of its own.
But there was a pattern, or at least a hint of a pattern. A labyrinth of enterprises owned by each other. Wennerström’s empire was variously valued at between 100 and 400 billion kronor, depending on whom you asked and how it was calculated. But if companies own each other’s assets—what then would be their value?
They had left Hedeby Island in great haste early in the morning after Salander dropped the bomb that was now occupying every waking moment of Blomkvist’s life. They drove to Salander’s place and spent two days in front of her computer while she guided him through Wennerström’s universe. He had plenty of questions. One of them was pure curiosity.
“Lisbeth, how are you able to operate his computer, from a purely practical point of view?”
“It’s a little invention that my friend Plague came up with. Wennerström has an IBM laptop that he works on, both at home and at the office. That means that all the information is on a single hard drive. He has a broadband connection to his property at home. Plague invented a type of cuff that you fasten around the broadband cable, and I’m testing it out for him. Everything that Wennerström sees is registered by the cuff, which forwards the data to a server somewhere else.”
“Doesn’t he have a firewall?”
Salander smiled.
“Of course he has a firewall. But the point is that the cuff also functions as a type of firewall. It takes a while to hack the computer this way. Let’s say that Wennerström gets an email; it goes first to Plague’s cuff and we can read it before