Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, The - Stieg Larsson [214]
Berger stood up and went around the table and threw her arms around the girl. Salander squirmed like a worm about to be put on a hook.
CHAPTER 29
Saturday, November 1–Tuesday, November 25
Salander was surfing through Wennerström’s cyber-empire. She had been staring at her computer screen for almost eleven hours. The idea that had materialised in some unexplored nook of her brain during the last week at Sandhamn had grown into a manic preoccupation. For four weeks she had isolated herself in her apartment and ignored any communication from Armansky. She had spent twelve hours a day in front of her computer, some days more, and the rest of her waking hours she had brooded over the same problem.
During the past month she had had intermittent contact with Blomkvist. He too was preoccupied, busy at the Millennium offices. They had conferred by telephone a couple of times each week, and she had kept him updated on Wennerström’s correspondence and other activities.
For the hundredth time she went over every detail. She was not afraid that she had missed anything, but she was not sure that she had understood how every one of the intricate connections fitted together.
This much-discussed empire was like a living, formless, pulsating organism that kept changing shape. It consisted of options, bonds, shares, partnerships, loan interest, income interest, deposits, bank accounts, payment transfers, and thousands of other elements. An incredibly large proportion of the assets was deposited in post-office-box companies that owned one another.
The financial pundits’ most inflated analyses of the Wennerström Group estimated its value at more than 900 billion kronor. That was a bluff, or at least a figure that was grossly exaggerated. Obviously Wennerström himself was by no means poor. She calculated the real assets to be worth between 90 and 100 billion kronor, which was nothing to sneez eat. A thorough audit of the entire corporation would take years. All in all Salander had identified close to three thousand separate accounts and bank holdings all over the world. Wennerström was devoting himself to fraud that was so extensive it was no longer merely criminal—it was business.
Somewhere in the Wennerström organism there was also substance. Three assets kept showing up in the hierarchy. The fixed Swedish assets were unassailable and genuine, available to public scrutiny, balance sheets, and audits. The American firm was solid, and a bank in New York served as the base for all liquid capital. The story was in the business with the post-office-box companies in places such as Gibraltar and Cyprus and Macao. Wennerström was like a clearing house for the illegal weapons trade, money laundering for suspect enterprises in Colombia, and extremely unorthodox businesses in Russia.
An anonymous account in the Cayman Islands was unique; it was personally controlled by Wennerström but was not connected to any companies. A few hundredths of a percent of every deal that Wennerström made would be siphoned into the Cayman Islands via the post-office-box companies.
Salander worked in a trance-like state. The account—click—email—click—balance sheets—click. She noted down the latest transfers. She tracked a small transaction in Japan to Singapore and on via Luxembourg to the Cayman Islands. She understood how it worked. It was as if she were part of the impulses in cyberspace. Small changes. The latest email. One brief message of somewhat peripheral interest was sent at 10:00 p.m. The PGP encryption programme (rattle, rattle) was a joke for anyone who was already inside his computer and could read the message in plain text:
Berger has stopped arguing about the ads. Has she given up or does she have something cooking? Your source at the editorial offices assured us that they were on the brink of ruin, but it sounds as if they just hired a new person. Find out what’s happening. Blomkvist has been working at Sandhamn for the past few weeks, but no-one knows