“This is probably the craziest thing I’ve ever been involved with,” he said. “When this is all over I’m going to found an association called ‘The Knights of the Idiotic Table’ and its purpose will be to arrange an annual dinner where we tell stories about Lisbeth Salander. You’re all members.”

He paused.

“So, this is how things really are,” he said, and he began to make a list of headings on Armansky’s whiteboard. He talked for a good thirty minutes. Afterwards the discussion went on for almost three hours.

Gullberg sat down next to Clinton when their meeting was over. They spoke in low voices for a few minutes before Gullberg stood up. The old comrades shook hands.

Gullberg took a taxi to Frey’s, packed his briefcase and checked out. He took the late afternoon train to Göteborg. He chose first class and had the compartment to himself. When he passed Årstabron he took out a ballpoint pen and a plain paper pad. He thought for a long while and then began to write. He filled half the page before he stopped and tore the sheet off the pad.

Forged documents had never been his department or his expertise, but here the task was simplified by the fact that the letters he was writing would be signed by himself. What complicated the issue was that not a word of what he was writing was true.

By the time the train went through Nyköping he had already discarded a number of drafts, but he was starting to get a line on how the letters should be expressed. When they arrived in Göteborg he had twelve letters he was satisfied with. He made sure he had left clear fingerprints on each sheet.

At Göteborg Central Station he tracked down a photocopier and made copies of the letters. Then he bought envelopes and stamps and posted the letters in a box with a 9.00 p.m. collection.

Gullberg took a taxi to City Hotel on Lorensbergsgatan, where Clinton had already booked a room for him. It was the same hotel Blomkvist had spent the night in several days before. He went straight to his room and sat on the bed. He was completely exhausted and realized that he had eaten only two slices of bread all day. Yet he was not hungry. He undressed, stretched out in bed, and almost at once fell asleep.

Salander woke with a start when she heard the door open. She knew right away that it was not one of the night nurses. She opened her eyes to two narrow slits and saw a silhouette with crutches in the doorway. Zalachenko was watching her in the light that came from the corridor.

Without moving her head she glanced at the digital clock: 3.10 a.m.

She then glanced at the bedside table and saw the water glass. She calculated the distance. She could just reach it without having to move her body.

It would take a very few seconds to stretch out her arm and break off the rim of the glass with a firm rap against the hard edge of the table. It would take half a second to shove the broken edge into Zalachenko’s throat if he leaned over her. She looked for other options, but the glass was her only reachable weapon.

She relaxed and waited.

Zalachenko stood in the doorway for two minutes without moving. Then gingerly he closed the door.

She heard the faint scraping of the crutches as he quietly retreated down the corridor.

Five minutes later she propped herself up on her right elbow, reached for the glass, and took a long drink of water. She swung her legs over the edge of the bed and pulled the electrodes off her arms and chest. With an effort she stood up and swayed unsteadily. It took her about a minute to gain control over her body. She hobbled to the door and leaned against the wall to catch her breath. She was in a cold sweat. Then she turned icy with rage.

Fuck you, Zalachenko. Let’s end this right here and now.

She needed a weapon.

The next moment she heard quick heels clacking in the corridor.

Shit. The electrodes.

“What in God’s name are you doing up?” the night nurse said.

“I had to… go… to the toilet,” Salander said breathlessly.

“Get back into bed at once.”

She took Salander’s hand and helped her into the bed. Then she got a bedpan.

“When you have to go to the toilet, just ring for us. That’s what this button is for.”

Blomkvist woke up at 10.30 on Tuesday, showered, put on coffee, and then sat down with his iBook. After the meeting at Milton Security the previous evening, he had come home and worked until 5.00 a.m. The story was beginning at last to take shape. Zalachenko’s biography was still vague – all he had was what he had blackmailed Björck to reveal, as well as the handful of details Palmgren had been able to provide. Salander’s story was pretty much done. He explained step by step how she had been targeted by a gang of Cold-Warmongers at S.I.S. and locked away in a psychiatric hospital to stop her blowing the gaff on Zalachenko.

He was pleased with what he had written. There were still some holes that he would have to fill, but he knew that he had one hell of a story. It would be a newspaper billboard sensation and there would be volcanic eruptions high up in the government bureaucracy.

He smoked a cigarette while he thought.

He could see two particular gaps that needed attention. One was manageable. He had to deal with Teleborian, and he was looking forward to that assignment. When he was finished with him, the renowned children’s psychiatrist would be one of the most detested men in Sweden. That was one thing.

The second thing was more complicated.

The men who conspired against Salander – he thought of them as the Zalachenko club – were inside the Security Police. He knew one, Gunnar Björck, but Björck could not possibly be the only man responsible. There had to be a group… a division or unit of some sort. There must be chiefs, operations managers. There had to be a budget. But he had no idea how to go about identifying these people, where even to start. He had only the vaguest notion of how Säpo was organized.

On Monday he had begun his research by sending Cortez to the second-hand bookshops on Södermalm, to buy every book which in any way dealt with the Security Police. Cortez had come to his apartment in the afternoon with six books.

Espionage in Sweden by Mikael Rosquist (Tempus, 1988); Säpo Chief 1962-1970 by P.G. Vinge (Wahlström amp; Widstrand, 1988); Secret Forces by Jan Ottosson and Lars Magnusson (Tiden, 1991); Power Struggle for Säpo by Erik Magnusson (Corona, 1989); An Assignment by Carl Lidbom (Wahlström amp; Widstrand, 1990); and – somewhat surprisingly – An Agent in Place by Thomas Whiteside (Ballantine, 1966), which dealt with the Wennerström affair. The Wennerström affair of the ’60s, not Blomkvist’s own much more recent Wennerström affair.

He had spent much of Monday night and the early hours of Tuesday morning reading or at least skimming the books. When he had finished he made some observations. First, most of the books published about the Security Police were from the late ’80s. An Internet search showed that there was hardly any current literature on the subject.

Second, there did not seem to be any intelligible basic overview of the activities of the Swedish secret police over the years. This may have been because many documents were stamped Top Secret and were therefore off limits, but there did not seem to be any single institution, researcher or media that had carried out a critical examination of Säpo.

He also noticed another odd thing: there was no bibliography in any one of the books Cortez had found. On the other hand, the footnotes often referred to articles in the evening newspapers, or to interviews with some old, retired Säpo hand.

The book Secret Forces was fascinating but largely dealt with the time before and during the Second World War. Blomkvist regarded P.G. Vinge’s memoir as propaganda, written in self-defence by a severely criticized Säpo chief who was eventually fired. An Agent in Place contained so much inaccurate information about Sweden in the first chapter that he threw the book into the wastepaper basket. The only two books with any real ambition to portray the work of the Security Police were Power Struggle for Säpo and Espionage in Sweden. They contained data, names and organizational charts. He found Magnusson’s book to be especially worthwhile reading. Even though it did not offer any answers to his immediate questions, it provided a good account of Säpo as a structure as well as its primary concerns over several decades.