“Anything new?”

“Nothing special,” Cortez said. “Today is all about May 1, naturally enough.”

“I’m going to be here for a couple of hours,” Blomkvist told him. “Take a break and come back around 9.00.”

After Cortez left, Blomkvist got out his anonymous mobile and called Daniel Olsson, a freelance journalist in Göteborg. Over the years Millennium had published several of his articles and Blomkvist had great faith in his ability to gather background material.

“Hi, Daniel. Mikael Blomkvist here. Can you talk?”

“Sure.”

“I need someone for a research job. You can bill us for five days, and you don’t have to produce an article at the end of it. Well, you can write an article on the subject if you want and we’ll publish it, but it’s the research we’re after.”

“Fine. Tell me.”

“It’s sensitive. You can’t discuss this with anyone except me, and you can communicate with me only via hotmail. You must not even mention that you’re doing research for Millennium.”

“This sounds fun. What are you looking for?”

“I want you to do a workplace report on Sahlgrenska hospital. We’re calling the report ‘E.R.’, and it’s to look at the differences between reality and the T. V. series. I want you to go to the hospital and observe the work in the emergency ward and the intensive care unit for a couple of days. Talk with doctors, nurses and cleaners – everybody who works there in fact. What are their working conditions like? What do they actually do? That sort of stuff. Photographs too, of course.”

“Intensive care?” Olsson said.

“Exactly. I want you to focus on the follow-up care given to severely injured patients in corridor 11C. I want to know the whole layout of the corridor, who works there, what they look like, and what sort of background they have.”

“Unless I’m mistaken, a certain Lisbeth Salander is a patient on 11C.”

Olsson was not born yesterday.

“How interesting,” Blomkvist said. “Find out which room she’s in, who’s in the neighbouring rooms, and what the routines are in that section.”

“I have a feeling that this story is going to be about something altogether different,” Olsson said.

“As I said… all I want is the research you come up with.”

They exchanged hotmail addresses.

Salander was lying on her back on the floor when Nurse Marianne came in.

“Hmm,” she said, thereby indicating her doubts about the wisdom of this style of conduct in the intensive care unit. But it was, she accepted, her patient’s only exercise space.

Salander was sweating. She had spent thirty minutes trying to do arm lifts, stretches and sit-ups on the recommendation of her physiotherapist. She had a long list of the movements she was to perform each day to strengthen the muscles in her shoulder and hip in the wake of her operation three weeks earlier. She was breathing hard and felt wretchedly out of shape. She tired easily and her left shoulder was tight and hurt at the very least effort. But she was on the path to recovery. The headaches that had tormented her after surgery had subsided and came back only sporadically.

She realized that she was sufficiently recovered now that she could have walked out of the hospital, or at any rate hobbled out, if that had been possible, but it was not. First of all, the doctors had not yet declared her fit, and second, the door to her room was always locked and guarded by a fucking hit-man from Securitas, who sat on his chair in the corridor.

She was healthy enough to be moved to a normal rehabilitation ward, but after going back and forth about this, the police and hospital administration had agreed that Salander should remain in room eighteen for the time being. The room was easier to guard, there was round-the-clock staff close by, and the room was at the end of an L-shaped corridor. And in corridor 11C the staff were security-conscious after the killing of Zalachenko; they were familiar with her situation. Better not to move her to a new ward with new routines.

Her stay at Sahlgrenska was in any case going to come to an end in a few more weeks. As soon as the doctors discharged her, she would be transferred to Kronoberg prison in Stockholm to await trial. And the person who would decide when it was time for that was Dr Jonasson.

It was ten days after the shooting in Gosseberga before Dr Jonasson gave permission for the police to conduct their first real interview, which Giannini viewed as being to Salander’s advantage. Unfortunately Dr Jonasson had made it difficult even for Giannini to have access to her client, and that was annoying.

After the tumult of Zalachenko’s murder and Gullberg’s attempted suicide, he had done an evaluation of Salander’s condition. He took into account that Salander must be under a great deal of stress for having been suspected of three murders plus a damn-near fatal assault on her late father. Jonasson had no idea whether she was guilty or innocent, and as a doctor he was not the least bit interested in the answer to that question. He simply concluded that Salander was suffering from stress, that she had been shot three times, and that one bullet had entered her brain and almost killed her. She had a fever that would not abate, and she had severe headaches.

He had played it safe. Murder suspect or not, she was his patient, and his job was to make sure she got well. So he filled out a “no visitors” form that had no connection whatsoever to the one that was set in place by the prosecutor. He prescribed various medications and complete bedrest.

But Jonasson also realized that isolation was an inhumane way of punishing people; in fact it bordered on torture. No-one felt good when they were separated from all their friends, so he decided that Salander’s lawyer should serve as a proxy friend. He had a serious talk with Giannini and explained that she could have access to Salander for one hour a day. During this hour she could talk with her or just sit quietly and keep her company, but their conversations should not deal with Salander’s problems or impending legal battles.

“Lisbeth Salander was shot in the head and was very seriously injured,” he explained. “I think she’s out of danger, but there is always a risk of bleeding or some other complication. She needs to rest and she has to have time to heal. Only when that has happened can she begin to confront her legal problems.”

Giannini understood Dr Jonasson’s reasoning. She had some general conversations with Salander and hinted at the outline of the strategy that she and Blomkvist had planned, but Salander was simply so drugged and exhausted that she would fall asleep while Giannini was speaking.

Armansky studied Malm’s photographs of the men who had followed Blomkvist from the Copacabana. They were in sharp focus.

“No,” he said. “Never seen them before.”

Blomkvist nodded. They were in Armansky’s office on Monday morning. Blomkvist had come into the building via the garage.

“The older one is Göran Mårtensson, who owns the Volvo. He followed me like a guilty conscience for at least a week, but it could have been longer.”

“And you reckon that he’s Säpo.”

Blomkvist referred to Mårtensson’s C.V. Armansky hesitated.

You could take it for granted that the Security Police invariably made fools of themselves. That was the natural order of things, not for Säpo alone but probably for intelligence services all over the world. The French secret police had sent frogmen to New Zealand to blow up the Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior, for God’s sake. That had to be the most idiotic intelligence operation in the history of the world. With the possible exception of President Nixon’s lunatic break-in at Watergate. With such cretinous leadership it was no wonder that scandals occurred. Their successes were never reported. But the media jumped all over the Security Police whenever anything improper or foolish came to light, and with all the wisdom of hindsight.