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.”

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 it even passes through his firewall. But the ingenious part is that the email is rewritten and a few bytes of source code are added. This is repeated every time he downloads anything to his computer. Pictures are even better. He does a lot of surfing on the Net. Each time he picks up a porn picture or opens a new home page, we add several rows of source code. After a while, in several hours or several days, depending on how much he uses the computer, Wennerström has downloaded an entire programme of approximately three megabytes in which each bit is linked to the next bit.”

“And?”

“When the last bits are in place, the programme is integrated with his Internet browser. To him it will look as though his computer has locked up, and he has to restart it. During the restart a whole new software programme is installed. He uses Internet Explorer. The next time he starts Explorer, he’s really starting a whole different programme that’s invisible on his desktop and looks and functions just like Explorer, but it also does a lot of other things. First it takes control of his firewall and makes sure that everything is working. Then it starts to scan the computer and transmits bits of information every time he clicks the mouse while he’s surfing. After a while, again depending on how much he surfs, we’ve accumulated a complete mirror image of the contents of his hard drive on a server somewhere. And then it’s time for the HT.”

“HT?”

“Sorry. Plague calls it the HT. Hostile Takeover.”

“I see.”

“The really subtle thing is what happens next. When the structure is ready, Wennerström has two complete hard drives, one on his own machine and one on our server. The next time he boots up his computer, it’s actually the mirrored computer that’s starting. He’s no longer working on his own computer; in reality he’s working on our server. His computer will run a little slower, but it’s virtually not noticeable. And when I’m connected to the server, I can tap his computer in real time. Each time Wennerström presses a key on his computer I see it on mine.”

“Your friend is also a hacker?”

“He was the one who arranged the telephone tap in London. He’s a little out of it socially, but on the Net he’s a legend.”

“OK,” Blomkvist said, giving her a resigned smile. “Question number two: why didn’t you tell me about Wennerström earlier?”

“You never asked me.”

“And if I never did ask you-let’s suppose that I never met you-you would have sat here knowing that Wennerström was a gangster while Millennium went bankrupt?”

“Nobody asked me to expose Wennerström for what he is,” Salander replied in a know-it-all voice.

“Yes, but what if?”

“I did tell you,” she said.

Blomkvist dropped the subject.

Salander burned the contents of Wennerström’s hard drive-about five gigabytes-on to ten CDs, and she felt as if she had more or less moved into Blomkvist’s apartment. She waited patiently, answering all the questions he asked.

“I can’t understand how he can be so fucking dim to put all his dirty laundry on one hard drive,” he said. “If it ever got into the hands of the police…”

“People aren’t very rational. He has to believe that the police would never think of confiscating his computer.”

“Above suspicion. I agree that he’s an arrogant bastard, but he must have security consultants telling him how to handle his computer. There’s material on this machine going all the way back to 1993.”

“The computer itself is relatively new. It was manufactured a year ago, but he seems to have transferred all his old correspondence and everything else on to the hard drive instead of storing it on CDs. But at least he’s using an encryption programme.”