"You've got to let things settle down."

"I know. But the thing with Borgsjo is going to be a real problem. I don't have the faintest idea how to handle it."

"Nor do I. But we'll think of something."

She lay quiet for a moment.

"I miss you."

"I miss you too."

"How much would it take for you to come to S.M.P. and be the news editor?"

"I wouldn't do it for anything. Isn't what's-his-name, Holm, the news editor?"

"Yes. But he's an idiot."

"You got him in one."

"Do you know him?"

"I certainly do. I worked for him for three months as a temp in the mid-'80s. He's a prick who plays people off against each other. Besides..."

"Besides what?"

"It's nothing."

"Tell me."

"Some girl, Ulla something, who was also a temp, claimed that he sexually harassed her. I don't know how much was true, but the union did nothing about it and her contract wasn't extended."

Berger looked at the clock and sighed. She got up from the bed and made for the shower. Blomkvist did not move when she came out, dried herself, and dressed.

"I think I'll doze for a while," he said.

She kissed his cheek and waved as she left.

Figuerola parked seven cars behind Mårtensson's Volvo on Luntmakargatan, close to the corner of Olof Palmes Gata. She watched as Mårtensson walked to the machine to pay his parking fee. He then walked on to Sveavagen.

Figuerola decided not to pay for a ticket. She would lose him if she went to the machine and back, so she followed him. He turned left on to Kungsgatan, and went into Kungstornet. She waited three minutes before she followed him into the cafe. He was on the ground floor talking to a blond man who looked to be in very good shape. A policeman she thought. She recognized him as the other man Malm had photographed outside the Copacabana on May Day.

She bought herself a coffee and sat at the opposite end of the cafe and opened her Dagens Nyheter. Mårtensson and his companion were talking in low voices. She took out her mobile and pretended to make a call, although neither of the men were paying her any attention. She took a photograph with the mobile that she knew would be only 72 dpi  -  low quality, but it could be used as evidence that the meeting had taken place.

After about fifteen minutes the blond man stood up and left the cafe. Figuerola cursed. Why had she not stayed outside? She would have recognized him when he came out. She wanted to leap up and follow him. But Mårtensson was still there, calmly nursing his coffee. She did not want to draw attention to herself by leaving so soon after his unidentified companion.

And then Mårtensson went to the toilet. As soon as he closed the door Figuerola was on her feet and back out on Kungsgatan. She looked up and down the block, but the blond man was gone.

She took a chance and hurried to the corner of Sveavagen. She could not see him anywhere, so she went down to the tunnelbana concourse, but it was hopeless.

She turned back towards Kungstornet, feeling stressed. Mårtensson had left too.

Berger swore when she got back to where she had parked her B.M.W. the night before.

The car was still there, but during the night some bastard had punctured all four tyres. Infernal bastard piss rats, she fumed.

She called the vehicle recovery service, told them that she did not have time to wait, and put the key in the exhaust pipe. Then she went down to Hornsgaten and hailed a taxi.

Lisbeth Salander logged on to Hacker Republice and saw that Plague was online. She pinged him.

-  Hello, Wasp. How are things in Sahlgrenska?

-  Relaxing. I need your help.

-  Well, well.

-  I never thought I would ask you to.

-  Must be something serious.

-  Goran Mårtensson, resident in Vallingby. I need access to his computer.

-  Okay.

-  You have to transfer all the material to Mikael Blomkvist, a Millennium.

-  Agreed. Consider it done.

-  Big Brother has tapped the phone Blomkvist and probably his email. You'll have to send the material to a hotmail address.

-  Okay.

-  If I'm not accessible, Blomkvist will ask you for help. He will contact you.

-  Mmm.

-  He's a bit square in the head, but you can trust him.

-  Mmm.

-  How much do you want?

Plague went quiet for a few seconds.

-  Is this has to do with your situation?

-  Yes.

-  Can I help?

-  Yes.

-  Then I'll help.

-  Thanks. But I always pay my debts. I need your aid until trial. I will pay 30,000.

-  Can you afford it?

-  I can afford it.

-  Okay.

-  I think we have to resort to Trinity. Can you possibly convince him to come to Sweden?

-  To do what?

-  What he does best of all. I'll pay your usual fee plus expenses.

-  Agreed. Who?

She explained what she needed to have done.

On Friday morning Jonasson was faced with an obviously irritated Inspector Faste on the other side of his desk.

"I don't understand this," Faste said. "I thought Salander had recovered. I came to Goteborg for two reasons: to interview her and to get her ready to be transferred to a cell in Stockholm, where she belongs."

"I'm sorry for your wasted journey," Jonasson said. "I'd be glad to discharge her because we certainly don't have any beds to spare here. But  - "

"Could she be faking?"

Jonasson smiled politely. "I really don't think so. You see, Lisbeth Salander was shot in the head. I removed a bullet from her brain, and it was 50/50 whether she would survive. She did survive and her prognosis has been exceedingly satisfactory... so much so that my colleagues and I were getting ready to discharge her. Then yesterday she had a setback. She complained of severe headaches and developed a fever that has been fluctuating up and down. Last night she had a temperature of 38 and vomited on two occasions. During the night the fever subsided; she was almost back down to normal and I thought the episode had passed. But when I examined her this morning her temperature had gone up to almost 39. That is serious."

"So what's wrong with her?"

"I don't know, but the fact that her temperature is fluctuating indicates that it's not flu or any other viral infection. Exactly what's causing it I can't say, but it could be something as simple as an allergy to her medication or to something else she's come into contact with."

He clicked on an image on his computer and turned the screen towards Faste.

"I had a cranial X-ray done. There's a darker area here, as you can see right next to her gunshot wound. I can't determine what it is. It could be scar tissue as a product of the healing process, but it could also be a minor haemorrhage. And until we've found out what's wrong, I can't release her, no matter how urgent it may be from a police point of view."

Faste knew better than to argue with a doctor, since they were the closest things to God's representatives here on earth. Policemen possibly excepted.

"What is going to happen now?"

"I've ordered complete bedrest and put her physiotherapy on hold  -  she needs therapeutic exercise because of the wounds in her shoulder and hip."

"Understood. I'll have to call Prosecutor Ekstrom in Stockholm. This will come as a bit of a surprise. What can I tell him?"

"Two days ago I was ready to approve a discharge, possibly for the end of this week. As the situation is now, it will take longer. You'll have to prepare him for the fact that probably I won't be in a position to make a decision in the coming week, and that it might be two weeks before you can move her to Stockholm. It depends on her rate of recovery."

"The trial has been set for July."

"Barring the unforeseen, she should be on her feet well before then."

Bublanski cast a sceptical glance at the muscular woman on other side of the table. They were drinking coffee in the pavement area of a cafe on Norr Malarstrand. It was Friday, May 20, and the warmth of summer was in the air. Inspector Monica Figuerola, her I.D. said, S.I.S. She had caught up with him just as he was leaving for home; she had suggested a conversation over a cup of coffee, just that.

At first he had been almost hostile, but she had very straightforwardly conceded that she had no authority to interview him and that naturally he was perfectly free to tell her nothing at all if he did not want to. He asked her what her business was, and she told him that she had been assigned by her boss to form an unofficial picture of what was true and what not true in the so-called Zalachenko case, also in some quarters known as the Salander case. She vouchsafed that it was not absolutely certain whether she had the right to question him. It was entirely up to him to decide whether he would talk to her or not.

"What would you like to know?" Bublanski said at last.

"Tell me what you know about Salander, Mikael Blomkvist, Gunnar Bjorck, and Zalachenko. How do the pieces fit together?"

They talked for more than two hours.

Edklinth thought long and hard about how to proceed. After five days of investigations, Figuerola had given him a number of indisputable indications that something was rotten within S.I.S. He recognized the need to move very carefully until he had enough information. He found himself, furthermore, on the horns of a constitutional dilemma: he did not have the authority to conduct secret investigations, and most assuredly not against his colleagues.

Accordingly he had to contrive some cause that would legitimize what he was doing. If the worst came to the worst, he could always fall back on the fact that it was a policeman's duty to investigate a crime  -  but the breach was now so sensitive from a constitutional standpoint that he would surely be fired if he took a single wrong step. So he spent the whole of Friday brooding alone in his office.

Finally he concluded that Armansky was right, no matter how improbable it might seem. There really was a conspiracy inside S.I.S., and a number of individuals were acting outside of, or parallel to, regular operations. Because this had been going on for many years  -  at least since 1976, when Zalachenko arrived in Sweden  -  it had to be organized and sanctioned from the top. Exactly how high up the conspiracy went he had no idea.

He wrote three names on a pad:

Goran Mårtensson, Personal Protection. Criminal Inspector.

Gunnar Bjorck, assistant chief of Immigration Division. Deceased (Suicide?).

Albert Shenke, chief of Secretariat, S.I.S.

Figuerola was of the view that the chief of Secretariat at least must have been calling the shots when Mårtensson in Personal Protection was supposedly moved to Counter-Espionage, although he had not in fact been working there. He was too busy monitoring the movements of the journalist Mikael Blomkvist, and that did not have anything at all to do with the operations of Counter-Espionage.

Some other names from outside S.I.S. had to be added to the list:

Peter Teleborian, psychiatrist

Lars Faulsson, locksmith

Teleborian had been hired by S.I.S. as a psychiatric consultant on specific cases in the late '80s and early '90s  -  on three occasions, to be exact, and Edklinth had examined the reports in the archive. The first had been extraordinary  -  Counter-Espionage had identified a Russian informer inside the Swedish telecom industry, and the spy's background indicated that he might be inclined to suicide in the event that his actions were exposed. Teleborian had done a strikingly good analysis, which helped them turn the informer so that he could become a double agent. His other two reports had involved less significant evaluations: one was of an employee inside S.I.S. who had an alcohol problem, and the second was an analysis of the bizarre sexual behaviour of an African diplomat.

Neither Teleborian nor Faulsson  -  especially not Faulsson  -  had any position inside S.I.S. And yet through their assignments they were connected to... to what?

The conspiracy was intimately linked to the late Alexander Zalachenko, the defected G.R.U. agent who had apparently turned up in Sweden on Election Day in 1976. A man no-one had ever heard of before. How was that possible?

Edklinth tried to imagine what reasonably would have happened if he had been sitting at the chief's desk at S.I.S. in 1976 when Zalachenko defected. What would he have done? Absolute secrecy. It would have been essential. The defection could only be known to a small group without risking that the information might leak back to the Russians and... How small a group?

An operations department?

An unknown operations department?

If the affair had been appropriately handled, Zalachenko's case should have ended up in Counter-Espionage. Ideally he should have come under the auspices of the military intelligence service, but they had neither the resources nor the expertise to run this sort of operational activity. So, S.I.S. it was.

But Counter-Espionage had not ever had him. Bjorck was the key; he had been one of the people who handled Zalachenko. And yet Bjorck had never had anything to do with Counter-Espionage. Bjorck was a mystery. Officially he had held a post in the Immigration Division since the '70s, but in reality he had scarcely been seen in the department before the '90s, when suddenly he became assistant director.

And yet Bjorck was the primary source of Blomkvist's information. How had Blomkvist been able to persuade Bjorck to reveal such explosive material? And to a journalist at that.

Prostitutes. Bjorck messed around with teenage prostitutes and Millennium were going to expose him. Blomkvist must have blackmailed Bjorck.