according to the newspapers compared to you I am normality personified.
- I
- Another finger for you. Need help?[4]
Salander hesitated. First Blomkvist and now Plague. Was there no end to all the people coming to her rescue? The problem with Plague was that he was a 350-pound recluse who communicated almost exclusively via the Internet and made Salander look like a miracle of social skills. When she didn't answer, Plague typed another line:
- Are you still there? Need help getting out of the country?
- No.
- Why did you shoot?
- Piss off.
- Do you think killing more people? And if so, should I worry? Surely I am the only person who can trace you.
- Mind your own business, do not have to worry about.
- I do not worry. Find me on hotmail if you need anything. Guns? Passport again?
- You're a sociopath.
- Look who's talking.[5]
Lisbeth disconnected from ICQ and sat down on the sofa to think. Ten minutes later she sent an email to Plague's hotmail address.
Prosecutor Richard Ekstrom, leader of the preliminary investigation, lives in Taby. He's married with two children and has a broadband connection to his house. I need access to his laptop or home computer. I need to read him in real time. Hostile takeover with mirrored hard drive.
She knew that Plague himself seldom left his apartment in Sundbyberg, so she hoped he had cultivated some pimply teenager to do the field work. There was no need to sign the message. She got an answer fifteen minutes later.
- How much are you paying?
- 10,000 to your account + expenses and 5,000 to your assistant.
- I'll be in touch.
On Thursday morning she had one email from Plague containing an FTP address. Salander was amazed. She had not expected a result for at least two weeks. Doing a hostile takeover, even with Plague's brilliant programme and his specially designed hardware, was a laborious process that required slipping bits of information into a computer one kilobyte at a time until a simple piece of software had been created. How rapidly it could be done depended on how often Ekstrom used his computer, and then it should normally take another few days to transfer all the data to a mirrored hard drive. Forty-eight hours was not merely exceptional, it was theoretically impossible. Salander was impressed. She pinged his ICQ:
- How did you manage it?
- Four family members have computers. You will not believe - they have no firewall! Zero safety. I had only to get hooked to the cable and load. My expenditure was 6000 kronor. Can you afford this much?
- Yes. Plus a bonus for urgency.[6]
She thought for a moment and then transferred 30,000 kronor to Plague's account via the Internet. She did not want to frighten him off with excessive amounts. Then she made herself comfortable on her Verksam IKEA chair and opened Ekstrom's laptop.
Within an hour she had read all the reports that Inspector Bublanski had sent to Ekstrom. Salander suspected that, technically, reports like these were not allowed to leave police headquarters. It proved once again the theory that no security system is a match for a stupid employee. Through Ekstrom's computer she gleaned several important pieces of information.
First, she discovered that Armansky had assigned two of his staff to join Bublanski's investigative team without remuneration, which in practice meant that Milton Security was sponsoring the police hunt for her. Their assignment was to assist in the arrest of Salander by all possible means. Thanks a lot, Armansky. I'll remember that. She frowned when she discovered which employees they were. Bohman she had taken for a straight arrow, and he had been perfectly decent in his behaviour towards her. Hedstrom was a corrupt nobody who had exploited his position at Milton Security to swindle one of the company's clients.
Salander had a selective morality. She had nothing at all against swindling the company's clients herself - provided they deserved it - but if she had accepted a job with a confidentiality agreement in it, she would never have broken it.
Salander soon discovered that the person who had leaked the information to the media was Ekstrom himself. This was evident from an email in which he answered follow-up questions about both Salander's psychiatric report and the connection between her and Miriam Wu.
The third significant piece of information was the insight that Bublanski's team did not have a single lead as to where they should look for Salander. She read with interest a report on what measures had been taken and