almost rode into the woods before at the last second she managed to regain control of the hog.
The helmet kept slipping down and masking her vision, even though she had put in some extra stuffing using a piece of leather she'd cut out of Nieminen's padded vest.
She did not dare stop to adjust the helmet for fear she would not be able to manage the bike's weight. She was too short to reach the ground with both feet and was afraid the Harley would tip over. If that happened, she would never be able to get it upright again.
Things went more smoothly once she got on the wider gravel road leading to the summer-cabin area. When she turned onto the Strangnas highway a few minutes later, she risked taking one hand off the handlebars to set the helmet right. Then she gave the bike some gas. She covered the distance to Sodertalje in record time, smiling in delight the whole way. Just before she reached Sodertalje, two blue-and-yellow police Volvos with their sirens on flew by in the other direction.
The sensible course would be to dump the Harley in Sodertalje and let Irene Nesser take the shuttle train into Stockholm, but Salander couldn't resist the temptation. She turned onto the E4 and accelerated. She did not go over the speed limit - well, not much anyway - but it still felt as though she were in freefall. Not until she reached alvsjo did she turn off and find her way to the fairground, where she managed to park the beast without tipping it over. She was very sad to leave the bike behind, along with the helmet and the piece of leather from Nieminen's vest. She walked to the shuttle train. She was seriously chilled. She rode the one stop to Sodra station, then walked home to Mosebacke and ran herself a hot bath.
***
"His name is Alexander Zalachenko," Bjorck said. "But officially he doesn't exist. You won't find him on the national register."
Zala. Alexander Zalachenko. Finally a name.
"Who is he and how can I find him?"
"He's not someone you'd want to find."
"Tell me anyway."
"What I'm going to tell you is top secret information. If it came out that I told you this, I'd be sent to prison. It's one of the most deeply buried secrets we have within the Swedish defence system. You have to understand why it's so important that you guarantee my anonymity."
"I've already done that," Blomkvist said impatiently.
"Alexander Zalachenko was born in 1940 in Stalingrad. When he was a year old, the German offensive on the eastern front began. Both of Zalachenko's parents died in the war. At least that's what Zalachenko thinks. He doesn't really know what happened during the war. His earliest memories are of an orphanage in the Ural Mountains."
Blomkvist made swift notes.
"The orphanage was in a garrison town and was, as it were, sponsored by the Red Army. You might say that Zalachenko got a military education very early. Since the end of the Soviet Union, documents have emerged which show there were experiments to create a cadre of particularly athletic, elite soldiers among the orphans who were being raised by the state. Zalachenko was one of them. To make a long story short, when he was five he was put in an army school. It turned out that he was talented. When he was fifteen, in 1955, he was sent to a military school in Novosibirsk, where together with two thousand other pupils he underwent training similar to Spetsnaz, the Russian elite troops."
"OK, let's get to the adult stuff."
"In 1958, when he was eighteen, he was moved to Minsk, to specialist training with the GRU-Glavnoye razvedyvatelnoye upravlenie, the military intelligence service that is directly subordinate to the army high command, not to be confused with the KGB, the civil secret police. The GRU usually took care of espionage and foreign operations. When he was twenty, Zalachenko was sent to Cuba. It was a training period and he was still only the equivalent of a second lieutenant. But he was there for two years, during the Cuban missile crisis and the invasion at the Bay of Pigs. In 1963 he went back to Minsk for further training. Thereafter he was stationed first in Bulgaria and then in Hungary. In 1965 he was promoted to lieutenant and got his first posting to Western Europe, in Rome, where he served for a year. That was his first undercover assignment. He was a civilian with a