murdered Dag and Mia. I also think I know why, but I'm missing some crucial pieces of information. I don't understand Bjurman's role. CALL ME. CONTACT ME AT ONCE. WE CAN SOLVE THIS. Mikael
Salander read the document slowly again. Kalle Blomkvist had been busy. Practical Pig. Practical Fucking Pig. He still thought there was something to solve.
He meant well. He wanted to help.
He didn't understand that whatever happened, her life was over.
It had ended before she even turned thirteen.
There was only one solution.
She created a new document and tried to write a reply, but the thoughts were whirling around in her head and there were so many things she wanted to say to him.
Salander in love. What a fucking joke.
He would never find out. She would never give him the satisfaction.
She deleted the document and stared at the empty screen. But no answer at all was less than he deserved. He had stood faithfully in her corner like a steadfast tin soldier. She created a new document and wrote:
Thanks for being my friend.
First she had a number of logistical decisions to take. She needed a means of transport. Using the burgundy Honda, still on Lundagatan, was tempting but out of the question. There was nothing in Prosecutor Ekstrom's laptop to indicate that anyone in the police investigation had discovered that she had bought a car, which might be because she had not yet managed to send in the registration documents and insurance papers. But Mimmi might have talked about the car when she was questioned by the police, and obviously Lundagatan was under sporadic surveillance.
The police knew that she had a motorcycle, and it would be even more obtrusive to take it out of storage from the apartment building on Lundagatan. Besides, after a number of summer-like days, a change in the weather was forecast, and she had no great desire to venture out on a bike on rain-slick highways.
One alternative, of course, would be to rent a car in Irene Nesser's name, but there were risks involved with that too. Someone might recognize her, and the fake identity would then be lost to her. That would be a catastrophe; it was her escape route out of the country.
Then she gave a lopsided smile. There was one other possibility. She booted up her computer, logged on to Milton Security's network and navigated to the car pool, which was administered by a secretary in Milton's reception area. Milton Security had close to forty cars at its disposal, some of which carried the company logo and were used on business trips. The majority were unmarked surveillance cars, and these were kept in the garage at Milton's HQ near Slussen. Practically around the corner.
She studied the personnel files and chose employee Marcus Collander, who had just gone on vacation for two weeks. He had left the telephone number of a hotel in the Canary Islands. She changed the hotel name and scrambled the digits of the phone number where he could be reached. Then she entered a note that Collander's last action while on duty had been to drop off one of the cars for servicing. She picked a Toyota Corolla automatic, which she had driven before, and recorded that it would be back a week later.
Finally she went into the surveillance system and reprogrammed the cameras she would have to walk past. Between 4:30 and 5:00 a.m. they would show a repeat of the previous half hour, but with an altered time code.
At 4:15 she packed her backpack. She had two changes of clothes, two Mace canisters, and the fully charged Taser. She looked at the two guns she had acquired. She rejected Sandstrom's Colt 1911 Government and chose Nieminen's Polish P-83 Wanad, which had one round missing from the magazine. It was slimmer and fit her hand better. She put it into her jacket pocket.
Salander closed the lid of her PowerBook but left the computer on the desk. She had transferred the contents of her hard drive to an encrypted backup on the Net and then erased her whole hard drive with a programme she had written herself, which guaranteed that not even she could reconstruct the contents. She did not want to rely on her Power-Book, which would just be cumbersome to drag around. Instead she took her Palm Tungsten PDA with her.
She looked around her office. She had a feeling that she would not be coming back to the apartment in Mosebacke and knew that she was leaving secrets