on the bookshelf and spent the next half hour bringing herself up to date on the files Armansky kept in his top right-hand desk drawer: his crucial, current jobs. When the computer dinged as a sign that the transfer was complete, she put the files back in the order that she had found them.
Then she shut down the computer and switched off the desk lamp, taking the empty cappuccino cup with her. She left the Milton Security building the same way she had come. It was 4:12 a.m.
She walked home and sat down at her PowerBook and logged on to the server in Holland, where she started a copy of Asphyxia 1.3. A window opened asking for the name of the hard drive. She had forty different options and scrolled down. She passed the hard drive for NilsEBjurman, which she usually glanced through every other month. She paused for a second at MikBlom/laptop and MikBlom/Office. She had not clicked on those icons for more than a year, and she wondered vaguely whether to delete them. But she then decided as a matter of principle to hang on to them - since she had gone to the trouble of hacking into a computer it would be stupid to delete the information and maybe one day have to do the whole procedure all over again. The same was true for an icon called Wennerstrom which she had not opened in a long time. The man of that name was dead. The icon Armansky/MiltSec, the last one created, was at the bottom of the list.
She could have cloned his hard drive earlier, but she had never bothered to because she worked at Milton and could easily retrieve any information that Armansky wanted to keep hidden from the rest of the world. Her trespassing in his computer was not malicious: she just wanted to know what the company was working on, to see the lay of the land. She clicked and a folder immediately opened with a new icon called ArmanskyHD. She tried out whether she could access the hard drive and checked that all the files were in place.
She read through Armansky's reports, financial statements, and email until 7:00 a.m. Finally she crawled into bed and slept until 12:30 in the afternoon.
On the last Friday in January Millennium's annual board meeting took place in the presence of the company's bookkeeper, an outside auditor, and the four partners: Berger (30 percent), Blomkvist (20 percent), Malm (20 percent), and Harriet Vanger (30 percent). Eriksson was there as the representative of the staff and the staff committee, and the chair of the union at the magazine. The union consisted of Eriksson, Lotta Karim, Cortez, Nilsson, and marketing chief Sonny Magnusson. It was Eriksson's first board meeting.
The meeting began at 4:00 and lasted an hour. Much of the time was spent on the financials and the audit report. Clearly Millennium was on a solid footing, very different from the crisis in which the company had been mired two years earlier. The auditors reported a profit of 2.1 million kronor, of which roughly 1 million was down to Blomkvist's book about the Wennerstrom affair.
Berger proposed, and it was agreed, that 1 million be set aside as a fund against future crises; that 250,000 kronor be reserved for capital investments, such as new computers and other equipment, and repairs at the editorial offices; and that 300,000 kronor be earmarked for salary increases and to allow them to offer Cortez a full-time contract. Of the balance, a dividend of 50,000 kronor was proposed for each partner, and 100,000 kronor to be divided equally among the four employees regardless of whether they worked full- or part-time. Magnusson was to receive no bonus. His contract gave him a commission on the ads he sold, and periodically these made him the highest paid of all the staff. These proposals were adopted unanimously.
Blomkvist proposed that the freelance budget be reduced in favour of an additional part-time reporter. Blomkvist had Svensson in mind; he would then be able to use Millennium as a base for his freelance writing and later, if it all worked out, be hired full-time. The proposal met with resistance from Berger on the grounds that the magazine could not thrive without access to a large number of freelance articles. She was supported by Harriet Vanger; Malm abstained. It was decided that the freelance budget would not be touched, but it would be investigated whether adjustments of other expenses might be made.