The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets Nest Page 0,119

upon an air vent just below the ceiling.

Kalle Bloody Blomkvist had somehow planted a mobile just outside her room. That could be the only explanation.

But why not smuggle in the mobile too? Ah, of course. The batteries.

Her Palm had to be recharged only once every three days. A mobile that was connected, if she surfed it hard, would burn out its batteries in much less time. Blomkvist - or more likely somebody he had hired and who was out there - would have to change the batteries at regular intervals.

But he had sent in the charger for her Palm. He isn't so stupid after all.

Salander began by deciding where to keep the hand-held. She had to find a hiding place. There were plug sockets by the door and in the panel behind the bed, which provided electricity for her bedside lamp and digital clock. There was a recess where a radio had been removed. She smiled. Both the battery charger and the Palm could fit in there. She could use the socket inside the bedside table to charge up the Palm during the day.

Salander was happy. Her heart was pounding hard when she started up the hand-held for the first time in two months and ventured on to the Internet.

Surfing on a Palm hand-held with a tiny screen and a stylus was not the same thing as surfing on a PowerBook with a 17" screen. But she was connected. From her bed at Sahlgrenska she could now reach the entire world.

She started by going on to a website that advertised rather uninteresting pictures by an unknown and not especially skilled amateur photographer called Gil Bates in Jobsville, Pennsylvania. Salander had once checked it out and confirmed that the town of Jobsville did not exist. Nevertheless, Bates had taken more than 200 photographs of the community and created a gallery of small thumbnails. She scrolled down to image 167 and clicked to enlarge it. It showed the church in Jobsville. She put her cursor on the spire of the church tower and clicked. She instantly got a pop-up dialog box that asked for her I.D. and password. She took out her stylus and wrote the word Remarkable on the screen as her I.D. and A(89)Cx#magnolia as the password.

She got a dialog box with the text [ERROR - you have the wrong password] and a button that said [OK - Try again]. Lisbeth knew that if she clicked on [OK - Try again] and tried a different password, she would get the same dialog box again - for years and years, for as long as she kept trying. Instead she clicked on the [O] in [ERROR].

The screen went blank. Then an animated door opened and a Lara Croft-like figure stepped out. A speech bubble materialized with the text [WHO GOES THERE?].

She clicked on the bubble and wrote Wasp. She got the instant reply [PROVE IT - OR ELSE...] as the animated Lara Croft unlocked the safety catch on her gun. Salander knew it was no empty threat. If she wrote the wrong password three times in a row the site would shut down and the name Wasp would be struck from the membership list. Carefully she wrote the password MonkeyBusiness.

The screen changed again and now had a blue background with the text:

[Welcome to Hacker Republic, citizen Wasp. It has been 56 days since your last visit. There are 11 citizens online. Do you want to (a) Browse the Forum (b) Send a Message (c) Search the Archive (d) Talk (e) Get Laid?]

She clicked on [(d) Talk] and then went to the menu selection [Who's online?] and got a list with the names Andy, Bambi, Dakota, Jabba, BuckRogers, Mandrake, Pred, Slip, SisterJen, SixOfOne, and Trinity.

- Hi gang, - Wasp wrote.

- Wasp. That really U? - SixOfOne wrote. - Look who's home.

- Where have you been hiding? - Trinity wrote.

- Plague you had told us in trouble, - Dakota wrote.

Salander was not sure, but she suspected that Dakota was a woman. The other citizens online, including the one who called himself SisterJen, were guys. Hacker Republic had a total (the last time she was connected) of sixty-two citizens, of whom four were female.

- Hi, Trinity, - Wasp wrote.

- Why do you greet only Trin? Are you