went into Salander's office and booted up her PowerBook.
From the moment in mid-April when Bjorck's report was stolen and Blomkvist realized that he was under surveillance, he had established his own headquarters at Salander's apartment. He had transferred the most crucial documentation to her desk. He spent several nights a week at the apartment, slept in her bed, and worked on her computer. She had wiped her hard drive clean before she left for Gosseberga and the confrontation with Zalachenko. Blomkvist supposed that she had not planned to come back. He had used her system disks to restore her computer to a functioning state.
Since April he had not even plugged in the broadband cable to his own machine. He logged on to her broadband connection, started up the I.C.Q. chat program, and pinged up the address she had created for him through the Yahoo group [Idiotic_Table].
- Hi, Sally.
- You say.
- I've reworked the two chapters we've been talking the other day. You've got the new version on Yahoo. What about your part?
- I have completed seventeen pages. Climb right now on the Idiotic Table.
Ping.
- Okay. Got it. Let me read it and then we'll talk.
- Another thing.
- What?
- I've created another forum on Yahoo called 'The Knights'.
Blomkvist smiled.
- Okay. The Knights of the Idiotic Table.
- Password: yacaracaI2.
- Agreed.
- Four members: you, me, Plague and Trinity.
- Your mysterious online friends.
- Just in case.
- Okay.
- Plague has copied information from the computer of the prosecutor Ekstrom. The pirated in April.
- Okay.
- If I lose my Palm, he will keep you informed.
- Okay. Thank you.
Blomkvist logged in to I.C.Q. and went into the newly created Yahoo group [The_Knights]. All he found was a link from Plague to an anonymous U.R.L. which consisted solely of numbers. He copied the address into Explorer, hit the return key, and came to a website somewhere on the Internet that contained the sixteen gigabytes of Ekstrom's hard drive.
Plague had obviously made it simple for himself by copying over Ekstrom's entire hard drive, and Blomkvist spent more than an hour sorting through its contents. He ignored the system files, software and endless files containing preliminary investigations that seemed to stretch back several years. He downloaded four folders. Three of them were called [PrelimInv/Salander], [Slush/Salander], and [PrelimInv/Niedermann]. The fourth was a copy of Ekstrom's email folder made at 2.00 p.m. the previous day.
"Thanks, Plague," Blomkvist said to himself.
He spent three hours reading through Ekstrom's preliminary investigation and strategy for the trial. Not surprisingly, much of it dealt with Salander's mental state. Ekstrom wanted an extensive psychiatric examination and had sent a lot of messages with the object of getting her transferred to Kronoberg prison as a matter of urgency.
Blomkvist could tell that Ekstrom's search for Niedermann was making no headway. Bublanski was the leader of that investigation. He had succeeding in gathering some forensic evidence linking Niedermann to the murders of Svensson and Johansson, as well as to the murder of Bjurman. Blomkvist's own three long interviews in April had set them on the trail of this evidence. If Niedermann were ever apprehended, Blomkvist would have to be a witness for the prosecution. At long last D.N.A. from sweat droplets and two hairs from Bjurman's apartment were matched to items from Niedermann's room in Gosseberga. The same D.N.A. was found in abundant quantities on the remains of Svavelsjo M.C.'s Goransson.
On the other hand, Ekstrom had remarkably little on the record about Zalachenko.
Blomkvist lit a cigarette and stood by the window looking out towards Djurgården.
Ekstrom was leading two separate preliminary investigations. Criminal Inspector Faste was the investigative leader in all matters dealing with Salander. Bublanski was working only on Niedermann.
When the name Zalachenko turned up in the preliminary investigation, the logical thing for Ekstrom to do would have been to contact the general director of the Security Police to determine who Zalachenko actually was. Blomkvist could find no such enquiry in Ekstrom's email, journal or notes. But among the notes Blomkvist found several cryptic sentences.
The Salander investigation is fake. Bjorck's original doesn't match Blomkvist's version. Classify TOP SECRET.
Then a series of notes claiming that Salander was paranoid and a schizophrenic.
Correct to lock up Salander 1991.
He found what linked the investigations in the Salander slush, that is, the supplementary information that the prosecutor considered