irrelevant to the preliminary investigation, and which would therefore not be presented at the trial or make up part of the chain of evidence against her. This included almost everything that had to do with Zalachenko's background.
The investigation was totally inadequate.
Blomkvist wondered to what extent this was a coincidence and to what extent it was contrived. Where was the boundary? And was Ekstrom aware that there was a boundary?
Could it be that someone was deliberately supplying Ekstrom with believable but misleading information?
Finally Blomkvist logged into hotmail and spent ten minutes checking the half-dozen anonymous email accounts he had created. Each day he had checked the address he had given to Criminal Inspector Modig. He had no great hope that she would contact him, so he was mildly surprised when he opened the inbox and found an email from [email protected]›. The message consisted of a single line:
Cafe Madeleine, upper level, 11.00 a.m. Saturday.
Plague pinged Salander at midnight and interrupted her in the middle of a sentence she was writing about her time with Holger Palmgren as her guardian. She cast an irritated glance at the display.
- What do you want?
- Hello, Wasp, I'm glad to hear from you too.
- Okay, okay. What?
- Teleborian.
She sat up in bed and looked eagerly at the screen of her Palm.
- Tell me.
- Trinity has arranged everything in record time.
- How?
- The shrink's very active. He spends his life traveling between Uppsala and Stockholm and we couldn't make a hostile takeover.
- I know. How?
- Play tennis twice a week. More than two hours. He left the computer in the car in an underground garage.
- Aha.
- Trinity had no problem to deactivate the car alarm and set up the computer. Took only thirty minutes to copy everything to the Firewire and install the Asphyxia.
- Where?
Plague gave her the U.R.L. of the server where he kept Teleborian's hard drive.
- How Trinity would say, 'this is some nasty shit'.
- ...?
- Take a look at that hard drive content.
Salander disconnected from Plague and accessed the server he had directed her to. She spent nearly three hours scrutinizing folder after folder on Teleborian's computer.
She found correspondence between Teleborian and a person with a hotmail address who sent encrypted mail. Since she had access to Teleborian's P.G.P. key, she easily decoded the correspondence. His name was Jonas, no last name. Jonas and Teleborian had an unhealthy interest in seeing that Salander did not thrive.
Yes... we can prove that there is a conspiracy.
But what really interested Salander were the forty-seven folders containing close to nine thousand photographs of explicit child pornography. She clicked on image after image of children aged about fifteen or younger. A number of pictures were of infants. The majority were of girls. Many of them were sadistic.
She found links to at least a dozen people abroad who traded child porn with each other.
Salander bit her lip, but her face was otherwise expressionless.
She remembered the nights when, as a twelve-year-old, she had been strapped down in a stimulus-free room at St Stefan's. Teleborian had come into the room again and again to look at her in the glow of the nightlight.
She knew. He had never touched her, but she had always known.
She should have dealt with Teleborian years ago. But she had repressed the memory of him. She had chosen to ignore his existence.
After a while she pinged Blomkvist on I.C.Q.
Blomkvist spent the night at Salander's apartment on Fiskargatan. He did not shut down the computer until 6.30 a.m. and fell asleep with photographs of gross child pornography whirling through his mind. He woke at 10.15 and rolled out of Salander's bed, showered, and called a taxi to pick him up outside Sodra theatre. He got out at Birger Jarlsgatan at 10.55 and walked to Cafe Madeleine.
Modig was waiting for him with a cup of black coffee in front of her.
"Hi," Blomkvist said.
"I'm taking a big risk here," she said without greeting.
"Nobody will hear of our meeting from me."
She seemed stressed.
"One of my colleagues recently went to see former Prime Minister Falldin. He went there off his own bat, and his job is on the line now too."
"I understand."
"I need a guarantee of anonymity for both of us."
"I don't even know which colleague you're talking about."
"I'll tell you later. I want you to promise to give him protection