The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets Nest Page 0,170

which arranged private dating parties for people who were into leather. There were photographs from various parties, and if she had been sober at the time, she would have recognized that she looked completely demented.

And - most disastrous of all - there was a video taken on holiday in the early '90s when she and Greger had been guests of the glass artist Torkel Bollinger at his villa on the Costa del Sol. During the holiday Berger had discovered that her husband had a definite bisexual tendency, and they had both ended up in bed with Torkel. It had been a pretty wonderful holiday. Video cameras were still a relatively new phenomenon. The movie they had playfully made was definitely not for general release.

The drawer was empty.

How could I have been so bloody stupid?

On the bottom of the drawer someone had spray-painted the familiar five-letter word.

CHAPTER 19

FRIDAY, 3.VI - SATURDAY 4.VI

Salander finished her autobiography at 4.00 on Friday morning and sent a copy to Blomkvist via the Yahoo group [Idiotic_Table]. Then she lay quite still in bed and stared at the ceiling.

She knew that on Walpurgis Night she had had her twenty-seventh birthday, but she had not even reflected on the fact at the time. She was imprisoned. She had experienced the same thing at St Stefan's. If things did not go right for her there was a risk that she would spend many more birthdays in some form of confinement.

She was not going to accept a situation like that.

The last time she had been locked up she was scarcely into her teens. She was grown-up now, and had more knowledge and skills. She wondered how long it would take for her to escape and settle down safely in some other country to create a new identity and a new life for herself.

She got up from the bed and went to the bathroom where she looked in the mirror. She was no longer limping. She ran her fingers over her hip where the wound had healed to a scar. She twisted her arms and stretched her left shoulder back and forth. It was tight, but she was more or less healed. She tapped herself on the head. She supposed that her brain had not been too greatly damaged after being perforated by a bullet with a full-metal jacket.

She had been extraordinarily lucky.

Until she had access to a computer, she had spent her time trying to work out how to escape from this locked room at Sahlgrenska.

Then Dr Jonasson and Blomkvist had upset her plans by smuggling in her Palm. She had read Blomkvist's articles and brooded over what he had to say. She had done a risk assessment and pondered his plan, weighing her chances. She had decided that for once she was going to do as he advised. She would test the system. Blomkvist had convinced her that she had nothing to lose, and he was offering her a chance to escape in a very different way. If the plan failed, she would simply have to plan her escape from St Stefan's or whichever other nuthouse.

What actually convinced her to decide to play the game Blomkvist's way was her desire for revenge.

She forgave nothing.

Zalachenko, Bjorck and Bjurman were dead.

Teleborian, on the other hand, was alive.

So too was her brother, the so-called Ronald Niedermann, even though in reality he was not her problem. Certainly, he had helped in the attempt to murder and bury her, but he seemed peripheral. If I run into him sometime, we'll see, but until such time he's the police's problem.

Yet Blomkvist was right: behind the conspiracy there had to be others not known to her who had contributed to the shaping of her life. She had to put names and social security numbers to these people.

So she had decided to go along with Blomkvist's plan. That was why she had written the plain, unvarnished truth about her life in a cracklingly terse autobiography of forty pages. She had been quite precise. Everything she had written was true. She had accepted Blomkvist's reasoning that she had already been so savaged in the Swedish media by such grotesque libels that a little sheer nonsense could not possibly further damage her reputation.

The autobiography was a fiction in the sense that she had not, of course, told the whole truth. She had no intention of doing that.

She went back to bed and pulled the covers over her.

She felt a niggling irritation that