"And I'm not Erika. She had a routine that I can't compete with. I'm still learning this job. Monika is working her backside off. And so is Lottie. Nobody has a moment to stop and think."
"This is all temporary. As soon as the trial begins - "
"No, Mikael. It won't be over then. When the trial begins, it'll be sheer hell. Remember what it was like during the Wennerstrom affair. We won't see you for three months while you hop from one T.V. interview sofa to another."
Blomkvist sighed. "What do you suggest?"
"If we're going to run Millennium effectively during the autumn, we're going to need new blood. Two people at least, maybe three. We just don't have the editorial capacity for what we're trying to do, and..."
"And?"
"And I'm not sure that I'm ready to do it."
"I hear you, Malin."
"I mean it. I'm a damn good assistant editor - it's a piece of cake with Erika as your boss. We said that we were going to try this over the summer... well, we've tried it. I'm not a good editor-in-chief."
"Stuff and nonsense," Cortez said.
Eriksson shook her head.
"I hear what you're saying," Blomkvist said, "But remember that it's been an extreme situation."
Eriksson smiled at him sadly. "You could take this as a complaint from the staff," she said.
The operations unit of Constitutional Protection spent Friday trying to get a handle on the information they had received from Blomkvist. Two of their team had moved into a temporary office at Fridhemsplan, where all the documentation was being assembled. It was inconvenient because the police intranet was at headquarters, which meant that they had to walk back and forth between the two buildings several times a day. Even if it was only a ten-minute walk, it was tiresome. By lunchtime they already had extensive documentation of the fact that both Fredrik Clinton and Hans von Rottinger had been associated with the Security Police in the '60s and early '70s.
Von Rottinger came originally from the military intelligence service and worked for several years in the office that coordinated military defence with the Security Police. Clinton's background was in the air force and he began working for the Personal Protection Unit of the Security Police in 1967.
They had both left S.I.S.: Clinton in 1971 and von Rottinger in 1973. Clinton had gone into business as a management consultant, and von Rottinger had entered the civil service to do investigations for the Swedish Atomic Energy Agency. He was based in London.
It was late afternoon by the time Figuerola was able to convey to Edklinth with some certainty the discovery that Clinton's and von Rottinger's careers after they left S.I.S. were falsifications. Clinton's career was hard to follow. Being a consultant for industry can mean almost anything at all, and a person in that role is under no obligation to report his activities to the government. From his tax returns it was clear that he made good money, but his clients were for the most part corporations with head offices in Switzerland or Liechtenstein, so it was not easy to prove that his work was a fabrication.
Von Rottinger, on the other hand, had never set foot in the office in London where he supposedly worked. In 1973 the office building where he had claimed to be working was in fact torn down and replaced by an extension to King's Cross Station. No doubt someone made a blunder when the cover story was devised. In the course of the day Figuerola's team had interviewed a number of people now retired from the Swedish Atomic Energy Agency. Not one of them had heard of Hans von Rottinger.
"Now we know," Edklinth said. "We just have to discover what it was they really were doing."
Figuerola said: "What do we do about Blomkvist?"
"In what sense?"
"We promised to give him feedback if we uncovered anything about Clinton and von Rottinger."
Edklinth thought about it. "He's going to be digging up that stuff himself if he keeps at it for a while. It's better that we stay on good terms with him. You can give him what you've found. But use your judgement."
Figuerola promised that she would. They spent a few minutes making arrangements for the weekend. Two of Figuerola's team were going to keep working. She would be taking the weekend off.
Then she clocked out and went to the gym at St Eriksplan, where she spent two hours driving herself hard to catch up on lost training time. She was