"You don't need to take a shower. You're soaked to the skin already."
"I've been running. You should come along."
"If I tried to go at your pace, I'd have a heart attack on Norr Malarstrand."
"Nonsense. Come on, time to get up."
He scrubbed her back and soaped her shoulders. And her hips. And her stomach. And her breasts. And after a while she had completely lost interest in her shower and pulled him back to bed.
They had their coffee at the pavement cafe beside Norr Malarstrand.
"You could turn out to be a bad habit," she said. "And we've only known each other a few days."
"I find you incredibly attractive. But you know that already."
"Why do you think that is?"
"Sorry, can't answer that question. I've never understood why I'm attracted to one woman and totally uninterested in another."
She smiled thoughtfully. "I have today off," she said.
"But not me. I have a mountain of work before the trial begins, and I've spent the last three evenings with you instead of getting on with it."
"What a shame."
He stood up and gave her a kiss on the cheek. She took hold of his shirtsleeve.
"Blomkvist, I'd like to spend some more time with you."
"Same here. But it's going to be a little up and down until we put this story to bed."
He walked away down Hantverkargatan.
Berger got some coffee and watched the screen. For fifty-three minutes absolutely nothing happened except that her screen saver started up from time to time. Then her I.C.Q. pinged again.
- Done. You have a lot of shit on your hard drive, like two viruses for example.
- Sorry. What's next?
- Who is the administrator of the computer network of the S.M.P.?
- Don't know. Maybe Peter Fleming, he is the head coach.
- Okay.
- What do I do now?
- Nothing. Go home.
- Is that all?
- We will be in touch.
- Should I leave the computer on?
But Salander was gone from her I.C.Q. Berger stared at the screen in frustration. Finally she turned off the computer and went out to find a cafe where she could sit and think.
CHAPTER 20
SATURDAY, 4.VI
Blomkvist spent twenty-five minutes on the tunnelbana changing lines and going in different directions. He finally got off a bus at Slussen, jumped on the Katarina lift up to Mosebacke and took a circuitous route to Fiskargatan 9. He had bought bread, milk and cheese at the mini supermarket next to the County Council building and he put the groceries straight into the fridge. Then he turned on Salander's computer.
After a moment's thought he also turned on his Ericsson T10. He ignored his normal mobile because he did not want to talk to anyone who was not involved in the Zalachenko story. He saw that he had missed six calls in the past twenty-four hours: three from Cortez, two from Eriksson, and one from Berger.
First he called Cortez who was in a cafe in Vasastad and had a few details to discuss, nothing urgent.
Eriksson had only called, she told him, to keep in touch.
Then he called Berger, who was engaged.
He opened the Yahoo group [Idiotic_Table] and found the final version of Salander's autobiographical statement. He smiled, printed out the document and began to read it at once.
Salander switched on her Palm Tungsten T3. She had spent an hour infiltrating and charting the intranet at S.M.P. with the help of Berger's account. She had not tackled the Peter Fleming account because she did not need to have full administrator rights. What she was interested in was access to S.M.P.'s personnel files. And Berger's account had complete access to those.
She fervently wished that Blomkvist had been kind enough to smuggle in her PowerBook with a real keyboard and a 17" screen instead of only the hand-held. She downloaded a list of everyone who worked at S.M.P. and began to check them off. There were 223 employees, 82 of whom were women.
She began by crossing off all the women. She did not exclude women on the grounds of their being incapable of such folly, but statistics showed that the absolute majority of people who harassed women were men. That left 141 individuals.
Statistics also argued that the majority of poison pen artists were either teenagers or middle-aged. Since S.M.P. did not have any teenagers on its staff, she drew an age curve and deleted everyone over fifty-five and under twenty-five. That left 103.