The Girl Who Kicked The Hornets Nest Page 0,182

going on in his office at the moment."

"What sort of meeting?"

"I can't explain just yet. I just need to know if he has a meeting with anybody right now. And if so, who."

"You want me to spy on a prosecutor who happens to be my superior?"

Figuerola raised her eyebrows. Then she shrugged. "Yes, I do."

"I'll do what I can," he said and hung up.

Sonja Modig was closer to police headquarters than Bublanski had thought. She was having coffee with her husband on the balcony of a friend's place in Vasastaden. Their children were away with her parents who had taken them on a week's holiday, and they planned to do something as old-fashioned as have a bite to eat and go to the movies.

Bublanski explained why he was calling.

"And what sort of excuse would I have to barge in on Ekstrom?" Modig asked.

"I promised to give him an update on Niedermann yesterday, but in fact I forgot to deliver it to his office before I left. It's on my desk."

"O.K.," said Modig. She looked at her husband and her friend. "I have to go in to H.Q. I'll take the car and with a little luck I'll be back in an hour."

Her husband sighed. Her friend sighed.

"I'm on call this weekend," Modig said in apology.

She parked on Bergsgatan, took the lift up to Bublanski's office, and picked up the three A4 pages that comprised the meagre results of their search for Niedermann. Not much to hang on the Christmas tree, she thought.

She took the stairs up to the next floor and stopped at the door to the corridor. Headquarters was almost deserted on this summer afternoon. She was not exactly sneaking around. She was just walking very quietly. She stopped outside Ekstrom's closed door. She heard voices and all of a sudden her courage deserted her. She felt a fool. In any normal situation she would have knocked on the door, pushed it open and exclaimed, "Hello! So you're still here?" and then sailed right in. Now it seemed all wrong.

She looked around.

Why had Bublanski called her? What was this meeting about?

She glanced across the corridor. Opposite Ekstrom's office was a conference room big enough for ten people. She had sat through a number of presentations there herself. She went into the room and closed the door. The blinds were down, and the glass partition to the corridor was covered by curtains. It was dark. She pulled up a chair and sat down, then opened the curtains a crack so that she would have a view of the corridor.

She felt uneasy. If anyone opened the door she would have quite a problem explaining what she was doing there. She took out her mobile and looked at the time display. Just before 6.00. She changed the ring to silent and leaned back in her chair, watching the door of Ekstrom's office.

At 7.00 Plague pinged Salander.

- Done. I'm controlling S.M.P.

- Where?

He sent over a U.R.L.

- We have twenty-four hours. Although we have the email for eighteen days we will hijack all their computers from home. It is very likely that most do not even have hooked up on a Saturday afternoon.

- Plague, take care of their computers at home and I'll take care of the S.M.P.

- It's what I intended to do. Your Palm is a bit limited. Is there anyone in particular who I should focus on?

- No. Any of them.

- Agreed.

- Plague.

- Yes.

- If you find anything by tomorrow, I want you to go on.

- Agreed.

- In that case, I'll pay.

- Bah. Okay. This is fun.

She logged out and went to the U.R.L. where Plague had uploaded all the administrator rights for S.M.P. She started by checking whether Fleming was online and at work. He was not. So she borrowed his identity and went into S.M.P.'s mail server. That way she could look at all the activity in the email system, even messages that had long since been deleted from individual accounts.

She started with Ernst Teodor Billing, one of the night editors at S.M.P., forty-three years old. She opened his mail and began to click back in time. She spent about two seconds on each message, just long enough to get an idea of who sent it and what it was about. After a few minutes she had worked out what was routine mail