memo, corrected the typos, and emailed it to all the paper's employees. She sent a copy to Pressens Tidning, a media journal, and also to the trade magazine Journalisten. Then she packed away her laptop and went to see Holm at his desk.
"Goodbye," she said.
"Goodbye, Berger. It was hellish working with you."
They smiled at each other.
"One last thing," she said.
"Tell me?"
"Frisk has been working on a story I commissioned."
"Right, and nobody has any idea what it's about."
"Give him some support. He's come a long way, and I'll be staying in touch with him. Let him finish the job. I guarantee you'll be pleased with the result."
He looked wary. Then he nodded.
They did not shake hands. She left her card key on his desk and took the lift down to the garage. She parked her B.M.W. near the Millennium offices at a little after 4.00.
PART IV. REBOOTING SYSTEM
I.VII - 7.X
Despite the rich variety of Amazon legends from ancient Greece, South America, Africa and elsewhere, there is only one historically documented example of female warriors. This is the women's army that existed among the Fon of Dahomey in West Africa, now Benin.
These female warriors have never been mentioned in the published military histories; no romanticized films have been made about them, and today they exist as no more than footnotes to history. Only one scholarly work has been written about these women, Amazons of Black Sparta by Stanley B. Alpern (C. Hurst & Co., London, 1998), and yet they made up a force that was the equal of every contemporary body of male elite soldiers from among the colonial powers.
It is not clear exactly when Fon's female army was founded, but some sources date it to the 1600s. It was originally a royal guard, but it developed into a military collective of six thousand soldiers with a semi-divine status. They were not merely window-dressing. For almost two hundred years they constituted the vanguard of the Fon against European colonizers. They were feared by the French forces, who lost several battles against them. This army of women was not defeated until 1892, when France sent troops with artillery, the Foreign Legion, a marine infantry regiment and cavalry.
It is not known how many of these female warriors fell in battle. For many years survivors continued to wage guerrilla warfare, and veterans of the army were interviewed and photographed as late as the 1940s.
CHAPTER 23
FRIDAY, 1.VII - SUNDAY, 10.VII
Two weeks before the trial of Lisbeth Salander began, Malm finished the layout of the 352-page book tersely entitled The Section. The cover was blue with yellow type. Malm had positioned seven postage-stamp-sized black-and-white images of Swedish Prime Ministers along the bottom. Over the top of them hovered a photograph of Zalachenko. He had used Zalachenko's passport photograph as an illustration, increasing the contrast so that only the darkest areas stood out like a shadow across the whole cover. It was not a particularly sophisticated design, but it was effective. Blomkvist, Cortez and Eriksson were named as the authors.
It was 5.00 in the morning and he had been working all night. He felt slightly sick and had badly wanted to go home and sleep. Eriksson had sat up with him doing final corrections page by page as Malm O.K.'d them and printed them out. By now she was asleep on the sofa.
Malm put the entire text plus illustrations into a folder. He started up the Toast program and burned two C.D.s. One he put in the safe. The other was collected by a sleepy Blomkvist just before 7.00.
"Go and get some rest," Blomkvist said.
"I'm on my way."
They left Eriksson asleep and turned on the door alarm. Cortez would be in at 8.00 to take over.
Blomkvist walked to Lundagatan, where he again borrowed Salander's abandoned Honda without permission. He drove to Hallvigs Reklam, the printers near the railway tracks in Morgongåva, west of Uppsala. This was a job he would not entrust to the post.
He drove slowly, refusing to acknowledge the stress he felt, and then waited until the printers had checked that they could read the C.D. He made sure that the book would indeed be ready to distribute on the first day of the trial. The problem was not the printing but the binding, which could take time. But Jan Kobin, Hallvigs' manager, promised to deliver at least five hundred copies of the first printing of ten thousand by that day. The book would be a trade paperback.