finished with him, the renowned children's psychiatrist would be one of the most detested men in Sweden. That was one thing.
The second thing was more complicated.
The men who conspired against Salander - he thought of them as the Zalachenko club - were inside the Security Police. He knew one, Gunnar Bjorck, but Bjorck could not possibly be the only man responsible. There had to be a group... a division or unit of some sort. There must be chiefs, operations managers. There had to be a budget. But he had no idea how to go about identifying these people, where even to start. He had only the vaguest notion of how Sapo was organized.
On Monday he had begun his research by sending Cortez to the second-hand bookshops on Sodermalm, to buy every book which in any way dealt with the Security Police. Cortez had come to his apartment in the afternoon with six books.
Espionage in Sweden by Mikael Rosquist (Tempus, 1988); Sapo Chief 1962 - 1970 by P.G. Vinge (Wahlstrom&Widstrand, 1988); Secret Forces by Jan Ottosson and Lars Magnusson (Tiden, 1991); Power Struggle for Sapo by Erik Magnusson (Corona, 1989); An Assignment by Carl Lidbom (Wahlstrom&Widstrand, 1990); and - somewhat surprisingly - An Agent in Place by Thomas Whiteside (Ballantine, 1966), which dealt with the Wennerstrom affair. The Wennerstrom affair of the '60s, not Blomkvist's own much more recent Wennerstrom affair.
He had spent much of Monday night and the early hours of Tuesday morning reading or at least skimming the books. When he had finished he made some observations. First, most of the books published about the Security Police were from the late '80s. An Internet search showed that there was hardly any current literature on the subject.
Second, there did not seem to be any intelligible basic overview of the activities of the Swedish secret police over the years. This may have been because many documents were stamped Top Secret and were therefore off limits, but there did not seem to be any single institution, researcher or media that had carried out a critical examination of Sapo.
He also noticed another odd thing: there was no bibliography in any one of the books Cortez had found. On the other hand, the footnotes often referred to articles in the evening newspapers, or to interviews with some old, retired Sapo hand.
The book Secret Forces was fascinating but largely dealt with the time before and during the Second World War. Blomkvist regarded P.G. Vinge's memoir as propaganda, written in self-defence by a severely criticized Sapo chief who was eventually fired. An Agent in Place contained so much inaccurate information about Sweden in the first chapter that he threw the book into the wastepaper basket. The only two books with any real ambition to portray the work of the Security Police were Power Struggle for Sapo and Espionage in Sweden. They contained data, names and organizational charts. He found Magnusson's book to be especially worthwhile reading. Even though it did not offer any answers to his immediate questions, it provided a good account of Sapo as a structure as well as its primary concerns over several decades.
The biggest surprise was Lidbom's An Assignment, which described the problems encountered by the former Swedish ambassador to France when he was commissioned to examine Sapo in the wake of the Palme assassination and the Ebbe Carlsson affair. Blomkvist had never before read anything by Lidbom, and he was taken aback by the sarcastic tone combined with razor-sharp observations. But even Lidbom's book brought Blomkvist no closer to an answer to his questions, even if he was beginning to get an idea of what he was up against.
He opened his mobile and called Cortez.
"Hi, Henry. Thanks for the legwork yesterday."
"What do you need now?"
"A little more legwork."
"Micke, I hate to say this, but I have a job to do. I'm editorial assistant now."
"An excellent career advancement."
"What is it you want?"
"Over the years there have been a number of public reports on Sapo. Carl Lidbom did one. There must be several others like it."
"I see."
"Order everything you can find from parliament: budgets, public reports, interpellations, and the like. And get Sapo's annual reports as far back as you can find them."
"Yes, master."
"Good man. And, Henry..."
"Yes?"
"I don't need them until tomorrow."
Salander spent the whole day brooding about Zalachenko. She knew that he was only two doors away, that he wandered in the corridors at night, and that he had come to her room at