out the paper. They take care of the finances. They're not supposed to interfere with the content, but situations do crop up. To be honest, Erika, between the two of us, this is going to be tough."
"Why's that?"
"Circulation has dropped by nearly 150,000 copies since the glory days of the '60s, and there may soon come a time when S.M.P. is no longer profitable. We've reorganized, cut more than 180 jobs since 1980. We went over to tabloid format - which we should have done twenty years sooner. S.M.P. is still one of the big papers, but it wouldn't take much for us to be regarded as a second-class paper. If it hasn't already happened."
"Why did they pick me then?" Berger said.
"Because the median age of our readers is fifty-plus, and the growth in readers in their twenties is almost zero. The paper has to be rejuvenated. And the reasoning among the board was to bring in the most improbable editor-in-chief they could think of."
"A woman?"
"Not just any woman. The woman who crushed Wennerstrom's empire, who is considered the queen of investigative journalism, and who has a reputation for being the toughest. Picture it. It's irresistible. If you can't rejuvenate this paper, nobody can. S.M.P. isn't just hiring Erika Berger, we're hiring the whole mystique that goes with your name."
When Blomkvist left Cafe Copacabana next to the Kvarter cinema at Hornstull, it was just past 2.00 p.m. He put on his dark glasses and turned up Bergsundsstrand on his way to the tunnelbana. He noticed the grey Volvo at once, parked at the corner. He passed it without slowing down. Same registration, and the car was empty.
It was the seventh time he had seen the same car in four days. He had no idea how long the car had been in his neighbourhood. It was pure chance that he had noticed it at all. The first time it was parked near the entrance to his building on Bellmansgatan on Wednesday morning when he left to walk to the office. He happened to read the registration number, which began with KAB, and he paid attention because those were the initials of Zalachenko's holding company, Karl Axel Bodin Inc. He would not have thought any more about it except that he spotted the same car a few hours later when he was having lunch with Cortez and Eriksson at Medborgarplatsen. That time the Volvo was parked on a side street near the Millennium offices.
He wondered whether he was becoming paranoid, but when he visited Palmgren the same afternoon at the rehabilitation home in Ersta, the car was in the visitors' car park. That could not have been chance. Blomkvist began to keep an eye on everything around him. And when he saw the car again the next morning he was not surprised.
Not once had he seen its driver.
A call to the national vehicle register revealed that the car belonged to a Goran Mårtensson of Vittangigaten in Vallingby. An hour's research turned up the information that Mårtensson held the title of business consultant and owned a private company whose address was a P.O. box on Fleminggatan in Kungsholmen. Mårtensson's C.V. was an interesting one. In 1983, at eighteen, he had done his military service with the coast guard, and then enrolled in the army. By 1989 he had advanced to lieutenant, and then he switched to study at the police academy in Solna. Between 1991 and 1996 he worked for the Stockholm police. In 1997 he was no longer on the official roster of the external service, and in 1999 he had registered his own company.
So - Sapo.
An industrious investigative journalist could get paranoid on less than this. Blomkvist concluded that he was under surveillance, but it was being carried out so clumsily that he could hardly have helped but notice.
Or was it clumsy? The only reason he first noticed the car was the registration number, which just happened to mean something to him. But for the KAB, he would not have given the car a second glance.
On Friday KAB was conspicuous by its absence. Blomkvist could not be absolutely sure, but he thought he had been tailed by a red Audi that day. He had not managed to catch the registration number. On Friday the Volvo was back.
Exactly twenty seconds after Blomkvist left Cafe Copacabana, Malm raised his Nikon in the shadows of Cafe Rosso's awning across the street and took a series of twelve photographs of the