The Girl Who Lived Twice (Millennium #6) - David Lagercrantz Page 0,100

doing?”

He repeated the words twice and was definitely in a bad way, in shock. All she could hear was his breathing. Had they drugged him? She banged her fist on the desk and registered that the vehicle had been on Norrlandsgatan, not far from where she was now. But that was unlikely to be where they had picked him up, so she wound the recording further back and heard his footsteps and his breathing, and a voice saying “Blomkvist?”—the voice of an older man, she thought. And after that a yelp, an exhalation of breath, and a woman shouting, “My God, what’s the matter with him?”

Where had all this taken place?

Blasieholmen, by the look of it. She could not determine the exact spot, but it must have been outside the Grand Hôtel or the Nationalmuseum, somewhere around there. She rang the emergency services and reported that the journalist, Mikael Blomkvist, had been assaulted in that neighbourhood. The young man who took the call recognized the name and asked for more details in an excited voice. But before Salander had time to add anything, someone in the background could be heard saying that an alert had already come in from that area: a man had collapsed, apparently having had some kind of fit outside Hotel Lydmar, and had been taken away.

“How?” she said.

There was confusion at the other end of the line, voices talking to each other.

“An ambulance fetched him?”

“An ambulance?”

For a split second she was relieved, but then she checked herself.

“Did you dispatch it?”

“I expect we did.”

“You ‘expect’ you did?”

“Let me check.”

Again, voices in the background, but it was difficult to catch what they were saying. Then the man was back on the line, clearly nervous.

“Who’s asking?”

“Salander,” she said. “Lisbeth Salander.”

“No, apparently we didn’t.”

“Well, have it stopped then,” she spat out. “Now.”

She yelled a stream of abuse, hung up and listened to the recording in real time. It was too quiet, she thought. Only the rumble of the vehicle and Blomkvist’s laboured breathing. There was nothing else to be heard, no other voices, but then…if it really was an ambulance that was a lead of sorts, and she considered ringing the police and raising hell. But no, unless the emergency centre was staffed by idiots, they must already be after it.

It was vital she acted before the tracking signals disappeared, and just then—in case she doubted the information she had received—a siren began to howl, and then something more: a scratching sound, hands searching through Blomkvist’s pockets, she thought, followed by movement and heavy breathing. Then a loud noise, a crunching crash, not a mobile being thrown away, but one being smashed to bits, and then the transmission died. It ended as suddenly as a gunshot, a power cut, and she kicked her chair. She grabbed her whisky glass from the table and hurled it at the wall where it broke into a thousand pieces. “Fucking hell…Fuck!”

She shook her head, pulled herself together and checked where Camilla was. Still at Strandvägen, of course. She wouldn’t get her hands dirty. Fuck her! She rang Plague and shouted at him as she pulled on her clothes and packed a backpack with her laptop, her pistol and her IMSI-catcher. Then she kicked over a lamp, put on her helmet and Google Glass and rushed out to her motorcycle in the square.

* * *

—

Rebecka Forsell had asked to sleep on her own. She thought Kowalski and Johannes could perfectly well share a room. But now she was lying awake in a narrow bed, in a small study crammed with books, reading the news on her mobile. Not a word about Johannes disappearing from the hospital. She was glad she had called the hospital staff to say that she was looking after Johannes herself, as well as Klas Berg on a secure line. She had subsequently ignored his admonitions and threats. To be fair, Berg had no idea what a marginal player he was in the overall scheme of things.

She could not have cared less about him or any of the others at military high command. All she wanted was to be able to process the full implications of what she had heard, and maybe also to understand why she had not suspected anything earlier. There had been no shortage of signs, that much was clear to her now. For example, the crisis Johannes had gone through at Base Camp afterwards. She had cried tears of relief that he was alive, and safe—despite