The Girl Who Lived Twice (Millennium #6) - David Lagercrantz Page 0,104

and he felt no better about it even after he’d spoken to her. He was glad, of course, that she had called; he was grateful for every piece of information. But he did not like what he heard in her voice—the rage, the pounding fury, and no matter how many times he said, “Keep out of this, let us handle it,” the words didn’t seem to get through. And he was certain she had not told him everything. He was convinced she was in the middle of an operation of her own, and he cursed when they hung up and cursed again now as he sat in the conference room with his colleagues Sonja Modig, Jerker Holmberg, Curt Svensson and Amanda Flod.

“What was that?” he said.

“I was wondering how Salander could have known so quickly about Blomkvist having been attacked,” Holmberg said.

“I thought I told you.”

“You said she’d done something to his mobile.”

“That’s right, she’d messed about with it—with his consent. So she could eavesdrop on him and see where he was, at least until they shut his mobile down.”

“What I really meant was, how was she able to react so fast,” Holmberg said. “It sounds…I don’t know, as if she’d just been hanging about, waiting for something like this to happen.”

“She said she’d been afraid it would,” Bublanski said. “Like a worst-case scenario. Svavelsjö M.C. had been keeping Blomkvist under observation, both at Bellmansgatan and out at Sandhamn.”

“And we still don’t have anything on the club?”

“We woke up the president, Marko Sandström, this morning. But he just laughed at us. Said that you needed to be suicidal to go after Blomkvist. We’re trying to track down the other members and we’ll watch them. So far, we’ve not been able to link any of them to the incident, other than to note that several of them have been impossible to reach.”

“And we don’t know why Blomkvist was at the Lydmar in the first place?” Flod said.

“No, we’ve no idea. We’ve got people there now. But Blomkvist appears to have been very cagey of late. Even his colleagues at Millennium had no idea what he was up to. Erika Berger says he’s taking some sort of holiday. Apparently he’s mainly been working on his story about the Sherpa.”

“Which may have something to do with Forsell.”

“It may indeed, and that’s given Must the jitters, and Säpo too.”

“Could it be a foreign operation?” Svensson said.

“The fact that the surveillance cameras were hacked would suggest it. And I don’t like the way they used a stolen ambulance, that really feels like a provocation, but in all likelihood—”

“—there’s a link to Salander,” Modig concluded.

“That’s what we all think,” Holmberg said.

“Perhaps we do,” Bublanski said, and he sank deep in thought. What was Salander hiding from him?

* * *

—

Salander had not told Bublanski about the Strandvägen apartment. She was hoping Camilla would lead her to Blomkvist, and she did not want the police to mess that up for her. But for now, Camilla was staying put. Maybe she was waiting for the same thing as Salander, the thing that Salander dreaded: images of Blomkvist being tortured and a demand for an exchange, her for him, or, worse, pictures of Blomkvist dead and threats to kill others close to her unless she gave herself up to them.

During the night, Salander had been in touch with Annika Giannini, Dragan Armansky, Miriam Wu and a couple of others—even Paulina, who presumably nobody knew about—and had told them to go somewhere they would be safe. It hadn’t been pleasant, but she had done what she had to do.

She did not have a clue where they had taken Blomkvist, except that it appeared to be northwards, which is why she was staying at the Clarion Hotel at Arlanda airport, in the same direction at least. But she was as unaware of the room she was in or of the hotel as she was of everything else, and she had not slept a wink.

She had spent hours at the desk trying to find some trace, some opening, and it was not until now, when finally she got a signal, that she sat up in her chair. Camilla was leaving the apartment at Strandvägen. That’s my girl, she thought. Please be a little careless now, and take me to him. But that was hoping for too much. Camilla had Bogdanov, and Bogdanov was in the same league as Plague.

So even if her sister did show her the way to some