The Girl Who Lived Twice (Millennium #6) - David Lagercrantz Page 0,113

shit. Big and wet and bloated. In the video footage he could be seen removing his helmet and drinking from a silver-coloured water bottle, before he poured the rest over his hair and face. Probably trying to recover from the mother of all hangovers.

She wrote back:

Plague answered:

That drunk buffoon could have gone anywhere. Either inland, into the depths of Norrland, or up towards the coast. And she had no fucking clue where they had taken Blomkvist. She felt like screaming and hitting out. But she controlled herself and sat there wondering if it would be worth contacting the bastards, seeing if that would help her work something out. She went into the e-mail account she had been given and discovered something new: two lines of numbers and letters she could not make sense of at first. Then she saw that they were GPS coordinates, of a place in the Uppland parish of Morgonsala:

Morgonsala.

What did that mean? Last time they had summoned her to a place outside Sunnersta, with incredibly detailed instructions on how to get there. Now, no directions, not a single word, just a reference to a position located…where?…she had a closer look—somewhere in the sticks, in the middle of a field. She saw that Morgonsala was a small community with sixty-eight inhabitants, northeast of Tierp, consisting mainly of forest and plains. There was a church, of course, and some ancient ruins as well as a few abandoned industrial sites from the ’70s and ’80s, when the district was humming with entrepreneurial spirit. She thought that looked quite promising, and when she put the coordinates into Google Earth she discovered a long, rectangular brick building with large glass windows standing in the middle of a field, not far from the forest.

Just about any building in Sweden could be a hiding place for criminals, there was a whole country to search through. Why point straight at that one? Why send her any coordinates at all? Was it a red herring? A trap?

She looked again at the map and saw that Rocknö, where Kovic had stopped at the service station, was right by the turnoff to Morgonsala.

Had one of Camilla’s lot squealed? Was that conceivable? Admittedly, it couldn’t have been a popular move to order the Svavelsjö crew to go after someone like Blomkvist. It would have seemed too risky, but why leak the information to her? What were they hoping for in return?

It made no sense. She wrote to Plague:

She sent him the GPS coordinates and wrote:

Then she got on her motorcycle and rode at a reckless speed to Morgonsala. Before long she noticed the wind growing stronger. The sky was clouding over and she gripped the handlebars so tightly that her fingers whitened inside her gloves.

CHAPTER 32

August 28

Ivan Galinov looked down at the journalist on the stretcher. What a fighter. He had not for a long time seen anyone go through this level of pain with such stoicism. But that did not help now. Time was passing and they could wait no longer. The journalist had to die—perhaps in vain, but it no longer mattered. For better or for worse, Galinov thought, here he now was, driven by the shadows of the past. By the fire itself, one could say.

Unlike so many of his colleagues at the GRU, Galinov had not applauded when Zalachenko’s twelve-year-old daughter threw a Molotov cocktail into his car and watched him burn. Instead he had withdrawn, and sworn to go after that girl one day. There was no denying that he had been floored all those years ago when he heard that Zalachenko, his closest friend and mentor, had defected and become the worst of the worst, a traitor to his country.

But later he realized it was not that simple, and they had reconnected, picking up more or less where they left off. They met in secret to exchange information, and they built up Zvezda Bratva together. Nobody, not even his own father, had meant as much to him as Zalachenko. Galinov would always honour his memory, in spite of the fact that he knew Zala had been the author of so much evil, not only in his profession but in other ways too,