The Girl Who Lived Twice (Millennium #6) - David Lagercrantz Page 0,119

She rode straight into him. The impact was so violent that she was thrown from the bike and hit the wall with her body, then landed painfully on an iron beam on the floor. She was on her feet in a second and leaped behind a metal column while her eyes registered the details of the building, the number of people and their weapons, the distances, the obstacles and, further away, the furnace she had seen in the film sequence.

A man in a white suit was standing right next to Blomkvist, wiping his face with a handkerchief, and she realized that she was already hurtling towards them, driven by an irrepressible inner force. A bullet glanced against her helmet. Others whistled around her. She shot back and one of the men by the furnace crumpled and fell, which was something. But she did not really have a plan.

She just charged on ahead and saw that the man in the white suit had taken hold of the stretcher to push Blomkvist into the flames. She fired another shot, but missed, so she ran straight at the man and both of them went crashing to the floor. What happened afterwards was not at all clear.

She only knew that she headbutted him, crushing his nose, then got back on her feet and shot at another shadowy figure. She fumbled to undo the leather strap around one of Blomkvist’s arms, which was a stupid mistake. Yet it seemed necessary to her. He was on a stretcher that was laid on a kind of trolley on rails. One push would have put him inside the furnace, and although it had taken only a few seconds to release the buckle, she had been distracted.

She felt a blow to her back and a bullet hit her arm and she fell forward, unable to parry a kick to her hand that sent her gun flying. Disaster. Before she had time to get up she was surrounded, and was certain they would shoot her right away. But there was confusion and tension, perhaps they were waiting for orders.

She was the one they had been after all along, and she cast about for a means of escape, knowing that two men were down and a third wounded but still standing. That left her alone against three men. And Blomkvist was not going to be able to help. He seemed dazed, and his legs…

She turned away and looked at the thugs again. Her old friends Jorma and Krille from Svavelsjö M.C., and also Peter Kovic, he was the one who had been injured. He was the weak link, and Krille wasn’t in very good shape either. Was he the one she had ridden into?

A little further away there was a blue door leading into an annexe. There’ll be more of them in there, she thought, and she could hear the man she had headbutted groaning behind her. That must be Galinov. He hadn’t been put out of action either, and now blood was pumping out of her arm. It became increasingly clear that she was done for. One careless movement and they would shoot her. But she refused to give up. Her brain went into overdrive. What sort of electronics did they have in the place? A camera, of course, and a computer and an internet connection, and maybe also an alarm system. But no…she had no access to all that right now. In any case there was no power.

Her only option was to play for time, and she looked at Blomkvist again. She needed him. She needed all the help she could get, and she needed to think positively now. At least she had saved Blomkvist, even if it was only temporarily. Everything else had been a monumental failure. Ever since her hesitation on Tverskoy Boulevard, she had caused nothing but trouble and suffering, and she berated herself even as her brain searched for solutions.

She studied the men’s body language and measured the distance to the hole in the window and her motorcycle and an iron rod, a glassblowing tool which was lying on the floor. She considered and rejected various plans of action. It was as if she were photographing every detail of the building, and she listened for sounds and anything that stood out, but also felt a strange premonition. A moment later, the blue door flew open and an all-too-familiar figure came towards her, footsteps resounding with triumph, but also with hopelessness. Tension and gravity