short of fantastic, and the fact that some of her own staff were unable to rejoice at their success, but felt it necessary to bad-mouth the person who had delivered the scoop, only went to show how envious journalists can be. They also complained about having to cooperate with the German magazine Geo, in which a Paulina Müller, a writer none of them had ever heard of, had written an article about the scientific work which had helped to identify the Sherpa Nima Rita.
Blomkvist himself had not written a single line, although he had of course done the groundwork. He had spent most of the time lying in a daze of morphine, coping with the pain and a series of operations. The doctors had been reassuring: He would probably be able to walk normally again within half a year, and that was a great relief. Yet he remained taciturn and downhearted and only occasionally, as when they were discussing her divorce, did he sound like his old self again. He had laughed when she told him that she was having a romance with a man called Mikael.
“How convenient,” he had said. But he did not want to talk about himself or his ordeal.
He was bottling up his suffering and she worried about him. With any luck he would open up a little today. He was going to be allowed home, and she thought she would visit him that evening. But first she was going to look through his story about troll factories, which he had not wanted to publish and had only reluctantly sent her. She put on her spectacles and started reading. OK, not a bad beginning, all things considered, she thought. He did know how to write an introduction, but then…she could understand why he had not been happy with it.
It sagged. He was being too complicated. He was trying to say too much at once, and she went to get herself some coffee before crossing out a sentence here and there. But then…what on earth was this? Towards the end of the article there was a clumsy addition which said that a man called Vladimir Kuznetsov not only owned troll factories in Russia, but was ultimately responsible for them. He was also the man behind the hate campaign which had preceded the murders of LGBTQ people in Chechnya, and that was not previously known.
She checked. No, all she could find online about Kuznetsov was almost…endearing. He was apparently a restaurateur and a bit of a character, an ice-hockey fan who also specialized in cooking bear steak and organizing lavish parties for the ruling elite. But Blomkvist’s article said something very different. It identified him as the person who had launched the disinformation and hacker attacks that triggered the stock market crash that summer. He was the driving force behind a large proportion of the lies and hatred spreading across the world. How sensational was that? And what the hell was Blomkvist playing at? How could he hide that kind of revelation deep inside the story, and dish it up without a shred of evidence?
Berger read the piece again and saw that Kuznetsov’s name contained a link to a number of documents in Russian and so she called over Irina, their editor and researcher who had helped Blomkvist earlier that summer. Irina was stocky, with large horn-rimmed spectacles and a crooked, warm smile. Immediately she settled down on Berger’s chair and immersed herself in the material, translating it aloud, and at the end they looked at each other and murmured:
“Bloody hell.”
* * *
—
Blomkvist had just made it back to his apartment on Bellmansgatan on crutches, and could not understand what Berger was going on about on the telephone. But then he was not particularly alert. He was full of morphine and his head was heavy, and he was haunted by flashbacks.
At first Salander had been there with him at the hospital, which had lent him a degree of calm; perhaps he felt better with a person by his side who knew exactly what he had been through. But just as he was getting used to having her around, she left without a word of goodbye. There was uproar, of course. The doctors and nurses ran around looking for her, as did Bublanski and Modig, who had not finished questioning her as a witness. As if that made any difference to her.
Salander was gone, and he took it badly. Bloody hell, Lisbeth, why are you always running