The Girl Who Lived Twice (Millennium #6) - David Lagercrantz Page 0,41
her cry and now, heading for Arlanda airport and Stockholm in her private jet, she sought his smile.
“Thanks for coming along,” she said.
“We’ll catch her, my love. We’ll get her,” he replied, tenderly patting her hand.
* * *
—
Salander must have slept after seeing Camilla and her entourage driving off towards the airport, because she woke up and discovered a note on the bedside table to say that Paulina had gone down to breakfast. But now it was ten past eleven and the dining room must be closed. Salander stayed up in the room and cursed to herself when she remembered she had eaten the last of the snacks in the minibar. She drank water from the tap and then showered and put on jeans and a black T-shirt, and sat at the desk to check her e-mails. She had received two files of more than ten gigabytes, together with a message from Medical Examiner Dr. Fredrika Nyman:
The anger between the lines passed Salander by, and in any case she was swiftly distracted. She could see that Camilla was now in Sweden, on the E4 from Arlanda heading for Stockholm. She clenched her fists and briefly wondered whether she should go there now too. But she stayed at the desk and pulled up the files the Nyman woman had sent, letting the pages scroll past her eyes like a flickering microfilm. Why was she even doing this, could she really be bothered?
For now she resolved to concentrate and take a look, at least while she decided what to do next. She knew that this was where she always excelled.
Salander was capable of grasping within a very short time the content of even the most voluminous documents, and that is why she preferred, as Nyman had suspected, to work directly with raw data. This way she could avoid being influenced by the opinions and annotations of other people. She used the SAMtools programme to convert the information into a so-called BAM file, a document containing the entire genome, and that in itself was no small feat.
In a way it was like a gigantic cryptogram, with four letters: A, C, G and T, the nitrogenous bases adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine. At first glance it looked like one big incomprehensible mass. But in fact it was code for an entire life.
To begin with Lisbeth looked for deviations, any deviations, by trawling indices and studying graphs. Then she turned to her BAM Viewer, her IGV, and compared specific and random segments with the DNA sequences of other people she had found in the 1,000 Genomes Project—genetic information collected from all over the world—and it was then that she discovered an anomaly in the rs4954 frequency in what is known as the EPAS1 gene, which regulates the body’s haemoglobin production.
There was something so sensationally different there that she immediately ran a search in the PubMed database, and not long after she suddenly exclaimed aloud and shook her head. Was it really possible? She had had an inkling it might be something like that, but she had not expected to see it in black and white quite so soon. Now utterly focused, she forgot all about her sister in Stockholm and even failed to notice that Paulina had come in and greeted her before going into the bathroom.
Now Salander was entirely concentrated on learning more about this variant of the EPAS1 gene. Not only was it extremely unusual, it also had a spectacular background, traceable all the way back to the Denisova hominins, a subspecies of Homo sapiens which had died out forty thousand years ago.
For a long time the Denisovans were unknown to scientists, but their existence had been recognized ever since Russian archaeologists discovered a bone fragment and the tooth of a woman in the Denisova cave in the Altai Mountains of Siberia in 2008. It seemed that in the course of history the Denisovans interbred with Homo sapiens in South Asia and passed on some of their genes to contemporary humans, among others this variant of EPAS1.