The Girl Who Lived Twice (Millennium #6) - David Lagercrantz Page 0,46

or explanation—which must have caused his staff a headache or two. That was why they were now on Sandön, in their house by the water, while the boys were with his mother. They had come out accompanied by the inevitable bodyguards, which meant she had to talk to them and look after them. Johannes had gone to ground in his study on the top floor. Yesterday she had heard him shouting into the telephone. This morning he had not even worked out. He had eaten his breakfast in silence and gone into hiding upstairs again. Something was seriously wrong. She could feel it.

Outside, the wind was getting up. She was in the kitchen making a beetroot salad with feta and pine nuts. It was time for lunch, but she could hardly bring herself to let him know.

She did go up in the end, and even though she should have known better she walked into the room without knocking to find him hurriedly putting away some papers. If he had not been acting so suspiciously, she wouldn’t even have noticed them. But now she could see that it was a psychiatric medical file. That was strange. Perhaps a security check on some colleague? She tried to smile her usual smile.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“It’s lunchtime.”

“I’m not hungry.”

You’re always hungry for Christ’s sake, she wanted to shout.

“What’s wrong?” she said. “Tell me.”

“Nothing.”

“Come on, I can see there is.”

She could feel the anger pounding inside.

“I told you, nothing.”

“Are you ill or something?” she said.

“What do you mean?”

“I can see you’re reading medical records, so obviously I’m interested,” she snapped back, and that was a mistake.

She realized it at once. He looked at her with eyes filled with anxiety, and that scared her. She muttered an apology, and as she left the room she noticed that her legs could hardly carry her.

What’s wrong? she thought. We used to be so happy.

* * *

—

Salander knew that Camilla was now in an apartment on Strandvägen in Stockholm. She knew that Camilla’s hacker, Jurij Bogdanov, and the former GRU agent and gangster Ivan Galinov were there with her, and she realized that she had to act. But how? Instead she carried on looking into the case of Blomkvist’s Sherpa. Perhaps it was a form of escapism. With her BAM Viewer she found sixty-seven distinctive markers in the DNA segment, so she went through them one by one and eventually identified a haplogroup, even a patrilineal one.

It was called DM174, and it too was highly unusual, which could be either a good or a bad thing, and she entered the group into the YFull search engine—the Moscow DNA-sequencing company Paulina had recommended—and waited.

“What a crap site, this is unbelievably slow.”

She was not hoping for anything much, and wondered why she was even bothering. She should forget the whole thing and concentrate on Camilla. But then she got an answer, and she whistled. There had been 212 hits, spread over 156 family names. That was much more than she had been expecting. She closed her eyes and took a deep breath, and then went through all the material, going into more depth with unusual variants in the segment. One name kept cropping up. It felt absurdly wrong. But it came up over and over again: Robert Carson in Denver, Colorado.

He did indeed look a little Asian. But apart from that, he was American through and through, a marathon runner, downhill skier and geologist at the city’s university, forty-two years old, father of three, a politically active Democrat and fierce opponent of the National Rifle Association, ever since his oldest son had been caught up in a school shooting in Seattle.

Robert Carson was also a keen amateur genealogist. Two years earlier he had had his large Y chromosome analyzed, which revealed that he had the same EPAS1 mutation as the beggar.

“I have the supergene,” he had written in a piece on the rootsweb ancestry website, to which he added a picture of himself posing in high spirits by a stream in the Rocky Mountains, showing off his biceps, wearing overalls and a Colorado Avalanche ice-hockey team cap.

He recounted that his paternal grandfather, Dawa Dorje, had lived in southern Tibet, not far from Mount Everest, but that he had fled the country in 1951 during the Chinese occupation and settled with relatives in the Khumbu Valley, near the Tengboche Buddhist monastery in Nepal. Online there was a picture of his grandfather together with Sir Edmund Hillary at the inauguration