The Girl Who Lived Twice (Millennium #6) - David Lagercrantz Page 0,50

going to kill me.”

“But you said you could go to your parents in Munich.”

“He’ll follow me there and soon have them wrapped around his little finger. They love him, don’t ask me why. Or at least they think they do.”

Salander nodded and tried to think clearly. Would it after all be better to wait? No, she decided, no. She could not hold back any longer, and she definitely couldn’t take Paulina with her to Stockholm. She had to go there at once—and by herself. She could not afford to remain passive, stuck in the past. She now had to follow the chase at closer quarters. If not, others would suffer, especially with people like Galinov on the scene.

“Shall I have a word with them?” she said.

“With my parents?”

“Yes.”

“Not on your life.”

“Why not?”

“Because you’re a social freak, Lisbeth, don’t you see that?” Paulina barked at her. Then she grabbed her handbag and marched out, slamming the door behind her.

Salander weighed up whether or not to run after her, but she remained frozen to the spot by her computer. She decided to try hacking the surveillance cameras around the apartment on Strandvägen, where Camilla apparently still was. But it was slow work. And she was distracted by so much else. Not just Paulina’s outburst, but all sorts of things. Including Blomkvist’s e-mail, although in the circumstances that seemed to be the lowest of her priorities.

It said:

“Is that so?” she mumbled. “Is that so?” She closed the e-mail and kept working on the surveillance cameras. But her fingers had a life of their own. Within half an hour she had looked up Forsell and Everest and become engrossed in endless reports about a woman called Klara Engelman.

Engelman looked a bit like Camilla, she thought, a cheaper version of her sister with the same charisma—someone who also took it for granted that she was the centre of attention—and Salander was certainly not going to waste any time on her. She had better things to do. She did, however, go on reading, even though her mind was not really on it at all. She sent a message to Plague about the cameras, and called Paulina, who didn’t pick up, but little by little she still managed to piece together a fuller picture, above all of Johannes Forsell’s ascent.

He and his friend Lindberg had reached the summit at one in the afternoon of May 13, 2008. The sky was still clear and they stayed up there for a while, admiring the view. They took photographs and reported back down to Base Camp. But not long after, in the narrow rock passage known as the Hillary Step, on the way down to the South Summit, they started to have problems and time began to run away from them.

At half past three—by which time they had only got as far as the so-called Balcony at 27,500 feet—they began to worry that they would run out of oxygen and would not make it down to Camp IV. Visibility had worsened too, and even though Forsell had no idea what was happening around them, he suspected that something serious had occurred.

He heard desperate voices on his radio. But by then he was too exhausted to fully grasp the situation, as he said later. He just staggered through the void, his legs barely holding him upright.

Soon after that the storm hit the mountain and everything turned into a lashing chaos. The cold was extreme, close to minus seventy-six degrees Fahrenheit, and the two of them were freezing and hardly able to distinguish up from down. It was understandable that neither of