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He thought a lot about Salander. He had never expected to see her again, but she fascinated and frightened him. He was not afraid of any living person. But his sister – his half-sister – had made a particular impression on him. No-one else had ever defeated him the way she had done. She had come back to life, even though he had buried her. She had come back and hunted him down. He dreamed about her every night. He would wake up in a cold sweat, and he recognized that she had replaced his usual phantoms.
In October he made a decision. He was not going to leave Sweden before he had found his sister and destroyed her. He did not have a plan, but at least his life now had a purpose. He did not know where she was or how he would trace her. He just sat in his room on the upper floor of the brickworks, staring out of the window, day after day, week after week.
Until one day a burgundy Honda parked outside the building and, to his complete astonishment, he saw Salander get out of the car. God is merciful, he thought. Salander would join the two women whose names he no longer remembered in the pool downstairs. His wait was over, and he could at last get on with his life.
Salander assessed the situation and saw that it was anything but under control. Her brain was working at high speed. Click, click, click. She still held the crowbar in her hand but she knew that it was a feeble weapon against a man who could not feel pain. She was locked inside an area of about a thousand square metres with a murderous robot from hell.
When Niederma
“Come down,” he said patiently. “You can’t escape. The end is inevitable.”
She wondered if he had a gun of some sort. Now that would be a problem.
He bent down and picked up a chair and threw it at her. She ducked.
Niederma
Niederma
Salander dropped the crowbar just as she had delivered the blow. She did not have time to pick up the knife, but kicked it away from him along the pallets, dodging a backhand blow from his huge fist and retreating back up on to the packing crates on the other side of the aisle. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Niederma
Niederma
Salander took an appraising look around. Click. She knew that she did not have a chance. She could survive for as long as she could avoid Niederma
She needed a weapon.
A pistol. A sub-machine gun. A rocket-propelled grenade. A perso
Any bloody thing at all.
But there was nothing like that to hand.
She looked everywhere.
No weapons.
Only tools. Click. Her eyes fell on the circular saw, but he was hardly going to lie down on the saw bench. Click. Click. She saw an iron rod that could be used as a spear, but it was probably too heavy for her to handle effectively. Click. She glanced through the door and saw that Niederma
A weapon… or a hiding place.
Niederma
He stopped in the doorway to the i
“I know you’re in here. And I’m going to find you.”
Niederma
Then he heard a clumsy rustling noise from somewhere in the centre of the room. He turned his head but at first could not tell where the sound was coming from. Then he smiled again. In the middle of the floor set slightly apart from the other debris stood a five-metre-long wooden workbench with a row of drawers and sliding cabinet doors beneath it.
He approached the workbench from the side and glanced behind it to make sure that she was not trying to fool him. Nothing there.
She was hiding inside the cabinet. So stupid.
He slid open the first door on the far left.
He instantly heard movement inside the cabinet, from the middle section. He took two quick steps and opened the middle door with a triumphant expression on his face.
Empty.
Then he heard a series of sharp cracks that sounded like pistol shots. The sound was so close that at first he could not tell where it was coming from. He turned to look. Then he felt a strange pressure against his left foot. He felt no pain, but he looked down at the floor just in time to see Salander’s hand moving the nail gun over to his right foot.
She was underneath the cabinet.
He stood as if paralysed for the seconds it took her to put the mouth of the nail gun against his boot and fire another five seven-inch nails straight through his foot.
He tried to move.
It took him precious seconds to realize that his feet were nailed solidly to the newly laid plank floor. Salander’s hand moved the nail gun back to his left foot. It sounded like an automatic weapon getting shots off in bursts. She managed to shoot in another four nails as reinforcement before he was able to react.
He reached down to grab her hand, but immediately lost his balance and regained it only by bracing himself against the workbench as he heard the nail gun being fired again and again, ka-blam, ka-blam, ka-blam. She was back to his right foot. He saw that she was firing the nails diagonally through his heel and into the floor.