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When Nieminen and his pals had found the open door at the end of the building, she opened her mobile again. She composed a message and sent it to the police station in Norrtälje.
POLICE MURDERER R. NIEDERMANN IN OLD BRICKWORKS BY THE O.K. STATION OUTSIDE SKEDERID. ABOUT TO BE MURDERED BY S. NIEMINEN AND MEMBERS OF SVAVELSJÖ M.C. WOMEN DEAD IN PIT ON GROUND FLOOR.
She could not see any movement from the factory.
She bided her time.
As she waited she removed the S.I.M. card from her telephone and cut it up with some nail scissors. She rolled down the window and tossed out the pieces. Then she took a new S.I.M. card from her wallet and inserted it in her mobile. She was using a Comviq cash card, which was virtually impossible to track. She called Comviq and credited 500 kronor to the new card.
Eleven minutes after her message was sent, two police vans with their sirens off but with blue lights flashing drove at speed up to the factory from the direction of Norrtälje. They parked in the yard next to Nieminen’s van. A minute later two squad cars arrived. The officers conferred and then moved together towards the brickworks. Salander raised her binoculars. She saw one of the policemen radio through the registration number of Nieminen’s van. The officers stood around waiting. Salander watched as another team approached at high speed two minutes later.
Finally it was all over.
The story that had begun on the day she was born had ended at the brickworks.
She was free.
When the policemen officers took out assault rifles from their vehicles, put on Kevlar vests and started to fan out around the factory site, Salander went inside the shop and bought a coffee and a sandwich wrapped in cellophane. She ate standing at a counter in the café.
It was dark by the time she got back to her car. Just as she opened the door she heard two distant reports from what she assumed were handguns on the other side of the road. She saw several black figures, presumably policemen, pressed against the wall near the entrance at one end of the building. She heard sirens as another squad car approached from the direction of Uppsala. A few cars had stopped at the side of the road below her to watch the drama.
She started the Honda, turned on to the E18, and drove home.
It was 7.00 that evening when Salander, to her great a
At first she thought she would ignore it, but at the third ring she sighed, got out of the bath, and wrapped a towel around her. With her lower lip pouting, she trailed water down the hall floor. She opened the door a crack.
“Hello,” Blomkvist said.
She did not answer.
“Did you hear the evening news?”
She shook her head.
“I thought you might like to know that Ronald Niederma
“Really?” Salander said.
“I talked to the duty officer in Norrtälje. It seems to have been some sort of internal dispute. Apparently Niederma
“Jesus.”
“The Svavelsjö mob was arrested, but they put up quite a fight. There was a shoot-out and the police had to send for a back-up team from Stockholm. The bikers surrendered at around 6.00.”
“Is that so?”
“Your old friend So
“That’s nice.”
Blomkvist stood there in silence. They looked at each other through the crack in the door.
“Am I interrupting something?” he said.
She shrugged. “I was in the bath.”
“I can see that. Do you want some company?”
She gave him an acid look.
“I didn’t mean in the bath. I’ve brought some bagels,” he said, holding up a bag. “And some espresso coffee. Since you own a Jura Impressa X7, you should at least learn how to use it.”
She raised her eyebrows. She did not know whether to be disappointed or relieved.
“Just company?”
“Just company,” he confirmed. “I’m a good friend who’s visiting a good friend. If I’m welcome, that is.”
She hesitated. For two years she had kept as far away from Mikael Blomkvist as she could. And yet he kept sticking to her life like gum on the sole of her shoe, either on the Net or in real life. On the Net it was O.K. There he was no more than electrons and words. In real life, standing on her doorstep, he was still fucking attractive. And he knew her secrets just as she knew all of his.
She looked at him for a moment and realized that she now had no feelings for him. At least not those kinds of feelings.
He had in fact been a good friend to her over the past year.
She trusted him. Maybe. It was troubling that one of the few people she trusted was a man she spent so much time avoiding.
Then she made up her mind. It was absurd to pretend that he did not exist. It no longer hurt her to see him.
She opened the door wide and let him into her life again.
NOTES
Olof Palme was the leader of the Social Democratic Party and Prime Minister of Sweden at the time of his assassination on 28 February 1986. He was an outspoken politician, popular on the left and detested by the right. Two years after his death a petty criminal and drug addict was convicted of his murder, but later acquitted on appeal. Although a number of alternative theories as to who carried out the murder have since been proposed, to this day the crime remains unsolved.
Prompted by Olof Palme’s assassination, Prime Minister Ingvar Carlsson called an investigation into the procedures of the Swedish security police (Säpo) in the autumn of 1987. Carl Lidbom, then Swedish ambassador to France, was given the task of leading the investigation. One of his old acquaintances, the publisher Ebbe Carlsson, firmly believed that the Kurdish organization PKK was involved in the murder and was given resources to start a private investigation. The Ebbe Carlsson affair exploded as a major political scandal in 1988, when it was revealed that the publisher had been secretly supported by the then Minister of Justice, A
Informationsbyrån (IB) was a secret intelligence agency without official status within the Swedish armed forces. Its main purpose was to gather information about communists and other individuals who were perceived to be a threat to the nation. It was thought that these findings were passed on to key politicians at cabinet level, most likely the defence minister at the time, Sven Andersson, and Prime Minister Olof Palme. The exposure of the agency’s operations by journalists Jan Guillou and Peter Bratt in the magazine Folket i Bild/Kulturfront in 1973 became known as the IB affair.
Carl Bildt was Prime Minister of Sweden between 1991 and 1994 and leader of the liberal conservative Moderate Party from 1986 to 1999.
A
Colonel Stig We