"But isn't that supposed to be done by her lawyer?"

"As you must have gathered by now, Lisbeth is an extraordinary person. She has secrets I happen to know about, but I can't reveal them to my sister. But Lisbeth should be able to choose whether she wants to make use of them in her trial."

"I see."

"And in order to do that, she needs this."

Blomkvist laid Salander's Palm Tungsten T3 hand-held computer and a battery charger on the table between them.

"This is the most important weapon Lisbeth has in her arsenal  -  she has to have it."

Jonasson looked suspiciously at the Palm.

"Why not give it to her lawyer?"

"Because Lisbeth is the only one who knows how to get at the evidence."

Jonasson sat for a while, still not touching the computer.

"Let me tell you one or two things about Dr Peter Teleborian," Blomkvist said, taking a folder from his briefcase.

It was just after 8.00 on Saturday evening when Armansky left his office and walked to the synagogue of the Soder congregation on St Paulsgatan. He knocked on the door, introduced himself, and was admitted by the rabbi himself.

"I have an appointment to meet someone I know here," Armansky said.

"One flight up. I'll show you the way."

The rabbi offered him a kippa for his head, which Armansky hesitantly put on. He had been brought up in a Muslim family and he felt foolish wearing it.

Bublanski was also wearing a kippa.

"Hello, Dragan. Thanks for coming. I've borrowed a room from the rabbi so we can speak undisturbed."

Armansky sat down opposite Bublanski.

"I presume you have good reason for such secrecy."

"I'm not going to spin this out: I know that you're a friend of Salander's."

Armansky nodded.

"I need to know what you and Blomkvist have cooked up to help her."

"Why would we be cooking something up?"

"Because Prosecutor Ekstrom has asked me a dozen times how much you at Milton Security actually knew about the Salander investigation. It's not a casual question  -  he's concerned that you're going to spring something that could result in repercussions... in the media."

"I see."

"And if Ekstrom is worried, it's because he knows or suspects that you've got something brewing. Or at least he's talked to someone who has suspicions."

"Someone?"

"Dragan, let's not play games. You know Salander was the victim of an injustice in the early '90s, and I'm afraid she's going to get the same medicine when the trial begins."

"You're a police officer in a democracy. If you have information to that effect you should take action."

Bublanski nodded. "I'm thinking of doing just that. The question is, how?"

"Tell me what you want to know."

"I want to know what you and Blomkvist are up to. I assume you're not just sitting there twiddling your thumbs."

"It's complicated. How do I know I can trust you?"

"There's a report from 1991 that Blomkvist discovered..."

"I know about it."

"I no longer have access to the report."

"Nor do I. The copies that Blomkvist and his sister  -  now Salander's lawyer  -  had in their possession have both disappeared."

"Disappeared?"

"Blomkvist's copy was taken during a break-in at his apartment, and Giannini's was stolen when she was mugged, punched to the ground in Goteborg. All this happened on the day Zalachenko was murdered."

Bublanski said nothing for a long while.

"Why haven't we heard anything about this?"

"Blomkvist put it like this: there's only one right time to publish a story, and an endless number of wrong times."

"But you two... he'll publish it?"

Armansky gave a curt nod.

"A nasty attack in Goteborg and a break-in here in Stockholm. On the same day," Bublanski said. "That means that our adversary is well organized."

"I should probably also mention that we know Giannini's telephone is tapped."

"A whole bunch of crimes."

"The question is, whose?"

"That's what I'm wondering. Most likely it's Sapo  -  they would have an interest in suppressing Bjorck's report. But Dragan... we're talking about the Swedish Security Police, a government agency. I can't believe this would be something sanctioned by Sapo. I don't even believe Sapo has the expertise to do anything like this."

"I'm having trouble digesting it myself. Not to mention that someone else saunters into Sahlgrenska and blows Zalachenko's head off. And at the same time, Gunnar Bjorck, author of the report, hangs himself."

"So you think there's a single hand behind all this? I know Inspector Erlander, who did the investigation in Goteborg. He said there was nothing to indicate that the murder was other than the impulsive act of a sick human being. And we did a thorough investigation of Bjorck's place. Everything points towards a suicide."

"Gullberg, seventy-eight years old, suffering from cancer, recently treated for depression. Our operations chief Johan Fraklund has been looking into his background."

"And?"

"He did his military service in Karlskrona in the '40s, studied law and eventually became a tax adviser. Had an office here in Stockholm for thirty years: low profile, private clients... whoever they might have been. Retired in 1991. Moved back to his home town of Laholm in 1994. Unremarkable, except  - "

"Except what?"

"Except for one or two surprising details. Fraklund cannot find a single reference to Gullberg anywhere. He's never referred to in any newspaper or trade journal, and there's no-one who can tell us who his clients were. It's as if he never actually existed in the professional world."

"What are you saying?"

"Sapo is the obvious link. Zalachenko was a Soviet defector. Who else but Sapo would have taken charge of him? Then the question of a co-ordinated strategy to get Salander locked away in an institution. Now we have burglaries, muggings and telephone tapping. Personally I don't think Sapo is behind this. Blomkvist calls them 'the Zalachenko club', a small group of dormant Cold-Warmongers who hide out in some dark corridor at Sapo."

"So what should we do?" Bublanski said.

CHAPTER 12

SUNDAY, 15.V  -  MONDAY, 16.V

Superintendent Torsten Edklinth, Director of Constitutional Protection at the Security Police, slowly twirled his glass of red wine and listened attentively to the C.E.O. of Milton Security, who had called out of the blue and insisted on his coming to Sunday dinner at his place on Lidingo. Armansky's wife Ritva had made a delicious casserole. They had eaten well and talked politely about nothing in particular. Edklinth was wondering what was on Armansky's mind. After dinner Ritva repaired to the sofa to watch T.V. and left them at the table. Armansky had begun to tell him the story of Lisbeth Salander.

Edklinth and Armansky had known each other for twelve years, ever since a woman Member of Parliament had received death threats. She had reported the matter to the head of her party, and parliament's security detail had been informed. In due course the matter came to the attention of the Security Police. At that time, Personal Protection had the smallest budget of any unit in the Security Police, but the Member of Parliament was given protection during the course of her official appearances. She was left to her own devices at the end of the working day, the very time when she was obviously more vulnerable. She began to have doubts about the ability of the Security Police to protect her.

She arrived home late one evening to discover that someone had broken in, daubed sexually explicit epithets on her living-room walls, and masturbated in her bed. She immediately hired Milton Security to take over her personal protection. She did not advise Sapo of this decision. The next morning, when she was due to appear at a school in Taby, there was a confrontation between the government security forces and her Milton bodyguards.

At that time Edklinth was acting deputy chief of Personal Protection. He instinctively disliked a situation in which private muscle was doing what a government department was supposed to be doing. He did recognize that the Member of Parliament had reason enough for complaint. Instead of exacerbating the issue, he invited Milton Security's C.E.O. to lunch. They agreed that the situation might be more serious than Sapo had at first assumed, and Edklinth realized that Armansky's people not only had the skills for the job, but they were as well trained and probably better equipped too. They solved the immediate problem by giving Armansky's people responsibility for bodyguard services, while the Security Police took care of the criminal investigation and paid the bill.

The two men discovered that they liked each other a good deal, and they enjoyed working together on a number of assignments in subsequent years. Edklinth had great respect for Armansky, and when he was pressingly invited to dinner and a private conversation, he was willing to listen.

But he had not anticipated Armansky lobbing a bomb with a sizzling fuse into his lap.

"You're telling me that the Security Police is involved in flagrant criminal activity."

"No," Armansky said. "You misunderstand me. I'm saying that some people within the Security Police are involved in such activity. I don't believe that this activity is sanctioned by the leadership of S.I.S., or that it has government approval."

Edklinth studied Malm's photographs of a man getting into a car with a registration number that began with the letters KAB.

"Dragan... this isn't a practical joke?"

"I wish it were."

The next morning Edklinth was in his office at police headquarters. He was meticulously cleaning his glasses. He was a grey-haired man with big ears and a powerful face, but for the moment his expression was more puzzled than powerful. He had spent most of the night worrying about how he was going to deal with the information Armansky had given him.

They were not pleasant thoughts. The Security Police was an institution in Sweden that all parties (well, almost all) agreed had an indispensable value. This led each of them to distrust the group and at the same time concoct imaginative conspiracy theories about it. The scandals had undoubtedly been many, especially in the leftist-radical '70s when a number of constitutional blunders had certainly occurred. But after five governmental  -  and roundly criticized  -  Sapo investigations, a new generation of civil servants had come through. They represented a younger school of activists recruited from the financial, weapons and fraud units of the state police. They were officers used to investigating real crimes, and not chasing political mirages. The Security Police had been modernized and the Constitutional Protection Unit in particular had taken on a new, conspicuous role. Its task, as set out in the government's instruction, was to uncover and prevent threats to the internal security of the nation. i.e. unlawful activity that uses violence, threat or coercion for the purpose of altering our form of government, inducing decision-making political entities or authorities to take decisions in a certain direction, or preventing individual citizens from exercising their constitutionally protected rights and liberties.

In short, to defend Swedish democracy against real or presumed anti-democratic threats. They were chiefly concerned with the anarchists and the neo-Nazis: the anarchists because they persisted in practising civil disobedience; the neo-Nazis because they were Nazis and so by definition the enemies of democracy.

After completing his law degree, Edklinth had worked as a prosecutor and then twenty-one years ago joined the Security Police. He had at first worked in the field in the Personal Protection Unit, and then within the Constitutional Protection Unit as an analyst and administrator. Eventually he became director of the agency, the head of the police forces responsible for the defence of Swedish democracy. He considered himself a democrat. The constitution had been established by the parliament, and it was his job to see to it that it stayed intact.

Swedish democracy is based on a single premise: the Right to Free Speech (R.F.S.). This guarantees the inalienable right to say aloud, think and believe anything whatsoever. This right embraces all Swedish citizens, from the crazy neo-Nazi living in the woods to the rock-throwing anarchist  -  and everyone in between.

Every other basic right, such as the Formation of Government and the Right to Freedom of Organization, are simply practical extensions of the Right to Free Speech. On this law democracy stands or falls.

All democracy has its limits, and the limits to the R.F.S. are set by the Freedom of the Press regulation (F.P.). This defines four restrictions on democracy. It is forbidden to publish child pornography and the depiction of certain violent sexual acts, regardless of how artistic the originator believes the depiction to be. It is forbidden to incite or exhort someone to crime. It is forbidden to defame or slander another person. It is forbidden to engage in the persecution of an ethnic group.

Press freedom has also been enshrined by parliament and is based on the socially and democratically acceptable restrictions of society, that is, the social contract that makes up the framework of a civilized society. The core of the legislation has it that no person has the right to harass or humiliate another person.

Since R.F.S. and F. P. are laws, some sort of authority is needed to guarantee the observance of these laws. In Sweden this function is divided between two institutions.

The first is the office of the Prosecutor General, assigned to prosecute crimes against F. P. This did not please Torsten Edklinth. In his view, the Prosecutor General was too lenient with cases concerning what were, in his view, direct crimes against the Swedish constitution. The Prosecutor General usually replied that the principle of democracy was so important that it was only in an extreme emergency that he should step in and bring a charge. This attitude, however, had come under question more and more in recent years, particularly after Robert Hårdh, the general secretary of the Swedish Helsinki Committee, had submitted a report which examined the Prosecutor General's want of initiative over a number of years. The report claimed that it was almost impossible to charge and convict anyone under the law of persecution against an ethnic group.