"There was one thing that struck me," Figuerola said

"What's that?"

"Evert Gullberg. He did his military service in the '40s and became an accountant or some such, and then in the '50s he vanished into thin air."

"And?"

"When we were discussing this yesterday, we were talking about him as if he were some sort of a hired killer."

"It sounds far-fetched, I know, but  - "

"It struck me that there is so little background on him that it seems almost like a smokescreen. Both IB and S.I.S. established cover companies outside the building in the '50s and '60s."

"I was wondering when you'd think of that," Edklinth said.

"I'd like permission to go through the personnel files from the '50s," Figuerola said.

"No," Edklinth said, shaking his head. "We can't go into the archives without authorization from the chief of Secretariat, and we don't want to attract attention until we have more to go on."

"So what next?"

"Mårtensson," Edklinth said. "Find out what he's working on."

Salander was studying the vent window in her room when she heard the key turn in the door. In came Jonasson. It was past 10.00 on Tuesday night. He had interrupted her planning how to break out of Sahlgrenska hospital.

She had measured the window and discovered that her head would fit through it and that she would not have much problem squeezing the rest of her body through. It was three storeys to the ground, but a combination of torn sheets and a ten-foot extension cord from a floor lamp would dispose of that problem.

She had plotted her escape step by step. The problem was what she would wear. She had knickers, a hospital nightshirt and a pair of plastic flip-flops that she had managed to borrow. She had 200 kronor in cash from Annika Giannini to pay for sweets from the hospital snack shop. That should be enough for a cheap pair of jeans and a T-shirt at the Salvation Army store, if she could find one in Goteborg. She would have to spend what was left of the money on a call to Plague. Then everything would work out. She planned on landing in Gibraltar a few days after she escaped, and from there she would create a new identity somewhere in the world.

Jonasson sat in the visitor's chair. She sat on the edge of her bed.

"Hello, Lisbeth. I'm sorry I've not come to see you the past few days, but I've been up to my eyes in A.&E. and I've also been made a mentor for a couple of interns."

She had not expected Jonasson to make special visits to see her.

He picked up her chart and studied her temperature graph and the record of medications. Her temperature was steady, between 37 and 37.2 degrees, and for the past week she had not taken any headache tablets.

"Dr Endrin is your doctor. Do you get along with her?"

"She's alright," Salander said without enthusiasm.

"Is it O.K. if I do an examination?"

She nodded. He took a pen torch out of his pocket and bent over to shine it into her eyes, to see how her pupils contracted and expanded. He asked her to open her mouth and examined her throat. Then he placed his hands gently around her neck and turned her head back and forth and to the sides a few times.

"You don't have any pain in your neck?" he said.

She shook her head.

"How's the headache?"

"I feel it now and then, but it passes."

"The healing process is still going on. The headache will eventually go away altogether."

Her hair was still so short that he hardly needed to push aside the tufts to feel the scar above her ear. It was healing, but there was still a small scab.

"You've been scratching the wound. You shouldn't do that."

She nodded. He took her left elbow and raised the arm.

"Can you lift it by yourself?"

She lifted her arm.

"Do you have any pain or discomfort in the shoulder?"

She shook her head.

"Does it feel tight?"

"A little."

"I think you have to do a bit more physio on your shoulder muscles."

"It's hard when you're locked up like this."

He smiled at her. "That won't last. Are you doing the exercises the therapist recommended?"

She nodded.

He pressed his stethoscope against his wrist for a moment to warm it. Then he sat on the edge of the bed and untied the strings of her nightshirt, listened to her heart and took her pulse. He asked her to lean forward and placed the stethoscope on her back to listen to her lungs.

"Cough."

She coughed.

"O.K., you can do up your nightshirt and get into bed. From a medical standpoint, you're just about recovered."

She expected him to get up and say he would come back in a few days, but he stayed, sitting on the bed. He seemed to be thinking about something. Salander waited patiently.

"Do you know why I became a doctor?" he said.

She shook her head.

"I come from a working-class family. I always thought I wanted to be a doctor. I'd actually thought about becoming a psychiatrist when I was a teenager. I was terribly intellectual."

Salander looked at him with sudden alertness as soon as he mentioned the word "psychiatrist".

"But I wasn't sure that I could handle the studies. So when I finished school I studied to be a welder and I even worked as one for several years. I thought it was a good idea to have something to fall back on if the medical studies didn't work out. And being a welder wasn't so different from being a doctor. It's all about patching up things. And now I'm working here at Sahlgrenska and patching up people like you."

She wondered if he were pulling her leg.

"Lisbeth... I'm wondering..."

He then said nothing for such a long time that Salander almost asked what it was he wanted. But she waited for him to speak.

"Would you be angry with me if I asked you a personal question? I want to ask you as a private individual, not as a doctor. I won't make any record of your answer and I won't discuss it with anyone else. And you don't have to answer if you don't want to."

"What is it?"

"Since you were shut up at St Stefan's when you were twelve, you've refused to respond when any psychiatrist has tried to talk to you. Why is that?"

Salander's eyes darkened, but they were utterly expressionless as she looked at Jonasson. She sat in silence for two minutes.

"Why?" she said at last.

"To be honest, I'm not really sure. I think I'm trying to understand something."

Her lips curled a little. "I don't talk to crazy-doctors because they never listen to what I have to say."

Jonasson laughed. "O.K. Tell me... what do you think of Peter Teleborian?"

Jonasson threw out the name so unexpectedly that Salander almost jumped. Her eyes narrowed.

"What the hell is this, 'Twenty Questions'? What are you after?" Her voice sounded like sandpaper.

Jonasson leaned forward, almost too close.

"Because a... what did you call it... a crazy-doctor by the name of Peter Teleborian, who's somewhat renowned in my profession, has been to see me twice in the past few days, trying to convince me to let him examine you."

Salander felt an icy chill run down her spine.

"The district court is going to appoint him to do a forensic psychiatric assessment of you."

"And?"

"I don't like the man. I've told him he can't see you. Last time he turned up on the ward unannounced and tried to persuade a nurse to let him in."

Salander pressed her lips tight.

"His behaviour was a bit odd and a little too eager. So I want to know what you think of him."

This time it was Jonasson's turn to wait patiently for Salander's reply.

"Teleborian is a beast," she said at last.

"Is it something personal between the two of you?"

"You could say that."

"I've also had a conversation with an official who wants me to let Teleborian see you."

"And?"

"I asked what sort of medical expertise he thought he had to assess your condition and then I told him to go to hell. More diplomatically than that, of course. And one last question. Why are you talking to me?"

"You asked me a question, didn't you?"

"Yes, but I'm a doctor and I've studied psychiatry. So why are you talking to me? Should I take it to mean that you have a certain amount of trust in me?"

She did not reply.

"Then I'll choose to interpret it that way. I want you to know this: you are my patient. That means that I work for you and not for anyone else."

She gave him a suspicious look. He looked back at her for a moment. Then he spoke in a lighter tone of voice.

"From a medical standpoint, as I said, you're more or less healthy. You don't need any more weeks of rehab. But unfortunately you're a bit too healthy."

"Why 'unfortunately'?"

He gave her a cheerful smile. "You're getting better too fast."

"What do you mean?"

"It means that I have no legitimate reason to keep you isolated here. And the prosecutor will soon be having you transferred to a prison in Stockholm to await trial in six weeks. I'm guessing that such a request will arrive next week. And that means that Teleborian will be given the chance to observe you."

She sat utterly still. Jonasson seemed distracted and bent over to arrange her pillow. He spoke as if thinking out loud.

"You don't have much of a headache or any fever, so Dr Endrin is probably going to discharge you." He stood up suddenly. "Thanks for talking to me. I'll come back and see you before you're transferred."

He was already at the door when she spoke.

"Dr Jonasson?"

He turned towards her.

"Thank you."

He nodded curtly once before he went out and locked the door.

Salander stared for a long time at the locked door. And then she lay back and stared up at the ceiling.

That was when she felt that there was something hard beneath her head. She lifted the pillow and saw to her surprise a small cloth bag that had definitely not been there before. She opened it and stared in amazement at a Palm Tungsten T3 hand-held computer and battery charger. Then she looked more closely at the computer and saw the little scratch on the top left corner. Her heart skipped a beat. It's my Palm. But how... In amazement she glanced over at the locked door. Jonasson was a catalogue of surprises. In great excitement she turned on the computer at once and discovered that it was password-protected.

She stared in frustration at the blinking screen. It seemed to be challenging her. How the hell did they think I would... Then she looked in the cloth bag and found at the bottom a scrap of folded paper. She unfolded it and read a line written in an elegant script:

You're the hacker, work it out! / Kalle B.

Salander laughed aloud for the first time in weeks. Touche. She thought for a few seconds. Then she picked up the stylus and wrote the number combination 9277, which corresponded to the letters W-A-S-P on the keyboard. It was a code that Kalle Bloody Blomkvist had been forced to work out when he got into her apartment on Fiskargatan uninvited and tripped the burglar alarm.

It did not work.

She tried 52553, which corresponded to the letters K-A-L - L-E.

That did not work either. Since Blomkvist presumably intended that she should use the computer, he must have chosen a simple password. He had used the signature Kalle, which normally he hated. She free-associated. She thought for a moment. It must be some insult. Then she typed in 74774, which corresponded to the word P-I-P-P-I  -  Pippi Bloody Longstocking.

The computer started up.

There was a smiley face on the screen with a cartoon speech balloon:

She found the document [Hi Sally] at the top of the list. She clicked on it and read:

First of all, this is only between you and me. Your lawyer, my sister Annika, has no idea that you have access to this computer. It has to stay that way.

I don't know how much you understand of what is happening outside your locked room, but strangely enough (despite your personality), you have a number of loyal idiots working on your behalf. I have already established an elite body called The Knights of the Idiotic Table. We will be holding an annual dinner at which we'll have fun talking crap about you. (No, you're not invited.)

So, to the point. Annika is doing her best to prepare for your trial. One problem of course is that she's working for you and is bound and fettered by one of those damned confidentiality oaths. So she can't tell me what the two of you discuss, which in this case is a bit of a handicap. Luckily she does accept information.

We have to talk, you and I.

Don't use my email.

I may be paranoid, but I have reason to suspect that I'm not the only one reading it. If you want to deliver something, go to Yahoo group [Idiotic_Table]. I.D. Pippi and the password is p9i2p7p7i.

Mikael

Salander read his letter twice, staring in bewilderment at the Palm. After a period of computer celibacy, she was suffering from massive cyber-abstinence. And she wondered which big toe Blomkvist had been thinking with when he smuggled her a computer but forgot that she needed a mobile to connect to the Net.

She was still thinking when she heard footsteps in the corridor. She turned the computer off at once and shoved it under her pillow. As she heard the key in the door she realized that the cloth bag and charger were still in view on the bedside table. She reached out and slid the bag under the covers and pressed the coil of cord into her crotch. She lay passively looking up at the ceiling when the night nurse came in, said a polite hello, and asked how she was doing and whether she needed anything.