Salander told her that she was doing fine and that she wanted a pack of cigarettes. This request was turned down in a firm but friendly tone. She was given a pack of nicotine gum. As the nurse was closing the door Salander glimpsed the guard on his chair out in the corridor. She waited until she heard the nurse's steps receding before she once again picked up her Palm.

She turned it on and searched for connectivity.

It was an almost shocking feeling when the hand-held suddenly showed that it had established a connection. Contact with the Net. Inconceivable.

She jumped out of bed so fast that she felt a pain in her injured hip. She looked around the room. How? She walked all the way round, examining every nook and cranny. No, there was no mobile in the room. And yet she had connectivity. Then a crooked grin spread across her face. The connection was radio-controlled and locked into a mobile via Bluetooth, which had a range of ten to twelve metres. Her eyes lit upon an air vent just below the ceiling.

Kalle Bloody Blomkvist had somehow planted a mobile just outside her room. That could be the only explanation.

But why not smuggle in the mobile too? Ah, of course. The batteries.

Her Palm had to be recharged only once every three days. A mobile that was connected, if she surfed it hard, would burn out its batteries in much less time. Blomkvist  -  or more likely somebody he had hired and who was out there  -  would have to change the batteries at regular intervals.

But he had sent in the charger for her Palm. He isn't so stupid after all.

Salander began by deciding where to keep the hand-held. She had to find a hiding place. There were plug sockets by the door and in the panel behind the bed, which provided electricity for her bedside lamp and digital clock. There was a recess where a radio had been removed. She smiled. Both the battery charger and the Palm could fit in there. She could use the socket inside the bedside table to charge up the Palm during the day.

Salander was happy. Her heart was pounding hard when she started up the hand-held for the first time in two months and ventured on to the Internet.

Surfing on a Palm hand-held with a tiny screen and a stylus was not the same thing as surfing on a PowerBook with a 17" screen. But she was connected. From her bed at Sahlgrenska she could now reach the entire world.

She started by going on to a website that advertised rather uninteresting pictures by an unknown and not especially skilled amateur photographer called Gil Bates in Jobsville, Pennsylvania. Salander had once checked it out and confirmed that the town of Jobsville did not exist. Nevertheless, Bates had taken more than 200 photographs of the community and created a gallery of small thumbnails. She scrolled down to image 167 and clicked to enlarge it. It showed the church in Jobsville. She put her cursor on the spire of the church tower and clicked. She instantly got a pop-up dialog box that asked for her I.D. and password. She took out her stylus and wrote the word Remarkable on the screen as her I.D. and A(89)Cx#magnolia as the password.

She got a dialog box with the text [ERROR  -  you have the wrong password] and a button that said [OK  -  Try again]. Lisbeth knew that if she clicked on [OK  -  Try again] and tried a different password, she would get the same dialog box again  -  for years and years, for as long as she kept trying. Instead she clicked on the [O] in [ERROR].

The screen went blank. Then an animated door opened and a Lara Croft-like figure stepped out. A speech bubble materialized with the text [WHO GOES THERE?].

She clicked on the bubble and wrote Wasp. She got the instant reply [PROVE IT  -  OR ELSE...] as the animated Lara Croft unlocked the safety catch on her gun. Salander knew it was no empty threat. If she wrote the wrong password three times in a row the site would shut down and the name Wasp would be struck from the membership list. Carefully she wrote the password MonkeyBusiness.

The screen changed again and now had a blue background with the text:

[Welcome to Hacker Republic, citizen Wasp. It has been 56 days since your last visit. There are 11 citizens online. Do you want to (a) Browse the Forum (b) Send a Message (c) Search the Archive (d) Talk (e) Get Laid?]

She clicked on [(d) Talk] and then went to the menu selection [Who's online?] and got a list with the names Andy, Bambi, Dakota, Jabba, BuckRogers, Mandrake, Pred, Slip, SisterJen, SixOfOne, and Trinity.

-  Hi gang,  -  Wasp wrote.

-  Wasp. That really U?  -  SixOfOne wrote.  -  Look who's home.

-  Where have you been hiding?  -  Trinity wrote.

-  Plague you had told us in trouble,  -  Dakota wrote.

Salander was not sure, but she suspected that Dakota was a woman. The other citizens online, including the one who called himself SisterJen, were guys. Hacker Republic had a total (the last time she was connected) of sixty-two citizens, of whom four were female.

-  Hi, Trinity,  -  Wasp wrote.

-  Why do you greet only Trin? Are you up to something, or something wrong with us?  -  Dakota wrote.

-  We are outstanding,  -  Trinity wrote.  -  Wasp talks only with intelligent people.

He got abuse from five directions at once.

Of the sixty-two citizens, Wasp had met two face to face. Plague, who for some strange reason was not online, was one. Trinity was the other. He was English and lived in London. Two years earlier she had met him for a few hours when he helped her and Blomkvist in the hunt for Harriet Vanger by doing an illegal tapping of a landline in St Albans. Salander fumbled with the clumsy stylus and wished she had a keyboard.

-  Still there?  -  Mandrake wrote.

She punched letters.

-  Sorry. I only have a Palm. Go slow.

-  What's wrong with your computer?  -  Pred wrote.

-  Nothing. Somthing's whong with me.

-  Tell your Big Brother,  -  Slip wrote.

-  The State has shut me up.

-  Why? What for?  -  Three chatters at once.

Salander summed up her situation in five lines, which were greeted by a worried muttering.

-  And how are you?  -  Trinity wrote.

-  I have a hole in my head.

-  Nothing unusial there, as to me you always had one,  -  Bambi wrote.

-  Wasp has always had the air in her wents,  -  SisterJen wrote, and that was followed by a spate of disparaging remarks about Wasp's mental abilities. Salander smiled. The conversation resumed with a contribution from Dakota.

-  Wait. This is an attack against a citizen of Hacker Republic. How do we respond to this?

-  Stockholm nuclear attack?  -  SixOfOne wrote.

-  No, that would be too much,  -  Wasp wrote.

-  A very small bomb?

-  Fuck off, sixo.

-  We could organize a blackout in Stockholm,  -  Mandrake wrote.

The citizens of Hacker Republic did not generally spread computer viruses. On the contrary  -  they were hackers and consequently implacable adversaries of those idiots who created viruses whose sole purpose was to sabotage the Net and crash computers. The citizens were information junkies and wanted a functioning Internet that they could hack.

But their proposal to shut down the Swedish government was not an idle threat. Hacker Republic comprised a very exclusive club of the best of the best, an elite force that any defence organization in the world would have paid enormous sums to use for cyber-military purposes, if the citizens could be persuaded to feel any kind of loyalty to any state. Which was not very likely.

But they were every one of them computer wizards, and they were well versed in the art of contriving viruses. Nor did they need much convincing to carry out particular campaigns if the situation warranted. Some years earlier a citizen of Hacker Republic, who in their private life was a software developer in California, had been cheated out of a patent by a hot dot.com company that had the nerve to take the citizen to court. This caused the activists in Hacker Republic to devote a startling amount of energy for six months to hacking and destroying every computer owned by that company. All the company's secrets and emails  -  along with some fake documents that might lead people to think that its C.E.O. was involved in tax fraud  -  were gleefully posted on the Net, along with information about the C.E.O.'s now not-so-secret mistress and pictures from a party in Hollywood in which he could be seen snorting cocaine.

The company went under in six months, and several years later some members of the "people's militia" in Hacker Republic, who did not easily forget an enemy, were still haunting the former C.E.O.

If fifty of the world's foremost hackers decided to launch a coordinated attack against an entire country, the country might survive, but not without having serious problems. The costs would certainly run into the billions if Salander gave it the thumbs-up. She thought for a moment.

-  Not now. But if things go as I think, maybe I ask for help.

-  Simply tell us,  -  Dakota wrote.

-  We had not been involved with a government for a long time,  -  Mandrake wrote.

-  I have a proposal, the idea is to revise the tax system. I have a program that would be perfect for a small country like Norway,  -  Bambi wrote.

-  Well, but Stockholm is in Sweden,  -  Trinity wrote.

-  What's the difference? It can be done as follows...

Salander leaned back against the pillow and followed the conversation with a smile. She wondered why she, who had such difficulty talking about herself with people of flesh and blood, could blithely reveal her most intimate secrets to a bunch of completely unknown freaks on the Internet. The fact was that if Salander could claim to have any sort of family or group affiliation, then it was with these lunatics. None of them actually had a hope of helping her with the problems she had with the Swedish state. But she knew that, if the need arose, they would devote both time and cunning to performing effective demonstrations of their powers. Through this network she could also find herself hideouts abroad. It had been Plague's contacts on the Net who had provided her with a Norwegian passport in the name of Irene Nesser.

Salander had no idea who the citizens of Hacker Republic were, and she had only a vague notion of what they did when they were not on the Net  -  the citizens were uniformly vague about their identities. SixOfOne had once claimed that he was a black, male American of Catholic origin living in Toronto. He could just as easily be white, female and Lutheran, and living in Skovde.

The one she knew best was Plague  -  he had introduced her to the family, and nobody became a member of this exclusive club without very strong recommendations. And for anyone to become a member they had also to be known personally to one other citizen.

On the Net, Plague was an intelligent and socially gifted citizen. In real life he was a severely overweight and socially challenged thirty-year-old living on disability benefit in Sundbyberg. He bathed too seldom and his apartment smelled like a monkey house. Salander visited him only once in a blue moon. She was content to confine her dealings with him to the Net.

As the chat continued, Wasp downloaded mail that had been sent to her private mailbox at Hacker Republic. One was from another member, Poison, and contained an improved version of her program Asphyxia 1.3, which was available in the Republic's archive for its citizens. Asphyxia was a program that could control other people's computers via the Internet. Poison said that he had used it successfully, and that his updated version included the latest versions of Unix, Apple and Windows. She emailed him a brief reply and thanked him for the upgrade.

During the next hour, as evening approached in the United States, another half-dozen citizens had come online and welcomed back Wasp before joining the debate. When Salander logged off, the others were discussing to what extent the Swedish Prime Minister's computer could be made to send civil but crazy emails to other heads of state. A working group had been formed to explore the matter. Salander logged off by writing a brief message:

-  Keep talking but do nothing without my approval. Come back when I can.

Everyone sent her hugs and kisses and admonished her to keep the hole in her head warm.

Only when Salander had logged out of Hacker Republic did she go into Yahoo and log on to the private newsgroup [Idiotic_Table]. She discovered that the group had two members  -  herself and Blomkvist. The mailbox had one message, sent on May 15. It was entitled [Read this first].

Hi Sally. The situation is as follows: The police haven't found your apartment and don't have access to the D.V.D. of Bjurman's rape. The disk is very strong evidence. I don't want to turn it over to Annika without your approval. I have the keys to your apartment and a passport in name of Nesser.

But the police do have the rucksack you had in Gosseberga. I don't know if it contains anything compromising.

Salander thought for a moment. Don't think so. A half-empty thermos of coffee, some apples, a change of clothes. No problem.

You're going to be charged with G.B.H. against or the attempted murder of Zalachenko, and G.B.H against Carl-Magnus Lundin at Stallarholmen  -  i.e., because you shot him in the foot and broke his jaw when you kicked him. But a source in the police whom I trust tells me that the evidence in each case is woolly. The following is important:

(1) Before Zalachenko was shot he denied everything and claimed that it could only have been Niedermann who shot and buried you. He laid a charge against you for attempting to murder him. The prosecutor is going to go on about this being the second time you have tried to kill him.

(2) Neither Lundin or Sonny Nieminen has said a word about what happened at Stallarholmen. Lundin has been arrested for kidnapping Miriam. Nieminen has been released.

Salander had already discussed all of this with Giannini. That was nothing new. She had told Giannini everything that had happened in Gosseberga, but she had refrained from telling her anything about Bjurman.