He got up and walked once around the table before stopping in front of Edklinth.

"You have a very talented colleague. She has hit the nail on the head."

Edklinth swallowed and nodded. The P.M. turned to the Minister of Justice.

"Get on to the Undersecretary of State and the head of the legal department. By tomorrow morning I want a document drawn up granting the Constitutional Protection Unit extraordinary authority to act in this matter. Their assignment is to determine the truth behind the assertions we have discussed, to gather documentation about its extent, and to identify the individuals responsible or in any way involved. The document must not state that you are conducting a preliminary investigation  -  I may be wrong, but I think only the Prosecutor General could appoint a preliminary investigation leader in this situation. But I can give you the authority to conduct a one-man investigation. What you are doing is therefore an official public report. Do you understand?"

"Yes. But I should point out that I myself am a former prosecutor."

"We'll have to ask the head of the legal department to take a look at this and determine exactly what is formally correct. In any case, you alone are responsible for your investigation. You will choose the assistants you require. If you find evidence of criminal activity, you must turn this information over to the P.G., who will decide on the charges."

"I'll have to look up exactly what applies, but I think you'll have to inform the speaker of parliament and the constitutional committee... This is going to leak out fast," the Minister of Justice said.

"In other words, we have to work faster," the P.M. said.

Figuerola raised a hand.

"What is it?" the P.M. said.

"There are two problems remaining. First, will Millennium's publication clash with our investigation, and second, Lisbeth Salander's trial will be starting in a couple of weeks."

"Can we find out when Millennium's going to publish?"

"We could ask," Edklinth said. "The last thing we want to do is to interfere with the press."

"With regard to this girl Salander..." the Minister of Justice began, and then he paused for a moment. "It would be terrible if she really has been subjected to the injustices that Millennium claims. Could it really be possible?"

"I'm afraid it is," Edklinth said.

"In that case we have to see to it that she is given redress for these wrongs, and above all that she is not subjected to new injustices," the P.M. said.

"And how would that work?" asked the Minister of Justice. "The government cannot interfere in an ongoing prosecution case. That would be against the law."

"Could we talk to the prosecutor?"

"No," Edklinth said. "As Prime Minister you may not influence the judicial process in any way."

"In other words, Salander will have to take her chances in court," the Minister of Justice said. "Only if she loses the trial and appeals to the government can the government step in and pardon her or require the P.G. to investigate whether there are grounds for a new trial. But this applies only if she's sentenced to prison. If she's sentenced to a secure psychiatric facility, the government cannot do a thing. Then it's a medical matter, and the Prime Minister has no jurisdiction to determine whether or not she is sane."

At 10.00 on Friday night, Salander heard the key turn in the door. She instantly switched off her Palm and slipped it under the mattress. When she looked up she saw Jonasson closing the door.

"Good evening, Froken Salander," he said. "And how are you doing this evening?"

"I have a splitting headache and I feel feverish."

"That doesn't sound so good."

Salander looked to be not particularly bothered by either the fever or the headache. Jonasson spent ten minutes examining her. He noticed that over the course of the evening her fever had again risen dramatically.

"It's a shame that you should be having this setback when you've been recovering so well over the past few weeks. Unfortunately I won't now be able to discharge you for at least two more weeks."

"Two weeks should be sufficient."

The distance by land from London to Stockholm is roughly 1900 kilometres, or 1180 miles. In theory that would be about twenty hours' driving. In fact it had taken almost twenty hours to reach the northern border of Germany with Denmark. The sky was filled with leaden thunderclouds, and when the man known as Trinity found himself on Sunday in the middle of the oresundsbron, there was a downpour. He slowed and turned on his windscreen wipers.

Trinity thought it was sheer hell driving in Europe, since everyone on the Continent insisted on driving on the wrong side of the road. He had packed his van on Friday morning and taken the ferry from Dover to Calais, then crossed Belgium by way of Liege. He crossed the German border at Aachen and then took the Autobahn north towards Hamburg and on to Denmark.

His companion, Bob the Dog, was asleep in the back. They had taken it in turns to drive, and apart from a couple of hour-long stops along the way, they had maintained a steady ninety kilometres an hour. The van was eighteen years old and was not able to go much faster anyway.

There were easier ways of getting from London to Stockholm, but it was not likely that he would be able to take thirty kilos of electronic gear on a normal flight. They had crossed six national borders but they had not been stopped once, either by customs or by passport control. Trinity was an ardent fan of the E.U., whose regulations simplified his visits to the Continent.

Trinity was born in Bradford, but he had lived in north London since childhood. He had had a miserable formal education, and then attended a vocational school and earned a certificate as a trained telecommunications technician. For three years after his nineteenth birthday he had worked as an engineer for British Telecom. Once he had understood how the telephone network functioned and realized how hopelessly antiquated it was, he switched to being a private security consultant, installing alarm systems and managing burglary protection. For special clients he would also offer his video surveillance and telephone tapping services.

Now thirty-two years old, he had a theoretical knowledge of electronics and computer science that allowed him to knock spots off any professor in the field. He had lived with computers since he was ten, and he hacked his first computer when he was thirteen.

It had whetted his appetite, and when he was sixteen he had advanced to the extent that he could compete with the best in the world. There was a period in which he spent every waking minute in front of his computer screen, writing his own programs and planting insidious tendrils on the Internet. He infiltrated the B.B.C., the Ministry of Defence and Scotland Yard. He even managed  -  for a short time  -  to take command of a nuclear submarine on patrol in the North Sea. It was as well that Trinity belonged to the inquisitive rather than the malicious type of computer marauder. His fascination was extinguished the moment he had cracked a computer, gained access, and appropriated its secrets.

He was one of the founders of Hacker Republic. And Wasp was one of its citizens.

It was 7.30 on Sunday evening as he and Bob the Dog were approaching Stockholm. When they passed Ikea at Kungens Kurva in Skarholmen, Trinity flipped open his mobile and dialled a number he had memorized.

"Plague," Trinity said.

"Where are you guys?"

"You said to call when we passed Ikea."

Plague gave him directions to the youth hostel on Långholmen where he had booked a room for his colleagues from England. Since Plague hardly ever left his apartment, they agreed to meet at his place at 10.00 the next morning.

Plague decided to make an exceptional effort and washed the dishes, generally cleaned up, and opened the windows in anticipation of his guests' arrival.

PART III. DISK CRASH

27. V  -  6.VI

The historian Diodorus from Sicily, 100 B.C. (who is regarded as an unreliable source by other historians), describes the Amazons of Libya, which at that time was a name used for all of north Africa west of Egypt. This Amazon reign was a gynaecocracy, that is, only women were allowed to hold high office, including in the military. According to legend, the realm was ruled by a Queen Myrina, who with thirty thousand female soldiers and three thousand female cavalry swept through Egypt and Syria and all the way to the Aegean, defeating a number of male armies along the way. After Queen Myrina finally fell in battle, her army scattered.

But the army did leave its imprint on the region. The women of Anatolia took to the sword to crush an invasion from the Caucasus, after the male soldiers were all slaughtered in a far-reaching genocide. These women trained in the use of all types of weapons, including bow and arrow, spear, battle-axe, and lance. They copied their bronze breastplates and armour from the Greeks.

They rejected marriage as subjugation. So that they might have children they were granted a leave of absence, during which they copulated with randomly selected males from nearby towns.

Only a woman who had killed a man in battle was allowed to give up her virginity.

CHAPTER 16

FRIDAY, 27.V  -  TUESDAY, 31.V

Blomkvist left the Millennium offices at 10.30 on Friday night. He took the stairs down to the ground floor, but instead of going out on to the street he turned left and went through the basement, across the inner courtyard, and through the building behind theirs on to Hokens Gata. He ran into a group of youths on their way from Mosebacke, but saw no-one who seemed to be paying him any attention. Anyone watching the building would think that he was spending the night at Millennium, as he often did. He had established that pattern as early as April. Actually it was Malm who had the night shift.

He spent fifteen minutes walking down the alleys and boulevards around Mosebacke before he headed for Fiskargatan 9. He opened the entrance door using the code and took the stairs to the top-floor apartment, where he used Salander's keys to get in. He turned off the alarm. He always felt a bit bemused when he went into the apartment: twenty-one rooms, of which only three were furnished.

He began by making coffee and sandwiches before he went into Salander's office and booted up her PowerBook.

From the moment in mid-April when Bjorck's report was stolen and Blomkvist realized that he was under surveillance, he had established his own headquarters at Salander's apartment. He had transferred the most crucial documentation to her desk. He spent several nights a week at the apartment, slept in her bed, and worked on her computer. She had wiped her hard drive clean before she left for Gosseberga and the confrontation with Zalachenko. Blomkvist supposed that she had not planned to come back. He had used her system disks to restore her computer to a functioning state.

Since April he had not even plugged in the broadband cable to his own machine. He logged on to her broadband connection, started up the I.C.Q. chat program, and pinged up the address she had created for him through the Yahoo group [Idiotic_Table].

-  Hi, Sally.

-  You say.

-  I've reworked the two chapters we've been talking the other day. You've got the new version on Yahoo. What about your part?

-  I have completed seventeen pages. Climb right now on the Idiotic Table.

Ping.

-  Okay. Got it. Let me read it and then we'll talk.

-  Another thing.

-  What?

-  I've created another forum on Yahoo called 'The Knights'.

Blomkvist smiled.

-  Okay. The Knights of the Idiotic Table.

-  Password: yacaracaI2.

-  Agreed.

-  Four members: you, me, Plague and Trinity.

-  Your mysterious online friends.

-  Just in case.

-  Okay.

-  Plague has copied information from the computer of the prosecutor Ekstrom. The pirated in April.

-  Okay.

-  If I lose my Palm, he will keep you informed.

-  Okay. Thank you.

Blomkvist logged in to I.C.Q. and went into the newly created Yahoo group [The_Knights]. All he found was a link from Plague to an anonymous U.R.L. which consisted solely of numbers. He copied the address into Explorer, hit the return key, and came to a website somewhere on the Internet that contained the sixteen gigabytes of Ekstrom's hard drive.

Plague had obviously made it simple for himself by copying over Ekstrom's entire hard drive, and Blomkvist spent more than an hour sorting through its contents. He ignored the system files, software and endless files containing preliminary investigations that seemed to stretch back several years. He downloaded four folders. Three of them were called [PrelimInv/Salander], [Slush/Salander], and [PrelimInv/Niedermann]. The fourth was a copy of Ekstrom's email folder made at 2.00 p.m. the previous day.

"Thanks, Plague," Blomkvist said to himself.

He spent three hours reading through Ekstrom's preliminary investigation and strategy for the trial. Not surprisingly, much of it dealt with Salander's mental state. Ekstrom wanted an extensive psychiatric examination and had sent a lot of messages with the object of getting her transferred to Kronoberg prison as a matter of urgency.

Blomkvist could tell that Ekstrom's search for Niedermann was making no headway. Bublanski was the leader of that investigation. He had succeeding in gathering some forensic evidence linking Niedermann to the murders of Svensson and Johansson, as well as to the murder of Bjurman. Blomkvist's own three long interviews in April had set them on the trail of this evidence. If Niedermann were ever apprehended, Blomkvist would have to be a witness for the prosecution. At long last D.N.A. from sweat droplets and two hairs from Bjurman's apartment were matched to items from Niedermann's room in Gosseberga. The same D.N.A. was found in abundant quantities on the remains of Svavelsjo M.C.'s Goransson.