January 21th - February 1st
Hey ya'll, back from my chill time in Greece and Italy! This chapter has taken me two months to write, so HOPEFULLY it isn't disjointed or confusing.
Lisbeth snored quietly as he descended into a fifth hour of typing. It was well past four in the morning and they would be out to catch the eight am Stockholm plane in just a few hours, but he couldn't bring himself to break from the rhythm he had established. He could always sleep on the little puddle jumper, he supposed, though he knew that sleep and airplanes had never clicked for him.
For all of its modern luxuries and speed, using Lisbeth's laptop was a slow going process that involved him constantly having to work his way around the various passwords and layers of security she'd placed on even the most mundane of things. Most of the blocks could be disabled with a master password she'd authorized him to use, but not all. He still didn't have access to the copy of own hard drive, even if it sat right there on her cluttered desktop.
He figured that if he could keep up the pace, he just might make the necessary week deadline that would leave Christer enough time to organize the magazine and have it out for publication in two.
It would be close call and would no doubt piss off his editor in chief.
He'd shot off an email to her before he started typing the article, explaining the eccentric change of events to the February issue of Millennium, but he doubted Berger would greet the idea with welcome arms despite its enormous potential.
Since the publication that had cleared Lisbeth's name, Berger had become less and less receptive of taking on stories that could possibly put them in the sights of a very angry subject. Blomkvist suspected that deep down; there was a level of post-traumatic stress that hadn't yet resolved itself after the shooting at Gyros and events involving the Poison Pen. At times she would display a weariness of her environment that could only be matched Lisbeth. She also refused to walk anywhere unless there was someone else with her and preferred to take her car wherever she went up until an independent journalist's car had been bombed.
No, Berger most certainly would not want this article in Millennium.
After careful analysis of the situation, he shot off three more emails to Christer, Lotta, and Malin, asking for back up. For some reason Malin had been online at the time, vowing to support the article to the best of her ability in the brisk email she had sent back to him. He would likely have to wait until he got back to Fiskargatan to get a response from the others.
By five, Lisbeth was up, leaning over his shoulder as he went back to edit over the eleven pages he'd created. In the reflection of the screen, Blomkvist could see the slightest expression of surprise that flickered in Lisbeth's eyes. Even he had surprised himself with the volume of his work in such a short period of time.
She offered a few pointers and clarifications, but when he asked to be allowed access to his hard drive, she snorted before walking into the bathroom for another cigarette break. He looked at the screen, happy with his level of productivity as the shower began to run in the bathroom. He rewarded himself by stepping in with Lisbeth, staying there until the hot water abruptly shut off and sent them scrambling from under icy water.
A snowstorm in Stockholm delayed their flight for three hours. A rainsquall in Tallinn further put them off track for another two. It wasn't until nearly four in the afternoon that the plane touched down in Stockholm, exactly twenty-four hours after they had left.
When she pulled into the parking space under the apartment, she noticed a glint off the motorcycle that she hadn't been there when they'd left.
The mirror!
Her lips twitched ever slightly into a crooked grin as her hand roamed over the mirror stalk, tracing the faint line of welded metal. The fist-sized dent in the gas tank where it had fallen onto a traffic post was gone, too. Except for the telltale scratches and battle scars along the side of the gas tank, the Honda was restored to its former rugged glory.
Blomkvist chuckled behind her. "I thought you might like it."
"Yeah." She swung a leg over the seat, kicking the bike to start it. It sputtered to life pathetically before dying once more. A few more kicks and she gave up; the garage was just too damn cold for the engine to turn over. It looked like even with the forecasted break in the weather for the coming week the bike would have to stay in lock up.
Sighing inaudibly, she slung the bag of surveillance equipment over her shoulder before hiking up the four flights of stairs to her penthouse apartment. Blomkvist puttered along a flight and a half behind her in his usual way when she unlocked the door to the frigid apartment.
Sliding her laptop bag across the kitchen counter, she looked at the variety of flashing electronics in the kitchen. Another power outage, she thought, rubbing her hands together for warmth as she checked the kitchen pipes. Frozen. Again. One day she was going to have a serious talk with the landlord over who did the shit wiring in the building.
The thermostat in the utility room refused to cooperate, and the security system would have to be reset again. Something thumped and yowled in the open washing machine as she searched for a blowtorch, the now familiar brown hairball trying its best to trip her as she moved around the apartment.
In the living room, Blomkvist fed rolls of newspaper into the built in fireplace, the iPod Lisbeth had gifted him playing Elvis quietly on the floor beside him. During the night he managed to fill it with whatever music he found on Lisbeth's machine while she slept and couldn't protest. Most of it was crap to his ears, yet there, buried in the deep recesses of her computer, was the King of Rock n Roll. He almost laughed out loud when he found it.
A laptop floated in the air in front of him as Lisbeth entered the room as silently as the cat following her. "Are you going through laptop withdrawals yet?"
He caught the soft jab he was entitled to with his hand as she walked by, plopping down on the opposite side of the sofa, the cat jumping up and lodging itself between the back of the couch and her leg. Even completely sprawled out on the black leather, Lisbeth just managed to touch the side of his leg with the tips of her toes.
The log in screen flashed in front of his eyes when he booted the laptop up, but was gone before he could pass the computer over to Lisbeth. He watched in amazement as the cursor opened file after file while its guide sat on the opposite end of the couch from him.
"How did you do that?"
"I synced the computer to my phone," a green highlighter passed over a timeline of events he had included, "I can watch every single keystroke you make and make my own."
"Smart," he confessed as opened her iTunes, "When do you start working for Steve Jobs?"
"Never. Other Steve is the brains of Apple."
He skimmed through his earlier work, making his own annotations on what to come back to. "Other Steve?"
She looked at him as if he had sprouted another head. "Steve Wozniak. Stop playing shitty music."
"I'm only playing what's you've already added to your collection, although I admit I don't see you as an Elvis Presley type."
She shrugged, opening up a window to the HR site on her phone as she watched Mikael hunt and peck his way to a complete sentence. She restrained herself from snatching the computer away from him. "You type really slow."
Blomkvist ignored her comment, clicking his way through the rest of her abysmal music library. He visibly flinched when something very metallic sounding blasted out of the speakers, the cat yowling along. "Were the Evil Fingers big on throwing pots and pans against rocks while yodeling by any chance?" he asked mildly, turning the aggravating noise off.
"I think they just banged pots and pans together and yodeled without the rocks. How about you talk to the cat while I type?"
Blomkvist looked somewhat relieved by the idea. "You know the story better than I do, so be my guest."
"You can still dictate," she clarified when he passed the laptop over the cat's head, "You know more about Shröder than I do." At the moment at least, she thought smugly. She'd sic'd Plague and Dakota on that particular project, though they still had yet to report back.
He rubbed the back of his neck, watching her become totally engrossed in her work, "I know a little bit," he admitted, "I think you're as always a few paces ahead of the game from me."
Her eyes flashed briefly over the lid of the computer, "You're not Kalle Blomkvist for nothing. Don't be so fucking modest because you know more than I do; just enjoy the moment," she said, flashing him a brief, crooked non-smile. "Now go to bed and don't argue. You look like shit."
Blomkvist nodded, thankful for the reprieve from work. Lisbeth waited for the telltale creak of the bedroom door before getting up and running the coffee machine.
Walking back into the living room, she nearly launched her coffee mug at the laptop when Plague's ugly mug popped across her screen. 'Where have you been for the last two days?'
'Hello? Did you like the little surprise I left you?'
Salander paused her work, glaring at the screen. "What surprise?"
'I turned your power off. That code you were so annoyed with a couple weeks ago can actually be used to overload most electronics and shut them off. You have a nice apartment by the way.'
"Enjoy the pictures because you'll never make it up the four flights of stairs to get here," she bit back, "Did you dig up anything on Shröder?"
'Depends; can I look at something other than a Seven Eleven napkin?'
'Yeah. Shröder is AKA Ranta. Jarrod is Atho, Horst is Harry, but Shröder is their primary alias. I emailed you all their dirty shit. Over and out.'
The video screen collapsed on itself, leaving Lisbeth with the various files Mikael had left open on her desktop. The email attachment Plague was a goldmine of information, right down to a near manual on transnational amphetamine smuggling tricks. She downloaded all fourteen gigabytes of emails, transaction records, and Internet histories into a folder aptly named 'TO: KALLE" before rinsing out her mug in the sink and crawling into bed beside Blomkvist.
Blomkvist was not surprised to find both Lisbeth and the bike missing the following morning. It was set to be a warm opening week for February, the conditions as ideal as they could possibly get for that time of year. At some point in the very early morning he thought he could recall the coffee machine running and the jingle of her keys in the lock, but by the time he padded into the kitchen the scent of coffee was just a faded memory.
The cat followed at an acceptable distance when he walked into the living room, coffee in hand. It watched him from the archway leading to the hall, and he knew that without Lisbeth in the same room, it would never come near him. He was completely fine with the arrangement.
He tapped the touchpad of the laptop, waking the sleeping machine. Lisbeth had left it unlocked for him, with a blue folder sitting squarely in the center of the desktop with the tag of "TO KALLE."
Simultaneously, his mobile began to dance across the coffee table, the caller ID displaying the picture had had snapped two weeks ago of Lisbeth asleep across her laptop in the dining room.
"Kalle."
"Hey, up?"
"Not really. I found the present you left me on the your desktop but I haven't unwrapped it yet." His attempt at humor was met with silence.
"Just listen: Per-Åke Sandström would be a good start for any confrontations you want to do."
Blomkvist turned the cell over to speakerphone, setting the phone down on the coffee table by his feet as he rubbed a hand across his face.When would the connections end? "The journalist Dag exposed?"
"He ran amphetamines and steroids in his car for Shröder four years ago, but he knows Shröder only as Atho Ranta."
His brow furrowed, as he opened up a simple search for what he could about the sleazy journalist. "Why the alias?"
"Don't know. I have eight years of shit on Shröder's hard drive to look through, every fucking call and text Camilla makes or receives, and no fucking computer to use at all!"
The call ended abruptly after that.
"Bye to you, too," He sighed to himself, staring at the computer screen. Lisbeth was eventually bound to get irritated with him for using her laptop sooner or later. With a final, heaving sigh, he continued on with his own search for Sandström.
In the aftermath of the publishing of Dag's book, Sandström had swiftly been arrested and sentenced to eight months for multiple counts of soliciting prostitution. He was out in six and a half for good behavior, but assigned to a parole agent for a period of one year. His current residence was listed as a small apartment in central Solna. Blomkvist scribbled down the address on a post it note before locking up the apartment.
The moment the door to Sandström's apartment creaked open Blomkvist knew the former advertising agent would be an easy egg to crack. When he announced his intentions, the man didn't bother to fight him. On the contrary, he removed the chain from the door and hung his head as he waved Blomkvist into the cramped apartment.
"I thought you were the parole officer when you rung."
"Yet I'm not and still you let me in."
"My life has been ruined enough as it is. What more could Millennium do to me?"
"We could go on in length and detail of your past abuse of women and the consequences that naturally followed, but that's not why I'm here. I want to know what you know about the Ranta Brothers."
"I don't kn-"
"Don't start that now I can offer you anonymity for this even though you and I both know don't deserve a single ounce of it. There's only one other person you've ever told about the Ranta's." Pure terror flashed behind Sandström's spectacles as his lip trembled for the slightest of moments. Blomkvist nodded at his involuntary reaction. "Good. You still remember who I'm talking about."
Sandström nodded and asked him if he wanted any coffee. Blomkvist refused pointedly before digging out a pen and pocket sized pad of paper.
"You swear I won't be named? If I have go back to-" Blomkvist held up a hand as Sandström shuddered.
"If you stall or evade my questions I'll rethink my proposition of clemency. How did you first meet the Rantas?"
"I met the younger one, Harry in a bar back in the eighties."
"In Tallinn or Stockholm?"
"Tallinn."
"Go on."
"He was twenty or something along those lines and walked up to me and said I looked like I needed a good whore to fuck. I passed him on it then."
Sandström paused for a moment, leading Blomkvist to look up from his scribbling with an expression of boredom mixed with revulsion. He turned his eyes back to his notes, waving Sandström on.
"Every now and again I would see him and he would always offer the same thing. I turned him down for years until finally I accepted."
"Ines H?"
"Yes."
Blomkvist finished jotting down a couple more details before looking up. "Who is Atho Ranta?"
Sandström shook slightly with the name. "I can't."
"Yes you can and you will. Who is Atho Ranta? What does he do?"
"Everything," Sandström responded, "Drugs, guns, women. He's Harry's older brother, but that look nothing alike. His hair's black and he has black eyes and he's built like a miniature tank. I've only seen him three times but that was enough. You can't erase a man like that from your memory."
"What happened in the three encounters you had with Atho?"
"The first time, God, we were drunk and he offered me Ines because she needed to learn."
"Learn what?"
"To cooperate. She would fight Atho's clients and he said it wasn't good for business. He took me to her place and then left. That's how the first two time I saw him went."
"How did you start running drugs for him?"
"That only started the second time I saw him. He offered me access to Ines whenever I wanted if I would take a carload of steroids across on the ferry between Tallinn and Stockholm. It worked fine for a year. But..."
"But what?"
"Atho got a carload of meth from I don't know where. The steroids market had dried up and meth had come in as the big thing to buy. I didn't want to do it at all but Atho wouldn't hear it. He took me to a warehouse and tied me to a chair. Then I met Ronald Niedermann. He snapped a man's neck right before my eyes and Atho just watched. I had no choice or I was going to have my neck snapped too."
"Where did the dealings take place?"
"A warehouse in a little hamlet an half an hour south of Tallinn."
"What was Niedermann's role?"
"I don't know. I only saw him twice. He might have been Atho's bodyguard or something like that but I really don't know. He was always following Atho around."
"Did you know any women involved in Atho's business?" Sandström shook his head ardently.
"Don't quit on me now, Per Åke. You're doing too good to slip up. I can fuck your life up even more than it already is if you don't cooperate."
"I…" Blomkvist glared up at him as he continued to stall. Sandström looked at him with conflicted eyes, his mouth hanging open slightly as he tried to formulate his words. "There was one…and she scared me as much as Niedermann. She was the one who made the drugs, but it wasn't just drugs that she made. She was fucking insane."
"How so?"
"Atho had a lot of women who became problems for him later on. Some got pregnant, contracted HIV, or tried running away. If he couldn't fix the problem when it cropped up, he'd give them over to the woman. After that they would just disappear."
"She killed them?"
Sandström nodded pathetically, "Gases, chemicals with so many warning stickers on them you wonder how they managed to exist in their containers. She cleaned up any problem there was and wouldn't leave a trace is what Harry told me once. That's what scared me the most about her."
"One last question Per Åke, and I thank you for the information you've volunteered," Mikael shifted to retrieve his phone from his pocket, flipping through his pictures, "Is this the woman?"
Sandström looked as if he had had a coronary. Blomkvist thanked him for his time before showing himself to the door.
When he arrived back at Fiskargatan forty minutes later, he sent a quick recap of the interview to Lisbeth. Her response fifteen minutes later was that she could have told him half the information herself. Blomkvist did not press on the exact methods she used to find her own information, but was assured by of Sandström's bizarre behavior that they weren't in the least bit legal. Salander simply responded that her methods worked well and he should possibly look into using them, an idea to which he politely declined.
Instead, he opened up the file Lisbeth had left on the desktop and began sifting through, one document and email at a time.
A week into her final stint in Göteborg, Lisbeth found herself having more trouble finding sleep that usual. She had worked almost around the clock during her free time digging into every crevice she could find for information leading to Shröder and Camilla while getting by on two hours of sleep a night. Now the magazine was set to print and she thought she would have a slight mental reprieve from not having to dig so hard, but her mind had yet to catch up with that particular notion.
In her insomnia-induced boredom, she opened up the Millennium file and picked out the Shröder article. She read through its forty-four pages in a matter of ten minutes, still finding the odd kink here and there to iron out. Minutes quickly turned to hours, the time only registering in her mind when bold typeface appeared at the bottom of the third to last page.
Still online, Lisbeth?
Looks like it. She looked at the time on her phone and frowned Two-thirty in the morning. Three-thirty in Stockholm. What's your excuse?
Pre-release jitters I suppose. Your late night rewrites aren't helping much.
I'm editing it. You could do a better job cementing the Zalachenko-Shröder-Camilla connection. The last eight pages were weak. I already fixed all of it. You're welcome.
Any compliments to go with that tall order? He typed.
The other thirty-six pages are solid. Don't try to confront Shröder again. Printing today?
Yes so no more 'editing' my article. The issue should be on shelves the day before you get back. Christer's outdone himself with the title graphics this time.
Boring.
Attention getting. You're welcome. Blomkvist's cursor closed the article copy, leaving her desktop oddly empty of activity as she smirked at his parting remark. Had anyone else tried to throw her words back in her face as Blomkvist had, Lisbeth would have smashed her foot in squarely in their own face. Or sent an email attachment of questionable origins. Probably both.
One more day, she thought. Then she was done with Göteborg. She would make sure to drop in on Dr. Jonasson before she took her indefinite leave of the city. All she had left was a marksmanship test in the coming afternoon. After that she was free to leave.
She thought whether or not she should just skip it altogether. It was a test primarily for those wanting to specialize in personal protection, so she really had no interest in it at all. Surveillance and PI's were more her thing while Personal Protection was really just protecting shitheads from other shitheads. In any case, she already had one not-such-a-shithead journalist that she had to keep from being dragged away to some fuckjob's torture chamber.
That thought brought her back to his attempted confrontation with Shröder. In her opinion, he'd laid all his cards out too soon. It was like trying to confront someone like Niedermann, which he'd also probably try. Fucking idiot. She should have been there to tell him no, that there were some people who you just don't reveal your cards to. More than a few journalists had gotten themselves killed for less shit than that.
She thought about the bomb that had been shoved up the exhaust of a journalist's car while she'd been Gibraltar. For the smallest of moments she thought of Blomkvist and how his pigheaded quest for good often got him in similar dire straights. Someone had to be around to tell him no. It was that train of thought that led to a final resolve to stay in Göteborg for the marksmanship exam.
She smiled to herself as her mind finally stopped resisting sleep. Lisbeth Salander was getting a gun.
The following morning, Lisbeth awoke to the sound of her phone vibrating across the end table. A hand shot out from under her pillow, grabbing the damn thing before it managed to vibrate itself onto the floor. She unlocked it and checked the time. Five twenty in the morning. Just fucking great.
Not bothering to stifle a yawn, she turned on the phone's Internet connection (she'd learnt quickly that leaving it on would drain the phone in a matter of hours) and checked what had set it off at this ungodly hour. She expected it to be either Blomkvist or Plague. What she got instead made sent her scrambling for her clothes and duffel bag.
Camilla had booked a flight to Stockholm leaving from Tallinn in forty minutes. Lisbeth cursed herself for taking the bike over the train. The flight between Tallinn and Stockholm was three hours while it was a four and a half hour ride to Stockholm if she hauled ass. She dialed Blomkvist twice as she whirled around the room packing, but was directed to voicemail each time. All of her texts bounced back. Fuck.
She bungeed down her duffel bag and took off up the E4, hitting 140 just past Jonköping. By Norkköping she was beating the plane by four minutes but a detour just outside of Södertälje set her back by thirty minutes. All and all, the trip was just over four hours by the time she dropped her kickstand and shouldered her duffel bag on the curb just outside the Millennium building.
Her hands were still numb from the vibrations of the bike when she punched in the security code at the top of the stairs. The TV was on full blast when she walked in, all six pairs of eyes glued to the screen. She supposed it was some sort of morning ritual for the magazine. Mikael was up in the loft, leaning against the railing with Christer beside him. He smiled when he spotted her and disappeared from her field of vision for the briefest of moments, reappearing on the stairs with the latest Millennium issue held triumphantly in his hands.
She had to admit; the cover did look pretty damn good.
She let him hug her when he approached, but didn't miss the sideways glance Berger shot her when she thought she wasn't looking. She decided to wrap her arms around Blomkvist just for the added 'piss off the bitch' bonus.
"You came back earlier than I expected."
"So did someone else."
Blomkvist looked at her with a comical expression that was quickly replaced with a sobering one. "Camilla."
Lisbeth nodded. "I don't think it's just a coincidence, either."
"Oh?"
"I would need my computer to be sure, but I think Shröder couldn't keep his mouth shut about you calling him and passed on the message to Camilla."
"And here I thought you came early back because you missed me." Berger looked up at that, too.
Lisbeth glared at him. "This isn't a fucking game, Mikael."
"I never suggested it was. What do you propose I do?"
She opened her mouth, but was cut off by the rattling of the mail slot. Both looked up in time to something small and metal bounce across the floor. Lisbeth's eyes widened when she recognized what it was, her instincts taking over as she shoved Mikael and Malin behind a desk and launched her duffel bag at the object. She dived behind the sofa just as the explosion roared through the office building.
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Personal thanks to Jpena for starting her own Millennium fanfic and really motivating me to get this story up and moving again!