Faste knew better than to argue with a doctor, since they were the closest things to God’s representatives here on earth. Policemen possibly excepted.

“What is going to happen now?”

“I’ve ordered complete bedrest and put her physiotherapy on hold – she needs therapeutic exercise because of the wounds in her shoulder and hip.”

“Understood. I’ll have to call Prosecutor Ekström in Stockholm. This will come as a bit of a surprise. What can I tell him?”

“Two days ago I was ready to approve a discharge, possibly for the end of this week. As the situation is now, it will take longer. You’ll have to prepare him for the fact that probably I won’t be in a position to make a decision in the coming week, and that it might be two weeks before you can move her to Stockholm. It depends on her rate of recovery.”

“The trial has been set for July.”

“Barring the unforeseen, she should be on her feet well before then.”

Bublanski cast a sceptical glance at the muscular woman on other side of the table. They were drinking coffee in the pavement area of a café on Norr Mälarstrand. It was Friday, May 20, and the warmth of summer was in the air. Inspector Monica Figuerola, her I.D. said, S.I.S. She had caught up with him just as he was leaving for home; she had suggested a conversation over a cup of coffee, just that.

At first he had been almost hostile, but she had very straightforwardly conceded that she had no authority to interview him and that naturally he was perfectly free to tell her nothing at all if he did not want to. He asked her what her business was, and she told him that she had been assigned by her boss to form an unofficial picture of what was true and what not true in the so-called Zalachenko case, also in some quarters known as the Salander case. She vouchsafed that it was not absolutely certain whether she had the right to question him. It was entirely up to him to decide whether he would talk to her or not.

“What would you like to know?” Bublanski said at last.

“Tell me what you know about Salander, Mikael Blomkvist, Gunnar Björck, and Zalachenko. How do the pieces fit together?”

They talked for more than two hours.

Edklinth thought long and hard about how to proceed. After five days of investigations, Figuerola had given him a number of indisputable indications that something was rotten within S.I.S. He recognized the need to move very carefully until he had enough information. He found himself, furthermore, on the horns of a constitutional dilemma: he did not have the authority to conduct secret investigations, and most assuredly not against his colleagues.

Accordingly he had to contrive some cause that would legitimize what he was doing. If the worst came to the worst, he could always fall back on the fact that it was a policeman’s duty to investigate a crime – but the breach was now so sensitive from a constitutional standpoint that he would surely be fired if he took a single wrong step. So he spent the whole of Friday brooding alone in his office.

Finally he concluded that Armansky was right, no matter how improbable it might seem. There really was a conspiracy inside S.I.S., and a number of individuals were acting outside of, or parallel to, regular operations. Because this had been going on for many years – at least since 1976, when Zalachenko arrived in Sweden – it had to be organized and sanctioned from the top. Exactly how high up the conspiracy went he had no idea.

He wrote three names on a pad:

Göran Mårtensson, Personal Protection. Criminal Inspector.

Gunnar Björck, assistant chief of Immigration Division. Deceased (Suicide?).

Albert Shenke, chief of Secretariat, S.I.S.

Figuerola was of the view that the chief of Secretariat at least must have been calling the shots when Mårtensson in Personal Protection was supposedly moved to Counter-Espionage, although he had not in fact been working there. He was too busy monitoring the movements of the journalist Mikael Blomkvist, and that did not have anything at all to do with the operations of Counter-Espionage.

Some other names from outside S.I.S. had to be added to the list:

Peter Teleborian, psychiatrist

Lars Faulsson, locksmith

Teleborian had been hired by S.I.S. as a psychiatric consultant on specific cases in the late ’80s and early ’90s – on three occasions, to be exact, and Edklinth had examined the reports in the archive. The first had been extraordinary – Counter-Espionage had identified a Russian informer inside the Swedish telecom industry, and the spy’s background indicated that he might be inclined to suicide in the event that his actions were exposed. Teleborian had done a strikingly good analysis, which helped them turn the informer so that he could become a double agent. His other two reports had involved less significant evaluations: one was of an employee inside S.I.S. who had an alcohol problem, and the second was an analysis of the bizarre sexual behaviour of an African diplomat.

Neither Teleborian nor Faulsson – especially not Faulsson – had any position inside S.I.S. And yet through their assignments they were connected to… to what?

The conspiracy was intimately linked to the late Alexander Zalachenko, the defected G.R.U. agent who had apparently turned up in Sweden on Election Day in 1976. A man no-one had ever heard of before. How was that possible?

Edklinth tried to imagine what reasonably would have happened if he had been sitting at the chief’s desk at S.I.S. in 1976 when Zalachenko defected. What would he have done? Absolute secrecy. It would have been essential. The defection could only be known to a small group without risking that the information might leak back to the Russians and… How small a group?

An operations department?

An unknown operations department?

If the affair had been appropriately handled, Zalachenko’s case should have ended up in Counter-Espionage. Ideally he should have come under the auspices of the military intelligence service, but they had neither the resources nor the expertise to run this sort of operational activity. So, S.I.S. it was.

But Counter-Espionage had not ever had him. Björck was the key; he had been one of the people who handled Zalachenko. And yet Björck had never had anything to do with Counter-Espionage. Björck was a mystery. Officially he had held a post in the Immigration Division since the ’70s, but in reality he had scarcely been seen in the department before the ’90s, when suddenly he became assistant director.

And yet Björck was the primary source of Blomkvist’s information. How had Blomkvist been able to persuade Björck to reveal such explosive material? And to a journalist at that.

Prostitutes. Björck messed around with teenage prostitutes and Millennium were going to expose him. Blomkvist must have blackmailed Björck.

Then Salander came into the picture.

The deceased lawyer Nils Bjurman had worked in the Immigration Division at the same time as the deceased Björck. They were the ones who had taken care of Zalachenko. But what did they do with him?

Somebody must have made the decision. With a defector of such provenance the order must have come from the highest level.

From the government. It must have been backed by the government. Anything else would be unthinkable.

Surely?

Edklinth felt cold shivers of apprehension. This was all conceivable in practice. A defector of Zalachenko’s status would have to be handled with the utmost secrecy. He would have decided as much himself. That was what Fälldin’s administration must have decided too. It made sense.

But what happened in 1991 did not make sense. Björck had hired Teleborian effectively to lock Salander up in a psychiatric hospital for children on the – false – pretext that she was mentally deranged. That was a crime. That was such a monstrous crime that Edklinth felt yet more apprehensive.