“Then why are you insinuating that Millennium’s credibility would be diminished
because we also have backers?”
The reporter held up his hand.
“OK, I’ll retract that question.”
“No. Don’t do that. I want you to print exactly what I said. And you can add that
if DN promises to focus a little extra on the Vanger Corporation, then we’ll focus a
little more on the Bonnier Group.”
But it was an ethical dilemma.
Blomkvist was working for Henrik Vanger, who was in a position to
sink Millennium with the stroke of a pen. What would happen if Blomkvist and
Vanger became enemies?
And above all—what price did she put on her own credibility, and when had she
been transformed from an independent editor into a corrupted one?
Salander closed her browser and shut down her PowerBook. She was out of work
and hungry. The first condition did not worry her so much, since she had regained
control over her bank account and Bjurman had already taken on the status of a
vague unpleasantness in her past. The hunger she dealt with by switching on the
coffeemaker. She made three big open rye-bread sandwiches with cheese, caviar,
and a hard-boiled egg. She ate her nighttime snacks on the sofa in the living room
while she worked on the information she had gathered.
The lawyer Frode from Hedestad had hired her to do an investigation of Mikael
Blomkvist, the journalist who was given a prison sentence for libelling financier
Hans-Erik Wennerström. A few months later Henrik Vanger, also from Hedestad,
joins Blomkvist’s magazine’s board of directors and claims that there is a conspiracy
to crush the magazine. All this on the same day that the former goes to prison.
Most fascinating of all: a two-year-old background article—“With two empty
hands”—about Hans-Erik Wennerström, which she found in the online edition
of Monopoly Financial Magazine. It seemed that he began his career in the very
same Vanger Corporation in the late sixties.