Under normal circumstances that sort of behaviour would have made her mentally
cock a pistol. But she had not felt an iota of threat or any sort of hostility from his
side. He had good reason to read her the riot act, even report her to the police.
Instead he had treated even her hacking into his computer as a joke.
That had been the most sensitive part of their conversation. Blomkvist seemed to
be deliberately not broaching the subject, and finally she could not help asking the
question.
“You said that you knew what I did.”
“You’ve been inside my computer. You’re a hacker.”
“How do you know that?” Salander was absolutely positive that she had left no
traces and that her trespassing could not be discovered by anyone unless a top
security consultant sat down and scanned the hard drive at the same time as she
was accessing the computer.
“You made a mistake.”
She had quoted from a text that was only on his computer.
Salander sat in silence. Finally she looked up at him, her eyes expressionless.
“How did you do it?” he asked.
“My secret. What are you thinking of doing about it?”
Mikael shrugged.
“What can I do?”
“It’s exactly what you do as a journalist.”
“Of course. And that’s why we journalists have an ethics committee that keeps
track of the moral issues. When I write an article about some bastard in the banking
industry, I leave out, for instance, his or her private life. I don’t say that a forger is a
lesbian or gets turned on by having sex with her dog or anything like that, even if it
happens to be true. Bastards too have a right to their private lives. Does that make
sense?”