CHAPTER 21
Thursday, July 3–Thursday, July 10
Salander was up before Blomkvist, around 6:00. She put on some water for coffee
and went to take a shower. When Blomkvist woke at 7:30, she was reading his
summary of the Harriet Vanger case on his iBook. He came out to the kitchen with a
towel round his waist, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes.
“There’s coffee on the stove,” she said.
He looked over her shoulder.
“That document was password protected, dammit,” he said.
She turned and peered up at him.
“It takes thirty seconds to download a programme from the Net that can crack
Word’s encryption protection.”
“We need to have a talk on the subject of what’s yours and what’s mine,” he said,
and went to take a shower.
When he came back, Salander had turned off his computer and put it back in its
place in his office. She had booted up her own PowerBook. Blomkvist felt sure that
she had already transferred the contents of his computer to her own.
Salander was an information junkie with a delinquent child’s take on morals and
ethics.
He had just sat down to breakfast when there was a knock at the front door. Martin
Vanger looked so solemn that for a second Blomkvist thought he had come to
bring the news of his uncle’s death.
“No, Henrik’s condition is the same as yesterday. I’m here for a quite different
reason. Could I come in for a moment?”
Blomkvist let him in, introducing him to “my research assistant” Lisbeth Salander.
She gave the captain of industry barely a glance and a quick nod before she went