“Somewhere along the way somebody heard about what I was poking my nose
into, and Wennerström was made aware of my existence. And all of a sudden a
whole bunch of strange things started happening. First I was threatened.
Anonymous calls from card telephones that were impossible to trace. Erika was
also threatened. It was the usual nonsense: lie down or else we’re going to nail you
to a barn door, and so on. She, of course, was mad as a hellcat.”
He took a cigarette from Salander.
“Then something extremely unpleasant happened. Late one night when I left the
office I was attacked by two men who just walked up to me and gave me a couple
of punches. I got a fat lip and fell down in the street. I couldn’t identify them, but
one of them looked like an old biker.”
“So, next...”
“All these goings-on, of course, only had the effect of making Erika very cross
indeed, and I got stubborn. We beefed up security at Millennium. The problem was
that the harassment was out of all proportion to the content of the story. We
couldn’t fathom why all this was happening.”
“But the story you published was something quite different.”
“Exactly. Suddenly we made a breakthrough. We found a source, a Deep Throat in
Wennerström’s circle. This source was literally scared to death, and we were only
allowed to meet him in hotel rooms. He told us that the money from the Minos
affair had been used for weapons deals in the war in Yugoslavia. Wennerström had
been making deals with the right-wing Ustashe in Croatia. Not only that, the source
was able to give us copies of documents to back it up.”
“You believed him?”
“He was clever. He only ever gave us enough information to lead us to the next
source, who would confirm the story. We were even given a photograph of one of
Wennerström’s closest colleagues shaking hands with the buyer. It was detailed
blockbuster material, and everything seemed verifiable. So we published.”
“And it was a fake.”