for some other kind of activity? The computer gave no clue as to what was going
on in Wennerström’s mind or what may have been perfectly obvious to him and so
was never formulated in an electronic document.
Salander was persuaded that most of these questions would never be answered.
They could see the message, but without a key they would never be able to
interpret the meaning. Wennerström’s empire was like an onion from which one
layer after another could be removed; a labyrinth of enterprises owned by one
another. Companies, accounts, funds, securities. They reckoned that nobody—
perhaps not even Wennerström himself—could have a complete overview.
Wennerström’s empire had a life of its own.
But there was a pattern, or at least a hint of a pattern. A labyrinth of enterprises
owned by each other. Wennerström’s empire was variously valued at between 100
and 400 billion kronor, depending on whom you asked and how it was calculated.
But if companies own each other’s assets—what then would be their value?
They had left Hedeby Island in great haste early in the morning after Salander
dropped the bomb that was now occupying every waking moment of Blomkvist’s
life. They drove to Salander’s place and spent two days in front of her computer
while she guided him through Wennerström’s universe. He had plenty of
questions. One of them was pure curiosity.
“Lisbeth, how are you able to operate his computer, from a purely practical point of
view?”
“It’s a little invention that my friend Plague came up with. Wennerström has an IBM
laptop that he works on, both at home and at the office. That means that all the
information is on a single hard drive. He has a broadband connection to his
property at home. Plague invented a type of cuff that you fasten around the
broadband cable, and I’m testing it out for him. Everything that Wennerström sees
is registered by the cuff, which forwards the data to a server somewhere else.”
“Doesn’t he have a firewall?”
Salander smiled.
“Of course he has a firewall. But the point is that the cuff also functions as a type of
firewall. It takes a while to hack the computer this way. Let’s say that Wennerström