“OK,” Blomkvist said, giving her a resigned smile. “Question number two: why
didn’t you tell me about Wennerström earlier?”
“You never asked me.”
“And if I never did ask you—let’s suppose that I never met you—you would have
sat here knowing that Wennerström was a gangster while Millennium went
bankrupt?”
“Nobody asked me to expose Wennerström for what he is,” Salander replied in a
know-it-all voice.
“Yes, but what if?”
“I did tell you,” she said.
Blomkvist dropped the subject.
Salander burned the contents of Wennerström’s hard drive—about five
gigabytes—on to ten CDs, and she felt as if she had more or less moved into
Blomkvist’s apartment. She waited patiently, answering all the questions he asked.
“I can’t understand how he can be so fucking dim to put all his dirty laundry on one
hard drive,” he said. “If it ever got into the hands of the police...”
“People aren’t very rational. He has to believe that the police would never think of
confiscating his computer.”
“Above suspicion. I agree that he’s an arrogant bastard, but he must have security
consultants telling him how to handle his computer. There’s material on this
machine going all the way back to 1993.”
“The computer itself is relatively new. It was manufactured a year ago, but he
seems to have transferred all his old correspondence and everything else on to the