went into the living room and found an anorexically thin girl sitting on the sofa,
wearing a worn leather jacket and with her feet propped up on the coffee table. At
first she thought the girl was about fifteen, but that was before she looked into her
eyes. She was still looking at this creature when Blomkvist came in with a coffeepot
and coffee cake.
“Forgive me for being completely impossible,” he said.
Berger tilted her head. There was something different about him. He looked
haggard, thinner than she remembered. His eyes had a shamed expression, and for
a moment he avoided her gaze. She glanced at his neck. She saw a pale red line,
clearly distinguishable.
“I’ve been avoiding you. It’s a very long story, and I’m not proud of my role in it. But
we’ll talk about that later...Now I want to introduce you to this young woman.
Erika, this is Lisbeth Salander. Lisbeth, Erika Berger, editor in chief of Millennium and
my best friend.”
Salander studied Berger’s elegant clothes and self-confident manner and decided
after ten seconds that she was most likely not going to be her best friend.
Their meeting lasted five hours. Berger twice made calls to cancel other meetings.
She spent an hour reading parts of the manuscript that Blomkvist put in her hands.
She had a thousand questions but realised that it would take weeks before she got
them answered. The important thing was the manuscript, which she finally put
down. If even a fraction of these claims were accurate, a whole new situation had
emerged.
Berger looked at Blomkvist. She had never doubted that he was an honest person,
but now she felt dizzy and wondered whether the Wennerström affair had broken
him—that what he had been working on was all a figment of his imagination.
Blomkvist was at that moment unpacking two boxes of printed-out source
material. Berger blanched. She wanted, of course, to know how it had come into his
possession.
It took a while to convince her that this odd girl, who had said not one word during
the meeting, had unlimited access to Wennerström’s computer. And not just his—
she had also hacked into the computers of several of his lawyers and close
associates.