She had telephoned some of the numbers haphazardly, but she had no idea what questions to ask. Soon she felt so idiotic that she stopped even trying. Instead she went out on the first Sunday in January and visited two apartment open houses. One was on Vindragarvägen way out on Reimersholme, and the other on Heleneborgsgatan near Hornstull. The apartment on Reimers was a bright four-room place in a tower block with a view of Långholmen and Essingen. There she could be content. The apartment on Heleneborgsgatan was a dump with a view of the building next door.

The problem was that she could not decide which part of town she wanted to live in, how her apartment should look, or what sort of questions she should be asking of her new home. She had never thought about an alternative to the 500 square feet on Lundagatan, where she had spent her childhood. Through her trustee at the time, the lawyer Holger Palmgren, she had been granted possession of the apartment when she turned eighteen. She plopped down on the lumpy sofa in her combination office/living room and began to think.

The apartment on Lundagatan looked into a courtyard. It was cramped and not the least bit comfortable. The view from her bedroom was a firewall on a gable facade. The view from the kitchen was of the back of the building facing the street and the entrance to the basement storage area. She could see a streetlight from her living room, and a few branches of a birch tree.

The first requirement of her new home was that it should have some sort of view.

She did not have a balcony, and had always envied well-to-do neighbours higher up in the building who spent warm days with a cold beer under an awning on theirs. The second requirement was that her new home would have to have a balcony.

For years she had lived in cramped spaces. Her kitchen was a mere 100 square feet, with room for only a tiny table and two chairs. Her living room was 200 square feet. The bedroom was a 120. Her fourth requirement was that the new apartment should have plenty of space and closets. She wanted to have a proper office and a big bedroom where she could spread herself out.

Her bathroom was a windowless cubbyhole with square cement slabs on the floor, an awkward half bath, and plastic wallpaper that never got really clean no matter how hard she scrubbed it. She wanted to have tiles and a big bath. She wanted a washing machine in the apartment and not down in some basement. She wanted the bathroom to smell fresh, and she wanted to be able to open a window.

Then she studied the offerings of estate agents online. The next morning she got up early to visit Nobel Estates, the company that, according to some, had the best reputation in Stockholm. She was dressed in old black jeans, boots, and her black leather jacket. She stood at a counter and watched a blond woman of about thirty-five, who had just logged on to the Nobel Estates website and was uploading photographs of apartments. At length a short, plump, middle-aged man with thin red hair came over. She asked him what sort of apartments he had available. He looked up at her in surprise and then assumed an avuncular tone:

“Well, young lady, do your parents know that you’re thinking of moving away from home?”

Salander gave him a stone-cold glare until he stopped chuckling.

“I want an apartment,” she said.

He cleared his throat and glanced appealingly at his colleague on the computer.

“I see. And what kind of apartment did you have in mind?”

“I think I’d like an apartment in Söder, with a balcony and a view of the water, at least four rooms, a bathroom with a window, and a utility room. And there has to be a lockable area where I can keep a motorcycle.”

The woman at the computer looked up and stared at Salander.

“A motorcycle?” the thin-haired man said.

“May I know … uh, your name?”

Salander told him. She asked him for his name and he introduced himself as Joakim Persson.

“The thing is, it’s rather expensive to purchase a cooperative apartment here in Stockholm …”

Salander did not reply. She had asked him what sort of apartments he had to offer; the information that it cost money was irrelevant.

“What line of work are you in?”

Salander thought for a moment. Technically she was a freelancer; in practice she worked only for Armansky and Milton Security, but that had been somewhat irregular over the past year. She had not done any work for him in three months.

“I’m not working at anything at the moment,” she said.

“Well then … I presume you’re still at school.”

“No, I’m not at school.”

Persson came around the counter and put his arm kindly around Salander’s shoulders, escorting her towards the door.

“Well, you see, Ms. Salander, we’d be happy to welcome you back in a few years’ time, but you’d have to bring along a little more money than what’s in your piggy bank. The fact is that a weekly allowance won’t really cover this.” He pinched her good-naturedly on the cheek. “So drop in again, and we’ll see about finding you a little pad.”

Salander stood on the street outside Nobel Estates for several minutes. She wondered absentmindedly what little Master Persson would think if a Molotov cocktail came flying through his display window. Then she went home and booted up her PowerBook.

It took her ten minutes to hack into Nobel Estates’ internal computer network using the passwords she happened to notice the woman behind the counter type in before she started uploading photographs. It took three minutes to find out that the computer the woman was working on was in fact also the company’s Net server—how dim can you get?—and another three minutes to gain access to all fourteen computers on the network. After about two hours she had gone through Persson’s records and discovered that there were some 750,000 kronor in under-the-table income that he had not reported to the tax authorities over the past two years.

She downloaded all the necessary files and emailed them to the tax authorities from an anonymous email account on a server in the USA. Then she put Master Persson out of her mind.

She scrutinized the photographs and floor plan, and in the end decided that it more than fulfilled her requirements. It had previously been owned by a director of the Asea Brown Boveri power company, who slipped into obscurity after he got himself a much-discussed and much-criticized golden parachute of several billion kronor.

That evening she telephoned Jeremy MacMillan, partner in the law firm MacMillan & Marks in Gibraltar. She had done business with MacMillan before. For a fee even he thought generous he had set up P.O. box companies to be owners of the accounts that administered the fortune she had stolen a year ago from the corrupt financier Hans-Erik Wennerström.

She engaged MacMillan’s services again, instructing him to open negotiations with Nobel Estates on behalf of Wasp Enterprises to buy the apartment on Fiskargatan near Mosebacke Torg. It took four days, and the figure finally arrived at made her raise her eyebrows. Plus the 5 percent commission to MacMillan. Before the week was out she had moved in with two boxes of clothes and bed linens, a mattress, and some kitchen utensils. She slept on the mattress in the apartment for three weeks while she investigated clinics for plastic surgery, straightened out a number of unresolved bureaucratic details (including a nighttime talk with a certain lawyer, Nils Bjurman), and paid in advance for the rent at her old place, as well as the electricity bills and other monthly expenses.

Then she had booked her journey to the clinic in Italy. When the treatments were done and she was discharged, she sat in a hotel room in Rome and thought about what to do next. She should have returned to Sweden to get on with her life, but for various reasons she could not bear to think about Stockholm.

She had no real profession. She could see for herself no future at Milton Security. It was not Armansky’s fault. In all probability, he would have liked her to work full-time and turn herself into an efficient cog in the company machine, but at the age of twenty-five she lacked the education, and she had no wish to find herself pushing fifty and still plodding away doing investigations of crooks in the corporate world. It was an amusing hobby—not a lifetime career.

Blomkvist was known for being a ladies’ man. At best she had been an amusing diversion, someone on whom he had taken pity at a moment when he needed her and there was no-one better available. But he had quickly moved on to yet more amusing company. She cursed herself for lowering her guard and letting him into her life.

When she came to her senses again she cut off all contact with him. It had not been easy, but she had steeled herself. The last time she saw him she was standing on a platform in the tunnelbana at Gamla Stan and he was sitting in the train on his way downtown. She had stared at him for a whole minute and decided that she did not have a grain of feeling left, because it would have been the same as bleeding to death. Fuck you. He had noticed her just as the doors closed and looked at her with searching eyes before she turned and walked away as the train pulled out.

She didn’t understand why he had so stubbornly tried to stay in contact with her, as if she were some fucking welfare project he had taken on. It annoyed her that he was so clueless. Every time he sent her an email she had to force herself to delete the message without reading it.

Stockholm did not seem in the least attractive. Apart from the freelance work for Milton Security, a few discarded bed partners, and the girls in the old rock group Evil Fingers, she hardly knew anyone in her hometown.

The only person she had any respect for now was Armansky It was not easy to define her feelings for him. She had always felt a mild surprise that she was attracted to him. If he had not been quite so married, or quite so old, or quite so conservative, she might have considered making an advance.

In the past she could never afford it.

She stood at the window of her hotel room overlooking Via Garibaldi in Rome. The city was like a pile of ruins. Then she made up her mind. She put on her jacket and went down to the lobby and asked if there was a travel agent in the vicinity. She booked a one-way ticket to Tel Aviv and spent the following days walking through the Old City in Jerusalem and visiting the al-Aqsa Mosque and the Wailing Wall. She viewed the armed soldiers on street corners with distrust, and then she flew to Bangkok and kept on travelling for the rest of the year.

There was only one thing she really had to do. She went to Gibraltar twice. The first time to do an in-depth investigation of the man she had chosen to look after her money. The second time to see to it that he was doing it properly.

It felt quite odd to turn the key to her own apartment on Fiskargatan after such a long time.

She set down her groceries and her shoulder bag in the hall and tapped in the four-digit code that turned off the electronic burglar alarm. Then she stripped off her damp clothes and dropped them on the hall floor. She walked into the kitchen naked, plugged in the refrigerator, and put the food away before she headed for the bathroom and spent the next ten minutes in the shower. She ate a meal consisting of a Billy’s Pan Pizza, which she heated in the microwave, and a sliced apple. She opened one of her moving boxes and found a pillow, some sheets, and a blanket that smelled a little suspect after having been packed away for a year. She made up her bed on the mattress in a room next to the kitchen.

She fell asleep within ten seconds of her head hitting the pillow and slept for almost twelve hours. Then she got up, turned on the coffeemaker, wrapped a blanket around herself, and sat in the dark on a window seat, smoking a cigarette and looking out towards Djurgården and Saltsjön, fascinated by the lights.

The air outside was icy. Salander was dressed in a pair of thin, worn jeans that had a rip beneath one back pocket where her blue panties showed through. She had on a T-shirt and a warm polo sweater with a seam that had started to fray at the neck. She had also rediscovered her scuffed leather jacket with the rivets on the shoulders, and decided she should ask a tailor to repair the almost nonexistent lining in the pockets. She was wearing heavy socks and boots. Overall, she was nice and warm.

She walked down St. Paulsgatan to Zinkensdamm and over to her old apartment on Lundagatan. She checked first of all that her Kawasaki was still safe in the basement. She patted the seat before she went up to the apartment and had to push the front door open against a mountain of junk mail.

She hadn’t been sure what to do with the apartment, so when she’d left Sweden a year ago, the simplest solution had been to arrange an automatic bank account to pay her regular bills. She still had furniture in the apartment, laboriously collected over time from various trash containers, along with some chipped mugs, two older computers, and a lot of paper. But nothing of value.

She took a black trash bag from the kitchen and spent five minutes sorting the junk from the real mail. Most of the heap went straight into the plastic bag. There were a few letters for her, mainly bank statements and tax forms from Milton Security. One advantage of being under guardianship was that she never had to deal with tax matters—communications of that sort were conspicuous by their absence. Otherwise, in a whole year she had accumulated only three personal letters.

The first was from a lawyer, Greta Molander, who had served as executor for Salander’s mother. The letter stated that her mother’s estate had been settled and that Lisbeth Salander and her sister Camilla had inherited 9,312 kronor each. A deposit of said amount had been made to Ms. Salander’s bank account. Would she please confirm receipt? Salander stuffed the letter in the inside pocket of her jacket.

The last letter was from Blomkvist. She thought for a moment before deciding not to open it, and threw it into the bag.

She filled another box with various items and knickknacks that she wanted to keep, then took a taxi back to Mosebacke. She put on makeup, a pair of glasses, and a blond shoulder-length wig and tucked a Norwegian passport in the name of Irene Nesser into her bag. She studied herself in the mirror and decided that Irene Nesser looked a little bit like Lisbeth Salander, but was still a completely different person.

After a quick lunch of a Brie baguette and a latte at Café Eden on Götgatan, she walked down to the car rental agency on Ringvägen, where Irene Nesser rented a Nissan Micra. She drove to IKEA at Kungens Kurva and spent three hours browsing through the merchandise, writing down the item numbers she needed. She made a few quick decisions.

She bought two Karlanda sofas with sand-coloured upholstery, five Poäng armchairs, two round side tables of clear-lacquered birch, a Svansbo coffee table, and several Lack occasional tables. From the storage department she ordered two Ivar combination storage units and two Bonde bookshelves, a TV stand, and a Magiker unit with doors. She settled on a Pax Nexus three-door wardrobe and two small Malm bureaus.

She spent a long time selecting a bed, and decided on a Hemnes bed frame with mattress and bedside tables. To be on the safe side, she also bought a Lillehammer bed to put in the spare room. She didn’t plan on having any guests, but since she had a guest room she might as well furnish it.

The bathroom in her new apartment was already equipped with a medicine cabinet, towel storage, and a washing machine the previous owners had left behind. All she had to buy was a cheap laundry basket.

What she did need, though, was kitchen furniture. After some thought she decided on a Rosfors kitchen table of solid beechwood with a tabletop of tempered glass and four colourful kitchen chairs.

She also needed furniture for her office. She looked at some improbable “work stations” with ingenious cabinets for storing computers and keyboards. In the end she shook her head and ordered an ordinary desk, the Galant, in beech veneer with an angled top and rounded corners, and a large filing cabinet. She took a long time choosing an office chair—in which she would no doubt spend many hours—and chose one of the most expensive options, the Verksam.

She paid with a card in the name of Wasp Enterprises and showed her Irene Nesser ID. She also paid to have the items delivered and assembled. The bill came to a little over 90,000 kronor.

She was back in Söder by 5:00 p.m. and had time for a quick visit to Axelsson’s Home Electronics, where she bought a nineteen-inch TV and a radio. Just before closing time she slipped into a store on Hornsgatan and bought a vacuum cleaner. At Mariahallen market she bought a mop, dishwashing liquid, a bucket, some detergent, hand soap, toothbrushes, and a giant package of toilet paper.

She was tired but pleased after her shopping frenzy. She stowed all her purchases in her rented Nissan Micra and then collapsed in Café Java on Hornsgatan. She borrowed an evening paper from the next table and learned that the Social Democrats were still the ruling party and that nothing of great significance seemed to have occurred in Sweden while she had been away.

She was home by 8:00. Under cover of darkness she unloaded her car and carried the items up to V. Kulla’s apartment. She left everything in a big pile in the hall and spent half an hour trying to find somewhere to park. Then she ran water in the Jacuzzi, which was easily big enough for three people. She thought about Blomkvist for a moment. Until she saw the letter from him that morning, she had not thought about him for several months. She wondered whether he was home, and whether the Berger woman was there now in his apartment.

After a while she took a deep breath, turned over on her stomach, and sank beneath the surface of the water. She put her hands on her breasts and pinched her nipples hard, holding her breath for far too long, until her lungs began to ache.

Erika Berger, editor in chief, checked her clock when Blomkvist arrived. He was almost fifteen minutes late for the planning meeting that was held on the second Tuesday of each month at 10:00 a.m. sharp. Tentative plans for the next issue were outlined, and decisions about the content of the magazine were made for several months in advance.

“This is Dag Svensson,” said Erika. “Freelancer. We’re going to buy an article from him.”

Blomkvist shook hands with the man. Svensson was blond and blue-eyed, with a crew cut and a three-day growth of beard. He was around thirty and looked shamelessly fit.

“We usually run one or two themed issues each year.” Berger went on where she had left off. “I want to use this story in the May issue. The printer is booked for April 27th. That gives us a good three months to produce the articles.”

“So what’s the theme?” Blomkvist wondered aloud as he poured coffee from the thermos.

“Dag came to me last week with the outline for a story. That’s why I asked him to join us today. Will you take it from here, Dag?” Berger said.

“Trafficking,” Svensson said. “That is, the sex trade. In this case primarily of girls from the Baltic countries and Eastern Europe. If you’ll allow me to start at the beginning—I’m writing a book on the subject and that’s why I contacted Millennium—since you now have a book-publishing operation.”

Everyone looked amused. Millennium Publishing had so far issued exactly one book, Blomkvist’s year-old brick about the billionaire Wennerström’s financial empire. The book was in its sixth printing in Sweden, had been published in Norwegian, German, and English, and was soon to be translated into French too. The sales success was remarkable given that the story was by now so well known and had been reported in every newspaper.

“Our book-publishing ventures are not very extensive,” Blomkvist said cautiously.

Even Svensson gave a slight smile. “I understand that. But you do have the means to publish a book.”

“There are plenty of larger companies,” Blomkvist said. “Well-established ones.”

“Trafficking,” Blomkvist said. “Tell us about it.”

“I’ve been digging around in the subject of trafficking for four years now. I got into the topic through my girlfriend—her name is Mia Johansson and she’s a criminologist and gender studies scholar. She previously worked at the Crime Prevention Centre and wrote a report on the sex trade.”

“I’ve met her,” Eriksson said suddenly. “I did an interview with her two years ago when she published a report comparing the way men and women were treated by the courts.”

Svensson smiled. “That did create a stir. But she’s been researching trafficking for five or six years. That’s how we met. I was working on a story about the sex trade on the Internet and got a tip that she knew something about it. And she did. To make a long story short: she and I began working together, I as a journalist and she as a researcher. In the process we started dating, and a year ago we moved in together. She’s working on her doctorate and she’ll be defending her dissertation this year.”

“So she’s writing a doctoral thesis while you …?”

“I’m writing a popular version of her dissertation and adding my own research. As well as a shorter version in the form of the article that I outlined for Erika.”

“OK, you’re working as a team. What’s the story?”

“We have a government that introduced a tough sex-trade law, we have police who are supposed to see to it that the law is obeyed, and we have courts that are supposed to convict sex criminals—we call the johns sex criminals since it has become a crime to buy sexual services—and we have the media, which write indignant articles about the subject, et cetera. At the same time, Sweden is one of the countries that imports the most prostitutes per capita from Russia and the Baltics.”

“And you can substantiate this?”

“OK.”

“It’s the focus of Mia’s dissertation, so to speak. But not of the book.”

Everyone was listening intently.

“Mia interviewed the girls. What I did was to chart the suppliers and the client base.”

Blomkvist smiled. He had never met Svensson before, but he felt at once that Svensson was the kind of journalist he liked—someone who got right to the heart of the story. For Blomkvist the golden rule of journalism was that there were always people who were responsible. The bad guys.

“And you found some interesting facts?”

“I can document, for instance, that a civil servant in the Ministry of Justice who was involved with the drafting of the sex-trade law has exploited at least two girls who came to Sweden through the agency of the sex mafia. One of them was fifteen.”

“Whoa.”

“I’ve been working on this story off and on for three years. The book will contain case studies of the johns. There are three policemen, one of whom works for the Security Police, another on the vice squad. There are five lawyers, one prosecutor, and one judge. There are also three journalists, one of whom has written articles on the sex trade. In his private life he’s into rape fantasies with a teenage whore from Tallinn—and in this case it’s not consensual sex play. I’m thinking of naming names. I’ve got watertight documentation.”

Blomkvist whistled. “Since I’ve become publisher again, I’ll want to go over the documentation with a fine-tooth comb,” he said. “The last time I was sloppy about checking sources I ended up spending two months in prison.”

“If you want to publish the story I can give you all the documentation you want. But I have one condition for selling the story to Millennium.”

“Dag wants us to publish the book too,” Berger said.

“Precisely. I want it to be dropped like a bomb, and right now Millennium is the most credible and outspoken magazine in the country. I don’t believe any other publisher would dare publish a book of this type.”

“So, no book, no article?” said Blomkvist.

“I think it sounds seriously good,” Eriksson said. There was a murmur of agreement from Cortez.

“I know,” Svensson said. “That doesn’t bother me. The moment the book is published, Mia will file a police report against everyone I name.”

“That’ll stir up a hell of a fuss,” Cortez said.

“That’s only half the story,” said Svensson. “I’ve also been analyzing some of the networks that make money off the sex trade. We’re talking about organized crime.”

“And who’s involved?”

“That’s what’s so tragic. The sex mafia is a sleazy bunch of nobodies. I don’t really know what I expected when I started this research, but somehow we—at least I—had the idea that the ‘mafia’ was a gang in the upper echelon of society. A number of American movies on the subject have probably contributed to that image. Your story about Wennerström”—Svensson turned to Blomkvist—“also showed that sometimes this is actually the case. But Wennerström was an exception in a sense. What I’ve turned up is a gang of brutal and sadistic losers who can hardly read or write; they’re total morons when it comes to organization and strategic thinking. There are connections to bikers and somewhat more organized groups, but in general it’s a bunch of assholes who run the sex business.”

“This is all made clear in your article,” Berger said. “We have laws and a police force and a judicial system that we finance with millions of kronor in taxes each year to deal with the sex trade … and they can’t even nail a bunch of morons.”

“It’s a tremendous assault on human rights, and the girls involved are so far down society’s ladder that they’re of no interest to the legal system. They don’t vote. They can hardly speak Swedish except for the vocabulary they need to set up a trick. Of all crimes involving the sex trade, 99.99 percent are not reported to the police, and those that are hardly ever lead to a charge. This has got to be the biggest iceberg of all in the Swedish criminal world. Imagine if bank robberies were handled with the same nonchalance. It’s unthinkable. Unfortunately I’ve come to the conclusion that this method of handling the problem would not survive for a single day if it weren’t for the fact that the criminal justice system simply does not want to deal with it. Attacks on teenage girls from Tallinn and Riga are not a priority. A whore is a whore. It’s part of the system.”

“So what do you all think?” Berger said.

“I like it,” Blomkvist said. “We’ll be sticking our necks out with that story, and that was the whole point of starting Millennium in the first place.”

“That’s why I’m still working at the magazine. The publisher has to jump off a cliff every now and then,” Nilsson said.

Everyone laughed except Blomkvist.

“He was the only one crazy enough to take on the job of publisher,” Berger said. “We’re going to run this in May. And your book will come out at the same time.”

“Is the book done?” Blomkvist said.

“No. I have the whole outline but only half the text. If you agree to publish the book and give me an advance, then I can work on it full-time. Almost all the research is done. All that’s left are some supplementary details—actually just checking stuff I already know—and confronting the johns I’m going to hang out to dry.”

“We’ll produce it just like the Wennerström book. It’ll take a week to do the layout”—Malm nodded—“and two weeks to print. We’ll complete the confrontations in March and April and sum it all up in a final fifteen-page section. We’ll have the manuscript ready by April 15 so we’ll have time to go over all the sources.”

“How will we work things with the contract and so on?”

“I’ve drawn up a book contract once before, but I’ll probably have to have a talk with our lawyer.” Berger frowned. “But I propose a short-term contract from February to May. We don’t pay over the odds.”

“That’s fine with me. I just need a basic salary.”

“Otherwise the rule of thumb is fifty-fifty on the earnings from the book after the costs are paid. How does that sound?”

“That sounds damn good,” Svensson said.

“Work assignments,” Berger said. “Malin, I want you to plan the themed issue. It will be your primary responsibility starting next month; you’ll work with Dag and edit the manuscript. Lotta, that means I want you here as temporary editorial assistant for the magazine from March through May. You’ll have to go full-time, and Malin or Mikael will back you up as time permits.”

Eriksson nodded.

“And I wouldn’t want it any other way.”

“Good. But can you put up with having somebody looking over your shoulder and criticizing you every which way all spring?”

Svensson grinned and looked at Blomkvist. “Bring it on.”

“If it’s going to be a themed issue, we’ll need more articles. Mikael—I want you to write about the finances of the sex trade. How much money are we talking about annually? Who makes the money from the sex trade and where does it go? Can we find evidence that some of the money ends up in government coffers? Monika—I want you to check out sexual attacks in general. Talk to the women’s shelters and researchers and doctors and welfare people. You two plus Dag will write the supporting articles. Henry—I want an interview with Mia Johansson—Dag can’t do it himself. Portrait: Who is she, what is she researching, and what are her conclusions? Then I want you to go in and do case studies from police reports. Christer—pictures. I don’t know how we’re going to illustrate this. Think about it.”

“This is probably the simplest theme of all to illustrate. Arty. No problem.”

“Let me add one thing,” Svensson said. “There’s a small minority on the police force who are doing a hell of a fine job. It might be an idea to interview some of them.”

“Have you got any names?” Cortez said.

“Phone numbers too,” Svensson said.

“Great,” Berger said. “The theme of the May issue is the sex trade. The point we have to make is that trafficking is a crime against human rights and that these criminals must be exposed and treated like war criminals or death squads or torturers anywhere in the world. Now let’s get going.”