Holmberg’s team was in luck. Just half an hour after they began knocking on doors among the intermittently populated cabins, they found Anna Viktoria Hansson. She had spent the spring morning clearing up a garden near the access road to the summer-cabin area. Yes indeed, she might be seventy-two, but she had good eyesight. Yes indeed, she had seen a short girl in a dark jacket walk past around lunchtime. At three in the afternoon two men on motorcycles had driven by. They made an appalling racket. And shortly after that, the girl had gone back the other way on one of the motorcycles, or maybe on a different one altogether. Well, it looked like the girl, but in the helmet she could not be 100 percent certain. And then the police cars started arriving.

Just as Holmberg was getting this statement, Andersson arrived at the cabin.

“What’s happening here?” he said.

Holmberg looked glumly at his colleague. “I don’t quite know how to explain this to you,” he said.

“Jerker, are you trying to tell me that Salander turned up at Bjurman’s cabin and all by herself beat the shit out of the top echelon of the Svavelsjö MC?” Bublanski sounded tense.

“Well, she was trained by Paolo Roberto.”

“Jerker, please. Give me a break.”

“OK, listen to this. Magnus Lundin has a bullet wound in his foot. Which is going to do him permanent damage. The bullet went out the back of his heel, blew his boot to kingdom come.”

“At least she didn’t shoot him in the head.”

“Apparently that wasn’t necessary. According to the local team, Lundin has serious injuries to his face: a broken jaw and two teeth knocked out. The medics suspected a concussion. Besides the gunshot wound to his foot, he also has a massive pain in his abdomen.”

“How’s Nieminen doing?”

“He seems unhurt. But according to the old man who called in, he was unconscious when he arrived. Nieminen came to after a while and was trying to leave just as the Strängnäs team got there.”

Bublanski was speechless.

“There’s one mysterious detail,” Holmberg said.

“Another one?”

“Nieminen’s leather vest… He came here on his bike.”

“Yes?”

“It was ripped.”

“What do you mean, ripped?”

“There’s a chunk missing. About eight by eight inches cut out of the back of it. Just where Svavelsjö MC has its insignia.”

Bublanski raised his eyebrows. “Why would Salander cut a square out of his vest? For a trophy? For revenge? But revenge for what?”

“No idea. But I thought of one other thing,” Holmberg said. “Magnus Lundin is a hefty guy with a ponytail. One of the guys who kidnapped Salander’s girlfriend had a beer belly and a ponytail.”

Salander had not had such a rush since she visited Gröna Lund amusement park several years before and rode on the Freefall. She went on it three times and could have gone another three if she had had the money.

It was one thing to ride a 125cc lightweight Kawasaki, which was really no more than a heavily souped-up moped, but it was something else entirely to maintain control of a 1450cc Harley-Davidson. Her first three hundred yards on Bjurman’s badly maintained forest track was a regular roller coaster, and she felt like a living gyro. Twice she almost rode into the woods before at the last second she managed to regain control of the hog.

The helmet kept slipping down and masking her vision, even though she had put in some extra stuffing using a piece of leather she’d cut out of Nieminen’s padded vest.

She did not dare stop to adjust the helmet for fear she would not be able to manage the bike’s weight. She was too short to reach the ground with both feet and was afraid the Harley would tip over. If that happened, she would never be able to get it upright again.

Things went more smoothly once she got on the wider gravel road leading to the summer-cabin area. When she turned onto the Strängnäs highway a few minutes later, she risked taking one hand off the handlebars to set the helmet right. Then she gave the bike some gas. She covered the distance to Södertälje in record time, smiling in delight the whole way. Just before she reached Södertälje, two blue-and-yellow police Volvos with their sirens on flew by in the other direction.

The sensible course would be to dump the Harley in Södertälje and let Irene Nesser take the shuttle train into Stockholm, but Salander couldn’t resist the temptation. She turned onto the E4 and accelerated. She did not go over the speed limit-well, not much anyway-but it still felt as though she were in freefall. Not until she reached Älvsjö did she turn off and find her way to the fairground, where she managed to park the beast without tipping it over. She was very sad to leave the bike behind, along with the helmet and the piece of leather from Nieminen’s vest. She walked to the shuttle train. She was seriously chilled. She rode the one stop to Södra station, then walked home to Mosebacke and ran herself a hot bath.

“His name is Alexander Zalachenko,” Björck said. “But officially he doesn’t exist. You won’t find him on the national register.”

Zala. Alexander Zalachenko. Finally a name.

“Who is he and how can I find him?”

“He’s not someone you’d want to find.”

“Tell me anyway.”

“What I’m going to tell you is top secret information. If it came out that I told you this, I’d be sent to prison. It’s one of the most deeply buried secrets we have within the Swedish defence system. You have to understand why it’s so important that you guarantee my anonymity.”

“I’ve already done that,” Blomkvist said impatiently.

“Alexander Zalachenko was born in 1940 in Stalingrad. When he was a year old, the German offensive on the eastern front began. Both of Zalachenko’s parents died in the war. At least that’s what Zalachenko thinks. He doesn’t really know what happened during the war. His earliest memories are of an orphanage in the Ural Mountains.”

Blomkvist made swift notes.

“The orphanage was in a garrison town and was, as it were, sponsored by the Red Army. You might say that Zalachenko got a military education very early. Since the end of the Soviet Union, documents have emerged which show there were experiments to create a cadre of particularly athletic, elite soldiers among the orphans who were being raised by the state. Zalachenko was one of them. To make a long story short, when he was five he was put in an army school. It turned out that he was talented. When he was fifteen, in 1955, he was sent to a military school in Novosibirsk, where together with two thousand other pupils he underwent training similar to Spetsnaz, the Russian elite troops.”

“OK, let’s get to the adult stuff.”

“In 1958, when he was eighteen, he was moved to Minsk, to specialist training with the GRU-Glavnoye razvedyvatelnoye upravlenie, the military intelligence service that is directly subordinate to the army high command, not to be confused with the KGB, the civil secret police. The GRU usually took care of espionage and foreign operations. When he was twenty, Zalachenko was sent to Cuba. It was a training period and he was still only the equivalent of a second lieutenant. But he was there for two years, during the Cuban missile crisis and the invasion at the Bay of Pigs. In 1963 he went back to Minsk for further training. Thereafter he was stationed first in Bulgaria and then in Hungary. In 1965 he was promoted to lieutenant and got his first posting to Western Europe, in Rome, where he served for a year. That was his first undercover assignment. He was a civilian with a fake passport, obviously, and with no contact with the embassy.”

Blomkvist nodded as he wrote. Against his will he was starting to get interested.

“In 1967 he was moved to London. There he organized the execution of a defected KGB agent. Over the next ten years he became one of the GRU’s top agents. He belonged to the real elite of devoted political soldiers. He speaks six languages fluently. He’s worked as a journalist, a photographer, in advertising, as a sailor-you name it. He’s a survival artist, an expert in disguise and deception. He commanded his own agents and organized or carried out his own operations. Several of these operations were contracts for hits, and a large number of them took place in the third world, but he was also involved in extortion, intimidation, and all kinds of other assignments that his superiors needed him to perform. In 1969 he was promoted to captain, in 1972 to major, and in 1975 to lieutenant colonel.”