The Girl in the Spider's Web (Millennium series Book 4) Read Free

were reacting strongly to something. His look was intense and clear, as though the veil which always seemed to cover his eyes had been magically drawn aside, and instead of staring inwards at his own complexities, August had apparently understood something uniquely deep and great about that crossing. So Balder ignored the fact that the lights had turned green. He just let his son stand there and observe the scene, and without knowing why, he was overcome by a strong emotion, which he found strange. It was only a look, after all, and not even an especially bright or joyful one at that. Yet it rang a distant bell, stirred something long dormant in his memory. For the first time in an age he felt hopeful.

CHAPTER 2
    20.xi
    Mikael Blomkvist had slept for only a few hours, having stayed up late to read a detective novel by Elizabeth George. Not a particularly sensible thing to do. Ove Levin, the newspaper guru from Serner Media, was due to present a strategy session for
Millennium
magazine later that morning and Blomkvist ought really to be rested and ready for combat.
    But he had no desire to be sensible. Only reluctantly did he get up and make himself an unusually strong cappuccino with his Jura Impressa X7, a machine which had been delivered to his home a while ago with a note saying, “According to you, I don’t know how to use it anyway”. It stood there in the kitchen now like a memorial to a better time. He no longer had any contact with the person who had sent it.
    These days he was hardly stimulated by his work. Over the weekend he had even considered looking around for something new, and that was a pretty drastic idea for a man like Mikael Blomkvist.
Millennium
had been his passion and his life, and many of his life’s best, most dramatic events had occurred in connection with the magazine. But nothing lasts for ever, perhaps not even a love for
Millennium
. Besides, this was not a good time to be owning a magazine dedicated to investigative journalism. All publications with ambitions for greatness were bleeding to death, and he could not help but reflect that while his own vision for
Millennium
may have been beautiful and true on some higher plane, it would not necessarily help the magazine survive. He went into the living room sipping his coffee and looked out at the waters of Riddarfjärden. There was quite a storm blowing out there.
    From an Indian summer, which had kept the city’s outdoor restaurants and cafés open well into October, the weather had turned hellish with gusts of wind and cloudbursts, and people hurried through the streets bent double. Blomkvist had stayed in all weekend, but not only because of the weather. He had been planning revenge on an ambitious scale, but the scheme had come to nothing, and that was not like him, neither the former nor the latter.
    He was not an underdog, and unlike so many other big media figures in Sweden he did not suffer from an inflated ego which needed constant boosting and soothing. On the other hand, he had been through a few tough years. Barely a month ago the financial journalist William Borg had written a piece in Serner’s
Business Life
magazine under the heading: MIKAEL BLOMKVIST’S DAYS ARE OVER .
    The fact that the article had been written in the first place and given such prominence was of course a sign that Blomkvist’s position was still strong. No-one would say that the column was well written or original, and it should have been easy to dismiss as yet another attack by a jealous colleague. But for some reason, incomprehensible in retrospect, the whole thing blew up. At first it might have been interpreted as a spirited discussion about journalism, but gradually the debate began to go off the rails. Although the serious press stayed out of it, all kinds of invective was being spewed out on social media. The offensive came not only from financial journalists and industry types, who had reason to set upon their enemy now that he was temporarily