Free The Girl in the Spider's Web (Millennium series Book 4) by David Lagercrantz

when he and Blomkvist met over lunch at Gondolen about six months ago. It was a spring day, a Saturday, and Armansky had offered to buy beer and snaps and all the rest of it. Even though they were ostensibly meeting as two old friends, there was no doubt that Armansky only wanted to talk about Salander and, with the help of a few drinks, indulge in a spot of sentimentality.
    Among other things, Armansky told Blomkvist that his company, Milton Security, had supplied a number of personal alarms to a nursing home in Högdalen. Good equipment, he said.
    But not even the best equipment in the world will help you if the electricity goes off and nobody can be bothered to fix it, and that is precisely what happened. There was a power outage at the home late one evening, and in the course of that night one of the residents, a lady called Rut Åkerman, fell and broke her femur, and she lay there for hour after hour pressing the button on her alarm to no avail. By the morning she was in a critical condition and, since the papers were just then focusing heavily on negligence in care for the elderly, the whole thing became a big deal.
    Happily, the old lady pulled through. But she also happened to be the mother of a senior figure in the Swedish Democrats party. When it emerged on the party’s website, Unpixelated, that Armansky was an Arab – which incidentally he was not at all, although it was true that he was occasionally called “the Arab” in jest – there was an explosion in the posted comments. Hundreds of anonymous writers said that’s what happens “when you let coons supply your technology” and Armansky took it very badly, especially when the trolling affected his family.
    But then suddenly, as if by magic, all those posts were no longer anonymous. You could see the names and addresses of those responsible, their job titles and how old they were. It was beautifully neat – as if they had all filled in a form. You could say that the entire site had been unpixelated, and of course it became clear that the posts did not just come from crackpots, but also from many established citizens, even some of Armansky’s competitors in the security business, and for a long time the hitherto-anonymous perpetrators were completely powerless. They could not understand what had happened. Eventually someone managed to close the site down. But nobody had any idea who lay behind the attack – except for Dragan Armansky himself.
    “It was classic Salander,” he said. “You know, I hadn’t heard from her for ages and was convinced that she couldn’t give a damn about me, or anybody else for that matter. But then this happened, and it was fantastic. She had stood up for me. I sent an effusive thanks by email, and to my surprise an answer came back. Do you know what she wrote?”
    “No.”
    “Just one single sentence: ‘How the hell can you protect that creep Sandvall at the Östermalm clinic?’”
    “And who’s Sandvall?”
    “A plastic surgeon to whom we gave personal protection because he’d been threatened. He’d pawed a young Estonian woman on whom he had performed breast surgery and she happened to be the girlfriend of a known criminal.”
    “Oops.”
    “Precisely. Not such a clever thing to do. I answered Salander to say that I didn’t think Sandvall was one of God’s little angels any more than she did. But I pointed out that we don’t have the right to make that kind of judgement. Even male chauvinist pigs are entitled to some degree of security. Since Sandvall was under serious threat and asked for our help, we gave it to him – at double the usual rate.”
    “But Salander didn’t buy your argument?”
    “Well, she didn’t reply – at least not by email. But I suppose you could say she gave a different sort of answer.”
    “What do you mean?”
    “She marched up to our guards at the clinic and ordered them to keep calm. I think she even gave them my regards. Then she walked straight past all the patients