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

and nurses and doctors, went into Sandvall’s office and broke three of his fingers. Then she made the most terrifying threats against him.”
    “Jesus!”
    “That’s putting it mildly. Stark staring mad. I mean, to do something like that in front of so many witnesses, and in a doctor’s office to boot. And of course there was a huge fuss afterwards – a lot of brouhaha about lawsuits and prosecutions and the whole damn thing. You can just imagine: breaking the fingers of a surgeon who’s lined up to perform a string of lucrative nips and tucks … It’s the kind of thing that gets top lawyers seeing dollar signs everywhere.”
    “What happened?”
    “Nothing. It all came to nothing, apparently because the surgeon himself didn’t want to take things any further. But still, Mikael, it was insane. No person in their right mind steams into a top surgeon’s office in broad daylight and breaks his fingers. Not even Salander.”
    Blomkvist actually thought that it sounded pretty logical, according to Salander logic, that is, a subject in which he was more or less expert. He did not doubt for one second that that doctor had done far worse than grope the wrong girlfriend. But even so he could not help wondering if Salander hadn’t screwed up in this case, if only on the score of risk analysis.
    It occurred to him that she might have
wanted
to get into trouble again, maybe to put some spice back into her life. But that was probably unfair. He knew nothing of her motives or her current life. As the storm rattled the windowpanes and he sat there in front of his computer Googling Frans Balder, he tried to see beauty in the fact that they had now bumped into each other in this indirect way. It would seem that Salander was the same as ever and perhaps – who knows? – she had given him a story. Linus Brandell had irritated him from the word go. But when Salander dropped into the story, he saw it all with new eyes. If she had taken the time to help Frans Balder then he could at least take a closer look at it, and with some luck find out a bit more about Salander at the same time.
    Why had she got herself involved in the first place?
    She was not just some itinerant I.T. consultant after all. Yes, she could fly into a rage over life’s injustices, but for a woman who had no qualms about hacking to get indignant about a computer breach, that was a little bit surprising. Breaking the fingers of a plastic surgeon, fine! But hackers? That was very much like throwing stones in glass houses.
    There must be some backstory. Maybe she and Balder knew each other. It was not inconceivable and so he tried Googling their names together, but without getting any hits, at least none that had any relevance.
    He focused on Frans Balder. The professor’s name generated two million hits but most of them were scientific articles and commentaries. It did not seem as if Balder gave interviews, and because of that, there was a sort of mythological gloss over all of the details of his life – as if they had been romanticized by admiring students.
    Apparently it had been assumed that Balder was more or less mentally disabled as a child until one day he walked into the headmaster’s office at his school on Ekerö island and pointed out a mistake in the ninth-grade maths book to do with so-called imaginary numbers. The mistake was corrected in subsequent editions and the following spring Balder won a national mathematics competition. He was reported as being able to speak backwards and create his own long palindromes. In an early school essay which was later published on the net he took a critical view of H.G. Wells’ novel
The War of the Worlds
on the grounds that he could not understand how beings superior to us in every way could fail to grasp something so basic as the differences between the bacterial flora on Mars and on Earth.
    After graduating from secondary school he studied computer sciences at Imperial College in London and defended his