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

thesis on algorithms in neural networks, which was considered revolutionary. He became the youngest ever professor at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm and was elected to the Royal Swedish Academy of Engineering Sciences. These days he was regarded as a world authority on the hypothetical concept of “technological singularity”, the state at which computer intelligence will have overtaken our own.
    In most photographs he looked like a dishevelled troll with small eyes, his hair standing on end. Yet he married the glamorous actress Hanna Lind. The couple had a son who, according to evening newspaper coverage, under the headline HANNA’S GREAT SORROW , was mentally disabled, even though the boy did not – at least not in the picture accompanying the article – look in the least bit impaired. The marriage fell apart and, amidst a heated custody battle in Nacka district court, the
enfant terrible
of the theatre, Lasse Westman, stepped into the fray to declare aggressively that Balder should not be allowed to look after his son at all because he cared more about “the intelligence of computers than that of children”. Blomkvist concentrated his efforts on trying to understand Balder’s research, and for a long time he sat engrossed in a complicated text about quantum processors in computers.
    Afterwards he went into Documents and opened a file he had created a year or so earlier. It was called LISBETH STUFF . He had no idea whether she was still hacking into his computer, but he could not help hoping that she did and wondered if he should not after all type out a little greeting. Long, personal letters were not her thing. He would do better to go for something brisk and a little bit cryptic. He wrote:
    

CHAPTER 5
    20.xi
    The words blinked onto the computer screen:
    
    Plague gave a hoarse, almost deranged yell, and that may have been unwise. But even if the neighbours had happened to hear, they could not have dreamed what it was about. Plague’s home was not an obvious setting for high-level international security coups.
    It felt more like a place where a social welfare case might hang out. Plague lived on Högklintavägen in Sundbyberg, a markedly unglamorous area with dull, four-storey, faded brick houses, and the apartment itself had nothing much going for it. It had a sour, stale smell, and his desk was covered in all sorts of rubbish, McDonald’s containers and Coca-Cola cans, crumpled-up pages from notebooks, unwashed coffee cups and empty sweet packets. Even though some had actually made it into the wastepaper basket – which had not been emptied for weeks – you could hardly take a step in the room without getting crumbs or grit under your feet. But none of this would have surprised anyone who knew him.
    Plague was not a man who normally showered or changed his clothes much. He spent his whole life in front of the computer, even when he was not working: a giant of a man and overweight, bloated and unkempt, with an attempt at an imperial beard that had long since turned into a shapeless thicket. His posture was dreadful and he had a habit of groaning when he moved. But the man had other talents.
    He was a wizard on the computer, a hacker who flew unconstrained through cyberspace and was probably second only to one person in the field, a woman in this particular case. The mere sight of his fingers dancing across the keyboard was a joy to behold. He was as light and nimble on the net as he was heavy and clumsy in the other, more material world, and as a neighbour somewhere upstairs, presumably Herr Jansson, now banged on the floor, he answered the message he had received:
    
    Then he leaned back with a delighted smile and tried to run through in his mind the sequence of events, savouring the triumph for a little while longer before going on to pump