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

someone who might have had the gall to order a tired journalist down to the pub. Since he saw no-one apart from Arne and his gang he went up to Amir at the bar.
    Amir was big and fat and jolly, a hard-working father of four who had been running the pub for some years. He and Blomkvist had become good friends. Not because Blomkvist was an especially regular customer, but because they had helped each other out in completely different ways; once or twice when Blomkvist had not had the time to get to the state liquor store and was expecting female company, Amir had supplied him with a couple of bottles of red wine, and Blomkvist in turn had helped a friend of Amir’s, who had no papers, to write letters to the authorities.
    “To what do we owe this honour?” Amir said.
    “I’m meeting someone.”
    “Anyone exciting?”
    “I don’t think so. How’s Sara?”
    Sara was Amir’s wife and had just had a hip operation.
    “Complaining and taking painkillers.”
    “Sounds like hard work. Give her my best.”
    “Will do,” Amir said, and they chatted about this and that.
    But Linus Brandell did not show up and Blomkvist thought it was probably a practical joke. On the other hand there were worse tricks than to have someone lure you down to your local pub, so he stayed for fifteen minutes discussing a number of financial and health-related concerns before he turned and walked towards the door, and that was when Brandell appeared.
    Nobody understood how Gabriella Grane had ended up at Säpo, Swedish Security Police, least of all she herself. She had been the sort of girl for whom everybody had predicted a glittering future. Her old girlfriends from the classy suburb of Djursholm worried that she was thirty-three and neither famous nor wealthy nor married, either to a rich man or to any man at all for that matter.
    “What’s happened to you, Gabriella? Are you going to be a police officer all your life?”
    Most of the time she could not be bothered to argue back, or point out that she was not a police officer but had been head-hunted for the position of analyst, and that these days she was writing far more challenging texts than she ever had at the Foreign Ministry or during her summers as a leader writer for
Svenska Dagbladet
. Apart from which, she was not allowed to talk about most of it in any case. So she might as well keep quiet and simply come to terms with the fact that working for the Swedish Security Police was considered to be about as low as you can go – both by her status-obsessed friends and even more so by her intellectual pals.
    In their eyes, Säpo were a bunch of clumsy right-leaning idiots who went after Kurds and Arabs for what were fundamentally racist reasons, and who had no qualms about committing serious crimes or infringements of civil rights in order to protect former senior Soviet spies. And indeed sometimes she was on their side. There was incompetence in the organization, and values that were unsound, and the Zalachenko affair remained a major blot. But that was not the whole truth. Stimulating and important work was being done as well, especially now after the shake-out, and sometimes she had the impression that it was at Säpo, not in any editorial or lecture hall, that people best understood the upheavals that were taking place across the world. But of course she often asked herself:
How did I end up here, and why have I stayed?
    Presumably some of it was down to flattery. No less a person than Helena Kraft, the newly appointed chief of Säpo at the time, had contacted her and said that after all the disasters and bad press they had to rethink their approach to recruitment. We need to “bring on board the real talents from the universities and, quite honestly Gabriella, there’s no better person than you,” and that was all it had taken.
    Grane was hired as an analyst in counter-espionage and later in the Industry Protection Group. Even though as a young woman, attractive in a slightly