Read The Girl Who Takes an Eye for an Eye: Continuing Stieg Larsson's Millennium Series for Free Online Page A

ignore it all and set off down the endless corridors with a taller and slightly more pleasant prison officer. The sally port gates were opened automatically by staff in the monitoring centre, who were following their progress via C.C.T.V. cameras in the ceiling. It was a while before they arrived at the visitors’ section, and he was kept waiting for a long time.
    So it was hard to say exactly when he noticed something was amiss.
    It was probably when Olsen appeared. Olsen was sweating profusely and seemed uneasy. He uttered a few polite remarks as he ushered Blomkvist into the visitors’ room at the end of the corridor. Salander was wearing her worn and washed-out prison uniform, which was always ridiculously loose on her. Normally she would stand up when he came in. Now she just sat there, tense and apprehensive. With her head tilted slightly to one side, she was staring past him. She was uncharacteristically still, and answered his questions in monosyllables, never once meeting his eye. In the end he had to ask her if something had happened.
    “That depends on how you look at it,” she said, and he smiled. It was a start, at least.
    “Do you want to tell me more?”
    She did not – “not now, and not in here” – and there was silence. The rain was hammering down on the exercise yard and the wall beyond the barred window. Blomkvist gazed blankly around the room.
    “Do I need to worry?” he said.
    “You certainly do,” she said with a grin. It was hardly the joke he had been hoping for. But it did relieve the tension and he smiled a little too, and asked if there was anything he could help with. For a while neither spoke, and then she said “maybe”, which surprised him. Salander never asked for help unless she badly needed it.
    “Great. I’ll do whatever you want – within reason,” he said.
    “Within reason?”
    She was smirking again.
    “I prefer to avoid criminal activity,” he said. “It would be a shame for both of us to end up in here.”
    “You’d have to settle for a men’s prison, Mikael.”
    “Unless my devastating charm gives me special dispensation to come here. What’s going on?”
    “I have some old lists of names,” she said, “and something isn’t right about them. For example, there’s this guy called Leo Mannheimer.”
    “Leo Mannheimer.”
    “Right, he’s thirty-six. It’ll take you no time to find him on the net.”
    “That’s a start. What should I be looking for?”
    Salander glanced around the visitors’ room, as if Blomkvist might find there what he was meant to be looking for. Then she turned and with an absent look said:
    “I don’t honestly know.”
    “Am I supposed to believe that?”
    “Broadly, yes.”
    “Broadly?”
    He felt a stab of irritation.
    “O.K., so you don’t know. But you want him checked out. Has he done anything in particular? Or does he just seem shady?”
    “You probably know the securities firm he works for. But I’d prefer your investigation to be unbiased.”
    “Come on,” he said. “I need more than that. What are those lists you mentioned?”
    “Lists of names.”
    She was being so cryptic and vague that for a moment he imagined she was simply winding him up, and they would soon go back to chatting, as they had the previous Friday. Instead, Salander stood up and called for the guard and said that she wanted to be taken back to her unit.
    “You’ve got to be joking.”
    “I don’t joke,” she said.
    He wanted to curse and shout and tell her how many hours it had taken him to travel to Flodberga and back, and that he could easily find better things to do with himself on a Friday evening. But he knew it was pointless. So he stood and hugged her, and with a little fatherly authority told her to take care of herself. “Maybe,” she said, and with any luck she was being ironic. Already she seemed lost in other thoughts.
    He watched as she was led away by Olsen. He did not like the quiet determination in her step.