The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest
Page 87

After three days he had tired of their incessant pleading, nagging and knocking on the wall. He could see no other way out. So he unlocked the door one last time and swiftly solved the problem. He asked Valentina to forgive him before he reached out and in one movement broke her neck between the second and third cervical vertebrae. Then he went over to the blonde girl on the bed whose name he did not know. She lay there passively, did not put up any resistance. He carried the bodies downstairs and put them in one of the flooded pits. At last he could feel some sort of peace.
Niedermann had not intended to stay long at the brickworks. He thought he would have to lie low only until the initial police manhunt had died down. He shaved his head and let his beard grow to half an inch, and that altered his appearance. He found a pair of overalls belonging to one of the workers from NorrBygg which were almost big enough to fit him. He put on a Becker's Paint baseball cap and stuffed a folding ruler into a leg pocket. At dusk he drove to the O.K. shop on the hill and bought supplies. He had all the cash he needed from Svavelsjo M.C.'s piggy bank. He looked like any workman stopping on his way home, and nobody seemed to pay him any attention. He shopped once or twice a week at the same time of day. At the O.K. shop they were always perfectly friendly to him.
From the very first day he had spent a considerable amount of time fending off the creatures that inhabited the building. They lived in the walls and came out at night. He could hear them wandering around the workshop.
He barricaded himself in his room. After several days he had had enough. He armed himself with a large knife which he had found in a kitchen drawer and went out to confront the monsters. It had to end.
All of a sudden he discovered that they were retreating. For the first time in his life he had been able to dominate his phantoms. They shrank back when he approached. He could see their deformed bodies and their tails slinking off behind the packing crates and cabinets. He howled at them. They fled.
Relieved, he went back to his warm room and sat up all night, waiting for them to return. They mounted a renewed attack at dawn and he faced them down once more. They fled.
He was teetering between panic and euphoria.
All of his life he had been haunted by these creatures in the dark, and for the very first time he felt that he was in control of the situation. He did nothing. He slept. He ate. He thought. It was peaceful.
The days turned to weeks and spring turned to summer. From his transistor radio and the evening papers he could tell that the hunt for the killer Ronald Niedermann was winding down. He read with interest the reports of the murder of Zalachenko. What a laugh. A psycho had put an end to Zalachenko. In July his interest was again aroused when he followed the reports of Salander's trial. He was appalled when she was acquitted and released. It did not feel right. She was free while he was forced to hide.
He bought the Millennium special issue at the O.K. shop and read all about Salander and Zalachenko and Niedermann. A journalist named Blomkvist had described Niedermann as a pathological murderer and a psychopath. He frowned.
Autumn came suddenly and still he had not made a move. When it got colder he bought an electric heater at the O.K. shop. He did not know what kept him from leaving the brickworks.
Occasionally some young people had driven into the yard and parked there, but no-one had disturbed him or tried to break into the building. In September a car drove up and a man in a blue windcheater had tried the doors and snooped around the property. Niedermann had watched him from the window on the upper floor. The man kept writing in his notebook. He had stayed for twenty minutes before he looked around one last time and got into his car and drove away. Niedermann breathed a sigh of relief. He had no idea who the man was or what business had brought him there, but he appeared to be doing a survey of the property. It did not occur to Niedermann that Zalachenko's death had prompted an inventory of his estate.
He thought a lot about Salander. He had never expected to see her again, but she fascinated and frightened him. He was not afraid of any living person. But his sister  -  his half-sister  -  had made a particular impression on him. No-one else had ever defeated him the way she had done. She had come back to life, even though he had buried her. She had come back and hunted him down. He dreamed about her every night. He would wake up in a cold sweat, and he recognized that she had replaced his usual phantoms.
In October he made a decision. He was not going to leave Sweden before he had found his sister and destroyed her. He did not have a plan, but at least his life now had a purpose. He did not know where she was or how he would trace her. He just sat in his room on the upper floor of the brickworks, staring out of the window, day after day, week after week.
Until one day a burgundy Honda parked outside the building and, to his complete astonishment, he saw Salander get out of the car. God is merciful, he thought. Salander would join the two women whose names he no longer remembered in the pool downstairs. His wait was over, and he could at last get on with his life.
Salander assessed the situation and saw that it was anything but under control. Her brain was working at high speed. Click, click, click. She still held the crowbar in her hand but she knew that it was a feeble weapon against a man who could not feel pain. She was locked inside an area of about a thousand square metres with a murderous robot from hell.
When Niedermann suddenly moved towards her she threw the crowbar at him. He dodged it easily. Salander moved fast. She stepped on to a pallet, swung herself up on to a packing crate and kept climbing, like a monkey, up two more crates. She stopped and looked down at Niedermann, now four metres below her. He was looking up at her and waiting.
"Come down," he said patiently. "You can't escape. The end is inevitable."
She wondered if he had a gun of some sort. Now that would be a problem.
He bent down and picked up a chair and threw it at her. She ducked.
Niedermann was getting annoyed. He put his foot on the pallet and started climbing up after her. She waited until he was almost at the top before she took a running start of two quick steps and jumped across an aisle to land on top of another crate. She swung down to the floor and grabbed the crowbar.
Niedermann was not actually clumsy, but he knew that he could not risk jumping from the stack of crates and perhaps breaking a bone in his foot. He had to climb down carefully and set his feet on the floor. He always had to move slowly and methodically, and he had spent a lifetime mastering his body. He had almost reached the floor when he heard footsteps behind him and turned just in time to block a blow from the crowbar with his shoulder. He lost his grip on the knife.
Salander dropped the crowbar just as she had delivered the blow. She did not have time to pick up the knife, but kicked it away from him along the pallets, dodging a backhand blow from his huge fist and retreating back up on to the packing crates on the other side of the aisle. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Niedermann reach for her. Quick as lightning she pulled up her feet. The crates stood in two rows, stacked up three high next to the centre aisle and two high along the outside. She swung down on to the two crates and braced herself, using all the strength in her legs and pushing her back against the crate next to her. It must have weighed two hundred kilos. She felt it begin to move and then tumble down towards the centre aisle.
Niedermann saw the crate coming and threw himself to one side. A corner of the crate struck him on the chest, but he seemed not to have been injured. He picked himself up. She was resisting. He started climbing up after her. His head was just appearing over the third crate when she kicked at him. Her boot struck him with full force in the forehead. He grunted and heaved himself up on top of the packing crates. Salander fled, leaping back to the crates on the other side of the aisle. She dropped over the edge and vanished immediately from his sight. He could hear her footsteps and caught a glimpse of her as she passed through the doorway to the inner workshop.
Salander took an appraising look around. Click. She knew that she did not have a chance. She could survive for as long as she could avoid Niedermann's enormous fists and keep her distance. But when she made a mistake  -  which would happen sooner or later  -  she was dead. She had to evade him. He would only have to grab hold of her once, and the fight would be over.
She needed a weapon.
A pistol. A sub-machine gun. A rocket-propelled grenade. A personnel mine.
Any bloody thing at all.
But there was nothing like that to hand.
She looked everywhere.
No weapons.
Only tools. Click. Her eyes fell on the circular saw, but he was hardly going to lie down on the saw bench. Click. Click. She saw an iron rod that could be used as a spear, but it was probably too heavy for her to handle effectively. Click. She glanced through the door and saw that Niedermann was down from the crates and no more than fifteen metres away. He was coming towards her again. She started to move away from the door. She had maybe five seconds left before Niedermann was upon her. She glanced one last time at the tools.
A weapon... or a hiding place.
Niedermann was in no hurry. He knew that there was no way out and that sooner or later he would catch his sister. But she was dangerous, no doubt about it. She was, after all, Zalachenko's daughter. And he did not want to be injured. It was better to let her run around and wear herself out.
He stopped in the doorway to the inner room and looked around at the jumble of tools, furniture and half-finished floorboards. She was nowhere to be seen.
"I know you're in here. And I'm going to find you."
Niedermann stood still and listened. All he could hear was his own breathing. She was hiding. He smiled. She was challenging him. Her visit had suddenly turned into a game between brother and sister.
Then he heard a clumsy rustling noise from somewhere in the centre of the room. He turned his head but at first could not tell where the sound was coming from. Then he smiled again. In the middle of the floor set slightly apart from the other debris stood a five-metre-long wooden workbench with a row of drawers and sliding cabinet doors beneath it.
He approached the workbench from the side and glanced behind it to make sure that she was not trying to fool him. Nothing there.
She was hiding inside the cabinet. So stupid.
He slid open the first door on the far left.
He instantly heard movement inside the cabinet, from the middle section. He took two quick steps and opened the middle door with a triumphant expression on his face.
Empty.
Then he heard a series of sharp cracks that sounded like pistol shots. The sound was so close that at first he could not tell where it was coming from. He turned to look. Then he felt a strange pressure against his left foot. He felt no pain, but he looked down at the floor just in time to see Salander's hand moving the nail gun over to his right foot.
She was underneath the cabinet.
He stood as if paralysed for the seconds it took her to put the mouth of the nail gun against his boot and fire another five seven-inch nails straight through his foot.
He tried to move.
It took him precious seconds to realize that his feet were nailed solidly to the newly laid plank floor. Salander's hand moved the nail gun back to his left foot. It sounded like an automatic weapon getting shots off in bursts. She managed to shoot in another four nails as reinforcement before he was able to react.
He reached down to grab her hand, but immediately lost his balance and regained it only by bracing himself against the workbench as he heard the nail gun being fired again and again, ka-blam, ka-blam, ka-blam. She was back to his right foot. He saw that she was firing the nails diagonally through his heel and into the floor.
Niedermann howled in sudden rage. He lunged again for Salander's hand.
From her position under the cabinet Salander saw his trouser leg slide up, a sign that he was trying to bend down. She let go of the nail gun. Niedermann saw her hand disappear quick as a lizard beneath the cabinet just before he reached her.
He reached for the nail gun, but the instant he touched it with the tips of his fingers she drew it under the cabinet.
The gap between the floor and the cabinet was about twenty centimetres. With all the strength he could muster he toppled the cabinet on to its back. Salander looked up at him with big eyes and an offended expression. She aimed the nail gun and fired it from a distance of fifty centimetres. The nail hit him in the middle of his shin.
The next instant she dropped the nail gun, rolled fast as lightning away from him and got to her feet beyond his reach. She backed up several feet and stopped.
Niedermann tried to move and again lost his balance, swaying backwards and forwards with his arms flailing. He steadied himself and bent down in rage.
This time he managed to grab hold of the nail gun. He pointed it at Salander and pulled the trigger.
Nothing happened. He looked in dismay at the nail gun and then at Salander again. She looked back at him blankly and held up the plug. In fury he threw the nail gun at her. She dodged to the side.
Then she plugged in the cord again and hauled in the nail gun.
He met Salander's expressionless eyes and was amazed. She had defeated him. She's supernatural. Instinctively he tried to pull one foot from the floor. She's a monster. He could lift his foot only a few millimetres before his boot hit the heads of the nails. They had been driven into his feet at different angles, and to free himself he would have to rip his feet to shreds. Even with his almost superhuman strength he was unable to pull himself loose. For several seconds he swayed back and forth as if he were swimming. He saw a pool of blood slowly forming between his shoes.
Salander sat down on a stool and watched for signs that he might be able to tear his feet loose. Since he could not feel pain, it was a matter of whether he was strong enough to pull the heads of the nails straight through his feet. She sat stock still and observed his struggle for ten minutes. The whole time her eyes were frozen blank. After a while she stood up and walked behind him and held the nail gun to his spine, just below the nape of his neck.