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

you can drag yourself down to the Bishops Arms across the street and meet me there.”
    Blomkvist was irritated. It wasn’t just the bossy tone. It was the intrusion on his home turf.
    “The telephone will do just fine.”
    “It’s not something which should be discussed on an open line.”
    “Why do I feel so tired when I talk to you, Linus?”
    “Maybe you’ve had a bad day.”
    “I
have
had a bad day. You’re right about that.”
    “There you go. Come down to the Bishop and I’ll buy you a beer and tell you something amazing.”
    Blomkvist wanted only to snap: “Stop telling me what to do!” Yet without knowing why, or perhaps because he didn’t have anything better to do than to sit in his attic apartment and brood over his future he said, “I pay for my own beers. But O.K., I’m coming.”
    “A wise decision.”
    “But, Linus …”
    “Yes?”
    “If you get long-winded and give me a load of wild conspiracy theories to the effect that Elvis is alive and you know who shot Olof Palme, then I’m coming straight home.”
    “Fair enough,” Brandell said.

CHAPTER 3
    20.xi
    Edwin Needham – Ed the Ned, as he was sometimes called – was not the most highly paid security technician in the U.S., but he may have been the best. He grew up in South Boston, Dorchester, and his father had been a monumental good-for-nothing, a drunk who took on casual work in the harbour but often disappeared on binges which not infrequently landed him in jail or in hospital. Yet these benders were the family’s best time, a sort of breathing space. When Ed’s father could be bothered to be around he would beat his mother black and blue. Sometimes she would spend hours or even whole days locked inside the toilet, crying and shaking. Nobody was very surprised when she died from internal bleeding at only forty-six, or when Ed’s older sister became a crack addict, still less when the remains of the family stood teetering on the brink of homelessness soon afterwards.
    Ed’s childhood paved the way for a life of trouble, and during his teenage years he belonged to a gang who called themselves “The Fuckers”. They were the terror of Dorchester, and engaged in gang warfare, assault and robbing grocery stores. There was something brutal about Ed’s appearance from an early age and this was not improved by the fact that he never smiled and was missing two upper teeth. He was sturdy, tall and fearless, and his face usually bore the traces of brawls with his father or gang fights. Most of the teachers at his school were scared to death of him. All were convinced that he would end up in jail or with a bullet in his head. But there were some adults who began to take an interest in him – no doubt because they discovered that there was more than aggression and violence in his intense blue eyes.
    Ed had an irrepressible thirst for knowledge, an energy which meant that he could devour a book with the same vigour with which he could trash the inside of a public bus. Often he was reluctant to go home at the end of the school day. He liked to stay on in what was known as the technology room, where there were a couple of computers. He would sit there for hours. A physics teacher with the Swedish-sounding name of Larson noticed how good he was with machines, and after social services got involved he was awarded a scholarship and transferred to a school with more motivated students.
    He began to excel at his studies and was given more scholarships and distinctions and eventually – something of a miracle in view of the odds against him – he went on to study Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at M.I.T. In his doctoral thesis he explored some specific fears around new asymmetric cryptosystems like R.S.A., and he then went on to senior positions at Microsoft and Cisco before being recruited by the National Security Agency at Fort Meade in Maryland.
    He did not have the ideal C.V. for the job, even leaving aside his criminal