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

behaviour as a teenager. He had smoked a lot of grass at college and flirted with socialist or even anarchist ideals, and had been arrested twice for assault – nothing major, just bar fights. He still had a volcanic temper and everyone who knew him thought better of crossing him.
    But at the N.S.A. they recognized his other qualities. Besides which it was the autumn of 2001. The American security services were so desperate for computer technicians that they hired pretty much anybody. During the ensuing years nobody questioned Needham’s loyalty – or patriotism, for that matter – and if anyone thought to do so, his advantages always outweighed his shortcomings.
    Needham was not just amazingly gifted. There was an obsessive streak to his character, a manic precision and a furious efficiency which boded well for a man in charge of building I.T. security at America’s most highly classified agency. Nobody was damn well going to crack his system. It was a matter of personal pride for him. At Fort Meade he quickly made himself indispensable, to the point where people were constantly lining up to consult him. Not a few were terrified of him and he was often verbally abusive. He had even told the head of the N.S.A. himself, the legendary Admiral Charles O’Connor, to go to hell.
    “Use your own busy fucking head for things you might just be able to comprehend,” Needham had roared when the admiral attempted to comment on his work.
    But O’Connor and everyone else let it happen. They knew that Needham screamed and yelled for the right reasons – because colleagues had been careless about security regulations, or because they were talking about things beyond their understanding. Not once did he interfere in the rest of the agency’s work, even though his level of clearance gave him access to pretty much everything, and even though in recent years the agency had found itself at the centre of a heated storm of opinion with advocates of both the right and the left seeing the N.S.A. as the devil incarnate, as Orwell’s Big Brother. As far as Needham was concerned, the organization could do whatever the hell it wanted, so long as his security systems remained rigorous and intact. And since he did not yet have a family he more or less lived at the office.
    Apart from the occasional drinking session, during which he sometimes turned alarmingly sentimental about his past, there was no suggestion that he had ever told outsiders what he was working on. In that other world he remained as silent as the grave and, if ever questioned about his profession, he stuck to a well-rehearsed cover story.
    It was not by chance, nor was it the result of intrigue or manipulation, that he had risen through the ranks and become the N.S.A.’s most senior security chief. Needham and his team had tightened internal surveillance “so that no new whistle-blowers can pop up and punch us on the nose” and during countless sleepless nights created something he alternately called “an unbreakable wall” or “a ferocious little bloodhound”.
    “No fucker can get in, and no fucker can dig around in there without permission,” he said. And he was enormously proud of that.
    He had been proud, that is, until that disastrous morning in November. The day had begun beautiful and clear. Needham, who had put on quite a belly over the years, came waddling over from the coffee machine in his characteristic way. Because of his seniority he completely ignored dress codes. He was wearing jeans and a red-checked lumberjack shirt, not quite buttoned at the waist, and he sighed as he settled down at his computer. He was not feeling great. His back and right knee hurt and he cursed the fact that his long-time colleague, Alona Casales, had managed to persuade him to come out for a run the night before. Sheer sadism on her part.
    Luckily there was nothing super-urgent to deal with. He only had to send an internal memo with some new procedures for those in charge of