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

quantum computing and neural networks. He has an amazingly cool, back-to-front brain. Thinks along completely unorthodox, ground-breaking lines, and as you can probably imagine the computer industry’s been chasing him for years. But for a long time Balder refused to let himself be recruited. He wanted to work alone. Well, not altogether alone – he’s always had assistants whom he’s driven into the ground. He wants results, and he’s always saying: ‘Nothing is impossible. Our job is to push back the frontiers, blah blah blah.’ But people listen to him. They’ll do anything for him. They’ll just about die for him. To us nerds he is God Almighty.”
    “I can hear that.”
    “But don’t think that I’m some star-struck admirer, not at all. There’s a price to be paid, I know that better than anyone. You can do great things with him. But you can also go to pieces. Balder isn’t even allowed to look after his own son. He messed up in some unforgivable way. There are a lot of different stories, assistants who’ve hit the wall and wrecked their lives and God knows what. But although he’s always been obsessive he’s never behaved like this before. I just know he’s onto something big.”
    “You just know that.”
    “You’ve got to understand, he’s not normally a paranoid person. Quite the opposite – he’s never been anywhere near paranoid enough, given the level of the things he’s been dealing with. But now he’s locked himself into his house and hardly goes out. He seems afraid and normally he really doesn’t do scared.”
    “And he was working on computer games?” Blomkvist said, without hiding his scepticism.
    “Well … since he knew that we were all gaming freaks he probably thought that we should get to work on something that we liked. But his A.I. program was also right for that business. It was a perfect testing environment and we got fantastic results. We broke new ground. It was just that—”
    “Get to the point, Linus.”
    “The thing is that Frans and his lawyers wrote a patent application for the most innovative parts of the technology, and that’s when the first shock came. A Russian engineer at Truegames had thrown together an application just before, which blocked our patent, and that can hardly have been a coincidence. But that didn’t really matter. The patent was only a paper tiger. The interesting thing was how the hell they had managed to find out about what we’d been doing. Since we were all devoted to Frans even to the point of death, there was actually only one possibility: we must have been hacked, in spite of all our security measures.”
    “Is that when you got in touch with the Security Police and the National Defence Radio Establishment?”
    “Not at first. Balder is not too keen on people who wear ties and work from nine to five. He prefers obsessive idiots who are glued to their computers all night long, so instead he got in touch with some weirdo hacker he had met somewhere and she said straight away that we’d had a breach. Not that she seemed particularly credible. I wouldn’t have hired her, if you see what I mean, and perhaps she was just talking drivel. But her main conclusions were nevertheless subsequently borne out by people at the N.D.R.E.”
    “But no-one knew who had hacked you?”
    “No, no, trying to trace hacker breaches is often a complete waste of time. But they must have been professionals. We had done a lot of work on our I.T. security.”
    “And now you suspect that Balder may have found out something more about it?”
    “Definitely. Otherwise he wouldn’t be behaving so strangely. I’m convinced he got wind of something at Solifon.”
    “Is that where he worked?”
    “Yes, oddly enough. As I told you before, Balder had previously refused to let himself be tied up by the big computer giants. No-one has ever banged on as much as he did about being an outsider, about the importance of being independent and not being a slave to