for the first time in her life salander had a bustline that made her - when she glanced at herself in the full-length mirror - catch her breath. the breasts were as fake as monica sholes' identity. they were made of latex and had been bought in copenhagen where the transvestites shopped.

she was ready for battle.

just after 9:00 she walked two blocks to the venerable zimmertal hotel, where she booked a room in monica sholes' name. she gave a generous tip to a boy who carried up her suitcase (which contained her travel bag). the suite was a small one, costing 22,000 kronor a day. she had booked it for one night. when she was alone she took a look around. she had a dazzling view of lake zurich, which didn't interest her in the least. but she did spend close to five minutes examining herself in the mirror. she saw a total stranger. big-busted monica sholes in a blonde page-boy wig, wearing more make-up than lisbeth salander dreamed of using in a whole month. she looked... different.

at 9:30 she had breakfast in the hotel bar: two cups of coffee and a bagel with jam. the cost was 210 kronor. are these people soft in the head?

just before 10:00 monica sholes set down her coffee cup, opened her mobile, and punched in the number of a modem uplink in hawaii. after three rings, the handshaking tone began. the modem was connected. monica sholes replied by punching in a six-digit code on her mobile and texting a message containing instructions to start a programme that salander had written especially for this purpose.

in honolulu the programme came to life on an anonymous home page on a server that was officially located at the university. the programme was simple. its only function was to send instructions to start another programme in another server, which in this case was a perfectly ordinary commercial isp offering internet services in holland. the function of that programme, in turn, was to look for the mirrored hard drive belonging to hans-erik wennerstrom and take command of the programme that showed the contents of his approximately 3,000 bank accounts around the world.

there was only one account of any interest. salander had noted that wennerstrom looked at the account a couple of times each week. if he turned on his computer and looked at that particular file, everything would appear to be normal. the programme showed small changes, which were to be expected, based on normal fluctuations in the account during the past six months. if during the next forty-eight hours wennerstrom should go in and ask to have the funds paid out or moved from the account, the programme would dutifully report that it had been done. in reality, the change would have occurred only on the mirrored hard drive in holland.

monica sholes switched off her mobile the moment she heard four short tones confirming that the programme had started.

she left the zimmertal hotel and walked over to bank hauser general, across the street, where she had made an appointment to see herr wagner, the general manager, at 10:00. she was there three minutes ahead of schedule, and she spent the waiting time posing in front of the surveillance camera, which took her picture as she walked into the department with offices for discreet private consultations.

"i need some assistance with a number of transactions," she said in oxford english. when she opened her briefcase, she let drop a pen from the zimmertal hotel, and herr wagner politely retrieved it for her. she gave him an arch smile and wrote an account number on the notepad on the desk in front of her.

herr wagner pigeonholed her as the spoiled daughter, or possibly mistress, of some bigshot.

"there are a number of accounts at the bank of kroenenfeld in the cayman islands. automatic transfer can be done by sequential clearing codes," she said.

"fraulein sholes, naturally you have all the required clearing codes?" he asked.

"aber naturlich," she replied with such a heavy accent that it was obvious she had only school-level german.

she started reciting several series of sixteen-digit numbers without once referring to any papers. herr wagner saw that it was going to be a long morning, but for a 4 percent commission on the transactions, he was prepared to skip lunch, and he was going to have to revise his pigeonhole for fraulein sholes.

she did not leave bank hauser general until just past noon, slightly later than planned, and she walked back to the zimmertal. she put in an appearance at the front desk before she went up to her room and took off the clothes she had bought. she kept on the latex breasts but replaced the page-boy wig with irene nesser's shoulder-length blonde hair. she put on more familiar clothes: boots with stiletto heels, black trousers, a simple shirt, and a nice black leather jacket from malungsboden in stockholm. she studied herself in the mirror. not unkempt by any means, but she was no longer an heiress. before irene nesser left the room, she sorted through a number of bonds, which she placed inside a thin portfolio.

at 1:05, a few minutes behind schedule, she went into bank dorffmann, about seventy yards away from bank hauser general. irene nesser had made an appointment in advance with a herr hasselmann. she apologised for being late. she spoke impeccable german with a norwegian accent.

"no problem at all, fraulein," herr hasselmann said. "how can i be of service?"

"i would like to open an account. i have a number of private bonds that i'd like to convert."

irene nesser placed her portfolio on the desk in front of him.

herr hasselmann examined the contents, hastily at first, and then more slowly. he raised an eyebrow and smiled politely.

she opened five numbered accounts, which she could access via the internet and which were owned by an apparently anonymous post-office-box company in gibraltar. a broker had set them up for her for 50,000 kronor of the money she had borrowed from blomkvist. she cashed in fifty of the bonds and deposited the money in the accounts. each bond was worth the equivalent of one million kronor.

her business at the bank dorffmann also took more time than expected, so now she was even more behind on her schedule. she had no chance to take care of her final transactions before the banks closed for the day. so irene nesser returned to the matterhorn hotel, where she spent an hour hanging around to establish her presence. but she had a headache and went to bed early. she bought some aspirin at the front desk and ordered a wake-up call for 8:00 a.m. then she went back to her room.

it was close to 5:00 p.m., and all the banks in europe were closed for business. but the banks in north and south america were open. she booted up her powerbook and uplinked to the net through her mobile. she spent an hour emptying the numbered accounts she had opened at bank dorffmann earlier in the day.

she divided the money up into small amounts and used it to pay invoices for a large number of fictional companies around the world. when she was done, the money had strangely enough been transferred back to the bank of kroenenfeld in the cayman islands, but this time to an entirely different account than the one from which it had been withdrawn earlier that day.

irene nesser considered this first stage to be secure and almost impossible to trace. she made one payment from the account: the sum of nearly one million kronor was deposited into an account linked to a credit card that she had in her wallet. the account was owned by wasp enterprises, registered in gibraltar.

several minutes later a girl with blonde page-boy hair left the matterhorn by a door into the hotel bar. monica sholes walked to the zimmertal hotel, nodded politely to the desk clerk, and took the lift up to her room.

there she took her time putting on monica sholes' combat uniform, touching up her make-up, and applying an extra layer of skin cream to the tattoo before she went down to the hotel restaurant and had an insanely delicious fish dinner. she ordered a bottle of vintage wine that she had never heard of before though it cost 1,200 kronor, drank one glass, and nonchalantly left the rest before she went into the hotel bar. she left absurd tips, which certainly made the staff notice her.

she spent quite a while allowing herself to be picked up by a drunk young italian with an aristocratic name which she did not bother to remember. they shared two bottles of champagne, of which she drank almost one glass.

around 11:00 her intoxicated suitor leaned forward and boldly squeezed her breast. she moved his hand down to the table, feeling pleased. he did not seem to have noticed that he was squeezing soft latex. at times they were so loud that they caused a certain amount of irritation among the other guests. just before midnight, when monica sholes noticed that a hall porter was keeping a stern eye on them, she helped her italian boyfriend up to his room.

when he went to the bathroom, she poured one last glass of wine. she opened a folded piece of paper and spiked the wine with a crushed rohypnol sleeping tablet. he passed out in a miserable heap on the bed within a minute after she drank a toast with him. she loosened his tie, pulled off his shoes, and drew a cover over him. she wiped the bottle clean, then washed the glasses in the bathroom and wiped them off too before going back to her room.

monica sholes had breakfast in her room at 6:00 and checked out of the zimmertal at 6:55. before leaving her room, she spent five minutes wiping off fingerprints from the door handles, wardrobes, toilet, telephone, and other objects in the room that she had touched.

irene nesser checked out of the matterhorn around 8:30, shortly after the wake-up call. she took a taxi and left her luggage in a locker at the railway station. then she spent the next few hours visiting nine private banks, where she distributed some of the private bonds from the cayman islands. by 3:00 in the afternoon she had converted about 10 percent of the bonds into cash, which she deposited in thirty numbered accounts. the rest of the bonds she bundled up and put in a safe-deposit box.

irene nesser would need to make several more visits to zurich, but there was no immediate hurry.

at 4:30 that afternoon irene nesser took a taxi to the airport, where she went into the ladies' room and cut up monica sholes' passport into little pieces, flushing them down the toilet. the credit card she also cut up and put the bits in five different rubbish bins, and the scissors too. after september 11 it was not a good idea to attract attention by having any sharp objects in your baggage.

irene nesser took lufthansa flight gd890 to oslo and caught the airport bus to the oslo train station, where she went into the ladies' room and sorted through her clothes. she placed all items belonging to the monica sholes persona - the page-boy wig and the designer clothes - in three plastic bags and tossed them into three different rubbish containers and wastebaskets in the train station. she put the empty samsonite suitcase in an unlocked locker. the gold chain and earrings were designer jewellery that could be traced; they disappeared down a drain in the street outside the station.

after a moment of anxious hesitation, irene nesser decided to keep the fake latex breasts.

by then she did not have much time and took on some fuel in the form of a hamburger from mcdonald's while she transferred the contents of the luxury leather briefcase to her travel bag. when she left, the empty briefcase remained under the table. she bought a latte to go at a kiosk and ran to catch the night train to stockholm. she arrived as the doors were closing. she had booked a private sleeping berth.

when she locked the door to her compartment, she could feel that for the first time in two days, her adrenaline levels had returned to normal. she opened the compartment window and defied the no-smoking regulations. she stood there sipping at her coffee as the train rolled out of oslo.

she ran through her checklist to be sure that she had forgotten no detail. after a moment she frowned and rummaged through her jacket pockets. she took out the complimentary pen from the zimmertal hotel and studied it for several minutes before she tossed it out of the window.

after fifteen minutes she crept into bed and fell asleep.

epilogue: final audit

thursday, november 27 - tuesday, december 30

millennium's special report on hans-erik wennerstrom took up all of forty-six pages of the magazine and exploded like a time bomb the last week of november. the main story appeared under the joint byline of mikael blomkvist and erika berger. for the first few hours the media did not know how to handle the scoop. a similar story just a year earlier had resulted in blomkvist being convicted of libel, and it had also apparently resulted in his being dismissed from millennium. for that reason his credibility was regarded as rather low. now the same magazine was back with a story by the same journalist containing much more serious allegations than the article for which he had run into so much trouble. some parts of the report were so absurd that they defied common sense. the swedish media sat and waited, filled with mistrust.

but that evening she on tv4 led off with an eleven-minute summary of the highlights in blomkvist's accusations. berger had lunched with the host several days earlier and given her an advance exclusive.

tv4's brutal profile scooped the state-run news channels, which did not clamber on to the bandwagon until the 9:00 news. by then the tt wire service had also sent out its first wire with the cautious headline: convicted journalist accuses financier of serious crime. the text was a rewrite of the tv story, but the fact that tt addressed the subject at all unleashed feverish activity at the conservative morning newspaper and at a dozen of the larger regional papers as they reset their front pages before the presses started rolling. up until then, the papers had more or less decided to ignore the millennium allegations.

the liberal morning newspaper commented on millennium's scoop in the form of an editorial, written personally by the editor in chief, earlier in the afternoon. the editor in chief then went to a dinner party as tv4 started broadcasting its news programme. he dismissed his secretary's frantic calls that there "might be something" to blomkvist's claims with these later famous words: "nonsense - if there were, our financial reporters would have found out about it long ago." consequently, the liberal editor in chief's editorial was the only media voice in the country that butchered millennium's claims. the editorial contained phrases such as: personal vendetta, criminally sloppy journalism, and demands that measures be taken against indictable allegations regarding decent citizens. but that was the only contribution the editor in chief made during the debate.