Saturday, November 1–Tuesday, November 25

Salander has spent four weeks relentlessly pursuing her idea. Because Blomkvist has also been busy, they have had only intermittent contact. She keeps going over the details to be certain everything is correct, but she is still not sure she understands how it is all connected. Wennerstrom is rich but not as rich as the analysts say he is. He has some large, legitimate, Swiss and American holdings—but he is also involved in the illegal weapons trade, money laundering, and other unorthodox business dealings in Russia and Colombia. He also has an offshore bank account.

When she sees an e-mail from Wennerstrom asking if the rumors about Millennium are true, she tells Blomkvist and he immediately gets extra security for the offices and books a new printer for this issue in case of sabotage. Salander asks to meet Blomkvist and wants to borrow 120,000 kroner for an investment. (She knows he has that much because she hacked his bank account.) He tells her he will be splitting his fee from Vanger with her as soon as he gets it, but she only wants this amount—and gifts on her birthday.

Salander uses part of the money to buy two fake passports and is now in Zurich in the guise of Irene Nesser, a blond Norwegian woman. After she rests, she covers her tattoos and buys another blond wig (in a different style), gets fake nails painted a garish pink, and lots of expensive makeup. She pays with a credit card in the name of Monica Sholes, the name on her fake British passport. She spends a lot of money on everything, including clothes; then she books another room in a hotel in the name of Monica Sholes.

On her computer, Salander starts a program she wrote that will ensure that Wennerstrom will see nothing but normal activity when he checks his bank accounts, even if the activity is not typical. She makes obvious appearances on surveillance cameras and leaves a strong impression at the bank when she asks to have money transferred from her offshore account. The banker is dubious, but all her paperwork is in order. Afterward, she goes back to the first hotel and dresses as Irene Nesser before she goes to another bank and opens five accounts with one million kroner each drawn from the accounts she created earlier. She uses the money to pay the invoices on fictional companies all over the world, and the money ends up in her offshore account—a different account than those in which the money started. She made one payment of one million kroner to her credit card—Wasp Enterprises, a corporation registered in Gibraltar.

Salander leaves her hotel room as Monica Sholes and makes a conspicuous presence at the bar. She picks up a young, aristocratic Italian man, then she knocks him out, wipes away her fingerprints, and goes back to her own room. Monica Sholes checks out of her hotel at 6:55 a.m. after erasing all fingerprints from the room. Irene Nesser checks out of her hotel at 8:30. She spends several hours visiting nine banks and depositing some of the private bonds from the offshore account into thirty numbered accounts. The remaining bonds she places in a safe deposit box. Nesser cuts up Sholes’s passport and flushes it down a toilet at the train station. Then she deposits all of her clothing in sealed bags in trashcans around the station. Salander enters her private sleeper compartment and is satisfied.