Chapter 16

ATTENTION: Rating now M for Mature. Alternating torture scenes throughout the chapter. You have been warned.

I'm sorry for disappearing for eight months again. Time flies. Oops…

February 24th – 27th

Her hands were bound ahead of her, stretched out and wedged into a wood vise while the rest of her was attached to a wooden chair with several rolls of duct tape. A single bulb hung from the ceiling, of what she soon saw was an unfinished basement with a thin vapor barrier covering pink insulation. The walls were lined with various woodworking tools and several paint cans had been stacked in a pyramid to the right of her. In the corner there seemed to be a new batch of concrete that had probably been laid recently. Directly in front of her there was a single window leading to the outside, a black garbage bag taped over it puffing in and out slightly.

A way to escape.

She tried to test the tape bonds, only to nearly cry out as pain shot through the right side of her ribs. She hit me with her fucking car, she thought, remembering how one moment she was popping the trunk of her car and the next she was flying into the side of another car before blacking out completely.

Fate, it seemed, was never on her side.

With squirming her way out of her bonds a dead end unless she wanted to risk puncturing a lung, she tried to free her hands, which were stuck palms facing outward against two opposing wood blocks. She tried to get her legs up to push against the edge of workbench, but there was no give to be found at all. It was the strangest, but somehow most effective way to be immobilized she had ever seen. She was at complete liberty to stand up; the chair was not bolted or secured down in any fashion. All Camilla needed to do was to bind her hands and jam them in a wood vise for her to be completely helpless. It didn't help her case at all that she felt like complete crap, either.

In fact, she'd felt like complete shit for the past three days. Kalle was right; the rosebush cuts had become infected. But she was too fucking stubborn to walk into a clinic in her Irene Nesser get-up and get a bottle of antibiotics. She'd been totally fine with sending Jeremy out to buy the codeine pills off the street, but for some reason she hadn't seen the sense of going out and getting something for the cuts. Even some simple penicillin would probably have worked in the earlier stages. Now she could only think of what she was in for if she managed to get out.

And that was a very big 'if' indeed.

Though all she wanted to do was sleep, she refused to let her guard down. Whatever plan her sister had, she wanted to be ready and alert, how ever long it took for her sister to show herself.

With no clock or exterior light source, she could only assume hours had passed since she finally came around that the door to the basement finally opened. She listened as her sister descended all seventeen steps to the bottom, unable to turn around and watch herself.

Two hands suddenly crashed down on her shoulders, but she didn't so much as blink. "Hello sister!"

Lisbeth watched with a stoic expression as her sister hopped up and sat cross-legged on the workbench directly across from her. "You look like someone ran over you with a car. Wait, that was me."

She hadn't changed since they had last seen each other ten years ago. She was short, like both their parents, but still several inches taller than Lisbeth. Her upper body was more muscular and toned, probably from hauling around bodies in Estonia.

But her appearance was wildly unkempt. Her hair was resorting back to its natural red after its latest dye job, but seemed to not have seen so much as a bottle of shampoo in at least a week. Her shirt was wrinkled and looked to have what might have been bloodstains on it.

"Fuck you."

She was completely unfazed. "Fuck you first. Don't you miss our fights when we were little? We were awful little shits."

"There's only one piece of shit here and I'm looking right at it."

"That really stings," she said, placing a hand lightly over where a heart should have been, "Deeply. Even bound in a chair you still try to pick fights with people bigger than you."

She leapt down from the workbench, walking around it slowly in a circle as her fingers traced the wood.

"So how do you like my new crib? It's not really mine; I'm just borrowing it for now. I actually never came down here until I had to find a place to put you. The workbench was a nice streak of luck." At the end of the table she stopped, her hand resting on the crank attached to the vise.

Instantly Lisbeth knew what her sister had in store for her. "I've seen better hell holes."

"Did any of them have your hands stuck a wood vise?" Suddenly Camilla shifted her weight onto the crank and Lisbeth found herself in a world of agony that could barely be hidden behind her usual mask of indifference as her knuckles were crushed together between two blocks of wood.

"Not exactly."

"That's too bad." Another half turn of the vise shot more pain up through her arms. "I think I'm going to go out for a while. After that I'll come back and help you get even more acquainted with this fun little tool."

'No new messages.'

For perhaps the seventh time in the last half hour, Blomkvist stuffed his regular phone into his breast pocket and gave a long sigh. The chair he was sitting in was too plush and reminded him of his two weeks spent in at Söder, so he got up and began to pace through the executive lounge. He didn't think he'd irritated her to the point of being left behind, but he did concede to himself that it was possible. He'd like to think she'd at least send him a message to stop with the texts, though.

Just as he reached into his pocket to check the time, white emergency lights began to flash around the terminal. The few individuals that had fallen asleep looked around in a confused state as the lights became accompanied by a shrill alarm and burly security personnel.

"Attention, Attention. An emergency has been reported in the international terminal. For your safety, please exit the terminal immediately and await further instruction."

Two pairs of boots appeared in front of him as he bent to pick up his own bag. "Mikael Blomkvist?"

He stood then, hauling his bag onto his shoulder and looking at the two officers with skepticism. "That would be me."

The men exchanged glances before the slightly smaller officer said, "Come with us."

The halls leading away from the international terminal were choked with passengers and bags, the three men having to fight their way through the chaos. Through the terminal windows, Mikael thought he could see several K-9 units scouring the perimeter of the airport, police in riot gear not far behind.

The fact that he himself had been singled out had him on edge. What if Lisbeth had been found? Or worse; Camilla? It would certainly explain the newly arrived bomb squad, he thought as he was led through the main security door and into what looked to be a room full of camera feeds.

Modig and Holmberg were sitting in front of a monitor displaying the long-term parking lot.

"Blomkvist."

"Sonja."

Modig pointed to the chair beside her. "Sit."

Blomkvist complied with the order just as the two officers left. He watched as Modig repeatedly played and reversed a particular feed. After a minute she paused the tape and turned to face him.

"About forty-five minutes ago, Lisbeth Salander was abducted from the long-term parking by what appeared to be her sister. We've already put out a kidnapping alert across the country and are setting up checkpoints on all highways going in and out of Stockholm."

And there it was. For forty-five minutes, he'd sat around doing absolutely nothing except calling a phone that had likely been taken or run over. He should have followed her from the very beginning. Now he was at a complete loss. There was no trail of breadcrumbs for him to follow. No car rental records he could use to track either of them down.

He turned from the security monitors to face the only people with a hope for finding Lisbeth. "What have you figured out so far?"

"Based on the looks of the car on these tapes we're looking for a newer black VW Jetta."

"Can you get a plate number?"

"Not off of these tapes. The lighting's too poor. We can enhance it when we take it back to the lab, but even then I'm not going to be optimistic and say that we can pull a full plate number."

"I'm back! How are the hands? Still throbbing or have we passed into the numb stage and need to up the ante a little bit?"

"Cold. You should turn the heater on." Lisbeth could hear her sister's footsteps coming closer to the chair, but she could not move her neck to see exactly where the bitch was.

"Is that a plea for comfort?" A light hand dragged across the tops of her shoulders as Camilla walked around the chair and dropped took a knee in front of Lisbeth. "Things are about to get very uncomfortable for you, sis."

With all the speed and ferocity she had left, Lisbeth jutted her neck out and head-butted her sister squarely on the bridge of her nose. Just as rapidly as she had lashed out, Camilla viciously backhanded her sister before clutching at her bleeding nose.

"That was a very bad idea," she said, rewarding her sister with three full turns of the vise.

While Modig and Holmberg were hunched over the parking lot's security footage, Blomkvist quietly stepped out of the room and pulled his phone from his pocket. If the police couldn't figure out a serial number, then maybe a hacker could.

"Janne. I need another favor."

"Depends. When am I getting paid for the last favor?"

"I'm getting the cash together, but I need more time. This favor directly concerns Wasp."

"Yeah?"

"It's not pretty. Four hours ago she was abducted by her sister right out of Arlanda's long-term parking. Her sister is planning to kill her and I doubt she'll be very humane about it."

"How can I help a fellow hacker in need?"

"Find her. The police think she was abducted by her sister in a black VW Jetta, but that's all they've managed to figure out. "

"That's not much. But I'll try. I need to get in touch with Plague on this. He can help too."

"Pull out all the stops. Talk to whomever you need to. But please help me find her." He repeated.

Somehow she managed to fall asleep after hours of excruciating pain gradually began to fade to a low thrumming throughout her hands and arms, though any slight movement on her part would instantly revive the agony. She was sure she'd been in the basement for at least a day, though it felt infinitely longer. Her mouth was dry and her stomach tight, though if her sister brought any source of food down she would have immediately rejected it.

All she wanted to do was sleep. Her face felt hot yet chills had begun to wrack her body. Even if she gritted her teeth together she couldn't altogether silence her chattering teeth. In the waking hours she spent alone wondered how having her hands slowly crushed would affect the infection that was rapidly defeating her faster than the pain.

She looked down at her hands, now an alarming shade of dark purple. Camilla had turned the vice only four times, yet Lisbeth swore the blocks had come closer together by almost an inch.

She wondered if her sister had any clue she were a hacker and how vital dexterity and maneuverability were to her. There was no telling how many more turns it would take to crush all twenty-seven bones in her hand past the point of repair.

After continuing that train of thought through its various avenues for an hour, she decided to sleep again.

He didn't even pretend he could fall asleep that first night when he booked a room at the Hilton, Annika still under the impression that he was at Sandhamm. At half past three in the morning, TV4 was still running breaking news on the kidnapping, although Lisbeth's name had not been published as Modig had promised. He watched anxiously for any new developments, but hour-by-hour, nothing had changed. He called Modig at least six times until she became so frustrated with his persistence that she blocked his number. She assured him she would call if anything new cropped up, but until then they needed space.

He also began to realize that with each call he was wasting whatever minutes he had left to contact Janne or Plague, who was not answering calls. Blomkvist could only hope he too was also busy with solving where Camilla had taken Lisbeth.

At that point there was little else to do but hope for the best.

By ten the next morning, the news had slightly reverted back to it's regular programming, the kidnapping still being mentioned in the ticker tape and during top of the hour bulletins. Blomkvist sat on the edge of his hotel bed wrapped in the comforter drinking the last of the room's complimentary coffee as traffic cameras displayed the havoc the previous night's rain had wreaked upon the highways outside Stockholm.

He nearly choked on his coffee when the idea came to him. Traffic cameras. Hackers. Hackers tracking the car using traffic cameras. The idea was too perfect to be true, he thought as he dialed three on the pre-paid.

He didn't even wait for a hello. "How many traffic cameras are on the E4?"

"I don't know." The young hacker yawned, "Between where and where?"

"Arlanda and anywhere. Do you think it's possible to track a car using the traffic cam feeds?"

There was a lengthy pause to the extent Blomkvist almost thought the call had dropped.

"Fuck!" Blomkvist yanked the phone from his ear as Janne rattled off a stream of expletives. "Yes Kalle! Yes! That is fucking perfect! Why didn't I think about that? I'm on it!" The hacker dropped the call before Blomkvist could say another word.

Somewhere between fevered dreams and lucid nightmares, she instinctually gasped as icy water was splashed across her face and torso. She narrowed her swollen and bloodshot eyes only to see her sister wearing a large coat and sitting on the bench far enough away that Lisbeth couldn't head-butt her again.

"Just thought I'd wake you up and warn you that the power's been cut off. It's going to get pretty cold down here soon," she said, "I'll be back after I go out and buy some firewood for upstairs."

Lisbeth's eyes never left her sister's as the vise was slowly twisted another turn and a half, accompanied by a barely audible snapping sound. When it was all said and done, Camilla hopped down from the bench and left the basement without a single look or word aimed towards her sister.

Lisbeth waited for what might have been a door upstairs slamming before screaming into the black nothingness before her for the first time.

By what she guessed was the second day of her imprisonment a camera had been hooked up to a support beam in the center of the basement. She could barely see it out of the corner of her eye if she turned her head all the way to the side, a task that was slowly becoming more and more difficult. She couldn't see where it was feeding into or where it was getting its power supply from, but she suspected Camilla's comment about the power was merely one of her many lies to help her introduce a new torture method.

And hypothermia was proving to be just as effective has hand crushing.

Eventually the basement door opened again, and Camilla came down with a smug look on her face.

"You've been down here a while now. No books, no TV, no Internet. Pretty boring if you ask me. So how about I tell you a story?"

"Once there was a time I want fishing, probably…six years ago. I sat out in a boat with Jarrod and Horst for six hours in the Baltic during the summer, not reeling in a damn thing. Every time I got something on the line, I'd reel it in so hard that the line would snap."

"The sixth or seventh time I got something on the line, Horst decided to take my line away from me saying, 'You have to let the fish win a little. Reel it in, then let it out, but then reel it back in a little more.'"

"So while I was sitting upstairs in front of the stove I thought that I should let you win a little. That I should give you a little slack."

Somewhere on the Internet, Lisbeth had once read about the effects of reperfusion syndrome. In the event of the crushing force being suddenly removed from the affected person's limb, the person would often go into a state of euphoria before dying shortly after from renal failure caused by the chemical remains of long-dead cells suddenly overloading the kidneys.

As all the blood came rushing back into her mangled hands, she could find no euphoria and openly howled as her sister watched on with a calculating smile.

Blomkvist was in the main lobby of the Hilton using the guest computer when his pre-paid rang.

"You found the car?"

"I found the car."

"Where?"

"From Arlanda the car pops up on all the cams up until the E18 intersection. At the E18 the car gets off the highway and heads west. It doesn't pop up at the 279, so the car must have gotten off before then. Just in case it switched directions I checked out the 176 cam, and nothing popped up either."

"Brilliant, Janne."

"It gets better. I ran the plates and it turns out that the car belongs to a local parolee named Per-Ake Sandstrom."

"Fuck."

"Problem?"

"I know where Wasp is." Blomkvist waved at an idling cab beneath the guest drop-off, "I have to go. If I don't call in half an hour, call Inspector Jan Bublanski. Tell him the address. You can look it up on your own."

Blomkvist hung up without reply.

With the cab door shut he threw all the bills left in his wallets into the front seat and began directing the driver to the Solna address.

"I just got off the phone with Jarrod. Thirty-eight million seems to have gone missing." Camilla stood behind her, her nails digging into Lisbeth's shoulder to the point of drawing beads of blood. "I think you know where it is."

"Fuck…off."

A knife ripped its way down her spine, slicing through her t-shirt and severing the tape that had kept her bound to the chair for three days. What had once been the only thing preventing her from kicking her sister's ass across the basement floor had suddenly become the only thing holding her upright in a chair that was quickly hooked out from under her.

"Where. Is. It?"

The only thing holding her up now were her hands, trapped so tightly in the vise that her wrists couldn't even dislocate properly as the rest of her body had been swept out from under her.

"I should have backed over you a few more times and then carried on my way. You're too much trouble to keep alive, even for a little while," she said, pacing around beside the workbench.

"You want to leave?" Camilla screamed as her hand dropped to rest on the crank. "Be my guest!"

Six spins were all it took. Lisbeth's hands slipped free of the wood vise as she fell backwards to the ground, unable to move a single muscle. Her hands felt like they were being attacked by the pins and needles from hell as blood rushed back into the mangled veins and arteries.

Her sister loomed less than a foot away, staring down at her with something between fascination and disgust.

Lisbeth didn't even have the strength to roll away as her sister's shoe collided with her side ribs. "Go!"

"Go!" Another kick and this time they both heard the telltale crack. This seemed to egg her on, sending blow after blow into her sister's side. "Go! Get up! Fight back!"

And then the kicks stopped.

"Fucking pathetic." Her shoe was now bearing down on the side of Lisbeth's skull, just above her ear. Eight pounds of pressure and it would all be over. "Would you like me to kill you now and save you a few hours?"

No one was coming for her. The police were too late. Blomkvist was too late. She'd been in the wrong place at the wrong time and now she was going die to where she lay.

She was going to die, but she was not going to beg.

"Fuck…off."

She couldn't see her sister's face, but could hear the sadistic smile she'd grown to expect every time the vise was turned. "Suit yourself."

The streets and driveways of the quiet Solna neighborhood were empty of any signs of life when Blomkvist stepped out of a cab a block away from the cul-de-sac that Sandström lived in. Four houses down on the end of the street was the white stucco building he had visited only twice in his life. He supposed he had a slight advantage that way if worse came to worse, though if Camilla had been staying there for any length of time she would know the lay of the house even better than he.

In the driveway a car was parked with a grey cover wrapped tightly over it. It had the right dimensions to it to be a Jetta by Blomkvist's estimation.

For a moment he stood beside the car, weighing his different options. If he went in through the back kitchen door he would be unnoticed by anyone who might be peeping from behind their curtains. If he went in through the front door he would be closer to the basement steps. If he climbed through the music room's window, he would have the best line of sight into the house.

He chose to go with the music room window, which he found was slightly ajar. With the help of a flower planter lying nearby he was able to boost himself up inside, immediately stopping and checking for any sign that his intrusion was noticed.

Nothing.

From the archway leading into the house he could see into both the living room and dining room, both completely empty. On the dining room table he thought he could see a decent sized Glock lying there in plain sight beside what looked like Lisbeth's fake passport and cigarette case. He stared at it for less than a second before deciding the reward outweighed the risk in grabbing the pistol. The magazine was missing two shots. One had been meant for Annika.

One by one, he cleared each room, the barrel of the pistol resting lightly in his sling and ready to be drawn in a fraction of a second.

Finally there was only one last place to check.

And it just had to be a fucking basement.

Footsteps suddenly thundered up the stairs, the door flinging open just inches from his face.

And there stood Camilla Salander, looking like a bat out of hell.

Her hand flew to her front sweater pocket, a handgun clearly outlined through the dark green fabric. He barely dived out of the way before the sound of a high caliber pistol rang out, the shot hitting a picture frame just above his head. Glass rained down into his hair as he fired from behind an end table, the shot going wide and shattering the music room window he'd climbed through earlier.

Camilla disappeared into the kitchen.

Shit.

If she was fast enough she could come up behind him through the kitchen archway.

And he was not going out with a bullet in his back.

He heard the hammer of her pistol click just in time to dive into the living room. A single shot flew into the ottoman to his left as he landed hard on his front, gun still gripped tightly in his hand. Another shot went through the back of the sofa before he could even turn around, coming within inches of his head.

He was essentially pinned down in the lair of a madwoman with only two options.

Wait or shoot.

Two shots smashed into the green backsplash as he returned fire over the living room sofa, each one ricocheting off into an unknown direction as he ducked behind the sofa again. Seconds passed. Nothing. He didn't dare look up in case she was waiting for him, instead crawling back the way he came for a better view of behind the kitchen island.

When he reached the end of the hallway he poked his head around the corner, staying low.

He could see the gun under the butcher's block and out of reach from the crumpled figure facedown on the floor. Bits of shattered porcelain covered much of the floor and counters where the shots had rebounded off the backsplash.

Gun still poised in his hand, he should and walked slowly into the kitchen. A hideous sucking noise immediately alerted him that she was still alive, if only barely. Blood was already seeping through the front of the green hoodie she was wearing, pooling onto the hardwood floor beneath her.

If he left her like that she would surely die.

If she died he would go to prison for at least ten years.

"I'm going to make a seal for these. Any funny business and I'll just get up and leave."

He found a package of white zip ties in the kitchen drawer next to a roll of duct tape and package of AA batteries.

Only when her hands were secured behind her back did he dare to look for anything he could use to seal the gunshot wound. In a cabinet next to the fridge he found a few sandwich bags that he could couple with a few strips of duct tape to seal off the sucking wounds in her back and front. She remained so eerily silent during the whole process that several times he found himself checking her pulse just to be sure she was still alive.

"You shoot…your enemies and…then stitch them up," she said in barely a whisper. "How…chivalrous of you."

"You're going to go to court," he said, ignoring her as he finished sealing the third edge on the plastic sandwich bag on her back, "And then you're going to prison and from there no parole board would ever in their right mind let you out."

When it looked as if she were going to bite out some sort of sarcastic remark, a horrible cough wracked her body, spraying the bottom cabinet with a fine, bloody mist. He couldn't even attempt to feel any sort of guilt for what he'd caused.

"Now I'm going to ask you this once; where is Lisbeth?"

"Too late to be the…hero, Kalle. I killed her."

Camilla gave out a bark he supposed was supposed to be a laugh.

"That's not…how it works Kalle."

He pressed the gun up to the side of her head. "When I'm the one holding the gun, this is exactly how it works. Where. Is. She?"

Out of the corner of his eye he caught sight of black figures silently surrounding the house. His thirty minutes were up. He knew what would come next. The battering ram. Loaded semi-automatics. There had been no conceivable way for their firefight earlier to go unnoticed in the little neighborhood. Looking down at the woman lying so broken on the floor for the last time, he dropped the pistol on the kitchen island and walked out of the room just as the back door caved in.

End Women Who Hate Men

I'm not sure how I feel about my longest fic to-date being over.

TBC eventually in "Body Breakers." I have AMAZING, HORRIBLY AWESOME AND "M" RATED IDEAS FOR THE PROLOGUE! Now I just have to actually write the prologue…holy fuck it's going to have a prologue!

Leave a guess as to what the title means in your review!