Firewall (41 page)

Martinsson pointed at the dead man. "Who is he?"

"I don't know. But I think his name starts with a C."

"Is it all finished now?"

"I believe so, but I don't know what it is that's finished."

Wallander felt that he should be thanking Martinsson, but he said nothing. Instead he walked over to Modin. Time enough to talk to Martinsson later.

Modin's eyes were filled with tears.

"He told me to walk towards you. He said that otherwise he would kill my mother and father."

"We'll deal with all that in due course," Wallander said. "How are you feeling?"

"He told me to say I had to stay and finish my work in Malmö. Then he shot her. And we left. I was shut in the boot and could hardly breathe. But we were right."

"Yes," Wallander said. "We were right."

"Did you find my notes?"

"Yes."

"I didn't start taking it seriously soon enough. A cash machine. A place where people come to take out their money."

"You should have said something," Wallander said. "But maybe I should have thought of it myself. We knew it had something to do with money, after all. It should have been an obvious hiding place for something like that."

"A cash machine as the launching pad for a virus bomb," Modin said. "It has a certain finesse, don't you think?"

Wallander looked at the boy beside him. How much longer could he handle the strain? He was struck by the sense of having stood like this sometime before, with a boy at his side, and he realised that he was thinking of Stefan Fredman. The boy who was now dead and buried.

"What was it that happened?" Wallander said. "Do you think you can tell me?"

Modin nodded. "He was there when she let me in. He threatened me. They locked me in the bathroom. Then I heard him start screaming at her. I could understand him since he was speaking English. At least the parts I could hear."

"What did he say?"

"That she hadn't done her job. That she had shown weakness."

"Did you hear anything else?"

"Only the shots. When he came to unlock the door I thought he was going to kill me too. He had the gun in his hand. But he said I was his hostage and that I had to do what he told me. Otherwise he would kill my parents." Modin's voice had begun to wobble.

"No hurry for the rest," Wallander said. "That's enough. That's plenty, in fact."

"He said they were going to knock out the global financial system. It was going to start here, at this cash machine."

"I know," Wallander said. "But now you need to sleep. You have to go home to your parents now."

They heard sirens close by. Now Wallander could see a dark blue VW Golf parked behind the pick-up. Impossible to see from where he had been standing.

Wallander felt how exhausted he was. And how relieved.

Martinsson came over. "We need to talk," he said.

"I know," Wallander said. "But not now."

It was 5.51 a.m. on Monday, October 20. Wallander wondered vaguely what the rest of the winter was going to be like.

CHAPTER FORTY

On Tuesday, November 11, all the charges against Wallander in the Eva Persson assault case were dismissed. Höglund was the one who gave him the news. She had also played a key role in the direction the investigation had taken, but he only found that out later.

A few days before, Höglund had paid a visit to Eva Persson and her mother. No-one knew what had been said during that visit; there had been no record of the conversation, no third party present, although these had been ordered by the court. Höglund did tell Wallander that she applied a "mild form of emotional blackmail". What that had entailed, she never told him, but Wallander was in time able to put together a reasonably clear picture. He assumed that she had told Persson to turn her thoughts to the future. She was cleared of the murder of Lundberg, but bringing false charges against a policeman could have unpleasant consequences.

The following day Persson and her mother had withdrawn the charges against Wallander. They acknowledged that his version of the events had been correct and that Persson had tried to hit her mother. Wallander could still have been held accountable for his actions in the situation, but the whole matter was swiftly dropped, much to everyone's relief. Höglund had also seen to it that a number of journalists were advised of the charges being dropped, but that item of news never made it into the papers.

This Tuesday was an unusually cold autumn day in Skâne, with gusting northerly winds that were occasionally close to storm strength. Wallander had woken early after an unsettled night. He could not recall his dreams in detail, but they involved being hunted and almost choked to death by shadowy figures and by objects bearing down on him.

When he arrived at the station around 8 a.m., he only stayed for a short while. He had decided finally to get to the bottom of a question that had been troubling him for a long time. After casting his eye over a few forms and after making sure that the photo album Marianne Falk had lent to the police had been returned to her, he left the station and drove to the Hökbergs' house. He had spoken to Erik Hökberg the day before and arranged the meeting. Sonja's brother Emil was at school and her mother was on one of her frequent visits to her sister in Höör. Erik looked pale, and perhaps he had lost weight. According to a rumour that had reached Wallander, Sonja Hökberg's funeral had been an intensely emotional affair. Wallander stepped into the house and assured Erik that his business would not take long.

"You said you wanted to see Sonja's room," Erik said. "But you didn't say why."

"I'll explain it to you. Why don't you come with me?"

"Nothing has been changed. We don't have the energy. Not yet."

They walked upstairs and into the pink room, where Wallander had once sensed that something was out of place.

"I don't think this room has always looked as it does now," he said. "At some point Sonja redecorated it, didn't she?"

Hökberg looked baffled. "How do you know that?"

"I don't know. I'm asking you."

Erik swallowed. Wallander waited patiently.

"It was after that time," Erik said. "The rape. She suddenly took everything down from the walls and got out all her things from when she was a little girl. Things that had been stored in boxes in the attic for years. We never understood why, and she never said anything about it."

Something was taken from her, Wallander thought. And she tried to run away from it in two ways: by reverting to a childhood where everything was still all right and by planning a revenge by proxy.

"That was all I wanted to know," Wallander said.

"Why is it so important to you now? Nothing matters any more. It won't bring Sonja back. Ruth and Emil and I are living half a life, if that."

"Sometimes one feels a need to get to the bottom of things," Wallander said apologetically. "Unanswered questions can hang on and on. But you're right, of course. Sadly, it cannot change anything."

They left the room and went back downstairs. Hökberg asked if he would like a cup of coffee, but Wallander declined. He wanted to leave this depressing place as soon as possible.

He drove back, parked on Hamngatan and walked to the bookshop that had just opened for the day. He was finally collecting the book he had ordered for Linda. He was shocked at the price. He had it gift-wrapped. Linda was coming the following day.

He was back in his office by 9 a.m. At 9.30 he gathered up his files and went to one of the conference rooms. Today they were having a final meeting to discuss the Tynnes Falk case before handing the documents over to the prosecutor. Since the investigation of the murder of Elvira Lindfeldt had involved the Malmö police, Inspector Foreman was to be at the meeting.

Wallander had not yet heard about the dropped charges against him, but this was not anything that weighed heavily on his mind. The important thing was that Modin had survived. This gave him comfort when he was overwhelmed by thoughts that he might have been able to prevent Jonas Landahl's death if he had been able to think just a little further ahead. Part of him knew that this didn't make sense, but these thoughts came and went regardless.

For once Wallander was the last to enter the conference room. He said hello to Forsman and did in fact remember his face from the conference they had both attended. Only two people were missing. Hans Alfredsson had returned to Stockholm and Nyberg was in bed with the flu. Wallander sat down and they started reviewing the case material. They had so much to cover that the meeting ran on until 1 p.m., but at that point they could finally close the books on it.

Wallander's memories of the case had started losing clarity and definition in the three weeks that had gone by since the shooting incident at the cashpoint. But the facts they had uncovered since then strongly supported their initial conclusions.

The dead man's name was Carter and he came from Luanda. They had now pieced together an identity and history for him, and Wallander thought he had at last been able to answer the question he had asked himself so many times during the investigation: what had happened in Angola? Now he knew at least the bare bones of the answer. Falk and Carter had met in Luanda during the 1970s, probably by accident. How that first meeting had gone and what had been said was impossible to reconstruct, but the two clearly had had a great deal in common. They shared many traits in which pride, a taste for revenge and a confused sense of being among the chosen few had predominated. At some point they had begun to lay the plans for an attack on the global financial system. They would fire their electronic missile when the time was right. Carter's extensive familiarity with the structures of financial organisations, coupled with Falk's innovative technological knowledge of the electronic world that connected those institutions, had been a potentially lethal combination.

Together they had built up a secretive and tightly controlled organisation that came to include such disparate individuals as Fu Cheng, Elvira Lindfeldt and Jonas Landahl. These three had been pulled in, brainwashed and forever ensnared. The picture that had emerged was of a highly hierarchical organisation in which Carter and Falk made all of the decisions. Even if the evidence was as yet insubstantial, there were indications that Carter had himself executed more than one unsatisfactory member of the group.

To Wallander, Carter seemed like the archetypal crazed and ruthless sectarian leader, driven by cold calculation. His impression of Falk remained more complicated since he had never been convinced that Falk was possessed of the same ruthlessness. However, Falk did appear to have had a carefully guarded but deep-seated need for affirmation. During the 1960s he had swung from the extreme right to the politically radical left. Finally, he had entirely broken with conventional politics and embarked on his demonic plottings against the human race.

The police in Hong Kong had established the true identity of Fu Cheng. His real name had been Hua Gang. Interpol had his fingerprints at the scene of several crimes, including two bank robberies in Frankfurt and Marseilles. Though he could not prove it, Wallander suspected that this money had been used to finance parts of Falk and Carter's operations. Hua Gang had been in organised crime for a long time and had been a suspect in murder cases both in Europe and Asia without ever having been convicted. There was no doubt that he had been the killer of both Sonja Hökberg and Jonas Landahl. Fingerprints and reports from witnesses confirmed this. But Hua Gang had been working under the direction of Carter, and perhaps Falk. There was still work to be done in mapping the reach and entire workings of the organisation, but the information they had suggested that there was no longer a reason to fear the group. With Carter and Falk out of the picture the organisation essentially had ceased to exist.

Wallander was never able, satisfactorily, to determine why Carter had shot Elvira Lindfeldt. Modin had reported as much as he could about the angry accusations Carter had flung at her before she died. Wallander assumed that she had known too much and become a liability. Carter must have been in a state of near desperation when he reached Sweden.

Still, he had come uncomfortably close to succeeding. If either Modin or Wallander had put the credit card into the machine at exactly 5.31 a.m. that Monday, October 20, they would have unleashed an electronic avalanche. The experts who had been tracing the infiltrations Falk had made into the bank networks had been amazed. Falk and Carter had exposed the major financial institutions of the world as shockingly vulnerable to attack. Security specialists around the world were working non-stop to rectify these deficiencies, while yet more groups were trying to construct an accurate picture of what would have happened had the plan actually been set in motion.

Luckily, of course, Wallander had not put Carter's Visa card into the machine. And nothing had happened, other than that a selection of cash machines in Skåne had gone haywire for the day. Many of them had been shut down, but as yet no problem had been located. Just as mysteriously, they had, in due course, resumed normal working order.

They never did find a satisfactory answer to why Sonja Hökberg was thrown against the high-voltage wires at the power substation, nor why Falk had been in possession of the blueprints. They had, however, found out how the burglars had gained entrance to the station. That had been thanks to Hansson's doggedness. It turned out that Moberg, one of the technicians, had come home from leave to find that his house had been broken into. The keys to the station had not been stolen, but Hansson maintained that whoever committed the burglary must have copied them and then had them duplicated by the American manufacturer, probably in return for a considerable sum of money. A simple check had revealed an entry visa in Landahl's passport, proving that he had been in the United States in the month following the break-in at Moberg's house. The money may have come from Hua Gang's bank robberies in Frankfurt and Marseilles.

Some loose ends were painstakingly tied up, others remained unsolved. They found out that Tynnes Falk had kept a post-office box in Malmö. But they could never work out why he had told Siv Eriksson that he had his mail sent to her address. His journal was never recovered, nor were the fingers that had been severed from his hand. The coroner's office did, however, determine that he had died from natural causes. Enander had been right about one thing: it was not a heart attack. Falk's death was the result of a burst blood vessel in his brain.

Other information trickled in. One day Wallander found a long report on his desk from Nyberg in which he described how they had determined that the empty case in Landahl's cabin on the ferry had, indeed, belonged to Falk. Nyberg had not been able to find the contents, but he assumed that Hua Gang had thrown them overboard in an effort to delay the identification of the body. They only ever recovered his passport. Wallander put the report aside with a sigh.

The crucial task had been the mapping of Carter and Falk's strange world. Wallander knew now that their ambitions had known no bounds. After their intended crippling of the world markets they had plans to strangle important utilities worldwide. They had been motivated in no small part by their vanity and an intoxication with their sense of power. Wallander thought that it was this weakness which had tempted Carter to have the electrical relay brought to the morgue and to have Falk's fingers cut off. There had been religious overtones in the macabre world where Carter and Falk had figured as not only overseers but also as deities.

Although Carter and Falk had lived in the idiosyncratic realm of their own deranged fantasies, Wallander had started to sense that at least their plan had cast attention on an important insight: the bewildering vulnerability of modern society.

Sometimes he thought about it for a long time late at night. During the past three decades a society had been emerging which he did not fully recognise. In his work he was forever confronted with the consequences of brutal forces that hurled people to the outer margins. The walls surrounding these outcasts were dauntingly high: drugs, unemployment, social indifference.

These changes were accompanied by a parallel development in which members of society were being connected ever more tightly by new technological innovations. But this highly efficient electronic network came at the cost of increased vulnerability to sabotage and terror.