Firewall

by Henning Mankell

  "We're trying," Wallander said.

  The boy didn't move. Wallander couldn't decide if he seemed scared or simply curious.

  "You're Emil, aren't you?"

  The boy said nothing.

  "You must have liked your sister."

  "Sometimes."

  "Only sometimes?"

  "Isn't that enough? Do you have to like people all the time?"

  "No, you don't."

  Wallander smiled, but the boy didn't smile back.

  "I think I know one time when you liked her," Wallander said.

  "When was that?"

  "A couple of years ago. She came home and was hurt."

  The boy shifted his feet. "How do you know that?"

  "I'm a policeman," Wallander said. "I have to know. Did she ever tell you what happened?"

  "No. But someone hit her."

  "How do you know that if she didn't tell you?"

  "I'm not saying."

  Wallander thought that if he pushed too hard the boy might clam up.

  "You asked me just now if I was going to find the man who killed your sister. If I'm going to be able to do that, I need your help. The best thing you can do right now is to tell me how you know that someone hit her."

  "She made a drawing."

  "She drew?"

  "She was good at it, but she never showed anyone. She drew pictures and then tore them up. But I went into her room sometimes when she wasn't here."

  "And you found something?"

  "She drew a picture of what happened."

  "Did she say that?"

  "Why else would she draw a picture of someone hitting her on the nose?"

  "Do you still have the picture?"

  The boy left the room. After a few minutes he came back with a pencil drawing in his hand.

  "I want it back."

  "Promise."

  Wallander took the drawing to the window. It was a disturbing picture. He saw that Sonja was good at drawing. He could recognise her face. But it was the man who dominated the picture. He loomed over her and his fist hit her nose. Wallander studied the face. If it was as accurate as her self-portrait they ought to be able to identify him from this drawing. Something on the man's wrist also caught his attention. At first he thought it was a bracelet. Then he saw that it was a tattoo.

  Wallander was suddenly in a hurry.

  "You did the right thing when you kept this drawing," he told the boy. "I promise you'll get it back."

  The boy followed him down the stairs. Wallander carefully folded the paper and put it in his inside pocket. There were still the sounds of sobbing coming from the living room.

  "Is she always going to be like that?" the boy said.

  Wallander felt a lump in his throat. "It will take time," he said. "But it will get better."

  Wallander didn't go in to say goodbye. He touched the boy's head and softly closed the front door behind him.

  Wallander tried to reach Höglund on his mobile but there was no answer. He called Irene who told him Höglund had had to go home. One of her children was sick. Wallander didn't have to think twice. He drove to her house on Rotfruktsgatan. It had started to rain. He folded his arms over his chest to make sure no rain would penetrate his coat and reach the drawing. Höglund opened the front door with a child on her arm.

  "I wouldn't have bothered you, but this is important," he said.

  "It's OK," she said. "She's a bit feverish, and my neighbour can't take her until later."

  Wallander went in. It had been a while since he was last here. In the living room he saw that the Japanese masks had gone from the walls. She followed his gaze.

  "He took his mementos with him," she said.

  "Does he still live in town?"

  "He moved to Malmö."

  "Are you going to stay here?"

  "I don't know if I can afford it."

  The girl in her arms was almost asleep. Höglund put her gently down on the sofa.

  "In a moment I'm going to show you a drawing," Wallander said. "But first I need to ask you something about Carl-Einar Lundberg. I know you haven't met him, but you've seen pictures of him and read the case files on him. Can you recall if there was any mention of a tattoo?"

  She didn't need time to think. "He had a snake design on his right wrist."

  Wallander smacked his hand down on the coffee table. The child jerked awake and started crying, but soon stopped and went back to sleep. At last they had reached a conclusion that held water. He took the drawing out, unfolded it and passed it to her.

  "That's Carl-Einar, no question. Where did you get hold of it?"

  Wallander told her about his encounter with Emil, and learning of his sister's hidden talent for drawing.

  "I'm not sure if we will ever be able to make a charge stick," Wallander said. "But that's not the most important thing right now. What we've done is to prove your theory. It's no longer only a working hypothesis."

  "All the same, it's difficult to believe that she would kill his father."

  "Keep in mind that there may be other factors we still don't know about. But we can lean on Lundberg and see what we get. We're going to assume she killed his father out of revenge. And Persson may not be lying when she said that Hökberg was the one who did both the stabbing and the hitting. Persson is a riddle unto herself that we'll have to attend to later."

  They pondered in silence these latest developments. Finally, Wallander said: "Someone became worried that Hökberg was going to tell us something. So we have three questions we need answers to: what was it she knew? What did it have to do with Falk? Who was the person who became worried?"

  The little girl on the sofa began to whimper. Wallander took that as his cue to leave.

  "Have you seen Martinsson since this morning?" Höglund said.

  "No, but I'm going there now. Don't worry, I'm planning to take your advice. I won't say a word."

  Wallander hurried to his car. He drove to Runnerströms Torg in the pouring rain.

  He sat in his car for a long time, summoning his energy. Then he walked into the building to face Martinsson.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  Martinsson greeted Wallander at the door with his widest smile.

  "I've been trying to call you," he said. "Things are happening."

  Wallander had gone into Falk's office with a great deal of pent-up aggression in his body. He was itching to punch Martinsson in the face. But Martinsson smiled and immediately led the conversation to the news of their morning's work. Wallander was somewhat relieved. It gave him breathing space. Time enough for him to have it out with Martinsson later. Besides, Martinsson's smile gave him pause. What if Höglund had misunderstood Martinsson's intentions? Martinsson may have had other matters to discuss with Holgersson. Höglund may also have taken some of his comments the wrong way. Yet in his heart he knew that she had not exaggerated the situation. She had said what she did because she was also upset by it.

  Wallander walked around the table to say hello to Modin.

  "Tell me what's happened," he said.

  "Robert is breaking through one layer of defence after another," Martinsson said with satisfaction. "We're getting deeper and deeper into the strange and fascinating world inside Falk's computer."

  Martinsson offered Wallander the folding chair, but he declined it. Martinsson checked his notes while Modin took a sip of what looked like carrot juice.

  "We've identified four more institutions in Falk's network. The first is the National Bank of Indonesia. Don't ask me how Robert managed to confirm that. He's a wizard when it comes to getting around security."

  Martinsson kept flipping the pages.

  "Then there's a bank in Liechtenstein called Lyder Bank. It gets somewhat harder after this. If we're right, then the next two companies are a French telecommunications firm and a commercial satellite company in Atlanta."

  Wallander furrowed his brow. "What do you make of it?"

  "Our previous theory, that it's all about m
oney, still stands as far as I'm concerned. But it's not clear yet how the telecom company or the Atlanta satellites are involved."

  "Nothing is here by coincidence," Modin said, curtly.

  Wallander turned towards him. "Try to explain it to me in a way I'll understand."

  "OK. Everyone arranges their bookshelves in their own way. Or their folders, or whatever. After a while you learn to see people's patterns even in their computers. The person who worked on this one was very deliberate. Everything is tidy. There is nothing superfluous. But it also isn't arranged in any obvious fashion, like in alphabetical order, or numerical sequences."

  Wallander interrupted him. "Say that again."

  "Well, usually people arrange things alphabetically or in numerical order. A comes before B comes before C. One comes before two and five before seven. But here, there isn't any of that."

  "What's the pattern, then?"

  "Something else entirely."

  "Do you see another kind of pattern?"

  Modin pointed to the screen. Wallander and Martinsson leaned forward.

  "Two components turn up repeatedly," Modin said. "The first one I discovered was the number 20. I tried to see what would happen if I add a few zeroes or change the order round. If I do that, something interesting happens."

  He pointed to the digits on the screen: a two and a zero.

  "See what happens when I do this." Modin typed something and the numbers were highlighted. Then they disappeared.

  "They're like frightened animals that run and hide," Modin said. "It's as if I were shining a bright light on them. They rush back into the darkness. But after a while they come out again, and always in the same place."

  "So how do you interpret this?"

  "That they're important somehow. There's also another component that behaves in this way."

  Modin pointed to the screen again, this time to the initials "JM". "They do the same thing," he said. "If you try to home in on them, they disappear."

  Wallander nodded.

  "They turn up all the time," Martinsson said. "Every time we identify a new institution on the list, they're there. But Robert has found something else."

  Wallander stopped them so he could polish his glasses.

  "If you leave them alone," Modin said, "you start to see after a while that they move around."

  He pointed to the screen again.

  "The first company we identified was the first on the list," he said. "And here the nocturnals are at the top of the column."

  "Nocturnals?"

  "That's what we are calling them," Martinsson said. "We thought it was fitting."

  "Keep going."

  "The second item we managed to identify a bit further down the list, in the second column. Here the nocturnals have moved to the right and lower. If you continue through the list you'll see that they move according to a strict pattern. They move towards the right-hand bottom corner."

  Wallander stretched his back.

  "This still doesn't tell us what they're doing."

  "We're not quite done," Martinsson said. "This is where it gets really interesting."

  "I've found a time element," Modin said. "The nocturnals change their co-ordinates with time. That means there's an invisible timekeeper in here somewhere. I amused myself by constructing a calculation. If you assume that the upper left corner is zero and there are 74 identities in the network and that the number 20 refers to October 20, then you see the following . . ." Modin typed until a new text emerged on the screen. Wallander read the name of the satellite company in Atlanta. Modin pointed to the last two components.

  "This is number four from the end," he said. "And today is October 17."

  Wallander nodded slowly. "You mean the pattern will reach some sort of high point on Monday? That the 20th represents some kind of end point for these nocturnals?"

  "It seems possible."

  "But what about the other component? This JM? What does it mean if we take the 20 to refer to the date?"

  No-one had an answer to that question.

  "What happens on Monday, October 20?"

  "I don't know. But I can tell you that some kind of countdown is under way."

  "Maybe we should just pull the plug."

  "It wouldn't help. This is just a monitor," Martinsson said. "We can't see the network clearly and we don't know if one or more servers are involved."

  "Let's assume the countdown is for a bomb of some kind," Wallander said. "Where, if not from here, is it being controlled?"

  "We don't know."

  Wallander suddenly had the feeling they were on the wrong track. Was he misguided in his assumption that the answer to the whole case lay in Falk's computer? Wallander hesitated. The doubt that had come over him was very strong.

  "We have to rethink this," he said. "From the beginning."

  Martinsson looked shocked. "Do you want us to stop?"

  "I mean we have to rethink this. There have been some developments you aren't aware of."

  They walked onto the landing. Wallander told him about Carl-Einar Lundberg. He felt uncomfortable in Martinsson's presence now, but did his best to hide his feelings.

  "We should move Hökberg's role out of the centre," he said. "I'm convinced now that she died because someone was afraid of what she could tell us."

  "And how do you explain Landahl's death?"

  "They had been in a relationship. Perhaps she had told him what she knew, and this had something to do with Falk."

  He also told him what had happened in Eriksson's flat.

  "That seems to contradict our ideas," Martinsson said.

  "We don't yet know why the electrical relay turned up in the morgue, or why Falk's body was removed. There's an air of desperation in all of this, combined with an extreme ruthlessness. Why would people behave in this way?"

  "Maybe they're fanatics," Martinsson said. "The only thing that matters to them is what they believe in."

  Wallander gestured towards Falk's office. "Modin has done a great job, but the time has come for us to bring in a specialist from the National Police. We can't take any risks if we are facing a countdown to Monday."

  "So Robert is finished here?"

  "Yes. I want you to contact Stockholm immediately. Try to get someone down here today."

  "But it's Friday."

  "I don't care. Monday is just around the corner."

  They went back in. Wallander congratulated Modin on his excellent work and told him he was no longer needed. Modin was clearly disappointed, but he didn't say anything. He just went back to the computer to finish up.