Firewall

by Henning Mankell

  "We don't know why yet, but Falk is at the heart of it. Or rather, whatever it is that's in his computer."

  "This hypothesis still seems unfounded to me" Holgersson said.

  "I can see no alternative." Wallander had no more energy for this discussion. "I have to get into some dry clothes," he said. "If you'll excuse me, I'm going home now."

  "One last thing," she said. "And I have to say this. It was completely irresponsible to have gone after this man alone. You should have taken Martinsson along as back-up."

  "Things happened pretty fast."

  "But you should not have ordered him to stay behind."

  Wallander had been wiping lumps of clay from his clothes. Now he looked up.

  "Ordered him?"

  "Yes, ordered him to stand back while you went in. I shouldn't have to remind you, of all people, that one of the basic rules of police work is never to act alone."

  Wallander had forgotten all about the mud now.

  "Where did you get the idea that I told him to stay behind?"

  "From various reports."

  Wallander knew there was only one possible source for this version of events. Martinsson. Elofsson and El Sayed had been too far back to have heard anything.

  "Perhaps we should talk about this tomorrow," he said.

  "I had to bring this up with you right away," she said. "It's my duty as your commanding officer. You're in a delicate enough situation as it is."

  She left him and continued towards her car.

  Wallander realised he was trembling with fury. Martinsson had lied. He had told Holgersson that Wallander had ordered him not to follow him out into the field where Wallander had subsequently been trapped and thought he was going to die.

  He looked up and saw Martinsson and Hansson coming towards him. The light from their flashlights bobbed up and down. From the other direction he heard Holgersson start up her car and drive away.

  Martinsson and Hansson stopped when they reached him.

  "Could you hold Martinsson's flashlight for a moment?" Wallander said to Hansson.

  "Why?"

  "Just do it, please."

  Martinsson handed Hansson his flashlight. Wallander took a step forward and hit Martinsson in the face. However, since it was hard to judge the distance between them in the shifting beams of the flashlights, the blow didn't land squarely on his jaw as intended. It was more of a gentle nudge.

  "What the hell are you doing?"

  "What the hell are you doing?" Wallander yelled back.

  Then he threw himself on Martinsson and they fell into the mud. Hansson tried to grab them as they fell, but he slipped. One of the flashlights went out, the other landed some distance away.

  "You told Holgersson I ordered you to stay behind! You have been spreading lies about me this whole time!"

  Wallander pushed Martinsson away and stood up. Hansson was also standing. A dog barked in the background.

  "You have been going behind my back," Wallander said, and he heard that his voice had become absolutely steady.

  "I don't know what you're talking about," Martinsson protested.

  "Behind my back, saying that I'm bad at my job. You sneak away into Holgersson's office when you think no-one is looking."

  Hansson broke in. "What is going on between you two?"

  "We're discussing the issue of good teamwork," Wallander said. "Whether it's better to say what you think to someone's face, or whether you should rather go behind someone's back and complain about them to their superior officer."

  "I still don't get it," Hansson said.

  Wallander sighed. He saw no point in dragging this out.

  "That was all I wanted to say," he said and threw a flashlight at Martinsson's feet.

  Then he walked over to a patrol car and told the officer behind the wheel to take him home.

  He took a bath and then went and sat in the kitchen. It was close to 3 a.m. He tried to think, but his head still felt empty. He went to bed, but he couldn't sleep. He thought over and over of the field and the terror he had experienced as he lay with his face pressed into the wet clay. The memory of feeling so humiliated at dying without his shoes on. And then his confrontation with Martinsson.

  I've reached my limit, he thought. Not only in relation to Martinsson, but perhaps in relation to everything I do.

  He wondered what the consequences of his fight with Martinsson would be. He had struck him in the face. It would come down to word against word, just like the case with Persson and her mother. Holgersson had already demonstrated that she put greater trust in Martinsson's accounts than in his own. And now Wallander had shown himself guilty of inappropriate force for the second time in only two weeks. There was no way to get past it.

  As he lay in the dark he wondered if he regretted his behaviour. He couldn't honestly feel that he did. It was motivated by a sense of personal dignity. The assault had been a necessary reaction to Martinsson's betrayal. All of the rage that he had been feeling since Höglund had told him about Martinsson had finally bubbled up to the surface.

  It was shortly after 4 a.m. when he finally fell asleep.

  It was Sunday, October 19.

  Carter landed in Lisbon on TAP flight 553 at 6 a.m. The connecting flight to Copenhagen was leaving at 8.15 a.m. As usual, his entry into Europe disturbed him. He felt protected in Africa. Here he was in foreign territory.

  At home he had looked carefully at his selection of passports and finally settled on the identity of Lukas Habermann, German citizen, born in Kassel in 1939. After going through customs in Portugal, he went into the nearest toilet and tore the passport into small pieces which he then flushed down the bowl. From now on he was the Englishman Richard Stanton, born in Oxford in 1940. He took an overcoat out of his luggage and slicked his hair down with water. He checked his luggage on to the flight for Copenhagen and went through passport control again, careful to avoid the line to the customs officer who dealt with him on arrival. He encountered no problems. He walked through the terminal until he reached an area that was under construction. Since it was Sunday, there were no workers around. He took out his mobile phone only after making sure that he was alone.

  She answered immediately. He did not like talking on the telephone so he only asked brisk questions and received equally succinct answers.

  She could tell him nothing about Cheng's whereabouts. He was supposed to have contacted her in the early evening, but he had not called. Carter listened to her extraordinary news with some scepticism. He was not used to being lucky. Finally, he was convinced. Robert Modin had been delivered straight into their hands.

  When the conversation was over, Carter thought about Cheng. Something must have happened to him. But on the other hand they had access now to Modin, and he was their biggest threat. Carter put away his phone and went to the executive lounge where he had an apple and a cup of tea.

  The plane to Copenhagen took off 5 minutes later than scheduled. Carter sat in seat 3D, on the aisle. The window seat made him feel too trapped. He told the flight attendant he did not want breakfast. Then he shut his eyes and fell asleep.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Wallander and Martinsson met in the corridor outside the canteen at the station at exactly 8 a.m. on Sunday. It was as if they had decided on the time and place in advance. Since they walked towards the canteen from opposite ends of the corridor, Wallander felt as if they were participating in a duel. But instead of drawing pistols, they nodded curtly at each other and went in to get coffee. The coffee machine had broken down again. They read the handwritten sign that had been affixed to the front. Martinsson had a black eye and his lower lip was swollen.

  "I'm going to get you for what you did," Martinsson said. "But first we have to finish this case."

  "It was wrong of me to hit you," Wallander said. "But that's all I'll take back."

  They said nothing more. Hansson came in and watched them, uneasily.

  Wallander suggested they may as well have thei
r meeting in the canteen rather than move to a conference room. Hansson put on a pot of water and offered to make them coffee from his private stash. Just as they were pouring it out, Höglund arrived. Wallander assumed it was Hansson who would have told her of the death of the man called Cheng, but it turned out to have been Martinsson. Wallander gathered that he had said nothing about the fight, but noticed that Martinsson looked at her with a new coldness. Probably he had spent the brief night working out who could have given him away to Wallander.

  Once Alfredsson joined them they were ready to begin the meeting. Wallander asked Hansson to brief Viktorsson on the night's events. In the present situation it was more than ever important that the prosecutor's office were kept abreast. There would probably be a press conference later in the day, but Chief Holgersson would have to take care of it. Wallander asked Höglund to assist her if she had time. She looked surprised.

  "But I wasn't even there."

  "You don't need to say anything. I just want you there so you can hear what Holgersson says. Particularly if she happens to say something stupid."

  A stunned silence greeted his last comment. No-one had heard him openly criticise Holgersson before. It was not premeditated on his part, it just slipped out. He felt another wave of exhaustion, of being burned out, maybe even old. Of course, his age excused his speaking plainly.

  He moved on to the most pressing matter.

  "We have to concentrate our efforts on Falk's computer. Whatever is programmed into it is going to take effect on October 20. We therefore have less than 16 hours to figure out what that is."

  "Where is Modin?" Hansson said.

  Wallander drained the last of his coffee and got up.

  "I'm going to pick him up. Let's get going, everybody."

  As they filed out of the canteen, Höglund grabbed his arm. He tried to shake her off.

  "Not now. I have to get Modin."

  "Where is he?"

  "With a friend of mine."

  "Can't anyone else get him?"

  "Of course they could, but I need the time to collect my thoughts. How to use the short amount of time we have most effectively. What does it mean that Cheng is dead?"

  "That's what I wanted to talk to you about."

  Wallander stopped. "All right," he said, "you have five minutes."

  "It seems as if we haven't posed the most important question."

  "And what might that be?"

  "Why he shot himself and not you."

  Wallander was getting irritated. He was irritated at everything and everyone and made no attempt to hide it.

  "And what's your opinion on that?"

  "I wasn't there. I don't know how things looked out there or what precisely happened. But I do know that it takes an awful lot, even for a person like that, to pull the trigger on himself."

  "And how do you know this?"

  "You have to admit I have some experience after all these years."

  Wallander knew he was lecturing her as he answered, but he couldn't help it. "The question is what your experience is really worth in this case. This person killed at least two people before he died and he would not have hesitated a moment to kill me. We don't know what was driving him, but he must have been a totally ruthless person. What happened was, he heard and saw the helicopter coming and he knew he was not going to get away in time. We know the people involved in this case are fanatical in some way. In this instance the fanaticism was turned on himself."

  Höglund wanted to say something more, but Wallander was already on his way to the front door.

  "I have to get Modin," he said. "We can talk more later. If our world still exists, that is."

  Wallander left the station. It was 8.45 a.m. and he was in a hurry. He drove at a very high speed. At one point he swerved to miss a hare, but one of his back wheels hit the animal. He could see its legs jerking when he looked in the rear-view mirror, but he didn't stop.

  He reached the house in Jägersro at 9.40 a.m. Elvira opened the door almost as soon as he rang the bell. She was dressed to go out, but Wallander could tell that she was very tired. In some way she seemed different from when he had seen her last. But her smile was the same. She asked if he wanted a cup of coffee. Wallander looked past her and saw Robert Modin drinking a cup of tea in the kitchen. Wallander wanted nothing more than to drink a cup of coffee with her, but he declined her offer. They had so little time. She insisted, took his arm and almost pulled him into the kitchen. Wallander saw her cast a quick glance at her watch. That made him suspicious. She wants me to stay, he thought. But not too long. She's expecting someone else. He said no thank you again and told Modin to get ready.

  "People who are always in a hurry make me nervous," she complained after Modin had left the kitchen.

  "Then you've found my first flaw," Wallander said. "I'm sorry about this, but it can't be helped. We need Modin in Ystad right away."

  "What is it that is so urgent?"

  "I haven't time to explain," Wallander said. "Let me just say that we're a bit worried about October 20. And that's tomorrow."

  Tired as Wallander was, he noticed a hint of worry in her face. Then she smiled again. Wallander wondered if perhaps she was afraid, but he dismissed the thought.

  Modin came down the stairs. He carried a laptop in each hand.

  "And when will I be seeing you again?" Elvira said.

  "I'll call you," Wallander said. "I don't know yet."

  They drove back to Ystad, at a slightly slower speed.

  "I woke up early," Modin said. "I had some new ideas that I would like to try out."

  Wallander considered telling him what had happened during the night, but he decided to wait. Right now it was important for Modin to stay focused. They kept driving in silence. It was pointless for Wallander to ask Modin what his ideas were since he would not understand the answers.

  They came to the place where Wallander had run over the hare. A murder of crows took off as they appeared. The hare was already dismembered beyond recognition. Wallander told Modin that he was the one who had run him over.

  "You see hundreds of dead hares along this road," Wallander said. "But it's only when you kill one yourself that you actually see it."

  Modin turned and stared at him. "Could you say that last part again? About the hare?"

  Wallander repeated what he had said.

  "Exactly," Modin said. "That's it. Of course."

  Wallander looked at him, questioningly.

  "I'm thinking about what we're looking for in Falk's computer," Modin said. "The way to think about it may be to look for something we've seen a hundred times without really noticing."

  Then Modin sank back into thought. Wallander was not sure he had understood this insight.

  At 11 a.m. he stopped the car in Runnerströms Torg. From here on in he was dependent on what Alfredsson and Modin would be able to accomplish, with the assistance of Martinsson. The most useful thing he could do would be to try to maintain the large perspective, and not think he would be able to dive into the electronic sphere with the others. He hoped Martinsson and Alfredsson would have the sense not to tell Modin what had happened last night. He should really have taken Martinsson aside and told him that Modin knew nothing about the events, but he couldn't stand to talk to him more than was absolutely necessary.