Firewall

by Henning Mankell

  "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 r
eturn 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.

  At the heart of his thinking on these changes was his heightened sense of personal vulnerability. He knew he was in danger of being mown down by Martinsson. He also felt harassed by the constantly changing conditions of the workplace and the new demands being made on them all. In the future, society would need a new kind of policeman. Not that his kind of experience and knowledge were no longer valuable, but now there were whole domains of knowledge he simply didn't have. He was forced to accept that he had, quite simply, become old. An old dog who could no longer be taught new tricks.

  During those long nights in his flat he often thought he no longer had the energy for police work. But he also knew that he had no choice but to go on, for at least another ten years. There were really no alternatives. He was an investigative police officer, a homicide detective. Travelling around to schools and lecturing on the dangers of drugs or drunken driving was not an option for him. That would never be his world.

  The meeting finally ended and the dossier was handed over to the prosecutor's office. No-one could be charged since all the suspects were dead. But the prosecutor had a report on his desk that could well lead to an indictment of Carl-Einar Lundberg.

  It was after the meeting was over that Höglund came to his office to tell him that Persson and her mother had recanted. Naturally Wallander was relieved, but he was not particularly surprised. Although he had his doubts about the ability of Swedish justice to prevail, he had always expected the truth in this particular case to come out in the end.

  They sat and talked for a while about the possibility that he could now counter the accusations. Höglund urged him to take up the issue of his mistreatment for the sake of the whole force, but Wallander was reluctant. He thought the best thing would be for the affair to be buried in silence.

  Once Höglund had left, Wallander sat staring into space for a long time. His head was empty. Finally, he got up to get a cup of coffee.

  At the door to the canteen he bumped into Martinsson. In the past few weeks Wallander had felt a strange and for him unfamiliar ambivalence. Normally he did not shy away from conflicts, but what had happened between him and Martinsson was more difficult and went deeper. There were elements of lost friendship, betrayal, camaraderie. When he bumped into Martinsson in the canteen he knew the moment had come. He could put it off no longer.

  "We should talk," he said. "Do you have a minute?"

  "I've been waiting for you."

  They went back to the conference room where they had spent the whole morning. Wallander got straight to the point.

  "I know you've been going behind my back. I know you've been spreading lies about me. You have questioned my ability to lead this investigation. Why you have done all this covertly instead of coming to me directly only you know. The only excuse I can think of for your behaviour is that you are laying the groundwork for your future career, and that you are willing to do anything to get where you want to go."

  Martinsson was calm. Wallander thought that his words seemed well rehearsed. "I can only tell you how it is. You have lost your grip and the only thing I'm guilty of is that I didn't say this earlier."

  "Why didn't you tell me to my face?"

  "I tried to, but you don't listen."

  "I do listen."

  "You think you do, but that's not the same thing as really listening."

  "Why did you tell Holgersson that I had ordered you not to follow me into the field that time?"

  "She must have misunderstood what I said."

  Wallander looked at Martinsson. The urge to punch him in the face was still there, but he knew he wouldn't do anything of the sort. He didn't have the energy. He was not going to be able to shake Martinsson. The man seemed to believe his own lies. At the very least he would not be able to get him to change his official line.

  "Was there anything else you wanted to talk about?"

  "No," Wallander said. "I have nothing else to say."

  Martinsson got up and left. Wallander felt as if the walls had come tumbling down around him. Martinsson had made his choice and their friendship was gone, broken off. Wallander wondered with growing despondency if it had ever really been there in the first place. Or had Martinsson always been waiting for his opportunity to strike?

  Waves of grief washed over him. And then there came a wave of rage. He was not going to give up. For the next few years at least he would remain in charge of the most complicated investigations in Ystad. But the feeling of having lost something was stronger than his rage. He asked himself again how he would have the energy to carry on.

  Wallander left the station directly after his conversation with Martinsson. He left his mobile in his office and didn't tell Irene anything about where he was going or when he would be back. He got into his car and took the road to Malmö. As he was approaching the exit for Stjärnsund he decided to take it. He didn't know why. Perhaps the thought of two broken friendships was too much to bear.

  Wallander's thoughts often returned to Elvira. She had entered his life under false pretences and in the final analysis he suspected she would even have been prepared to kill him. But he could not stop himself from thinking about her the way he himself had actually experienced her. A woman at a dinner table who had listened to what he had to say. A woman with beautiful legs who had dispelled his loneliness for a brief time.

  When he turned into Sten Widén's ranch it l
ooked abandoned. Widén had put up a "For Sale" sign some time ago, but now there was on top of it a "Sold" sign. The house was empty. Wallander walked to the stables. The horses had gone. A lone cat sat in a pile of hay and looked at him suspiciously.