Firewall (21 page)

"It seems it's at least a possibility."

"That Hökberg is responsible for the murder, you mean?"

"I'm not implying anything. That's not my job. I'm just telling you the facts. It's a legitimate possibility, that's all."

"What about the hammer?"

"Only Hökberg's prints. No-one else's."

Wallander nodded. "That's good to know."

"We know more than that," Nyberg said, leafing through the papers strewn across his desk. "Sometimes the pathologists exceed even their own expectations. They have determined that the blows were inflicted in stages. First he was hit with the hammer, then with the knife."

"Definitely not the other way around?"

"No. And not at the same time."

"How on earth can they know that?"

"I can only tell you the approximate answer to that, and it's hard to explain."

"Does this mean Hökberg switched weapons in the course of her attack?"

"I believe so. Persson had the knife in her bag, but she gave it to Hökberg when asked."

"Like an operation," Wallander said with a shudder. "The surgeon asking for tools."

They thought about this for a moment. Nyberg broke the silence.

"There was one more thing. I've been thinking about that bag out at the power substation. It was lying in the wrong place."

Wallander waited for him to continue. Nyberg was an excellent and thorough forensic technician, but he could also sometimes demonstrate unexpected investigative skills.

"I went out there," he said, "and I took the bag with me. I tried throwing it to the spot by the fence where it was found, but I couldn't throw it that far."

"How so?"

"You remember what the place looks like. There are towers, poles, high-voltage lines and barbed wire everywhere. The bag always got stuck on something."

"That means someone must have carried it over there?"

"Maybe. But the question then is why?"

"Do you have an idea?"

"The obvious explanation would be that the bag was put there deliberately because someone wanted it to be found – but maybe they didn't want it to be found right away."

"Someone wanted the body to be identified, but not immediately?"

"Yes, that's what I was thinking. But then I discovered something else. The place where the bag was found is in the direct beam of one of the spotlights."

Wallander sensed where Nyberg was going, but said nothing.

"I'm simply wondering now if the bag was there because someone had been rifling through it, looking for something."

"And maybe found something?"

"That's what I think, but it's your job to work these things out."

Wallander got up. "Good work," he said. "You may have hit on something."

Wallander went back up the stairs and stopped at Höglund's office. She was bent over a stack of papers.

"I want you to contact Hökberg's mother," he said. "Find out what the girl usually had in her bag."

He told her about Nyberg's idea. He didn't bother to wait while she made the call. He felt restless and started back to his office. He wondered how many miles he had covered walking to and fro in these corridors all these years. He heard the phone in his office and hurried over. It was Martinsson.

"I think it's time for you to come down here," he said.

"Why?"

"Robert Modin is a proficient young man."

"What's happened?"

"Exactly what we were hoping for. We're in. The computer has opened its doors."

Wallander hung up. It's finally happened, he thought. It's taken some time, but we finally did it.

He took his coat and left the station.

It was 1.45 p.m. on Sunday, October 12.

PART 2
The Firewall

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Carter woke up at dawn because the air-conditioning unit suddenly stopped. He lay listening to the darkness, frozen between the sheets. There was the steady drone of cicadas and a dog barked in the distance. The power had gone out again. That happened every other night in Luanda. Savimbi's bandits were always looking for ways to cut the power to the city. In a few minutes the room would be stifling hot, but he didn't know if he had the energy to go down to the room past the kitchen and start up the generator. He didn't know what was worse: the insufferable heat or the throbbing of the generator.

He turned and looked at the time. It was 5.15 a.m. He heard one of the guards outside, snoring. That was probably Jose. As long as Roberto kept himself awake it didn't matter. He shifted his head and felt for the muzzle of his gun under the pillow. When it came down to it, beyond the guards and the fences, this was his real protection against the burglars hiding in the dark. He understood them, of course. He was a white man, he was wealthy. In a poor and downtrodden country like Angola, crime was a given. If he had been one of the poor, he would have robbed people himself.

As suddenly as it had stopped, the air conditioning started up again. That meant it wasn't the work of bandits, it was simply a technical glitch. The power lines were old, left over from the Portuguese colonial times. How many years ago that was, he could no longer remember.

Carter had trouble getting back to sleep. He thought about the fact that he was about to turn 60. In many ways it was a miracle that he had reached this age, given his unpredictable and dangerous way of life.

He pushed away the sheet and let the cool air touch his skin. He didn't like to wake up at dawn. He was most vulnerable during the hours before sunrise, left to the dark and his memories. He could get worked up over old wrongs that had been done to him. It was only when he focused on the revenge he was planning that he could calm himself. By then several hours might have passed. The sun would be up, the guards would have started talking and Celine would be unlocking the door to the kitchen to come in and make his breakfast.

He pulled the sheet back over his body. His nose started to itch and he knew he was about to sneeze. He hated to sneeze. He hated his allergies. They were a weakness he despised. The sneezing could come at any time. Sometimes they interrupted him in the middle of a lecture and made it impossible for him to continue. Other times he broke out in hives. Or else his eyes kept filling with tears. He pulled the sheet all the way up and over his mouth. This time he won. The need to sneeze died away. He thought about all the years that had gone by and all that had occurred which had led to his lying in a bed in Luanda, capital of Angola.

Thirty years ago he had been a young man working at the World Bank in Washington, DC. He had been convinced that the bank had the potential to do good in the world, or at the very least shift the balance of justice in the Third World's favour. The World Bank had been founded to provide the huge loans needed in the poverty-stricken parts of the world and which exceeded the capacity of individual nations and banks to provide. Many of his friends at the University of California had told him that he was wrong, that no reasonable solutions to the economic inequality of the world were addressed at the World Bank, but he had maintained his beliefs. At heart he was no less radical than they. He too marched in the anti-war demonstrations. But he had never believed in the potential of civil disobedience to reshape the world. Nor did he believe in the small and squabbling socialist organisations. He had come to the conclusion that the world had to be changed from within existing social structures. If you were going to try to shift the balance of power, you had to stay close to its source.

He had, however, a secret. It was what had made him leave Columbia and go to university in California. He had been in Vietnam for one year, and he had liked it. He had been stationed close to An Khe most of the time, along the important route west from Qui Nhon. He knew he killed many soldiers during that year and that he had never felt remorse over this. While his buddies had turned to drugs for solace, he had maintained a disciplined approach to his work. He knew he was going to survive the war, that he would not be one of the bodies sent home in a plastic bag. And it was then, during the stifling nights patrolling the jungle, that he had arrived at his conviction that you had to stay close to the source of power in order to affect it. Now, as he lay in the damp heat of the Angolan nights, he sometimes experienced the feeling that he was back in the jungle. He knew he had been right.

He had understood that there was going to be an opening at the executive level in Angola and he had immediately learned Portuguese. His career climb had been meteoric. His bosses had seen his potential, although there were others with more experience who applied for the same post. He had been appointed to a desirable post with little or no discussion.

That was his first contact with Africa, with a poor and shattered country. His time in Vietnam didn't count, he had been an unwelcome intruder. Here he was welcome. At first he spent his time listening, seeing and learning. He had marvelled at the joy and dignity that flourished amid the hardship.

It had taken him almost two years to see that what the bank was doing was wrong. Instead of helping the country to gain true independence and enable the rebuilding of the war-torn land, the bank merely served to protect the very rich. He noted that the people around him treated him with deference to his high rank. Behind the radical rhetoric there was only corruption, weakness and greed. There were others – independent intellectuals and the occasional politician – who saw what he saw, but they were not in positions of power. No-one listened to them.

At last he could stand it no longer. He tried to explain to his superiors that the strategies of the bank were misdirected, but he received no response, despite time and time again making transatlantic flights to persuade the staff at the top in the head office. He wrote countless memos, but he never had an answer that conveyed more than well-meaning indifference. At one of these meetings he finally understood that he had been labelled as difficult, as someone who was beginning to fall outside the pale. One evening he spoke with his oldest mentor, a finance analyst called Whitfield who had followed his career since his undergraduate days and who had helped recruit him. They met for dinner at a restaurant in Georgetown and Carter had asked him straight out: was he alienating everyone? Was there really no-one who could see that he was right and that the bank was wrong? Whitfield had answered just as candidly and told him he was asking the wrong question. It didn't matter that Carter was right or wrong. What mattered was bank policy.

Carter flew back to Luanda. As he leaned back into his first-class seat, a dramatic decision was taking shape.

It took several sleepless nights for him to see what it was he wanted. It was also at this time that he met the man who would play a decisive role in convincing him that he was doing the right thing. With hindsight Carter had often marvelled at the mixture of conscious decision and random coincidence that shaped a person's life.

It had been an evening in March in the middle of the 1970s. He had suffered a long period of sleeplessness as he searched for a way out of his dilemma. One evening, feeling restless, he decided to go to one of the restaurants in Luanda's harbour, Metropol. He liked going there because there was little chance he would run into anyone from the bank. Or any of Angola's elite, for that matter. He was usually left in peace at the Metropol. At the next table that night there had been a man who spoke very poor Portuguese and, since the waiter couldn't speak English, Carter had stepped in to translate.

Then the two of them had started talking. It turned out that the man was Swedish and was in Luanda on a consulting project commissioned by the state-owned telecom sector, which was grossly neglected and underdeveloped. Carter could never afterwards say exactly what it was that sparked his interest in the man. He was usually someone who maintained a stern reserve. But there had been something about this man that lowered his guard, even though Carter was a suspicious person by nature. His usual attitude was that most of the people he met were his enemies.

It had not taken Carter long to understand that the man at the next table – who soon joined him at his own – was highly intelligent. He was not only an able engineer and technician, but someone who seemed to have read up on and understood much of Angola's colonial history and present political situation.

The man's name was Tynnes Falk. He had only learned this when it was late and they had said goodbye. They had been the last to leave the establishment. A lone waiter was slumped half asleep at the bar. Their chauffeurs were waiting outside. Falk was staying at the Hotel Luanda. They decided to meet the following evening.

Falk had only meant to stay in Luanda for the three months that the project was expected to take. When the work was over, Carter had offered him a new consulting project. It was mainly an excuse to hold on to him, so that they could continue their conversations.

Falk had therefore come back to Luanda two months later. That was when he told Carter he was unmarried. Carter had likewise remained unmarried, though he had lived with a succession of women and fathered three girls and one boy, whom he almost never saw. In Luanda he now had two black lovers. One was a professor at the local university, the other the ex-wife of a cabinet minister. He kept these liaisons secret, except from his staff. He had avoided forming relationships within the bank. Since Falk seemed very lonely, Carter guided him into a suitable relationship with a woman named Rosa, the daughter of a Portuguese businessman and his Angolan housekeeper.

Falk had started to feel at home in Africa. Carter got him a pleasant house with a garden and a view of Luanda's beautiful harbour. He also wrote a contract that rewarded Falk excessively for the modest work he was expected to carry out.

They continued their conversations. Whatever subject they discussed on those long tropical nights, they always found that their political and moral opinions coincided. It was the first time Carter had met anyone in whom he could fully confide. Falk felt the same way.

It was during these long African nights that the plan began to take shape. Carter listened with fascination to the surprising things Falk told him about the electronic world in which he lived and worked. Through Falk he had come to understand that he who controlled electronic communication controlled everything. It was above all what Falk told him about how wars would be fought in the future that excited him. Bombs would be nothing more than computer viruses smuggled into the enemy's storehouse of weapons. Electronic signals could eliminate the enemy's stock markets and telecom networks. The days of nuclear submarines were over. Future threats would come barrelling down the miles of fibre-optic cables that were now entangling the world like a spider's web.

They were in agreement from the beginning about the need for patience. Never to make haste. Their time would come. Then they would strike.

They complemented each other. Carter had contacts. He knew how the bank functioned. He understood the details of the financial world. He knew how delicate the economic balance of the world really was. Falk was the technician who could translate ideas into practical reality.

They spent the evenings together for many months, refining their plans. During the past 20 years they had been in regular contact.

Carter was jerked out of his thoughts and instinctively reached for the gun under his pillow. But it was only Celine, fumbling with the locks on the kitchen door. He ought to fire her. She made too much noise preparing his breakfast. The eggs were never cooked the way he liked them, and she was ugly and fat. Besides, she was stupid. She could neither read nor write and she had nine children. Her husband spent most of his time – if he wasn't drunk – chatting in the shade of a tree.

Carter had at one time been persuaded that these were the people who would create the new world, but he didn't believe it any longer. So it was just as well to destroy the world, to smash it into bits.

The sun had already swum up over the horizon. And now Tynnes Falk was dead. That which should never have happened, had happened. They had always been aware of the fact that something beyond their control might interfere with their plans. They had built this into their calculations and had taken every possible precaution. But they had never imagined that one of them might die. An unplanned death. When Carter first got that call from Sweden, he had refused to believe it was true. His friend no longer existed. It hurt him and it changed all their plans. And it had happened at the worst possible time – right when they were about to strike. Now he alone was left on the threshold of the great moment. But life always consisted of more than carefully laid plans and conscious decisions. There was always coincidence.

Their great operation had a name in his head: Jacob's Marsh.

On a rare occasion Falk had drunk a lot of wine and begun speaking of his childhood. He had grown up on an estate where his father was some kind of caretaker. There had been a marsh next to a particular strip of forest. It had been bordered by beautiful, chaotic wild-flower meadows, so Falk had said. He had played there as a child very often, watching the dragonflies and having the best times of his life. He had explained why it was called Jacob's Marsh. A long time ago a man named Jacob had drowned himself there over an unrequited love.