“Does this mean Hökberg switched weapons in the middle of her attack?”
“I think so. Eva Persson had the knife in her purse, but she gave it to Sonja 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 show unexpected investigative skills.
“I went out there,” he said, “and I brought the bag with me. I tried to throw it to the spot by the fence where it had been found, but I could never throw it that far.”
“Why not?”
“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 walked all the way over there?”
“Maybe. But the question then is, Why?”
“You have an idea?”
“The most natural explanation would be that the bag was placed there deliberately and that someone wanted it to be found — but maybe they didn’t want it to be found immediately.”
“Someone wanted the body to be identified, but not immediately?”
“Yes, that’s what I was thinking. But then I discovered something. 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 searching through it, looking for something.”
“And maybe found something?”
“That’s what I think, but it’s your job to figure these things out.”
Wallander got up.
“Good work,” he said. “You may just have hit on something.”
Wallander went back up the stairs and stopped by Höglund’s office. She was bent over a stack of papers.
“I want you to contact Sonja Hökberg’s mother,” he said. “Find out what Sonja normally had in her purse.”
Wallander told her about Nyberg’s idea and she nodded.
Wallander didn’t bother to wait while she made the call. He felt restless, and he started back toward his office. He wondered how many miles he had covered by 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 a quarter to two on Sunday, the twelfth of October.
Part Two
The Firewall
Chapter Twenty-One
Carter woke up at dawn because the air conditioning unit suddenly stopped. He lay tensed between the sheets listening to the darkness. There was the constant drone of cicadas, and a dog barked in the distance. The power had gone out again. That happened every other night here 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 filled with stifling heat. 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 unbearable heat or the throbbing noise from the generator.
He turned his head and looked at the time. It was a quarter past five. He heard one of the guards snoring outside. That was most likely Jose. As long as Roberto kept himself awake, it didn’t matter. Carter shifted his head and felt the muzzle of his gun under the pillow. When it came down to it, beyond the guards and fences, this was his real protection against the countless 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.
Suddenly the air conditioning started up again. That meant it wasn’t the bandits who had caused the problem, it was simply a technical glitch. The power lines were old, left over from colonial times under the Portuguese. How many years ago that was he could no longer remember.
Carter had trouble falling asleep again. He thought about the fact that he was about to turn sixty. It was in many ways a miracle that he had reached this age given his unpredictable and dangerous lifestyle.
He pulled 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 these hours before sunrise, left to the dark and his own memories. He could get worked up over old wrongs that had been done to him. It was only when he focused his thoughts on the revenge he was planning that he could calm himself again. But by then several hours had often passed. The sun would be up, the guards would have started talking, and Celine would be unlocking the door to the kitchen in order to come in and make his breakfast.
He pulled the sheet back up 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 it 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 tearing up.
He pulled the sheet all the way up over his mouth. This time he won out. The need to sneeze died away. He started thinking about all the years that had gone by and all that had taken place that had led to his lying in a bed in Luanda, capital of Angola.
Thirty years earlier, he had been a young man working at the World Bank in Washington, D.C. 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 favor. The World Bank had been founded to provide the huge loans that were needed in the poverty-stricken parts of the world and that exceeded the capacity of individual nations and banks. Although many of his friends at the University of California had told him he was wrong, that no reasonable solutions to the economic inequality of the world were addressed at the World Bank, he had maintained his beliefs. At heart he was no less radical than they. He too marched in the antiwar demonstrations. But he had never believed in the potential of civil disobedience to change the world. Nor did he believe in the small and squabbling socialist organizations. He had come to the conclusion that the world had to be changed from within the existing social structures. If you were going to try to shift the balance of power, you had to stay close to its source.
But he had a secret. It was what had made him leave Columbia University and go to 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 westward from Qui Nhon. He knew he had 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 had known that he was going to survive the war; that he would not be among the bodies sent home in plastic sacks. And it was then, during the stifling nights patrolling the jungle, that he had arrived at his belief that you had to stay close to the source of power in order to affect it. Now, as he lay in the wet heat of the Angolan night, he sometimes experienced the feeling that he was back in the jungle. He knew he had been right.