Höglund was on the phone with Martinsson when Wallander came back into the kitchen. She handed him the receiver.
“How is it going over there?”
“Robert Modin has a lot of energy, I’ll give him that much,” Martinsson said. “He took a lunch break and had a strange kind of quiche, but he was ready to get back to work again before I was even ready for coffee.”
“Have there been any developments?”
“He keeps insisting that the number twenty is significant. It’s returned in several different contexts. But he’s not over the wall yet.”
“What do you mean?”
“That’s his own terminology. He hasn’t cracked the code yet, though he’s sure now it consists of two words. Or possibly a number and a word, though I’m not sure how he knows that.”
Wallander told him briefly what they were doing. When the conversation was over he asked Höglund to go back to the neighbor and confirm the date of Jonas Landahl’s departure. He also wanted her to ask if anyone else had been seen on the ninth.
She left, and Wallander sat down on the sofa to think. But he had not come up with anything when she returned twenty minutes later.
“It’s pretty disturbing, really,” she said. “He keeps a record of these events. Is that all one has to look forward to in retirement? In any case, he’s absolutely sure the boy left on Wednesday.”
“What about the ninth?”
“He didn’t see anyone. But of course not even he spends every moment at the kitchen window.”
“So that doesn’t tell us anything,” Wallander said. “It could as easily have been the boy as anyone else.”
It was five o’clock. Höglund left to pick up her children. She offered to come back later that night, but Wallander told her to stay at home. He would call her if anything else developed.
He went to the boy’s room for a third time, and knelt to peer under the bed. Höglund had already checked it but he wanted to see with his own eyes if there was anything there.
Then he lay down on the bed.
Suppose he’s hidden something important in this room, Wallander thought. Something he wants to be able to check on when he first wakes up in the morning and when he’s going to bed at night. Wallander let his gaze travel along the walls of the room. Nothing. He was about to sit up when he saw that one of the bookcases next to the closet leaned slightly in toward the wall. It was very apparent from the vantage point of the bed. He sat up, and the angle was no longer visible. He walked over to the bookcase and bent down. Someone had placed a small shim under each side, creating a sliver of space underneath. He slid his fingers in and immediately felt that there was something there. He coaxed out the object and knew what it was before he had a chance to look at it. A diskette. He had his cell phone out and was dialing a number even before he made it to the desk. Martinsson answered immediately. Wallander explained where he was and what he had found. Martinsson wrote down the address and said he was on his way. Robert Modin would have to be left unsupervised for a short while.
Martinsson was there within fifteen minutes. He started the computer and inserted the diskette. Wallander leaned forward to read the name of the diskette. JACOB’S MARSH. It reminded him of something Höglund had said about the games, and he felt a rush of disappointment. Martinsson double-clicked on it. There was only one file on the diskette, and it had last been opened on the twenty-ninth of September. Martinsson double-clicked on the file.
They were both startled by the text that came up on the screen.
Release the minks.
“What does that mean?” Martinsson asked.
“I don’t know,” Wallander said. “But we have another connection. This time between Jonas Landahl and Falk.”
Martinsson stared at him uncomprehendingly.
“Don’t you remember? Falk was involved in that animal-release heist a while back.”
Now Martinsson remembered.
“I wonder if Jonas Landahl was involved in that job. He might have been one of the people who got away.”
Martinsson was still confused.
“So this is all about minks?”
“No,” Wallander said. “I don’t think so. I think we need to find Jonas Landahl as soon as possible.”
Chapter Twenty-Six
It was early dawn on the fourteenth of October, and Carter had just been forced to make an important decision. He had opened his eyes in the dark and listened to the noise of the air conditioning unit. He heard that it was almost time to clean out the mechanism inside. There was a low hum that shouldn’t have been there in the monotone gush of cold air from the machine. He had stood up, shaken out his slippers since there could be insects hiding inside, put on his robe, and gone down into the kitchen. Carter helped himself to a bottle of the previously boiled water that had spent the night inside the refrigerator. He slowly drank two large glasses, then went upstairs to his study and sat down in front of the computer. It was never turned off. It was connected to a large reserve battery in case of a blackout, and it was also hooked up to a surge protector that managed the constant ebbs and flows of power from the electrical outlet.
He had a message from Fu Cheng. He read it carefully.
Afterward he sat motionless in his chair for a while.
The news was not good, not good at all. Cheng had done what he had told him to do, but the police were apparently still trying to break into Falk’s computer. Carter was convinced that they would never be able to break the codes, and even if they did they would never understand what they were looking at. But there was something in the message that worried him, and it was the fact that the police had brought in a young man to help them with their task.
Carter had a healthy respect for young men with glasses who spent a great deal of their time in front of computers. He and Falk had often spoken about these modern-day geniuses. They could break into secret networks, read through and even interpret the most complicated electronic programs.
Cheng had written that he believed Modin to be this kind of young man. Cheng pointed out that Swedish hackers had broken into the defense systems of other countries on more than one occasion.
He could be one of the dangerous ones, Carter thought. A modern-day heretic. Someone who won’t leave our systems and our secrets alone. In an earlier age, a person like Modin would have been burned at the stake.
Carter didn’t like it, as little as he had liked any of the developments after Falk’s death. Falk had really left him in the lurch. Now Carter was forced to clean up around him, and he didn’t have much time to weigh each decision carefully. Haste had led to mistakes, such as removing Falk’s body. Maybe it hadn’t even been necessary to kill that young woman? But she could have talked. And the police didn’t seem to be losing interest.
Carter had seen this kind of behavior before — a person determined to follow a set of tracks leading to the wounded animal hiding in the bush.
After only a few days he realized it was the policeman called Wallander who was tracking them. Cheng’s analysis had been very clear on the matter. That’s why they had tried to take him out. But they had failed, and now the man was still tenaciously following their tracks.
Carter got up and walked over to the window. The city had not yet started to wake up. The African night was full of scents and sounds. Cheng was dependable. He was capable of a fanatic loyalty that Carter and Falk had once decided might be useful. The question now was only if that was enough.
He sat down at the computer and started typing. It took a little less than half an hour to list all the acts he felt constituted the alternatives. Then he cleared his mind of any emotion that would distract him from the best possible course of action.