“Nothing is here by coincidence,” Modin said abruptly. Wallander turned toward him.
“Try to explain it to me in a way that I’ll understand.”
“Everyone arranges their bookshelf in their own way. Or their folders, or whatever. After a while you learn to see people’s patterns, even in their computers. The person who worked on this one was very deliberate. Everything is tidy. There’s nothing superfluous. But it also isn’t arranged in any mundane way following the alphabet or numerical sequences.”
Wallander interrupted him.
“Say that again.”
“Well, usually people arrange things alphabetically or according to some numerical sequence. A comes before B comes before C. One comes before two and five before seven. But here there isn’t any of that.”
“What’s the pattern, then?”
“Something else entirely.”
Wallander tried to sense where Modin was going.
“You see another kind of pattern?”
Modin nodded and pointed to the screen. Wallander and Martinsson leaned forward.
“Two components turn up repeatedly,” Modin continued. “The first one I discovered was the number twenty. I tried to see what would happen if I added a few zeroes or changed the order around. If I do that, something interesting happens.”
He pointed to the digits on the screen: a two and a zero.
“See what happens when I do this.”
Modin typed something and the numbers were highlighted. Then they disappeared.
“They’re like frightened animals that run and hide,” Modin said. “It’s as if I were shining a bright light on them. Then they rush back into the darkness. But after a while they come out again, and always in the same place.”
“So how do you interpret this?”
“That they’re important somehow. There’s also another component that behaves in this way.”
Modin pointed to the screen again, this time to the initials “JM.”
“They do the same thing,” he said. “If you try to home in on them, they disappear.”
Wallander nodded.
“They turn up all the time,” Martinsson said. “Every time we identify a new institution on the list, they’re there. But Robert has also found something else.”
Wallander stopped them so he could polish his glasses.
“If you leave them alone,” Modin said, “you start to see after a while that they move around.”
He pointed to the screen again.
“The first company we identified was the first on the list,” he said.
“And here the nocturnals are at the top of the column.”
“‘Nocturnals’?”
“That’s what we call them,” Martinsson said. “We thought it was a fitting name.”
“Keep going.”
“The second item we managed to identify lay a bit farther down on the list in the second column. Here the nocturnals have moved to the right and lower down. If you continue through the list, you’ll see that they move according to a strict pattern. They move down toward the lower right-hand corner.”
Wallander stretched out his back.
“This still doesn’t tell us what they’re doing.”
“We’re not quite done,” Martinsson said. “Now is when it gets really interesting.”
“I’ve found a time element,” Modin said. “The nocturnals change their coordinates with time. That means there’s an invisible timekeeper in here somewhere. I amused myself by constructing a calculation. If you assume that the upper left corner is zero, and that there are seventy-four identities in the network, and that the number twenty refers to the twentieth of October, then you see the following.”
Modin typed away until a new text emerged on the screen. Wallander read the name of the satellite company in Atlanta. Modin pointed to the last two components.
“This is number four from the end,” he said. “And today is the seventeenth of October.”
Wallander nodded slowly.
“You mean the pattern will reach some sort of high point on Monday? That the twentieth represents some kind of end point for these nocturnals?”
“It seems possible.”
“But what about the other component? This ‘JM’? What does it mean if we take the twenty to refer to the date?”
No one had an answer to that question. Wallander continued.
“What happens on Monday the twentieth of October?”
“I don’t know. But I can tell you that some kind of countdown is underway.”
“Maybe we should just pull the plug.”
“It wouldn’t help, since this is just a monitor,” Martinsson pointed out. “We can’t see the network clearly and we don’t know if one or more servers are involved.”
“Let’s assume the countdown is for a bomb of some kind,” Wallander said. “Where is it actually being controlled, if not from here?”
“We don’t know.”
Wallander suddenly had the feeling they were on the wrong track. Was he misguided in his assumption that the answer to the whole case lay in Falk’s computer? Wallander hesitated. The doubt that had come over him was very strong.
“We have to rethink this,” he said. “From the beginning.”
Martinsson looked shocked.
“Do you want us to stop?”
“I mean we have to rethink this. There have been some developments you aren’t aware of.”
They walked out onto the landing. Wallander told him about Carl-Einar Lundberg. He felt uncomfortable in Martinsson’s presence now, but he tried to hide his feelings.
“We should move Sonja Hökberg’s role out of the center,” he concluded. “I’m convinced now that someone was simply afraid of what she could tell us.”
“And how do you explain Landahl’s death?”
“They had been in a relationship. Perhaps she had told him what she knew, and in some way this had to do with Falk.”
He also told him what had happened in Siv Eriksson’s apartment.
“But that seems to contradict our ideas,” Martinsson said.
“But we still can’t explain why the electrical relay turned up in the morgue, or the fact that Falk’s body was removed. There’s an air of desperation in all of this, combined with an extreme ruthlessness. Why do people behave in this way?”
Martinsson thought it over.
“Maybe they’re fanatics,” he said. “The only thing that matters to them is what they believe in.”
Wallander gestured toward Falk’s office.
“Robert Modin has done a great job, but the time has come for us to bring in experts from the National Police cybercrimes division. We can’t take any risks regarding a countdown to Monday.”
“So Robert is done here?”
“Yes. I want you to contact Stockholm immediately. Try to get someone down here today.”
“But it’s Friday.”
“I don’t care. Monday is just around the corner.”
They went back in. Wallander congratulated Modin on his excellent work and told him he was no longer needed. Modin was clearly disappointed but didn’t say anything. He simply turned back to the computer to finish up.
Both Wallander and Martinsson turned their backs to him and started discussing the matter of his compensation in low tones. Wallander said he would take this on.
Neither one of them noticed the fact that Modin had quickly copied the remaining material onto his computer.
They said good-bye outside in the rain. Martinsson was going to drive Modin back to his home.
Wallander shook his hand and thanked him.
Then he drove down to the police station. He thought about the fact that Elvira Lindfeldt was coming up from Malmö to see him that evening. He was both excited and nervous. But before then, he had to meet with the others about rethinking the case. Sonja’s rape had dramatically altered the significance of certain events.