But what about Stark? How many incidents, brief impressions, people, animals, and things might have made a lasting impression on the man? The possibilities were boundless.
He stared at the empty field as though hypnotized, as if it might reveal the password of its own accord.
Come on, come on, he urged himself. If he didn’t work it out now, he would have to give up. He certainly wasn’t going to involve anyone else in figuring out the log-in details of a computer that in theory did not even exist.
But what might he find in that virtual landscape if he did get inside? Would there be anything he needed to know? Had Stark stored incriminating information, or was René merely going to find pictures of naked women and e-mails that concerned no one but Stark himself?
He stretched the muscles of his neck to loosen them and took another crack. First he typed in the name of Stark’s mother, then her civil registration number, then her initials and her civil registration number, followed by her name spelled backward and in all sorts of combinations. Eventually, he crossed her off his list.
After that, he tried the names of various grandmasters of chess: Ruy Lopez, Emanuel Lasker, Bobby Fischer, Efim Bogoljubov, Bent Larsen, Anatoly Karpov and all kinds of other hits he found on the net relating to the game. Tournaments, concepts, and terminology in both Danish and English, the names of the pieces, one by one, followed by different combinations of famous moves.
No solution. A needle in a haystack.
Again, he shook his head, looked at the time, listened to hear if his wife was getting out of bed. Then he cocked his head to check the weather outside, before returning to the empty log-in field.
What could have meant something to William Stark besides his work? As far as he was aware there was nothing but chess, his lady friend, and her daughter. But they were parameters he’d already been through from every angle.
But what about the less obvious?
Nicknames? Special dates? Their first encounter? Their first kiss? What could have meant something to him?
He looked at Malene and Tilde Kristoffersen’s names, trying for the umpteenth time to rearrange them, but there were far too many possibilities.
What had been most important to them? The most important of all? Most likely the daughter’s illness and their efforts to make her better. Yes, it could well be that. Nothing had occupied Stark’s mind up to the time of his disappearance like Tilde’s health. René knew as much from the few occasions on which he had listened with rather reserved admiration to Stark’s description of how much they strove to help the poor girl.
He looked again at his notes, nodded to himself and typed “Crohn’s disease,” expecting yet another rejection.
And then it happened. He was in, and like the phoenix from the ashes a virtual desktop appeared with a background photo of Tilde, taken in a carefree moment. No intricate combinations, no hyphens, no numerals, nothing. Just “Crohn’s disease”-and voilà, he’d entered the promised land.
As his eyes widened, he heard the slap of bedroom slippers on the tiles of the bathroom floor, the door closing hard as though his wife had got out of bed on the wrong side again. He had ten, maybe fifteen minutes until he had to close the laptop and pretend he’d just gotten up himself. Otherwise, Her Majesty’s prying questions would know no bounds and his fatigue would be compounded beyond endurance.
He skated across the folders on the desktop. They were neatly ordered, labeled according to the period in which the files they contained had been created, from 2003 to 2008. He clicked on a couple, finding their contents rather uninteresting at first blush, mainly large numbers of scientific studies, correspondence with doctors and the families of patients all over the world, Tilde’s test results, copies of medical records, letters of protest, and respectful acknowledgments. All with the sole aim of getting to grips with Tilde’s illness and trying to do something about it. Nothing new or surprising as far as René could make out.
He proceeded into the Documents library to see if there could be folders containing information that might compromise the group or reveal whether Stark had been cognizant of the Baka project fraud. For while Stark’s disappearance had given rise to general consternation, René himself was more interested in finding out why Stark hadn’t already gone missing in Cameroon as planned. Why had he come back early? Something must have happened in Cameroon, and knowing Stark as he did, René could only presume that some kind of prior knowledge had prompted him to react so unexpectedly.
But this was still mere conjecture.
Upon hearing his wife open the bathroom door rather less demonstratively than she had closed it and that the sound of slippers had now been superseded by the padding of bare feet, he knew it was time to stop.
He clicked on a couple of icons and took a quick look at the rest of the folders under Documents. And so it was his eyes came to rest on one without a name.
Five minutes, surely he could allow himself five minutes. So he clicked on the folder, whereupon at least twenty subfolders appeared, each specifying a geographical location and particular subject.
Some bore the names of African states, like Tanzania, Mozambique, Kenya, or Ghana. Others were more cryptically labeled: CNTCTNME, BESTKS., CNTRCT, POL1, POL2, POL3, and so on.
René found it odd. His ministry no longer provided aid to several of the countries in question, and some of them belonged to a category of states with whom they’d had considerable problems in recent years when it came to getting them to report back properly.
He clicked on a random folder. CNTCTNME, it read, clearly a file containing the names of Stark’s most important contacts. He quickly ran through the list. Many of them had been crossed out in red and replaced by others a fair amount of time before Stark’s disappearance, but René recognized them all.
He shook his head and opened the next folder: CNTRCT. In many ways this one seemed more complex.
René frowned as his wife slammed the doors of her wardrobe upstairs. So this was going to be another day on which nothing would please her.
He saw now that several of the contracts in the folder were the kind of confidential material not normally removed from the ministry. But upon opening the first of them to investigate further, he discovered to his surprise that it contained not the contract in its entirety, but merely an appendix.
What would he want with an appendix to a contract? he mused, moving on to the next. Here, too, the contents were an appendix rather than the contract itself. As he proceeded through the entire list of subfolders he realized that Stark had added appendices to at least twenty-five ministerial contracts. Each specified an atypical transfer of money, and only in connection with a development project of considerable magnitude whose budget Stark was responsible for.
He began to add the sums together and when he reached two million kroner René knew for certain that his had not been the only criminal activity taking place in the ministry.
He could hardly believe it. His most trusted and honest coworker, William Stark, had systematically siphoned off funds from their development projects and defrauded the state of two million good Danish kroner!
René smiled to himself, ignoring the sudden appearance and automatic nagging of his wife. Things were beginning to shape up.