Firewall - By Henning Mankell & Ebba Segerberg Page 0,176

name had been Hua Gang. Interpol had his fingerprints at the scene of several crimes, including two bank robberies in Frankfurt and Marseilles. Though he could not prove it, Wallander suspected that this money had been used to finance parts of Falk and Carter's operations. Hua Gang had been in organised crime for a long time and had been a suspect in murder cases both in Europe and Asia without ever having been convicted. There was no doubt that he had been the killer of both Sonja H枚kberg and Jonas Landahl. Fingerprints and reports from witnesses confirmed this. But Hua Gang had been working under the direction of Carter, and perhaps Falk. There was still work to be done in mapping the reach and entire workings of the organisation, but the information they had suggested that there was no longer a reason to fear the group. With Carter and Falk out of the picture the organisation essentially had ceased to exist.

Wallander was never able, satisfactorily, to determine why Carter had shot Elvira Lindfeldt. Modin had reported as much as he could about the angry accusations Carter had flung at her before she died. Wallander assumed that she had known too much and become a liability. Carter must have been in a state of near desperation when he reached Sweden.

Still, he had come uncomfortably close to succeeding. If either Modin or Wallander had put the credit card into the machine at exactly 5.31 a.m. that Monday, October 20, they would have unleashed an electronic avalanche. The experts who had been tracing the infiltrations Falk had made into the bank networks had been amazed. Falk and Carter had exposed the major financial institutions of the world as shockingly vulnerable to attack. Security specialists around the world were working non-stop to rectify these deficiencies, while yet more groups were trying to construct an accurate picture of what would have happened had the plan actually been set in motion.

Luckily, of course, Wallander had not put Carter's Visa card into the machine. And nothing had happened, other than that a selection of cash machines in Sk氓ne had gone haywire for the day. Many of them had been shut down, but as yet no problem had been located. Just as mysteriously, they had, in due course, resumed normal working order.

They never did find a satisfactory answer to why Sonja H枚kberg was thrown against the high-voltage wires at the power substation, nor why Falk had been in possession of the blueprints. They had, however, found out how the burglars had gained entrance to the station. That had been thanks to Hansson's doggedness. It turned out that Moberg, one of the technicians, had come home from leave to find that his house had been broken into. The keys to the station had not been stolen, but Hansson maintained that whoever committed the burglary must have copied them and then had them duplicated by the American manufacturer, probably in return for a considerable sum of money. A simple check had revealed an entry visa in Landahl's passport, proving that he had been in the United States in the month following the break-in at Moberg's house. The money may have come from Hua Gang's bank robberies in Frankfurt and Marseilles.

Some loose ends were painstakingly tied up, others remained unsolved. They found out that Tynnes Falk had kept a post-office box in Malm枚. But they could never work out why he had told Siv Eriksson that he had his mail sent to her address. His journal was never recovered, nor were the fingers that had been severed from his hand. The coroner's office did, however, determine that he had died from natural causes. Enander had been right about one thing: it was not a heart attack. Falk's death was the result of a burst blood vessel in his brain.

Other information trickled in. One day Wallander found a long report on his desk from Nyberg in which he described how they had determined that the empty case in Landahl's cabin on the ferry had, indeed, belonged to Falk. Nyberg had not been able to find the contents, but he assumed that Hua Gang had thrown them overboard in an effort to delay the identification of the body. They only ever recovered his passport. Wallander put the report aside with a sigh.

The crucial task had been the mapping of Carter and Falk's strange world. Wallander knew now that their ambitions had known no bounds. After their intended crippling of the world markets they