The computer, which he had seen the hawk-eyed man working on via Latifi’s telephoto lens, was also protected—encrypted information that couldn’t be accessed without the code.

There was only one more option. He had to find the encryption key.

It had to be here, somewhere. He was sure of it. No one who regularly changed his RSA code—a combination of fifteen or maybe even twenty numbers and letters and question marks and dashes—could keep that in his head. That kind of asymmetric encryption code had to be written down.

If he found that key, he could decrypt the contents of the computer. See where the track led him. He’d infiltrated every kind of criminal organization and knew that whether they were selling drugs or humans or weapons, they all had one thing in common—they kept good books. Not because they were proud. Or because they weren’t aware of the risk of preserving evidence. It was about preventing unnecessary violence. Making sure that everyone involved could see that the money was being distributed fairly. It minimized the risk of these constitutionally suspicious individuals suspecting they were getting screwed and starting to war against their own instead of rival gangs and the police.

He looked around the room he’d already searched.

Looked at everything he could see. And everything he couldn’t.

“Latifi?”

He’d called the Albanian policeman who was watching the house from the roof, who probably caught a glimpse of him now and then.

Maybe he even saw him right now.

“Yes?”

He had a feeling how this might play out.

“The drawings. You got them handy?”

“Yes.”

“The tower room. How big is it?”

“Wait.”

Hoffmann heard a rustle, heard the click of Latifi’s glasses case.

“Six meters and thirty-five centimeters long, five meters and twenty centimeters wide.”

“Just a second.”

He chose the wall on the opposite side of the window, where he was least visible, walked across the room, one foot in front of the other from wall to wall. He knew that his feet were twenty-eight centimeters long, and after two rounds he had an answer he felt was correct.

“I thought so.”

“What, Larsson?”

“The room is smaller than I remembered the drawing. More square. I got five meters and fifteen on one side and five and twenty on the other.”

“One meter and twenty centimeters shorter in one direction.”

“Yep. And I think I know why.”

A dark oak built-in bookshelf covered most of the far wall. He’d run across brick walls that turned into doors only a few times, but hidden rooms were more common. They were also usually easier to detect. He had completely missed this one. Cleverly constructed—even now, when he concentrated on every corner, edge, and strip of wood, nothing revealed itself. He knocked, listened, grabbed hold of shelves, pressed and wiggled various curved ornaments. Until he, more or less by mistake, leaned against the glass door of an illuminated cabinet with a hodgepodge of trinkets inside, and just like the brick wall—there was an almost inaudible click. The glass door just followed his hand back, and before he knew it, the entire shelf wall was gone.