The pursuit and death of Hua Gang is the violent culmination of Kurt Wallander’s hunt for the gunman connected to Tynnes Falk’s stolen body and the wider series of killings. In the fog and rain near Sandhammaren, Wallander confronts the armed suspect, survives a near-fatal shot, and pursues him across a ploughed field. The gunman’s suicide ends the chase, but not all the danger surrounding the case.

The Pursuit Begins

Wallander first recognizes the dark blue Mercedes van in the fog: it is the vehicle believed to have returned Tynnes Falk’s body to the cash machine. He concludes that the person searching the area may be looking for Robert Modin, though he also realizes that the gunman could be after him. When a shot erupts behind him, Wallander drops to the ground; bending to retrieve his slipping phone has put him low enough to avoid being hit. He escapes toward the car park as police sirens approach, and the van remains behind, linking the attempted attack to the investigation of Falk’s body.

The Search Tightens

At a forest north of Sandhammaren, the police closed in on a man believed to be the shooter. A dog owner had reported someone hiding in the bushes, and officers, dog units, and Kurt Wallander’s colleagues assembled around a small wooded area bordered by the road to Skillinge and open fields. A radio report placed the suspect farther north; then two shots sounded, followed by a patrol officer’s warning that the man was firing at them. Wallander and Hansson hurried to the patrol car and found El Sayed and Elofsson frightened but alive. The gunman appeared to be among trees across the road, near a path leading down to the sea.

Wallander tried to coordinate a wider containment. Martinsson called for a helicopter with powerful searchlights, while Wallander ordered the officers to take cover and called out to the gunman in Swedish and then English to put down his weapon. The man did not answer. When a shadow crossed the road and disappeared into the field, Wallander realized that the suspect was escaping toward more extensive woodland, where he would be harder to surround. He swung a police car around to cast its headlights across the field. The gunman stopped in the light, turned, and fired; one bullet shattered the windscreen and another destroyed a headlight. Wallander warned the approaching patrol cars not to advance until the area was declared safe.

With the gunman running and the helicopter still waiting for orders, Wallander chose pursuit over the slower plan to encircle him. Martinsson objected, but Wallander ran into the ploughed field. Mud clung to his shoes until one came off; he tore off the other and kept going barefoot across the furrows. The gunman, too, struggled on the soft ground. When he stumbled and fell, Wallander saw him searching for the weapon he had dropped and ran toward him, about thirty-five metres away. Wallander lost his footing and fell headfirst into the mud as the man recovered the gun and aimed it at him. Wallander pulled the trigger, but his own weapon failed; he threw himself down into the mud as the shot rang out.

The Gunman’s Death and Identification

Wallander lay motionless in the mud, waiting for another shot. For a moment, the field seemed to offer him only a pointless ending: his face pressed into cold clay, his shoes lost, and the gun he had tried to fire useless in his hands. The approaching helicopter finally gave him reason to look up. The gunman lay on his back with his arms spread. He had shot himself in the temple; the shot Wallander heard had not been aimed at him. The gunman’s death ended the immediate confrontation, while leaving Wallander shaken, nauseated, and cold in his soaked clothes. Elofsson found both shoes and wiped the thick clay from them as the search operation was dismantled.

Wallander identified the dead man as the person who had entered Tynnes Falk’s flat while Wallander was waiting there for Marianne Falk, and as the assailant who had twice tried to kill him. At the scene, Wallander also suspected the man of dragging Sonja Hökberg to the power substation and throwing Jonas Landahl into the propeller shaft on the Poland ferry. His sense that the danger had ended was premature: he believed his colleagues and Robert Modin were now safe, but the narrative makes clear that he would later discover otherwise.

The subsequent identification established that the gunman was Hua Gang, who had used the name Fu Cheng. Police in Hong Kong matched his identity, and Interpol held his fingerprints in connection with crimes including bank robberies in Frankfurt and Marseilles. Wallander suspected, without being able to prove it, that money from those robberies had helped finance the operation. Fingerprints and witness reports confirmed Hua Gang as the killer of both Hökberg and Landahl. The evidence also placed him under Carter’s direction, and perhaps Falk’s, distinguishing his role as the organisation’s killer from the two men who had made its decisions.

What the Death Resolves—and Leaves Open

The gunman’s death closes the immediate pursuit, but it does not explain the full design behind the violence. Later findings placed Hua Gang within a tightly controlled operation whose leaders were Carter and Tynnes Falk. Their plan depended not simply on killing or concealment, but on exploiting weaknesses in the electronic networks connecting major financial institutions. The pursuit therefore ends one armed threat while leaving the larger threat to be understood through its technical and organizational consequences.

The danger had come close to becoming an international financial crisis. Had Wallander or Robert Modin inserted Carter’s Visa card into a cash machine at exactly 5:31 a.m. on Monday, October 20, the transaction would have triggered the electronic attack. Wallander’s encounter with the gunman belongs to the same chain of events that leads to that attempted trigger: the suspect is found while the police are searching for Modin, and the later confrontation at a cash machine reveals how an ordinary transaction could activate the plan. The contrast is stark: a familiar, routine act was intended to set off consequences far beyond the person using the machine.

The operation was ultimately thwarted, and the investigators concluded that with Carter and Falk out of the picture the organization had effectively ceased to exist. Yet the discovery of the plan exposed how vulnerable major financial institutions had been; security specialists around the world worked to repair the weaknesses, while experts tried to establish what the attack would have done. The gunman’s death thus marks a turning point in the investigation rather than a self-sufficient solution: the immediate pursuer is gone, but the stakes of the case are measured by the systems the conspirators nearly brought down.

Some links remained unexplained even after the investigation advanced. The police never found a satisfactory reason why Sonja Hökberg had been thrown against the high-voltage wires at the substation, or why Falk possessed its blueprints. The pursuit ends with the gunman dead, but these unanswered questions preserve a residue of uncertainty around the crimes that led to it.