conditioned reaction, that’s all.
‘I don’t think I can,’ he said.
‘Are you afraid of me?’
‘Yes,’ Harry said.
A sad sweetness filled his lower abdomen, the silent lament of his sex.
She laughed out loud, but stopped when she saw his eyes. She pouted and said in a pleading child’s voice: ‘But Harry, go on…’
‘I can’t. You’re so wonderful, but…’
Her smile was intact but she blinked as if he had slapped her.
‘It’s not you I want,’ Harry said.
Her eyes wavered. The corners of her mouth pulled as if she were going to laugh.
‘Hah,’ she said.
It was meant ironically, it was supposed to have been an exaggerated theatrical exclamation. Instead it came out as a weary, resigned groan. The play was over, they had both forgotten their lines.
‘Sorry,’ Harry said.
Her eyes filled with water.
‘Oh, Harry,’ she whispered.
He wished she hadn’t said that, so he could have asked her to leave right away.
‘Whatever it is you want from me, I haven’t got it,’ he said. ‘She knows it. Now you know it, too.’
Part Four
26
Saturday. The Soul. The Day.
As the sun streamed across Ekeberg Ridge on Saturday morning, with the promise of another record-breaking temperature, Otto Tangen was going over the mixing console for the last time.
It was dark and cramped in the bus, and there was the smell of mouldy clothes that neither Otto’s Elvis Presley car fresheners nor his roll-up tobacco would ever succeed in dispersing. Sometimes he felt like he was sitting in a bunker in the trenches with the stench of death in his nostrils, but still isolated from what was going on immediately outside.
The student building stood in the middle of a piece of land at the top of Kampen with a view down towards Toyen. On each side of and almost parallel with the old four-storey red-brick building were two taller blocks of flats from the ’50s. The same paint and the same type of windows were used in the student building as in the blocks of flats, presumably in an attempt to give the area a unified look. However, the age difference could not be camouflaged; it still looked as if a waterspout had sucked up the student building and gently planted it down in the middle of a housing cooperative.
Harry and Waaler agreed to locate the bus in the car park with all the other cars, directly in front of the student building, where reception was good and the bus was not too conspicuous. Passers-by who still might cast a cursory glance its way would assume that the rusty, blue Volvo bus with the isoprene-covered windows belonged to the rock band ‘Kindergarden Accident’, which was painted in black letters on the side with skulls as dots over the two ‘i’s.
Otto dried his sweat and checked that all the cameras were working, that all the angles were covered and that everything that moved outside the building was picked up by at least one camera, so that they could follow the target from the moment he entered the hallway to the doorway of any one of the 80 student rooms in the eight corridors on the four floors.
They had been assembling, lining up and screwing in cameras to the wall all night. Otto still had the metallic, bitter taste of dry mortar in his mouth and yellow wall plaster dusted the shoulders of his filthy denim jacket, like the scaly scurf of dandruff.
Waaler had listened to reason in the end and realised that if they were to keep to the deadline, they would have to manage without sound. It wouldn’t affect the arrest in the slightest; the only thing was that they would lose material proof if the target were to say anything incriminating.
They had not managed to put cameras in the lift, either. Using a cable-free camera, Otto couldn’t get a decent picture in the bus because the concrete shaft blocked the signals, and the problem with using cables was that, however they placed them, they were either visible or there was the chance that they would get entangled in the lift machinery. Waaler had given the OK on that since the target would be on his own in the lift anyway. The occupants of the house had been sworn to secrecy and had received strict instructions to lock their doors and stay inside their rooms from 4.00 till 6.00.
Otto Tangen moved the mosaic of small pictures round on the three large data screens and increased the size of them until they formed a logical whole. On the screen to the left: the corridors running north, the fourth floor at the top and the ground floor at the bottom. On the middle screen: the entrance to the block, all the stair landings and the doors to the lift. On the screen to the right: the corridors running south.
Otto clicked ‘Save’, put his hands behind his head and leaned backwards in his chair with a satisfied grunt. He could monitor the whole building. Of young students. If they had had more time, he might have set up a few cameras in some of the student rooms. Without any of the students knowing, of course. Tiny little fish-eye lenses placed where they would never be discovered. Along with Russian microphones. Randy young trainee nurses from Norway. He could have videoed them and sold the videos through his contacts. Screw that bastard Waaler. How the hell could he have known about Astrup and the barn in Asker! A suspicion of an idea fluttered through Otto’s brain and disappeared again. He had long suspected that Astrup was paying someone to spread a protective wing over his operation.
Otto lit up a cigarette. The pictures were like stills; not a single movement in the yellow-painted corridors or on the stairs betrayed that this was a live transmission. Those students who were spending the summer in their rooms were probably still in bed sleeping. But if he waited for a couple of hours he might catch sight of the guy who was let in by the doll in room 303 at 2.00 in the morning. She had looked drunk. Drunk and ready. He had just looked ready. Otto thought about Aud-Rita. The first time he had met her for pre-drinks at Nils’s place everyone had had their fat paws out to shake hands, and when she put out her own little white hand to Otto and drawled ‘Aud- Rita’ it had sounded as though she was asking if he was pissed: Er’u drita.
Otto released a deep sigh.
That bastard Waaler had been going over the course with people from Special Forces right up until midnight. Otto had caught the discussion between Waaler and the head of the soldiers outside his bus. Later in the day some soldiers from a special unit were to be deployed in threes in every corridor on each floor, 24 in all, dressed in black with balaclavas and carrying loaded MP5s, tear gas and gas masks. At a signal from the bus they would jump into action immediately the target knocked on a door or tried to enter one of the rooms. The thought made Otto tremble with excitement. He had seen them in action twice before and the guys were bloody unreal. There were bangs and flashes of light, just like at a heavy-rock concert, and on both occasions the targets were so numb with fear that the whole thing was over in seconds. Otto had been told that was the point of it, to frighten the wits out of the target so that he couldn’t raise the mental capacity to resist.
Otto stubbed out his cigarette. The trap was set. It was just a question of waiting for the rat.
The police were due to arrive at about 3.00. Waaler had banned any movement into and out of the bus before or after that time. It was going to be a long, hot day.
Otto threw himself down on the mattress on the floor. He wondered what was going on in room 303 right now. He missed his own bed. He missed its movement. He missed Aud-Rita.
At that same moment the entrance gate slammed behind Harry. He stood still to light his first cigarette of the day as he peered up at the sky where the morning mist lay, like a thin veil that the sun was in the process of burning through. He had slept. A deep, continuous, dreamless sleep. It hardly seemed possible.
‘That one gonna stink today, Harry! The weather forecast say it’s gonna be hottest day since 1907. Maybe.’
It was Ali, who lived in the flat below Harry and owned Niazi. It didn’t matter how early Harry got up, Ali and
