‘Are you absolutely certain?’
‘Yes.’ The operations manager laughed again. ‘I remember him well. Really nice guy. He was down here a couple of times, in fact.’
‘On his own?’
The man had to think about it. ‘Um… yes…’ He drew it out. ‘There were so many of them. But I’m almost certain that he covered this part of the basement himself. I was with him, of course. I personally-’
‘That’s fine,’ Silje said and put the photograph of Jeffrey Hunter back in her bag. ‘Did anyone come down here afterwards?’
‘What do you mean by afterwards? After the President had disappeared?’
‘Yes.’
‘No,’ the operations manager said, and then added: ‘In the hours immediately after the alarm had been raised, the whole building was searched from top to bottom. Of course, I can’t be sure, as I was in the office with the police, checking everything with the drawings…’ he waved at the papers that were sticking up out of Silje’s bag, ‘and giving orders about this and that. In any case, the basement was cordoned off.’
‘Cordoned off? The basement?’
‘Yes, of course.’ He smiled meaningfully. ‘For security reasons…’
The phrase sounded like a mantra, something he said hundreds of times a day and which had therefore lost all meaning. ‘The lower basement was closed off well before the President arrived. As I understood it, the Secret Service wanted to… minimise all risk. They closed off parts of the west wing too. And sections of the seventh and eighth floor. What they call minimal risk, or… minimising risk…’ He desperately tried to remember the new English phrase he had learnt. ‘Minimalise the risk area,’ he said happily in Norwegian in the end. ‘Quite normal. In those circles. Very sensible.’
‘So the police might actually never have come down here,’ Silje said slowly. ‘In the hours after the President had been kidnapped, I mean.’
‘No…’
Again he seemed to be unsure about what she actually wanted to hear. He stared at her intently without finding the answer.
‘Well, the whole floor was closed off. Locked. You can only take the lift down here if you have a key. I’m sure you understand that we don’t want guests wandering around down here. Technical equipment and… Yes, you understand. Like I said, we had given keys to the Secret Service, but no one else had them. Apart from me, and those of my employees who-’
‘Were these drawings used when the building was searched?’ Silje Sorensen asked and grabbed the papers from her bag.
‘No. Those are the original drawings. We used the most recent ones, which include the presidential suite. But the drawings of the basement are just the same, so that the floor plan you have…’ he pointed at it, ‘is identical. The basement. In both versions.’
‘And none of the drawings include this door?’ Silje asked again, as if it was hard to believe.
‘We cooperated fully with the police,’ the operations manager assured her. ‘We worked closely and well with them, both before and after the kidnapping.’
Oh my God, Silje thought to herself and swallowed. There were too many of us. Far too many cooks and an incredible mess. The basement was closed off and locked. According to the drawings, there’s no door here. They were looking for an escape route and everything was chaotic. We didn’t find the door because we weren’t looking for it.
‘Could I go home now?’ Ali Khurram asked, still standing close to the wall, several metres away. ‘Can I not go now?’
‘People like you never cease to amaze me,’ Silje Sorensen said savagely, without taking her eyes from the desperate man. ‘Don’t you understand anything? Do you really think that you can break the law as you please and then be allowed to go home to your wife as if nothing had happened? Do you really believe that?’
She took a step towards him. Ali Khurram said nothing. Instead he looked up at the constable. The tall policeman was called Khalid Mushtak, and had graduated from police college a couple of years earlier with the best marks in his year. His eyes narrowed and his Adam’s apple gave away the fact that he had swallowed, but he said nothing.
‘When I said people like you,’ Silje corrected herself swiftly, puncturing the air with great big speech marks, ‘I didn’t mean people like you in that sense. I meant… I meant people who haven’t learnt to understand our system. Who don’t understand how…’
She stopped abruptly. The constant buzz of the colossal unprotected ventilation system that ran along the ceiling was the only thing to be heard. The operations manager had finally stopped smiling. Ali Khurram wasn’t snivelling any more. Khalid Mushtak stared at the policewoman, but didn’t say a word.
‘I apologise,’ Silje Sorensen said eventually. ‘I’m sorry. That was a very stupid thing to say.’
She held her hand out to the policeman.
He didn’t accept.
‘It isn’t me you should be apologising to,’ he said in a neutral tone, and put handcuffs on the arrestee. ‘It’s this guy here. But you’ll have plenty of opportunity to do that. My guess is that he’ll be detained for some time.’
The smile he gave her as he snapped the handcuffs shut was neither cold nor scornful; it was sympathetic.
Silje Sorensen could not remember the last time she had felt like such a complete fool. But it was even worse that there was an emergency exit from the Hotel Opera that no one had known about, other than a Secret Service agent who had now taken his own life.
Presumably out of shame, she thought as she felt herself blushing.
Worst of all was the fact that it had taken a day and a half to find it.
‘A bloody door,’ muttered the woman who never swore.
She went up the stairs behind Khalid Mushtak’s broad back.
‘It took us forty hours to find a damn door. God knows what else we haven’t found yet!’
XXIX
‘A door. They found a door.’
Warren Scifford passed his hand over his eyes. His hair looked wet, as if he’d just washed it. He had changed out of his suit into jeans and a wide dark blue sweatshirt, with YALE written in big letters across the chest. His boots looked like they were made from real snakeskin. The outfit made him look older than he did in a suit. The fact that his skin was starting to loosen on his neck was more obvious in a baggy sweatshirt. His suntanned complexion no longer gave a healthy, sporty impression. On the contrary, there was something forced about his appearance in such youthful clothes that somehow highlighted the fact that his skin was unnaturally tanned for the time of year. He had one leg crossed over the other and might have looked like he was about to fall asleep, had it not been for the toe of the upper boot that was tapping nervously. Again he was lying more than sitting in the chair, with his elbows resting on the arms. ‘A door that we can confirm was checked by the Secret Service,’ Adam Stubo said. ‘By Jeffrey Hunter. When did you discover that he’d disappeared?’
Warren Scifford took his time straightening up. Only now did Adam notice that he had cut himself badly and the blood was seeping through a plaster just by his left ear. The smell of aftershave was a hint too strong.
‘He called in sick,’ the American said eventually.
‘When?’
‘On the morning of the sixteenth of May.’
‘So he was here before the President came to Norway?’
‘Yes. He was the person in charge of securing the hotel. He came here on the thirteenth.’
The Chief of Police, Bastesen, stirred his coffee. He watched the whirlpool in his cup with fascination.
‘I thought those guys were completely incorruptible,’ he mumbled in Norwegian. ‘No wonder we haven’t got anywhere.’
