meeting, many years before.
‘I’m sorry, Hillary. I’m truly sorry for you and Chelsea.’
Mrs Clinton said nothing. Her eyes were red. Her mouth trembled. She managed to smile, nodded and let go of Helen’s hand before moving on, proud, straight-backed, meeting the eye of anyone who dared to look.
Helen Lardahl Bentley had never forgotten the advice of the President’s wife, but she had not followed it. Helen couldn’t live without trusting someone. Nor could she have set course for the country’s top position without a handful of loyal staff, whom she trusted implicitly. An exclusive group of good friends who wished her well.
Warren Scifford had been one of them.
That was what she had always believed. But he was lying. He had betrayed her, and the lie was bigger than him.
Because he couldn’t know what he claimed in the letter the Trojans knew. No one knew. Not even Christopher. It was her secret, her burden, and she had carried it alone for more than twenty years.
It was totally incomprehensible, and it was only the panic, the paralysing, overwhelming fear that engulfed her when Jeffrey Hunter showed her the letter that had prevented her from seeing that.
Warren was lying. Something was very wrong.
No one could know.
Her teeth felt like they were covered in fur and she had a bad taste in her mouth. She looked timidly around the bathroom. There, she saw it by the mirror. Hanne Wilhelmsen had put out a glass for her, with a new toothbrush and a half-used tube of toothpaste in it. She struggled with the obstinate packaging and cut herself on the plastic before managing to extract the toothbrush.
President Bentley bared her teeth at the mirror.
‘You bastard!’ she whispered. ‘May you burn in hell, Warren Scifford! That’s the only place for people like you!’
II
Warren Scifford felt awful.
In the half-dark he fumbled around for his mobile phone, which was playing a mechanical version of something that was supposed to sound like a cockerel. The noise would not stop. He sat up in bed, confused. He had forgotten to close the blackout curtains again before going to bed, and the grey light behind the thin curtains gave him no idea of what time it was.
The cockerel got louder and Warren swore passionately as he searched around on the bedside table. Finally he caught sight of the mobile phone. The display said it was 05:07. It must have fallen on the floor in the course of his three hours of restless sleep. He couldn’t imagine how he had managed to set the alarm so wrong. He had meant to set it for five past seven.
He missed a few times before he finally managed to turn the alarm off. He sank back into the bed. He closed his eyes, but knew immediately that there was no point. His thoughts were crashing and colliding and creating chaos, so it would be impossible to sleep. He stood up, resigned, padded into the shower and stood under the water for the next fifteen minutes. If he wasn’t rested, he could at least scrub himself into some sort of waking state.
He dried himself and pulled on his boxer shorts and a T-shirt.
It didn’t take him long to rig up the portable office. He left the ceiling lamp switched off and closed the blackout curtains. The table lamps gave sufficient light to work. When everything was set up, he filled the kettle and stood leaning against the bookshelf, waiting for it to boil. For a moment he considered coffee. But the powder looked old and tasteless, so he took a tea bag and dropped it into the cup instead, then filled it with boiling water.
No new emails.
He tried to work his way back. It was around two in the morning when he went to bed. That would be around eight in the evening in Washington DC. So now it would eleven o’clock back home. Everyone was working flat out. No one had sent him anything for more than four hours.
He tried to reassure himself that it was because they thought he was asleep.
It didn’t work. The fact that he was being frozen out was becoming increasingly apparent. The more time that passed without the President being found, the more Warren Scifford’s role was diminishing. Even though he was still the contact person for the local police, it was obvious that operations at the embassy on Drammensveien had increased in scope and content without him being fully informed. The operative investigators the FBI had sent to Norway some hours after he had arrived were the kings of the castle. They stayed at the embassy. They were linked to communications technology that made his little office, with his selection of mobile phones and encrypted PC, look like a pathetic delivery to a technical museum.
They didn’t give a damn about the Norwegian police.
Some of them did still come to the meetings he tried to set up several times a day in an attempt to coordinate the American effort with anything that the Norwegian police might have discovered regarding clues, evidence and theories. When he informed them that the body of Jeffrey Hunter had been found, he was given something that might at least resemble attention. As far as he could understand from the ambassador, a minor diplomatic tussle had ensued regarding the man’s earthly remains. The Norwegians wanted to keep him for further examination. But the US authorities simply refused.
‘I don’t give a damn,’ whispered Warren Scifford and gave his face a good rub.
He had warned Ambassador Wells.
‘They’re going to hit the roof when they realise what you’re up to,’ he’d said in exasperation when they met at the embassy the day before. ‘OK, they might have a US-friendly government, but I realise that this is a country where opposition can be strong. They might be stubborn, as you warned me, but they’re not stupid. We simply can’t -’
The ambassador had interrupted him with an ice-cold stare and a voice that made Warren hold his tongue. ‘
It was a complete lie and they both knew it.
Warren took a sip of the tea. It didn’t taste of much, but at least it was warm. The room was too. Far too warm. He went over to a box on the wall to see if he could turn down the temperature. He had never managed to get the hang of the whole Celsius system. The switch was turned to twenty-five degrees, and that was certainly too hot. Maybe fifteen would be better. He held his hand up to the vent in the wall. The air cooled immediately.
He hesitated for a moment, and then turned his computer off. There were two files on the desk. One was as thick as a book. The other contained no more than twenty pages. He took both of them and lay back down on the bed, bolstered by the pillows and cushions at the head of the bed.
He looked through the classified report on the intelligence situation first. It was more than two hundred pages long and he had not received it in a coded email, as he should have done according to various agreements and routines. He had discovered, by accident, that it existed when he overheard some snippets of conversation in the headquarters at the embassy, and had had to argue his way to a copy. Conrad Victory, the sixty-year-old special agent who was in charge of operations at the embassy, thought that Warren didn’t need the document. And in situations like this they operated with a strict ‘need-to-know’ policy, which Warren, given his experience, should understand. His role was to be the liaison between the Norwegian and American police. He had himself complained how difficult it was to resist the pressure the Norwegians put on him with regard to American information and intelligence. The less he knew, the less Oslo Police would interfere.
But Warren didn’t give in. When nothing else worked, he resorted to highlighting his close personal relationship with the President. Between the lines, of course. It worked. Finally.
He had fallen into bed at two in the morning and had not really had a chance to look at the document until now.
It was frightening reading.
In the intense search for the President’s kidnappers, it was becoming increasingly clear that her disappearance
