‘I thought I knew him,’ she said and took a sip of coffee.
Her voice was remarkably calm, given that she just seemed to have been in shock. Johanne thought she heard a slight tremor in her voice as Helen Bentley carefully patted down her hair and continued. ‘I seem to remember that I could use the Internet. I need a computer, of course. It’s time I started to tidy up this miserable affair.’
Johanne swallowed. She swallowed again. She opened her mouth to say something, but no sound came out. She noticed that the President was looking at her. Gently she put her hand on Johanne’s arm.
‘I knew him too, once,’ Johanne whispered. ‘I thought I knew Warren Scifford too.’
Perhaps it was because Helen Bentley was a stranger. Perhaps it was the knowledge that this woman did not belong here, in Johanne’s life, in Oslo or Norway, that made her speak. Madam President would be going home. Today, tomorrow or sometime soon at least. They would never meet again. In a year or two from now, the President would barely remember who Johanne Vik was. Perhaps it was the enormous social, physical and geographical distance between them that made Johanne, finally, after thirteen years of silence, tell the story of how Warren had betrayed her so spectacularly and she had lost the child they were expecting.
When she had finished her story, Helen Bentley had resolved any doubts she might have had. Carefully she pulled Johanne to her. Held her and stroked her back. And when she finally stopped crying, she got up and quietly asked if she could use a computer.
V
It was Abdallah al-Rahman himself who had come up with the name
The thought had amused him enormously. Choosing a name was not, strictly speaking, necessary, but it had made it far easier to trick Madam President into leaving her hotel room. In the weeks after it had been announced that the President was to visit Norway in the middle of May, he had applied guerrilla tactics to American intelligence.
Quick in. Quick out.
He had planted information that was fragmentary and insignificant. But it did intimate that something was going to happen, and by carefully using phrases like ‘from within’, ‘unexpected internal attack’ and then the mention of a ‘horse’ in a memo that the CIA found on a corpse that floated ashore in Italy, he had them exactly where he wanted them.
When the information reached Warren Scifford and his men, they took the bait and it became the Trojan Horse, just as he wanted.
Abdallah was back in the office after having gone for a ride. Morning in the desert was one of the most beautiful things he knew. The horse had really gone through its paces, and afterwards he and the mare had bathed in the pond under the palm trees, by the stable. The animal was old, one of the oldest he had, and it felt good to know that she was still fast, supple and lively.
The day had started well. He had already finished his regular business. Answered all his emails, had a telephone conference. Read a board report that told him nothing of any interest. As early morning changed to mid-morning, he noticed his concentration flagging. He told reception that he was not to be disturbed and logged out of his computer.
CNN news was playing, without sound, on a plasma screen on one of the walls.
On the opposite wall was an enormous map of the US.
A large number of coloured pinheads were spread out over the country. He sauntered over to the map and zigzagged between them with his finger. He stopped at Los Angeles.
That was perhaps Eric Ariyoshi, Abdallah al-Rahman mused, and gave the pinhead a slight caress. Eric was a Sansei, third-generation American-Japanese. He was nearly forty-five and had no family. His wife left him four weeks after they married, when he lost his job in 1983, and since then he had lived with his parents. But Eric Ariyoshi had not let himself go under. He did odd jobs wherever he could until, at the age of thirty, he finished evening classes and became a qualified cable engineer.
But the real change came when his father died.
The old man had been detained on the west coast during the Second World War. He was only a boy at the time. Together with his parents and two younger sisters, he had spent three years in a prisoner-of-war camp. Only a handful of the detainees had actually done anything wrong. Most had been good Americans since they were born. His mother, Eric’s grandmother, died before they were released in 1945. Eric’s father never got over it. When he grew up, he settled on the outskirts of Los Angeles and ran a small flower shop that only just managed to keep him, his wife and their three children alive. And he filed a suit against the American state. It was a long case, which became very expensive.
When Eric’s father died in 1994, it was discovered that all he had left behind was crippling debt. The small house that his son had used all his income on for the past fifteen years was still registered in his father’s name. The bank repossessed the house, and Eric once again had to start from scratch. The suit that his father had filed against the American state for unjust internment never came to anything. The only thing that old Daniel Ariyoshi had got from sticking to the rules and listening to increasingly expensive lawyers was a life of bitterness that ended in ruin.
It said in the report that it had been easy to persuade Eric.
Naturally he wanted money, lots of money, given how poor he was. But he had also earned it.
Abdallah’s finger moved on, from pinhead to pinhead.
Unlike Osama bin Laden, he didn’t want to use suicide bombers and fanatics to attack a US that they hated and had never understood.
Instead he had built up a silent army of Americans. Of dissatisfied, betrayed, repressed, conned Americans, ordinary people who belonged to that country. Many of them had been born there, all of them lived there and the country was theirs. They were American citizens, but the US had never repaid them with anything other than betrayal and defeat.
‘The spring of our discontent,’ Abdallah whispered.
His finger stopped by a green pinhead outside Tucson, Arizona. It might represent Jorge Gonzales, whose youngest son had been killed by the sheriff’s assistant during a bank raid. The boy was only six years old, and just happened to be cycling past. The sheriff made a short statement to the local press saying that his excellent assistant had been certain that the boy was one of the robbers. And that everything had happened very fast.
Little Antonio only measured four foot two, and had been six metres from the policeman when he was shot. He was sitting on a green boy’s bike, wearing a slightly too big T-shirt with Spiderman on the back.
No one was punished for the incident.
No one was even charged.
The father, who had worked at Wal-Mart since he came to the country of his dreams from Mexico as a thirteen-year-old, never got over his son’s death and the lack of respect shown by the people who should have protected him and his family. When he was offered a sum of money that would allow him to move back to his homeland as a wealthy man in return for doing something that wasn’t at all frightening, he grabbed the chance with both hands.
And so it continued.
Each pinhead represented yet another fate, another life. Abdallah had, of course, never met any of them. They had no idea who he was, and never would do either. And the thirty or so men who had worked for him since 2002, finding and recruiting this army of broken dreams, equally had no idea where the orders and money came from.
A red reflection from the plasma screen made Abdallah turn round.
The picture showed a fire.
He went back to his desk and turned up the volume.
‘…
The Americans had started hoarding.
