‘Everything,’ he muttered and blew a smoke ring towards the ceiling.
‘What?’
‘I’m frustrated about everything. We’ve got God knows how many men rooting around trying to find out who’s kidnapped the President and how they did it, and that just doesn’t seem to matter.’
‘Of course it matters, it-’
‘Have you been watching the box recently?’ Adam nodded towards the television. ‘It’s all power politics, the whole thing.’
‘What did you expect? That the case would be just like any other missing-person case?’
‘No. But why are we working our backsides off to find losers like Gerhard Skroder and that Pakistani who shits his pants if we so much as look at him, when the Americans have already decided what happened?’
Salhus looked like he was enjoying himself. Without answering, he put his cigar in his mouth and his feet on the table.
‘What I mean is…’ Adam started, looking around for something to use as an ashtray, ‘last night, three men sat for five hours trying to piece together the puzzle to establish when Jeffrey Hunter hid himself away in the ventilation shaft. It was complicated. Lots of loose ends: when was the presidential suite last inspected? When did the sniffers come in? When was it vacuumed afterwards, because the President is allergic to dogs? When were the cameras switched on and off? When did… You get the idea. They did finally manage to get it all to fit. But what’s the point?’
‘The point is that we have a case to solve.’
‘But the Americans don’t give a damn.’
He looked sceptically at the plastic cup that Salhus was holding out for him, then he shrugged and tipped the ash off into it.
‘Oslo Police are hauling in one crook after another,’ he continued, ‘and they all seem to have been involved in the kidnapping. They’ve found the second driver. They’ve even managed to get hold of one of the president lookalikes. None of them can tell us anything about the job other than that it was well paid and they have no idea where the money came from. We’ll have the cells full of bloody kidnappers before the night’s over!’
Peter Salhus roared with laughter.
‘But are they at all interested?’ Adam asked rhetorically and leant forward on the desk. ‘Does Drammensveien show the slightest bit of interest in what we’re doing? No, not at all. They’re busy running around doing their own thing, playing cowboys and Indians, while the rest of the world is going to the dogs. I’ve had it. I give up.’
He took another draw on his cigar.
‘You have a reputation for being phlegmatic,’ Salhus commented. ‘You’re supposed to be the calmest man in the NCIS. But I have to say that that all seems to be rather unfounded. What does your wife have to say about it all?’
‘My wife? Johanne?’
‘Do you have more than one?’
‘Why should she have anything to say about it?’
‘As far I know, she’s got a PhD in criminology and some experience with the FBI,’ Salhus said, raising his hands in defence. ‘Would have thought she was qualified to have an opinion, if nothing else.’
‘It’s possible,’ Adam said, staring at the cigar ash that had fallen on his trouser leg. ‘But I actually don’t know what she thinks. I’ve no idea what she thinks of this case.’
‘Well, that’s the way it is,’ Peter Salhus said lightly, pushing the plastic cup even closer to Adam. ‘We’ve barely been home in the past couple of days, any of us.’
‘That’s the way it is,’ Adam repeated in a monotone and stubbed out his cigar even though there was still quite a lot left, as if the stolen pleasure was too good to be true. ‘That’s the way it is for us all.’
It was twenty to eleven, and he still hadn’t heard a thing from Johanne.
VIII
Johanne had no idea what time it was. She felt as if she had been transported to a parallel universe. The shock she had felt when Mary appeared with the half-dead President the night before had changed into a feeling of being completely disconnected from the world outside the flat in Krusesgate. She had watched the news, but she hadn’t even been out to buy the papers.
The flat was like a fortress. No one came in and no one went out. It was as if Hanne’s resolve to honour the President’s request not to raise the alarm had created a moat around their existence. Johanne really had to concentrate to remember whether it was morning or evening.
‘It has to be something completely different,’ she said suddenly. ‘You’re focusing on the wrong secret.’
She had been silent for a long time. She had quietly listened to the other two women. She had followed their conversation, which was at times eager and at other times hesitant and pensive, for so long without saying anything that Helen Bentley and Hanne Wilhelmsen had almost forgotten she was there.
Hanne raised an eyebrow. Helen Bentley frowned, a puzzled expression that made the eye on the bruised side of her face close.
‘What do you mean?’ Hanne asked.
‘I think you’re thinking about the wrong secret.’
‘I don’t understand,’ Helen Bentley said, leaning back and crossing her arms, as if she had been offended in some way. ‘I hear what you’re saying, but I don’t understand.’
Johanne pushed her empty coffee cup to one side and tucked her hair behind her ear. For a moment she sat staring at a mark on the table, with her mouth half open, without breathing, as if she didn’t really know where to begin.
‘We humans are deluded,’ she said finally, and added with a disarming smile, ‘We all are, in some way or other. And perhaps especially… women.’
She paused to think again. She cocked her head and twisted a lock of hair round her finger. The two other women still looked sceptical, but they were listening. When Johanne started to speak again, her voice was lower than usual.
‘You said that you were woken by Jeffrey, who you knew. Obviously you were very tired. Judging by what you’ve said, you were pretty confused at first.
Johanne took off her glasses and peered short-sightedly at the room.
‘He showed you a letter,’ she continued. ‘You don’t remember the exact contents. What you remember is that you panicked.’
‘No,’ Helen Bentley said decisively. ‘I remember that-’
‘Hold on,’ Johanne said, raising a hand. ‘Please. Hear me out first. That’s actually what you said. You keep stressing that you panicked. It’s as if you’re hopping over a link. It’s as if you… you’re so ashamed that you couldn’t deal with the situation that you can’t even reconstruct it in your mind.’
She could have sworn that she saw a blush pass over the President’s face.
‘Helen,’ Johanne said, and reached her hand over towards the other woman.
It was the first time she had addressed the President by her first name. Her hand lay palm up, untouched, on the table, so she withdrew it again.
‘You are the President of America,’ she said in a gentle voice. ‘You have literally been in the wars before.’
The hint of a smile crept over Helen Bentley’s face.
‘To panic in a situation like that,’ Johanne continued, drawing breath, ‘is not particularly, well, president-like. Not in your view. You’re being too harsh on yourself, Helen. You don’t need to be. To be honest, it’s not very helpful. Even a person like you has weaknesses. Everyone does. The only disaster in this situation was that you thought they had found yours. Why don’t we try to go back a bit further? Let’s see what happened in the seconds
‘I read the letter from Warren,’ Helen Bentley said succinctly.
‘Yes, and it said something about a child. You don’t remember any more than that.’
