Death In Oslo

Mother talking about that day when you were sitting with her?’

Still no answer.

‘You know what,’ Al said in a muted voice as he waved the calendar around. ‘Dying from a morphine overdose is not as pleasant as people might think. Can you feel your lungs struggling? Can you feel that it’s harder to breathe?’

His brother snarled and tried to tense his body like a bridge, but didn’t have the power.

‘Mother was the only one who knew,’ Al said. ‘But she didn’t judge me, Fayed. Ever. It was hard for her to accept my secret, but she never used it against me. Mother was my soulmate. She could have been yours too, if you’d behaved differently. You could at least have tried to be part of the family. Instead you did what you could not to belong.’

‘I never did belong,’ Fayed wheezed. ‘You made sure of that.’

He was pale now. He lay completely still and closed his eyes.

‘Me? Me? It was me who…’

He resolutely took the syringe of morphine and injected another ten milligrams into Fayed’s thigh muscle.

‘We haven’t got time for this. What’s going to happen, Fayed? Why are you here? Why have you come to see me after all these years, and what the hell have you used the information about Helen’s abortion for?’

It had started to look as if Fayed was really frightened. He tried to gasp for breath, but his muscles wouldn’t obey. A white froth appeared on his lips, as if he didn’t even have the capacity to swallow his own spit.

‘Help me,’ he said. ‘You have to help me. I can’t…’

‘Answer my questions.’

‘Help me. I can’t… Everything… according to plan.’

‘Plan? What plan? Fayed, what plan are you talking about?’

He was about to die. It was obvious. Al felt hot. He noticed that his hands were shaking as he grabbed the syringe with Naloxone and got it ready.

‘Fayed,’ he said and put his free hand under his brother’s chin so he could force him to look at him. ‘You really are in trouble now. I have the antidote here. Just tell me one thing. One thing! Why did you come here? Why did you come to me?’

‘The letters,’ Fayed mumbled.

His eyes looked completely dead now.

‘The letters are coming here. If anything goes wrong…’

He stopped breathing. Al gave him a good thump on the chest. Fayed’s lungs made another attempt to defy death.

‘I’ll pull you down with me,’ he said. ‘You were the one they loved.’

Al grabbed a knife from his bag and cut the tape that bound Fayed’s right arm to the headboard. He had injected the morphine straight into Fayed’s muscle, but now he needed a vein. He slowly emptied the antidote into a blue vein in his brother’s lower arm. Then quickly, so he wouldn’t lose heart again, he taped his arm back to the headboard. He got up and took a few steps. Now he couldn’t hold back the tears.

‘Fucking hell! Fucking hell! All I ever wanted in my life was peace and quiet. No quarrelling! No fuss! I found this little backwater where everything was going well for me and the girls, and then you have to come and…’

He was sobbing now. He wasn’t used to crying. He didn’t know what to do with his arms. They were just hanging at his sides. His shoulders were shaking.

‘What letters are you talking about, Fayed? What have you done? Fayed, what have you done? ’

Suddenly he stormed across the floor and bent down over his brother. He put his hands to his cheeks. Fayed’s moustache, the great big ridiculous moustache that he had recently grown, tickled his skin as he stroked his brother’s face, again and again.

‘What have you done this time?’ he whispered.

But his brother didn’t answer, because he was dead.

X

It was just gone two o’clock when Helen Bentley came back into the kitchen. She looked awful. Six hours’ sleep and a long shower had worked wonders for her in the morning, but now she was deathly pale. Her eyes were glazed and she had moon-shaped bags under her eyes. She sank heavily down on to a chair, and greedily took the coffee that Johanne offered her.

‘The New York Stock Exchange opens in an hour and a half.’ She sighed and drank some coffee. ‘It’s going to be a black Thursday, perhaps the worst since the thirties.’

‘Have you found anything out?’ Johanne asked tentatively.

‘I’ve got some kind of overview. It’s clear that our friends in Saudi Arabia were not so friendly after all. There are persistent rumours that they’re behind it, together with Iran. Without anyone in my administration admitting anything, of course.’

She forced a smile. Her lips were nearly as pale as the rest of her face.

‘Which means that Warren must’ve sold out to the Arabs,’ Johanne said, still speaking quietly.

The President nodded and put a hand over her eyes. She sat like this for a few moments, before suddenly looking up and saying: ‘I just can’t work out how all this fits together without logging on to my secured pages in the White House. I’ll have to use my own code. And even then there will still be a lot that I can’t access as I need other equipment. But I have to find out if Warren has been burnt. I have to find out how much my people know about all this before making any sound. If they don’t know anything about his-’

‘He’s in full swing here in Norway,’ Johanne said. ‘I would have known if anything had happened to him. If he’d been arrested or anything like that, I mean.’

She paused for a moment, and looked over at her mobile. ‘Or at least, I think I would.’

‘But that doesn’t necessarily mean anything,’ the President said. ‘If they know that he’s involved, they may just as easily feel that it’s expedient to keep him on his toes. But if they don’t know…’ she took a deep breath, ‘then it might be dangerous to have him running around freely when I raise the alarm. I have to get into my pages. I just have to do it.’

‘It’ll only take them a few seconds to discover you,’ Johanne said, with some scepticism. ‘They’ll see the IP address and find out that the computer is here. And then Armageddon will break loose.’

‘Yes. Could it… No. I don’t need a long time, really. Just a couple of hours, I hope.’

The door to the sitting room opened and Hanne Wilhelmsen rolled in.

‘An hour’s nap here and there,’ she said and yawned. ‘It actually makes you feel quite rested. Have you managed to make any headway?’

She looked at Helen Bentley.

‘A fair bit. But now I’ve got a problem. I have to access my secured pages, but if I use your computer, that will immediately tell them that I’m alive, and not only that, where I am.’

Hanne sniffed and wiped her nose with her finger.

‘A problem, hmm. What should we do?’

‘My computer,’ Johanne said, surprised at herself, and raised her finger. ‘What about using that?’

‘Your computer?’

‘Do you have a computer? Here?’

The other two looked warily at her.

‘It’s in the car,’ Johanne said eagerly. ‘And it’s registered with the University of Oslo. They would, of course, also be able to trace the IP address there, but it would take longer to… They would have to contact the university first, then they would have to find out who the laptop had been lent to, and then they would have to establish where I was. And in fact…’ she looked guiltily at her mobile phone again, ‘Adam is the only one who knows,’ she finished, subdued. ‘And he doesn’t really know either.’