Death In Oslo

‘Do you know,’ the President said. ‘I think that’s a good idea. I don’t need more than a couple of hours. And that is presumably the amount of time we can buy by using another computer.’

Hanne was the only one who was still sceptical.

‘I don’t know a lot about IP addresses and things like that,’ she said. ‘But is either of you absolutely certain that this will work? That it’s not the line itself that’s traced?’

Johanne and Helen Bentley exchanged looks.

‘I’m not certain,’ the President said. ‘I simply have to take that chance. Could you get it?’

‘Of course,’ Johanne said and got up. ‘I’ll only be five minutes.’

As the front door closed, Helen Bentley sat down on the chair beside Hanne’s wheelchair. She seemed to be struggling to find the right words. Hanne looked at her with an expressionless face, as if she had all the time in the world.

‘Hannah. Do you… You said you were a retired policewoman. Do you have a gun in the house?’

Hanne rolled away from the table.

‘A gun? What do you want-’

‘Shhh,’ the President said. There was a hint of authority in her voice that made Hanne stiffen. ‘Please. I’d rather Johanne didn’t know about this. I wouldn’t like my one-year-old to be in the same flat as a loaded gun. Of course, I don’t think it will be necessary to use it. But you must remember that-’

‘Do you know why I’m sitting here? Has the thought never occurred to you? I’m sitting in this bloody wheelchair because I was shot. My spine was destroyed by a bullet. I don’t exactly have a good relationship with guns.’

‘Hannah! Hannah! Listen to me!’

Hanne tightened her lips and looked straight at Helen Bentley.

‘I am normally one of the world’s best-guarded people,’ the President almost whispered, as if she was frightened that Johanne might already be back. ‘I have heavily armed bodyguards with me everywhere, all the time. That’s not for no reason, Hannah. It is absolutely necessary. The moment that it’s known that I’m here in this flat, I will be completely defenceless. Until the right people get here, and then I’ll be protected by them again. But until then, I have to be able to defend myself. I know you’ll understand, if you just think about it.’

Hanne was the first one to look away.

‘I do have a gun,’ she said eventually. ‘And ammunition. I never had those heavy steel cupboards removed, and they… Are you any good?’

The President gave a shy smile.

‘My teachers might say otherwise. But I can handle a gun. I’m the commander-in-chief, remember?’

Hanne was still staring at the table without expression.

‘One more thing,’ Helen Bentley said, and laid her hand on Hanne’s arm. ‘I think it’s best if you all leave. Leave the flat, in case something happens.’

Hanne lifted her head and stared at the President with a look of exaggerated disbelief. Then she started to laugh. She threw her head back and roared with laughter.

‘Good luck,’ she hiccuped. ‘I will not be budged. And as for Mary, she lives with a radius of about thirty metres. You will never, and I repeat never, get her to leave this flat. I occasionally manage to convince her to go down into the cellar, but you won’t be able to do that. And as for-’

‘Here you go,’ Johanne said, out of breath. ‘It’s full summer outside, by the way!’

She put her laptop down on the kitchen table. With practised hands, she plugged in the external mouse, laid down a mat, put the plug in a socket and turned on the machine.

‘Voila!’ she said and logged on. ‘There you go, Madam President. A computer that it will take time to trace!’

She was so excited that she didn’t notice Hanne’s worried face as she reversed out from the table, turned round and rolled off into the flat. The rubber wheels squeaked on the parquet floor. The sound vanished when a door was shut, somewhere deep in the heart of the enormous flat.

XI

The young man who was sitting in front of a monitor in a tiny office close to the Situation Room in the White House noticed that the characters and numbers were starting to dance on the screen. He closed his eyes hard, shook his head and tried again. It was still difficult to focus on one row, one column. He gave his neck a massage. The stringent smell of old sweat rose up from his armpits and made him drop his arms in shame and hope that no one would come in.

This wasn’t what he had gone to university for. When he got a job at the White House, two years after qualifying as a computer engineer and having worked in the commercial sector, he couldn’t believe his luck. Now, five months on, he was already bored. He had demonstrated his abilities in the small computer company that had headhunted him after graduation, and had thought that it was his indisputable talents as a programmer that had made the Bentley administration poach him.

But now, nearly six months later, he felt he had been little more than a runner.

And he had been sitting in a stuffy room with no windows, sweating and stinking, for twenty-three hours, staring at codes that flickered on the screen. He had been asked to create some kind of order in the chaos. It was important that he kept focused.

He pressed his fingers against his eyes.

He was so exhausted that he was no longer sleepy. It was as if his brain had just stopped. It didn’t want to do any more. He felt like his own hard disk had logged out and left the rest of his body to fend for itself. His hands felt numb and a stabbing pain in his lower back had been bothering him for hours.

He breathed out slowly, and opened his eyes as wide as he could to try to get some moisture. He should really get something more to drink, but it was another quarter of an hour before he could take a break. He must try to have a shower.

There. There was something there.

Something.

He blinked and his fingers moved like lightning across the keyboard. The screen froze. He lifted a reluctant hand and ran his index finger along a row from left to right, before he started to hammer on the keyboard again.

Another screen came up.

It couldn’t be true.

It was true, and he was the one who had seen it. He had discovered before anyone else, and suddenly he didn’t regret switching jobs any more. Once again his fingers moved busily over the keyboard. Then he pressed Print, grabbed the phone and waited in suspense for the next screen.

‘She’s alive,’ he whispered, forgetting to breathe. ‘She’s fucking alive!’

XII

‘This is the most beautiful place in the whole of Oslo,’ Adam Stubo said, and pointed to a simple bench by the water. ‘I think we could both do with a bit of air.’Summer had ambushed the city. The temperature had risen by nearly ten degrees in the course of twenty-four hours. The sun blasted the sky in an explosion of white light. The leaves on the trees along the banks of the Aker River seemed to have turned a darker shade of green in that time alone, and there was so much pollen in the air that Adam’s eyes started to run as soon as they got out of the car.

‘Is this a park?’ Warren Scifford asked without any real interest. ‘A big park?’

‘No. This is the edge of the city. Or the start of the forest, whichever way you want to look at it. This is where the two meet, trees and houses. Lovely, isn’t it? Sit yourself down.’

Warren looked at the dirty bench with suspicion. Adam produced a hanky and wiped away the remains of the national-day celebrations. A patch of hardened chocolate ice cream, a stripe of ketchup and something he’d rather