questioning in connection with tonight’s bomb attack. They are witnesses, not suspects, at this point, but that may change. Don’t let her get away with any crap about calling the American embassy. Just bring them here as fast as you can. Go.’
As the two detectives left the room, Ravnsborg was firing off more orders. All police and security staff were told to be on the lookout for a male, aged thirty-five to forty, six feet tall, dark hair, British, going by the name of Carver.
‘Do we have an eye colour?’ one of his men asked.
Ravnsborg looked mournfully down at the photograph, which lit Carver in a blaze of flash. ‘Red,’ he said, then, ‘That was a joke.’
There was a nervous ripple of forced laughter. Another order was given to make the picture available to TV stations, along with the information that Mr Carver was wanted for questioning by police so that he could be eliminated from their enquiries.
All the time, phones around the office were ringing constantly with updates from the bomb-site, questions from reporters, interruptions from politicians wanting to get in on the act. Ravnsborg had just finished a short, infuriating conversation with the National Police Commissioner, who had simultaneously wished him luck, promised him promotion if the investigation should turn out well, and assured him of a swift relocation to the furthest, coldest reaches of the nation if it did not, when the young policeman approached his desk again.
‘You again,’ Ravnsborg sighed. ‘What do you want?’
‘You’re not going to believe it, sir. But all hell has broken loose down at the opera house.’
45
Carver rode the moped at walking pace along the broad esplanade that ran between the fancy food and drink joints and the sea. There was something for everyone down here: steakhouses, pizza parlours, gourmet French and specialist seafood. All the restaurants supplied huge fleece blankets so that customers could sit outside and still keep snug. But there were no cosy couples sharing blankets and stealing kisses. Wherever he looked, Carver saw people huddled round radios and phone-screens, taking in the latest news from the bombing. Some of the restaurants had set up TVs in their dining-rooms, as if admitting that no one would be interested in anything else tonight.
No one paid him the slightest bit of attention as he went by. He felt like a shark swimming unseen amidst seaside holidaymakers: a hated killer who would surely be hunted down and slaughtered if he were ever revealed. He felt stained by guilt. He felt like killing Damon Tyzack. But before he could do that, he needed to get away, regroup, and find a better battlefield.
At the police headquarters, the duty press officer completed the release that would be mailed out to all media, along with the photo of the bombing suspect, or ‘key witness’ as Ravnsborg had decided to call him. She was just about to press ‘Send’ when her finger paused above the keyboard.
Better get the boss to take one final look at it first. That way her back was covered.
She hit ‘Print’ instead and waited for the hard copy to emerge from the machine.
Carver could have done with one of those fleeces. The kid’s jacket was pretty flimsy and the sweat that covered his body had chilled in the cool evening air. It would be a lot colder out on the water, but there was nothing else to be done for it. He was determined to get as far away from Oslo as he could. Above all, he wanted to be as far as possible from Maddy.
He still didn’t know if she’d played any part in the set-up, but it made no difference. Either she was working with Tyzack, in which case he wanted nothing whatever to do with her. Or she was innocent, in which case he had to draw attention away from her, towards himself. If the police saw them together, she would automatically be classed as an accomplice. It was bad enough being dumped in the crap himself, without dragging her any deeper into it.
He wished he could call her up to explain his disappearance. But he had to assume that either Tyzack, or the police, or both, were intercepting her phones. All he could hope for was that Larsson would work out what he was doing and explain it to Maddy. If she understood his desertion, perhaps then she would forgive it.
There was nothing to be done about that, so Carver focused his attention on the matter in hand. He needed a boat, something fast, but all he could see moored alongside the pontoons were sailing boats. Up ahead a bridge curved over a waterway: one of the abandoned docks that cut deep gouges out of Oslo’s shoreline. When he reached it, Carver looked down the quayside and his face broke into a smile of grim satisfaction behind his helmet visor. A line of small, fast boats was moored down the full length of the dock, and any one of them would do just fine.
The press officer’s face was blandly impassive, but inside she was heaving a sigh of relief. Thank God she had brought the text of the release back to Ravsnborg to be checked. He had received new information. Apparently the bomber had gone crazy up on the opera house roof and started shooting people.
‘Make it clear that members of the public are not, under any circumstances, to attempt to apprehend him,’ Ravnsborg told her. ‘This man is armed and extremely dangerous. If anyone spots him, they must call the police immediately. But they must not do anything themselves. I do not want any dead heroes. OK? Now go. I want this out and on the air… Go!’
46
It took no more than a few seconds for Carver to spot what he was looking for: a 25-foot Scorpion RIB with a 90-horsepower Honda engine sitting on its tail. Rigid inflatable boats were the workhorses of the Royal Marines and SBS alike and Carver had spent more hours than he cared to think about sitting in them, going to and from missions and training exercises. When he got off the moped, took off his helmet and got down into the boat, it felt like a kind of homecoming.
Carver had no ignition keys, but he didn’t need them. He could get an RIB started with nothing more than his belt buckle.
He began by finding the battery, stored beneath the driver’s seat. A red plastic isolator key was inserted in the top. Carver turned it to the ‘On’ position. Now the boat had power.
Next to the battery was a toolkit. In it Carver found a knife. He used it to cut about four inches off the laces of his All Stars. He relaced his shoes before pulling out the boat’s kill-switch, the safety device that shut down the engine if the driver went overboard. Unless the switch was out, the engine would not work. It was held in place by a plastic clip, linked by a lanyard to the driver’s life-jacket. If the line was jerked too far, the toggle was pulled, the switch popped back in and the engine died. Carver tied the cut length of lace around the shaft of the kill-switch, ensuring that it stayed out. Perfect.
Moving to the back of the boat, he lowered the engine so that the propeller was in the water. Then he took off the hood and found the starter motor. It was controlled by a solenoid, whose job was to relay power from the battery to the motor. Carver placed his metal belt buckle over the solenoid’s terminals. That linked the terminal connected to the battery with the terminal connected to the starter motor. A circuit was formed. The engine spluttered into life.
He’d just hot-wired an RIB.
He made his way round the boat, casting off its lines from the quay. Then he stood at the controls, put the boat into reverse and eased his way back into the dock, swinging the boat round so that its bow was pointed at the bridge.
Beyond the bridge lay Oslo fjord, and beyond that the open sea. Somewhere out there was a Baltic ferry. Carver put the boat into forward gear and increased the speed. Once he had passed under the bridge and gone
