Behind him Carver saw the RIB swirl off into the darkness like a twig in a racing stream. He had nowhere else to go now. He had to get to the top of the chain or he would be washed away to his death.
He lifted one hand above the other, then tensed himself for the next crash against the hull.
As the water moved him away from the hull again, he moved his other hand a little further up the chain. And so it went on: the agonizingly slow movements up the slippery chain; the repeated slips as his wet, cold-numbed fingers lost their grip; the terrible shivering as the chill of the water seeped ever deeper into his body; and all the time the constant battering of flesh and bone against plate steel. Finally, though, Carver hauled himself almost clear of the water and now he could lean back on the chain and place his feet against the side of the buttress and haul himself up, pace by pace, hand over hand, until he was standing at the foot of the final sheer stretch up the hull to the opening.
He gritted his teeth to stop their incessant chattering, wiped the seawater and rain from his eyes and reminded himself that when he was in the SBS he’d think nothing of training exercises that required him to climb up the legs of a giant North Sea oil rig, or the hull of the Queen Elizabeth II. All he had to do now was get up a lousy bit of steel.
And then he heard a new sound, the clattering of a helicopter rotor. Still holding the chain, he twisted round so that he was looking away from the ferry, out to sea, and instantly saw the chopper, outlined against the last fragments of light on the western horizon. It was hovering, inquisitively, some way off, watching and waiting with all the cruel patience of a cat at a mousehole. Carver leaned back, placed his feet against the hull and started pulling himself up towards the opening, taking the strain on his shoulders, arms and thighs.
Now the predator swooped. The helicopter moved much closer to the boat. A searchlight cut through the darkness and rain, picking him out against the dazzling white backdrop of the hull and forcing him to screw his eyes shut to keep out its scorching glare. Directly above him, barely an arm’s length away, he heard a sharp, percussive rattle, like stones catapulted against a sheet of corrugated iron. Someone was shooting at him. Carver flinched, dreading the impact of a ricochet. The gunman in the helicopter fired again, even closer this time. There was no noise or muzzle-flash from the weapon, just the same rattling stones. It didn’t take a genius to work out the choice that Carver was being given. By the time the third salvo was fired, he had let go of the chain and was falling towards the water. This time the bullets hit the hull exactly where his body had been.
The ferry steamed away; the helicopter hovered directly over Carver and a rope was lowered down to him. He trod water, held a hand over his eyes to deflect the buffeting down-draught and saw Tyzack standing in the doorway smirking down at him. Carver was being mocked and, as the rope dangled in the water in front of him, he suddenly understood why. He’d got the whole thing wrong and everything he had done – not just tonight but for days, even weeks – had been based on lousy, idiotic, unforgivable stupidity. He was so angry with himself, so frustrated, that he almost didn’t reach out for the rope. It was an admission of defeat. Problem was, he didn’t have a better idea. Besides, the closer he got to Tyzack, the easier it would be to wipe that stupid grin off his face.
But when he was finally pulled inside the helicopter, Carver didn’t get to wipe anything at all. Instead, he was grabbed by two pairs of hands and shoved down into a chair. Someone stuck a gun up against the side of his head. And the last thing he knew was Damon Tyzack leaning over him with a syringe in his hands sighing, ‘Sadly, this really won’t hurt at all…’
52
Ole Ravnsborg looked down at the damp, huddled figure wrapped in a rough woollen blanket, sitting on a metal chair in his office and shivering unhappily. The young man’s hands were wrapped around a mug of hot coffee. It did not appear to have done much to raise his spirits. So Ravnsborg began by giving him the good news.
‘We found your moped, Mr Olsen,’ he said. ‘It was abandoned in Aker Brygge, at the end of Stranden, just as he promised. He even left your helmet.’
Per Olsen looked up, feeling better than he had done for some time. He almost managed a grin. ‘That’s great,’ he said. ‘Can I take it away now?’
‘Afraid not,’ Ravnsborg told him. ‘We need to do forensic tests and then we may have to hold it as evidence, in the event of a trial.’
Olsen looked downcast again. ‘But that could be months!’
‘It could, yes, I am sorry about that. But you will get it back eventually…’ He thought for a moment. ‘… Assuming there are no appeals.’
‘Thanks a lot.’ Olsen was now plunged into the pits of that melodramatic, self-pitying despair that is reserved for those in their teens and early twenties.
Ravnsborg pulled up a chair and sat down opposite him. ‘Now, tell me exactly, in detail, what happened to you.’
‘Why should I?’ Olsen sulked.
‘Grow up,’ said Ravnsborg. ‘I am not your father, having some stupid argument. I am a police officer attempting to understand two violent, criminal incidents in which at least ten people died, and I am not interested in playing childish games. Either you talk to me, or I throw you in a cell overnight for obstructing my investigation. And, no, you will not be given dry clothes.’
‘All right, all right… I get it.’
It took Ravnsborg a while, and there were points where even he, who prided himself on his non-violent nature, was tempted to grab Olsen by the neck and shake some sense into him, but in the end he had a clear picture of events.
‘There is just one point I want to be completely certain of,’ he concluded. ‘The man who stole your moped was armed. He placed his gun against the back of your neck…’
‘The barrel was hot,’ Olsen said, ‘I just remembered.’
‘So he had already used the gun. In fact, you may be interested to hear, he had just shot two men dead and killed a third with his bare hands.’
‘My God…’ Olsen wrapped the blanket even tighter around his body, as if it could protect him.
‘And yet he did not shoot you. In fact, he did nothing to you, except throw you in the water.’
‘That wasn’t nothing!’
‘Oh yes, I think it was. And he even told you where you would be able to find your moped afterwards.’
‘I shouldn’t have told your men that. I should have waited and just gone to get it myself.’
‘But then you would have been committing a crime, so it is as well that you did not. As it is, you have been a great help to me, Mr Olsen. Thank you. And I will have one of my men drive you home, so you won’t even miss your moped.’
When Olsen had been led away, Ravnsborg sat for a while in silence, letting the many apparently contradictory elements of the evening’s events sort themselves out in his mind. Olsen’s survival was just one of these. If Carver were really a heartless killer, why had he not killed the young man when stealing his ridiculous little moped? It would have removed a witness. Ravnsborg wished there were some way of seeing precisely what had happened around the hotel and up on the roof of the opera house. Oslo was not littered with CCTV cameras every few metres: the Norwegian government, unlike so many of its counterparts, still trusted its people to go about their business unobserved.
Ravnsborg was musing on this fact when a thought suddenly struck him. The government might take that view, but the people, particularly the young, were just like their counterparts everywhere else. They photographed or videoed every single moment of their lives. And then they put it online.
The massive policeman lumbered off to the incident room. He looked around, mentally sorting through his officers until he found two detectives who looked particularly juvenile and, to his eyes, badly dressed. He thought they would understand the task best.
‘You, you… come here!’ he snapped. ‘Go on the internet – Google, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, all those places. Find everything you can relating to the bomb at the Haakon, and the shoot-out at the Operaen. Oh, and anything that anyone took between those two points. In fact, find every damn frame of material taken in Oslo tonight. Stick it all together. Then come and get me.’
