It was amazing, Ravnsborg mused, this total change in the way the world perceived itself, and it had happened almost overnight. There had been no massive advertising campaigns, no government policies: just a spontaneous global decision to make everyone visible everywhere, all the time.
Already there were six different YouTube entries that showed the actual moment of the explosion, and more than twice as many dealing with the aftermath. The first group all began with something extraneous in the foreground: a girl posing awkwardly for her boyfriend, trying not to look embarrassed; two teenage lads pulling silly faces at the rich folk gathered inside the hotel cafe; an elderly couple arm in arm, smiling at the grandchild recording them on his phone. But the next scene was always the same: a blast of light and flame; a tremor as the force hit the person holding the camera or phone; the boom of the blast, followed by screams and shouts of alarm. The YouTube films all kept rolling. In the post 9/11 world, everyone understood the value of live disaster footage. But there was another film, retrieved by detectives at the site itself. Immediately after the blast, this one switched to a single, unchanging shot: the night sky seen through the blood-smeared filter of the glass that had killed the young woman behind the lens.
It was now possible for Ravnsborg to assemble a sort of montage that showed the run-up to the explosion, the blast itself and the aftermath from a series of different angles. He knew now that Madeleine Cross had not been lying when she described the events at her cafe table. He could see her behind the face-pulling boys. Larsson, too, was there. And, yes, there was a third figure, just rising from the table as the film began. That must be Carver.
It was only when he had spent more than two hours watching the same few minutes of footage again and again that Ravnsborg spotted a fourth individual, a red-haired man, standing outside the cafe, tapping out a message on a phone. That same figure was on another film, walking into the hotel, barely a second before the blast. He could be seen emerging fifteen seconds later. So, too, was a man who appeared to be wearing a T-shirt similar to the one worn by the man in the cafe that Ravnsborg had identified as Carver. He stood for a moment outside the hotel, a single point of stillness among the confusion all around him. Then the red-haired man came up behind him.
That took him by surprise, thought Ravnsborg, zooming in as close as he could on Carver’s face.
The other man was very close to him, whispering in his ear. Were these instructions, perhaps? Or was he making threats? For Carver’s face twice winced as though he had been hurt. Ravnsborg wished he had a shot that could give him a view from beside or behind the redhead, just so he could see what he was sticking in Carver’s back. The obvious assumption was a knife, for Carver then jerked forward, arching his back and pulling his hands round to protect his kidneys.
Ravnsborg could then see what Carver had not, the red-haired man sidling back into the crowd and disappearing down the street. Carver, meanwhile, looked around. He saw someone – Ravnsborg knew from his witness statement that this must have been Larsson – then ran.
But why? Was this the natural reaction of a fugitive, fleeing the scene of a crime? Or was Carver fleeing something else?
The answers to his question, Ravnsborg felt sure, lay up on the roof of the opera house. He went and poured himself yet another black coffee, then settled down again. He was using a workstation equipped with a widescreen the size of a large domestic TV. It enabled him to get several different shots in front of him at the same time.
His young officers had collected all the material they had found into folders covering specific times, places and incidents. Sipping on his coffee as he worked, he clicked on the one marked ‘Operaen’. There were nine different video files, and 114 photos.
Ravnsborg rubbed his aching eyes. He slapped his hand against his cheek to sting himself back awake. And then he got down to work.
53
Karin Madsen lay in bed at three in the morning watching the man she was about to marry emerge from the bathroom and walk towards her. There was barely any light in the room, but even so she could tell just by the set of Thor Larsson’s shoulders and the heavy, sighing sound of his breathing that something was wrong: something above and beyond the obvious stress of the past six hours.
She propped herself up on one elbow and asked, ‘What is it?’
‘What’s what?’ he mumbled, almost as if he were making a point of sounding exhausted.
‘Do you think I won’t notice something’s wrong? Come on, Thor.’
‘I’m just wrecked, OK? It’s been a long day, and a night from hell.’
‘I know, darling, it must have been terrible. I understand. But that’s not what I mean. I know you too well, Thor Larsson. I’ve changed your bedpan and wiped your backside. You can’t fool me. Something’s wrong.’
He sat down on the bed. ‘Yes, Kari, something is wrong,’ he said irritably, stating the blindingly obvious. ‘My oldest friend has disappeared. The police say he is responsible for a terrorist attack. His girlfriend doesn’t know if he is alive or dead, innocent or guilty. I have been interviewed by the police, and they told me they may speak to me again. And I’m probably going to have a whole bunch of cops as uninvited guests at my wedding. So yes, something’s wrong.’
Well, it was a reasonable explanation, but it wasn’t the whole story, Kari was sure of it. Something else was eating at Thor. But whatever it was, he wasn’t going to tell her now. If she pressed him any harder it would only lead to an argument and she didn’t want that, not two nights before her wedding.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, reaching out to rub his back. ‘Come to bed now. I’ll hold you till you fall asleep.’
But it was Karin who slept first, and Thor Larsson who lay in the darkness, guts churning, eyes staring blankly up at the ceiling for hours until exhaustion finally claimed him.
54
Arjan Visar had received the technical specifications for the weapon that would be used to kill Lincoln Roberts within seventy-two hours of Tyzack’s departure from his villa. He was impressed. Tyzack might be an animal, but it had taken cunning and imagination for him to devise his means of attack, and initiative to commission the design he had in mind.
The finished device, however, depended on an existing piece of technology that could not be purchased without attracting undue attention. So it was that a modest commercial premises tucked away in a mostly residential area of detached family homes in the English Midlands was burned to the ground as a result of an electrical fault. Amidst the damage caused by the blaze itself and the efforts of fire crews to put it out before it could spread to nearby houses, no one noticed the absence of two small units from the company’s inventory. Within a couple of hours of the theft, they had been taken to a small engineering company, whose workshop was located under a railway arch in Manchester, and work had already begun on their conversion from the peaceful uses for which they were designed to the deadly intent conceived by Damon Tyzack.
As the engineers were getting down to work on their conversion job, Jack Grantham was at Heathrow trying to find a seat on an early-morning flight to Oslo. It wasn’t easy. The news that the Norwegian police were looking for an English male – they hadn’t specified that he was a suspect, but that was the only inference that could be drawn – had suddenly given what would otherwise be a shocking but relatively minor tragedy a much more powerful domestic angle. When, in the early hours, Oslo University Hospital announced that two of the seriously wounded victims of the King Haakon Hotel bombing had both passed away, and that they were a British pensioner couple, that just added to the feeding frenzy. It had taken a discreet conversation with a senior British Airways executive to squeeze Grantham on to the 7.20 plane, leaving a big-name newspaper columnist fuming as he was bumped on to a lunchtime departure.
On the plane, Grantham returned to the subject that had been nagging at him for hours. He’d spent the previous evening at the movies: even intelligence officers, after all, have wives and social lives that need to be attended to occasionally. When he left the cinema he forgot to switch his phone back on. It wasn’t till he was home
