doors away, and he couldn’t be bothered with his shoes. He picked them up with two fingers of his right hand, and carried the whisky bottle in the other.
‘What time are you having breakfast?’
‘Seven. Then I’m going out to Os. I want to catch Lukas before he goes to work. That’s what we have to hope for – that Lukas will agree to help us.’
He yawned and weakly raised two fingers to his forehead in a farewell salute. In the doorway Sigmund turned back.
‘I think I’ll get up a bit later,’ he said. ‘Then I’ll go straight down to the police station about nine. I’ll let them know you’ve gone to talk to Lukas again. They seem to think it’s OK for you to go off on your own here in Bergen. You’d never get away with it back home!’
‘Fine. Good night.’
Sigmund mumbled something inaudible as the door closed behind him with a muted bang.
As Adam undressed and got ready for bed, he realized he’d forgotten to ring Johanne. He swore and looked at his watch, even though it was only two minutes since he’d established that it was eleven thirty-six.
It was too late to call, so he went to bed.
And couldn’t get to sleep.
It was the number 19 that was keeping Johanne awake. She had spent the entire evening reading about Rashad Khalifa and his theories about the divine origins of the Koran. Whatever she tried to think about in order to tempt sleep, that damned number 19 popped up again, and she was wide awake once more.
After an hour she gave up. She would find something mindless to watch on TV. A detective programme or a sitcom; something to make her sleepy. It was already after one o’clock, but TV3 was usually showing some kind of crap at this time of night.
The sofa was a complete mess. Papers everywhere, every single one a printout from the Internet.
Johanne threatened her own students with death and destruction if they ever used Wikipedia as a source in a piece of academic work. She used it all the time. The difference between Johanne and her students was that she had the sense to be critical, in her opinion. This evening it had been difficult. The story of Rashad Khalifa made riveting reading, and every link had led her deeper into this remarkable story.
It was so fascinating.
She padded silently into the kitchen and decided to follow her mother’s advice. Milk in a pan, two large dessert spoonfuls of honey. Just before it boiled she added a dash of brandy. As a child she hadn’t had a clue about the final ingredient. As an adult she had confronted her mother, telling her it was totally irresponsible to give a child alcohol to get her to sleep. Her mother had waved away her objections, pointing out that the alcohol evaporated, and that in any case alcohol could be regarded as medicine. At least in these circumstances. Besides which they were very rarely given her special milk mixture, she had added, when Johanne still didn’t seem convinced.
She smiled and shook her head at the thought. Poured the milk into a big mug. It was almost too hot to hold.
She put it down on the coffee table and made some space on the sofa. Switched on the TV and flicked on to TV3. It was difficult to work out what the film was actually about. The pictures were dark, showing trees being blown down in a violent storm. When a vampire suddenly appeared among the tree trunks, she switched off.
Without really making a conscious decision, she reached for a pile of papers next to her mug of milk. Despite the fact that it was a stupid thing to do in view of the late hour, she settled down to read more about Rashad Khalifa and his peculiar theory about the number 19.
The Egyptian had emigrated to the United States as a young adult, and trained there as a biochemist. Since he found the English translation of the Koran unsatisfactory, he re-translated the whole thing himself. During the course of his work, towards the end of the Sixties, he got the idea that the book ought to be analyzed. From a purely mathematical point of view. The aim would be to prove that the Koran was a divine text. After several years and a great deal of work, he put forward his theory about the number 19 as a kind of pervading, divine key to the word of Allah.
Johanne didn’t have the requisite knowledge to follow the strange Muslim’s great leaps of thought. The whole thing seemed to be based on comparatively advanced mathematics, while in some parts it seemed utterly banal. For example, he noted that in the Koran, ‘Basmalah’ is mentioned 114 times, which is a number divisible by 19. In certain places he based his comments more directly on the text, such as when he referred to the fact that sura 74:30 said, ‘Over it is nineteen.’
Tentatively, she took a sip of the hot milky drink. Her mother’s theory didn’t stand up; the alcohol burned on her tongue and prickled in her nose.
Rashad Khalifa carried out an inconceivable number of calculations, she noted once more. The most ridiculous was to add up all the numbers mentioned throughout the whole of the Koran, and to show that this total was also divisible by 19. At first she really couldn’t understand what was special about that, but then she realized that 19 was a prime number, and therefore divisible only by itself, and that made things slightly easier to understand.
‘But then there are a hell of a lot of prime numbers,’ she muttered to herself.
The room was cold.
They had installed a thermostat with a timer on every radiator in an attempt to protect both their bank account and the environment. While Adam kept on turning up the radiators to maintain the heat overnight, she kept turning them down to allow the system to work as it was meant to. She regretted it now. For a moment she considered lighting a fire, but instead she went into the bedroom and fetched a blanket.
Her drink was beginning to cool down. She took a big gulp, then put the mug down again and started to read.
To begin with, the Muslim world had seemed delighted with the eccentric Khalifa’s discoveries. At first his work was taken seriously. Muslims the world over accepted the idea of mathematical evidence for the existence of Allah. Even the well-known sceptic Martin Gardner referred to Khalifa’s mathematical discoveries as interesting and sensational in one of his articles in
Then things went downhill for the Egyptian-American Rashad Khalifa.
He wrote himself into the Koran.
Not content with regarding himself as a prophet on the same level as the Prophet, he created his own religion. According to ‘The Submitters’, all other religions, including corrupt Islam, would simply die out when the prophet foretold in both the Koran and the Bible arrived, and Islam would rise again in a pure, unadulterated form.
She was going cross-eyed. Johanne put down the papers.
Perhaps she would be able to sleep on the sofa.
She wasn’t going to think about Rashad Khalifa any more.
Still, it was hardly surprising that he gained supporters, she thought, trying to get comfortable. Many modern Muslims welcomed his attack on the Muslim priesthood. On the other hand, numerology would always tempt those with a weakness for fanaticism – extremists of all kinds. Khalifa’s theories were still accepted, in spite of the fact that the man himself had been murdered in 1990.
By a fanatical Muslim, following a fatwa issued at the same meeting as the one against Salman Rushdie.
‘Oh my God,’ she mumbled, trying to close her eyes. ‘These religions!’
The number 19 was performing
It was ten past two.
Tomorrow would be terrible if she didn’t get to sleep soon. She got up abruptly, and with the blanket tucked under her arm she padded into the bathroom to take a sleeping tablet. The very thought that they were there was usually enough, but this time she took one and a half tablets, swilled down with running water from the tap.
Fifteen minutes later she was fast asleep in her own bed, untroubled by dreams.
Lukas Lysgaard had waited until everyone was asleep. He left a note for Astrid saying that he was worried about his father and was going to check that everything was OK, but would be back later that night. He had left the
