by Mark Davis
Elizabeth saw the hazy outline of a path in the tall grass, almost grown over.
“There,” she said.
Nasrin threw the keys to Elizabeth.
“If anything happens to me, run to the car and drive for your life,” she said.
Their boots crunched on a gravel pathway. Nasrin insisted on walking in front of Elizabeth, keeping her right hand on her hip, taking it slow, making as little noise as possible. The path curved several times until a clearing came into view, and after that a green stretch of mowed lawn with lawn chairs, plastic tables, golf balls and red plastic cups all scattered about.
Beyond the lawn was a log cabin, its wood weathered and gray with a roof of curling shingles that came halfway down, obscuring the top halves of two narrow windows. A door in the middle of the cabin was painted an incongruous bright red. The door opened, and a tall, thin man in his early thirties stepped out. His round head was covered in strands of thin, brownish-red hair. He wore dark jeans and an untucked, plaid shirt of blacks, blues and reds.
“I thought you were coming yesterday afternoon,” he shouted.
“Too late in the day,” Nasrin shouted back.
“ID please.”
As they approached, Nasrin pulled her warrant card. Elizabeth noticed several cables snaking through the grass and a large satellite dish on the roof. Off to the side, under a narrow wooden shed, sat an electric generator on a table, with shelves underneath that stored several red canisters of gasoline. In the opposite direction was a barrel to catch rainwater, with a hose connected to the side of the house.
“I’m Detective Inspector Nasrin Jones, Scotland Yard, and this is one of our consultant investigators, Elizabeth Browne.”
“Everett Walleen,” the man said in a slow-as-syrup American Southern accent. “Come inside.”
Inside was single room, a utilitarian kitchen with a wood stove, a table littered with papers and a single laptop computer, its screen glowing with the TechCrunch landing page. A shotgun leaned against the opposite corner.
“This place is clean,” Walleen said. “The only equipment you will find is this old Dell with nothing on it that would be of any use to you.”
“That’s just as well since this little inquiry is off the books,” Nasrin said. “We’re just looking for some leads.”
“Lady, nothing is off the books with you folks, ever.”
“We want to know why an IP address that sources to this area was used to set up a web account accessed by all the Preikestolen suicides,” Nasrin said.
Walleen pulled a pack of Marlboros, tapped a few out and offered them, a token gesture to the unlikely. When the two women declined, he struck a match with his thumbnail, lit up and took a deep drag. His eyes narrowed in satisfaction as he exhaled blue smoke. Walleen was wiry as well as tall, with large, expressive brown eyes like a child’s.
“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” he said.
Nasrin snorted. Elizabeth could sense she was about to get tough, perhaps too tough, a mistake that would shut down this interview.
“I believe you,” Elizabeth said. “But hypothetically, in your expert opinion, suppose a black hat hacker was sitting out in the woods here, how would he construct that?”
“Well,” Walleen drew out the vowels, “hypo-thet-tically speaking, I suppose a scenario could be envisioned in which the hacker received a request for a proposal on a black auction site—”
“Which site?” Nasrin asked.
She was bearing down again, the trained interrogator trying to flip the script back to obtain dominance. It was a gamble. It could shut Walleen down. But if he answered her, a little bit of the patina of this being a hypothetical scenario would be worn off, and Walleen would be answering more directly.
“Zerodaygasm.ru,” he said.
“What was the RFP for?”
“It wanted a domain proxy, setting up a message board to be operated remotely, through a tier of nested domains. Which was kinda weird.”
“Weird, how?” Elizabeth asked.
“Weird like he could have done this through a legitimate proxy service. He was being extra careful with redundant layers. I had no … I mean the hacker in the woods … would have started with no idea about the purpose of the site. Just the technical requirements of the RFP.”
“Do think the customer can be traced?” Nasrin asked.
“No,” Walleen took another drag, “I do not. Not if he was smart on his end, using cheap, throwaway devices in wireless cafes. And if he was smart enough to get to someone like me, he was smart enough to do all that.”
Nasrin’s pressure had worked, prompting Walleen to open up and drop the hypothetical pretense, a cool shift that Elizabeth had to admire.
“Did you construct the site for him?”
“No, but I went back and looked it up. At first it was a soft, touchy-feely kind of board where people posted about their troubles and fears and dreams, wanting to end it all and such. A special level of subscribers who logged in were given all kinds of secure codes, all meant to assure them of the anonymity of the site. Then the dialogue took a mean turn. I could see this host manipulating people, making them feel worthless instead of making them feel better. But you see a lot of that online.”
“How were you paid?” Nasrin asked.
“I wasn’t paid at all,” he said. “But your average hypothetical hacker might accept untraceable bitcoins.”
“We’ll see about that.”
Walleen’s eyes narrowed.
Elizabeth looked around the cabin. An open box of a chocolate cereal with a cartoon vampire, an empty box of chocolate-covered raisins on the floor, a pack of sausages in plastic wrap.
“Where are you from, Everett?” Elizabeth asked.
“Slidell, St. Tammany Parish,” he said. “I got in a bit of trouble with the local constabularies, and decided that my best work could be done somewhere else. I’ve been in Europe for six years now.”
“Where?” Nasrin asked.
“Slovenia, then Czech Republic, mostly. And here.”
“Business good?”
“Good enough for me not to want to be mixed up in something like this.”
“You mean something too public,” Nasrin said. “But you are mixed up in it.”
“Not me, just the hacker in the woods,” he said.
Nasrin stared at him for a half beat.
“Agreed.”
Walleen shuffled over to the computer. He pulled a USB stick and slapped it into Nasrin’s outstretched palm.
“That’s everything. That’s all that can be known from the hacker end.”
“How did you come to work for Karl Pedersen?” Elizabeth asked.
Elizabeth was also trained to read people, to catch the slight register of a tic or a lip bite. At the mention of that name, Everett Walleen looked away for a half-a-beat.
“I have no bosses, only clients.”
“So you are not a Hammer?”
Walleen snorted.
“The last time I was on a hog, I wound up in a tree. And my mamma was part Creek, which in Slidell means some African way back there too, so I guess I’d flunk their little Nordic-Nazi test.”
“But you do work for Pedersen?” she asked.
“Karl had nothing to do with any of this. That is why he wanted you to talk to me. This is business he don’t need.”
“Don’t go far,” Nasrin said. “The PST will be by.”
“So much for hypothetical and off-the-record.”
“I believe it was you who said that nothing is off the record,” Nasrin replied. “But for what it is worth, I just gave you a heads up.”
“Okay, so let ’em come,” Walleen said. “They’ll find nothing here but boudin sausages and some Ringnes beer in the icebox. And they can have the sausages.”
He smiled.
“Thank you for coming by. And please don’t come again.”
___________
>
“Come to Jesus?” Lars asked.
His wood-paneled office, more birch of course, was backed with a bookcase dedicated to collecting oblong blobs of clear plastic on stands, along with pictures of his two impossibly beautiful offspring—a girl and boy, each with cornflower blue eyes, blonde hair like spun gold.
“It’s an American expression and it means a coming to terms,” Nasrin said, and then smiled. “And you get to be Jesus.”
“I see,” Lars said. “I do in fact get to be Jesus.”
Nasrin and Elizabeth stood before the landscape of the chief inspector’s bare, wooden desk like two delinquents before the principal. It was all but decided that they would be expelled.
“I could cite for you all the procedures and even some laws that you have broken,” Lars said. “I could play the role of bureaucrat. But I won’t do that. I will simply characterize what you have done as a breach of trust. I trusted you both, and now I don’t.”
“I understand your position,” Nasrin said. “But we did uncover digital forensic evidence that will be of use.”
“Which, thanks to you, comes with a contaminated chain of custody that may not stand up in a Norwegian court of law, which I remind you, still governs jurisprudence for the Kingdom of Norway. A quaint distinction from your point of view, I am sure.”
“We respect your position,” Elizabeth said.
Lars turned to her, head tilted like a curious bird.
“My position is that of a man crouched under a flimsy umbrella as hot steaming piss rains through my ceiling from the Ministry of Justice and Security.”
“I am sorry to hear that,” Nasrin said. She sounded sorry, investigator to investigator.
“You can dwell on that on the way home,” Lars said. “And you both will fly economy-class.”
“Just one thing before we go,” Nasrin said. “Did you look at the data on Walleen’s thumb drive?”
Lars leaned forward in his chair, eyes narrowing.
“Not yet, did you?”
“Yes.”
Elizabeth had watched as Nasrin had put the thumb drive straight into Thor’s palm a few hours before, but that did not—she now realized—preclude her from copying it somewhere along the way. This infraction was, of course, another demerit for Lars to add to both of their columns.
“And has Thor come around to informing you of how much of the data was being routed through Iceland?”
“That is all to the best,” Lars said. “We have excellent relations with the Greiningardeild Ríkislögreglustjóra.”
“Goodness me,” Nasrin said. “And I can’t even say the first few consonants without choking. You surely know—and if you don’t, Thor can explain it to you—that there are old warehouses along a wharf on the south end of Reykjavik that act as server farms for drug deals, money laundering, as well as a lot of legitimate but secretive business.”
“We know that.”
“And they do that because the peculiarly lax laws there make it hard to get the government to trace anything. Remember, Iceland is the country that expelled the FBI for looking into WikiLeaks.”
“What’s your point?”
“Just how many months, years or centuries do you think it will take you to get Reykjavik to tell you anything revealing about what is being routed through their server farms?”
“Fine, if Iceland is a dead end, I can always go to Agent Norris and ask him to query the NSA.”
“Ah, yes, sounds smart,” Nasrin said. “And do you know what we mean at Vauxhall Cross when we say ‘Washington Time’?”
Silence, which deepened as the inspectors stared at each other like two animals squaring off. It was Lars who finally spoke.
“Bitch,” Lars whispered the word.
“When I need to be.”
Elizabeth looked at them, reading their expressions, trying to make sense of what was being said.
“So you’re MI6?” he asked. “Why the Scotland Yard cover? Why did MI6 send you over for this?”
“As I was saying, ‘Washington time’ is Vauxhall for ‘you’re holding your cock in your hands,’” Nasrin said. “I can say that if you and Thor are relying on Washington to unscramble this for you, you might as well gently stroke your hands up and down. It will feel better.”
Lars bolted up, slamming the back of his chair into his bookcase and rattling his forest of plaques. In Elizabeth’s experience, an American bureaucrat in his position would have hurled expletives and violently thrown them out of his office, but Lars kept his voice down and eyes locked on Nasrin.
“Washington cares about this too,” Lars said.
“Yes, Washington cares because several prominent Americans were killed. And you’d best go through Charlie Bowie—you do know that counselor title is pure bullshit, that he’s CIA? Charlie would be your most direct route, the ambassador’s an idiot, as you know. But your request would have to make it to the office of the DCI, and from there to the ODNI, to be farmed out for comment among its 17 committee members who represent the U.S. intelligence community, and from there go to the one agency that could actually do the job—the NSA with its big ears—where a request from Norway about suicides would wend its way through their priority intelligence process, competing for their processing time against active threats like ISIS, Russian hacking of elections and Chinese penetration of U.S. defense companies. Good luck with that.”
Lars sighed out a deep breath, smiled, looked down at his desk and shook his head. He raised his head again, looking directly into Nasrin’s eyes.
“You actually think there is a deal to be made here?”
“I do indeed,” Nasrin said. “I was, by the way, on the Greater Manchester Police force for a good ten years, homicide, before being recruited by the Secret Intelligence Service. I was selected for this assignment to do double duty, as I often do in foreign cases that involve fatal action against British subjects.”
“Why this case?”
“There is an interest in it at the highest levels,” Nasrin said. “A prominent playwright. And it is said that the Duchess of Cambridge herself is a devoted reader of Anne Shrewsbury mysteries.”
“Now you are the one doing the stroking,” he said.
“There could be other equities in this case,” Nasrin said. “But keep us on and I promise to keep you in the loop on anything we discover. That’s a personal pledge I am authorized to convey to you direct from C. So you don’t need the American NSA. If we have a deal, I can get Thor and his thumb drives into GCHQ tomorrow to participate in a full forensic.”
Lars sighed again, walked to the window and looked out at the clutter of tall triangular white sails cutting against each other like shark fins across the Oslofjord.
He looked back at Nasrin.
“How do I know you will not park Thor in some sanitized visitor’s room in some remote corner of the Doughnut?”
“The Doughnut has no corners. I promise Thor will be taken straight to the war room, and that he can be as hands-on in this matter as he wishes, provided he signs certain releases.”
“I can make that deal,” Lars said. “But if Thor is not physically within the walls of GCHQ by sunset tomorrow—or if he reports back to me that you are withholding anything, a hashtag or an umlaut—the ministry will expel you. And then I will have a friendly drink with some friends in the press. Your cover will be blown for life.”
“I can accept those terms because we do not renege.”
“And total discretion afterwards? No James Bond fables at my expense in the press?”
“Total discretion,” Nasrin said. “We have no interest in that kind of publicity. That would be MI5.”
“Me too,” Elizabeth said, and instantly regretted it.
Lars and Nasrin both turned to Elizabeth in dead silence. In the heat of their negotiation, they had forgotten that there was a civilian in the room.
SEVEN
They met with a hug at a dockside café,
but George was too fidgety to sit still.
“Mind if we take a walk?”
“Sure, it’s late in the day and I’m already well caffeinated,” Elizabeth said.
“How are you doing today?”
“Well,” she said. And she was. It wasn’t just the brightness of the long summer days and the cheeriness of the scene of shoppers and strollers along Oslo’s main dock. Elizabeth had just finished a long Skype talk with Max. He seemed to be doing well for a change, chattier than usual, with an A-minus on a calculus midterm. And there were hints of a girl, though that worried Elizabeth a bit.
College romances are always the toughest. And this would be his first. That is the way it was with a vulnerable child, every bit of happy news—getting into a tough school, try-outs for the lacrosse team—became a potential ordeal.
“Let’s stroll by City Hall,” George said. They passed by the steps that led to the twin brick towers done in a Brutalist style that either evoked admiration or disgust, but never indifference.
“I heard Nelson Mandela give his Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech in the great hall. Did you know that?”
At sixty-four, George walked briskly with the stride and natural ease of a much younger man.
“I believe you may have mentioned it once or twice or forty times before,” Elizabeth said, which made George laugh. He had a habit of name-dropping and bragging about every notable event in his life, a tendency toward braggadocio that for Elizabeth only brought George’s more sensitive, vulnerable side into stark contrast. Elizabeth loved him more for his little eccentricities.
A steel clock face on one of the towers struck one o’clock, prompting 49 carillon bells to chime a popular rock tune from the 20th century. They walked in silence until the bells were done.
“George, I can’t tell you what it means to me to have you here.”
He stopped and turned to look her in the eye.
“You had a relapse,” he said.
“I’m consulting on a case that is more than a little disturbing.”
“No matter how clinically detached we try to be, we can’t help but get caught up in the horror of some of the things we see. I would be worried for you, Elizabeth, if it were otherwise.”