by Mark Davis
“A good discovery, Doctor Browne, I must admit,” Dahl said. “Two standard USB drives, 8 gigabytes each.”
Elizabeth found a Pyrex casserole dish. Dahl once again tried the knife, gave up and resorted to tearing the top off the box of chocolate-covered raisins. She came up with two more flash drives.
“Thor will be busy,” Elizabeth said.
“We will all be very busy,” Lars said.
NINE
“What are you taking?”
“Lithium. Occasionally, one of the benzodiazepines,” Elizabeth said.
“Sleep?”
“Satisfactory, if I walk more than two miles a day and do my yoga stretches at night,” Elizabeth said. “If I don’t get exercise, sleep is patchy.”
“Dreams?” George asked.
She did not want to talk about that. George let the silence grow, the hook every psychiatrist uses to elicit more information. The fact that Elizabeth knew what he was doing didn’t make it any easier to resist him.
“Disturbing,” she said. “Like before.”
“That’s the second time you’ve used that word with me,” George said. “The first time was about the case we’re working on. Would you like to explore your dreams with me?”
Elizabeth took a bite of reindeer steak. She almost responded that she did not know “we” were working on anything together.
“No,” she finally replied. “Their meaning is manifest. They are about my work, trying to help people. And not succeeding. Nightmares, really, although they don’t wake me up.”
George laughed.
“As we noted years before, those dreams of yours just show that you truly are a shrink. I’ve never told you, but should have, that I have had those kinds of dreams since my residency.”
“Thank you for telling me,” Elizabeth said. George could not have professionally spoken about his own dream life when he first led her through psychotherapy. It was good to hear it now.
He paused, weighing something on his mind.
“Elizabeth …”
“The paper?”
“Yes.”
“I now realize that I surprised you when I showed up here, horning in on what I can now see is territory you had staked out.”
“Yes, you did. How, George?”
“I came here years ago on a Fulbright, and from the first minute I arrived I felt at home. I came back for two summers, six and four years ago. I’m not one for mysticism, but if there is anything to reincarnation, I was definitely a Norwegian in one of my lives.”
“Maybe you were a Viking, George.”
He chuckled.
“Norwegian summers are glorious. Winter is not as harsh as you might think, either, especially if you don’t mind a little cross-country skiing to the local market. In fact, I am considering retiring here.”
“How is it that I never knew that about you?” Elizabeth said.
“It’s not a secret, exactly, but Norway has become my retreat, my special place,” he said.
“Norway is lovely,” Elizabeth said. “But how did you come to this case George?”
“I have friends in the Norwegian government,” he said. “They know me well and thought I might be interested in this case.”
“Who specifically?”
“The PST.”
He looked down at his food, took a sip of beer, and said, “And Lars Stenstrom.”
“You know Lars? How?”
“I wasn’t taking patients, but he was a friend of a friend, so four years ago I saw him over the summer in Oslo. About twelve visits, that’s all.”
“Lars was your patient?”
George nodded.
“And what was his …” Elizabeth stopped herself.
George smiled.
___________
Elizabeth sipped her coffee and stared out the giant windows of the Oslo Park Service office. Nasrin had not chosen a chair next to her, but did take one directly across the conference table from her. Looking out the window was a good strategy to avoid eye contact.
This morning, the Oslofjord was a serene waterscape of sails under a blue sky. Even a master artist would struggle to keep it from appearing trite.
“I have been up the better part of the night,” Thor said, standing by an illuminated screen with a control in his hand. “And the better part of the night is not something to be missed on a Saturday in Oslo.”
Agent Norris and Charles Bowie chuckled. Was it Sunday? Elizabeth had lost track of the days.
“Normally, I know you would all be holding your hymnals in church at this time,” Thor said to more chuckles. “But I am sure you are really more curious about what is in Walleen’s thumb drives.”
Thor advanced the digital presentation.
“Until now, we had to guess what might have been passing between the victims through the dark web. Now, thanks to the late Everett Walleen’s hidden data, we have this—”
The screen filled with the image of a landing page. The background imagery was of a light, misty forest in gray-green with silhouettes of light-green pines. All of this was behind the almost translucent image of a woman’s face. She had high cheekbones, knowing blue eyes that seemed to follow the viewer. Her blonde hair parted into golden waves, and around her elegant neck was a bejeweled torc of gold.
Freyja’s hair shimmered and waved slightly, like golden wheat in a light wind. There was no other movement.
The landing page had no text, no links to other sites or a menu of other pages. All that could be seen was the image and its slight, rippling motions of a breeze stirring the branches of trees in the forest and individual strands of Freyja’s hair.
“How could they use something like this?” Lars asked.
Thor paced and pulled on his lips in a nervous gesture.
“There is a lot we have yet to figure out. Here is what we know. There is an unusual data packet attached to this site. When we decoded it, what we got were two things. First, a link to those drafts folders in an associated Gmail account on which the communications took place. I have asked my colleague Ian at GCHQ to negotiate with Google to retrieve the files. This I believe we can do, perhaps for all of the victims in their discussions with the—” Thor glanced at Freyja—“host.”
“Will you distribute what you find?” Nasrin asked.
Ingrid wheeled a cart of coffee and pastries into room. Her eyes were narrow and bloodshot, lips drawn. She looked as pleased to be in the office on a Sunday morning as she would have been at an evangelical foot washing.
“Yes,” Lars said, “we will distribute the British files to you, and the American files to Agent Norris. If you wish to share them between you, or to ask Elizabeth to review them, that is your business.”
“You said, ‘first,’ about the Gmail files,” Bowie said to Thor. “What else did you find?”
“Hidden in this website is a large subset of packets that the users could access on an audio line.”
“What was it?” Lars asked. “Freyja’s speaking?”
“No human voices at all,” Thor replied. “Just this.”
He hit a toggle and nothing happened. From the back of the room, Ingrid spoke out what was obviously a Norwegian obscenity.
“What do you hear, Ingrid?” Thor asked.
“Tell me you don’t hear that for real?” she asked, setting the tray of Danish in the middle of the table. Charles Bowie grabbed one and took a large bite.
“How can you miss it?” Ingrid asked, her face twisted with irritation. “Such a weird scream, almost painful.”
Slowly, a thin note at an extremely high-pitch came out of the speakers. Elizabeth looked around, as one by one they heard it.
“The note is at 15,000 hertz,” Thor said, “but I am pulling it down to a more audible range. If we were all in our twenties again, we would have all heard it along with Ingrid.”
“I still hear nothing,” Agent Norris said, prompting everyone to laugh
, since he was the oldest in the room.
“That sound is embedded in the data stream,” Thor said. “With a simple code, anyone on the receiving end could have heard it. With the right software, they could have pulled information out of it.”
Bowie set down the remnant of his Danish, brushed crumbs from his chinstrap beard, rose and left the room.
___________
After a long, technical discussion about the website and the mysteries of how it had been covertly hosted through Tor and the dark web, they broke at noon. As Elizabeth gathered her papers, Nasrin walked around the table toward her. Elizabeth felt her pulse quicken, her body involuntarily stiffen.
“Yes, Nasrin, what do you want?”
Nasrin stared for half a beat, taking in Elizabeth’s new coldness.
“Jesus just asked the two of us to lunch,” she said.
Elizabeth made eye contact with Lars, who acknowledged her with a nod. He walked over to them and assumed a friendlier demeanor than he had shown the last time the three of them had a conversation.
“I know a good little place,” Lars said. “Perhaps we can have a spot of lunch? If we are going to continue to work together …”
Elizabeth smiled at him and nodded.
Lars drove them in his government-issue Volvo down a throughway into the heart of the city. They passed through a mountain tunnel. On the other side, vast, sloping sheets of white marble emerged along the harborside like a jagged piece of floating ice, the Oslo Opera House. Lars turned right on a city road that rose upward through a forest of boutiques and elegant homes to take advantage of a rare open parking space near the concrete mass of a museum. It was the Munchmusett, dedicated exclusively to the works of Edvard Munch.
“I always rather liked him,” Nasrin said as they got out of the car. “Never fails to cheer me up.”
“Over here,” Lars led them down the street a good block to a bistro with outdoor seating in a recess in an office building. The manager smiled and nodded at Lars in recognition and sat them outside at a table in the shade of an awning along the small boulevard. Across the street, tourists lined up to buy tickets to the latest Munch exhibit, “The Frieze of Life.”
Lars said something and the manager put a “reserved” sign on the other three outdoor tables, and one-by-one leaned the chairs inward.
When the waiter came, Lars favored hierarchy over chivalry by ordering first. He asked for a hamburger and water. Elizabeth asked for the same. Nasrin ordered a salmon salad with a white wine, defying the dry mood set by Lars.
When the waiter was safely gone, Lars spoke.
“It is clear to me that we are in new territory,” Lars said. “Soon we will be examining the personal files of the victims.”
“And perhaps that of the perpetrator,” Elizabeth said.
“Perpetrator?”
“She means the host of the website,” Nasrin said.
“But is that person necessarily a perpetrator?” Lars asked.
“If he or she deliberately manipulated vulnerable people, then yes,” Elizabeth said.
“Assuming that the perpetrator, as you call him or her, did not go over the edge himself or herself,” Lars said. “If the host wasn’t Everett Walleen all along.”
“He or she would still be the perp,” Elizabeth said. “That’s often how suicide cults work. Mother duck jumps and all the little ducklings follow.”
“What interests me is the audio signal,” Nasrin said. “Did you notice Bowie bolt up and leave the room to report something to somebody?”
“Yes, he knows something,” Lars said. “For a spy, he could have been subtler.”
“I wonder what might be encoded in those sounds.” Nasrin said. “And how the victims deciphered them?”
“And why go to all that trouble?” Lars asked.
Elizabeth sat back and studied Lars. His demeanor was noticeably more cooperative. Lars had not suddenly become friendlier, she realized. He just needed allies to help him to stay ahead of Bowie.
She pondered what she could say that would not violate her agreement with the U.S. government.
“Maybe it’s not a code,” Elizabeth said. “Maybe it’s—”
A detonation hurt her ears, strummed her jawbone. The boom made the metal table vibrate like a tuning fork and the plate glass windows of the restaurant ripple.
At the same time she felt the blast, Elizabeth watched the doors of a parked, red VW Golf across the street blow out sideways, the front windshield implode, and the hood crumple inward. The whole front of the car buckled as if pounded with a giant fist.
Then came the sounds of falling debris and tinkling glass.
Lars tossed the table to the side and knocked Elizabeth flat to the ground—Nasrin pulled a gun from her purse and screamed “RPG.” Elizabeth realized that her eyes and brain had captured, like a single frame of film, the cone of a shell rotating in the air just before it had hit the car. But that car, parked and empty, had not been the intended target.
A dark-gray Audi squealed out from behind the flaming car and came to a quick stop in the middle of the road. Three men emerged—two big men and one smaller fellow—all in shiny, cheap suits with shirts half-unbuttoned, with black or dirty blonde long hair pulled back in ponytails … Vikings with guns. The three men poised in shooting stances and hammered shots down the road in rapid succession. A few shots answered back, but an outcropping of office building obscured the other shooter.
There was another torrent of shooting by the Vikings as they stood firm by their Audi, until the shooting finally stopped on both sides.
One of the Vikings ran forward, a big, black-haired man with a gold chain bobbing on his hairy chest, arm outstretched to point his gun at something in the road. He passed behind the outcropping, out of their sight. There was only one more shot.
A coup de grâce.
The man returned toward his comrades in a skulking stride. He glanced to his right, saw Nasrin and the barrel of her Glock tracking him. His comrades made Nasrin at the same instant, pivoting their guns at her.
“No trouble here, fellows,” Nasrin shouted. “We’re not your enemies.”
She continued to track the black-haired Viking until he returned to his pack. Then she flipped the Glock upward, both arms raised.
“See? Run along now.”
The men starred at Nasrin, predators still assessing the threat.
“We’re the bloody PST and MI6 rolled into one. Believe me, you don’t need this trouble.”
The car doors slammed and the tires of the Audi squealed as the car pivoted and roared away.
“Christ, that was close,” Nasrin said. “Some timing. And you had to knock over my bloody wine.”
Lars lifted himself off Elizabeth and helped her up with one hand. The restaurant manager and waiter ran out as Elizabeth brushed herself off.
Nasrin still clutched her Glock, now pointed just below the horizon line. She crept to the side of the building, raised the pistol and took a quick look. She walked gingerly out into the street, scanning both ends of the boulevard.
Lars and Elizabeth followed.
A single figure lay in the road. Beyond him, the green cylinder of the RPG launcher, with instructions in red, Cyrillic lettering. Elizabeth looked at the man. He was skinny and pale, about thirty, with thinning light blonde hair and an expensive, all-black Italian suit. Dark, arterial blood spurted in gouts from a hole in his shiny silk shirt like the intermittent spray from a geyser. The bullet hole in the side of his forehead looked like a bloody tree knot.
“He’s still breathing,” Lars said. He pulled out his phone, hit a speed dial and began to bark commands into it.
Nasrin knelt beside the man. Blood streamed out between the man’s teeth. He made a gurgling sound.
“Though not for long,” Nasrin said, slipping her gun into her waistband.
Part of Elizabeth’s training included basic first aid. She could use her belt a
s a tourniquet for a slit wrist. There was nothing she could do here but compress the chest wound, but even that seemed useless.
Nasrin pulled the man’s shirt apart, buttons popping and skittering.
“Wait for the paramedics,” Lars shouted.
“I’m not looking for wounds,” Nasrin said. “I’m looking for this.”
She raked off a film of blood with the edge of her hand to reveal a pale tattoo of light blue and rose ink across the dying man’s white chest. A tableaux of dragons, saints, angels, demons, all dancing in the air around a red castle with crenelated walls. Nasrin pushed the shirt upward to reveal neat, eight-pointed stars below each shoulder.
She pulled her phone and snapped a picture.
“Authority stars, he’s a made man,” Nasrin said. “He got them in prison, probably in one of the labor camps run by the prisoners.”
“Stop that,” Lars ordered.
Nasrin released the man’s shirt, thick beads of blood forming on her fingernails.
The man burbled more blood, spasmed and groaned. The air bled out his mouth and chest wound like the final bleat of an expiring bagpipe.
“Lars, please check his pockets before your detectives arrive,” Nasrin said, standing up. “I’m going to the restroom to scald my hands under hot water. You wouldn’t believe the diseases these characters pick up in prison.”
Nasrin calmly walked back toward the restaurant in search of soap and hot water.
“Have you seen a gun on her before?” Lars asked.
“Does it matter?” Elizabeth asked.
Lars glanced at Nasrin disappearing into the restaurant.
“No,” he said. “I am rather glad she has it.”
Lars’ phone trilled. He answered, listened and shouted something into the receiver and snapped the phone shut.
“There are battles going on all around us,” he said.
But he didn’t have to tell Elizabeth that. She could hear it, small arms fire echoing off the hills around the city.
TEN
Thor’s plaid shirt was indifferently tucked into his blue jeans. His blonde curls bounced when he walked and sweat rolled from his hairline down the sides of his forehead and face. Thor glanced up at the flat screen Nasrin and Elizabeth were watching in the conference room and froze.