by Anne Holt
XV
The American president had no idea what time or day it was any more.
She had tried to focus on the time.
They had taken her watch off and pulled a hood over her head as soon as they got in the car. She hadn’t resisted at all, as it had taken her by surprise. It was only when the engine started that she managed to pull herself together and estimated the journey to be just under half an hour. The men didn’t say a word in the course of that time, so she had at least been able to count without being distracted. They had tied her hands together in front, not behind her back. So, sitting on her own in the back seat, she could use her fingers to count. Every time she reached sixty, she grabbed hold of the next finger. When ten minutes had passed and she had no fingers left, she scratched herself on the back of her hand with a longish manicured nail. The pain helped her to remember. Three scratches. Thirty minutes. About half an hour.
Oslo was not big. A million inhabitants? More?
The weak red light on the wall by the locked door was the only thing that made it at all possible to see. She kept her eyes fixed on the red light and breathed deeply.
She must have been here for some time now. Had she fallen asleep? She had gone to the toilet in the corner of the room. It wasn’t easy to get her trousers down with tied hands, but she had managed. It was worse pulling them up. How many times had she been over to the cardboard box full of newspapers? She tried to remember, to calculate, to get an idea of time.
She must have fallen asleep.
Oslo wasn’t big.
Not that big. Not even a million inhabitants.
Sweden was the largest. Stockholm was biggest.
Concentrate. Breathe. Think. You can do it. You know.
Oslo was small.
Half a million? Half a million.
She didn’t think she had slept in the car. But afterwards?
Her body felt leaden. It was painful to move. She had been sitting for too long in the same position. She tried carefully to ease her thighs apart. She was astonished to discover that she had soiled herself. The smell wasn’t a problem, she couldn’t smell anything.
Breathe. Calm. You’ve been asleep. Concentrate.
She remembered the plane landing.
The town crept up the surrounding hillsides. The fjord forced its way into the heart of the city.
Helen Lardahl Bentley closed her eyes to ward off the red darkness. She tried to recapture her impressions from Air Force One on approach to the airport, just south of Oslo.
North. It was north of the city, she eventually remembered.
It helped to keep her eyes closed.
The forests surrounding the capital were far less wild and frightening than they were made out to be in the family stories that she heard on her grandma’s lap. The elderly woman had never been to the old country, but the picture that she painted for her children and grandchildren was vivid enough: Norway was beautiful and frightening, with rugged mountains everywhere.
It wasn’t true.
From the window of Air Force One, Helen Bentley had seen a different landscape. It was friendly, with rolling hills and mountains with snow on their north-facing slopes. The trees were starting to parade that luminous green colour that belonged to the time of year.
How big was Oslo?
They couldn’t have gone that far.
As far as she had understood, the hotel was in the centre of town. They couldn’t have taken her that far in half an hour.
They had turned quite a lot of corners. Maybe they were necessary manoeuvres, but it might just as easily have been to confuse her. She might still be in the centre.
But she might also be wrong. She might have counted wrong. Had she actually fallen asleep?
She had not slept in the car. She had kept a clear head and counted the seconds. When she twisted her hands, she could feel the three scratches with her fingertip. Three scratches meant thirty minutes.
The hood they had pulled over her head was clammy and smelt strange.
Had she fallen asleep?
Her eyes filled with tears. She opened them wide. Mustn’t cry. A tear fell from the corner of her eye and trickled down her nose towards her mouth.
Don’t cry.
Think. Open your eyes and think.
‘You are the president of America,’ she whispered through gritted teeth. ‘You are the president of the USA, goddammit!’
It was hard to focus on one thought. Everything was fuzzy. It was as if her brain had got caught in a loop that made no sense, with arbitrary images in an increasingly confusing collage.
Responsibility, she thought, and bit her tongue until it bled. I have responsibility. I have to pull myself together. Fear is an old friend. I am used to fear. I have gone as far as a person can go and I’ve often been afraid. I have never shown it to anyone, but my enemies have frightened me. Enemies who have threatened me and everything I stand for. I have never let myself be broken. Fear only sharpened my senses. Fear made me clear-sighted and wise.
The blood tasted sweet, like warm iron.
Helen Bentley had plenty of practice in managing fear.
But not panic.
It floored her. Not even the familiar iron claw, which was now clamped round the back of her head, could jolt her from the confused state of paralysed fear that had gripped her since she was taken from the hotel suite. The adrenalin had not made her sharp and clear-sighted, as it normally did in conflict situations or important TV programmes. Quite the opposite. When the man by the side of her bed had whispered his short message, the world stood still and the pain was so overwhelming that he had to help her to her feet.
She had only once before experienced anything like it.
And that was a long time ago, and should have been forgotten.
It should have been forgotten. I should have forgotten it by now.
She was crying now, sobbing silently. Her tears were salty and mixed with the blood from her bitten tongue. The light by the door seemed to be getting brighter and there were threatening shadows everywhere. Even when she squeezed her eyes shut, she felt the red, dangerous dark closing in on her.
I must think. I have to think clearly.
Had she fallen asleep?
The experience of losing count of time confused her more than she might have imagined. For a moment she felt like she had been away for days, but then she reined in her rambling thoughts and made another attempt to reason.
Listen. Listen for sounds.
She opened her ears and senses. Nothing. It was silent.
At the late supper last night, the Norwegian prime minister had told her that the national-day celebrations would be loud. That the whole city would be out.
‘This is the children’s day,’ he had told her.
Trying to reconstruct an actual event was something solid. Something to focus her thoughts on, so that they didn’t detach and swirl around like leaves in the wind. She wanted to remember. She opened her eyes and stared straight at the red lamp.
The Prime Minister had stammered, and used bullet points.
‘We don’t parade our military forces,’ he said with a thick accent, ‘as other nations do. We show the world our children.’
She hadn’t heard any happy children’s shouts since she came to this empty bunker with the horrible red light. No brass bands. Nothing other than complete silence.
She couldn’t get rid of her headache. The way she was sitting, with her hands tied in front of her with thin strips of plastic that bit into the skin on her wrists, prevented her from performing her normal ritual. In desperation, she realised that the only thing she could do was to let go of the pain and to hope for salvation.
Warren, she thought, apathetically.
Then she fell asleep, in the middle of the worst attack she had ever experienced.
XVI
Tom Patrick O’Reilly stood on the corner of Madison Avenue and East 67th Street and longed to be home. It had been a tiring flight, as he had
n’t been able to sleep. He had sat on his own from Riyadh to Rome. It felt like being transported by a robot. Only when they landed in Rome did the pilot come out of the cockpit and greet him with a nod, before opening the doors. He had exactly twenty minutes until his next departure on a scheduled flight to Newark. Tom O’Reilly was sure that he wouldn’t manage it. But a woman in uniform had suddenly appeared – he had no idea where from – and miraculously rushed him through all the security checks.
The trip from Riyadh to New York had taken exactly fourteen hours, and the time difference made him feel confused and unwell. He never got used to it. His body felt heavier than normal and he couldn’t remember the last time his knee hurt so much. He had tried, without success, to cancel a couple of meetings that were scheduled in New York that afternoon.
He just wanted to go home.
The last meal with Abdallah had been eaten in silence. The food was delicious, as always. Abdallah had smiled his inscrutable smile as he ate slowly and systematically from one side of his plate to the other. His family were, as usual, not present. It was just them, Abdallah and Tom, and a silence that seemed to dominate. The servants disappeared too, once the fruit had been served. The candles had burnt down and the only light came from the big terracotta lamps on the walls. Abdallah had eventually got up and left him with nothing more than a quiet good night. In the morning, Tom had been woken by a servant and collected by a limousine. When he got into the car, the palace seemed to be totally deserted.
He had not looked back, and now Tom O’Reilly was standing on a corner on Upper East Side, clutching an envelope in his hand. The unfamiliar uncertainty made him anxious, almost frightened. The terrifying eagle on the postbox looked as if it was about to attack. He put down his small suitcase.
He could, of course, open the letter.
He tried to look around without drawing attention. The pavement was teeming with people. Car horns hooted in irritation. An old woman with a lapdog on her arm bumped into him as she passed. She was wearing sunglasses, despite the grey skies and the drizzle in the air. On the other side of the street, he noticed three youths talking animatedly. Tom thought they looked at him. Their lips were moving, but it wasn’t possible to hear what they were saying above the noise of the city. A girl smiled at him when he met her eyes; she was pushing a pram and was lightly dressed for the cool weather. A man stopped just beside him. He looked at his watch and opened his newspaper.
Don’t be paranoid, Tom reassured himself, and stroked his chin. They’re just normal people. They’re not watching you. They’re Americans. Just ordinary Americans and I am in my own country. This is my country and I’m safe here. Don’t be paranoid.
He could open the envelope.
He could throw it away.
Maybe he should go to the police.
With what? If the letter was illegal, he would be investigated and confronted with the fact that he had actually brought it into the country. If it was OK and Abdallah had been telling the truth, he would have betrayed the man who had looked after him for so many years.
He slowly opened the outer envelope. He pulled out the one inside, with the back facing up. The letter was not sealed, only glued down in the usual way. There was no sender’s address. He froze as he was about the turn the envelope over to see who the addressee was.
What he didn’t know wouldn’t harm him.
He could still throw the envelope away. There was a rubbish bin only a few metres along the street. He could throw the letter away, go to his meetings and forget the whole thing.
But he would never be able to forget it, because he knew that Abdallah would never forget him.
He resolutely dropped the letter into the blue postbox, then he picked up his suitcase and started to walk. As he passed the rubbish bin, he scrunched up the outer envelope with no name on it and dropped it into the bin.
There was nothing wrong with posting a letter.
It was not a crime to do a friend a favour. Tom straightened his shoulders and took a deep breath. He would try to wrap up the meetings as quickly as possible and catch the early-evening flight to Chicago. He wanted to get home to Judith and the kids. He had done absolutely nothing wrong.
He was just terribly tired.
He stopped at the pedestrian crossing and waited for the green man.
Three taxis were hooting furiously, quarrelling about the inside lane on Madison Avenue. A dog barked loudly and wheels screeched on the asphalt. A little girl howled in protest when her mother pulled her by the arm to stand beside Tom. She gave him an apologetic smile. He smiled back, full of understanding, and took a couple of steps out into the road.
When the police reached the scene only a few minutes later, the witnesses all told different stories. The mother with the little girl was almost hysterical and not of much help when it came to establishing what had actually happened when the big middle-aged man was mowed down by the green Taurus. She just hugged her daughter tight and cried. The man in the Taurus was at breaking point too, and could only sob something about ‘suddenly’ and ‘crossed on the red man’. Some of the pedestrians just shrugged their shoulders and mumbled that they hadn’t seen anything, while they sneaked looks at their watches and rushed off as soon as the police let them go.
However, it seemed that two witnesses were absolutely certain. One of them, a man in his forties, had been standing on the same side of the street as Tom O’Reilly. He could have sworn that the man had staggered and, without waiting for the green man, had just tumbled into the road. A sudden turn, thought the witness, and nodded sagely. He was more than willing to give his name and address to the overwhelmed policewoman, he said as he glanced over at the body lying motionless in the middle of the road.
‘Is he dead?’ he asked quietly, and was given a nod in confirmation.
The other witness, a younger man in a suit and tie, had been standing on the other side of 67th Street. He gave a description of events that was remarkably similar to the first man. The policewoman also noted his personal details and was relieved to be able to reassure the distraught driver that it all appeared to be a terrible accident. The driver started to breathe more evenly and some hours later, thanks to the clarity of the witnesses, was a free man again.
Not much more than an hour after Tom O’Reilly had died, the place had been cleared. His body was swiftly identified and driven away. Traffic flowed as before. The remains of blood on the asphalt did make the odd passer-by wonder for a moment, but a shower around six in the evening washed the road clean of the final remains of the tragedy.
XVII
‘Who did you get the idea from?’
The policeman who was sitting in front of the monitor in the gym at the police HQ and who had spent more than a day and a half going through footage that showed nothing other than an empty corridor stared at Adam Stubo with scepticism. ‘It’s not logical,’ he added in an aggressive tone. ‘There can’t be anyone who would think that something interesting was recorded after the woman disappeared.’
‘Yes,’ replied Bastesen, Chief of Police. ‘It is completely logical, and it’s a huge blunder on our part that we didn’t think of it. But what’s done is done. So now let’s see what you can show us.’
Warren Scifford had eventually returned. It had taken Adam half an hour to get hold of him. The American didn’t answer his mobile phone and no one picked up the phone at the embassy. When he did show up, he just smiled and shrugged without giving any explanation as to where he’d been. He took off his coat on his way into the gym, where the air was now unbearable.
‘Fill me in,’ he said, grabbing an empty chair, which he pulled into the table and sat down on.
The policeman’s fingers leapt over the keyboard. The screen flickered grey, before the picture was clear. They had seen this part of the video many times before: two Secret Service agents walking towards the door of the presidential suite. One of them knocked on the door.
The digital clock on the top left-hand corner of
the screen showed 07:18:23.
The agents stood there for a few seconds before one of them tried the door.
‘Strange that the door was open,’ muttered the policeman, fingers ready at the keyboard.
No one said anything.
The men went in and disappeared from the scope of the camera.
‘Just let the film run,’ Adam said quickly, and noted the time.
07:19:02.
07:19:58.
The two mean came tearing out.
‘That’s where we’ve stopped,’ the policeman said, exasperated. ‘That’s where I stopped and went back to twenty past twelve.’
‘Fifty-six seconds,’ Adam said. ‘They were in her room for fifty-six seconds before they came running out and raised the alarm.’
‘Under a minute to cover more than a hundred square metres,’ Bastesen mused and rubbed his chin. ‘That’s not much of a search.’
‘Would you please speak English,’ Warren requested without taking his eyes from the screen.
‘Sorry,’ Adam said. ‘As you can see, they can’t have done a very thorough search. They saw the apparently empty suite, read the note and that’s about it. Hang on. Look, look there!’
He bent down towards the screen and pointed. The policeman at the keyboard had fast-forwarded to a frame where a movement could be seen at the bottom of the screen.
‘A . . . a chambermaid?’
Warren squinted.
‘Chamber boy,’ Adam corrected. ‘If there is such a thing.’
The cleaner was a relatively young man. He was wearing a practical uniform and pushing a large trolley in front of him. It had shelves of shampoo bottles and other small items and a deep, apparently empty basket in front for dirty laundry. The man paused a moment before opening the door to the suite and going in, pushing the trolley in front of him.
‘07:23:41.’ Adam read the numbers slowly. ‘Do we have an overview of what was happening elsewhere at that time? In the rest of the hotel?’