by Anne Holt
Fortunately.
Billy T. had told the police that the watch had been stolen. They did not believe him. Finally he had insisted on phoning the insurance company, and sure enough they were able to confirm that Billy Thorvald Fastlyng had received a pretty penny following a break-in into his basement storeroom, for a gold watch that had gone missing, among other things.
That was one he had received from his grandfather for his confirmation, as Hanne now knew, but the police did not.
They had been forced to release Billy T.
“Is it only Linus who lives here?” Hanne asked, in an attempt to divert her anxiety at being so far from home.
“Yes. Why do you ask?”
“Is this a three-room apartment?”
“Yes.”
“One bedroom for you. One living room. And this room.”
“Yes,” Billy T. said, squinting at her in impatience. “Where are you going with this?”
“You have six children. At least two of them aren’t grown-ups yet. Where do they stay when they’re here?”
She could have sworn that Billy T. blushed. He smiled, slightly nonplussed, and ran his hand over his skull as he crossed to the window.
“We don’t have . . .” he began with his back to her, before he restarted. “We don’t have any fixed arrangements, so to speak, actually. When I see Jenny and Niclas we go to . . . well, we find other things to do, sort of thing. Outside. Tusenfryd amusement park or something like that.”
“Do they never spend the night?”
“Yes, of course. Sometimes. Then they sleep on the sofa.”
Hanne shook her head. He did not see it. She swiveled across to the wardrobe and opened it. On one side, pants and sweaters were neatly folded. A wire basket was filled with socks, and there were two suits and a number of shirts hanging in the other half of the closet. Beyond that the space was bare, apart from a uniform she noticed was from Sinsen Youth Band.
“Does Linus play in a band?” she asked.
“I don’t think so, not now.”
Billy T. hesitated slightly before adding: “But he did in the past. Trombone, I think. Yes, trombone. You see he keeps all his belongings incredibly well organized. I’ve looked in all the drawers in here. Nothing but neatly ironed clothes in all of them—he’s even pressed his underpants. Some shaving gear in the chest of drawers as well, and that’s all.”
“That computer,” Hanne said, nodding at the bedside table. “Is it password-protected?”
“Well . . . I haven’t tried to open it. I didn’t really think . . .”
He fell silent as Hanne rolled across to the bed, picked up the laptop, opened it, and switched it on, before setting it down on the bed and beginning to type.
“Hmm. No password.”
All was quiet for a few seconds.
“My goodness,” she said, almost to herself. “He isn’t connected to the Internet at all.”
“What?”
“This computer is air-gapped, I think.”
“What does that mean?”
“That Linus definitely doesn’t want to go online. Look at this . . .”
She pointed at the screen.
“He hasn’t even installed a browser!”
“But what’s the point of having a computer if you’re not on the Internet? Doesn’t that make it just a . . . typewriter?”
“No, it can still be programmed of course. And you can run it via USB.”
“But . . . why?”
Hanne’s fingers raced over the keyboard.
“Security,” she murmured. “Air-gapped machines can either be completely isolated from the Internet, as this one obviously is, or linked to a closed network that isn’t connected to the Internet at any point. Used by organizations where secrecy is top priority. The military. Industry. Government. As protection against unauthorized access, quite simply. Hacking. Viruses. Observation.”
“But why would Linus be afraid of anything like that?”
She did not answer. For a few minutes, her fingers continued their pursuit of the laptop’s secrets, before she switched it off, folded it up, and returned it to the bedside table.
“I’ve no idea,” she said in the end. “All I found was school related. No log of previous online activity. Of course, he might have had a browser and subsequently deleted both that and the log, and God knows what. It could be traced by a professional, almost certainly, but I don’t know how to do that. Could we take it with us?”
“No,” Billy T. said quickly. He was standing by the door now and, appearing to regret the whole business of searching the room, was ready to leave. “I don’t think I can do that. Not yet, at least. By the way, how come you know so much about computers?”
Hanne looked up and gazed at him over her glasses.
“I view the world through the Internet, Billy T. I don’t know so very much, but definitely enough so that I can live inside there for most of my waking hours.”
She let her eyes survey the room one last time.
“Your trick worked.”
“What do you mean?”
“In the past you always knew what I meant.”
He hesitated a little before smiling meekly and saying: “It was a good idea, forcing you to come here with me. You agree with me. There’s something wrong with Linus.”
“Well, yes and no. This is a conspicuously sterile room, to say the least. However, we haven’t mentioned what is most conspicuous of all. Can you manage to lift the mattress?”
“The mattress?”
Running out of patience, she pointed at the bed.
“This habit you have of answering questions with fresh questions is something you’ll have to drop if this new teamwork of ours is going to work. I’d like to know if Linus is hiding something.”
Billy T. walked dutifully across and removed the bedclothes. He carefully raised the mattress along its entire length.
The bed base consisted of wooden slats held together by two broad strips. There was nothing else there. Billy T. waited until Hanne gave him a sign and then replaced the mattress and made up the bed again.
“That’s the most remarkable aspect of this whole room,” she said.
“What is?”
“Linus is a man at the peak of his virility. Does he have a girlfriend?”
“Not as far as I know.”
“Going by his father, as he once looked and behaved, he’s a young, healthy man with urges and needs. All the same . . .”
She took a deep breath.
“No trace of porn,” she said as she exhaled. “He’s not online, and has no films or magazines. Nothing. You said you’d checked all the drawers. I know I’m skating on thin ice here, Billy T., so I’m asking you to be absolutely certain. Don’t you think there should be some porn in here if everything was as it should be?”
“Yes,” he said softly. “Maybe. No. Yes. There should be.”
“Does he know where you stash your porn?”
“No,” he said, even more softly. “Not to my knowledge.”
“Then,” she said, folding her hands on her lap, “I’m on tenterhooks to hear what it is you’re scared has happened to him. I have my own hunch, and I understand that you wanted me to have a look at this room first. Now I want to hear it from you. What is it you think he’s mixed up in?”
Billy T. stared at her for a few seconds, as if he didn’t really dare to answer. Then he took three steps over to the chest of drawers and pulled out the top drawer with some difficulty.
“In addition to what I mentioned earlier, he has this.”
He picked up the Koran and handed it to her.
“Look near the very beginning. What’s called the Opening Prayer.”
Hanne held the book and read.
She read the short prayer. Several times over, or so it seemed.
“This,” she said at last, with a light smack of the green book covered in gold decoration that she had just shut with a bang, “together with the fact that Linu
s’s watch was found at the scene of the terrorist action yesterday. And then there’s this almost ascetic, tidy room. I can well understand you.”
“I knew you would.”
“You think he’s been converted. You’re afraid he’s somehow involved in yesterday’s bomb attack.”
It knocked her sideways, far more than she would have expected, to see his eyes grow moist. She had never seen Billy T. cry. Hardly seen him hesitate. Now he ran both hands slowly over his head, from behind and forward to his forehead until he had covered his eyes and confirmed in an almost inaudible voice: “Yes. That’s what I’m shit scared of. And I’ve got more to go on, Hanne. I’ve got more. Last night, just after two o’clock, Linus left the apartment. He sneaked out. I followed him. He didn’t see me.”
Hanne felt uncomfortably hot. Billy T.’s lower lip was quivering. He swallowed and pulled himself together and could not manage to speak in anything other than clipped sentences. His arms dangled by his sides now, and now and then he opened his eyes wide so that the tears would not spill over.
This was not what they had agreed on, Hanne thought.
Far from it.
She had allowed herself to be persuaded to help an old friend for a couple of hours. To ward off thoughts he would not share with her until she had seen a bedroom in a high-rise apartment building in a part of the city where she never otherwise ventured. She had thought that her walls were high enough by now. Yesterday morning, when Billy T. had suddenly stood at her door, eager to come in, she had noticed that. The liberating absence of emotion. Only his eyes had pierced a tiny crack in the bulwark she had spent eleven years, three months, and a number of days building to protect herself from people like Billy T. It was stopped up again as soon as he had left.
This was not what they had agreed.
“Get a grip,” she said in an undertone, albeit with a scathing edge.
He pulled himself together, quite literally: straightened his back, cleared his throat, and continued: “He didn’t go far. Only over to Trondheimsveien. And then a few hundred yards on to an area with apartment buildings. Rødbergveien. I managed to follow him all the way. I saw who it was he visited.”
Abruptly, he used his sleeve to wipe his nose.
Like a sad child, it crossed Hanne’s mind.
“And who was it?” she asked tersely.
“Andreas Kielland Olsen.”
“I see.”
“One of Linus’s childhood friends.”
“Exactly.”
“But they’re no longer friends. Or . . . at least that’s what I had thought. Andreas is actually called something different now. His name is Arfan. He converted to Islam. Three years ago. So to be honest, Hanne . . .”
He took a really mega-breath of air and straightened his back so suddenly that Hanne could hear it creak.
“The sum total of all these facts is that I’m pretty confused. I can’t see anything other than that—”
“What the fuck?”
Both Hanne and Billy T. glanced at the door that had thumped open. Neither of them had heard anyone enter the apartment.
“What the hell are the two of you doing in here?”
Linus took half a step inside the room, where he stood with his arms outstretched at his sides, as if he wanted to prevent them from fleeing. When neither of them answered, he gazed at his father in disbelief.
“Dad? You, who always say that we should show respect for . . .”
His eyes wandered over to the wheelchair.
“And who the fuck is . . . Hanne? Is it you, Hanne? What are you doing in here and why have you . . . ?”
The young man crossed the room in two paces and grabbed hold of the Koran, still lying on Hanne’s lap.
She recognized him without difficulty. A good-looking man, with regular features and big blue eyes. His reddish-blond curls from when he was little had been tamed into a short haircut. He no longer wore glasses. Contact lenses, she assumed. Linus was not quite as tall as his father, but he had definitely inherited his broad shoulders and enormous hands.
“We believe you’ve converted,” Hanne said, unruffled. “Become a Muslim. Your dad’s worried about it. Quite a lot, in fact. He just wanted my opinion on it. That’s why we’re here.”
“Muslim? Muslim?”
He waved the Koran in Billy T.’s face.
“This is for schoolwork, Dad. Schoolwork, do you understand? And now get out of here, both of you!”
He was not old enough to avoid his voice breaking into falsetto. Billy T. held his palms up reassuringly and began to walk into the hallway. Hanne rolled just as quietly in his wake.
“Hell,” Linus screamed after them, before slamming the door behind them. “Damn it all, I haven’t converted!”
“The converts are a chapter to themselves,” Professor Iftikhar Siddiqui said, taking a deep breath. “When all is said and done, we know too little to draw any conclusions. We calculate there are about a thousand of them here in Norway, but whether there’s a greater or lesser likelihood of their being radicalized is something we haven’t researched enough.”
Police Chief Silje Sørensen was listening to the NRK broadcast with half an ear. She had a splitting headache and grabbed a packet of aspirin from the desk drawer. Pushing first two, then three tablets out of the foil, she swallowed the bitter pills with water from a half-filled glass in front of her.
“NRK is good in times of crisis,” Håkon Sand muttered. “Could you face turning it up a bit louder?”
“A Norwegian convert,” Silje said, sounding discouraged, and hid her face in her hands. “As if we didn’t have enough problems with the ones who are born Muslims.”
“He wasn’t completely Norwegian, you know. Half American and quite dark skinned.”
“Good Lord, Håkon.”
Silje rolled her eyes and poured more water in the glass from a pitcher full of ice cubes.
“The boy’s name is Jørgen Fjellstad, and he comes from Lørenskog.”
“Was. And came. He is—to state it carefully, from what I’ve heard about the condition of the corpse—extremely dead.”
Silje glanced at the clock on the wall. Half past ten. She had stolen half an hour on the sofa on a couple of occasions, but apart from that, she had not slept for thirty-six hours.
“Is the identification confirmed?”
“Not formally, but there can be no doubt it’s him. Apparently a bit of a tough guy, the elderly man who found him. Stood a few miles away from the discovery site, where he had a cell phone signal, and went back with the recovery crew to show them exactly where he had found the body.”
He rummaged in his pants pocket for his snuff tin.
“It means that these videos,” he continued as he shaped a plug with the forefinger and thumb of both hands, “both the one yesterday and the one today, must have been shot before the bombing of the NCIN offices. That also means—”
He broke off when the Police Chief raised her hands.
“New management meeting in half an hour. We’ll discuss that then. I must have a tiny break, Håkon.”
Reclining into her chair, she closed her eyes.
The threat of a fresh bomb attack had considerably sharpened their state of readiness. Provisional authorization for the use of armed weapons had been granted. All leave was canceled. Vacations postponed. Even a handful of women and two men on parental leave had reported for duty. The colossal curved building at Grønlandsleiret 44 had hardly ever accommodated so many of its service personnel since it was built in the mid-seventies.
The police force was also visible on the streets. Every dog patrol was out and about. Sixteen of the eighteen police horses that resided at Akershus were saddled up and on duty; the other two had minor injuries and were permitted to stay behind. The Police Chief had also taken the extraordinary step of calling in recently retired police officers for renewed efforts on the streets. Visibility was the byword.
Visibility, vigilance, and the search for a jun
kie with a gray hood and baseball cap.
TV2’s surveillance cameras had not told the police much more than the receptionist could. A man in dirty clothes, with a shambling gait, had placed a package on the counter without a word and disappeared out into Karl Johans gate again.
Scruffy, the TV2 woman had said.
Pretty foul smelling. A beard, she thought. Or maybe not. Definitely a white man. Reddish, that beard? Maybe not. More blond, if indeed he had had a beard at all. She was far from certain.
Unfortunately the camera was badly focused. There had been major cleaning operations in the area a couple of days earlier, and the camera had been knocked out of position without anyone noticing. The man with the small package had been captured only by the lens when he came in the door. It was impossible to arrive at any more specific description than the one the receptionist was able to give.
The threat of another terrorist attack was serious enough. All the same, it had been so vague that it was impractical to take more than general precautions. Silje had been called into the government’s crisis council as soon as the news was reported, for the third time in thirty-six hours. There had been no shortage of suggestions for extraordinary initiatives to protect the populace. The Ministry of Justice had gone to the greatest lengths and put forward the idea of canceling all public events until further notice—from movie theaters and sports meetings to political hustings and church services. Silje had had her hands full convincing the gathering of deeply concerned cabinet secretaries that such measures would provide only an appearance of safety. As long as they had no more to go on than a hazy threat about Allah’s wrath once again striking the unbelievers, it would be better to leave it up to every individual citizen to decide how to react to the threat.
The citizens were obviously worried enough.
For the first time in its history, the Saga movie theater did not have a single visitor in the course of the day and closed its doors when no one showed any interest in the evening showings either.