by Anne Holt
“What if this group isn’t online at all?”
Harald Jensen looked at her skeptically.
“What do you mean by ‘not online’?”
Silje dabbed her nose with the tissue and leaned forward in her seat.
“Your predecessor paid the price for you not having discovered Anders Breivik before the July 22 terrorist attack. Without comment on whether the criticism was justified . . .”
She tore a blank sheet of paper from a pad on the desk and snatched a pen from her handbag. Leaning forward, she placed the paper between them and drew a vertical line.
“You had two potential sources of information,” she said curtly, pointing at one column. “Primarily the open one. The guy’s activity on various web pages, as well as his participation in debates. In old and new media outlets. The problem you face, as far as that kind of information is concerned, is well known. Freedom of speech.”
She wrote OPEN and SEMI-OPEN INFO on the left-hand side of the paper.
“Freedom of speech,” she repeated with emphasis. “You’re allowed to believe virtually whatever you want in our Western society. Besides, as you yourself made a song and dance about the other day, these people usually bark far more than they bite. Nearly always, in fact. And there are so many of them. Depressingly many. There are limits to how close an eye you can keep on people who express themselves in such extreme terms on the Internet.”
Harald Jensen gave a slight nod.
“And then you have this other thing,” Silje said, pointing at the blank column. “What you spoke about when we were at Michaelsen’s. All the search words that your computers have been programmed to react to. The monitoring of goods being imported and exported. Travel routes. Airline tickets, visa applications. Web pages that are looked up.”
She struggled to catch his eye, but his gaze was firmly fixed on the sheet of paper.
“Cross-checking,” she went on. “Monitoring of who’s talking to whom. ‘Suspicion by association,’ I think one of your American colleagues once called it. If you have contact with Krekar, you have to reckon on being looked at very closely. Isn’t that right?”
She wrote ALARM SIGNALS on the blank half of the paper.
“You probably call it something else, but bear with me. You have your own systems, you cooperate with others, and you are also part of the international antiterrorism work in Global Shield.”
Harald slowly scratched the stubble on his chin. Still he did not take his eyes off the sheet of paper.
“As far as Breivik is concerned, your predecessor claimed he had only made one single alarming purchase. On the Internet, from Poland, and to a value of only 100 kroner. Too little, in other words.”
“Yes—”
“Now, in fact, that later turned out to have been wrong. The guy bought 330 pounds of aluminum powder from another seller in Poland immediately afterward: 330 pounds, Harald, of a chemical that is one of only fourteen that Global Shield pays attention to keeping an eye on! An important ingredient of the bomb that Breivik smartly divided into several packages and collected in person from a shipping firm’s office somewhere in Sweden.”
“Where are you heading with this?”
For the first time he seemed irritated rather than frustrated.
“Three factors, Harald, that could have stopped him.”
She held three fingers up in the air.
“All that terrible stuff he said on the Internet. Unfortunately, that did not cause any alarms to go off.”
She folded her index finger into her palm.
“That he bought a small consignment of chemicals from Poland that the Customs Service actually warned you about. At the time you considered it too insignificant to warrant a response.”
A second finger was folded.
“And a fairly large purchase of an essential ingredient in homemade fertilizer bombs that you didn’t get wind of. For lots of reasons. Partly because it was divided up into several packages and partly because he collected it himself from Sweden. Since both Sweden and Poland are EU countries, there are no customs declarations between them. You received no warnings because he crossed the final border himself, without being stopped by random checks.”
“I still don’t understand where you’re going with this.”
“What if someone has actually learned from him?”
“Learned? He’s behind bars for the rest of his life! Hated by the entire world!”
“Sadly, not by the entire world,” she said. “But that’s not my point. The point is that in retrospect, three factors emerge as possible opportunities to stop him. What if these . . .”
She snatched up the paper she had been writing on.
“What if these . . . True Ummahs, or whatever the culprits are called, have learned that they need to stay off the Internet completely? Not buy anything there. Not send emails or take part in debates. Not have any opinions, out loud and bragging. Not travel by plane. Not—”
“But . . .”
He raised both hands to stop her.
“How would they communicate then? Make plans? Or for that matter, how in heaven’s name would they find one another?”
Silje indicated the computer screen, where the picture of Jørgen Fjellstad was still frozen.
“First things first: by mail, for example. There’s no Western society that can conduct mail checks on a vast scale. It isn’t legal, either, and what’s more, it demands an immense amount of work. The memory stick arrived in the mail. None of the other videos were delivered electronically either. None of it can be traced. Don’t you discern a pattern here, Harald? Of a group of individuals who quite simply have . . .”
Hesitating momentarily, she licked her lips and cleared her throat.
“Who, quite simply, have chosen to work offline?”
Losing her Internet connection could enrage her. The Internet was Hanne Wilhelmsen’s periscope: that was how she saw the world without the world seeing her. Now the whole shebang had been down for half an hour. She had spent the first fifteen minutes rebooting her own systems. When it had eventually become clear that it was her provider’s fault that she suddenly felt so helpless and overwhelmingly alone, she grew so angry that she banged the lid of her laptop shut. The screen cracked.
Fortunately she had two more computers.
It was impossible to sleep.
It was now 11:30 p.m., and Nefis and Ida were asleep. It had been lovely to be just the three of them that weekend. On Saturday they had gone to a restaurant, a sushi place in Majorstua about which Ida had heard good reports. It was Hanne’s first visit to a restaurant in four months. Even though she had not exactly felt relaxed, the food had been excellent, and it had all been accomplished in less than two hours. On Palm Sunday, Ida had insisted on painting Easter eggs, though Hanne had pointed out that this was actually a tradition associated with Easter Sunday.
They had competed to produce the best egg and, as usual, Nefis had won. Unanimously: she had never appreciated the idea of letting children win anything by virtue of their tender years.
It had been a pleasant weekend as a threesome.
Hanne was not sure what was making her feel uneasy. Naturally, the two terrorist attacks had affected her as they had everyone else, but Hanne had many years of experience of distancing herself from other people’s sorrow and pain. In the police force, it had sometimes been necessary in order to execute her duties. Since then, it had been a precondition in order to survive.
Meeting Billy T. again had also been unsettling, but far less so than she might have feared. She had not heard from him since he had driven her home following the confrontation with Linus on Friday. Now it occurred to her, with a touch of surprise, that he had hardly been in her thoughts all weekend—not since she had told Nefis about the visit and regarded the matter as over.
When she turned it over in her mind, she realized that Billy T. had become insignificant to her. Once upon a time, he had been so important that in the end, it grew dange
rous. Never again would any person outside the family come so close to her. But that was over with now, she acknowledged. The years had made her stronger, and the minor breach of her defenses that she had felt the first time he phoned was now shored up for good.
It felt fine.
Besides, this made it possible for her to give him more help if that should prove necessary. It probably wouldn’t. If Billy T. still thought she had anything to contribute with reference to Linus’s extraordinary behavior, he would not have left her in peace all weekend.
It could not be Billy T. who was keeping her awake.
It must be the work.
The case.
Earlier that evening, she had taken a look at the other folders Henrik Holme had brought with him. They did not inspire her. It was Karina Knoph’s disappearing act that had seized hold of her, attracting her and at some moments causing her to be so lost in thought that Ida burst out laughing.
During daylight hours, Hanne normally sat at the massive dining table in the living room with all her gadgets and usually with the gigantic TV screen switched on. She liked to absorb lots of impressions at once and was happy to read a book, listen to music, and watch a movie simultaneously.
Only when it was necessary not to disturb the others did she withdraw to her home office. It was accessed from the hallway, some distance away from the bedrooms.
She did not like being there.
For some reason, Nefis had chosen to decorate the room in what she probably thought was a style reminiscent of the police service. The walls were silver-gray. Along one entire wall was a storage unit in a darker shade of gray, with drawers and cabinets in enameled metal. Some of the cupboards even had tiny keys, as if it might ever be necessary for Hanne to hide anything from Ida and Nefis. The curtains were bluish-gray with delicate stripes, in a quality of wool that not a single police district in Norway would be able to afford but that sent out signals about something severe and stately.
Even the desk seemed as cold as ice: an enormous sheet of pale birch, with four legs of brushed steel.
Worst of all was the painting on the opposite side of the bookcase. The artist was an American of whom Hanne had never heard. When Nefis had arranged something that most resembled an unveiling two years ago, Hanne had managed to smile, maybe even seem enthusiastic. Later, when she had done a search on the Internet and realized that those two police cars in Las Vegas by night must have cost $1.5 million, she had felt so agitated that she nearly made a comment.
But only nearly.
She did not like this room, but Nefis had given it to her. And now she sat here, disconnected from the world and unable to sleep.
Fortunately she had printed out copies as she went along. Rolling across to the printer, she picked up a bundle. She placed them on the almost bare desk and began to sort through them.
Until her Internet connection had ceased, she had been studying Gunnar and Kirsten Ranvik.
At least she had tried: the little family in Korsvoll was virtually absent from the Internet.
From what Henrik Holme had told her about the man’s functional level, it was possibly not so strange that Gunnar did not feature on social media. Eighteen years ago, when he had been attacked and left helpless beside Maridal Lake, there would most likely have been newspaper coverage of the case. However, 1996 was so early in the infancy of the Internet that she had not found anything about the incident. All she had come across about Gunnar were some lists of results from racing-pigeon competitions in recent years. He was relatively successful, she noted with mild surprise, and placed four sheets of paper in a separate bundle.
She had conducted a search on Kirsten Ranvik’s address.
Only one telephone was registered. A landline.
Hanne could have managed exceedingly well without a cell phone if it hadn’t been for Ida. Hanne was in charge of a great deal of the logistics involving her daughter, and she depended on being able to receive and send quick messages to the mothers and occasional father of Ida’s friends. All the same, that was the only thing she needed it for. For that reason, it was remarkable that a woman—in full-time work and with responsibility for a son seemingly dependent on care—did not possess a cell phone.
Hanne put the page with information she had gleaned about tax status, address, and phone in one corner of the desk. At the top of the sheet of paper she wrote: “Ask HH to check for possible siblings.”
Kirsten Ranvik was not on any social media either, at least not in her own name. Hanne found a picture of her on the Deichman Library Facebook pages. It was taken at an event in the Nordtvet library in Groruddalen, where she obviously worked. Hanne scrutinized the photo that she had screen-dumped and printed out.
Kirsten Ranvik was a petite woman who looked tense in the photograph, almost anxious, with her hands folded and hugged to her chest. She was standing on the far left of a group of five people, and while the others were smiling at the camera, Kirsten Ranvik looked serious and peered askance at the floor. Most of all, she looked as if she wanted to be out of the picture.
A photograph from a crime evening at Nordtvet in 2013 was the only trace of Gunnar Ranvik’s mother on social media.
That was also odd.
Throughout Hanne’s many years of eleven fictional accounts on Facebook, two on Twitter, and one on both Instagram and Snapchat, it had been her experience that it was swarming with librarians there. Being fond of books appeared to be a badge of honor in cyberspace, at least among those who claimed to be so.
Kirsten Ranvik must also be fond of books, Hanne assumed, but she did not boast about it online.
She was not there.
But she had been a member of the Progress Party.
That emerged from a PDF file Hanne had found. The article had been published in Fremskritt, the Progress Party’s membership magazine, in 2003: a happy little summer piece, from which it emerged that Kirsten Ranvik liked birds and wildflowers. Home baking and walks in the great outdoors. Books, of course, especially the old classics. She had once reached as far as the final question in Double or Quits, the TV quiz program. Her specialist subject had been Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil, a topic so narrow that Hanne found it odd that it had been accepted as a single category. Kirsten Ranvik almost reached her goal. Vexing, of course, to be wrong on the very last question, which was about the girl Barbro’s surname. All the same, however, an achievement to come so far, Kirsten Ranvik said, smiling in front of a rose bush in her own garden.
The article was written to introduce one of the people the journalist called “the faithful toilers”—in other words, the candidates who filled the bottom rungs of the election lists, Hanne quickly discovered. Prior to the local government elections that year, the party had asked Kirsten to be a candidate. In twelfth place, an eternity away from any possibility of being elected, which of course she was not.
Since 2003 the Internet had been silent on the subject of Kirsten Ranvik, apart from the solitary photograph from the crime fiction evening.
Remarkable, Hanne thought, continuing to browse.
The Progress Party was now part of the government and had numerous adherents. Nevertheless, it was curious that a librarian would choose a party that had never been foremost in the campaign for the preservation of the philosophy behind the People’s Library. Hanne also thought she had read an article claiming that cultural people voted mainly for the Labor Party and parties further to the left.
Of course there must be exceptions.
Kirsten Ranvik was obviously one of them.
The library in Nordtvet did not have its own home page, only a boring adjunct to the main Deichman pages. There was no overview of the staff there. When Hanne had asked Henrik to call on Gunnar last week, they had established through a simple search of tax records that Gunnar’s mother was still working. As early as the police documents from 1996, it was evident that she was a librarian. After more than an hour online, Hanne did not know very much more about her than that she worked at
Nordtvet library.
She gathered up the documents again and put them in one of the cabinets in the ugly wall unit. She really ought to attempt to catch some sleep.
She wheeled herself back to her iMac to switch it off. Mainly out of habit, she tried to look at vg.no, the online news outlet—checking two or three newspapers was normally the last thing she did before going to bed.
The Internet was up and running again.
Thank goodness. She felt an almost physical relief at once again being able to peer out at a world that could not peer back at her.
And she was wider awake than ever.
Usually there was little reading material at this time of night. Staff numbers were low on the night shift, and there was little domestic news. Now, however, VG had splashed a political story as the top item, despite the time being almost one o’clock. She clicked rapidly into the page.
“Cancel May 17!” the headline screamed at her:
Member of Parliament Fredrik Grønning-Hansen writes this evening in a Facebook post that the two-hundredth-anniversary celebrations of the Norwegian Constitution should be cancelled. “It will be far too great a risk to let hundreds of thousands of people, a large number of whom are children, gather in the city center in the wake of the two unsolved terrorist attacks on our city,” is one of his observations. He further claims that “Muslims, invited here by naive bleeding hearts over a number of years, have, through these attacks, robbed us of the opportunity to celebrate this, our greatest demonstration of peace, freedom, and liberal ideals.”