Odd Numbers

by Anne Holt

  “He laughed,” he repeated, growing serious all of a sudden. “And wondered whether these gentlemen generals had never heard of the Sikh Light Infantry in the British Army. Their turbans didn’t hinder them significantly. That put a rocket under those generals, you know. But, of course, that might only be . . .”

  He took off his jacket again and loosened his tie.

  “. . . an urban myth. What was it about Abhai Kaur?”

  “I’m going now,” Peder Ranvik said, rising from his chair.

  “I don’t think so,” Håkon said cheerfully.

  Peder Ranvik made to move off.

  “Sit down,” Håkon said.

  “I can leave whenever I want. Which is right now.”

  “I have difficulty understanding your unwillingness to cooperate. Around eighty-five pounds of your C4 is still unaccounted for. You would think you’d be eager to help—”

  “It was never my C4. But I agree with you. It’s deeply concerning that it has fallen into the wrong hands. As you said yourself, I did my best to find out about it at the time it was my business. It no longer is.”

  The Captain drew his chair neatly up to the table and headed for the door, where he turned.

  “A number of significant dates lie ahead of us,” he said impassively. “Labor Day on May 1, Liberation Day on May 8. Not to mention—”

  “May 17,” Håkon completed his sentence when the Captain paused briefly for effect. “The anniversary of our very Constitution. We are well aware of it.”

  “You have a major problem,” the Captain added. “However, it’s no longer my problem.”

  He opened the door and almost crashed into a police officer on his way in. The policeman let Peder Ranvik pass and slam the door behind him. He seemed out of breath when he leaned over the table to the Deputy Chief of Police and said: “Another bomb. Not yet exploded. In Sandefjord, below a retail center in the middle of town. There’s no end to this, Sand. No new video yet, as far as the Security Service, Sandefjord Police, or we ourselves are aware. But another bomb placed in a location crowded with people?” He inhaled sharply and exclaimed: “It can’t just be coincidence.”

  “I’m one of those people who believes in coincidence,” Hanne said. “Coincidence, pure and simple, rules most things. But it is strange, I must admit.”

  She had just given Henrik a short version of Billy T.’s story—not especially detailed and pretty toned down in the bargain. Just a worried father’s account—an old friend of hers, afraid that his son had ended up in bad company. She had not mentioned either the preceding concern about conversion or Linus’s extremely conspicuous proclivities over the past six months. She had also suppressed the information that a watch inherited by the boy had been inside the NCIN offices when it was blown up almost two weeks ago.

  “Here,” she said, pushing a plate laden with buns across the table. “Ida was baking yesterday afternoon. A bit dry, but put jam on them.”

  Helping himself to a bun, Henrik sliced it open and added a lavish portion of the mashed strawberries.

  “I agree,” he said, nodding, and took a bite. “For the very same librarian to turn up in both his investigation and ours is against the odds. Is he a policeman, this friend of yours?”

  “Why do you ask?”

  Henrik, who was chewing, swallowed and took another bite.

  “Well . . . you don’t seem so very . . . mobile, really. Not very sociable. Just like me.”

  He flashed a smile.

  “So I thought he might have been a colleague. From your former life, sort of thing. When you weren’t confined to a wheelchair. Is that it?”

  “You’re not so stupid, Henrik.”

  “But if we play with that thought—”

  “Henrik—”

  “I know,” he said, his mouth full of food. “We shouldn’t play with thoughts. Or form hypotheses until we have far more to base them on. But if we do now permit ourselves a little thought experiment . . .”

  She peered at him over her glasses again, but at least said nothing.

  “If it’s not a coincidence that she is mixed up both in a case linked to right-wing radicalism—”

  “Alleged right-wing radicalism,” Hanne corrected. “In all probability even imagined right-wing radicalism. I don’t have any basis for believing that my friend’s guesses have any foundation.”

  “Okay, but if he’s right. Then it would be fun to take a look at what possible similarities our cases might have. Ours and the one to do with . . . what’s his name, this friend of yours?”

  “That’s of no consequence.”

  “Okay. Sorry.”

  “None.”

  “What?”

  Henrik put down the last morsel of his bun and sneaked his hands under his thighs.

  “There are no similarities,” Hanne said.

  “Yes, there are.”

  “What, then?”

  Henrik ran the risk of taking the last bite, before tucking his hands away again.

  “Do you remember I said that Gunnar was racist?”

  “He’s mentally retarded, Henrik. And if disliking Pakistanis qualifies for the description ‘racist,’ then we’re a nation of racists.”

  “Yes, we are.”

  He felt an impulse to repudiate her use of the description “mentally retarded,” but did not quite dare. Even though he felt far more secure about Hanne now than twelve days earlier, Henrik still struggled with the fear that she would grow tired of him. Ask him to leave, as she always did, sooner or later.

  He would prefer it to be later, and so let the matter drop.

  Bending over, Hanne brought up a slim paper folder in a red plastic cover. By now Henrik had finally ascertained that there was indeed a shelf below the seat, a low basket with space for both a laptop and lots of other things.

  “I think perhaps you should take a closer look at this Kirsten Ranvik,” Hanne said. “Sadly, you can forget about the Internet. I’ve already turned over every stone in there, and this is all I could find.”

  She slid the folder across to him.

  “That visit of yours to Ullersmo Prison didn’t give us very much more to go on either,” she added. “This will probably also be a waste of time, but spend a day or two on this woman. She’s starting to become interesting. The fact of her son being made an invalid by two Norwegian Pakistanis who got away with it would be more than enough to make many ordinary, everyday racists far more determined. See if there’s anything else in her life to build on.”

  “But if there’s nothing more to be found on the Internet, how should I—”

  “Henrik. You’re a police officer. We got to the bottom of cases in the past as well. Before the Internet. It was quite enjoyable. Give it a try.”

  A silent alert lit up her telephone display. Using her thumb, she quickly keyed into vg.no.

  “Oh, shit!” she said softly after a few seconds.

  “What is it?”

  “Another bomb. In Sandefjord town center this time. A state of emergency has been declared for the whole of Vestfold region.”

  At last the high-pitched noise from the alarm system had stopped. It had been so piercing that many people had set off running to flee from the actual noise, without any further thought about what the reason for the racket might be.

  In that way, the sirens had fulfilled their function.

  Hvaltorvet was deserted.

  The shopping mall from the late eighties was located in the middle of the town center. An unlovely building stretched out in several directions above a basement parking garage with drive-in access from the south. When police arrived on the scene, they had their hands full holding back people who were desperate to take their cars. Two men in their forties had to be physically restrained from thinking more of their vehicles than their own personal safety. They were now in custody, each in his own police van, outside the vast security zone the police had cordoned off with tape and barriers.

  Luckily the Sandefjord police h
ad planned a major exercise at Torp, the international airport only twenty miles to the northeast of the town. The exercise was scheduled to start at noon, only fifteen minutes after the alarm sounded at Hvaltorvet.

  A toddler’s dad had discovered the bomb just after 11:30. Partly in anger, partly in fear, he had followed his uncontrollable, defiant three-year-old who lacked any appreciable understanding of how dangerous it was to run about on his own in a dimly lit underground parking garage. He was caught just beside the basement entrance to the mall, behind three cars parked so close together that the owners would have difficulty opening the car doors. The dad breathed a sigh of relief until he saw what the little boy had sat down on: a black metal case with cables running from it and a digital counter attached, causing him to set a personal best for the two-hundred-meter sprint with the child in his arms.

  As a result of the terrorist exercise at Torp, a fully equipped bomb disposal team from Oslo Police was on the spot in fifteen minutes.

  Two men had now spent twenty minutes examining the bomb.

  “Goddamn it to hell!” one of them said, pulling off his helmet.

  The other said nothing but straightened his back and tried to remove his helmet too.

  The first one replaced the lid on the metal case and lifted it.

  “Are you going to help me, or what? It’s fucking heavy.”

  “In a minute,” his colleague answered, tearing off his gloves and producing a plastic bag from one of his countless pockets. “It’s to be hoped this letter’s of more interest than the rest of the package.”

  He dropped the letter into the plastic bag and sealed it.

  “I wonder how many false alarms like this we’re going to see in the near future. Three old car batteries, that’s all, and an alarm clock.”

  “Well, at least we got a pretty realistic exercise out of it,” his workmate said with a sigh. “That’s something to be going on with. Come on, then. Let’s get this highly undangerous lump of garbage up into the light of day.”

  It was still light outside.

  Spring continued to be behind schedule, but at least the days were growing increasingly long. It was nine o’clock in the evening, and Ida had started to have difficulty falling asleep if the blinds in her room were not pulled right down and secured against drafts.

  “Kari Thue damn well looks better with every day that passes,” Hanne murmured, grabbing an apple from the fruit bowl on the coffee table. “Roses in her cheeks and sparkling eyes. But she’s the only one.”

  “The National Police Commissioner, though, looks like something the cat dragged in,” Nefis remarked, settling comfortably at the opposite end of the sofa. “Would you like a blanket?”

  “No, thanks. It’s not the least odd that she’s exhausted.”

  She pointed at the TV screen. Admittedly Caroline Bae had been tall and well built since she stepped into the public eye in autumn 2011, but now her face seemed positively bloated. Even the national broadcaster’s makeup team could not do much with the distinct bags under her eyes and two sharp furrows running from her nose to each corner of her mouth.

  “Managing the police force under conditions such as these must be pure hell. Just think of all the people they employ!”

  Hanne laughed quietly, with almost a hint of malice.

  “And until today, with some degree of sympathy from the force, they could order police officers from small towns and districts into Oslo. Even though the bomb in Sandefjord was a fake, it has probably led to not a single police chief in the entire country being willing to give up so much as a paper clip in the foreseeable future. Coordinating police resources in peaceful times is difficult enough, Nefis. Coordinating a police force that is scared to death must be well-nigh impossible.”

  “Are they scared to death?”

  “What would you be? Shh!”

  “I didn’t say a word.”

  “It must be possible to demand an answer,” Kari Thue said angrily, her eyes fixed on Caroline Bae. “A number of newspapers have reported that a letter was found inside the fake bomb in Sandefjord. Does this letter give us grounds for concern?” Before the Police Commissioner had managed to answer, she went on: “Was the drama in Sandefjord also intended to terrify us? Was the whole thing part of the Islamists’ game to make us increasingly fearful? Are we facing—”

  The female presenter raised her hand.

  “That’s a lot of questions all at once. Commissioner Bae, can you answer the first of them? Did the letter in Sandefjord contain some kind of threat?”

  Caroline Bae thrust out her chin and blinked.

  “I’d like to ask for your understanding of the reasons we can’t go into details about this. I also cannot confirm that a letter was found. The only thing I can say is that the bomb turned out to be . . .” She held her breath for a moment, her eyes flickering, before she regained control and corrected herself: “It was not a bomb at all.”

  “Will you deny that a letter was found?” Kari Thue shot in. “When VG, Dagbladet, and Aftenposten all claim to have reliable sources to back up the existence of one?”

  “As I said, for operational reasons, we would not wish to—”

  Kari Thue rolled her eyes and held out her hands. Her voice was so loud that the sound crackled in the loudspeakers.

  “So we have a situation where Norway is under siege. As Norwegians, we are prisoners of our own fear—a fear created by Islam, the present day’s most evil . . .”

  “She’s absolutely unbelievable,” Nefis whispered.

  “She’s sly,” Hanne said curtly. “Or maybe even evil.”

  “Genuinely evil people are extremely rare, Hanna.”

  “. . . and where we, the Norwegian people, are unable to find out whether, following today’s burlesque performance in Sandefjord, we are yet again threatened by a group whose belief and ideology . . .”

  The Mayor of Oslo was standing by her side. Calmly, he placed his hand on her arm. She froze and fell silent.

  “My dear Kari,” he said, smiling indulgently, “I think now’s the time to simmer down. We are not under siege. We are the independent kingdom of Norway. We have been through . . .”

  Kari Thue pulled her arm away, but at least she did not interrupt him.

  “. . . great adversity. More may come. The most important thing we can do now is to remain calm. Take care of one another. Don’t forget our own fundamental values. Not thoughts about . . .”

  Hanne snatched up the remote control and pressed the mute button.

  “Anyway, Ida won’t be going in the parade,” she said, taking the last bite of her apple.

  “Of course, she’ll be going in the children’s parade. She’s looking forward to it.”

  “It’s out of the question,” Hanne said. “Neither one of you will step outside here on May 17. She can invite anyone she likes. But they’ll all stay inside. Here. With me.”

  “Strictly speaking, that’s not up to you to decide, sweetheart.”

  Nefis stood up and leaned over her.

  “Go away,” Hanne said, smiling. “I’ve made up my mind.”

  “I know you have,” Nefis said unflappably and kissed her lightly on the face. “But when you’ve made up your mind about something, it doesn’t necessarily mean that’s the way it’s going to be. I’d like a glass of wine. What about you?”

  “Yes, please. White.”

  Nefis headed out to the kitchen.

  Hanne stared at the silent image on the screen. A woman in her fifties with an old-fashioned hairstyle was speaking. Hanne had no idea who she was, until the subtitle informed her that her name was Sabrina Knutsen, Sandefjord’s mayor.

  Interested to hear this, she picked up the remote.

  “. . . the board will decide at the beginning of next week. If the recommendation is not made for the town’s celebrations on May 17 to be cancelled, then in the end this will be a matter for the local council.”

  They cut to the Mayor of Oslo.

  “M
ay 17 cannot be cancelled,” he said gravely. “May 17 is coming, whether we want it or not. Regardless of any decision made by a local council, our forthcoming National Day is also the bicentenary of our Constitution and ought to be commemorated as such. It would be a horrendous irony if terrorists were to make us . . .”

  “I think Ida is a bit angry with us,” Nefis said, handing Hanne a glass. “Canceling the celebrations would probably not improve matters.”

  “Angry? Why’s that?”

  “Well, for example, she’s wondering why she doesn’t have my original surname. Why I don’t still have it.”

  “But that’s easy to explain! I’ve told her loads of times. We wanted to be called the same thing, all three of us. My surname is easier to spell.”

  “And more Norwegian,” Nefis said in an undertone, drawing her legs up on the sofa and taking a sip of the wine. “That’s what she thinks, anyway. That we want to . . . hide the fact that she is half Muslim.”

  “What nonsense. Half Muslim? It’s surely not possible to be half a religion? She is what she is. When she’s eighteen, she can choose for herself what she wants to be called.”

  “She’s not even eleven yet, Hanna. Her eighteenth birthday is a lifetime away as far as she’s concerned. Maybe we could—”

  She broke off and took another swig.

  “She is partly right,” Nefis added quietly.

  “No, she’s not.”

  “Yes, she is. I want her to be Norwegian. As Norwegian as possible.”

  “You take her with you to Turkey twice a year. According to what you say, she speaks reasonably good Turkish.”

  “Not as good now as before. I speak to her less and less in my own mother tongue.”

  “That’s stupid,” Hanne said forthrightly, linking her fingers with Nefis’s. “You should keep the language going. But as far as all this fuss about Muslims and Norwegians and . . .”

  Putting down her glass and letting go of Nefis’s hand, she grimaced as she struggled into a more comfortable sitting position.

  “I’m sick of it,” she groaned. “If there’s something this world needs, it’s less nationalism. Less religion. Ida Wilhelmsen is Ida Wilhelmsen. Her passport is red. She can decide the rest for herself when the time comes. By the way . . . can we invite a guest on Saturday?”