Death in Oslo (45 page)

‘Of course. What is it?’

‘Without going into any details, I have to admit that we have . . . Well, we’ve got a fairly good idea about what’s going on at the American embassy. Let’s put it that way.’

Pause.

They’re tapping them, Adam thought to himself and grabbed the half-empty can of Coke. They’ve tapped an allied embassy on Norwegian soil. What the hell . . .

‘They think the President is alive, Adam.’

Adam’s pulse increased a hint. He coughed and tried to keep a straight face. Just to be on the safe side, he turned away from Warren.

‘And where is she?’

‘Well, that’s the whole point. They believe that the President has accessed websites that she needs a code to get into. Either it’s her, or someone else has managed to get her to give them the codes. And even if the latter is true, it would still mean that she’s alive.’

‘But . . . I don’t quite . . .’

‘They’ve traced her to your wife’s IP address. But luckily they don’t know that yet.’

‘Joh—’

He stopped. He didn’t want to say her name when Warren might hear.

‘They traced an IP address to a computer that belongs to the university. Now they’re arguing with the management up there to find out who uses the machine. We think we managed to delay them a bit, but not for that long. But I thought . . . I’ll get Bastesen to send a patrol car out to your house, just in case. If there’s any truth in these rumours that the FBI has taken the law into their own hands, you know. And if I was you, I’d go home.’

‘Yes . . . Of course. Thank you.’

He finished the conversation, without it crossing his mind that the patrol car should be sent somewhere else. Johanne wasn’t at home. She and Ragnhild were somewhere in Frogner. At an address he didn’t know.

He stood up in a rush.

‘I have to go,’ he said and started to walk.

He left the plastic bag and unopened can of Coke on the bench behind him. Warren stared at the rubbish in surprise before running after Adam.

‘What is it?’ he asked when he caught up with him.

‘I’ll drop you off in town, OK? There something I have to sort out.’

His heavy body quivered as he started to run towards the car. Just as he was getting in, Warren’s phone rang. His answers were brief: yes and no. After about a minute and a half, he hung up. When Adam took his eyes off the road for a second and looked at the American, he got a shock. Warren was ashen, his mouth was open and it looked like his eyes were about to disappear into his skull.

‘They think they’ve found the President,’ he said in a flat voice and put his mobile phone back in his breast pocket.

Adam changed gear and pulled out on to the main road.

‘Circumstances might indicate that she’s with Johanne,’ Warren continued in the same flat voice. ‘Are we on our way back to your house?’

Shit, Adam thought in desperation. How have they managed to do that already? Couldn’t you have delayed them any longer?

‘I’ll drop you off in town,’ he said. ‘You can make your own way from there.’

With one hand on the wheel, driving up Maridalsveien at full speed, he tried to call Salhus back. The phone just rang and rang until an answering machine came on.

‘Peter, it’s Adam,’ he barked. ‘Call me straight away. Immediately, d’you hear?’

The best thing would probably be to take the ring road to Smestad. Snaking down through town at this time of day would take for ever. He swung the car on to the roundabout over Ring 3 and accelerated westwards.

‘Listen,’ Warren said quietly. ‘I’ll let you in on a secret.’

‘About time you started to tell me something,’ Adam muttered, but he was barely listening.

‘I’m at loggerheads with my own people. And it’s about to blow.’

‘D’you know what, I’m sure you can talk to someone about that, just not me.’

He switched lanes to overtake a lorry and nearly collided with a small Fiat that got in the way. He swore angrily, swerved round the Fiat and accelerated again.

‘If you’re on your way to Johanne now,’ Warren tried, ‘then you should take me with you. It’s a very dangerous situation, to put it mildly, and I—’

‘You won’t be coming.’

‘Adam!
Adam!
’

Adam slammed on the brakes. Warren, who hadn’t put his seatbelt on, was thrown on to the dashboard. He just had time to put his arms out in front of him. Adam let the car roll on to the hard shoulder just by the toll booths below Rikshospitalet.

‘What?’ he roared at the American. ‘What the fuck do you want?’

‘You can’t go alone. I’m warning you. For your own sake.’

‘Get out. Get out of the car. Now.’

‘Now? Here? On the motorway?’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t mean it, Adam. Now listen—’

‘Get out!’

‘Listen to me!’

There was a hint of desperation in his voice. Adam tried to breathe regularly. He gripped the wheel with both hands. All he wanted to do was punch the American.

‘Like I just said in the park. I’m an idiot when it comes to women. I’ve done so many . . .’ He held his breath for a long time. When he started to talk again, it all came out in a rush. ‘But do you doubt my abilities as an FBI agent? Do you think incompetence would have got me where I am today? Do you really believe that it’s wise for you to go alone into a situation about which you know nothing, rather than taking an agent with thirty years’ experience with you to back you up? And what’s more, I’ve got a gun.’

Adam bit his lip. He exchanged a brief look with Warren, put the car into first gear and pulled out into the road again. He rang Johanne’s number. She didn’t answer. The answerphone didn’t kick in.

‘Fuck,’ he said through clenched teeth and rang 1881. ‘Fucking bastard hell.’

‘Excuse me,’ said a voice on the other end. ‘What did you say?’

‘An address in Oslo, please. Hanne Wilhelmsen. Krusesgate, what number?’

The woman replied curtly after a few seconds.

As they took the exit from the ring road to Smestad, he called another number. This time it was the central switchboard.

He had no intention of going into a dangerous situation alone.

But nor did he have any intention of taking with him a foreign national, whom he now knew he disliked.

Intensely.

H
elen Lardahl Bentley was more confused after she had read the secured pages than she had been before. There was so much that didn’t make sense. The BSC Unit had obviously been pushed to one side. That might, of course, be because they had realised what Warren was up to. The heads of the FBI might think that it was wise not to confront him with it, yet at the same time they wanted to marginalise his potential to manipulate the investigation. But she still couldn’t work out why the profile that Warren and his men had developed was being so discredited by the rest of the system. The document seemed to be incredibly thorough. It correlated with everything they had initially feared when the first vague suggestions about the Trojan Horse had reached the FBI only six weeks ago.

The profile frightened her more than anything else she found.

But there was something that wasn’t right.

On the one hand, it seemed that everyone agreed that an attack on the US was imminent. On the other hand, none of the powerful organisations under the Homeland Security umbrella had found anything that would indicate links to existing or known organisations. It was as if they were clutching at straws. Jeffrey Hunter’s money could be traced to the cousin of the Saudi Arabian oil minister and to a consultancy firm he owned in Iran, but that was that. She couldn’t see that anyone had got any further, and she turned hot and cold when it started to dawn on her just how hard the American
government, led by her own vice president, had hit out at the two Arab countries. Without decoding equipment, she couldn’t get in to the pages where the actual correspondence was saved, but she had started to comprehend the scale of the catastrophe towards which her country was headed.

She was sitting in an office at the far end of the flat.

When the doorbell rang, she only just heard it. It rang again. She listened. It rang a third time. Quietly she got up and picked up the gun that Hanne had found and loaded for her. She left the gun locked, put it inside her waistband, and pulled her sweater down over it.

Something was terribly wrong.

W
arren Scifford and Adam Stubo were standing outside the door to Hanne Wilhelmsen’s flat in Krusesgate, arguing at the tops of their voices.

‘We’ll wait,’ Adam said, furious. ‘A patrol car will be here any second!’

Warren pulled his arm out of the Norwegian’s firm grip.

‘It’s
my
president,’ he hissed back. ‘It is
my
responsibility to find out if
my country’s
top leader is behind that door.
My life depends on it, Adam!
She is the only one who believes me! No way am I waiting for a gang of trigger-happy uniformed—’

‘Hello,’ said a hoarse voice. ‘Who’s that?’

The door opened ten centimetres or so. At about face height there was a taut steel safety chain, and an old woman stared out at them with wild, wide-open eyes.

‘Don’t open it,’ Adam said immediately. ‘Please, woman, please close the door now!’

Warren kicked the door. The woman jumped back with a stream of oaths. The chain was still intact. Adam grabbed hold of Warren’s jacket, but it slipped out of his hand and he lost his balance. He made a desperate attempt to grab Warren’s trouser leg, but the older man was much fitter. When he pulled his leg loose, he also planted a powerful foot right in Adam’s groin, which made the Norwegian collapse and black out. The old woman inside stopped her carry-on when another kick to the door made the chain come loose. The door flew open and hit the woman, who was thrown backwards and landed on a shoe rack.

Warren stormed in with his gun in his hand. He stopped by the first door and pulled himself in to the wall before shouting: ‘Helen! Helen! Madam President, are you there?’

No one answered. With his gun raised, he moved on and went into the next room.

It was a large sitting room. There was a woman in a wheelchair sitting by the window. She didn’t move and her face was expressionless. However, he did notice that she was looking at a door at the back of the big room. There was another woman sitting on the sofa, with her back to him and a child on her lap. She pulled the child tightly to her and looked terrified.

The child wailed.

‘Warren.’

Madam President came in.

‘Thank God,’ Warren said and took two steps closer as he put his gun back in its holster. ‘Thank God you’re alive!’

‘Stay where you are.’

‘What?’

He stopped instantly when she pulled out a gun and pointed it at him.

‘Madam President,’ he whispered. ‘It’s me! Warren!’

‘You betrayed me. You betrayed America.’

‘Me? I haven’t—’

‘How did you find out about the abortion, Warren? How could you use that against me, you who—’

‘Helen . . .’

He tried to move closer, but quickly stepped back when she raised the gun again and said: ‘I was tricked to leave the hotel by a letter.’

‘I swear . . . I don’t know what you’re talking about!’

‘Hands above your head, Warren.’

‘I—’

‘Put your hands above your head!’

He reluctantly put his hands in the air.

‘
Verus amicus rara avis
,’ Helen Bentley said. ‘That’s how the letter was signed. No one else knows about the inscription. Only you and me, Warren. Just us.’

‘
I lost the watch! It was
. . .
stolen! I
. . .’

The child was screaming like it was possessed.

‘Joanna,’ the President said. ‘Take your daughter with you and go into Hannah’s office. Now.’

Johanne got up and ran across the room. She didn’t even look in the man’s direction.

‘If your watch was stolen, Warren, what is that you’re wearing on your left arm?’

She cocked the gun.

In slow motion, as if to avoid provoking a reaction, he turned his head to look. His sweater had slid down his arms when he raised his hands. He was wearing a watch around his wrist, an Omega Oyster with diamonds for numbers and an inscription on the back.

‘It’s . . . You see . . . I thought it was . . .’

He let his hands fall.

‘Don’t,’ the President warned him. ‘Lift them up again.’ He looked at her. His arms were hanging loosely by his sides. His palms were open and he started to lift them towards her in a peremptory, pleading gesture.

Madam President fired.

The bang made Hanne Wilhelmsen jump. The echo thundered in her ears and she felt her hearing vanish into a drawn-out whistling sound for a few seconds. Warren Scifford lay motionless on his back on the floor, with his face up. She rolled over to him and put her finger on his pulse. Then she sat up and shook her head.

Warren smiled and raised his eyebrow, as if he had thought of something amusing at the moment of death, an irony that no one else could share.

Adam Stubo stood in the doorway. He was holding his balls and his face was white. When he saw the dead body, he groaned and stumbled forward.

‘Who are you?’ the President asked calmly; she was still standing in the middle of the room with the gun in her hand.

‘He’s a good guy,’ Hanne said, quick as a flash. ‘Police. Johanne’s husband. Don’t . . .’

The President raised her gun and handed it to Adam by the butt.

‘Then it’s best that you look after this. And if it’s not too much bother, I’d like to phone my embassy now.’

The noise of sirens grew in the distance.

And got louder and louder.

A
l Muffet carried his dead brother down into the cellar and put the body in an old chest that had presumably been in the house since it was built. It wasn’t long enough. Al had to put Fayed in sideways, bending his knees and neck, like a foetus. Having to pull and struggle with the body repulsed him, but he finally managed to force the lid down again. His brother’s suitcase was at the back of the cupboard under the stairs. Neither Fayed nor his belongings would be staying there for very long. The most important thing was to remove all traces before the girls came home from school. His daughters did not need to see their dead uncle. Nor their father being arrested. He had to send them away. He could make the excuse of an unexpected conference or an important meeting out of town, and arrange for them to stay with their dead mother’s sister in Boston. They were too young to stay at home on their own.