And they were watching CNN.
She turned the TV off.
She felt so small. She went over to the kitchen window, which had finally been fixed. There was no longer a cold draught when she ran her hand along the windowsill. It was almost dark outside, but not quite. The spring brought with it the return of this beautiful light that made the evenings less threatening and the mornings easier.
She spun round. ‘Who was it?’
‘Work,’ he mumbled.
‘Work? At midnight on the seventeenth of May?’
He walked over to her. She was staring out of the window again. He put his arms round her slowly. She smiled and felt the goodness of his body warm her back. She relaxed. Closed her eyes.
‘I want to go to sleep,’ she whispered and ran a finger down his underarm. ‘Please take me to bed.’
‘Warren is in Oslo,’ he whispered, not letting her go, even though he felt her stiffen. ‘Warren Scifford.’
‘What?’
‘He’s here in connection with…’
Johanne was no longer listening. Her head felt light and detached, as if it was no longer her own. A flush of heat pulsed down her arms into her hands, which she lifted and pressed to the window pane. She saw the lights of an aeroplane in the sky to the north, and could not understand what it was doing there at this time of night, on a day like today. She found herself smiling without knowing why.
‘Don’t want to know,’ she said lightly. ‘You know that. Don’t want to hear about it.’
Adam refused to let her go. Her body felt smaller now; she was positively skinny. And stiff as a poker.
Warren Scifford, the Chief, had been Johanne’s teacher at the FBI Academy. And more than just a teacher, Adam had soon understood. Johanne was very young at the time, only twenty-three, whereas Warren must have been well into his forties. A love affair that happened an eternity ago. Adam had not felt even a hint of jealousy on the few occasions that he and Warren had bumped into each other. The last time must have been three or four years ago at an Interpol meeting in New Orleans, when they had even had dinner together. But for reasons that he could not explain, he had felt uncomfortable when Warren started to ask lots of questions about Johanne. He had avoided answering in any detail, and for the rest of the meal they had talked about their work and American football.
Warren Scifford played a leading role in Johanne’s great secret. Any talk of the man was forbidden, a fact that only told Adam the obvious: that he had at some point hurt her deeply.
But shit happens, he thought, and held on to Johanne. It’s horrible and can be very difficult at the time. But you get over it. It’s almost fifteen years ago now, my love. Forget it. Get over it, for God’s sake. Or is there something more?
‘Talk to me,’ he whispered in her ear. ‘Can’t you just tell me what this is all about?’
‘No.’ Her voice was no more than breath.
‘I’m going to have to work with him,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry.’
He still tried to hold on to her, but she pulled herself loose with surprising strength and pushed him away. The look in her eyes frightened him when she asked: ‘What did you say?’
‘He needs a liaison.’
‘And it has to be you. Of all the hundreds of… You said no, of course.’
In a way she suddenly seemed more present, as if she had woken up when he let go of her body.
‘I was given an order, Johanne. I work for an organisation that gives orders. Saying no is not an option.’ He made quote marks with his fingers.
Johanne turned away from him and went into the sitting room. She twisted the cork from the corkscrew and put it back into the half-empty wine bottle. Then she grabbed the glasses and took them out into the kitchen, where she put them down on the worktop. Then she checked that the dishwasher was full, put some soap in the dispenser, closed the metal door and started the machine. She snatched up a cloth, wrung it under running water and wiped the surfaces. Then she carefully shook the cloth over the sink, rinsed it again and folded it before hanging it over the edge.
Adam followed her every movement without saying a word.
Finally, Johanne looked at him.
‘I just want to make one thing absolutely clear before we go to bed,’ she said. Her voice was calm and enunciated, just as it was when she was giving Kristiane a telling-off. ‘If you say yes to being Warren Scifford’s liaison, this marriage is over.’
He didn’t know what to say, so he said nothing.
‘I’ll leave you, Adam. If you say yes, I’ll leave you.’
Then she went and got ready for bed.
Finally, the Norwegian national day had come to an end.
WEDNESDAY 18 MAY 2005
I
When Warren Scifford woke up, he didn’t know whether it was the jet lag, the fact that he hadn’t had enough sleep or a latent flu that was making him feel so awful. He lay in bed for a while, staring at the ceiling. The airy sky-blue curtains let the sunlight in. His bed was bathed in morning light. When he finally lifted his head to look at the digital clock on the TV, he furrowed his brow in disbelief.
Half past four in the morning.
Now he understood the point of those hideous rubber blackout curtains he had ignored when he flopped into bed at around one. He struggled out of bed and padded over to the window to close the curtains. Darkness fell in the room. Only a sliver of light that prised its way through the opening between the curtains made it possible to see anything at all.
He turned on the bedside lamp and lay down again without pulling the duvet over him. His naked skin contracted in the breeze from the air-conditioning. His neck was stiff and he could feel a headache lurking behind his eyes. He was exhausted and yet alert at the same time, and he knew that he wouldn’t go back to sleep. After a few minutes, he got up again and put on a peacock-blue silk dressing gown. There was an electric kettle on the shelf by the TV. Three minutes later he was stirring a cup of bitter, strong instant coffee, which he drank as soon as he could. It helped, but he still felt so drained that in other circumstances he might have been worried.
He quickly worked out that it would be half past ten in the evening in Washington DC. This raised his spirits a notch. He could still count on a couple of problem-free hours, should it be necessary to contact anyone. He quickly set up his portable office on the desk that he had got the hotel to install. When he had arrived in the afternoon, there had been a great rococo table with a huge vase of flowers in the room, which would hardly have done the job. The desk he had now was simple and unpretentious, but massive. He took out an unusually large laptop from the metal case standing by the bed, then four mobile phones and a pile of pastel-coloured paper. He placed them all neatly in a row with meticulous precision. On top of the paper he laid three pens, equally spaced. A black pen, a red pen and a blue pen. The four mobile phones were of different appearance and made by different manufacturers, and he placed them, as if on display, to the left of the laptop. Finally he took a small printer, in three detachable parts, out of the suitcase, attached it to the computer and plugged it into the socket under the window. The laptop immediately turned itself on. The hotel boasted about its complimentary wireless connection, but he instead tapped in an American number. Seconds later he had accessed one of his mailboxes, which only four people knew about. The encryption code scrambled briefly, as it always did, showing him a chaos of characters before settling down into a well-known image.
Warren Scifford yawned and then blinked away the tears that had been squeezed out. He had received a reply to the query he had sent before he went to bed. He opened the email with a single click.