Søren sighed softly. The flag-burning and the riots might have subsided, but the Mohammed cartoons and Denmark’s participation in Iraq and Afghanistan were still making the country a target. In the old days, e-mails like this would have slumbered gently in archives unless there were further alerts in the matter. Now they had to follow up on every single Islamist whisper that had Denmark’s name in it. Especially now that the Summit was so close. His thoughts went to the morning’s partially botched training exercise, and he suppressed a wave of irritation. The damned Summit was moving Copenhagen even further up the list of attractive targets, whether you were an Islamist terrorist, a swastika-waving neo-Nazi, or just an attention-seeking grassroots organization with a spare bucket of red paint.
It made him tired. The hatred that flowed in wide, black rivers across the Internet, venting itself at Danes, Muslims, Gypsies, gays, Jews, liberals, conservatives, women—at every conceivable and inconceivable minority, in Denmark and the rest of the world … it was more than just stupidity. It was evil. He wasn’t a religious person, and he usually resisted such simplistic terms, but when he read what people wrote online on a regular basis about “stupid bitches” and “sheep fuckers” and “horny homos” who, according to vox populi, all deserved to be hanged or burned or mutilated, that was the only word he could think of: evil.
“Gitte!”
She had tiptoed into his office, set the coffee down, and was already on her way out again.
“Could you forward this to the techies right away?”
Gitte took the printout of the email and quickly scanned through it.
“These three,” Gitte said, pointing at the first three addresses with a long, slender finger. “I think I can guess who they are without any help from the IT department.” She smelled of apples and lemons now, Søren thought fleetingly, with a faint pang of emptiness somewhere in his abdomen.
“Yes,” he said quickly. “It looks like our very own bunch of flag-waving White Pride idiots are at it again. These others, on the other hand, could be just about anyone. This one is probably the most significant.” He circled the Danish IP address that had been in touch with what he quietly thought of as “the Islamist whisper.” “But we ought to get them all checked out. Ask them to send us a list as soon as possible.”
Gitte nodded briskly and left, and Søren turned back to the flickering pale-green screen on his desk. Despite Denmark’s restrictive gun laws, it really wasn’t all that difficult to get hold of an ordinary hand weapon if you knew where to go. Gun-shopping in Hungary seemed a bit extreme, what with all the delivery problems and border crossings it entailed, so maybe the buyer was looking for something a little more exotic. Søren scrolled down through the bare-bones layout one last time. “Buy now, good stuff, new needles, from Russia with love.”
In my next life, he thought, I want to do something else. Something that actually permits the existence of love.
Nina jumped back a few steps, swearing, but it was too late.
The aerator from the kitchen faucet had come off. It shot down into the dirty pan soaking in the sink, and a cascade of greasy dishwater sprayed indiscriminately across the wall, the counter, the floor, and Nina’s T-shirt and jeans. She turned the water off and gave the little piece of thoroughly corroded metal that should have been replaced a long time ago a dirty look. Now the kitchen floor was awash with water and dust bunnies, and on the counter, the parade of salad bowls, plates, cutlery, and cups remained unstacked and unwashed. Nina felt her already bad mood descend into a thoroughly foul temper. It wasn’t really the water on the kitchen floor and the unappetizing onion skins and carrot peelings at the bottom of the sink, although none of that helped. It was Morten. Morten and the damn duffel bags in the bedroom.
Morten was packing.
He had done it many times before. He was a geologist and had been the resident “mud logger” at one of the North Sea oil rigs for years. Recently he had been promoted to project manager, which did mean fewer days at sea, but he still had to go on a regular basis, and every single time, Nina had the same aching anxiety in the pit of her stomach when he started packing. She missed him when he was gone, and once the door had closed behind him, Ida’s hostile, brooding silence would hang over the apartment like a sort of teenage curse. It wasn’t that Nina had much trouble from Ida while Morten was away. She went to her friends’ houses most nights, but she also dutifully picked up Anton and did the grocery shopping a couple times a week. On the face of it, a fourteen-year-old marvel of daughterly obedience. But Nina knew she did those things only because Morten had asked her to do them and because doing them quietly was one more way of avoiding conversation. If Ida did deign to join them for dinner, her complete lack of expression squashed any attempt at small talk. Ida seemed barely able to tolerate Nina’s presence, and Nina asking her to pass the potatoes was obviously a major imposition.
Nina would almost have preferred the arguments they used to have, and she felt sorry for Anton, who fidgeted in his chair as he tried to lighten the atmosphere with jokes and quotes from his favorite show on Cartoon Network. He did sometimes manage to wring smiles out of Ida or Nina, but God, he had to work at it.
Nina got out a cloth and mopped up the water from the kitchen floor while she tried to concentrate on the seven o’clock news. The police didn’t have enough manpower for the Copenhagen Summit, and the far right was up in arms again because some new Islamic cultural center was building “what amounted to minarets,” according to the professionally outraged spokesman for the party. As he went on about the importance of “upholding Danish values,” Nina’s ability to concentrate plummeted abruptly. She dried her hands, turned her back on the rest of the mess, and went into the bedroom.
He was almost done.
Socks, underwear, T-shirts, and a variety of electronic gear were laid out in small, separate mounds on the double bed, so that all he had to do was dump them into the waiting bags. He had done it so many times that he could now pack for a two-week absence in under half an hour.
“Have you seen my iPod?”
Nina shook her head. Morten put his arms around her and pulled her to him so her shoulders pressed against his chest. He was so tall that his chin rested naturally on top of her head, and it gave her a feeling of being tugged inside a big, friendly fur coat. He bent to give her a fleeting kiss on the back of her neck before he let her go and once again directed his attention to the piles on the bed.
“I lent it to Anton, so it could be anywhere.”
Nina nodded. Anton scattered things throughout the apartment—and everywhere else, too—pretty much at random. In many ways it was like living with an eight-year-old Alzheimer’s patient. Or maybe just with an eight-year-old, Nina corrected herself.
Morten began the process of transferring the piles into the duffel bags. He was working quickly and methodically now. He put his phone, train pass, and wallet in his jacket pocket, and that was pretty much it.
Nina felt the dull ache of longing already. It was her fault he had had to take this inconvenient job in the first place. It was all he had been able to get at short notice, and it would take time for him to work his way up from being an itinerant mud logger to a more family-friendly Copenhagen-based job. She hated it, and Morten probably did, too, although he was far too polite to complain about it to her face. Working on the rigs was a cross he had chosen to bear, like he bore everything else life had asked of him, or more accurately, everything else that Nina had put him through. Shaken, not stirred. James Bond-style.