Christian nodded, but remained next to the desk as if he were waiting for something more.
“I have to go now,” Søren said, trying to hide the irritation that was starting to well up inside him. If the man had more to say, why didn’t he just up and say it? Surely Christian could see that he was on his way out the door.
“There’s a time issue,” Christian said. “We’re stretched to the limit right now in terms of manpower. We have three men off on the SINe course. Iben is down for the count with some virus, Martin is still on sick-leave with stress, and then there’s the Summit and … well.…”
Søren paused in the doorway. The problem was real, he knew that. Over the summer all of the civil defense and emergency services were supposed to switch their communication over to a common, coordinated digital communication system. Secure Information Net, or SINe for short. This way, it was hoped, they wouldn’t be fumbling with outdated analog radios at the Summit. The switch was the main reason for the ill-fated training exercise. IT, in particular, were overworked and under pressure. Too many superiors were pestering Christian and his colleagues right now, and Søren was only one of them.
“Any idea what our young friend was doing on the site?”
“No. I mean, he was there for a while, and we can tell that he searched for ‘radiation therapy’ and ‘cancer treatment.’ ”
“That could mean anything, given the content of the site.”
“Yes. And the telephone numbers he used for the subsequent contact didn’t give us anything either. Top-up disposables, probably dumped the minute he had used them. Possibly stolen in the first place. At any rate, they’re not in service anymore.”
“Okay.” Søren drummed his fingers against the doorframe, then made up his mind. “How is this for a compromise? Get the computer off him ASAP, before he dumps it or makes some kind of switch. After that … if you get me the full report sometime next week, I’ll get off your back. I’ll talk to the young man tomorrow. See what he has to say for himself and put the fear of God in him while I’m at it.”
“Um … maybe two weeks from now?” Christian’s pleading face looked almost comical.
“Yes, okay.” Søren nodded. So far, they were still just following up on the famous Islamist whisper. Pushing Christian past the point of collapse would get him nowhere.
Young men—and yes, some of them were Muslims—did routinely develop an unhealthy interest in recipes for explosives or suicide videos. The Service had had good results from nipping that kind of thing in the bud—often a little chat with the PET had a remarkable cooling effect on the hot-headed juvenile compulsion to fantasize about death, destruction, and things that go boom. It had been quite a while since he had personally done one of these wake-up calls, but right now that was the simplest solution. Most of his own people had been clocking overtime since the middle of March, and there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell that he would be able to pass it off to some other department. The ops teams were almost as run-down as IT, and most of Søren’s colleagues were fighting tooth and nail to protect their own interests.
“Khalid Hosseini.” Søren repeated the name to himself as he hurried off to the meeting room on the third floor. It was pretty damn ballsy to say no to the PET when your name was Khalid. Ballsy—and a little alarming.
Helle was on her knees in the garden weeding among the perennials. She had recently acquired a pair of lined trousers with foam pads built into the knees so she didn’t have to lug her weeding mat around the garden with her, although perhaps “garden” was too generous a word to describe their approximately 800-square-meter plot. The tough, dark-green fabric made her rear end look plumper than it actually was.
“I’m going now,” he said.
She didn’t reply right away. Instead she exclaimed in disgust and jumped up, quite nimbly considering her sixty-two years.
“They’re here already!” she hissed.
“Who?” he asked, confused.
“The Spanish slugs!” She marched across the lawn to the shed on the property boundary abutting the neighbor’s. Highly illegal nowadays, and during his time in the Buildings and Safety Department of the local municipality, he had helped to reject several planning applications for just that sort of thing. This shed, however, had probably been here as long as the house, or, in other words, since 1948.
She came out of the shed a few moments later, now armed with a dandelion knife, with which she proceeded to dispatch the offending gastropod by cleaving the gleaming brown body in two.
“I need you to get me some more slug bait,” she said. “Preferably today.”
“Why the hurry? It’s just one slug.”
She straightened up and used her wrist to push the hair out of her face. Her floral gardening gloves were dark from dirt and plant sap.
“It’s an invasive species,” she said with ruthless intensity in her blue eyes. “They don’t have any natural predators here, and a sexually mature slug can lay up to four hundred eggs in one season. You have to keep them at bay.”
“Yes, yes, all right. I’ll drive over to the garden center when I get back.”
“Where are you going?”
“Just around the lake.”
“Take your phone.”
He grunted. He didn’t like the little metallic thingamajig. He struggled to read the numbers on the tiny buttons, and he had never grown completely confident in its use. But she was right, it would be wise to bring it. What if he fell and broke his hip? What if he had a heart attack out there on the lake path, and he keeled over into the reeds where no one would see him? Though whether he would be able to use this masterpiece of communication technology in that case was another matter.
He went inside, retrieved the phone from the drawer, and stuck it in the pocket of his dark-gray windbreaker.
“Okay, I’m going,” he called out to the garden.
“Remember dinner is at five-thirty today,” she called back.
Was it Wednesday again already? It must be. That was the night she had choir practice. Otherwise they always ate at 6 P.M.
IT WAS WINDY down by the lake, and he was glad for he wore his windbreaker. After a warm week when everything had blossomed all at once, it had gotten chilly again, and he had grown more sensitive to the cold with age. What with the dog walkers and the exercise fanatics there was a constant traffic on the lakefront path, and he stared at the joggers with envy as they pumped away with their muscular shorts-clad legs and carried on easy, smiling conversations with each other to demonstrate that they weren’t winded by such a trifling little trot. Just you wait, he thought, just you wait. Someday you, too, will drag yourself out of bed gasping for breath, wondering whether you can make it to the bathroom by yourself.
He had barely reached the lake park when the symptoms started. The ache in his hip—he knew that one, he could get used to that one. But also a stabbing pain in his chest, like a stitch in his side, only worse. One foot in the grave, he thought, and was once again overwhelmed by frustration that he couldn’t get that snotty-nosed puppy of a lawyer to understand that someone had to look after Helle.
She had just turned twenty-two when they got married; he had been forty-six. They had met each other at the Town Hall, where she worked as the mayor’s secretary, a job she dispatched with a cool efficiency that made her seem mature and professional compared to most of the girls in the typing pool. Yes, that’s what they used to call them, “the girls.” Without any of the artificial political correctness one had to employ these days. This was back in the ’70s when fringe purses and hot pants were starting to sneak into even the stuffiest of local government offices, but Helle stuck to classic pencil skirts, pearl necklaces, and cardigans with a Chanel-like elegance that always made him think of Grace Kelly. But it wasn’t until he discovered that her father picked her up every evening because she didn’t dare walk home alone … it wasn’t until then that he realized the depth of the vulnerability she kept hidden beneath her professional façade. It touched him deeply, and it was for this reason that he began to cautiously suggest that he would be glad to drive her home any day her father found it inconvenient.