“And?”
“And pays the price.”
“Why are you telling me all this, Bohr?”
Bohr clasped his hands. “I have to admit that I thought you’d killed Rakel at first, Harry.”
“Oh?”
“The spurned husband. It’s the classic, isn’t it? The first thing you think. And I thought I could tell from the look in your eyes at the funeral. A mixture of innocence and remorse. The look that belongs to someone who’s killed for no other motive than their own hatred and lust, and who regrets it. Who regrets it so much that he’s managed to suppress it. Because that’s the only way he can survive, the truth is too unbearable. I saw that look in Sergeant Waage. It was as if he’d managed to forget what he’d done to Hala, and only remembered it again when I confronted him with it. But then, when I found out that you had an alibi, I realised that the guilt I’d seen in your eyes was the same I felt. Guilt because you hadn’t been able to prevent it happening. And the reason why I’m telling you this...” — Bohr got up from the table and disappeared into the darkness as he went on — “is because I know you want the same thing as me. You want to see them punished. They took someone we loved away from us. Prison isn’t enough. An easy death isn’t enough.”
The fluorescent lights flickered a few times, then the room was bathed in light.
Sure enough, it was an office. Or had been. The six or seven desks, the pale patches where computers had stood, the wastepaper bins, random office equipment, a printer — everything suggested that the office had been abandoned in some haste. There was a picture of the king hanging on the white wooden wall. Military people, Harry thought automatically.
“Shall we go?” Bohr asked.
Harry stood up. He felt dizzy and walked rather unsteadily towards the wooden door where Bohr was waiting, holding Harry’s phone, pistol and lighter out towards him.
“Where were you?” Harry asked as he put the phone and lighter away and weighed the pistol in his hand. “The night Rakel was killed? Because you weren’t at home...”
“It was a weekend, I was at the cabin,” Bohr said. “In Eggedal. Alone, I’m afraid.”
“What were you doing there?”
“Yes, what was I doing? Polishing weapons. Keeping the stove alight. Thinking. Listening to the radio.”
“Mm. Radio Hallingdal?”
“Yes, actually, it’s the only station you can get there.”
“They had radio bingo that night.”
“They did. Do you spend a lot of time in Hallingdal?”
“No. Do you remember anything special?”
Bohr raised an eyebrow. “About the bingo?”
“Yes.”
Bohr shook his head.
“Nothing?” Harry said, feeling the weight of the pistol. He concluded that the bullets hadn’t been removed from the magazine.
“No. Is this an interview?”
“Think.”
Bohr frowned. “Maybe something about all the winners being from the same place? Ål. Or Flå.”
“Bingo,” Harry said quietly, and put the pistol in his coat pocket. “You’re hereby removed from my list of suspects.”
Roar Bohr looked at Harry. “I could have killed you in there without anyone finding out. But radio bingo is what got me off your list?”
Harry shrugged. “I need a cigarette.”
They walked down some worn, creaking wooden steps and out into the night as a clock started to chime.
“Bloody hell,” Harry said, breathing in the cold air. In the square in front of them people were hurrying towards bars and restaurants, and above the rooftops he could see the City Hall. “We’re in the middle of the city.”
Harry had heard the City Hall bells play both Kraftwerk and Dolly Parton, and once Oleg had been delighted to recognise a tune from the game Minecraft. But this time they were playing one of the regular tunes, “Watchman’s Song” by Edvard Grieg. Which meant it was midnight.
Harry turned around. The building they had come out of was a barrack-like wooden building just inside the gates of Akershus Fortress.
“Not exactly MI6 or Langley,” Bohr said. “But this did actually used to be the headquarters of E14.”
“E14?” Harry dug out his packet of cigarettes from his trouser pocket.
“A short-lived Norwegian espionage organisation.”
“I vaguely remember it.”
“Started in 1995, spent a few years doing James Bond — style action stuff, then there were power struggles and political rows about its methods, until it was shut down in 2006. The building’s been empty since then.”
“But you’ve got the keys?”
“I was here for its last few years. No one ever asked for them back.”
“Mm. A former spy. That explains the chloroform.”
Bohr smiled wryly. “Oh, we did more interesting things than that.”
“I don’t doubt it.” Harry nodded towards the clock on the City Hall tower.
“Sorry I ruined your evening,” Bohr said. “Can I bum a cigarette off you before we call it a night?”
“I was a young officer when I was recruited,” Bohr said, blowing smoke up towards the sky. He and Harry had found a bench on the ramparts behind the cannons pointing out across the Oslo Fjord. “It wasn’t just people from the military in E14. There were diplomats, waiters, carpenters, police officers, mathematicians. Beautiful women who could be used as bait.”
“Sounds like a spy film,” Harry said, sucking on his own cigarette.
“It was a spy film.”
“What was the mandate?”
“Gathering information from places Norway could imagine having a military presence. The Balkans, the Middle East, Sudan, Afghanistan. We were given a lot of freedom; we were supposed to operate independently of the American intelligence network and NATO. For a while it actually looked like we might manage it. A strong sense of camaraderie, a lot of loyalty. And maybe a bit too much freedom. In closed environments like that you end up developing your own standards for what is acceptable. We paid women to have sex with our contacts. We equipped ourselves with unregistered High Standard HD 22 pistols.”
Harry nodded. That was the pistol he had seen in Bohr’s cabin, the pistol CIA agents preferred because it had a lightweight and efficient silencer. The pistol the Soviets found on Francis Gary Powers, the pilot of the U2 spy plane that was shot down over Soviet territory in 1960.
“With no serial numbers, they couldn’t be traced back to us if we ever had to use them for liquidation.”
“And you did all that?”
“Not the bit about paying for sex or liquidating anyone. The worst thing I did...” Bohr rubbed his chin thoughtfully. “Or the one that felt worst... was the first time I deliberately got someone to trust me, then betrayed them. Part of the admission test was to get from Oslo to Trondheim as quickly as possible with only ten kroner in your pocket. The point was to show you had the social skills and imagination that an active situation might require. I offered the money to a kind-looking woman at the Central Station in return for borrowing her phone to call my mortally ill younger sister in the district hospital in Trondheim, to tell her that my luggage had just been stolen, along with my wallet, train ticket and phone. I called one of the other agents and managed to cry on the phone. When I hung up the woman was crying as well, and I was just about to ask to borrow money for the train fare when she offered to drive me in her car, which was in the car park next to the station. We drove as fast as we could. The hours passed, and we talked about everything, our deepest secrets, the way you only do with strangers. My secrets were lies I had learned, good training for someone hoping to be a spy. We stopped at Dovre after four hours. Watched the sun go down over the plateau. Kissed. Smiled through the tears and said we loved each other. Two hours later, just before midnight, she dropped me off in front of the main entrance to the hospital. I told her to find somewhere to park while I found out where my sister was. I said I’d wait in reception. I walked straight through the reception area, out through the other side, and ran as fast as I could to the statue of Olav Tryggvason where the head of recruitment for E14 was waiting with a stopwatch. I was the first person to get there, and was celebrated as a hero that night.”