'OK,' she said. 'Thank you.'
'Not at all…' Rikard sniffled.
His heart was pounding. He could smell Harry Hole now. With infinite care he opened the door and groped for the light switch on the wall. In his other hand he held the gun, pointing it at the bed he could more or less make out in the dark. He breathed in and flicked the light switch; the bedroom was flooded in light. The room was bare – just a basic bed which was tidy and unoccupied. Like the rest of the flat. He had already searched the other rooms. And now he was in the bedroom and could feel his pulse beginning to calm down. Harry Hole was not at home.
He put his gun in the pocket of the filthy denim jacket and felt it crush the urinal block he had taken from the toilet in Oslo Central Station, which was next to the public telephone he had used to find out Hole's Sofies gate address.
It had been easier to enter the building than he had thought. After ringing twice at the main door without receiving an answer, he had been on the point of giving up. But then he pushed the door and although it was closed it had not snapped shut. Must have been the cold. On the second floor Hole's name was scribbled on a strip of masking tape. He had put his cap against the glass pane above the lock and hit it with the barrel of his gun; it had cracked with a crisp crack.
The sitting room faced the backyard so he took the risk of switching on a lamp. He looked around. Simple and spartan. Tidy.
But his Trojan Horse, the man who could lead him to Jon Karlsen, was not there. For the time being. But he hoped he had a weapon or ammunition. He started with the places it would be natural to imagine a policeman might keep a gun, in drawers or cupboards or under the pillow. On finding nothing, he carried out a systematic room-to-room search, but without any success. Then he began the random search that is manifest proof that you have in fact given up and are desperate. Under a letter on the telephone table he found a police ID card with a photo of Harry Hole. He pocketed it. He moved books and records which he noticed were arranged in alphabetical order on the shelves. There was a stack of papers on the coffee table. He flicked through them and stopped at a photograph with a motif he had seen in many variants: dead man in a uniform. Robert Karlsen. He saw the name Stankic. One form had Harry's name at the top; his eyes ran down it and stopped at a cross by a familiar expression. Smith amp; Wesson. 38. The signatory had written his name with grandiose flourishes. A gun licence? A request form?
He gave up. So Harry Hole had the gun on him.
He went into the cramped but clean bathroom and turned on the tap. The hot water made him tremble. The soot from his face turned the sink black. Then he turned on the cold tap and the coagulated blood on his hands dissolved and the sink went red. He dried himself and opened the cabinet above the sink. Found a roll of gauze which he tied around his hand and the wound from the glass.
There was something missing.
He saw a short bristle beside the tap. As if after a shave. But there was no razor, no shaving foam. Or a toothbrush, toothpaste or a toilet bag. Was Hole on his travels, in the middle of a murder inquiry? Or perhaps he lived with a girlfriend?
In the kitchen, he opened the fridge, which contained a milk carton with a sell-by date six days away, a jar of jam, white cheese, three tins of stew and a freezer compartment with sliced rye bread in a plastic wrapper. He took the milk, the bread, two of the tins and switched on the stove. There was a newspaper with today's date lying beside the toaster. Fresh milk, latest newspaper. He began to lean towards the travel theory.
He had taken a glass from the high wall cupboard and was about to pour some milk when a sound made him drop the carton on the floor.
The telephone.
He watched the milk spread across the red terracotta tiles while listening to the insistent ringing in the hall. Three mechanical clicks followed five beeps and a woman's voice filled the room. The words came fast and the tone seemed cheerful. She laughed, then put down the phone. There was something about that voice.
He placed the opened tins of stew in the hot frying pan as they had done during the siege. Not because they didn't have plates, but so that everyone knew they had equal portions. Then he went into the hall. The small, black answering machine was flashing red and showed a number 2. He pressed PLAY. The tape started.
'Rakel,' a woman's voice said. It sounded a bit older than the one that had just spoken. After a couple of sentences she handed over to a boy who excitedly chatted away. Then the last message came again. And he knew for certain he had not been imagining that he had heard the voice before. It was the girl on the white bus.
When the messages were finished, he stood looking at the two colour photographs stuck to the wall under the mirror. In one, Hole, a darkhaired woman and a boy were sitting on a pair of skis in the snow squinting at the camera. The other was faded and old, and showed a small girl and boy, both in bathing costumes. She seemed to have Down's syndrome – he was Harry Hole.
He sat in the kitchen eating at his leisure and listening to the sounds in the stairwell. The glass pane was patched up with the transparent tape he found in the drawer of the telephone table. After eating he went to the bedroom. It was cold. He sat on the bed and ran a hand over the soft bedclothes. Smelt the pillow. Opened the wardrobe. He found a pair of grey boxer shorts and a folded white T-shirt with a drawing of a kind of eight-armed Shiva with the word FRELST, redeemed, underneath and JOKKE amp; VALENTINERNE above. The clothes smelt of soap. He undressed and put them on. Lay down on the bed. Closed his eyes. Thought of the photograph of Hole. Of Giorgi. Put the gun under the pillow. Even though he was absolutely exhausted he could feel an erection on the way. His dick pressed against the tight-fitting but soft cotton. And he went to sleep in the secure knowledge that he would wake up if anyone opened the front door.
'Expect the unexpected.'
That was the motto of Sivert Falkeid, the leader of Delta, the police Special Forces Unit. Falkeid stood on a ridge behind the container, a walkie-talkie in his hand and the swish of taxis and juggernauts heading home for Christmas on the motorway in his ears. Beside him stood Chief Inspector Gunnar Hagen with the collar of his green flak jacket turned up. Falkeid's boys were in the cold, ice-bound darkness beneath them. He checked his watch. Five to three.
It was nineteen minutes since one of the dog patrol's Alsatians had indicated that a person was inside a red container. Nevertheless Falkeid did not like the situation. Even though the task seemed easy enough. That was not what he disliked.
So far everything had gone like clockwork. It had taken a mere fortyfive minutes from the time he received Hagen's call for the five selected soldiers to appear primed and ready at the police station. Delta consisted of seventy people, in the main highly motivated, well-trained men with an average age of thirty-one. Details were drawn up according to need, and their spheres of activity included so-called 'difficult armed actions', the category into which this job fell. In addition to the five men from Delta there was one person from FSK, Forsvarets Spesialkommando, the military Special Forces. And this was where his misgivings began. The man was an ace marksman personally drafted in by Gunnar Hagen. He called himself Aron, but Falkeid knew that no one in FSK operated under their real name. In fact, the whole force had been secret since its inception in 1981, and it was only during the famous Enduring Freedom Operation in Afghanistan that the media had managed to get hold of any specific details at all about this crack unit which, in Falkeid's opinion, was more reminiscent of a secret brotherhood.
'Because I trust Aron,' had been Hagen's brief explanation to Falkeid. 'Do you recall the rifle shot in Torp in '94?'
Falkeid remembered the hostage drama at Torp airfield very well. He had been there. No one was told afterwards who had fired the shot that saved the day, but the bullet had gone through the armpit of a bulletproof vest hanging in front of the car window and into the bank robber's head, which had then exploded like a pumpkin in the back seat of a brand-new Volvo, which the car dealer took in part exchange, washed and resold. That wasn't what bothered him. Nor that Aron was carrying a rifle that Falkeid had not seen before. The letters MAR on the gunstock did not mean a thing to him. At this moment Aron was lying somewhere outside the terrain with laser sights and night-vision goggles, and had reported in that he had a clear view of the container. Otherwise Aron confined himself to grunts when Falkeid asked for updates on the radio. But that didn't bother him, either. What Falkeid did not like about the situation was that Aron should have been there at all. They had no need whatsoever of a marksman.