Headhunters

by Jo Nesbo

  Kjikerud was of relatively short stature and had, like me, thick, dark hair. I had persuaded him to have a haircut before starting as head of security, had explained to him that no one has confidence in a guy who looks like a roadie for a washed-up hard-rock band. But there was nothing I could do about his teeth, which were discoloured from chewing Swedish snus. Or his face, an oblong oar blade with a prognathous jaw that could on occasion make me feel that the snus-stained set of teeth was going to jump out in the air and snap, a bit like that wonderful creature in the Alien films. But that, of course, would have been too much to ask of a person with Kjikerud’s limited ambitions. He was lazy. But keen to get rich. And so the clash between Ove Kjikerud’s desires and personal attributes continued; he was a criminal and an arms collector with violent tendencies, but he actually wanted to live a life of peace and quiet. He wanted, nay, almost begged for friends, but people seemed to sense that something was not right with him, and kept their distance. And he was a devout, incurable romantic who now sought love with prostitutes. At present he was hopelessly in love with a hard-working Russian whore by the name of Natasha whom he refused to cheat on despite the fact that she – as far as I could establish – had absolutely no interest in him. Ove Kjikerud was an unattached floating mine, a person without an anchor, a will or any driving force, someone who let themselves drift on the current towards inevitable disaster. Someone who could only be saved by another person throwing a line around him and giving his life direction and meaning. A person like me. Someone who could appoint a sociable, diligent young man with a clean record as head of security. The rest would be simple.

  I switched off the computer and left.

  ‘Back in an hour, Ida.’

  Walking downstairs, I felt it had sounded wrong. It was definitely oda.

  At twelve o’clock I drove into the car park in front of a Rimi supermarket that according to my satnav was precisely three hundred metres from Lander’s address. The GPS was a gift from Pathfinder, a sort of consolation prize in case we didn’t win the competition to appoint their boss, I assume. They had also given me a speedy introduction into what a GPS – or Global Positioning System – actually was and explained how a network of twenty-four satellites in orbit around the earth with the aid of radio signals and atomic clocks could locate you and your GPS sender wherever you were on the planet, down to a radius of three metres. If the signal was picked up by four satellites or more, it could even tell you the elevation, in other words whether you were sitting on the ground or were up in a tree. The whole system had – like the Internet – been developed by the US Defense Department to guide Tomahawk rockets, Pavlov bombs and other fallout-fruit one might want to drop on the right person. Pathfinder had also more than hinted that they had developed transmitters that had access to land-based GPS stations no one knew about, a network that functioned in all weathers, transmitters that could penetrate thick house walls. The chairman of Pathfinder had also told me that to get GPS to work you had to factor in that one second on earth is not one second for a satellite at top speed in space, that time is distorted, that one ages more slowly out there. Satellites actually proved Einstein’s theory of relativity.

  My Volvo slipped into a line of cars all in the same price bracket and I turned off the ignition. No one would remember the car. I took the black portfolio and walked up the hill to Lander’s house. My jacket was in my car and I had put on a blue boiler suit without any markings or logos. The cap concealed my hair, and no one would be surprised by sunglasses as it was still one of those radiant autumn days with which Oslo is so blessed. Nevertheless I cast my eyes down on meeting one of the Filipina girls who push prams for the ruling classes in this suburb. But the short street where Lander lived was otherwise deserted. The sun flashed against the panoramic windows. I checked the Breitling Airwolf watch that Diana had given me for my thirty-fifth birthday. Six minutes past twelve. It was six minutes since the alarm in Jeremias Lander’s house had been deactivated. It had happened quietly on a computer in the security company’s operations room, via a technical back door that ensured that the outage would not be registered on the data log of shutdowns and power cuts. The day I employed the security chief of Tripolis had indeed been manna from heaven.

  I went up to the front door and listened to the birds chirping and the setters barking in the distance. In the interview Lander had said he didn’t have a home help, a wife or grown-up children in the house during the day or any dogs. But you could never be one hundred per cent sure. I generally worked on a ninety-nine and a half per cent basis, and the uncertainty of the half a per cent was compensated for by the supply of adrenalin: I observed, listened and sensed better.

  I took out the key I had been given by Ove at Sushi&Coffee, the spare key that all customers have to deposit with Tripolis in case of burglary, fire or a systems failure while they are away. It slid into the lock and turned with a well-lubricated click.

  Then I was inside. The discreet alarm on the wall slept with extinguished plastic eyes. I put on the gloves and taped them to the sleeves of my overall so that no loose body hairs should fall onto the floor. Pulled the bathing cap from under my hat down over my ears. The important thing was not to leave any DNA evidence. Ove had once asked me if it wouldn’t be just as well to shave my head.

  I had given up trying to explain to him that after Diana my hair was the last thing with which I was willing to part.

  I had plenty of time but still hurried down the hall. On the wall above the staircase hung portraits of what must have been Lander’s children. I am at a complete loss to understand what it is that makes grown people spend money on whoring artists’ embarrassing lachrymose versions of their beloved offspring. Do they like to see their guests blush? The living room was lavishly furnished but humdrum. Apart from Pesche’s fire-engine-red chair, which looked like a buxom woman with her legs apart, who had just given birth to a baby: the big square pouffe you can rest your feet on. Doubt if it was Jeremias Lander’s idea.

  Above the chair hung the picture, Eva Mudocci, the British violinist Munch had met at around the turn of the previous century and whom he had sketched straight onto stone when doing her portrait. I had seen other copies of the print before, but it wasn’t until now, in this light, that I could see who Eva Mudocci resembled. Lotte. Lotte Madsen. The face in the picture had the same pallor and melancholy in her eyes as the woman I had so emphatically deleted from my memory.

  I took the picture off the wall and placed it on the table face down. Used a Stanley knife to cut. The lithograph was printed on beige paper and the frame was modern, so there were no pins or tacks that had to be removed. In short, the simplest of jobs.

  Without warning the silence was broken. An alarm. An insistent pulsation fluctuating in frequency from under a thousand hertz to eight thousand, a sound that cuts through the air and background noise so effectively that you can hear it several hundred metres away. I froze. It lasted only a few seconds, then the alarm in the street stopped. The car owner must have been careless.

  I continued working. Opened the portfolio, laid the lithograph inside and took out the A2 sheet of Miss Mudocci that I had printed off at home. Within four minutes it was framed, in place and hanging on the wall. I angled my head and inspected it. It could be weeks before the victims of our scam discovered the most ridiculously obvious of fakes. In the spring I had replaced an oil painting, Knut Rose’s Horse with Small Rider, with a picture I had scanned from an art book and blown up. Four weeks passed before the theft was reported. Miss Mudocci would probably be given away by the whiteness of the paper, but it might take some time. And by then it would be impossible to pinpoint the time of the theft, and the house would have been cleaned enough times to remove all traces of DNA. Because I knew they would look for DNA. Last year, after Kjikerud and I had performed four burglaries in under four months, Inspector Brede Sperre – that blond, media-horny idiot – appeared in Aftenposten maintaining that a gang of professional art thieves was on the
prowl. And that even though the values involved were not the highest, the Robberies Unit – in order to nip this turn of events in the bud – were using investigative methods normally reserved for murder and the big drug busts. All citizens of Oslo could rest assured on that account, Sperre had said, letting his boyish locks flutter in the wind and looking into the camera lens with steely grey eyes as the photographer snapped away. Of course he had not told the truth: that this priority was being pushed on them by the residents of these areas, the affluent people with political influence and the will to protect theirs and their kind. And I had to admit that I gave a start when Diana, earlier that autumn, had told me that the dashing policeman in the papers had been into the gallery, wanting to know whether anyone had been grilling her about her clients and who had which works of art in their homes. Apparently the art thieves were well informed about what was hanging where. When Diana had queried the reason for my furrowed brow, I had given her the wry smile and replied that I didn’t much like having a rival closer than two metres to her. To my surprise, Diana had blushed before laughing.

  I marched smartly back to the front door, removed the bathing cap and the gloves with care, wiped the door handle on both sides before letting myself out. The street lay just as morning-still and crisply autumn-dry in the unbroken sunshine.

  On my way to the car I checked my watch. Fourteen minutes past twelve. It was a record. My pulse was fast but regulated. In forty-six minutes Ove would activate the alarm in the operations room. And at roughly the same time I guessed that Jeremias Lander would be getting to his feet in one of our interview rooms and shaking the chairman’s hand with a final apology before leaving our offices and placing himself out of my control. But in my stable of candidates, of course. Ferdinand would – as I had instructed him – have to explain to the client it was a shame that this hadn’t worked out, but that if they were going to angle for applicants as good as Lander, they ought to consider jacking up the salary by twenty per cent. A third of more is, as we all know, more.

  And this was just the start. In two hours and forty-six minutes I would be going on a big game hunt. A Greve hunt. I was underpaid, so what? Fuck Stockholm and fuck Brede Sperre; I was king of the heap.

  I whistled. The leaves crackled beneath my shoes.

  5

  CONFESSION

  IT HAS BEEN said that when the American police investigators Inbau, Reid and Buckley published Criminal Interrogation and Confessions in 1962, they laid the foundations for what have since become the prevailing interview techniques in the Western world. The truth is, of course, that the techniques prevailed long before then, that Inbau, Reid and Buckley’s nine-step model merely summarised the FBI’s hundred-year experience of extracting confessions from suspects. The method has shown itself to be enormously effective, on both the guilty and the innocent. After DNA technology made it possible for old cases to be re-examined, hundreds of people were found to have been wrongly imprisoned in the USA alone. Around a quarter of these wrongful convictions were based on confessions extracted by the nine-step model. That says everything about what a fantastic tool it is.

  My goal is to induce the candidate to admit he is bluffing, that he is unsuitable for the job. If he can get through the nine steps without confessing this, there is reason to assume that the candidate himself really believes he has the necessary qualifications. And those are the candidates I am looking for. I persist in saying ‘he’ as the nine-step model is most usefully applied to men. My not inconsiderable experience is that women seldom apply for jobs they are not qualified – and they prefer to be overqualified – to do. And even then it is the easiest task in the world to make her break down and confess she hasn’t got what is required. False confessions are not uncommon with men, too, of course, but that’s fine. After all, they don’t land in prison, they only miss out on a management job that requires calm under pressure.

  I have absolutely no scruples about using Inbau, Reid and Buckley. It is a scalpel in a world of healing, herbs and psychobabble.

  Step one is a direct confrontation and many do not get any further than this point. You make it crystal clear to the candidate that you know everything and that you are sitting on evidence that proves the person in question does not have the requisite abilities.

  ‘I may have been somewhat hasty in expressing an interest in your application, Greve,’ I said, leaning back in my chair. ‘I’ve been doing a bit of research, and it turns out that the HOTE shareholders consider that you failed as a CEO. That you were weak, you lacked the killer instinct and it was your fault the company was bought up. Being bought up is precisely what Pathfinder fears, so I’m sure you understand that it will be difficult to view you as a serious candidate. But …’ With a smile, I raised my cup of coffee. ‘Let’s enjoy the coffee and talk about other things instead. How’s the decorating going?’

  Clas Greve sat on the other side of the fake Noguchi table with an erect back, his eyes boring into mine. He laughed.

  ‘Three and a half million,’ he said. ‘Plus share options, naturally.’

  ‘I beg your pardon.’

  ‘If the board of directors at Pathfinder is afraid the shares might motivate me to sex up the business for potential buyers, you can reassure them that we’ll put in a clause about the shares becoming invalid in the case of a buyout. No parachutes. In that way the board and I have the same incentive. To build a strong company, a company that will eat rather than be eaten. The value of shares is calculated according to the Black–Scholes pricing model and added to the fixed salary after your third has been worked out.’

  I put on the best smile I had. ‘I’m afraid you’re taking some things for granted, Greve. There are several points here. Don’t forget you’re a foreigner, and Norwegian companies prefer to have their own to—’

  ‘You were literally salivating all over me yesterday at your wife’s gallery, Roger. And you were right to. After your proposition I did some research into you and into Pathfinder. I became immediately aware that even though I am a Dutch citizen, you will have difficulty finding a more appropriate candidate than me. The problem then was that I wasn’t interested. But one can do a lot of thinking in twelve hours. And in that time, for example, one might conclude that the pleasures of house renovation may be restricted over the long term.’

  Clas Greve folded his suntanned hands in front of him.

  ‘It’s time I got back in the saddle. Pathfinder is perhaps not the sexiest company I could have chosen, but it has potential, and a person with vision and the board on his side could build it up into something really interesting. However, it is by no means certain that the board and I share the same vision, so your job is, I suppose, to bring us together as soon as possible in order that we might see whether there is any point continuing.’

  ‘Listen, Greve—’

  ‘I am in no doubt that your methods work on many people, Roger, but with me you can give the show a miss. And go back to calling me Clas. After all, this is supposed to be just a cosy chat, isn’t it?’

  He lifted his coffee cup as if he were going to make a toast. I grabbed the opportunity for a timeout and lifted my own.

  ‘You seem a bit stressed, Roger. Are there competitors for this commission of yours?’

  My laryngeal reflex has a tendency to kick in when I am caught unawares. I had to swallow quickly so as not to cough up coffee over Sara Gets Undressed.

  ‘I understand all too well that you have to go for it, Roger,’ Greve smiled, leaning closer.

  I could smell the heat of his body and a faint aroma which reminded me of cedar trees, Russian leather and citrus. Cartier’s Declaration? Or something in that price range.

  ‘I’m not at all offended, Roger. You’re a pro, and I am, too. Naturally, you just want to do a good job for the client, that’s what they’re paying you for, after all. And the more interesting the candidate, the more important it is to give the person in question a thorough going-over. The claim that HOTE shareholders were not
happy is not a stupid one. I would have tried something like that if I’d been you.’

  I couldn’t believe my ears. He had thrown step one right back in my face by stating that we should give the show a miss; my ploy had been blown. And now he was running step two, what Inbau, Reid and Buckley call ‘sympathising with the suspect by normalising actions’. And the most incredible thing was that even though I knew exactly what Greve was doing, it did build up, this feeling I had read so much about: the suspect’s desire to throw in his cards. I almost felt like laughing out loud.

  ‘I don’t quite understand what you mean now, Clas.’ Although I was trying to appear relaxed, I could hear that my voice had a metallic timbre and my thoughts were wading through syrup. I was unable to mobilise a counter-attack before the next question came.

  ‘Money is not actually my motivation, Roger. But if you like, we can try to increase the salary. A third of more …’

  … is more. He had taken over the interview completely now and gone straight from step two to step seven: Present the alternative. In this case, give the suspect an alternative motivation for confessing. The execution was perfect. Of course he could have brought my family into play, said something about how proud my deceased parents or my wife would be if they heard how I had pushed up the salary, our commission, my bonus. But Clas Greve knew that would be going too far, of course he knew that. I had quite simply met my match.

  ‘OK, Clas,’ I heard myself say. ‘I give in. It is just as you say.’

  Greve leaned back in his chair again. He had won, and now he was letting his breath out and smiling. Not with a sense of triumph, just happy that it was over. Used to winning, I noted down on the sheet I already knew I would throw away afterwards.