Headhunters

by Jo Nesbo

  The road passed a park with a large pond in the middle, and I took one of the brown paths leading to a group of trees on the other side. Not because it was a short cut, but to get the dot on Greve’s GPS to move off the street map. Bodies can be moved around in cars, but they don’t move through the landscape. It was confirmation of the suspicion that my wake-up call from Lotte’s place this morning would have planted in the Dutch headhunter’s head: that Roger Brown had risen from the dead. That Brown had not been lying in the mortuary at Rikshospital as it had seemed from the GPS, but presumably in a bed in the same building. But they had said on the news that everyone in the car was dead, so how …?

  I may not be particularly empathetic, but I am a good judge of intelligence, so good that I am used to hiring leaders for Norway’s biggest companies. So while I plodded around the pond, I again went through Greve’s probable reasoning at this moment. Which was simple. He would have to come after me, have to exterminate me, even if it involved much greater risk than before. For I was no longer just someone who could put a stop to HOTE’s plans for taking over Pathfinder, I was a witness who could put him in the slammer for the murder of Sindre Aa. If I was allowed to live long enough for the case to come to court.

  In short, I had sent him an invitation he could not refuse.

  I had arrived at the other side of the park, and as I passed the clump of birch trees, I stroked my fingers along the thin, white, peeling bark, pressed them lightly against the hard trunk, bent my fingers and scraped my nails across the surface. Smelt my fingertips, stopped, closed my eyes and breathed in the aroma as memories of childhood, play, laughter, wonder, gleeful horror and discovery flooded back. All the tiny things I thought I had lost but which were there, of course, encapsulated, they didn’t disappear, they were water children. The old Roger Brown had been unable to recapture them, but the new one could. How long would the new one live? Not much longer now. But it didn’t matter, he would live his last hours more intensely than the old one had lived all his thirty-five years.

  I was hot when I finally saw Kjikerud’s place. I walked up into the edge of the forest and sat down on a tree stump where I had a good view of the terraced houses and blocks of flats along the road. And established that people in east Oslo do not have the same wide array of views that those living in west Oslo have. We could all see the Post Giro building and the Plaza Hotel. The town didn’t come across as any uglier or more attractive. The only difference was that basically you could see the western side from here. Which made me think of the story about Gustave Eiffel and the famous tower he had built for the World Expo in Paris in 1889; the critics said the finest view in Paris was from the Eiffel Tower because that was the only place in Paris where you couldn’t see it. And I wondered if perhaps that was what it was like being Clas Greve; that the world for him had to seem a slightly less hideous place. Because he couldn’t see himself through other people’s eyes. Mine for example. I saw him. And I hated him. Hated him with such a surprising intensity and passion that it almost frightened me. But it was not a muddied hatred, quite the contrary, it was a pure, decent, almost innocent hatred, in the same way that the crusaders must have hated the blasphemers. And that was why I could sentence Greve to death with the same measured, naive hatred that allows the devout Christian American to send his death-row neighbour to the execution chamber. And in many ways this hatred was a purifying sensation.

  It made me understand, for example, that what I had felt for my father was not hatred. Anger? Yes. Contempt? Maybe. Pity? Definitely. And why? Many reasons, to be sure. But I saw now that my fury originated from my feeling, deep down, that I was like him, that I had it in me to be exactly like him: a drunken, penniless wife-beater who thought east was east and could never be west. And now I had become him, definitively and in full measure.

  The laughter bubbled up inside me, and I did nothing to stop it. Not until it resounded among the tree trunks, a bird took off from a branch above me and I saw a car coming down the road.

  A silver-grey Lexus GS 430.

  He had come faster than I had expected.

  I got up instantly and walked down to Kjikerud’s house. Standing on the step, about to insert the key into the lock, I looked at my hand. The shaking was imperceptible, but I saw it.

  It was instinct, an ur-fear. Clas Greve was the kind of animal who made other animals afraid.

  I found the keyhole at first attempt. Turned the key, opened the door and went quickly into the house. Still no smell. Sat up on the bed, shifted backwards until I was sitting with my back against the headboard and to the window. Checked that the duvet covered Ove lying beside me.

  Waited. The seconds were ticking. And my heart was, too. Two heartbeats a second.

  Greve was cautious, that went without saying. He wanted to make sure I was alone. And even though I was alone, he knew now that I was not as harmless as he had initially thought. Firstly, I must have had something to do with his dog’s death. Secondly, he must have been there, seen her body and known that I was capable of killing.

  I didn’t hear the door open. Didn’t hear his footsteps. Only saw him standing in the doorway in front of me. His voice was gentle and the smile genuinely apologetic.

  ‘Sorry to burst in on you like this, Roger.’

  Greve was dressed in black. Black trousers, black shoes, black roll-neck, black gloves. On his head a black woollen hat. The only thing that was not black was the gleaming silver Glock.

  ‘That’s fine,’ I said. ‘It’s visiting time.’

  22

  SILENT FILM

  IT IS SAID that a fly’s perception of time, the reason it experiences the palm of a hand zooming towards it as yawningly slow, is due to the fact that the information it receives through its facet eyes contains such a large amount of data that nature has had to equip it with an extra-fast processor so as to be able to deal with everything in real time.

  For several seconds there was total silence in the sitting room. How many I don’t know. I was a fly and the hand was on its way. Kjikerud’s Glock pistol was directed at my chest; Greve’s eyes at my shiny pate.

  ‘Aha,’ he said at length.

  This one word contained everything. Everything about how we humans have been able to conquer the earth, rule over the elements, kill creatures that are greater than ourselves in speed and strength. Processor capacity. Greve’s ‘Aha’ came at the end of an avalanche of thoughts, the search for and filtering of hypotheses, relentless deductive powers that together led to an inevitable conclusion: ‘You’ve shaved off your hair, Roger.’

  Greve was – as suggested earlier – an intelligent person. Of course he had done more than state the banal fact that my hair had been removed, but also when, how and why it had happened. Because that cleared up all the confusion, answered all the questions. That was why he added, more as a fact than as a question: ‘In the wrecked car.’

  I nodded.

  He sat down in the chair at the foot of the bed, rocked it back against the wall, without the barrel of the gun deviating an inch from me.

  ‘And then? Did you plant the hair on one of the bodies?’

  I thrust my hand in the jacket pocket.

  ‘Freeze!’ he screamed, and I saw the finger pressing the trigger. No cocked hammer. Glock 17. A dame.

  ‘It’s my left hand,’ I said.

  ‘OK. Slowly does it.’

  I took my hand out slowly and slung the bag of hair on the table. Greve nodded gently without taking his eyes off me.

  ‘So you knew,’ he said. ‘That the transmitters were in your hair. And that she had put them there for me. That was why you killed her, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Did it feel like a loss, Clas?’ I asked, leaning back. My heart was pounding, yet I felt remarkably mellow in this, my final hour. The flesh’s mortal dread and the spirit’s serenity.

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘Or was she just – what did you call it? – a means to an end? A necessary expense to acquire income?�
�

  ‘Why do you want to know, Roger?’

  ‘Because I want to know if people like you really exist or whether they’re just fiction.’

  ‘Like me?’

  ‘People who are unable to love.’

  Greve laughed. ‘If you wanted an answer to that you only needed to look in the mirror, Roger.’

  ‘I loved someone,’ I said.

  ‘You might have imitated love,’ Clas said. ‘But did you really love? Do you have any proof of that? I see only proof of the opposite, that you denied Diana the one thing she wanted besides you: a child.’

  ‘I would’ve given her that.’

  He laughed again. ‘So you’ve changed your mind? When did that happen? When did you become the contrite husband? When you discovered that she was fucking another man?’

  ‘I believe in contrition,’ I said quietly. ‘In contrition. And in forgiveness.’

  ‘And now it’s too late,’ he said. ‘Diana got neither your forgiveness nor your child.’

  ‘Not yours either.’

  ‘It was never my intention to give her a child, Roger.’

  ‘No, but if you’d wanted it, you’d never have been able to do it, would you?’

  ‘Of course I would. Do you think I’m impotent?’

  He spoke quickly. So quickly that only a fly could have perceived the nanosecond of hesitation. I breathed in. ‘I’ve seen you, Clas Greve. I’ve seen you from … a frog’s-eye view.’

  ‘What the fuck are you on about now, Brown?’

  ‘I’ve seen your reproductive organs at a closer range than I would’ve chosen of my own accord.’

  I watched his mouth slowly drop, and went on.

  ‘In an outside toilet near Elverum.’

  Greve’s mouth seemed poised to formulate something, but nothing emerged.

  ‘Was that how they made you talk when you were in the cellar in Suriname? By targeting your testicles? Battering them? A knife? They didn’t take the desire, only the reproductive capacity, didn’t they? What was left of your balls was sewn together with rough thread.’

  Greve’s mouth was closed now. A straight line in a stony face.

  ‘That explains the fanatical hunt for what you yourself said was a pretty insignificant drug smuggler in the jungle, Clas. Sixty-five days, wasn’t it? Because it was him, wasn’t it? He was the one who’d slashed your manhood. Taken from you the ability to make replicas of yourself. He’d taken everything from you. Almost. So you took his life. And I can understand that.’

  Yes, indeed, this was Inbau, Reid and Buckley’s sub-point in step two: suggest a morally acceptable motive for the crime. But I no longer needed his confession. Instead he got mine. In advance. ‘I understand, Clas, because I’ve decided to kill you for the same reason. You took everything from me. Almost.’

  Greve’s mouth made a sound I interpreted as laughter. ‘Who’s sitting with the gun here, Roger?’

  ‘I’m going to kill you the way I killed your damned dog.’

  I saw his jaw muscles tighten as he clenched his teeth, saw the white of his knuckles.

  ‘You never saw that, did you, now? It ended its days as crow fodder. Transfixed on the prongs of Aa’s tractor.’

  ‘You make me sick, Roger Brown. You sit there moralising while you yourself are an animal killer and a child murderer.’

  ‘You’re right. But wrong about what you said to me at the hospital. That our child had Down’s syndrome. Quite the opposite, all the tests showed that it was healthy. I persuaded Diana to have an abortion simply because I didn’t want to share her with anyone. Have you ever heard anything so childish? Pure, unadulterated jealousy towards an unborn baby. I assume I didn’t get enough love when I was growing up. What do you think? Perhaps it was the same for you, Clas? Or were you evil from birth?’

  I don’t think Clas took the questions in because he was staring at me with that gawping expression that showed his brain was working at full capacity again. Reconstructing, following the branches on the tree of decisions back down to its trunk, to the truth, to where it had all started. And found it. One single sentence at the hospital. Something he had said himself: ‘… have an abortion because the baby has Down’s syndrome.’

  ‘So tell me,’ I said when I saw that he had understood, ‘have you loved anyone else apart from your dog?’

  He raised the gun. There were only seconds left of the new Roger Brown’s short life. Greve’s ice-blue eyes sparkled and the gentle voice was just a whisper now.

  ‘I had been thinking of putting a single bullet through your head as a mark of respect for being a prey worthy of a hunter, Roger. But I think I’ll go back to the original plan after all. Shooting you in the stomach. Have I told you about stomach shots? How the bullet bores through your spleen causing the gastric acid to leak out and burn its way through the rest of the intestines? Then I have to wait until you beg me to kill you. And you will, Roger.’

  ‘Perhaps you ought to cut the chat and shoot, Clas? perhaps you shouldn’t wait as long as you did at the hospital?’

  Greve laughed again. ‘Oh, I don’t think you’ve invited the police here, Roger. You’ve killed a woman. You’re a murderer like me. This is between you and me.’

  ‘Think again, Clas. Why do you reckon I risked going to the Pathology Unit and tricking them into handing over the bag of hair?’

  Greve rolled his shoulders. ‘Simple. It’s the DNA evidence. Probably the only thing they had which they could have used against you. They still think the name of the person they’re looking for is Ove Kjikerud. Unless you wanted your beautiful mane back, that is. Make a wig out of it? Diana told me your hair was very important to you. That you used it to compensate for your height?’

  ‘Correct,’ I said. ‘But incorrect. Sometimes the headhunter forgets that the head he is hunting can think. I don’t know if it thinks better or worse without hair, but in this case it has enticed the hunter into a trap.’

  Greve blinked slowly while I observed his body tense up; he sensed mischief.

  ‘I don’t see a trap, Roger.’

  ‘It’s here,’ I said, whisking aside the duvet next to me. I saw his eyes fall on the body of Ove Kjikerud. And on the Uzi machine gun that lay on his chest.

  He reacted with lightning speed, pointing the pistol at me. ‘Don’t try anything, Brown.’

  I moved my hands towards the machine gun.

  ‘Don’t!’ Greve screamed.

  I raised the weapon.

  Greve fired. The explosion filled the room.

  I pointed my gun at Greve. He had half risen to his feet in the chair and loosened off another round. I pressed the trigger. Pressed it all the way. A hoarse roar of lead tore through the air, Ove’s walls, the chair, Clas Greve’s black trousers, the perfect thigh muscles beneath, tore open his groin and, I hoped, his genitals which had been inside Diana, his well-developed abdominal muscles and the organs they were supposed to protect.

  He fell back in the chair and the Glock thudded to the floor. There was an abrupt silence, then the sound of a cartridge rolling over the parquet. I angled my head and peered down at him. He returned the look, his eyes black with shock.

  ‘Now you won’t pass the medical for Pathfinder, Greve. Sorry about that. You will never steal the technology. However thorough you are. In fact, that bloody thoroughness was your undoing.’

  Greve’s groan was barely audible, something Dutch.

  ‘It was the thoroughness that tempted you here,’ I said. ‘To the final interview. Because do you know what? You’re the man I’ve been seeking for this job. A job for which I not only think but know you are perfect. And that means the job is perfect for you. Believe me, herr Greve.’

  Greve didn’t answer, just stared down at himself. The blood had made the black roll-neck even blacker. So I went on.

  ‘You are hereby appointed as the scapegoat, herr Greve. As the man who killed Ove Kjikerud, the body lying next to me.’ I patted Ove on the stomach.

  Gr
eve groaned again and raised his head. ‘What the fuck are you babbling on about?’ His voice sounded desperate and at the same time groggy, sleepy. ‘Ring for an ambulance before you murder someone else, Brown. Think about it, you’re an amateur, you’ll never get away from the police. Ring now, and I’ll save you, too.’

  I looked down at Ove. He seemed peaceful where he lay. ‘But it’s not me who will kill you, Greve. It’s Kjikerud here, don’t you understand?’

  ‘No. Christ, ring for a bloody ambulance now. Can’t you see I’m bleeding to death here!’

  ‘Sorry, it’s too late.’

  ‘Too late? Are you going to let me die?’

  Something different had crept into his voice. Could it have been tears?

  ‘Please, Brown. Not here, not like this! I implore you, I beg you.’

  It was tears indeed. They streamed down his cheeks. Not that strange perhaps, if what he had said about being shot in the stomach was correct. I could see blood dripping from the inside of his trouser legs onto the polished Prada shoes. He had begged. Had not been able to maintain dignity in death. I have heard it said that no one can, that those who appear to manage it are just emotionless from shock. The most humiliating part for Greve was of course that there were so many witnesses to his breakdown. And there would be more.

  Fifteen seconds after I had let myself into Kjikerud’s house and entered the sitting room without tapping in ‘Natasha’ on the alarm, the CCTV cameras would have begun to record as the alarm went off at Tripolis. I formed a mental image of how they would have flocked around the monitor, how they would have stared at the silent film in disbelief, with Greve as the only visible actor, seen him open his mouth but would have been unable to hear what he said. They would have seen him shoot and take a hit, and cursed Ove for not having had a camera that showed the person in bed.