by Samuel Bjork
Lukas got off his bicycle, deployed the kickstand, and sat down on a rock. They met in various places, and this was one of them. Not that they’d met many times. This was perhaps the eighth time, wasn’t it? The woman came by car. The last time had been some weeks ago. Normally she would turn up, open the window, hand him the envelope, and drive off without saying anything. However, the last time had been different. She’d gotten out of the car, lit a cigarette, and chatted with him briefly, not about anything important, just about the weather and things like that. He did not know how old she was—thirty-five or thereabouts. She was always quite well dressed, with ankle boots and a coat or a smart jacket, and she wore bright red lipstick and had a lovely smile. She had long dark hair and a straight nose, and she always wore sunglasses whatever the weather. The woman was clearly not one of the initiated, Lukas had no doubt about that. You could tell from the way she dressed. Lipstick and ankle boots and sunglasses, even cigarettes. In the Bible she would have been a whore, but it was exactly as Pastor Simon had said: Sometimes the path to the light goes through silent darkness. Lukas felt that he and the woman balanced each other out, with her on one side, himself on the other. Both messengers. Brought together by God, for God. He got up and stretched his arms, kicked a pebble on the ground into the bushes. Hummed a little to himself. He’d started doing that recently. He did not sing out loud, just quietly to himself, a melodious chant. Eternity has already begun. He clearly remembered the first time Pastor Simon had said it. It was the third day of the Sørlandet camp, after Lukas had been saved and found God. Eternity has already begun. Lukas went on humming and looked up at the trees again. A nuthatch was fluffing its feathers. Farther in, he could hear a woodpecker hammering away. Last Saturday he had seen an owl up at the house in the forest. Lux domus. Many people did not like owls, they regarded them as birds of ill omen, but Lukas knew better. The weekend had been just as rewarding as he had expected, perhaps even better. Nils had done a good job in the forest. It really had become a paradise.
A car pulled up and stopped a short distance from him. It was not the same car as the last time, but it was her; he recognized her through the windshield. Her long dark hair, drawn back into a ponytail, lipstick, but no sunglasses this time. It looked as if she had no intention of getting out of the car today. She simply summoned him, opened the window, and stuck out the envelope. She scooted around a little nervously, as if something were wrong. As if she were in a hurry and just wanted to get this over and done with as quickly as possible. Lukas held out his hand for the envelope, and at that moment she turned to him, glanced at him briefly before turning away again.
Lukas’s heart skipped a beat. Her eyes were two different colors. One was brown. The other blue. Lukas had never seen anything like it in his whole life. He stood frozen holding the envelope, unable to utter a single word, and for the first time in a very, very long time, he felt a kind of terror creep over him, drops of something dark in his happy blood. The woman with the different-colored eyes closed the window and rejoined the traffic on Maridalsveien. Soon she was gone again, just as quickly as she had appeared.
24
Mia Krüger hauled the large cardboard box into the office and closed the door behind her. The usually busy offices were quiet; no one was there. She had lost Anette along the way—Anette had to help her daughter with something and would come back later. Mia had said that there was no need, she was happy to go through the items on her own. Anette had reeked of guilt, like everyone torn between the demands of family and work, but Mia had reassured her that it wasn’t a problem. She had promised to call if she found anything important. The truth was that Mia preferred to work alone. It made thinking easier. Going deep. Seeing the connection. She had nothing against Anette or indeed any of her colleagues—they did an excellent job—but every now and again being surrounded by people got to be too much for her and her brain refused to work as it should.
Mia carried the box to the incident room and put it on the table. She sat down and stared at the wall. As always, Ludvig had put up pictures from both cases, Post-it notes and arrows, names and questions. Pauline and Johanne. Dresses? Who? At least they knew the answer to that now, even though they’d gotten no further than a cardboard box left behind by a dead man with an eagle tattoo on his neck. Mia removed the lid and spread out the box’s contents on the large table. There was not much in it. A few photographs. One showing a dog. A golden retriever. A guy on a fishing trip, his face not included in the photograph, only the large salmon he held in his hands. A car. Who on earth keeps a photograph of their car? Mia thought as she delved deeper into the box. Underneath a pile of bills, she found what she was looking for. A laptop and an iPhone. She tried turning on the iPhone. The battery was dead. She searched the box for the charger but didn’t find one, nor one for the laptop; when she tried turning that on, it, too, had run out of power.
Mia was heading to her office to fetch her own charger when she heard noise from one of the offices farther down the corridor. It would appear that not everyone had gone home after all. The new nerd was still there . . . what was his name again? Gabriel. Gabriel, that was it. Mia was annoyed that her brain still refused to work properly, her diet of pills and alcohol on the island having left its traces, nausea and dizziness, no appetite, and jumbled thoughts that refused to straighten out. She walked down the corridor to Gabriel’s office and made up her mind to start exercising again. She used to be in great shape once, but that was a long time ago. She wondered if Chen was still in town. Probably. But he was pissed off with her. Or was she pissed off with him? She couldn’t remember. She made a mental note. Call Chen. Get back to exercising. Get the blood flowing through her muscles. Get her brain working again.
“Hello, are you still here?”
Mia popped her head around without knocking. The young man with the blond hair jumped.
“Oh, I didn’t hear you,” he said apologetically.
Mia thought she detected a hint of blushing in his cheeks.
“Sorry, my mistake.” She smiled. “I was just wondering if you could help me with something.”
“Of course.” Gabriel nodded. “Do you mind if I finish connecting these?” He pointed to some cables lying on the floor.
“Take all the time you need,” Mia said.
“I thought the police were supposed to be experts,” Gabriel told her as he crawled under the desk with the cables in his hand. “But whoever installed this had no idea what they were doing.”
“Don’t ask me, I don’t know anything about computers. I’m down in the incident room.”
“Okay, I’ll be with you in a minute.”
Mia stopped by her own office on her way back and picked up the chargers, for both the laptop and the iPhone. Who keeps photographs of their car and their dog? Mia had no photographs at the office. She had put everything she owned into storage when she moved to Hitra. Paid three years’ rental in advance. She did not want to have to think about her personal possessions now. Her photographs, her parents, or Sigrid. She pushed the thought aside and continued to the incident room. She connected Roger Bakken’s laptop and phone to the chargers and went out on Munch’s smoking terrace to get a bit of fresh air. The evening twilight was descending over the city, and the air was growing colder. She pulled her leather jacket around herself more tightly and missed her knitted cap. Why was she acting like this? Behaving like a spoiled brat? Was she starting to feel sorry for herself? Now? She’d never complained a single day in her life. She had a sudden urge for a cigarette. She’d never smoked, but it seemed the right thing to do up here. Smoking in order to think, that was what Holger did. And where was he anyway? She checked her watch; it was two hours since he had gone to see his lawyer. She hoped it was nothing serious; they had enough on their plate as it was.
“Ahem, Mia?”
Gabriel had appeared in the incident room. Mia went back inside to join him. Suddenly she felt bad for the
guy, new to working with the police. Had anyone bothered showing him the ropes? Told him what he was here to do?
“How are you, Gabriel?” she said, sitting down on the big table.
The young hacker looked away and then at the floor; it definitely looked as if he was blushing. He really was a delicate little petal, Mia thought and produced a packet of lozenges from her pocket.
“Oh, I’m all right,” Gabriel said.
“You’re settling in? Do you have everything you need?”
“I’ve just finished installing the equipment. Looks good. In fact, I’m going to a meeting in Grønland later. Orientation. Someone named Møller?”
“Ah, yes, we call him Hat Trick,” Mia said. “He’s good.”
“Excellent.” Gabriel nodded. “I haven’t seen police databases before. It’ll be fun to see how they work.”
Mia smiled. “You’re a hacker and you’ve never had a look at our databases? I find that hard to believe. Or sneaked a peek at Interpol? Come on, you must have done that.”
Gabriel reddened again and looked tongue-tied. “I don’t know. . . .”
“I’m just pulling your leg, relax. I don’t care. Do I look as if I care?”
Mia offered him a lozenge. Gabriel took one and sat down on a chair. Mia liked this boy. Nice and clever. Polite and shy. It was good to be around such people again. In fact, she was starting to feel better. Her brain was recalibrating.
“What can I do for you?”
“Those two,” Mia said, pointing to the laptop and the iPhone currently charging.
“Whose are they?”
“Roger Bakken. The guy who ordered the dresses the girls were wearing.”
“The one with the tattoo?” Gabriel asked.
“Yes. You’re well informed.”
Gabriel smiled. “I record all the unit’s phone calls, text messages, and conversations. Everything shows up on my computer.”
Mia took another lozenge. “Really? Anything new?”
Gabriel gave her a strange look. “Are you asking me? I haven’t been here long.”
“It’s been a while since I was last here,” she said. “But seriously? Everything anyone says and all our text messages?”
“Yep. Plus, all our cell phones have a tracker so I can see where everyone is. Security and hypercommunication.”
“Good God. Quite useful, though.”
“Absolutely,” the young man agreed.
“So when Curry calls gay chat lines at night, we’ll know about it the next day, is that right?”
Gabriel looked uncomfortable. He wasn’t sure if she was joking or she was up to something.
“In theory, yes,” he said, his cheeks rather red once more.
“I’m just kidding.”
She got up and gave him a pat on the shoulder. Gabriel went over to the laptop and the cell phone, sat down on the floor, and turned on both devices. He continued to stare at them while they slowly came to life. The iPhone was up and running first, asking for a PIN code. The laptop followed soon after; that, too, was password-protected.
“Will it be easy to access it?”
“Yes.”
“Can you do it?”
“Now?”
“Yes, please.”
“Sure.”
Gabriel got up, went to his office, and returned with a memory stick. Mia watched as the young hacker went to work on the computer.
“I have a program called Ophcrack on this,” Gabriel said as he inserted the memory stick into the laptop. “All I have to do is change the start-up sequence so that it reads the memory stick before it reads the hard drive, understand?”
Mia nodded. She was not the sharpest person in the world when it came to computers, but this much she understood. Gabriel turned off the laptop and turned it back on again.
“There, as it starts up, it’ll first read the memory stick, and then it’ll load Ophcrack.”
Mia watched while Gabriel worked.
“Right. As you can see, this machine has two users, Roger and Randi.”
“Who is Randi?”
Gabriel shrugged. “Perhaps he had a girlfriend?”
“Remind me to check that out. Randi.”
“Will do. Which password do you want me to crack?”
“Let’s start with Roger.”
“Okay,” Gabriel said, pointing to the screen. “Take a look at the columns saying ‘LM Pwd 1’ and ‘LM Pwd 2.’ If the password is more than seven characters long, and it probably is, the first seven characters will appear in the column LM Pwd 1 and the rest in LM Pwd 2. Now all I have to do is select the user.”
Gabriel selected “Roger” and clicked a command in the program, “Crack.”
“And presto.”
Mia waited in tense anticipation for a few seconds while the program ran. Soon the password appeared on the screen in front of them:
“FordMustang67.”
The car in the photograph. If she hadn’t had this young genius to help her, she probably could have cracked it herself. Not in a few seconds, obviously, but eventually.
“Is this something everyone can do?” Mia wanted to know.
“Ophcrack is freeware. It’s available on the Net, so as long as you know what you’re looking for, then yes, everyone can do it.” Gabriel turned the computer on and off again.
The log-in screen appeared, and he was about to type in the password when Mia’s phone rang. The display said it was Holger Munch. She went out on the smoking terrace to answer it.
“Mia here.”
“Hi, Mia, it’s Holger.”
“Where are you?”
“In the car. Listen, there’s something we need to talk about.”
“Okay, right, go on, then.”
“Not on the phone. Let’s go for a beer.”
“You want a beer?”
“No, I don’t want a beer, but I do need to talk to you. It’s personal. Not work. You can have a beer; I’ll have a Farris.”
“Okay,” Mia said. “Where do you want to meet?”
“Are you at work?”
“Yes.”
“How about Justisen in a few minutes?”
“No problem, Holger. See you there.”
“See you soon,” Holger said, and ended the call.
How strange. Holger had never minded discussing problems on the phone before, Mia thought. Then she remembered what Gabriel had just told her. Their phones were being monitored—for their own safety, of course. Once again she hoped that nothing serious had happened.
“I’m afraid I need to leave,” she told Gabriel when she came back inside.
“Okay.” The hacker nodded. “The laptop is up and running now. You want me to crack the iPhone as well?”
“That would be super,” Mia said with a smile. “Will you be working late?”
“I’ll stick around for a while,” Gabriel said. “I prefer to work nights anyway, and there’s a lot for me to learn.”
“If something spectacular crops up, then call me, okay? If not, we’ll go over it tomorrow.”
“Understood,” Gabriel said.
“Thanks for your help,” Mia said.
She walked down the steps, pulled the jacket around herself more tightly, and made her way to Møllergata.
25
Holger Munch was sitting in Justisen’s beer garden under one of the heat lamps. He had just lit a cigarette and was looking anxiously at his phone, typing a message, but put it down the moment Mia appeared.
“Hello, Mia.”
“Hello, Holger.”
“Is it all right with you that we’re outside? I’ve already ordered.”
“Sure,” Mia said, pulling out a chair.
It was an Oslo evening at the end of April and, truth be told, still to
o cold to be sitting outside, but the heat lamp helped. Mia knew there was very little point in sitting indoors with Holger. He smoked nonstop, so she might as well make herself comfortable outside from the start. She took a blanket and covered her legs.
“What have you ordered?”
