by Jo Nesbo
No, Palle wouldn’t be giving Wenche the Saturn stud. And he wouldn’t be giving her any lost earring either. And she would never know they’d been tricked, the pair of them. Because from this afternoon onwards, Palle will no longer be among us, as they say. And she’ll have to make do with what she has. Meaning me. But I think she’ll get to like me. The new me. Next in line for a taxi licence following Palle’s unexpected demise. I smiled to myself in the mirror, steering with one hand, the other in my pocket, where I held the pin of the pearl earring I had once given Wenche. Held it gently, but firmly. The way you hold a balloon on a string.
PART TWO
Power
RAT ISLAND
I
a halyard flaps lazily against the flagpole in the wind. I look out over the city. It seems strangely peaceful. But then, from the roof of a ninety-floor skyscraper you don’t see the human ants fleeing or hunting through the streets. Hear the cries of those beaten to the ground, the pleas for mercy, the click of the cocked rifle. But you hear the shooting. The growl of a solitary motorcycle. And now that night has fallen you see the fires.
Although from up here most of them look small. The torched cars that look like cheerful lanterns, casting a little light in a city in which it has been over a year since the street lamps stopped working.
I heard a burst of machine-gun fire, not too long. They’re young, but they’ve learned when to stop to prevent the weapon from overheating. They have learned what they need to know in order to survive in these times. Or to be more accurate: to survive a little longer than a person whose needs are the same as yours; food, weapons, shelter, petrol, clothing, drugs and at least one woman who can carry a man’s genes into the next generation. To employ a cliché, it’s a jungle down there. And the jungle gets closer with each day that passes not with each hour. I’m guessing the building we’re standing on now will be part of the jungle by first light.
Up here those who are able to evacuate are doing so. The elite, the richest of the rich, the ones who could afford the ticket out. I stand and study them, the final group of fourteen people, impatiently peering in the direction of the bay from which they expect to see it approach, the military helicopter shuttling back and forth between here and the aircraft carrier the New Frontier. The ship has room for three and a half thousand people, food, medicine and everything else necessary for four years on the open sea without needing to visit a harbour. It sails tonight and will be at sea for an indefinite period of time. I don’t know what the tickets cost, only that it’s slightly less expensive for women since it has been decided that there are to be equal numbers of both sexes on board. No one’s saying it out loud, but this is effectively a Noah’s Ark for the elite.
My childhood friend Colin Lowe stands in front of me. His wife Liza and daughter Beth are closer to the landing pad, eyes peeled for the helicopter. Colin is one of the country’s wealthiest entrepreneurs. He owns internet sites and properties all over the world, including the skyscraper we’re standing on. But, as he has just told me, it took them less than thirty minutes to pack.
‘You’ve got everything you need,’ I assure him.
The atmosphere up here is nervous, hectic but also strangely excited. Heavily armed and uniformed private militia men, paid for by Colin Lowe Inc., guard the landing pad and the door to the roof. There are more of them on the ground level and around the lifts. Their job is to stop anyone storming the building in the hope of reaching safety before the gangs come. Or even better, of boarding the helicopter out to New Frontier. It’s hard to blame those who try, and hard to blame those who stop them. We fight for ourselves and those dearest to us, that’s the way we’re made.
When I arrived at the building earlier in the evening there was a smell of fear and desperation around the gates. I saw a man wearing an expensive suit offer one of the guards at the entrance a briefcase stuffed with notes, but the guard turned him down. Either because there were witnesses, or because no one knows whether that money will be worth anything tomorrow. There was a beautiful, middle-aged woman behind him whom I thought I recognised. As she offered herself to the head guard she reminded him of the names of the films she had acted in.
‘We’re heading for entropy,’ says Colin.
‘You know perfectly well I don’t know what words like that mean,’ I say.
‘The Second Law of Thermodynamics.’
‘Still blank.’
‘Don’t you legal people know anything?’
‘Only how to clean up after the engineers.’
Colin laughs. I had just summed up the symbiotic nature of our partnership in Lowe Inc. over the last fifteen years.
‘Entropy,’ says Colin, and looks out over the city’s skyline, a jagged silhouette against a sun that is about to disappear into the sea. ‘Entropy means that, in a closed system, over the course of time everything will be destroyed. When you leave a sandcastle it will be changed the following day by the weather and the wind. Not replaced by something even more fantastic but just flatter, greyer. Lifeless, soulless. Nothing. That’s entropy, Will. It’s the most universal natural law of them all.’
‘The law of lawlessness,’ I say.
‘Thus speaks the lawyer.’
‘Thus speak the philosophers. According to Hobbes, without laws, without a social contract, we’ll be thrown out into a chaos worse than the worst dictatorship. And the way things are looking now, he was right.’
‘Leviathan is here,’ Colin concurs.
‘What’s Leviathan?’ asks his daughter Beth. Without our noticing it she’s come over to join us. She’s seventeen, three years younger than her brother Brad, who is out there somewhere. She looks so like my own daughter Amy, but that isn’t the only reason I feel the tears welling up when I look at Beth.
‘It’s the story of a sea monster that doesn’t exist,’ I tell her when Colin doesn’t reply.
‘Then how can it be here?’
‘It’s just an image, darling.’ Colin pulls his daughter close. ‘A famous philosopher used it to describe a society without law and order.’
‘Like this one?’ she asks.
A man in military uniform approaches. Colin coughs. ‘Go and keep Mum company, Beth, I’ll be along soon.’
She obediently runs off.
‘Lieutenant?’ says Colin.
‘Mr Lowe.’ The uniformed man has thick, short grey hair and a crackling walkie-talkie from which an agitated voice seems to be trying to contact him. ‘My man on the ground floor tells me they’re having trouble keeping people out. Should they use live ammunition if…?’
‘Are they gangs?’
‘Mostly ordinary people hoping to board the helicopter, Mr Lowe.’
‘Poor sods. Only shoot as a last resort.’
‘Very well, sir.’
‘How long until the helicopter gets here?’
‘The pilot says in about twenty minutes, sir.’
‘OK. Keep us posted when it comes so that everyone is ready to board as soon as it lands.’
‘Very good, Mr Lowe.’
As the lieutenant moves away from us I hear him answer the voice on the walkie-talkie. ‘I know, sergeant, but our orders are not to use more force than is necessary. Understood? Yes, maintain your position and…’
His words fade, leaving behind the soft tapping of the halyard and the siren of a police car that rises up from the dark streets below us. Colin and I both know it isn’t the police – it’s been over a year since they dared patrol the streets after nightfall – but probably four young men armed with automatic weapons and doped up enough to leave their reflexes intact and hopefully intensified but their inhibitions dulled. Although inhibitions aren’t just dulled, they’re more or less gone. And not just among these predators but among the population in general.
And maybe that’s the only excuse for what I’ve done.
I
can still hear that motorcycle. There must be a hole in the silencer or whatever it’s called.
* * *
—
I accelerate down the empty street, through the city, heading southwards, towards the slaughterhouse. It makes a racket from that bullet-hole in the silencer, gotta get that fixed. And I need petrol. The needle’s showing red, no bloody way of knowing if I’ve enough to get there. You definitely do not want to get stranded in the city centre in the middle of the night without your gang, because suddenly you’re the prey. But OK, as long as I have petrol, as long as this engine keeps turning then I’m at least partway up the food chain. Because I’ve found what I was looking for up on the hillside behind me. The opening. The hole in the fortress. Maybe everyone living in the villa will be dead in a few hours’ time, maybe not. I’m not the judge here, I’m just the messenger. The sound of the bike echoes round the tall, deserted office blocks. If I ride too hard I might run out of petrol, but the longer I’m still here in the centre the greater my chances of getting in trouble. The mob I just passed up by the Lowe building, for example, when I slowed down a bit one of them tried to grab me to get hold of the bike. People are animals, they’re desperate, they’re angry and afraid. For fuck’s sake. What’s happened to this city? What’s happened to this big, great country?
II
‘Helicopter due in eighteen minutes!’ shouts the lieutenant.
‘One thousand and eighty seconds,’ says Colin, always quicker than me at mental arithmetic.
It didn’t take long from the discovery of the virus to the outbreak of the pandemic and the sudden dissolution of everything. People dropped like flies. In the first instance from the disease, then as a result of the collapse of the economy and the social and political institutions. Naturally, the poor were hardest hit by the pandemic; bad news always operates that way. But it was not until food shortages occurred that the situation changed from being something societies tried to tackle together into a struggle between the haves and the have-nots. First pitting the poor against the rich, and then the poor against the poor, until finally the only ones who weren’t enemies were family and friends. The food shops were empty, and in due course the gun shops too, although the production of guns and rifles was about the last to stop. The forces of law and order, already breaking down, collapsed. The richest barricaded themselves in behind the walls of their farms and country mansions, preferably on elevated sites which were easier to defend. A few of the very richest, such as Colin Lowe, who had seen the coming of the collapse long before the pandemic, had taken the precaution of acquiring private estates and islands that were self-sufficient and guarded by private militia equipped with the latest in weapons technology. Paradoxically the virus helped them in their struggle against those who posed the greatest threat to them: hordes of the poor and the desperate. Because the virus spread out of control in and around households where people lived in crowded conditions without health insurance and unable to afford to follow the government’s quarantine rules. But once the pandemic had levelled off and become less of a threat than the plundering I think the hardest hit were those stuck in the middle. Those with something that could be taken from them but without the means to protect and defend it. And once they had lost everything these people also turned into plunderers. Poverty, desperation, violence, all were contagious.
When the pandemic started I was head of the legal department of Colin’s IT company. The virus came from the east, from the other end of the country, but it swept over us – the majority, the safe middle class – before we had time to react.
When Colin first showed me Rat Island five years earlier, a tiny prison island of no more than a hundred hectares not far from the airport, I’d teased him about being a doomsday prepper, one of those paranoid wackos who spends all their time preparing for the worst, for the day when they have no one but themselves to rely on. The reason there are so many of them in our country probably has something to do with the culture of individual liberty here. You make your own luck and no one’ll stop you, but no one’ll help you either.
‘It’s just common sense,’ was his reply when I suggested that it was bordering on the paranoid. ‘I’m an engineer and a programmer, and people like us aren’t hysterics who go around thinking the end is nigh. We just reckon on the likelihood of something unlikely happening, same as we do in our work. Because there’s one thing you can be sure of, and that is that, given enough time, everything – but absolutely everything – that can happen will happen. The likelihood of the breakdown of society in my lifetime isn’t great, but then it isn’t negligible either. When I multiply that likelihood by what it would cost me, financially and in terms of quality of life, what that gives me is the price I should be willing to pay for my insurance. This –’ he gestured with his hand in the direction of the barren and rocky island with the empty concrete buildings that had once been built to keep killers in, not out – ‘is a small price to pay if I want to sleep better at night.’
At that time I was not aware that he already had cabinets full of weapons there. Nor that the reason he and several of his director friends had undergone laser surgery to correct near-sightedness had not been cosmetic but from the knowledge that in a world without law and order it would be difficult to get hold of either spectacles or contact lenses, and that clear eyesight would be critical in a struggle to survive that would have brought us a step closer to the Stone Age.
‘No reason not to be prepared, Will. If only for your family’s sake.’
But I had not been prepared.
It is not the case that the looting started when the authorities decided to open the prisons which had, in effect, become chambers of death in which isolation was impossible and the virus spread unhindered. The numbers of prisoners released in this way was not sufficient in itself to account for the chaos. It was the feeling it created. A feeling that the authorities were losing control, that law and order were suspended, that soon we would have to grab whatever we could before others grabbed it first. Nor was it that we failed to see or understand what was happening. It was not an irrational fear. We knew that if we could just put this pandemic behind us – and in some countries it was already on the wane – we would be able to return to our normal lives. But we also saw that fear had grown stronger than the common sense of the herd. It wasn’t mass hysteria but the lack of a shared common sense. So people made individual choices that were rational and sensible for themselves and those they loved, but catastrophic for the rest of society.
Some became looters and turned to violence out of sheer necessity.
Others – like Colin’s son Brad – did so because they wanted to.
Brad Lowe’s relationship with his father was complicated. As his firstborn, Brad was the one Colin expected to take over the business after him. But it wasn’t something Brad was cut out for. He lacked his father’s intellect and his capacity for work, had neither his vision nor his desire to change the world, and none of his charm or his ability to enthuse others. What he had inherited from his father was an egotism that was at times infinite, and a willingness to sacrifice everything and everyone in pursuit of his goal. It might involve Brad using his father’s money to bribe the trainer to pick him for the college football team ahead of others with more talent. Or persuading his father to give him money for a project he and his friends had started to help less fortunate students but which, as it turned out, went towards drugs, women and wild parties in the off-campus house they rented. The final straw that made Colin remove his son from college was when the dean informed him that Brad had physically threatened him after it was discovered he had forged documents to make it look as though he had passed certain exams he had not even taken.
Brad came back home the ultimate loser that summer. And I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him. For years our families used to spend mountain holidays in an enormous two-storey cabin we rented together until Colin bought the place. The bad relat
ionship between father and son made it hard for the rest of us to be around Brad. Because he wasn’t a boy without feelings. Quite the contrary, in fact; he had way too many of them. He loved and admired his father. It had always been that way and was something people could see clearly. A lot more clearly than the fact that the father loved his son. Now Brad’s emotions veered wildly between despair, anger, an apathetic indifference and an aggression directed against everyone who didn’t do what he wanted them to, whether one of his family, one of ours, or one of the employees at the cabin. And that was when I discovered the other Colin inside Brad. The one who appeared when Colin’s seductive intelligence and contagious enthusiasm failed to persuade people: the threatening person. The Colin who could almost on a whim buy up some troublesome little competitor, strip its assets and put the workers out of a job. On the couple of occasions when I had trashed Colin’s plan on legal grounds he had become so angry that I know he was within a whisker of firing me. I know because I recognised from childhood the black look that came into his eyes when he didn’t get his way.
