Odd Numbers

by Anne Holt

  If he had the same media habits as Linus, it was not so strange that the Security Service had been forced to resort to good old-fashioned methods.

  Manpower, no less.

  Manpower on foot and possibly bugging equipment in the apartment.

  The tiny burst of radio noise was a mistake, of course. A fuck-up that hardly anyone apart from Billy T. would have discovered. The racket must have come from a white delivery van parked on the opposite side of the street, just beside the garbage container he had hidden behind thirty-six hours earlier. It was exactly as neutral and dirty as it was meant to be. Billy T. shifted onto the other knee and repeated the same finicky operation with his left shoe.

  There was silence all around.

  No telecom workers on the telegraph poles. No ditchdiggers taking a break and a cola. No other teams from the Security Service. A cat swaggered quietly across the street, and at the parking area parallel to the apartment block where Arfan Olsen lived there was the odd abandoned car.

  One post, Billy T. concluded. The white delivery van. That must mean that they knew Arfan was not at home. If he had been there, they would have had people on all sides of the building. These people would remain here, for safety’s sake, to report on any possible visitors.

  Irregularities.

  What did he know?

  Billy T. caught himself grinning as he stood up and brushed the knees of his trousers. The Security Service nowadays depended mainly on computer use. Unbelievably enormous computers, with algorithms and encoded alarms and other crazy stuff that Billy T. had no idea about. The Internet was the great arena of modern intelligence gathering, and many of the slobs were so stupid that they broadcast information about their planned crimes on web pages that they must be aware were under constant surveillance. Especially these damned jihadists who, under cover of freedom of speech and full of hubris, ran their own hate pages against the very society that protected them.

  The whole Internet could go fuck itself. This was the sort of thing that was Billy T.’s domain.

  He veered to the right instead of the left, away from the delivery van and Arfan Olsen’s apartment block. He then skirted the smaller building on the south side of the street and turned north again in its lee. He crossed the grassy area to Årvollveien, followed it for a stretch, and turned right into Kildeveien. There, he crossed another plot of grass and finally found himself at the rear of Arfan’s apartment building—on the side facing west, where the balconies were situated.

  Some of them were glassed in. A disappointment, he initially thought.

  The second doorbell up on the left side, he remembered from the one that Linus had rung. From this side of the building, that apartment would be on the right. The first floor on the right-hand side of the first pair of balconies. As if to take his bearings, he pointed his forefinger at the one he thought must be the correct balcony. A blessed mist had drifted in over Årvoll after the light drizzle had stopped, and the target was barely more than a hundred yards off now.

  More than enough for him. Everything was still completely silent.

  He crossed over to the balcony on the ground floor. Fortunately it had no glass at the front, and the balcony itself was sufficiently low for a man of his height to be able to look over the edge quite easily.

  A small seating unit was stored in the corner. He could see the outlines of a gas barbecue under a tarpaulin and three empty flowerpots stacked on top of the furniture. It was dark inside. Taking a chance, he hauled himself over the edge.

  Progress was easier than he had feared. He had no idea what he weighed nowadays. It was obviously too much, and doubt nagged at him as it dawned on him what sort of procedure climbing up onto the balcony above would involve.

  He pressed his face to the window, using his hand to screen it from the light, and peered inside. No one at home. At least not in the living room. He quickly unscrewed the clamps holding the side glass in place, pulled it from the slots into which it was inserted, and set it carefully aside against the wall. At a speed and with a flexibility of which he would not have thought himself capable, he clambered onto the edge, supporting himself by the drainpipe that ran the length of all three balconies, and managed with the aid of an outlet on the wall as a foothold to hoist himself up to the next story.

  Against all odds, he succeeded.

  For a few seconds, he stood close to the wall at the right of the balcony to catch his breath. It was the only half square yard that could not be seen from inside, unless you walked all the way up to the window.

  His thighs were smarting. He could hear his pulse racing. He breathed with his mouth open and forced himself to calm down.

  Eventually he dared to lean slightly to the right. Swiftly, and only to cast a glance inside. It was dark in there and seemed deserted.

  Yet again he inclined forward and peered in for perhaps ten seconds, before concluding that his interpretation of the Security Service’s single surveillance post was accurate: Arfan Olsen was not at home.

  Billy T. hunkered down in front of the balcony door and fished his skeleton key out of his jacket pocket. It was too easy. People spent thousands of kroner on securing their front doors, without it registering that it was much easier to gain access through the balcony.

  It took him all of eleven seconds—he counted—before donning a pair of disposable gloves.

  As quietly as possible, he opened the door and sneaked inside. Since the apartment was in all likelihood bugged, he flipped off his shoes and looked around.

  It smelled as if there was nothing there.

  The living room was spartanly furnished. A sofa from IKEA, the same as the one he himself had. An armchair and an old coffee table, marked by glasses and moisture on the wood. Along one wall was a wide shelf unit, with the lower part comprising cabinets with doors. He approached it and quickly surveyed the books that filled only three of the twenty-seven feet of shelving in total. Mostly legal textbooks, he noted. A couple of novels by Jo Nesbø and a world atlas. Three travel guides, for Berlin, Prague, and Rome. The walls were bare.

  It was just as tidy there as in Linus’s room. In fact, this was Linus’s room in living room format.

  Billy T. felt his pulse rate soar again, though he could not fathom why. Everything was still silent. Nonetheless he felt an intense urge to get out of the apartment. He could no longer understand why he was here.

  He struggled to calm his breathing, but his hands and feet were tingling. Realizing he was hyperventilating, he rummaged feverishly in his pockets for something resembling a bag. He could only find keys, loose change, and his phone and instead cupped his hands. As well as he could, he breathed slowly and deeply in and out through the opening beside his left thumb.

  Linus was telling the truth, then. Linus had not converted.

  He tried desperately to remember what had made him think this was a good idea. What it was that had made it necessary for him to break into an apartment in Årvoll to find out what his son had gotten himself involved in. His mind simply would not function; it seemed as if all his thought sequences had let go before they had really gotten started. Everything was a jumble, and with a jerk, he tore his hands away from his mouth and took out his phone. His fingers were shaking as he found his way to the camera. Removing the glove from his right hand, he raised the phone to head height and began to snap.

  The balcony, the living room. He turned around, took two steps back, and photographed the bookshelves with two clicks, the right side and then the left.

  It was helpful to do something that demanded nothing more than pressing a button. He didn’t have a single thought left other than photographing the apartment. He tiptoed from room to room, opening closets and drawers with his still-gloved left hand, and snapped away wildly. After only a few minutes, there was hardly anything in the apartment that had not been stored on Billy T.’s new phone.

  His pulse was still rocketing, but he no longer felt so riddled with anxiety. Stepping into his shoes, he stuffed hi
s phone into his inside pocket and sidled back out onto the balcony.

  Two minutes later, he was standing once more on the grassy ground. The urge to flee from there as fast as his feet would carry him was overwhelming. Nevertheless, he ambled at a leisurely pace across the lawn, taking the same route that he had come on, and did not look back until he reached the little stand of trees beside Kildeveien.

  Everything was hushed. No one had seen him. The cool, damp air felt liberating, and he breathed more easily. He could only just make out the balconies in the mist. On Monday, when he had made up his mind to get to the bottom of whatever Linus was doing, he had paid a visit to his internist and been signed off work because of a knee injury. There was nothing at all wrong with either of his knees, and for that reason he could add benefit fraud to the list of crimes he had committed in the past few days.

  The list was growing quite long.

  Shivering in the cold, Billy T. walked on. Now at least he had discovered what the unlawful visit to Arfan Olsen had been about, and his anxiety attack had begun to wane.

  Silje Sørensen feared she was coming down with something. She felt uncomfortably hot, her neck was itching, and the headache that had lasted for more than twenty-four hours was now killing her.

  “Since you’re here,” she said with a sigh when Håkon Sand came through the door, as usual with no warning except a peremptory knock on the door the second before it opened, “I need to go home now and catch some sleep.”

  It was now half past six on the evening of Thursday, April 10.

  In the wake of the embarrassing affair that had been Khalil Alwasir’s brutal arrest and the attempt to redress it with an unreserved apology, things had really reached boiling point out there on the streets.

  It was just over forty-eight hours since the explosion in Gimle terrasse. Until now, public statements had been characterized by a certain respect for the numerous fatalities and the surviving relatives, at least in the traditional media. But even there they had given space to what Silje, in her heart of hearts, called extreme right-wing forces, even though she was well aware that unfortunately they did not qualify for that title. There were those who were even worse. Though they did not resort to newspapers and TV stations, they had social media all the same.

  As if the Security Service did not already have enough to do, she had thought, on the rare occasions she had taken a minute or two to check Facebook and Twitter.

  The Muslim voices in Norwegian public life, with only a few exceptions, had kept their silence at any rate.

  They were grieving.

  The funerals were already in progress for the families who had something to bury. That did not apply to them all. On her orders, both the police and forensics teams had done their utmost to release the bodies as quickly as possible. The surviving relatives should at least not suffer unnecessarily, through being unable to put their loved ones into the earth as soon as was practical and actually possible.

  Following the incident at Oslo Central Station, patience had run out for many of them.

  Two members of Parliament—a woman from the Conservative Party and a man from the Socialist Left—had seemed so furious during an interview on NRK that Silje thought she could feel the drops of spittle through the TV screen. They did not fail to make a point, time and time again, that there was no reason in the world to assume Khalil Alwasir was a terrorist, apart from police jumping to conclusions exclusively on the grounds of skin and hair color. Alwasir had short hair and no beard, and he wore an Armani jacket and designer jeans. He could have shown his identification as a senior manager at Aker Solutions if the police had taken thirty seconds to listen instead of pushing him to the ground so viciously that he had passed out.

  Racism, seethed trend-setting Muslims throughout the country, and Silje could do nothing other than agree that they were partly right. Not in public, of course: she had assured the general public that this was a difficult time and that Alwasir had left behind an ownerless backpack despite stern warnings from the authorities about that sort of thing. However, she had been hopping mad in private to Håkon until around ten o’clock, when he had shrugged and gone home to sleep.

  Of course it was racism. Everyday racism combined with hysteria, she thought. A dangerous mixture.

  “Can I have a short report before you leave?” Håkon asked, flopping down into a chair. “My God, it was good to get some sleep.”

  “I can believe it. I could fall into a coma just sitting here.”

  “You had sorted out the Tunisian affair before I left, so we don’t need to talk about that.”

  She opened her mouth to bawl him out again but lacked the energy. “The explosives,” she said instead.

  “Yes?”

  “The provisional analysis suggests that it is NATO’s type of C4. In other words, it could be from our own armed forces—unfortunately or fortunately, depending on how you look at it. If it were from the Middle East, then we’d have a gigantic problem because someone must have brought it here. If it’s Norwegian, then someone here at home, to say the least, has some explaining to do.”

  “The army,” Håkon said, nodding.

  “Primarily them maybe, but C4 can also be found in civilian use here in Norway. Extremely limited, but all the same. We’re working extensively on closer analysis that might tell us more about the mixture proportions, and so hopefully that will give us an answer as to where it came from. Besides, these types of explosives can contain different trace elements. They’re working at full blast, to use what might be a tasteless expression.”

  “We’ll have to be patient then,” he said, grinning.

  “Tell that to everyone out there,” she said with a sigh, and put her face in her hands.

  “What about the homicide case, then? Jørgen, alias Abdullah?”

  She let herself sink back into her big office chair, leaning back and closing her eyes. “No news,” she mumbled.

  “There’s never no scrap of news at all,” Håkon interjected. “Something more on the time of death, for example?”

  “The provisional estimate is sometime between Saturday evening and Sunday afternoon. Which confirms the problem.”

  “What problem?”

  Silje opened her eyes and stared at him.

  “You’d think I was the one who was rested rather than you. The time line, of course! On the video we got on Tuesday evening, Abdullah is reading out a message about NCIN’s office being bombed. But when NCIN was actually blown to smithereens, our friend was already dismembered and in a pile of stones in Marka from the look of things.”

  She squeezed her eyes tightly shut and then opened them wide.

  “I mean,” she murmured, “he may of course have been dismembered at some time later than the time of death. And carried out there, you see.”

  “Have we managed to establish some proper contact with NCIN, in actual fact?”

  Silje shrugged.

  “They have quite a few . . . routines to go through in these first few days. And I expect they’re fairly disconcerted, understandably. Their leader died, as you know, but we’ve finally managed to establish some kind of continuous contact with the deputy leader. What’s her name again?”

  “Don’t remember. It took me a couple of years to learn the names of Abid Raja and Hadia Taijik. It’s as though we don’t have any reference points for these odd combinations of letters! After all, Ola is Ola, Marius is Marius, and Mohammad is okay enough, for that matter. But all these other names are just like gobbledy—”

  “Håkon!”

  “Oops,” he said, with a light smack at his mouth. “Forgot for a moment to be PC.”

  Silence ensued.

  Silje imagined she could hear all the journalists at the entrance when she closed her eyes, all the way up to the eighth floor, behind closed windows. When she opened them again, the chirping sound had gone.

  “Have we asked the Americans?” Håkon queried.

  “For satellite photos? Yes. They don’t
like to admit to keeping such a close eye on Norway, but those satellites of theirs travel over us at regular intervals. They almost certainly have images of Nordmarka. They might be incredibly detailed. If we’re really lucky, they might have taken some just when the body was dumped. In a normal criminal case, they would just look back at us, quizzical and slightly affronted. In a terrorist case like this . . .”

  She gulped and touched her throat.

  “I think I’m coming down with a bug.”

  “You can’t do that.”

  “In a case like this, it may be that the Americans will be more amicably inclined. With all due discretion, of course. We probably won’t be permitted to tell anyone, to put it bluntly. The Ministry of Foreign Affairs is working on it. We’ll see.”

  Håkon got to his feet and crossed over to the coffee machine, where he pressed a couple of buttons to initiate the usual low hum.

  “Do you want some?”

  “No, thanks,” she said. “I hope to go out like a light as soon as I get home.”

  “There’s one thing I’ve thought of,” he said as he waited for the machine to finish its tune.

  Silje did not answer. She was trying to gather strength to stand up but was unsure whether it was at all physically possible.

  “Who actually benefits from NCIN being so badly harmed?”

  “No one apart from terrorists benefits from terrorism,” she said tonelessly.

  “But . . .”

  Håkon picked up his double espresso and went back to his chair.

  “. . . in fact, both sets of extremists benefit from this, don’t they?”

  “No idea,” she muttered. “I want to go home. Can you call the car service? I shouldn’t really drive myself in this condition.”

  “People such as Kari Thue are having a field day. As well as those retards on the far right of the Progress Party.”

  “Håkon.”

  She did not have the energy to imbue the rebuke with any vehemence.

  “But have you heard them, or what? They’re enjoying themselves immensely with all this ‘told you so’ rhetoric—I’ve never heard anything like it. At the same time, it’s obvious that at least the most extreme of the Muslims are strutting about at the thought of NCIN getting a shot across their bow. Quite literally.”