Odd Numbers

by Anne Holt

  “How many are we talking about?”

  “Two hundred and four backpacks were sold when the recall was announced. One hundred and eighty-six people got their money back.”

  “So there are . . . eighteen backpacks out there? There are only eighteen backpacks of that type?”

  “Plus or minus some shrinkage, I’d think.”

  Silje looked at his coffee cup.

  “It is at least something to go on,” she said. “Would you make one for me too?”

  Håkon set the machine going again.

  “We’re working further with what we have. With what we don’t have, too, to some extent. Using all our resources—I’ve almost lost track of everyone who’s working on this now. We have considered going public with a general search for these backpacks but have decided that would be premature. In the first place, we must be surer that this picture is actually relevant to the case, and not just a picture of three tough guys out on a spring trek. And second, there’s always such a damned uproar about these public appeals that we’d prefer to wait until we finally don’t have a choice. Here.”

  He crossed the room and placed a cup of espresso in front of her.

  “Poor Roger Michaelsen,” she said, sipping the scalding liquid.

  “It’s not at all a shame for the guy. I think he showed balls. It’s somewhat un-Norwegian to take the blame in that way.”

  “He didn’t take the blame. He took responsibility.”

  “Same thing. Do you remember the Colonel? Prag? Pral? The one in Vassdalen.”

  “Colonel Pran. Arne Pran, I think his name was. He gave orders for a military exercise in an area prone to landslides. Sixteen soldiers died. Yes, indeed. I remember that well. It must have been sometime at the end of the eighties.”

  “He took both the blame and the responsibility, that one! Our friend Roger in the Progress Party can come out of that with his head held high. He is in a small but exclusive group of people who actually take the consequences of not having done their job. Besides, his departure is simply feeding the wolves. The pressure on you and Harald Jensen will diminish—at least for a day or two.”

  There was a tap on the door.

  “Come in,” Silje said in a loud voice.

  Bertil Orre had had a haircut, and his suit must have been new. How he could afford such an extensive wardrobe on a secretary’s salary, working for the government, had been incomprehensible to Silje—until a couple of weeks ago, when she had learned that he still lived at home with his mother.

  “Yes?” she said, forcing a smile to hide her own impatience.

  This was the fourth time he had knocked in the past hour.

  “VG is on the line again. On my personal cell phone number, believe it or not. They claim that Miriam down in the communications office has promised them an interview with you. What’s more . . .”

  His phone rang. Silje thought she recognized an electronic version of “Let It Swing.” Merely glancing at his phone, Bertil silenced it and dropped it into his pocket.

  “Harald Jensen wants to talk to you. At his office in Nydalen, I’m afraid. He was quite insistent. As soon as is at all possible.”

  Silje rose from her seat, pouring the rest of her coffee down her throat.

  “VG can whistle for an interview any time this week,” she said, using her hands to brush her uniform skirt. “Speak to Miriam, please, and sort that out. As far as Harald is concerned . . .”

  She grabbed her jacket from a hanger on the wall and pulled it on.

  “. . . then call for a car for me, please. I’m far more favorably disposed to Harald Jensen.”

  Henrik Holme’s warm feelings for his new colleague, Hanne Wilhelmsen, were cooling fast.

  Of course, he could accept that she had not made contact with him over the weekend. Now, however, it was past three o’clock on Monday afternoon, and she had still not been in touch. After his dreadful meeting with Ingrid Knoph that same morning, he had gone home for a hot shower and clean clothes.

  Afterward, he had been at a total loss.

  Ought he to go to work?

  He felt in the way there—an outsider, as usual, but even worse than normal. While all the others were working away on the same case, it seemed as if he was merely going through the motions in the office, making the odd search in the database and simply waiting for Hanne to contact him.

  Staying at home did not seem right either. He had not been given time off. He had to find something to do. At least it had to appear as if he had, he finally concluded, and hit on a partial solution: he left Karina’s photo album at home and then took a taxi to police headquarters to show that he wasn’t a shirker.

  He could have saved himself the bother.

  Hardly anyone noticed him. The atmosphere in headquarters was tense—intense, almost: people hastened along the corridors, and many of them bore clear signs of not having slept well for the past week. No one even laughed at him when they thought he was not looking. No one knocked on his door, and when it was two o’clock, he put on his leather jacket and went home. No one tried to stop him.

  Now he had brewed a substantial pot of green tea, and his mood brightened somewhat at the idea of what Karina’s photo album might contain. He took out a candle from the massive corner cupboard and placed it in a holder that he set down on the window ledge in the kitchen. Wiping the table thoroughly with a cloth, he put down the pink album. From a top cabinet, he fetched a couple of cookies that he arranged on a plate. With no chocolate chips. He didn’t want to make a mess.

  He placed his phone at precise right angles to the album, with the display visible, after double-checking the battery level and that the sound was switched on.

  The very first photograph was a large baby picture. Henrik was confused for a moment. Ingrid Knoph had said that there were a number of these albums, and that this one was from the last two years before Karina’s disappearance. He leafed quickly on through the pages. The rest of the pictures were far more recent. The baby picture was probably just inserted as a gimmick, some kind of ex libris label to indicate who the album was about.

  Henrik thought most babies looked alike: chubby and drooling.

  This one was exceptionally sweet, he thought as he flicked back.

  Karina had curly hair as a baby, and she had acquired two teeth. She was gazing directly at the photographer and looked as if she would split her sides laughing. Her eyes were two narrow slits in her round face above a sturdy double chin, and she was holding a rattle in one hand.

  A professor at police college had once said that they always ought to obtain a baby photograph of all victims and perpetrators—at least in serious violent crimes and homicide cases. It would remind them of their humanity, vulnerability, and original innocence, he felt. There could be something in that. This little troll was some distance away from a slightly provocative seventeen-year-old with blue hair.

  Karina had never been only that.

  Not when she disappeared, either.

  To her mother, she was the most important thing in the world. Her mother had seen so much in her daughter that she could not live with the knowledge of her death. Her father had almost certainly also loved Karina. You could easily love a child without getting along particularly well with him or her. Henrik’s father was quite different from him, and they had never entirely understood each other. All the same, he did not doubt that his father loved him, and never had doubted it, even though they had barely held a decent conversation since the time when Henrik was a little boy.

  To Frode and Ingrid Knoph, this tiny baby—an only child and undoubtedly very much longed for—had been the most important thing in the world—even when she was seventeen and had gone missing.

  Henrik browsed further through the album.

  Few of the photographs were especially good. Snapshots in the main, as a rule with someone’s movement reducing the sharpness of the focus in parts of the image. There was Karina on a trip to a holiday cabin, Karina at a party, and K
arina on what must be a vacation in Greece with her parents. Frode Knoph looked serious in all the pictures. Ingrid and Karina were smiling. A series of photographs in the middle of the album looked as if they had been taken on a climb up a bare mountainside. The backpacks suggested that they were traveling from one cabin to another, perhaps the entire family. Frode was not in any of these pictures, but he had probably been the one who had snapped the photographs.

  Two confirmation photos had obviously been taken by a professional photographer. One was full length and so big that it covered one entire page. Karina was wearing her regional costume. Henrik was not sure which one, but his mother had taught him that the ones with beadwork on the chest were always from western Norway. He knew it was not a Hardanger costume, but thought it might be from Voss.

  He wondered what connection the Knoph family had to Voss.

  And leafed on through the album.

  On the third-to-last page he found what he had been hoping for.

  It was so surprising that he almost spilled tea over the whole album, since he had just raised his cup to take a drink.

  It was a series of pictures taken in an old-fashioned photo booth. Four pictures on a vertical strip, one on top of the other, of three teenagers squeezed together in a small cubicle. Karina sat in the center, pulling faces, while two dark-skinned boys pushed their way into the photograph from either side.

  At the bottom photo, one of the boys had won the battle. He had thrust his face in front of both the others and was presenting a crooked smile to the camera as he made a V-sign with his fingers.

  “Mohammad F., Fawad, and me, summer 1996.”

  Karina must be left-handed, he noticed. The handwriting sloped abruptly to the left, and here and there throughout the album, her hand had drawn ink across the page.

  Previously, he had one name in his possession. A first name.

  Now he had two first names, an initial, and a fairly good photograph.

  It was honestly almost unbelievable.

  A few months ago, the entire department had been invited to Kripos for a briefing about new technological aids in the fight against crime. They were in full swing, with the construction of a national center of expertise in biometrics. By encoding the almost 170,000 photographs of criminals that the police already held in their databases, it was envisaged that in the near future, the police would possess an effective instrument for impeding known offenders from crossing land borders.

  Facial recognition, quite simply, and they had made immense progress. The system was already used for recognizing people from photographs. One of the investigators, a hefty guy with thirty years in the police force behind him, had explained that the breakthrough had come about when the Americans had shown greater generosity about sharing their skills in biometrics.

  They were formidable, he had said, opening his eyes wide to emphasize the significance.

  Henrik’s little computer program was far from advanced. He had bought it on the Internet on his iPad without being entirely sure what he would use it for. During the first few days, he had amused himself by scanning pictures of old classmates from his own photo album to see where in the world they had ended up. It had delighted him to see that his worst bully in middle school must weigh about four hundred and fifty pounds now and was claiming a disability benefit. Before the age of thirty. The guy obviously had oceans of time to spend on Facebook and was not particularly embarrassed about his grotesque appearance.

  Henrik’s app for less than 300 kroner recognized people on the Internet. In other words, the program was dependent on pictures of the object being freely accessible out there—social media for the majority and media coverage for far fewer.

  The police system took the criminal database as its starting point. Henrik would be able to phone Kripos tomorrow and ask the amiable superintendent for help in finding out whether Mohammad F. had earned himself a place in those ranks.

  But first he would use the app.

  His iPad was lying on the window ledge. He quickly keyed in to access the screen image that invited him to direct the camera at whatever photograph he wanted to cross-check.

  Snap.

  “Wow!” he said quietly to himself: it had taken less than thirty seconds for a whole series of pictures to appear.

  Most of them from Instagram.

  His nickname was @Fawadman.

  Henrik had been mistaken. It was not Mohammad who had leaned forward and stolen the flash on the last photograph. It was Fawad.

  It did not really matter.

  In a short time, he would have the full name of one of Karina’s friends from the summer before she vanished. This very evening, if he was lucky with the open searches he could do from home. Tomorrow at the latest, if he needed to make use of the police databases.

  Tomorrow at the latest.

  It was hardly credible, and he grabbed his phone and tapped it against his right temple, muttering all the while: “Ring. Go ahead and ring, why don’t you?”

  However, his exhortations did not cause it to emit a single sound.

  There were any number of reasons that Silje had allowed herself to be so easily persuaded to take a trip up to the Security Service headquarters and Harald Jensen in Nydalen. The most obvious was that she felt police headquarters had become a prison. Hundreds of people were slaving away on the task of finding some kind of pattern in two terrorist attacks and one murder that might, or might not, be connected.

  Sometimes she was not entirely sure which she would prefer.

  In any case, she wanted to get away. Out. For some air.

  This was not what she had expected.

  “Could I see the end again?” she asked, after they had both stared at the frozen image of Jørgen Fjellstad, alias Abdullah Hassan, in silence for a remarkably long time. “I assume this machine isn’t linked up to the Internet?”

  “What do you take us for?” Harald Jensen said, sounding discouraged, and wound back a couple of minutes. “They didn’t even see this in the Ministry of Justice. They sent it straight up to us when the package turned out to be an unmarked memory stick. We informed them without delay, of course, about what it contained.”

  The background was the same as the one in the previous videos. At least it was white and neutral. Jørgen was wearing the same clothes and scarf over his mouth, and the scar on his forehead shone just as ridiculously undisguised as before:

  The kuffar’s time is over. Our sisters are being raped by the kuffar. Our brothers are being murdered by the kuffar. Instead of protesting against this, instead of recapturing Al-Quds, we are humiliating ourselves in Kuwait, in Saudi Arabia, and in Egypt. In the whole of the Western world. We let Norwegians and Danes mock the Prophet—peace be with Him. But the time is now ripe. We have shown Norway what we are capable of. Do not seek friendship with the kuffar, because their time is over. Norway has not yet seen what is coming. What is coming, what is now, it is all jihad. Everyone is obliged to take revenge, and revenge is coming. Allahu akbar.

  “The kuffar are the unbelievers,” Silje said, “but what does ‘Al-Quds’ mean?”

  “Jerusalem. The usual jihadist drivel—Jerusalem shall be recaptured.”

  “That sort of flowery rhetoric is on all three of his videos. But the films are all different, apart from that. In the first one, after the attack on NCIN, he boasts uninhibitedly about what they claim to have done. After that came a really threatening video that was like the final part of this one.”

  She sniffed. Her throat infection was fortunately gone but had left behind a bad cold.

  “This one here, on the other hand, is a combination. He takes responsibility for the last explosion, the one at Grønnere Gress. In addition he threatens another attack.”

  She closed her eyes and took a deep breath as if about to sneeze, but nothing came of it.

  “And this time it seems as if we should be afraid of something . . .”

  Hesitating, she fished a paper tissue out of her handbag.
/>   “. . . bigger,” she finally added.

  “Agreed. It is . . .”

  Harald Jensen rose from his chair and placed his hands on the small of his back.

  “. . . incredibly frightening,” he said sotto voce. “No matter who is behind all this, their planning is scarily precise and of a character I’ve actually never heard of.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This Abdullah Hassan . . .”

  He pointed at the computer screen before starting to massage his back.

  “So he read out a message on three videos before he was killed. At least. There might well be more.”

  “Let’s hope not.”

  “In two of the videos, he talks about specific bombs and names the places. The analysis we have carried out shows that he has also known the approximate number of fatalities. He does not give the number of victims, but all he says tallies with the fact that the bomb at Gimle terrasse cost far more lives than the one at Grønnere Gress.”

  “The bomb at NCIN was more powerful.”

  “Yes, true. More sophisticated in its positioning as well. By the way, have you made any progress with ascertaining when it was placed and how?”

  Silje looked at him. He had dark bags under his eyes, and his lips were bloodless and moist. His hair looked lifeless and quite oily, and his shirt collar had acquired a dark line against his skin.

  “Can we discuss this later?” she requested.

  He shrugged.

  “If you prefer.”

  He flopped back down on the chair again.

  “I can’t get anything to add up. Why was Jørgen Fjellstad killed and dismembered? How the hell could he know so accurately what was going to happen? And how in the name of heaven can we find nothing, not a . . .”

  He slammed both fists down on the desk.

  “. . . shit about this group anywhere at all? And when it comes to this Arfan Olsen, whom we pray to all the gods in existence has somehow got something to do with the Prophet’s True Ummah, then he’s . . .” He gave a long, despairing sigh. Silje thought she could hear his voice quiver when he continued: “. . . squeaky clean. We’ve been inside his apartment. Nothing of interest. We’re listening in on his comings and goings. Nothing of interest. He watches normal TV programs and has an email correspondence more suitable as sleeping pills than as support for the idea that he’s a terrorist. He hasn’t even got a fucking computer. Just a cell phone and an iPad that he uses to an extremely limited extent. He leaves his apartment at a normal time in the mornings, is at the law school all day long, and has a part-time job in a library. He goes for walks in the forests and countryside. Goes to bed early. He’s had a couple of friends to visit—an absolutely ordinary young Norwegian man.”