Apart from a T-shirt, the boy was naked. Harry moved closer to the grainy picture. The man had one hand on his hip, the other on the back of the boy’s head. Harry could see the shadow of a profile behind the glass mosaic, but it was impossible to distinguish any features. Suddenly the cramped, stinking bathroom seemed to shrink, and the photos on the wall lurched toward him. Harry gave in to the impulse, tore them down, half in fury, half in despair, the blood pounding in his temples. He glimpsed his face in a mirror before giddily staggering out of the room with a pile of pictures under his arm. He slumped onto a chair.
“Bloody amateur!” he muttered when he was breathing normally again.
This was a flagrant breach of the plan. As they didn’t have a search warrant it was agreed they wouldn’t leave any traces, just find out what was in the flat and then, if they discovered anything, return with a search warrant later.
Harry looked for a place on the wall to fix his gaze and convince himself it was necessary to take concrete evidence to persuade the stubborn mule of a Police Chief. If they were quick they could get hold of a lawyer that evening and be waiting with the requisite papers when Løken returned from the dinner. While he was debating to and fro, he picked up the night-vision goggles, switched them on and looked through the window. The window looked out onto a backyard, and unconsciously he was searching for a window frame with a glass mosaic like the one in the photos, but all he could see were whitewashed walls swimming in the green shimmer of the goggles.
Harry glanced at his watch. He realized he would need to hang the photos back up. The Police Chief would have to make do with his description. Then his blood froze.
He had heard something. That is, he had heard a thousand things, but one sound among the thousand did not belong to the now familiar cacophony from the streets. And it came from the hall. It was a well-lubricated click. Oil and metal. When the draft told him that someone had opened the door, he thought of Sunthorn, until it struck him that the person who had just entered was trying to be as quiet as possible. Harry held his breath while his brain whirred through his sound archives at a furious pace. A sound expert in Australia had told him that the membrane in your ear can hear the difference in pressure between a million different frequencies. And this had not been the sound of a doorknob being turned but a recently oiled gun being cocked.
Harry was at the back of the room like a living target against the white walls, and the light switch was on the opposite side, by the door. He grabbed the large scissors from the middle of the table, crouched down and followed the cable from the architect’s lamp to the socket. He pulled out the plug and rammed the scissors into the hard plastic with all his strength.
A blue light flashed from the socket, after which there was a muffled explosion. Then it was pitch-black.
The electric shock numbed his arm, and with the stench of burned plastic and metal in his nostrils he slid groaning along the wall.
He listened, but all he could hear was traffic and his own heart. It was pounding so hard he could feel it; it was like sitting on a horse at full gallop. He could hear something being carefully laid on the floor and knew the person had removed his shoes. He still had the scissors in his hand. Could he see a shadow moving? It was impossible to say; it was so dark that even the white walls weren’t visible. The bedroom door creaked, a click followed. Harry realized the intruder had tried to switch on the light, but the short circuit had obviously blown all the fuses in the flat. That told him at least the person was familiar with the layout. But if it was Løken, Sunthorn would have rung. Or would he? The image of Sunthorn’s head leaning against the car window, a little hole above the ear, flickered past him.
Harry wondered whether he should try to crawl toward the front door, but something told him that this was what the other person was waiting for. As he opened the door his silhouette would be like one of the targets at the shooting gallery in Økern. Shit! The man was probably sitting on the floor somewhere with his gun trained on the door right now.
If only he could contact Sunthorn! At that moment he realized he still had the binoculars around his neck. He put them to his eyes, but saw only green fog, as if someone had smeared the lenses with snot. He rotated the focus as far as possible. Everything was still blurred, but he was able to discern the outline of a person standing by the wall on the other side of the table. His arm was bent and the gun was pointing to the ceiling. It was perhaps two meters from the edge of the table to the wall.
Harry launched himself, grabbed the tabletop with both hands and held it in front of him like a battering ram. He heard a groan and the clunk of a gun hitting the floor, then he slid across the table and seized what felt like a head. He tightened his arm around the neck and squeezed.