‘Eight men from Delta and a blender,’ Kaja said, referring to the blue light rotating on the roof of the MPV. ‘Sure this isn’t a bit over the top?’
‘It has to be over the top,’ Harry said. ‘If we want to attract attention to the person who initiated this arrest, then we need a bigger party factor than usual.’
‘Leaked it to the press?’
Harry clocked her.
‘If you want attention, I mean,’ she said. ‘Imagine it, Leike, the celebrity, being arrested for the murder of Marit Olsen. They would pass up on the birth of a princess for that.’
‘And what about if his fiancée is there?’ Harry said. ‘Or the mother? Are they going to be in the papers and on live TV, too?’ He jerked the revolver and the cylinder clicked into place.
‘What are we going to do with the big party factor then?’
‘The press come later,’ Harry said. ‘They question the neighbours, passers-by, us. They find out what a magnificent show it was. That’ll do me. No innocents involved, and we get our front page.’
She sent him a sideways glance as the shadows of the next tunnel passed over them. They crossed Majorstuen and went up Slemdalsveien, past Vinderen, and she saw him staring out of the window, at the tram stop, a naked expression of torment on his face. She felt an urge to place a hand over his, to say something, anything, that could remove that expression. She looked at his hand. It was holding the revolver, squeezing it, as though it was all he had. This could not go on, something was going to burst. Had already burst.
They climbed higher and higher; the town lay beneath them. They crossed the tramlines and then the lights began to flash behind them and the barrier was lowered.
They were in Holmenveien.
‘Who’s coming with me to the door, Milano?’ Harry shouted to the passenger seat at the front.
‘Delta 3 and Delta 4,’ Milano shouted back, turning and pointing to a man with a large figure 3 chalked onto the chest and back of his combat suit.
‘OK,’ Harry said. ‘And the rest?’
‘Two men on each side of the house. Procedure Dyke 1-4-5.’
Kaja knew this was code for the formation. It had been borrowed from American football, and the aim was to communicate quickly without anyone else understanding, in case they had managed to tune into the radio frequencies that Delta used. They came to a halt a couple of houses down from Leike’s. Six of the men checked their MP5s and jumped out. Kaja saw them move up through the neighbours’ large gardens of brown, withered grass, bare apple trees and the tall hedges they had a proclivity for in west Oslo. Kaja checked her watch. Forty seconds had gone when Milano’s radio crackled. ‘Everyone in position.’
The driver released the clutch, and they drove slowly towards the house. Tony Leike’s recently acquired home was yellow, single storey, impressively large, but the address was more resplendent than the architecture, which lay somewhere between functionalist and a wooden box, as far as Kaja could judge.
They stopped outside two garage doors at the end of a shingle drive leading to the front door. Several years back, during a hostage crisis in Vestfold where Delta had surrounded a house, the hostage-takers had escaped by strolling down a path from the house into the garage, starting up the house owner’s car and simply driving off, to the open-mouthed amazement of the heavily armed police bystanders.
‘Stay back and follow me,’ Harry said to Kaja. ‘Next time it’s your turn.’
They got out and Harry immediately made for the house with the two other policemen one step behind and to the side, in a triangle formation. Kaja could hear from his voice that his pulse was accelerated. Now she could see it in his body language too, from the tenseness of the neck, from the exaggeratedly supple way he was moving.
They went up the steps. Harry rang the bell. The other two had positioned themselves at each side of the door, backs against the wall.
Kaja counted. Harry had told her in the car that in the FBI manual it said you had to ring or knock, shout ‘Police!’ and ‘Please open up!’, repeat and then wait ten seconds before you entered. The Norwegian police had no such precise instructions, but that didn’t mean there weren’t guidelines.
On this afternoon in Holmenveien, however, none of them were in evidence.
The door burst open. Kaja automatically recoiled a step when she saw the Rasta hat in the doorway, then saw Harry’s shoulders swivel and heard the sound of fist on flesh.
42
Beavis
THE REACTION HAD BEEN INSTINCTIVE; HARRY HAD SIMPLY not been able to prevent it.
When Forensics Officer Bjørn Holm’s moonlike face had appeared in Tony Leike’s doorway and Harry had seen the other officers in full swing behind him, he realised in a flash what had happened and everything went black.