doubters that you were right, and they were wrong.
That Hole is on his way up, that he can be given
responsibility and all that.’
‘Well?’ Bjarne Møller had put his hands behind
the long skull again.
‘Well?’ Harry aped. ‘Is that what’s behind it? Am
I just a pawn again?’
Møller gave a sigh of despair.
‘We’re all pawns, Harry. There’s always a
hidden agenda. This is no worse than anything else.
Do a good job and it’ll be good for both of us. Is
that so damned difficult?’
Harry sniffed, started to say something, caught
himself, took a fresh run-up, then abandoned the
idea. He flicked a new cigarette out of the pack.
‘It’s just that I feel like a bloody horse people bet
on. And I loathe responsibility.’
Harry let the cigarette hang loosely from his lips
without lighting it.
He owed Møller this favour, but what if he
screwed up? Had Møller thought about that?
Liaison Officer. He had been on the wagon for a
while now, but he still had to be careful, take one
day at a time. Hell, wasn’t that one of the reasons
he became a detective? To avoid having people
underneath him, and to have as few as possible
above him? Harry bit into the cigarette filter.
They heard voices out in the corridor by the
coffee machine. It sounded like Waaler. Then peals
of laughter. The new office girl perhaps. He still
had the smell of her perfume in his nostrils.
‘Fuck,’ Harry said. Fu-uck. With two syllables,
which made his cigarette jump twice in his mouth.
Møller had closed his eyes during Harry’s
moment of reflection and now he half-opened them.
‘Can I take that as a yes?’
Harry stood up and walked out without saying a
word.
8
Toll Barrier at Alnabru. 1 November
1999.
THE GREY BIRD GLIDED INTO HARRY’S FIELD OF
VISION and was on its way out again. He increased
the pressure on the trigger of his .38 calibre Smith
& Wesson while staring over the edge of his gun
sights at the stationary back behind the glass.
Someone had been talking about slow time on TV
yesterday.
The car horn, Ellen. Press the damn horn. He
has to be a Secret Service agent.
Slow time, like on Christmas Eve before Father
Christmas comes. The first motorcycle was level
with the toll booth, and the robin was still a black
dot on the outer margin of his vision. The time in
the electric chair before the current . . .
Harry squeezed the trigger. One, two, three times.
And then time accelerated explosively. The
coloured glass went white, spraying shards over
the tarmac, and he caught sight of an arm
disappearing under the line of the booth before the
whisper of expensive American tyres was there –
and gone.
He stared towards the booth. A couple of the
yellow leaves swirled up by the motorcade were
still floating through the air before settling on a
dirty grey grass verge. He stared towards the
booth. It was silent again, and for a moment all he
could think was that he was standing at an ordinary
Norwegian toll barrier on an ordinary Norwegian
autumn day, with an ordinary Esso petrol station in
the background. It even smelled of ordinary cold
morning air: rotting leaves and car exhaust. And it
struck him: perhaps none of this has really
happened.
He was still staring towards the booth when the
relentless lament of the Volvo car horn behind him
sawed the day in two.
Part Two
GENESIS
9
1942.
THE FLARES LIT UP THE GREY NIGHT SKY, MAKING IT
resemble a filthy top canvas cast over the drab,
bare landscape surrounding them on all sides.
Perhaps the Russians had launched an offensive,
perhaps it was a bluff; you never really knew until
it was over. Gudbrand was lying on the edge of the
trench with both legs drawn up beneath him,
holding his gun with both hands and listening to the
distant hollow booms as he watched the flares go
down. He knew he shouldn’t watch the flares. You
would become night-blind and unable to see the
Russian snipers wriggling out in the snow in no
man’s land. But he couldn’t see them anyway, had
never seen a single one; he just shot on command.
As he was doing now.
‘There he is!’
It was Daniel Gudeson, the only town boy in the
unit. The others came from places with names
ending in -dal. Some of the dales were broad and
some were deep, deserted and dark, such as
Gudbrand’s home ground. But not Daniel. Not
Daniel of the pure, high forehead, the sparkling
blue eyes and the white smile. He was like a
recruitment-poster cut-out. He came from
somewhere with horizons.
‘Two o’clock, left of the scrub,’ Daniel said.
Scrub? There can’t be any scrub in the shell-