photocopier, and the young Foreign Office
probationer jumped, managing only a wan smile
before Brandhaug was round the next corner. Lise
was a newly fledged lawyer and the daughter of a
friend from university days. She had started only
three weeks ago. And from that moment she had
been aware that the Under Secretary, the highest
civil servant in the building, knew who she was.
Would he be able to have her? Probably. Not that
it would happen. Necessarily.
He could already hear the buzz of voices before
he opened the door. He looked at his watch.
Seventy-five seconds. Then he was inside, casting
a fleeting glimpse around the room to confirm that
all the authorities summoned were represented.
‘Well, well, so you’re Bjarne Møller?’ he
shouted with a broad smile as he offered his hand
across the table to a tall thin man sitting beside
Anne Størksen, the Chief Constable.
‘You’re the PAS, aren’t you? I hear you’re
running the roller-coaster leg of the Holmenkollen
relay?’
This was one of Brandhaug’s tricks. Coming by a
little piece of information about people he met for
the first time. Something that wasn’t in their CV. It
made them insecure. Using the acronym PAS – the
internal abbreviation for Politiavdelingssjef, the
head of Crime Squad – particularly pleased him.
Brandhaug sat down, winked at his old friend Kurt
Meirik, the head of Politiets
overvåkningstjeneste, or POT, the Security
Service, and studied the others sitting round the
table.
As yet, no one knew who would take charge of
the meeting as the representatives were equally
high ranking, theoretically at least, coming from the
Prime Minister’s Office, Oslo police district,
Norwegian Security Service, Crime Squad and
Brandhaug’s own Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The
Prime Minister’s Office had called the meeting, but
there was no doubt that Oslo police district, in the
guise of Anne Størksen, and POT, in the shape of
Kurt Meirik, wanted the operational responsibility
when procedures were that far advanced. The
Under Secretary of State from the Prime Minister’s
Office looked as if he envisaged taking charge.
Brandhaug closed his eyes and listened.
The nice-to-see-you conversations stopped, the
buzz of voices slowly subsided and a table leg
scraped on the floor. Not yet. There was the
rustling of papers, the clicking of pens – at
important meetings like these most heads of
department had their personal note-takers with
them in case at a later point they began to blame
each other for things that had happened. Someone
coughed, but it came from the wrong end of the
room and apart from that it wasn’t the kind of
cough that preceded speaking. Sharp intake of
breath. Someone spoke.
‘Let’s begin then,’ Bernt Brandhaug said, opening
his eyes.
Heads turned towards him. It was the same every
time. A half-open mouth, the Under Secretary of
State’s; a wry smile from Anne Størksen showing
that she understood what had taken place – but
otherwise, blank faces looking at him without a
hint of recognition that the battle was already over.
‘Welcome to the first co-ordination meeting. Our
task is to get four of the world’s most important
men in and out of Norway more or less in one
piece.’
Polite chuckles from around the table.
‘On Monday, 1 November, we will receive a
visit from the PLO leader Yasser Arafat, the
Israeli PM Ehud Barak, the Russian PM Vladimir
Putin and, last but not least, the cherry on the cake:
at 6.15 a.m., in exactly twenty-seven days’ time,
Air Force One, with the American President on
board, will be landing at Gardemoen Airport,
Oslo.’
Brandhaug’s gaze moved from face to face down
the table. It stopped at the new one, Bjarne
Møller’s.
‘If it isn’t foggy, that is,’ he said, earning himself
a laugh and noticing with satisfaction that Møller
forgot his nervousness for a moment and laughed
along with the others. Brandhaug responded with a
smile, revealing his strong teeth which had become
even whiter since his last cosmetic treatment at the
dentist’s.
‘We still don’t know exactly how many people
are coming,’ Brandhaug said. ‘The President had
an entourage of 2,000 in Australia and 1,700 in
Copenhagen.’
Mumbles around the table.
‘However, in my experience, a guesstimate of
around 700 is probably more realistic.’
Brandhaug was quietly confident his
‘guesstimate’ would soon be confirmed as he had
received a fax an hour before with a list of the 712
people coming.