Tuesday 11 November, 19:10
The question surfaced the way the useful ones do, sideways.
“Your monitoring,” he said. “Geir was careful. A careful man builds alarms. If somebody’s been walking round your old servers for months as a robot that hadn’t moved in eleven years, something should have noticed. Sent an email. Woken somebody up.”
“We’ve got all that. Geir built it.” Jonas was grey with tiredness. “Unusual logins, privilege changes, new admin sessions. They all go to one mailbox. ops-alerts. We all watch it.”
“Show me ops-alerts. Since the summer.”
It was nearly empty.
For a company that had had a stranger walking its corridors since the summer, the alert inbox was serene. A disk warning. Two expired certificates. Nothing about FN-SRV03. Nothing about svc_labsync waking up after eleven years and walking through the building at three in the morning.
“That can’t be right,” Jonas said. “They fire automatically. They can’t just—”
He stopped, because Viktor had already found it. In the mailbox settings, tidy and small, sat a rule. The kind anyone makes in thirty seconds. This one said that any message whose subject contained Geir’s alert wording, his own phrases, word for word, should skip the inbox, be marked as read, and go to a folder called Arkiv/Diverse that nobody had ever opened. It had been run once, the day it was made, over everything already in the inbox.
Jonas opened it. A single logon on a Sunday evening in July, and then two months of alarms poured down the screen. Logons, sessions, a new scheduled task, an admin login at 03:11 on a Sunday in October. Every one of them read. None of them seen.
The alarms had been ringing for two months. Someone had simply put a pillow over them.
“When was the rule made?” Viktor’s voice had gone level.
“Sixteenth of September. Eleven forty.”
“From where?”
Jonas looked, and frowned, and looked again.
“Not Geir. Not an admin. A normal login.” He sat back. “The reception PC.”
Beyond the glass the office was nearly empty. Kristin had sent home everyone who did not need to be there at three. On the front desk, under the reception lamp, the Tupperware of skillingsboller sat with a tea towel half over it. Behind it, an empty chair, pushed in neatly, with a cardigan folded over its back.
“Who uses the reception PC?” Viktor said.
“It’s shared. Sort of. I sit there sometimes, if she’s at lunch and the phone—” Jonas stopped, and went to his own badge log without being asked, and Viktor watched him hope as he scrolled. “Sixteenth of September. I badged out at 11:31. Back at 12:24.” He did not look up. “I was across the road. Eating.”
“So at eleven forty.”
“So at eleven forty it was just—” He looked, despite himself, through the glass towards the front desk and the tea towel and the cardigan. “Mona.”
“Mona.”
“Mona Hellesøy. She’s been here forever. She does the birthdays. She bakes.” He said it as if the baking were a character reference, which in a sense it was. “She wouldn’t. Viktor, she’s the kindest person in this building. She put her hand on my shoulder this morning, with him still lying in there. She cried more than any of us.”
“I’m sure she did,” Viktor said, and meant it, and found that it did not help. “Where is she?”
“Home. Kristin’s told everybody to stay home tomorrow. She’ll be in Thursday. She’s always in.” Jonas swallowed. “Are you going to ring Dahl?”
“Not yet.”
“But you know. We know.”
“We know who held the door. We don’t know who walked through it.” Viktor looked at the cardigan. “She’s got a phone in her handbag, and somebody on the other end of it who’s been very patient for months. If I take her now, he hears it before she’s finished crying. And then he’s gone, and the key’s still out there, and he tries it on the next tired company with a woman at the front desk who bakes.”
“So what do we do?”
“You go home. You don’t say her name to anyone. Not to Kristin, not tonight.” He held Jonas’s eyes until the boy nodded. “And on Thursday, I’m going to ask her who she’s been baking for.”
Jonas went. Viktor heard the front door, the lock, a car starting in the wet. Then only the fans in the server room, a long way off, and the rain beginning again on the flat roof.
He stayed in Geir’s chair. A careful man does not stop at the interesting part. He opened Geir’s mailbox, which Kristin had unlocked for the police that morning, and sorted it by time.
At 22:30, by the server’s log, Geir had opened the old integration document.
At 22:33 he had opened a new email.
It was still there, in the drafts folder, where the program had saved it on its own without asking. Nobody had sent it.
To: Viktor Brekke
Subject: Sorry. Let’s just check.
Below the subject line there was nothing. A white field. No greeting, no full stop, not the first letter of his name. A man had sat on a stool between two humming racks, with something in his chest he thought was tiredness, and had taken out his phone, and looked up an address he had not used in nine years, and had found the words for the top of the message and not for anything underneath.
Last saved 22:33.
Viktor did not touch the mouse. He sat with his hands on his knees in the dead man’s chair while the rain worked at the roof, and read the subject line again, and then again, and the white space under it did not fill.