Tuesday 11 November, 23:00
The wind had come round and was coming off Byfjorden now, pushing sludd against the Dorthea‘s windows in soft grey handfuls that slid and did not melt. The old boat worked against her fenders. Down the shore the floodlit gables of Bryggen stood in their row, like teeth in a lit mouth.
Viktor sat at the galley table with his laptop shut in front of him and did not open it.
Nine years without a word, and at the end Geir had reached for him. To say what? Sorry for what? It was Viktor who owed the apologies. It had always been that way round.
He opened the drawer by the sink. The blister strip lay where it always lay, behind the matches, the foil dimpled where his thumb had pressed it on other nights without pushing through. Fourteen. He had counted them so often that counting had become a way of not taking one.
He took one. He swallowed it with water from the tap, standing up, and was in the bunk before he could hear what he thought about it.
He slept like a stone dropped in a fjord, all at once and a long way down, and came up at five to one with his mouth full of cotton wool and his head full of certainty.
Someone had been inside Fjordnett for months. Someone who knew an account forgotten by everyone except Geir, and Geir’s alert wording word for word, and when the release went out. Not a teenager in another hemisphere. Someone who had been close.
He rang Dahl. She answered on the second ring, because she slept as badly as he did and had stopped pretending otherwise.
“Who hates Fjordnett?” Viktor said.
“Good evening to you too, Brekke.”
“A company that age makes enemies. People it sacked. People it beat. This is personal, Line. It’s far too patient to be anything else.”
“You sound odd.”
“I sound awake.”
A pause in which he could hear her decide not to ask. “I’ll pull some threads,” she said. “Go to sleep.”
He didn’t. He sat on the edge of the bunk with the phone in his hand until the sludd turned to drizzle, and the window went from black to the colour of old dishwater.
Wednesday 12 November, 08:40
By morning she had a name, and he was ready to love it before she had finished saying it.
Vestdata. Fjordnett’s nearest competitor, an office out at Sandsli ten minutes from Kokstad, the same grey box with a different logo. They had lost three municipal contracts to Fjordnett in five years and had not been gracious about any of them. And in 2016 the two companies had tried, briefly, to work together: an integration project, a partnership on paper, killed after four months in a storm of unpaid invoices and solicitors’ letters.
“That’s them,” Viktor said.
“That’s a company that dislikes another company.” Dahl was driving. The wipers went at the slowest setting and still had too much to do. “Bergen is full of them.”
“Lean on them. Properly. Bring the MD in. Take their laptops.”
“On what?”
“On the fact that they knew where everything was.”
She glanced at him. He had his coat buttoned wrong and had not noticed. His head was a room with the curtains drawn, and in the dimness one idea stood very tall.
A text came in from Kristin, answering his question about who would be in today. Mona had sent her one line at seven: Vondt i hovudet. Kjem i morgon.
“And Hellesøy?” Dahl said, reading it over his arm at a red light. He had told her about the rule in the first five minutes of the drive, and she had not enjoyed hearing it twelve hours late.
“Tomorrow. When I know who’s holding her lead.”
Leif Haugland met them in a glass meeting room with a view of the car park and a bowl of apples nobody had eaten. A broad man in his fifties with a good watch and a face that had been friendly for a living for thirty years. The friendliness lasted until Viktor’s third question.
“You’re not police,” Haugland said.
“No.”
“Then I don’t understand why I’m answering you.”
“Because a man is dead,” Viktor said, “and someone who knew Fjordnett from the inside put him on the floor of a server room. Your company tried to get inside Fjordnett for four months in 2016. You’ve been losing to them ever since.”
Dahl said, “Brekke,” in a voice that was a hand on his arm.
He kept going. He heard himself keep going: staff who had left angry, old logins, Haugland’s own whereabouts on Monday night. With each question the man’s face shut another window.
“Do you know what you’re accusing me of?” Haugland said at last. He had gone red along the jaw. “We’re a real company. Forty people. I have nurses as customers. I don’t sabotage a competitor’s software that goes into the same homes as mine.” He stood up. “If you want people who hate Fjordnett, they’re not hard to find. There was a contractor on that project in 2016, Riise, sued us over invoices, sued half of Bergen, wrote nasty things about all of us on some forum for a year. Harmless. A boy with a grudge. Moved to Oslo, I heard.” He flicked the name away with his fingers. “And that’s the last thing I’m saying without our lawyer. I’ll be ringing your politimester this afternoon, Inspector. I’d like him to know how his investigation is being run.”
Viktor wrote Riise in his notebook, under a sketch of the svc_labsync timeline he could no longer quite read, and underlined it once. Then Haugland held the door for them, and there was nothing to do but walk through it.
In the car Dahl did not start the engine. Rain crawled down the windscreen. On the dashboard her phone lit up with the word Rød, and she watched it ring out.
“You were wrong in there, Brekke,” she said. “You were wrong the way you used to be wrong.”
He said nothing. There was nothing to say that would not have been a defence.
“Fast,” she said. “Loud. Sure of yourself. And that man had a thing on his face when you mentioned 2016, and you were too busy shouting to see it.” She started the car. “Now he’s got a complaint and Rød’s got a reason. Well done.”
Wednesday 12 November, 23:50
He spent the evening on the Dorthea not opening the drawer.
He opened it once, to check, and closed it. Thirteen. He put the strip in his coat pocket, because he did not trust the man who would be standing in the galley at three in the morning, and went out on deck with a coffee he did not want.
The rain had eased. Out on Byfjorden the Askøy lights lay on the black surface in long yellow stripes that broke and mended and broke again. Up the hill behind him, between two roofs, a small window was lit, as it often was at this hour. Someone else who read late.
At ten to midnight his phone rang. A Bergen number he didn’t know.
“It’s me. Haugland. From Vestdata.” The friendliness was gone from the voice, and so was the anger. What was left sounded like a man standing in his own garden in the dark so his wife wouldn’t hear. “There’s something I couldn’t say in front of my people.”
Viktor waited.
“In 2016, during the project, Fjordnett sent us a pile of documentation. Integration specs. Emailed round to a great long list, half of it should never have gone out that wide. And one of them had a password in it. In plain text. In an appendix. For some account the integration used.” He breathed out. “I remember because one of my developers made a joke about it in a meeting. Said if Fjordnett ever annoyed us we could just log in and switch them off. We all laughed.”
“Do you still have it?”
“God, no. It’s nine years ago.” A pause. “But we had contractors in and out all through that project. Freelancers. Half of them we never saw again. Any of them could have kept a copy of anything.” His voice dropped. “Nobody was careful. Nobody was ever careful.”
The line went dead.
Viktor stood on the deck with the phone still at his ear. He set the mug down on the rail. He was already feeling for his car keys.