Thursday 13 November, 00:40
Jonas came in a hoodie over pyjama trousers, with his hair standing up at the back and his laptop under his arm, and did not ask why.
The copy of the file Geir had opened on Monday night sat on an old share that had been encrypted at ten past three. But the document had been sent, and Fjordnett deleted nothing. The mail archive went back to 2009, a landfill of every message anyone had ever written,.
“Sender Geir Solheim,” Jonas typed. “March 2016. Attachment.” He hit return. “There.”
An integration specification. Nineteen pages, technical, dull. Sent on the twelfth of March 2016 at 14:52.
“Go home, Jonas,” Viktor said.
“I can…”
“Go home. Sleep. I’ll need you at seven.”
Jonas looked at the screen, and at him, and went.
Viktor scrolled. Page seventeen, an appendix headed Service account configuration, and below it, in a little grey box, the username svc_labsync and its password, in plain text.
He sat back.
So that was the file. Geir had followed a forgotten account down through eleven years of permissions until he found a document, and when he opened it he had found his own name at the top.
Viktor could see the afternoon it was made. A Saturday in March, the office empty, a tired careful man pasting a configuration into an appendix without stripping it, pressing send, going for a coffee. Realising, probably, by the next morning. Meaning to change the password. Writing it on one of those lists such men keep, change svc_labsync pw, a list that is only an inventory of things there will never be time to do.
And at 22:33, three minutes after he opened it, Geir had started a message to the one man he knew who had made the same kind of mistake and paid for it.
Sorry. Let’s just check.
Not an accusation. An offer. The same one he had made in an Oslo doorway nine years ago, turned round and held out the other way.
Viktor put his hand flat on the desk and kept it there until it stopped shaking.
Then he made himself look at the recipients. Forty-one addresses. He went down them slowly, as if they were names on a war memorial. Fjordnett staff, most of them gone. Vestdata staff. And a scatter of consultants at firms that had folded or merged or simply stopped answering.
[email protected] · [email protected] · [email protected] · [email protected] · [email protected] · [email protected]
Thirty-five more of the same. A list long enough to lose a name in, and he nearly lost it. His eye went past t.riise@, and stopped, and came back.
He took out his notebook and found the page from Haugland’s glass room. Riise, contractor 2016. Underlined once.
Dahl answered on the fifth ring, which for her meant asleep. He read her the address.
“Riise.” A keyboard, slowly. “Tobias. Thirty-four. No record. Registered address in Oslo since 2019.” A yawn she did not apologise for. “I’ll have someone look at him in the morning. Go to sleep, Brekke.”
He wrote it under the name, Reg. Oslo 2019, printed the list, folded it into his inside pocket, and sat down in the chair by the window to wait for half past seven.
Two people, then. A ghost with a nine-year-old key, somewhere, and a living woman who had held the door for him and put a box of something warm beside it.