Thursday 13 November, 09:05
The app sat on her home screen disguised as a folder called Oppskrifter, between the weather and the bank. Recipes. Inside the folder was one icon, and inside the icon was one contact.
Skarv.
Viktor looked at the word for longer than he needed to. Down on the jetties in Sandviken the old men who fished at dawn called them that, the black birds that stood with their wings hung out like washing.
“Cormorant,” Dahl said, reading over his shoulder.
“I know.”
He scrolled back to the beginning, to August, while Mona sat beside him at the meeting-room table, no longer crying, correcting him now and then in a small dry voice. No, that one was at night. He always answered at night.
The messages were models of courtesy. Skarv never threatened. Never swore. Never hurried. Every instruction came wrapped in an apology for the inconvenience and every payment with a word for her health.
You sound tired, Mona. Please rest. None of this is your fault.
You must not apologise for being frightened. Being frightened is not a failing. It means that you are paying attention.
I am here. It does not matter what time it is.
“He was kind to me,” Mona said. “That’s the thing I can’t… He was the only one being kind to me. Nobody can be that patient. I used to think he must care, a little.”
Viktor had stopped reading the words. He was reading the times down the right-hand edge of the screen. 02:11. 02:14. 04:03. 04:06. 23:48. 23:51. Night after night after night, since August, and never more than three or four minutes between her message and the answer.
And the language. Bokmål, mostly, neat and correct. But at 02:14 one night in October she had written four lines in the Naustdal of her childhood, the spelling going to pieces, and at 02:17 the reply had come back in the same tongue without a single mistake. When she climbed back into Bokmål the next evening, so did he.
“You’re not foolish,” Viktor said, before she could say it. “You were talking to a machine.”
Jonas had come to stand in the doorway with a coffee he wasn’t drinking. “A bot? Like a script?”
“Not a script. Nobody sits up writing like that every night since August. Someone built it, someone gets the money. But the thing holding her hand at four in the morning was a language model.” He put the phone down on the table. “The greed is old. The patience is new.”
Mona looked at the phone as if it had stopped being hers.
Viktor picked it up again and went to the end of the thread. Monday evening.
22:40. Thank you for everything, Mona. Tomorrow will be a difficult day at the office. Please behave normally, for your own sake. The last payment will come once the update has gone out.
He read the time again.
Something cold went down his back and settled at the base of his spine.
“Twenty-two forty,” he said.
“So?” said Dahl.
“Geir’s watch stopped at twenty-two thirty-seven.”
Nobody in the room said anything. Through the glass wall somebody laughed too loudly at nothing and then stopped.
“It’s about Tuesday,” Dahl said at last, carefully. “Behave normally. The payment. It’s a man tidying up before he goes to bed. He’s been writing to her at that time of night for months.”
“Three minutes.”
“Brekke.”
“I know what the pathologist said. I’ve seen the watch.” He did not take his eyes off the screen. “Three minutes, Line. And then thank you for everything.”
She didn’t answer. She had the look she had at the review, of someone who would not say a thing until she could prove it.
He made himself go on. Wednesday, mid-morning, the day after Fjordnett had told its customers the release was moving.
The update is Thursday now, I understand. Patience. Nothing has changed.
Then this morning, 07:41, the buzz against the table that neither of them had looked at.
Good morning, Mona. I hope your head is better today. Will you go to the office? I think it would be good for you to be among people.
“Among people,” Jonas said, in a strange voice.
Viktor set the phone down, face-up this time, in the middle of the table where they could all see it.
“He doesn’t know we’ve found the back door,” he said. “He thinks it ships tonight at nine, to everyone. He’s waiting for her to tell him it’s an ordinary Thursday.” “Which means for one more day we know something he doesn’t.”
He stood up.
“Let’s not waste it.”