Thursday 13 November, 10:15
The danger was not that Skarv would attack. He had attacked already. The danger was that he would notice he had been noticed, and vanish, with a nine-year-old key still cut and copied in his pocket, ready for the next tired company.
He expected Mona to behave normally. So Mona would behave normally.
They put her back at her own desk. If Skarv asked where she was, she would be where she always was, and it would be true. The boller sat in their box with two gone, one eaten by Jonas without noticing and one by Dahl, who had noticed. Viktor sat in the visitor’s chair beside the desk, and the phone lay between them on the blotter like something that might go off.
“I can’t,” Mona said. “Knowing what it is. I’ll get it wrong. He always knows.”
“You won’t be alone. You tell me what you’d say, in your words, and we send your words. Not mine.” He pulled the chair closer. “It’s had since August to learn how to sound like a person. We only have to sound like you for one day.”
At 10:15 the phone lit up.
Good morning, Mona. I am glad you are at work. A hard day, I know. Is everyone behaving as normal at the office?
Mona’s breath caught in her throat and stayed there.
“What’s true?” Viktor said. “Give him something true. True is the easiest thing to say.”
“Everybody’s sad.” It came out a whisper. “People are crying. The police were here.”
“Then tell him that.”
She typed it herself, slowly, with one finger, the way she typed everything. He read it before she sent it and changed nothing.
It is awful here. Everyone is crying. The police came again about Geir. I keep to my desk. I made skillingsboller and nobody can eat them.
The reply came in three minutes. Of course it did.
You are very brave. Stay quiet, and soon it will be over. After tonight you need never think of me again.
Viktor read it twice.
“After tonight,” he said. “He’s counting the hours.”
The three dots came back. They pulsed, stopped, pulsed again. Mona’s hand went to her mouth.
Are the police still at the office? Someone said on the news there is a consultant helping them.
Nobody moved. Through the glass, Jonas had stopped typing in the middle of a line.
Viktor felt the skin tighten across his shoulders, the old feeling of being looked at through a window from a dark street. A camera crew in the car park on Tuesday. A man in a wet coat, walking fast. Somewhere somebody had paused that.
“Something true,” he said. “And dull. Make me dull, Mona.”
She looked at him. Then she looked at the box of boller, and something of the old office manager came back into her face, the woman who had dealt with twelve years of couriers and auditors and men from the municipality.
There is a policewoman who comes and goes. And Kristin has hired a man to help with the computers. He sits by the window and drinks all the coffee and he has not eaten one bun.
Viktor nodded. She pressed send.
The dots came at once this time, and went, and came again. A minute. Two. Then:
Thank you, Mona. Eat one yourself. You must keep up your strength.
Mona put the phone face-down on the blotter and took her hand away.
“He still thinks it ships tonight,” Viktor said, more to himself than to her. He rubbed his face. “Good. We keep him warm. We keep him certain. And tonight we give him what he’s waiting for.”
Jonas had come out from behind the glass. “We ship the poisoned release?”
“No. We ship him a release.” Viktor got to his feet. “He’s built a trap for two hundred doors. So we build him a two-hundred-and-first. The only one he’s allowed to open. And on the other side of it there’s nothing at all.” He looked out at the rain, at the grey box across the road with its lights coming on. “Except us. Waiting. With the lights off.”
He went to find Kristin. She was in her glass office with the phone at her ear and a pen in her teeth, and she took the pen out when she saw his face.
“I need you to agree to something that is going to sound insane,” he said. “And I need a municipality that doesn’t exist.”