Thursday 13 November, 10:50
Kristin Aase listened to the whole thing in her glass office with her arms folded, and her face lost its colour a sentence at a time.
“You want me to ship the poisoned release,” she said. “On purpose.”
“Yes.”
“So that when his back door wakes up in the fake town and phones home, the police can follow the call.”
“Yes.”
“And if it goes wrong, I have shipped working malware out of my own building. This week.”
“It won’t leave the building.”
Ola Nygård had arrived at half past nine with two hard cases and a thermos, nodded once at the room in general and laid out three laptops on Kristin’s meeting table the way a man sets a table for guests he isn’t sure he likes. Forty, ponytail, a fleece with a coffee stain over the heart. He hadn’t looked up since.
“Not your building,” he said. “Ours.”
Line Dahl was leaning in the doorway with her phone still in her hand, as if she didn’t trust it out of her sight. “It will be signed off. I’ve had the politiadvokat on the phone since you started talking, and she’ll put it in writing by one. The kit is Kripos’s, NC3’s, sealed and logged, and Ola runs it. Everything recorded. If we get an address, there’s an order ready for the provider. If we don’t, we’ve lost a night’s sleep.” She looked at Viktor. “Some of us would have lost it anyway.”
“And Rød?”
“Rød will consent. He doesn’t know it yet.”
“And if it doesn’t work?”
“Then he’s never heard of you.” Dahl put the phone in her pocket. “He’d like that to be true already.”
Jonas came in with a printout. “svc_labsync’s disabled,” he said. “Nine-fifteen. Ola’s people wanted it left alive since Tuesday, under watch, so he wouldn’t smell us. It’s dead now. Ola’s imaged FN-SRV03, the whole disk. And all the admin passwords are new. All of them.”
“He’ll notice,” Kristin said. “If he tries to use it.”
“He won’t try,” Viktor said. “He’s finished in there. He’s sitting somewhere waiting for the doors to open. You don’t go back and rattle the lock when the party’s about to start.”
Ola typed something, read it, typed again. “The town needs a name.”
Nobody offered one.
“Lillevik,” Ola said, and wrote it down, and that was the town named. Then, without raising his eyes: “One problem. If he checks the customer list, Lillevik isn’t on it.”
The room was quiet. Jonas opened his mouth and shut it again.
“Could he check it?” Viktor said.
“He had the domain since the summer,” Jonas said. “He could have copied anything. I don’t know what he copied.”
“Then we hope he’s as lazy as everybody else in this story.”
Kristin unfolded her arms. Through the glass she was looking at her staff: eleven of them now, not twelve, moving about the open-plan office with the stunned carefulness of people in a house where someone has died. Out at reception Mona sat at her own desk with her hands round a cup she wasn’t drinking from. Kristin didn’t look at her.
“The real customers,” she said. “The home-care services that are still down. Tell me about them. Because that is the part I care about, and nobody in this room has mentioned them yet.”
Since Tuesday morning Viktor had kept her on a list he hadn’t written down: the founder who was too composed, who had held a release for reasons nobody had asked her to explain. He took her off it now. It was a small, private movement, and it didn’t show.
“That’s the most important part,” he said. “Those nurses work again today. On paper. Printed lists, driven out, handed over. Nobody misses their insulin because we were busy building a town.”
“We have offline backups,” she said slowly. “From Sunday. Tapes. In the fireproof safe in the server room, and the police gave us that room back an hour ago. Geir insisted on them. Every year, at the budget meeting, someone said nobody uses tapes any more, Geir, and every year he wrote them back into the budget anyway.” Her voice caught on something and she went straight over it. “We all laughed at him.”
“Then let’s stop laughing at Geir,” Viktor said. “Let’s go and get his tapes.”