Thursday 13 November, 21:00
Lillevik kommune came into existence at nine o’clock that night, on three sealed laptops in a locked room on an upper floor at Allehelgens gate.
It had a town hall and a mayor, because Ola kept a sense of humour where other men keep a hip flask: in the personnel file the mayor’s name was Per Lillevik, which Jonas found hilarious and Line Dahl did not. It had forty-two home-care clients, all invented, with plausible names and plausible medication lists and plausible small sorrows. It had a copy of Fjordnett’s care software, version 14.2, waiting for its update. And it had one narrow pipe to the outside world, through a small grey box at Ola’s elbow with a Kripos evidence seal across the lid.
“We let him in,” Ola said, and touched the box. “We let him look. He leaves with nothing.”
At 21:00, on the stroke, they shipped the poisoned release. To Lillevik, and to Lillevik alone.
Then they waited.
On the way in from Kokstad, Viktor had stopped at the Dorthea for ten minutes and a dry shirt, and on his way back up the gangway, without thinking, he had switched off the deck light.
A too-bright room, a bad coffee machine, and too many people trying not to look at the same screen. The back door would sleep first, Ola said. It was built to. Nobody connects an update to a thing that happens hours later.
At half past eleven Dahl went out without saying where and came back with a plastic bag from the 7-Eleven down the street: a dozen boller in a paper sack, slightly squashed, still faintly warm from the oven by the till. Nobody remarked on them and everybody ate them. Mona, who had refused to go home and was there on the record as a cooperating witness, with an officer beside her and her phone on the table in front of her, took one and held it and began to cry, without any noise, and couldn’t have said why.
At 01:47 the grey box blinked.
“There,” Ola said.
One line on his screen. Something inside Lillevik had woken, stretched, looked round, and decided the coast was clear. It reached for the outside world. Ola let it. The address came up, resolved, sat there.
Dahl leaned in. “Where?”
“Frankfurt.” Ola read it a second time. “Rented server. Data centre.” He sat back. “Not him.”
“Then where is he?”
“Behind it. Somewhere.” He shrugged, a small movement under the fleece. “We see the first hop. That’s all we see.”
Viktor heard the room deflate. Dahl looked at her watch, and Viktor knew the sum she was doing: a request to Germany, an answer in a week, and by then a man in a warm room would have wiped his disks and gone to bed.
Ola was typing.
“What are you doing?”
“Feeding him.”
On the second screen the Lillevik file server filled with folders. Payroll. Patient records, all forty-two of them. A roster of two hundred customers that had supposedly installed the update overnight. And, near the top, where a hungry man would see it first, a single file.
admin_master_backup
“What does it do?” Viktor said.
“Nothing.” Ola didn’t look up. “Until it’s opened. Then it tells me where.”
At 02:40 the back door began to look round Lillevik, folder by folder, the way a burglar walks through a stranger’s house with a torch. Ola watched it and said nothing at all. At 03:05 it found the payroll and took it. At 03:14 it found the roster.
At twenty-five past three Viktor went down to the street with Dahl, because his legs had stopped working and he needed the cold. They stood in the doorway out of the sludd and didn’t talk. Dahl had taken a cigarette from his packet without asking and then not lit it.
Upstairs, in the too-bright room, Mona’s phone lit up on the table.
Viktor would read it afterwards, in the log, with the times beside it. Ola looked across, saw her face and the screen, and for once in his life said more than he needed to.
“Answer him,” he said. “You know how.”
Lillevik? I do not know this kommune.
He had checked. Ola’s warning from that morning had come true in seven words.
Mona picked up the phone. Her hands were steady. Afterwards the officer said that was the thing she remembered, how steady they were.
New contract from the summer. Kristin was so proud of it. She showed everyone the picture of the town hall.
She sent it, and sat back, and only then began to shake.
When Viktor came up the stairs with the sludd melting on his shoulders, the room was very still and every face in it turned towards him. He read the screen. He read it again. He looked at Mona, and she looked back at him over the rim of a paper cup with her chin up, like a woman at a bus stop who has decided she isn’t going to cry in front of strangers.
“The picture of the town hall,” he said.
“There was a picture,” Mona said. “In August. Of a different kommune. She did show everyone.”
The phone stayed dark. No reply. Not in three minutes, not in thirty. For three months that machine had answered every message within minutes, at any hour of the night. Now it said nothing, and the nothing filled the room until Viktor could hear the fluorescent tube ticking above Ola’s head.
He’s gone, Viktor thought. He smelled it. He’s pulled the plug and he’s sitting in the dark with his hand on the power cable, and in the morning there’ll be nothing anywhere but an eleven-year-old password and a woman who’ll go to prison for it.
At 04:22 the grey box made no sound at all, but Ola’s second screen did. A soft chime, like a lift arriving.
“Opened,” Ola said.
Everyone stood up.
“Same route?”
“No.” Ola’s fingers had started moving again. “Not Frankfurt. He’s downloaded it and opened it at home. No VPN. He’s in a hurry.” He read the address off the screen and ran it, and waited, and ran it again. “Residential. Broadband. Norwegian provider.”
Dahl already had her phone at her ear. Viktor heard her say politiadvokat, and the time, and the word now.
“Where?” Viktor said.
Ola didn’t answer for a moment. He checked where that block of addresses lived, and checked again.
“Bergen,” he said.
The provider took forty minutes: Dahl on one phone, the politiadvokat on another, an order typed and signed and sent to a sleepy man at a desk somewhere south of Oslo. Nobody sat down. Mona held her paper cup. At 05:04 an email came in to Dahl’s phone and she read it standing up and handed it, without a word, to Ola.
Ola read it and looked up.
“Sandviken,” he said.
For a moment Viktor didn’t react at all. Then a breath came out of him, short, incredulous, with nothing funny in it.
Sandviken. The steep wet shoulder of the city below the mountain, where the old sjøboder stand on their pilings with their feet in the water and the smau climb up between wooden houses so close you can touch both walls. Where, three days ago, before dawn, a man who couldn’t sleep had sat on the deck of a houseboat and watched a cormorant dive, and taken a phone call.
“What?” Dahl said, watching his face.
Viktor read the street name over Ola’s shoulder. “Ladegårdsgaten.” He could see the street. He could see the house, second floor, the small window up under the roof. A window that was lit at three in the morning as often as his own. He had thought it was a man who read late.
“He’s been four hundred metres from my front door the whole time,” he said. “I’ve probably stood behind him in the queue at the bakery.” He looked at the address on Ola’s screen a moment longer. “Hello, Skarv. I’d like my harbour back.”