Friday 14 November, 15:20
Ola’s room at Allehelgens gate had no window and smelled of warm plastic and someone’s orange. The laptop from Ladegårdsgaten had been copied, sealed and signed for; what Ola had on his screen was the copy, and he scrolled it without hurrying.
Most of it was ordinary: a browser, a mail client, three subscriptions to AI services that anyone could buy with a card, the same ones schoolchildren used for homework. A folder called skatt with two years of unfiled tax returns in it.
And a long text file, kept and added to since August, that the tools had been fed before every conversation.
“Read it,” Dahl said.
Ola read it. His voice did not change at all.
Target: female, 61, office manager. Divorced? Debt. Mention husband’s business gently. Mirror her dialect. Never hurry her.
Husband’s name Arvid. Van, workshop lease, Stavanger. Do not mention Stavanger first. Wait for her.
She writes Bokmål at work. When upset she goes into Nynorsk (Sunnfjord, Naustdal). Follow her in. Do not overdo it.
Write formal, correct Bokmål. No dialect unless she goes first. Older women trust formal.
Ask about the baking. She bakes when she is frightened.
If she says she wants to stop: do not argue. Be sad. Thank her. Wait one day.
Nobody in the room said anything. Viktor became aware that he was standing very close to the screen.
Ola scrolled. There was more, in the same short lines, dated, adjusted as the weeks went by: what had worked, what had made her go quiet, what to say about her sleep. It read like a kennel log.
Then he stopped, and read the next one twice to himself before he read it aloud.
10.11 22:39. He’s gone. Session idle. Thank her. Tell her tomorrow will be difficult. Remind her: normal.
Dahl looked at the timestamp and then at Viktor, and Viktor felt the room tilt a quarter of a degree, the way the Dorthea tilted when someone stepped onto her from the jetty. Twenty-two thirty-nine. Two minutes after Geir’s watch had drawn its flat line.
He’s gone.
“Interview’s at four,” Dahl said. “Ask him then. Don’t ask him with your face.”
They put Viktor in the room next door with Ola and a monitor on a trolley, and Dahl went in with a colleague from datakrim and the defence lawyer the court had appointed, a tired man from Strandkaien who kept his coat on.
On the screen Tobias Riise looked smaller than he had on the steps. Someone had given him a cup of water and he had not drunk it. He sat with his hands under the table, and every so often one of them came up to his mouth and was put back down.
He talked. That surprised nobody but the lawyer. An interview room with a camera was the first audience he’d had since the forum.
The document: on an old hard drive, from the 2016 job. “I keep things.” He had found it again in July, looking for something else. Tried the password one wet Sunday evening, not really expecting anything. Logged straight out again, and waited a month for somebody to notice. Nobody did.
“And?” said Dahl.
“First try.” He nearly laughed. “Nine years. They never changed it.”
“Vestdata owed you the money,” Dahl said. “Why Fjordnett?”
He looked at her as if it were a stupid question. “Fjordnett’s was the door that was open.”
The ransomware: rented. “There’s a website. You pay a share. It’s like hiring a car.” He had never logged into the wallet the money was meant to go to. Not once. “It wasn’t for money. It was for noise.”
Mona: he didn’t say her name. He called her the office lady and then, when the lawyer looked at him, Mrs Hellesøy.
Then Dahl put a sheet of paper on the table between them, face up, and turned it round so he could read it. Viktor didn’t need to see it. He’s gone.
“Twenty-two thirty-nine,” Dahl said. “Monday. Tell me what you meant.”
Tobias looked at the paper.
“I was on the lab box. Domain admin, you can shadow the console. I could see his session.” He touched the edge of the sheet. “Not see him. See what he was doing. He’d been poking about since nine. He pulled the logs for the account. Then at half ten he opened the document. My document.” Something moved in his face that was close to pride. “I watched him read it. Page seventeen. The cursor was right there. And then it stopped.”
“Stopped.”
“Idle. Nothing. Five minutes, nothing.” He shrugged with one shoulder. “I thought he’d gone home. To sleep on it. People like him always sleep on it, they’d rather check in the morning. I thought I had one night.”
“He was on the floor of the server room,” Dahl said. “Dead.”
The room on the monitor was silent for a while. The lawyer put a hand on his client’s arm and the client didn’t notice.
“I didn’t know that,” Tobias said. “I didn’t do anything to him. I just watched.”
Beside Viktor, Ola had stopped typing.
Then Tobias lifted his head and looked into the camera, not at Dahl, not at the lawyer, straight up into the small black lens above the door, as if he had known since the start which room was next to this one and who was sitting in it.
“I know who you are, Brekke,” he said. “I read about you. The Oslo case. The file that went to the wrong place.” He let a second go by, pleased with it. “Henrik, wasn’t it?”
Nobody in either room moved.
“One careless thing. One door left open. Somebody pays who never should have.” He sat back. “The only difference between us is that I knew which door I was using.”
Viktor’s hand was flat on the monitor. He didn’t remember putting it there. The screen was warm under his palm and the face was under his fingers, and for a moment what he saw instead was a carrier bag of groceries, a carton of milk going warm on a widow’s lap in an overheated hearing room in Oslo.
Ola looked at the hand and then away from it.
Viktor took it back, wiped the print off the screen with his sleeve, and went out.
The rain had come back behind the building, ordinary rain, straight down, into the yard where the patrol cars were washed. Dahl found him there ten minutes later, his back against the wall. She didn’t pretend she hadn’t seen the feed.
“He wanted that to land,” she said.
“It isn’t wrong, though. That’s the trouble with the cruel ones. They tell you the truth to hurt you with it.” He watched the water run off the roof of a van. “Careless man, careful man. Same open door.”
He pushed himself off the wall.
“So let’s go and shut some.”