Anne Holt - Death In Oslo

He stood up in a rush.

‘I have to go,’ he said and started to walk.

He left the plastic bag and unopened can of Coke on the bench behind him. Warren stared at the rubbish in surprise before running after Adam.

‘What is it?’ he asked when he caught up with him.

‘I’ll drop you off in town, OK? There something I have to sort out.’

His heavy body quivered as he started to run towards the car. Just as he was getting in, Warren’s phone rang. His answers were brief: yes and no. After about a minute and a half, he hung up. When Adam took his eyes off the road for a second and looked at the American, he got a shock. Warren was ashen, his mouth was open and it looked like his eyes were about to disappear into his skull.

‘They think they’ve found the President,’ he said in a flat voice and put his mobile phone back in his breast pocket.

Adam changed gear and pulled out on to the main road.

‘Circumstances might indicate that she’s with Johanne,’ Warren continued in the same flat voice. ‘Are we on our way back to your house?’

Shit, Adam thought in desperation. How have they managed to do that already? Couldn’t you have delayed them any longer?

‘I’ll drop you off in town,’ he said. ‘You can make your own way from there.’

With one hand on the wheel, driving up Maridalsveien at full speed, he tried to call Salhus back. The phone just rang and rang until an answering machine came on.

‘Peter, it’s Adam,’ he barked. ‘Call me straight away. Immediately, d’you hear?’

The best thing would probably be to take the ring road to Smestad. Snaking down through town at this time of day would take for ever. He swung the car on to the roundabout over Ring 3 and accelerated westwards.

‘Listen,’ Warren said quietly. ‘I’ll let you in on a secret.’

‘About time you started to tell me something,’ Adam muttered, but he was barely listening.

‘I’m at loggerheads with my own people. And it’s about to blow.’

‘D’you know what, I’m sure you can talk to someone about that, just not me.’

He switched lanes to overtake a lorry and nearly collided with a small Fiat that got in the way. He swore angrily, swerved round the Fiat and accelerated again.

‘If you’re on your way to Johanne now,’ Warren tried, ‘then you should take me with you. It’s a very dangerous situation, to put it mildly, and I-’

‘You won’t be coming.’

‘Adam! Adam! ’

Adam slammed on the brakes. Warren, who hadn’t put his seatbelt on, was thrown on to the dashboard. He just had time to put his arms out in front of him. Adam let the car roll on to the hard shoulder just by the toll booths below Rikshospitalet.

‘What?’ he roared at the American. ‘What the fuck do you want?’

‘You can’t go alone. I’m warning you. For your own sake.’

‘Get out. Get out of the car. Now.’

‘Now? Here? On the motorway?’

‘Yes.’

‘You don’t mean it, Adam. Now listen-’

‘Get out!’

‘Listen to me!’

There was a hint of desperation in his voice. Adam tried to breathe regularly. He gripped the wheel with both hands. All he wanted to do was punch the American.

‘Like I just said in the park. I’m an idiot when it comes to women. I’ve done so many…’ He held his breath for a long time. When he started to talk again, it all came out in a rush. ‘But do you doubt my abilities as an FBI agent? Do you think incompetence would have got me where I am today? Do you really believe that it’s wise for you to go alone into a situation about which you know nothing, rather than taking an agent with thirty years’ experience with you to back you up? And what’s more, I’ve got a gun.’

Adam bit his lip. He exchanged a brief look with Warren, put the car into first gear and pulled out into the road again. He rang Johanne’s number. She didn’t answer. The answerphone didn’t kick in.

‘Fuck,’ he said through clenched teeth and rang 1881. ‘Fucking bastard hell.’

‘Excuse me,’ said a voice on the other end. ‘What did you say?’

‘An address in Oslo, please. Hanne Wilhelmsen. Krusesgate, what number?’

The woman replied curtly after a few seconds.

As they took the exit from the ring road to Smestad, he called another number. This time it was the central switchboard.

He had no intention of going into a dangerous situation alone.

But nor did he have any intention of taking with him a foreign national, whom he now knew he disliked.

Intensely.

Helen Lardahl Bentley was more confused after she had read the secured pages than she had been before. There was so much that didn’t make sense. The BSC Unit had obviously been pushed to one side. That might, of course, be because they had realised what Warren was up to. The heads of the FBI might think that it was wise not to confront him with it, yet at the same time they wanted to marginalise his potential to manipulate the investigation. But she still couldn’t work out why the profile that Warren and his men had developed was being so discredited by the rest of the system. The document seemed to be incredibly thorough. It correlated with everything they had initially feared when the first vague suggestions about the Trojan Horse had reached the FBI only six weeks ago.

The profile frightened her more than anything else she found.

But there was something that wasn’t right.

On the one hand, it seemed that everyone agreed that an attack on the US was imminent. On the other hand, none of the powerful organisations under the Homeland Security umbrella had found anything that would indicate links to existing or known organisations. It was as if they were clutching at straws. Jeffrey Hunter’s money could be traced to the cousin of the Saudi Arabian oil minister and to a consultancy firm he owned in Iran, but that was that. She couldn’t see that anyone had got any further, and she turned hot and cold when it started to dawn on her just how hard the American government, led by her own vice president, had hit out at the two Arab countries. Without decoding equipment, she couldn’t get in to the pages where the actual correspondence was saved, but she had started to comprehend the scale of the catastrophe towards which her country was headed.

She was sitting in an office at the far end of the flat.

When the doorbell rang, she only just heard it. It rang again. She listened. It rang a third time. Quietly she got up and picked up the gun that Hanne had found and loaded for her. She left the gun locked, put it inside her waistband, and pulled her sweater down over it.

Something was terribly wrong.

Warren Scifford and Adam Stubo were standing outside the door to Hanne Wilhelmsen’s flat in Krusesgate, arguing at the tops of their voices.

‘We’ll wait,’ Adam said, furious. ‘A patrol car will be here any second!’

Warren pulled his arm out of the Norwegian’s firm grip.

‘It’s my president,’ he hissed back. ‘It is my responsibility to find out if my country’s top leader is behind that door. My life depends on it, Adam! She is the only one who believes me! No way am I waiting for a gang of trigger-happy uniformed-’

‘Hello,’ said a hoarse voice. ‘Who’s that?’

The door opened ten centimetres or so. At about face height there was a taut steel safety chain, and an old woman stared out at them with wild, wide-open eyes.

‘Don’t open it,’ Adam said immediately. ‘Please, woman, please close the door now!’

Warren kicked the door. The woman jumped back with a stream of oaths. The chain was still intact. Adam grabbed hold of Warren’s jacket, but it slipped out of his hand and he lost his balance. He made a desperate attempt to grab Warren’s trouser leg, but the older man was much fitter. When he pulled his leg loose, he also planted a powerful foot right in Adam’s groin, which made the Norwegian collapse and black out. The old woman inside stopped her carry-on when another kick to the door made the chain come loose. The door flew open and hit the woman, who was thrown backwards and landed on a shoe rack.