Ю Несбё - The Jealousy Man and Other Stories

‘Yee-ha!’ Larsen hollered, his arms stretched up in the air. It was as though a light that had been turned off in his head for a long time was suddenly switched on again.

I piloted the drone over the wall. A hundred metres down the hill three armoured trucks stood stationary, their engines turning over. And an SUV that I seemed to recognise.

‘They’ve got more men on the outside,’ I said. ‘Shall we turn on the loudspeakers and tell them we’re opening the gates so they can fetch their dead?’

‘Wait,’ said Downing. ‘Look.’

He pointed to the alarm lights. One of them was on.

‘Someone’s broken the kitchen window,’ he said.

I flew the drone back and sure enough, the shutter on the kitchen window had been twisted to one side, probably with a crowbar.

‘A passed pawn,’ said Downing. He put on his night vision and picked up his rifle. ‘Adams, you take over here.’

The next moment he was out the door and had disappeared into the dark corridor outside.

We looked at each other. ‘Passed pawn’ was a term we’d learned. It meant soldiers operating independently of the unit. Without waiting for orders they could react at lightning speed to any opportunities that suddenly opened up. We listened but we couldn’t hear Downing’s footsteps. He had briefly shown us a ninja technique for silent walking but there hadn’t been time to train in hand-to-hand fighting, we’d been so focused on making certain the walls were impregnable.

We heard a bang that made us jump.

Then a sound like someone falling down the basement stairs.

We waited. I was holding the automatic shotgun so tightly my forearm ached.

I counted to ten, and when Downing still hadn’t knocked I turned to the other two.

‘Downing’s dead,’ I said.

‘This passed pawn will never breach the secure room,’ Chung said confidently.

‘Yes, but he can get Brad out,’ I said. ‘I’m going to take a look.’

‘Are you crazy?’ whispered Larsen. ‘The passed pawn has night vision — you won’t have a chance, Will!’

‘That is exactly my chance,’ I said, checking that my gun was loaded and the safety catch off.

‘What do you mean?’

I pointed to the control panel, to the switch that controlled all the lighting in the house.

‘Turn the light on when I go out, turn it off again in eight seconds, then on and off every five seconds.’

‘But...’

‘Do as he says,’ said Chung, who I could see had got the idea.

I opened the door and slipped out into the darkness. The light went on. I ran towards the stairs, about as ninja-like as a rhinoceros. Downing lay there at the bottom. The night vision obscured his eyes but from the hole in his forehead I could see he was dead. I counted the seconds silently inside as I pulled the night vision off him. I sensed rather than heard the enemy approaching, hoping that the blinding of the light would delay him just long enough while he had to stop and remove the night vision.

Six, seven.

I had just got the night vision on when the light went again.

Now I heard the steps, heading away. He was retreating, had to get his goggles on again.

I followed the sound, trying to step more quietly but guessing he couldn’t hear me as well anyway now that he was on the move himself.

I came to the T-junction with the security room to the right and Brad’s cell on the left. Counted. Three, four. Flipped up the goggles and slipped round the corner to the right as the light came on.

Nothing.

I turned and there he was, standing seven, eight metres away from me, in front of the door to Brad’s cell. Wearing black, not camouflage. He turned towards me, towards the light, for it was clear he could see nothing, and he lifted a hand to remove the goggles he had down over the balaclava.

Maybe the balaclava made it easier, I don’t know, but I dropped to my knees, aimed and fired at him. To my amazement none of the bullets seemed to hit him. He tore off the goggles and tossed them away so they skidded over the floor and then he fired, the sounds echoing deafeningly around the stone walls. I didn’t feel any pain, just a pressure in my left shoulder, as though someone had given me a friendly shove. But I lost all strength in that arm and the rifle slipped to the floor.

The passed pawn saw that I was helpless, but instead of firing wildly he took aim with the rifle steadied against his shoulder. It looked as though it was a point of honour for him to drop his enemy with a bullet through the forehead.

I raised my right hand, the palm towards him, and for a fraction of a second he hesitated, as though this universal and timeless gesture of submission touched some instinct in him. Because that’s how I like to think of mercy.

Five...

Dark again, and I rolled from my kneeling position down and sideways as he fired. I pulled the goggles back down, saw the figure in the puke-green light, raised the rifle with my right hand and pulled the trigger. One shot. Then another. The second one got him. And the third. The fourth missed and ricocheted off the wall behind him. But the fifth hit, I think. And the sixth.

The lights came on and went off twice before I had emptied the magazine.

It was only later, after they had retrieved their dead and wounded, and I had taken off the night goggles, that it struck me: I no longer felt the dizziness and nausea I had felt earlier. On the contrary, I had never felt more balanced, more on top of things, clearer.

And at about daybreak, for the first time since Amy disappeared, Heidi slipped across to me in bed and put her arms around me. I kissed her and then — more careful with each other than we usually were — we made love.

A few days after we had repulsed the attack, I was back on Rat Island. Again Colin was waiting for me on the jetty. He looked wasted. Not thinner, wasted.

Rats darted back and forth in front of us on our way to the prison building.

‘There are more of them,’ I said, looking down at the sloping rocks which had been white the last time I was here. Now they looked black, not from the waves that broke over them as I had thought when I stood looking from the fishing boat on the way in, but because there were so many rats covering them.

‘I think they swim over in the night,’ said Colin, noticing the direction of my gaze. ‘They’re frightened.’

‘Of what?’

‘Of other rats. Those on the mainland are running out of food, they’ve started eating each other. So the smaller rats come over here.’

‘Won’t they start eating each other here too?’

‘In the end, yes.’

We went inside, entering a part of the building that had been converted into a sort of mansion-type medieval castle. Liza was waiting at the top of the first-floor stairs and she shook my hand. Previously we would always hug each other. That was another of the customs that had vanished with the coming of the pandemic, although in our case now that wasn’t the only reason: Amy’s absence and Brad’s absence made the children almost painfully present.

She excused herself, saying she had things to do, and disappeared, leaving Colin and I to enter the large and sparsely furnished dining room just in time to see an unusually large rat disappear through the door at the other end.

‘Damn, that was big,’ I said.

‘But not so big that it doesn’t run away from us and not the other way round,’ said Colin. ‘Although that’s probably just a matter of time,’ he added with a sigh.

We sat down and two servants approached, placed white serviettes in our laps and served us directly from a steaming saucepan.

‘We can’t even serve the food from ordinary dishes,’ said Colin. ‘They’re everywhere and they’ll risk anything once they pick up the smell of food. And they reproduce faster than we’re able to shoot them.’