Jo Nesbo - The Son

‘Dear friends and family,’ she said. ‘I wanted to add that Anders was right. We just can’t wait until summer. .’

Simon swore. He had parked in the middle of Kvadraturen and was studying a map of the area. Telenor’s police assistance service had told him that the phone was here. The mobile Sonny Lofthus had used to text him. And which Simon now knew was a pay-as-you-go phone registered to a Helge Sorensen. It made sense, he had used the ID card of the same prison officer earlier.

But where could he be?

The coordinates covered only a few streets, but those streets were Oslo’s most densely populated. Shops, offices, hotels, flats. Simon jumped when there was a knock on the side window. He looked up and saw a harshly made-up, chubby girl in hot pants whose breasts were squeezed into some kind of corset. He shook his head, she pulled an ugly face at him and walked off. Simon had forgotten that this was the city’s busiest red-light district and that a single man in a parked car in these streets was inevitably regarded as a punter. A blow job in the car, ten minutes at the Bismarck Hotel or possibly up against the wall of Akershus Fortress. He had once been that man. It wasn’t something he was proud of, but once upon a time he had been willing to pay for a crumb of human contact and a voice saying ‘I love you’. The latter had fallen under the category of ‘special services’ and cost two hundred kroner extra.

He called the number again and watched the people walking up and down the pavements, hoping that one of them would reach for their phone and thus give themselves away. He sighed and ended the call. Looked at his watch. At least he knew that the phone was in the area, and that ought to indicate that Sonny was staying put and wasn’t up to anything devilish tonight.

So why did Simon have the feeling that something wasn’t right?

Bo sat in the unfamiliar living room, looking out of the large panorama window. He sat in front of a bright light which was aimed at the window so that anyone watching him from the outside would see only his silhouette and not his features. Hopefully Sonny Lofthus didn’t have too clear an idea of Yngve Morsand’s build. Bo was thinking that this was exactly how Sylvester had been sitting when he had left him in Lofthus’s house. Good, stupid, loyal, loud Sylvester. And that that fucker had killed him. How he had done that, they would probably never know. Because there would never be an interrogation, a torture session where Bo could exact his revenge, savour it like he would a glass of retsina with its taste of resin. Some people couldn’t stand it, but to Bo it represented the taste of his childhood, the island of Telendos, friends, a gently rocking boat in the bottom of which he would lie and look at the always blue Greek sky and hear the waves and the wind sing a duet together. He heard a click in his right ear.

‘A car stopped down the road and then turned round.’

‘Did anyone get out?’ Bo asked. The earpiece, the cable and the microphone were so discreet that they wouldn’t show up in the backlight from the outside.

‘We didn’t have time to see, but the car is driving away now. Perhaps it was lost.’

‘OK. Everyone get ready.’

Bo adjusted his bulletproof vest. Lofthus wouldn’t have time to fire any shots, but he preferred to take precautions. He had placed two men in the garden to grab Lofthus when he came through the gate or over the fence, and one in the corridor behind the unlocked front door. All other means of access to the house were closed and locked. They had been here since five o’clock in the afternoon, they were tired and the night had barely begun, but thoughts about Sylvester would keep him awake. The thought of getting that bastard. Lure him out here. If not tonight, then tomorrow, or the next night. From time to time Bo considered how strange it was that the big man — who possessed so little humanity himself — had such an insight into people. Their urges, weaknesses and motivations, how they reacted to pressure and fear and how he, with enough information about their temperament, proclivities and intelligence, could predict their next move with astonishing — or as the big man himself used to say: disappointing — accuracy. Sadly the big man had given orders that the boy must be killed immediately and not taken prisoner so his death would be swift and far too free from pain.

Bo shifted in the chair when he heard a sound. And even before he had turned round, a thought crossed his mind. That he didn’t have the big man’s ability to predict what this guy would do next. Not when he left Sylvester in the yellow house, and not now.

The boy had a bloody handkerchief tied around his head and was standing in a side doorway, the one that led from the living room and straight into the garage.

How the hell had he got in that way, when they had locked the garage? He must have come from behind, from the forest. Picking a locked garage door was surely one of the first things a clever junkie would have learned. But this wasn’t Bo’s most pressing problem. His most pressing problem was that the boy was holding something which had an unfortunate resemblance to an Uzi, the Israeli machine gun that spits out nine x 19mm bullets faster than your average execution squad.

‘You’re not Yngve Morsand,’ Sonny Lofthus said. ‘Where is he?’

‘He’s here,’ Bo said, turning his head to the microphone.

‘Where?’

‘He’s here,’ Bo repeated, a little louder this time. ‘In the living room.’

Sonny Lofthus looked around as he walked towards Bo with the machine gun raised and his finger on the trigger. The clip appear to hold thirty-six bullets. He stopped. Had he spotted the earpiece and the cable from the microphone?

‘You’re talking to someone,’ the boy said and had time to take a step backwards before the door to the hallway was flung open and Stan burst in with a pistol. Bo reached for his own Ruger as he heard the dry, crackling cough from the Uzi and a cascade of glass when the window behind him shattered. White stuffing spilled from the upholstered furniture and splinters flew from the parquet flooring. The guy splattered bullets generously with no particular target in mind. But it didn’t matter, an Uzi will always outgun two pistols. Bo and Stan took shelter behind the nearest sofa. It fell silent. Bo was lying on his back clutching his pistol with both hands in case the guy’s face appeared above the edge of the sofa.

‘Stan!’ he shouted. ‘Take him out!’

No reply.

‘Stan!’

‘You do it!’ Stan screamed from behind the sofa by the other wall. ‘He’s got a fucking Uzi, for fuck’s sake!’

There was a click in Bo’s earpiece: ‘What’s going on, boss?’

At the same moment Bo heard the sound of a car starting up and revving the engine loudly. Morsand had taken his stately Mercedes 28 °CE Coupe 1982 model to the Twin’s party in Oslo, but his wife’s run-around car — a cute little Honda Civic — was still there. Now that Morsand had killed her, he no longer had a wife who could run around in it, but the key must have been left in the ignition. It was probably what they did with wives and cars out here in the countryside, share them. He heard voices from his men outside.

‘He’s trying to get away!’

‘Someone is opening the garage door.’

Bo heard a grating sound when the Honda was put into gear. And a groan when the engine choked. Was the guy a total amateur? He couldn’t shoot and he couldn’t drive.

‘Get him!’

The car was started a second time.

‘We heard something about an Uzi. .’

‘It’s the Uzi or the Twin, your choice !’

Bo scrambled to his feet and ran to the shattered window in time to see the car jump out of the garage. Nubbe and Evgeni had positioned themselves in front of the gate. Nubbe was firing away with his Beretta, bullet after bullet. Evgeni had a Remington 870 with the barrel sawn off at the clip raised to his cheek. He jerked as he pulled the trigger. Bo saw the windscreen explode, but the car continued to accelerate, the front bumper hitting Evgeni right above the knees, flipping him up, and Bo saw him somersault in the air before the windscreen-less Civic swallowed him like a killer whale gulps down a seal. The Civic took out the gate and a section of the fence, drove straight across the narrow gravel path and into the wheat field on the other side. And, without slowing down, it ploughed on, screeching in first gear, as it carved a path through the golden sheaves bathed in moonlight, turned in a wide curve before returning to the gravel path further down. The engine howled even louder — the driver was obviously pushing down the clutch without taking his foot off the accelerator. Then he got the car into second gear, the engine came close to cutting out again, but it recovered and the car continued down the gravel path where, because the driver hadn’t managed to switch on the headlights, it soon disappeared in the darkness.