Jo Nesbo - The Redbreast

'Hi Lise!' he shouted as he passed the photocopier, and the young Foreign Office probationer jumped, managing only a wan smile before Brandhaug was round the next corner. Lise was a newly fledged lawyer and the daughter of a friend from university days. She had started only three weeks ago. And from that moment she had been aware that the Under Secretary, the highest civil servant in the building, knew who she was. Would he be able to have her? Probably. Not that it would happen. Necessarily.

He could already hear the buzz of voices before he opened the door. He looked at his watch. Seventy-five seconds. Then he was inside, casting a fleeting glimpse around the room to confirm that all the authorities summoned were represented.

'Well, well, so you're Bjarne Moller?' he shouted with a broad smile as he offered his hand across the table to a tall thin man sitting beside Anne Storksen, the Chief Constable.

'You're the PAS, aren't you? I hear you're running the roller-coaster leg of the Holmenkollen relay?'

This was one of Brandhaug's tricks. Coming by a little piece of information about people he met for the first time. Something that wasn't in their CV. It made them insecure. Using the acronym PAS-the internal abbreviation for Politiavdelingssjef, the head of Crime Squad-particularly pleased him. Brandhaug sat down, winked at his old friend Kurt Meirik, the head of Politiets overv amp;kningstjeneste, or POT, the Security Service, and studied the others sitting round the table.

As yet, no one knew who would take charge of the meeting as the representatives were equally high ranking, theoretically at least, coming from the Prime Minister's Office, Oslo police district, Norwegian Security Service, Crime Squad and Brandhaug's own Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Prime Minister's Office had called the meeting, but there was no doubt that Oslo police district, in the guise of Anne Storksen, and POT, in the shape of Kurt Meirik, wanted the operational responsibility when procedures were that far advanced. The Under Secretary of State from the Prime Minister's Office looked as if he envisaged taking charge.

Brandhaug closed his eyes and listened.

The nice-to-see-you conversations stopped, the buzz of voices slowly subsided and a table leg scraped on the floor. Not yet. There was the rustling of papers, the clicking of pens-at important meetings like these most heads of department had their personal note-takers with them in case at a later point they began to blame each other for things that had happened. Someone coughed, but it came from the wrong end of the room and apart from that it wasn't the kind of cough that preceded speaking. Sharp intake of breath. Someone spoke.

'Let's begin then,' Bernt Brandhaug said, opening his eyes.

Heads turned towards him. It was the same every time. A half-open mouth, the Under Secretary of State's; a wry smile from Anne Storksen showing that she understood what had taken place-but otherwise, blank faces looking at him without a hint of recognition that the battle was already over.

'Welcome to the first co-ordination meeting. Our task is to get four of the world's most important men in and out of Norway more or less in one piece.'

Polite chuckles from around the table.

'On Monday, 1 November, we will receive a visit from the PLO leader Yasser Arafat, the Israeli PM Ehud Barak, the Russian PM Vladimir Putin and, last but not least, the cherry on the cake: at 6.15 a.m., in exactly twenty-seven days' time, Air Force One, with the American President on board, will be landing at Gardemoen Airport, Oslo.'

Brandhaug's gaze moved from face to face down the table. It stopped at the new one, Bjarne Moller's.

'If it isn't foggy, that is,' he said, earning himself a laugh and noticing with satisfaction that Moller forgot his nervousness for a moment and laughed along with the others. Brandhaug responded with a smile, revealing his strong teeth which had become even whiter since his last cosmetic treatment at the dentist's.

'We still don't know exactly how many people are coming,' Brandhaug said. 'The President had an entourage of 2,000 in Australia and 1,700 in Copenhagen.'

Mumbles around the table.

'However, in my experience, a guesstimate of around 700 is probably more realistic.'

Brandhaug was quietly confident his 'guesstimate' would soon be confirmed as he had received a fax an hour before with a list of the 712 people coming.

'Some of you are probably wondering why the President needs so many people for a two-day summit meeting. The answer is simple. What we are talking about here is the good old-fashioned rhetoric of power. Seven hundred, if my assessment is correct, is precisely the number of people Kaiser Friedrich III had with him when he entered Rome in 1468 to show the Pope who the most powerful man in the world was.'

More laughter round the table. Brandhaug winked at Anne Storksen. He had found the reference in Aftenposten. He brought his two palms together.

'I don't need to tell you how short a time two months is, but it means that we're going to need daily co-ordination meetings at ten in this room. Until these four men are off our hands you'll just have to drop everything else. There's a bar on holidays and time off. And sick leave. Any questions before we go on?'

'Well, we think -' the Under Secretary of State began.

'That includes depressions,' Brandhaug interrupted, and Bjarne Moller couldn't help laughing out loud.

'Well, we -' the Under Secretary began again.

'Over to you, Meirik,' Brandhaug called.

'What?'

The Head of the Security Service (POT) raised his shiny pate and looked at Brandhaug.

'You wanted to say something about POT's threat assessment?' Brandhaug said.

'Oh that,' Meirik said. 'We've brought copies with us.'

Meirik was from Tromso and spoke a strangely haphazard mixture of Tromso dialect and standard Norwegian. He nodded to a woman sitting beside him. Brandhaug's eyes lingered on her. OK, she wasn't wearing make-up, and her short brown hair was cut in a bob and held in an unbecoming hairslide. And her suit, a blue woollen job, was downright dull. But even though she had made herself look exaggeratedly sober, in the way that professional women who were afraid of not being taken seriously often did, he liked what he saw. Brown, gentle eyes and high cheekbones gave her an aristocratic, almost un-Norwegian appearance. He had seen her before, but the haircut was new. What was her name again-it was something biblical-Rakel? Perhaps she was recently divorced. That might explain the new haircut. She leaned over the attache case between her and Meirik, and Brandhaug's eyes automatically sought the neckline on her blouse, but it was buttoned too high to show him anything of interest. Did she have children of school age? Would she have any objections to renting a room in one of the city centre hotels during the day? Was she turned on by power?

Brandhaug: 'Just give us a short resume^ Meirik.'

'Fine.'

'I would like to say one thing first…' the Under Secretary of State said.

'Shall we let Meirik finish first? Then you can say as much as you like afterwards, Bjorn.'

That was the first time Brandhaug had used the Under Secretary's Christian name.

'POT considers there to be a risk of an attack or the infliction of other damage,' Meirik said.

Brandhaug smiled. Out of the corner of his eye he saw the Chief Constable do the same. Smart girl, law degree and flawless administrative record. Perhaps he ought to invite her and her husband to a trout supper one evening. Brandhaug and his wife lived in a spacious timber house in the green belt in Nordberg. In winter you had only to put on your skis outside the garage and you were off. Brandhaug loved the house. His wife had thought it was too black. She said that all the dark wood made her afraid, and she didn't like the forest being around them, either. Yes, an invitation to supper. Solid timber, and fresh trout he'd caught himself. They were the right signals to give.