Phantom (40 page)

“Thanks,” Harry said. “Did you get the bags from Rita at Schrøder’s?”

“Yes, I did. I’ve told Pathology to make it a priority. They’re analyzing the blood now.”

Pause.

“And?” Harry asked.

“And what?”

“I know that intonation, Beate. There’s something else.”

“DNA tests take more than a few hours, Harry. It—”

“Can take days before we have a final result.”

“Yes, so for the time being it’s incomplete.”

“How incomplete?” Harry heard footsteps in the corridor.

“Well, there’s at least a five percent chance there’s no match.”

“You’ve been given an interim DNA profile and have a match in the DNA database, don’t you?”

“We use incomplete tests only to say who we can
eliminate
.”

“Who’s the match for?”

“I don’t want to say anything until—”

“Come on.”

“No. But I can say it’s not Gusto’s own blood.”

“And?”

“And it’s not Oleg’s. All right?”

“Very all right,” Harry said, suddenly aware that he had been holding his breath.

A shadow under the door.

“Harry?”

Harry hung up. Pointed the rifle at the door. Waited. Three short knocks. Waited. Listened. The shadow didn’t move. He tiptoed along the wall toward the door, out of any possible firing line. Put his eye to the peephole in the middle of the door.

He saw a man’s back.

The jacket hung straight and was so short he could see the trouser waistband. A black piece of cloth hung from his back pocket, a cap, perhaps. But he wasn’t wearing a belt. His arms hung close to his sides. If the man was carrying a weapon it had to be in a holster, either on his chest or on the inside of his calf. Neither very common.

The man turned to the door and knocked twice, harder this time. Harry held his breath while studying the distorted image of a face. Distorted, and yet there was something unmistakable about it. A pronounced underbite. And he was scratching himself under the chin with a card he had hanging from his neck. The way police officers sometimes carried ID cards when they were going to make an arrest. Shit! The police had been quicker than Dubai.

Harry hesitated. If the guy had orders to arrest him he would also have a blue chit with a search warrant he had already shown the receptionist and he would have been given a master key. Harry’s brain calculated. He tiptoed back, pushed the rifle in behind the wardrobe. Went back and opened the door. Said: “What do you want and who are you?” while glancing up and down the corridor.

The man stared at him. “What a state you’re in, Hole. Can I come in?” He held up his ID card.

“Truls Berntsen. You used to work for Bellman, didn’t you?”

“Still do. He sends his regards.”

Harry stepped aside and let Berntsen go first. “Cozy,” Berntsen said, looking around.

“Take a seat,” Harry said, indicating the bed and sitting on the chair by the window.

“Chewing gum?” Berntsen said, offering a packet.

“Gives me cavities. What do you want?”

“As friendly as ever.” Berntsen grinned, rolled up the chewing gum, placed it in his drawerlike prognathous jaw and sat down.

Harry’s brain was registering intonation, body language, eye movement, smell. The man was relaxed, yet threatening. Open palms, no sudden movements, but his eyes were collecting data, reading the situation, preparing for something. Harry already regretted stowing his rifle. Not having a license was the least of his problems.

“Thing is, we found blood in connection with a grave desecration at Vestre Cemetery last night. And the DNA test shows it to be yours.”

Harry watched as Berntsen neatly folded the silver paper that had been wrapped around the chewing gum. Harry remembered him better now. They had called him Beavis. Bellman’s errand boy. Stupid and smart. And dangerous. Forrest Gump gone bad.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Harry said.

“No, I can imagine,” Berntsen said with a sigh. “Mistake in the system, perhaps? I’ll have to drive you down to Police HQ to take another blood sample.”

“I’m searching for a girl,” Harry said. “Irene Hanssen.”

“She’s in Vestre Cemetery?”

“She’s been missing since this summer, at any rate. She’s the foster sister of Gusto Hanssen.”

“News to me. Nevertheless, you’ll have to come with me down to—”

“It’s the girl in the middle,” Harry said. He had taken the Hanssen family photograph from his jacket pocket and passed it to Berntsen. “I need a little time. Not much. Afterward you’ll understand why I’ve had to do things like this. I promise to report within forty-eight hours.”

“
48 HRS.
,” Berntsen said, studying the picture. “Good film. Nolte and that Negro. McMurphy?”

“Murphy.”

“Right. Stopped being funny, didn’t he? Isn’t that strange? You have something, and then suddenly you’ve lost it. How do you think that feels, Hole?”

Harry looked at Truls Berntsen. He wasn’t so sure about this Forrest
Gump thing anymore. Berntsen held the photograph up to the light. Squinted with concentration.

“Do you recognize her?”

“No,” said Berntsen, passing the picture back as he twisted around. Obviously it wasn’t comfortable sitting on the item of clothing he had in his back pocket because he quickly moved it to his jacket pocket. “We’re going for a ride to Police HQ, where we will review your forty-eight hours.”

His tone was light. Too light. And Harry had already done his thinking. Beate had prioritized her DNA tests at the Pathology Unit and still did not have a final result. So how come Berntsen had a blood test result off Gusto’s shroud already? And there was another thing. Berntsen hadn’t moved the item quickly enough. It wasn’t a cap—it was a balaclava. The type used when Gusto was executed.

And the next thought followed hard on its heels: the burner.

Had the police maybe not been the first on the scene? Was it Dubai’s lackey instead?

Harry considered the rifle in the wardrobe. But it was too late to escape now. In the corridor he heard footsteps approaching. Two people. One of them so big the floorboards creaked. The footsteps stopped outside the door. The shadows of two pairs of legs, standing akimbo, fell under the crack and across the floor. He could, of course, have hoped they were police colleagues of Berntsen, that this was a real arrest. But he had heard the floor’s lament. A big man, he guessed the size of the figure running after him through Frogner Park.

“Come on,” Berntsen said, getting up and standing in front of Harry. Scratched his chest beneath his lapel in an apparently casual way. “A little ride, just you and me.”

“We’re not alone, it seems,” Harry said. “I see you have backup.”

He nodded to the shadow under the door. Another shadow appeared. A straight, oblong shadow. Truls followed his gaze. And Harry saw it. The genuine astonishment on his face. The kind of astonishment types like Truls Berntsen cannot simulate. They weren’t Berntsen’s people.

“Move away from the door,” Harry whispered.

Truls stopped masticating the chewing gum and looked down at him.

T
RULS
B
ERNTSEN LIKED
to have his Steyr pistol in a shoulder holster, positioned in such a way that the gun lay flat against his chest. It made
it harder to see when you stood face-to-face with someone. And just as he knew that Harry Hole was an experienced detective, trained by the FBI in Chicago and so on, he also knew that Hole would automatically notice anything bulky in the usual places. Not that Truls figured he would need to use the pistol, but he had taken precautions. If Harry resisted he would escort him outside with the Steyr discreetly pointing at his back, having put on the balaclava so that any potential witnesses couldn’t say whom they had seen with Hole before he disappeared off the face of the earth. The Saab was parked on a back street; he had even smashed the only street lamp so that no one would see the license plate. Fifty thousand euros. He had to be patient, build stone by stone. Get a house a little higher up in Høyenhall, with a view looking down on them. Down on her.

Harry Hole seemed smaller than the giant he remembered. And uglier. Pale, ugly, dirty and exhausted. Resigned, unfocused. He thought this was going to be an easier job than he had anticipated. So when Hole whispered he should move away from the door, Truls Berntsen’s first reaction was irritation. Was the guy attempting to play games now that everything looked to be going so well? But his second reaction was that this was the voice they used. Police officers in critical situations. No coloring, no drama, just a neutral, cold clarity with the least possible chance of a misunderstanding. And the greatest possible chance of survival.

So Truls Berntsen—almost without thinking—took a step to the side.

At that moment the top part of the door panel was blown into the room.

As Berntsen whirled around his instinctive conclusion was that the barrel must have been sawn off to have such wide coverage at such short range. He already had a hand inside his jacket. With the shoulder holster in its conventional position and without a jacket, he would have drawn faster, since the handle would have been sticking out.

Truls Berntsen fell backward onto the bed with the gun freed and at the end of an outstretched arm as the remains of the door opened with a bang. He heard the glass shatter behind him before everything was drowned out by a new explosion.

The noise filled his ears, and there was a snowstorm in the room.

In the doorway the silhouettes of two men stood in the snowdrift. The taller one raised his gun. His head almost touched the doorframe—he was well over six feet. Truls fired. And fired again. Felt the wonderful recoil and even more wonderful certainty that this was for
real—to hell with the consequences. The tall one jerked, seemed to flick his bangs before stepping back and disappearing from view. Truls shifted his pistol and his gaze. The second man stood there without moving. White feathers fluttered around him. Truls had him in his sights. But he didn’t fire. He saw him more clearly now. Face like a wolf. The kind of face Truls had always associated with the Sami, Finns and Russians.

Now the guy calmly raised his gun. Finger wrapped around the trigger.

“Easy, Berntsen,” he said in English.

Truls Berntsen gave a long, drawn-out roar.

H
ARRY FELL
.

He had lowered his head, crouched and moved back as the first blast of the shotgun sprayed over his head. Back to where he knew the window was. Felt the pane almost bend before it remembered it was glass and gave way.

Then he was in free fall.

Time had jammed on the brakes, as though he were falling through water. Hands and arms working like slow paddles in a reflexive attempt to stop the body rotating into the beginnings of a backward somersault. Semi-transmitted thoughts bounced between the brain’s synapses:

He was going to land on his head and break his neck.

It was lucky he didn’t have curtains.

The naked woman in the window opposite was upside down.

Then he was received by softness everywhere. Empty cardboard boxes, old newspapers, dirty diapers, milk cartons and day-old bread from the hotel’s kitchen, wet coffee filters.

He lay on his back in the open dumpster amid a shower of glass. Flashes of light appeared from the window above him, like camera flashbulbs. Muzzles of flames. But it was eerily quiet, as though the flashes came from a TV with the volume turned down. He could feel that the duct tape around his neck had torn. Blood was streaming out. And for one wild moment he considered staying where he was. Closing his eyes, going to sleep, drifting off. He seemed to be watching himself sit up, jump over the edge of the dumpster and race toward the gate at the end of the yard. Open it as he heard a protracted, furious roar from the window reach the street. Slip on a drain cover but manage to stay on his feet. See a black woman in tight jeans, who smiled instinctively and pouted at him, then reviewed the situation and averted her gaze.

Harry set off.

And decided that this time he would just run.

Until there was nowhere left to run.

Until it was over, until they had him.

He hoped it wouldn’t be too long.

In the meantime he would do what hunted prey are programmed to do: flee, try to escape, try to survive for a few more hours, a few more minutes, a few more seconds.

His heart pounded in protest, and he began to laugh as he crossed the street in front of a night bus and continued down toward Oslo Central Station.

Harry was locked in. He had just woken and noticed. On the wall immediately above him hung a poster of a skinned human body. Beside it, a neatly carved wooden figure depicting a man on a cross bleeding to death. And beside that, medicine cabinet after medicine cabinet.

He twisted around on the couch. Tried to continue where he had left off yesterday. Tried to see the picture. There were lots of dots, but he hadn’t managed to connect them. And even the dots were for the time being mere assumptions.

Assumption one: Truls Berntsen was the burner. As an employee in Orgkrim he was probably in a perfect position to serve Dubai.