Immortals (8 page)

Chapter 12

The Bodyguard

Hantel Corporate Headquarters

St. Olav’s Gate, Oslo, Norway

9 May, 2012

Ludvig was in a pensive mood. He had made the trip back from Sogn the night before. He had denied himself Dagny the second time round, for fear of the fucking heart-attack. As soon as he had reached Oslo, he had decided to immerse himself in work, after just a brief night’s sleep.

The transcripts that lay on his table were ominous. The political Left of Norway was resurgent and would, in all likelihood, be a part of the ruling coalition after the forthcoming elections. On his table were the transcripts of emails exchanged between a
[email protected]
and a
[email protected]
. The contents alluded to an unholy pact between a Bernt Garethson, the chairman of the second-largest telecommunications concern in Norway, and Hanka Luvenson, the leader of the Norway Nationalist Party.

The Norwegian government’s most ambitious project of unifying the country under a single wireless framework providing service for all the competing networks would soon be announced. As per the emails on Ludvig’s desk, Hantel would not be allowed to bid for the contract, as it would be deemed to be holding competing interests. The reasons would be tenuous but Luvenson would make sure that the government managed to scrape through with the decision to keep out Hantel, and also make sure that the 1.4 billion-dollar contract went to Garethson. An amount equal to $200 million had transferred hands to seal the pact and Ludvig held emails written in code that intimated the routes that the money had to take to reach Luvenson.

There was a knock on the door.

Eindride Haalkud walked in. A gentle giant, he was the head of the ostensibly insipid Company Analysis wing of Hantel. The offices of the Company Analysis wing were in the basement and pretty much no one had any idea what went on there.

Haalkud was seldom seen beyond the confines of the basement, although some geeky types working in the wing occasionally surfaced in the company canteen for a quick bite or two.

‘You are aware of these emails?’ Ludvig asked him.

Haalkud peeked over from his chair and saw the transcripts on Ludvig’s table.

‘Yes.’

Haalkud was very meticulous in his work and everything that came from his office went through him. These transcripts had been intercepted the day before and he had understood their significance as soon as he had seen them. He had dispatched them immediately to the boss’s office and had sent the memo number and an (*) asterisk to Ludvig’s personal cell by an SMS.

‘Do we have anything on Luvenson? Something worth “going to war with” kind of leverage?’

Haalkud had just the thing that Ludvig wanted.

‘I have something but I am not sure if you are going to like what I have.’

Ludvig looked into Haalkud’s eyes

‘Indulge me, please.’

Haalkud presided over his electronic dragnet every day, pulling straws out of thin air. He was privy to 3,589 different zero-day attacks on virtually every email, social network, banking and financial network. These attacks, if used recklessly, would perhaps cripple half of the world’s communication networks, plunging more than a billion people into the stone-age instantly. He understood that the modern world ran on computers and networks and had dedicated more than two decades to silently bug every bug-worthy network. He had diligently found some of the flaws and had created a host of others. But he was careful with what he did with the power he had. What he pulled out from the electronic quagmire surprised even him every now and then. And what he was about to tell Ludvig was going to be surprising, if not shocking, for him.

He hesitated a bit and then spoke very slowly for a measure of impact.

‘Miss Dagny is doing Luvenson.’

Ludvig’s face did not reveal any emotion.

A smirk played across Haalkud’s face as he continued:

‘Could be love.’

Ludvig smiled a wry smile. He knew better.

‘Thanks, Haalkud. Keep me posted if something interesting props up.’

Haalkud got his cue and pulled his burly frame up awkwardly from the chair.

Ludvig watched him shuffle out of the room, and then picked up the phone on his table.

***

Hantel Corporate Headquarters

St. Olav’s Gate, Oslo, Norway

11 May, 2012

It was a couple of days after his little talk with Haalkud, and what he wanted lay before him on his table – a compressed video file written on a mini-disk that had very explicit and intimate scenes of the nubile nymphet Dagny and the very married Luvenson.

Ludvig was waiting in quiet anticipation. Waiting for another one of his corporate combats; rare occasions that livened him up and infused a rush of adrenaline in his wiry old veins.

Dagny had been easy to recruit. The lure of a major film and the threat of a scandal had been enough to buy her co-operation. She had captured her next tryst with Luvenson on film and the film now lay in front of Ludvig. She was then promptly sent out of the country and was currently vacationing in a holiday chateau in Lyon in France.

There wasn’t any pretence of love between the two. For Dagny, it was part of her social climbing that led her to cling to men of power in industry and politics. There was nothing as personal as love as had been suggested by Haalkud a couple of days ago. Her concerns regarding the fallout had been addressed adequately. She was assured by Ludvig’s men that Luvenson would either not do anything or would be rendered irrelevant when this was over.

A copy of the file had already been dispatched to Luvenson in the morning. Ludvig was waiting for the response.

Daniel Knutsen, a divisional head of the Market Analysis bureau of Hantel, walked into Ludvig’s chambers.

Daniel or Dan to everyone, was actually the operational head of the Company Analysis wing and was responsible for action on any ‘actionable intelligence’ that was provided by Haalkud’s team.

Ludvig liked Dan. He was efficient and loyal to a fault; qualities that Ludvig knew were worth their measure in gold.

‘Any news, Dan?’

‘Well, Luvenson has gobbled up the bait. I have heard he was jumping up and down on the
Stortinget
and was hurling abuses at all and sundry.’

Ludvig had a hearty laugh. Dan continued

‘He wants to schedule a meeting. But the bastard wants to talk to you directly.’

Ludvig smiled.

‘I am looking forward to it. Set it up tonight.’ He relished the fact that he would make the bastard squirm in front of his eyes, set a price for putting an end to his torture, and then extract what he wanted from him.

***

The meeting had been set up in a rundown diner that made an impossibly delicious
Smørrebrød
. An advance team of Dan’s men had sanitised the place. Ludvig, looking dapper in a formal suit, descended from his office and headed towards the exit. All this excitement was making him a bit edgy and he was relishing the rush.

He needed to empty his bladder yet again and entered the lavatory in the parking area. Two of his guards took position on either side of the door.

Ludvig was engrossed in imagining the course that the evening was about to take when he heard a commotion outside. There was the unmistakable hushed sound of a silenced automatic. Ludvig heard at least three rounds, maybe one more. The rest-room door was pushed in and one of his guards barged in while Ludvig was still fumbling with the zip on his pants. The guard rushed towards Ludvig and caught his neck from behind with an iron grip. He then pushed Ludvig towards the wall, pinning him against the wall. Before Ludvig could make any sound, the guard pressed the trigger of his gun and emptied two rounds into the back of Ludvig’s head in quick succession.

Ludvig heard his skull crack and then felt the bullet searing into his left eye from within, before blacking out, his limbs going limp and then his body slumping to the ground once his assailant loosened the grip on his neck.

In a matter of a few more seconds, he was dead, slumped under a urinal of the Hantel Corporation headquarters.

Domus-Nova

Mouse-tail Galaxy

Domus-Nova Year 2548, Earth Year 7859 AD

He woke up in the white room, paralysed and on the cot as before. He glanced around the room and found the same big, featureless white room.

However, the room was not entirely featureless this time.

He screwed up his eyes for a better view and there was a dark, rectangular clock face on the far wall. He had never seen anything on any wall until then. On the last sojourn to the white hall, he had seen his young face and had seen another young man strapped to yet another cot in an adjacent room.

Now, he was looking at a clock face.

It seemed like an information overload to him, having drawn a blank for the last thirty years of ‘interruptions’. He instinctively peered into the clock face for the time.

It was about six thirty. Then the oddity sunk in

Oh no! But it wasn’t six thirty.

The clock face was marked zero to sixteen, making it a sixteen hour clock face; the time then had to be eight thirty or rather eight forty!

That also meant that the day it represented was a thirty-two hour day, provided the clock showed half a day and each hour would have eighty minutes. It was entirely possible that the clock showed only a quarter of a day in which case it would be a sixty-four hour day.. That too, assuming the intervals depicted five minutes each. It could be an entirely different time-span if the intervals meant something else.

Holy crap! Where the fuck was he?

There was a soft whirring noise to his left and a window materialised in the wall there, with a beautiful, dark, night sky. A light swept through the night sky as if a giant searchlight was scanning the night sky and it was dark again.

The dark revealed numerous stars twinkling in the background. The searchlight came at regular intervals and lit up the sky, dimming the stars in its light. Ludvig stayed transfixed by the view and watched the play of the light.

Then he saw the most wondrous, the most beautiful sight of his entire life. A deep blue light slowly spread across the night sky, and this light was followed in a few minutes by a radiant blue sphere that rose across his window sill, ascending up over the horizon. A smaller white sphere occupied the left lower quadrant of the bigger blue sphere, the white and the blue of the spheres bathing the night sky.

The beauty of this sky was bewitching and it was the first time Ludvig felt calm and relaxed in the white room. The white of the room slowly started dissolving and he felt the familiar sensation of his body being slowly engulfed in the darkness that preceded the return to his earth life.

He knew he was going back but this was the first time that he wished to stay in the white room for a bit longer…

***

Hantel Corporate Headquarters

St. Olav’s Gate, Oslo, Norway

11 May, 2012

Ludvig woke up in the bed in the back room of his office. He had worked late the previous night and had decided to sleep right there in the office itself.

He had until afternoon before taking a couple of gunshots in the back of his head. The biggest problem of the ‘rewind’ was reliving the same moments all over again. He knew what was to happen each minute of that day. He knew each word that would be spoken to him.

He was still stumped by the oddity of what happened in the ‘interruption’. He knew that he would get tired of asking himself questions and yet not have any answers. He had learnt not to ask himself these questions and to just get on with the strange life that he had been given.

He made a phone call and found out about the guard. His name was Brasa, an Italian immigrant who had been in his security detail for the past two years.

He had to plan for the day ahead.

He called for Dan to meet him personally.

Dan was in the building, having spent his night in the office too, and walked up to his boss’s office in five minutes.

‘Wanted to see me?’

‘Yeah. I have been thinking.’

‘I have sent the material to Luvenson. Expect to hear from the bastard soon.’

Ludvig sighed and sat down in the chair.

‘I have changed my mind, Dan. No more meeting the bastard. I want you to set up a timer on the Internet that will release the file after a countdown of six hours. Send a screenshot of the timer to Luvenson. In addition, send him the message that I want him out of this year’s political race, immediately. No negotiations.’

There was that tone of finality in Ludvig’s voice. Dan did not say anything and got up from his chair to do his boss’s bidding.

‘And one more thing, Dan,’ Ludvig continued.

‘Just run a check on Brasa.’

Dan knew Brasa, on the security detail of Ludvig. He did not understand what Ludvig meant. He was surprised that Ludvig even knew the name of the bodyguard.

Dan would later find a fresh deposit of a million kroner in Brasa’s account and on a little prodding and questioning Brasa would confess to having received money to eliminate Ludvig.

Dan was taken aback. But it wasn’t the first time that this was happening. He was now sure that Ludvig had other means of gathering intelligence. And that he had failed to uncover these other means even after secretly trying to do so over the last few years. It filled him with respect and contempt for the wily old Ludvig.

Brasa was not heard from, ever again.