The Lion's Mouth (22 page)

Packing a capacious rucksack, he made his way to Fornebu Airport without having bought a ticket. It was impossible for flights to be full on a Wednesday in April. Not in the middle of the day, anyway.

THURSDAY, APRIL 10

LATE MORNING
,
GOVERNMENT COMPLEX

“A
ll predictions now center on the new government being similar to the old one, with the single change that Joachim Hellseth, currently spokesman for fiscal policy in Parliament, will be brought in as Finance Minister. Any further replacements in the government line-up would come as a great surprise.”

The Minister of Agriculture switched off the radio and leaned back in his office chair. The reporter was probably correct. That was certainly the impression he’d got from Tryggve yesterday. He had smiled, although the smile had not appeared particularly sincere, and clapped him on the shoulder.

Not that it was so terribly important. Naturally, he wanted to continue. He was enjoying it. The Ministry of Agriculture was an exciting place to be: he was doing a challenging and important job and would like to continue in the role. However, if it was not to be, then it was not to be. There were plenty of other jobs out there.

The phone rang.

For a moment he sat looking at it, smiling broadly; he felt calm and well, knowing that he would be fine regardless of what the message was. Then he lifted the receiver.

“Tryggve Storstein,” the secretary intoned.

“Put him on,” the Minister of Agriculture responded; then, after a short pause, “Hello, Tryggve. How’s it going?”

“Better. Now at least I’m managing to get some sleep. Six hours last night. I feel like a new and better person.”

Chuckling, the Minister of Agriculture took out his snuffbox.

“Churchill always managed with four. And he had a more peaceful time than you’re having, didn’t he?”

He thought he could hear the smile at the other end of the line.

“Well,” Tryggve Storstein said. “You’ll stay on in the team, won’t you?”

The Minister of Agriculture felt the hand holding the receiver begin to shake. Had this been more important to him than he would admit? Swallowing, he coughed briefly.

“Of course. If you want me to.”

“I do. The party does.”

“I’m really pleased about that, Tryggve. Thank you very much.”

His voice sounded genuinely happy.

The Culture Minister was leafing through four faxes that had just arrived on her desk. Lighting up a Prince Mild, she noticed with annoyance that she had smoked more than she usually permitted herself prior to lunchtime.

They were offers of employment, from two TV stations and one newspaper. And one from a large multinational company that required someone to deal with external communications. She let her gaze run over the sheets of paper without reading them thoroughly, then folded them and stuffed them into a drawer marked “PERSONAL” in Dymo lettering.

The phone rang.

She took the call and the conversation that ensued lasted all of forty-five seconds.

When she replaced the receiver, she was smiling from ear to ear. She phoned through to her secretary, after having retrieved the faxes she had just filed away.

“Shred these, please,” she said, handing the papers to her secretary.

The older woman sighed in relief.

“Congratulations,” she whispered, winking with her right eye. “I’m so pleased!”

Health Minister Ruth-Dorthe Nordgarden could not get anything done. Every time the phone rang, she hurled herself at it, and every time she came away disappointed. Now she was no longer crestfallen. She was furious.

For a while she had considered phoning some of the others to discover whether they had heard anything. But it would be the greatest humiliation of all to have confirmed what she was finally beginning to suspect: that the others were to continue, but she was not.

In a rage, she took hold of her large handbag and rummaged through its contents. She eventually found what she was looking for: a carrot wrapped in greaseproof paper.

A painful crunch seared through her head as she chomped on it.

13.46,
SECURITY SERVICE SECTION
,
OSLO POLICE STATION

“T
his can’t possibly be sheer chance. It’s totally impossible.”

The police officer who had burst into the Security Service Chief’s office without knocking was agitated and out of breath as he slapped his right hand down on the papers he placed before Ole Henrik Hermansen.

“The Swedish Security Police are of the opinion that it was sabotage. A fuel pipe was damaged in a way they can’t put down to either wear and tear or an operational fault. The entire plane was thoroughly examined only a few hours before departure, and they found nothing then.”

Ole Henrik Hermansen had lost his inscrutable poker face. Now his expression was tense and alert; his brow wrinkled and his eyes flashed with intense anxiety.

“Is this confirmed? Or to be more precise: how certain are they?”

“Naturally they don’t know yet. They’re making further investigations. But that’s not all, Hermansen. There’s much more!”

Producing a red folder from his own briefcase, the police officer flicked through to a large, grainy, color photograph of a young man with blond hair combed back; he was staring to one side of the camera lens, wore rimless glasses and had a cigarette in the corner of his mouth.

“Tage Sjögren,” the officer said. “Thirty-two years old, from Stockholm, leader of a group of right-wing extremists who call themselves ‘White Struggle.’ They’ve been in trouble with the police before, but that’s mostly been street protests on the anniversary of Karl the Twelfth’s birthday and suchlike. In the past year, though, it seemed as if the group had gone underground. The Security Police had lost sight of them, though they know they’re still active. And a week ago …”

Now the police officer was so enthusiastic that he laughed: he reminded the Security Service Chief of his own son when the boy came racing home with his report card before the summer recess.

“… Tage Sjögren came to Norway!”

Ole Henrik Hermansen was holding his breath, but only realized this when his ears began to ring; he exhaled through tightly compressed lips and a faint trumpeting sound underlined the sensational nature of the new information.

“Bloody hell,” he said softly. “Do we know anything at all about his movements here?”

Leaning back in his chair, the police officer placed his hands behind his head.

“No. The devastating thing is that this Tage guy isn’t of such interest to the Swedes that they would tell us as a matter of course. They only know that he traveled here, and returned to Sweden on …”

By now the man was beaming; like a dog straining on a leash, he was in full cry and just waiting to be set free.

“… on Saturday morning!”

Ole Henrik Hermansen stared at his subordinate for some considerable time.

“Get me the Head of the Swedish Security Police on the telephone,” he snapped. “We need to ask them to bring the man in for interview. Without delay.”

22.30,
MINISTRY OF HEALTH

T
he chauffeur had been waiting in the basement since five o’clock that afternoon. She knew that her use of chauffeur-driven cars annoyed everyone, including the Senior Private Secretary and her political colleagues, but then they couldn’t know how irritating it was to have to make conversation with all kinds of taxicab drivers whose sole aim was to prove that they knew better than the nation’s elected representatives. Anyway, you were entitled to some fringe benefits in this job.

Besides, it looked as though this would be the last day she would have use of her own chauffeur. Tryggve Storstein had still not phoned.

It had taken so long that the journalists had started to speculate. Little Lettvik had called on her confidential cell phone number, wanting to know if it was true that she had not been asked to continue. Ruth-Dorthe Nordgarden had slammed down the phone. The news roundup on television had been cautious, admittedly, but nevertheless they had placed a question mark beside her photograph when they made their predictions for the new Cabinet.

She needed another carrot. Peevishly, she rummaged in her handbag, but found nothing. However, she knew there was a bag in the kitchen area.

She paused momentarily in the doorway leading to the outer office. Could she hear the phone from the kitchen? Before she had made up her mind, it rang. She had transferred all calls to her direct line and had sent the entire staff home. She did not want any witnesses to her great mortification.

“Hello,” she yelled into the receiver; having dashed across to her desk, she was now standing at the wrong side, with nowhere to sit.

“Hello?” The voice sounded surprised. “Who am I speaking to?”

It was Tryggve.

“Hello, Tryggve. It’s me. Ruth-Dorthe.”

“Are you still working?”

“Just tidying things up.”

A pause ensued.

“You can stop that. You’re going to continue.”

Another lengthy pause.

“Thank you so much, Tryggve. I’ll never forget this. This day, I mean. Never.”

At the other end of the phone, Tryggve Storstein felt the hairs stand up on the back of his neck.

Ruth-Dorthe’s expression of gratitude sounded almost like a threat.

FRIDAY, APRIL 11

10.55,
STORTORGET SQUARE

N
ot since the old King’s funeral in January 1991 had Oslo city center been so crowded. The side streets leading to the main square were closed to vehicular traffic, and a phalanx of stern-looking uniformed police officers was trying to keep the road through Kirkegata open so that the cortège, which was expected in a few minutes, would have a clear route through. For the moment the line stayed firm, the gap between the bystanders on either side of the street no wider than a generous path. TV cameras were everywhere, and here and there Brage Håkonsen could see the ridiculously easy to recognize plain-clothes police officers from the Security Service, who were wearing ear plugs and sun-glasses despite the overcast sky.

Two police horses rounded the corner adjacent to Karl Johans gate, trotting gracefully and nervously on either side of the road. It was effective: people pulled back in genuine alarm at the sight of the enormous animals frothing at the mouth and showing the whites of their eyes. All of a sudden four motorbikes raced around the corner from Karl Johans gate and across Kirkegata, followed by limousines in a cortège.

They advanced at top speed toward Oslo Cathedral, where they came to a sudden halt, forming a line. Prominent guests from far and near were quickly, and sometimes rather abrasively, hustled into the vestibule by uniformed and plain-clothes police officers. Brage Håkonsen, from his lookout point at the intersection between
Grensen and Kirkegata, grinned when he spotted the German Chancellor Helmut Kohl protesting as he was led by the arm; he pushed aside the over-eager officer – a whole head shorter – and took the time to turn to some acquaintance and greet him politely.

The musicians of the Royal Guards arrived, and Chopin’s Funeral March fell like a cloak of silence on the thronging crowds. Brage Håkonsen removed his cap, not out of respect, but because he knew how important it was to behave identically to everyone else.

Behind the Guards swept a black hearse with Norwegian flags on the hood and mourning drapes at the windows, though these did not prevent the multitudes from seeing that Birgitte Volter’s coffin was white. A wreath of deep-red roses, like a circlet of thick, coagulated blood, crowned the casket. Brage Håkonsen could hear people starting to sniff. For reasons he could not explain, and certainly would not admit to, he too became caught up in the solemnity of the occasion; in its ceremony and its sorrow.

He shook off the emotion, feeling annoyed, and moved to the front of the crowd, toward the actual square.

It happened all of a sudden.

Four men and seven women, yelling and shouting, pushed their way through the packed sidewalk and onto the road in front of the funeral cortège before any of the police had time to react.

“Stop the whaling,” they screeched. “Killers! Killers!”

Brage stopped short; he found himself suddenly staring into the eyes of a colossal rubber whale that swelled and rose into the air, powered by an activist holding a helium pump between his legs.

“Stop the whaling NOW! Stop the whaling NOW!”

The rhythmic shouts almost drowned out the music played by the Royal Guards, the only people within earshot who paid no attention to the commotion. They played on, the somber cadences
pounding out an accompaniment to the yells of the demonstrators and the wheezing of the whale, which had now grown to almost life size. It writhed and twisted as it expanded, and seemed intent on swimming right into the Cathedral. One of the activists – Brage had no idea where he’d come from, but he appeared to be in his late fifties, with a huge seaman’s beard and a number of insignia on his shoulders – grabbed a bucket that had been hoisted to him by a young woman. In a flash, he prised the lid open with a Swiss army knife, and with a sweeping, unrestrained movement hurled red paint at the hearse. However, the chauffeur had grasped the situation, and was now reversing at speed; the horses behind him whinnied in fear and trotted back. The red paint splashed on the asphalt, and only a few drops reached the vehicle conveying Birgitte Volter’s earthly remains.

Though the police had been taken by surprise, it took them very little time to put a stop to the protest. Twenty police officers flung themselves at the demonstrators, and it took almost exactly five minutes to clap them in irons, puncture the whale, and cram both activists and deflated sperm whale into a Black Maria parked next to the H&M department store. The entire episode was dealt with speedily and efficiently, despite the actions of a group of male spectators who had felt called upon to help the police but whose screaming, hot-tempered behavior had made the task considerably more onerous than it might have been.

“Hey!” Brage Håkonsen yelled, tugging and tearing at his handcuffs. “I’m not involved in this!”