Assassin

34

The fifth-floor corridor of the King Haakon Hotel was reserved for the exclusive use of female guests. Men could hardly be forbidden from walking past the rooms, but they certainly were not encouraged to do so.

Damon Tyzack had no qualms at all about intruding. As he made his way along the carpet to the last door on the right he was dressed entirely in black, from his combat boots and his military fatigue pants to his shirt, fleece and ballistic vest – even the cap that hid most of his flame-red hair. He wore gold-framed glasses, a bushy moustache and there was a large and very vivid purple birthmark on his cheek: the kind of thing that people try very hard not to stare at, even though they are unable to see anything else.

Next to him trotted a yellow Labrador, a breed whose remarkable sense of smell and limitless appetite made it perfectly suited to work as a bomb dog. Yellow labs are also disarming. They are so appealing, so smile-inducing that they envelop their owner or handler in their golden glow. When Tyzack had appeared at the front desk claiming to be conducting a check for explosives in Ms Kreutzmann's room, flashing a fake ID from a non-existent security firm, giving the clerk a confirmatory phone number that was routed through to one of his men, sitting in a van parked not fifty metres away, he was immediately believed.

Tyzack wasn't entirely lying. He really did have every intention of checking the explosives he was going to place around the bedroom, sitting area and bathroom that Jana Kreutzmann would soon be occupying. He wanted to make absolutely certain that she could not possibly survive their detonation. Fraulein Kreutzmann had been causing Tyzack a great deal of trouble with her endless investigations into other people's business. Some of the articles she'd written lately had been getting uncomfortably close to trafficking routes and networks in which he had a direct personal interest. There was every chance that if she were allowed to keep going she might expose him to the kind of public attention that would prove extremely embarrassing. That could not be allowed to happen.

He had been given a pass-key. It let him into a very feminine environment that reminded him a little of the Cross woman's ranch-house in Idaho. It wasn't the specific style of furniture or decoration, just the feeling that someone had worked hard to make things pretty. There were raspberry-pink cushions arranged on the creamy sofa and bright green apples in a china bowl made to look like a wicker basket on the glass table in front of it; softer pink curtains over the window behind; a gold and scarlet patterned bedspread. It made Tyzack uneasy to be in the room – it was all too perfect, as though the women who stayed there were somehow better, even happier than him – but the fact that he was about to smash it all to pieces came as a calming, comforting thought.

He was using shaped charges of cyclotol – a 70/30 mix of two explosives: TNT and RDX – designed to provide an intense, highly focused blast. The largest charge was placed in the toilet cistern, with two smaller back-up devices behind an air-conditioning vent and under the sofa. The key to the whole system was the room's own bedside telephone. Tyzack opened it up and inserted a tiny transmitting device.

When the phone rang, the transmitter would send a detonation signal to all three devices. A separate circuit, however, acted as a safety-catch: nothing would happen until it had been remotely activated.

Tyzack wanted to be sure that the target was in place before he let the bomb do its work. He unscrewed the switch outside the bathroom that controlled the lights inside and put another transmitter in it. When the light was switched on, he would know. It would, of course, have been a simple job to link the switch directly to the bombs. Tyzack, however, had other ideas. Jana Kreutzmann arrived in Oslo shortly after eight in the evening. The Nobel organization had sent a car to meet her and deliver her to her hotel. By nine she had checked in and was heading up to her room. When she got there, she kicked off her shoes and called room service to order a light supper. It would be with her in twenty minutes, she was told. Perfect, she thought, that would just give her time to take a shower. She was longing to wash away the accumulated cares and stresses of another fourteen-hour day, so she walked over to her bathroom, turned on the light, and then let the water run, building up heat, while she slipped out of her clothes.

The transmitter on the light switch worked perfectly, alerting Tyzack as soon as it was turned on. He looked through a pair of compact binoculars to check that the other elements were in place; then he murmured a single word to himself: 'Showtime!'