Death In Oslo

WEDNESDAY 18 MAY 2005
I

When Warren Scifford woke up, he didn’t know whether it was the jet lag, the fact that he hadn’t had enough sleep or a latent flu that was making him feel so awful. He lay in bed for a while, staring at the ceiling. The airy sky-blue curtains let the sunlight in. His bed was bathed in morning light. When he finally lifted his head to look at the digital clock on the TV, he furrowed his brow in disbelief.

Half past four in the morning.

Now he understood the point of those hideous rubber blackout curtains he had ignored when he flopped into bed at around one. He struggled out of bed and padded over to the window to close the curtains. Darkness fell in the room. Only a sliver of light that prised its way through the opening between the curtains made it possible to see anything at all.

He turned on the bedside lamp and lay down again without pulling the duvet over him. His naked skin contracted in the breeze from the air-conditioning. His neck was stiff and he could feel a headache lurking behind his eyes. He was exhausted and yet alert at the same time, and he knew that he wouldn’t go back to sleep. After a few minutes, he got up again and put on a peacock-blue silk dressing gown. There was an electric kettle on the shelf by the TV. Three minutes later he was stirring a cup of bitter, strong instant coffee, which he drank as soon as he could. It helped, but he still felt so drained that in other circumstances he might have been worried.

He quickly worked out that it would be half past ten in the evening in Washington DC. This raised his spirits a notch. He could still count on a couple of problem-free hours, should it be necessary to contact anyone. He quickly set up his portable office on the desk that he had got the hotel to install. When he had arrived in the afternoon, there had been a great rococo table with a huge vase of flowers in the room, which would hardly have done the job. The desk he had now was simple and unpretentious, but massive. He took out an unusually large laptop from the metal case standing by the bed, then four mobile phones and a pile of pastel-coloured paper. He placed them all neatly in a row with meticulous precision. On top of the paper he laid three pens, equally spaced. A black pen, a red pen and a blue pen. The four mobile phones were of different appearance and made by different manufacturers, and he placed them, as if on display, to the left of the laptop. Finally he took a small printer, in three detachable parts, out of the suitcase, attached it to the computer and plugged it into the socket under the window. The laptop immediately turned itself on. The hotel boasted about its complimentary wireless connection, but he instead tapped in an American number. Seconds later he had accessed one of his mailboxes, which only four people knew about. The encryption code scrambled briefly, as it always did, showing him a chaos of characters before settling down into a well-known image.

Warren Scifford yawned and then blinked away the tears that had been squeezed out. He had received a reply to the query he had sent before he went to bed. He opened the email with a single click.

He read slowly. Then he read the whole thing again before clicking on the print icon and waiting for the whirring sound that told him that the document was being transferred to the printer and about to come out. He swiftly logged out and turned off the laptop. Then he went over to the door to check that the security lock was still on. No one had touched it.

He needed a shower.

He stood under the rushing, too-hot water for several minutes. To begin with it burnt on his skin, before a comfortable numbness spread down his spine. His neck already felt more flexible and his sinuses unblocked. He gave himself a good lather and washed his hair. Then he turned off the hot water and gasped in an ice-cold cascade.

Now he was certainly wide awake. He dried himself briskly and took some clean clothes from his suitcase, having confirmed behind the blackout curtains that it looked like it would be a sunny day. He got dressed, grabbed the printout and threw himself down on the bed, pushing three pillows behind his head.

The Trojan Horse link was not just warm, it was burning hot.

It was six weeks since one of the special agents had come into his office with a small pile of paper and a worried look on his face. When the man left half an hour later, Warren Scifford had put his elbows on the table, clasped his hands behind his neck and stared at the desktop for ages while silently cursing his own vanity.

He could have stayed where he felt comfortable. Warren Scifford was the best in his field; he was an expert in behavioural psychology, and the FBI had nurtured and developed him for over three decades now. He could have continued being a superhero in his own universe. Paradoxically, there was something safe and manageable about pursuing bizarre serial murderers and perverted rapists. Warren Scifford had done it for so long and seen so much that the crimes no longer made any real impact. His emotions did not cloud an increasingly sharp eye and growing insight.

He was the very best hunter.

But then he was tempted.

President Bentley had called him personally in November, well before she was sworn in, to persuade him. Warren could still remember the feeling of intoxication when she contacted him. The sweet taste of success made him soft, and he laughed out loud and punched the air with his fist when the conversation was over. Not only was he wanted by America’s commander-in-chief for an important position, she had in fact begged him. Even though Helen Bentley had been a close friend for more than six years, he knew that that gave him no advantages in the extensive jigsaw puzzle she had started to piece together when George W. Bush had finally and unwillingly given his concession speech.

Quite the opposite, in fact. Commentators had praised Madam President as the various appointments were announced. The extent to which she had steered clear of friends and loyal supporters in favour of candidates who were indisputably competent and independent was admirable.

But Warren was to be one of them, and he became a daily visitor to the West Wing.

The group he had been appointed to lead was part of the FBI. But he was to report directly to the President all the same, something that had caused a serious rift with the director of the FBI before the intelligence group had even been established. The entire procedure was completely at odds with FBI tradition. Of course, the director had to back down, but Warren’s pride in being given the prestigious position waned somewhat when he had to acknowledge that he was no longer deemed to be a true Bureau man. For a short while he had considered changing his mind. But he quickly understood that that wouldn’t be possible.

After 9/11, things had changed in the FBI. The Bureau had very quickly gone from being a police organisation that focused mainly on traditional, domestic crime to spearheading the fight against terrorism. Restructures that would have taken years to implement before were now completed within weeks. A storm of patriotic efficiency swept through all government organisations, institutions and departments that had anything to do with national security. The process was greatly helped by more or less unlimited resources and a legislative authority that proved to be more flexible than Americans might otherwise have thought before that catastrophic morning in September.

The image of the enemy had changed too.

There were still countries and states that were a threat to the world’s most powerful nation. Following the disintegration and dissolution of the Soviet Union, the prospect of a traditional attack had as good as disappeared. But as the US had interests all over the world, it was still important to focus attention on unfriendly nations and hostile states that could attack for ideological, economic or territorial reasons.

So those functions continued, now as ever.

But it was not a state that had attacked the US on the 11th of September. There was no country to strike back at. The men who had hijacked the four planes and crashed them on American soil were individuals, of different origins and diverse backgrounds. While the political machinery surrounding President Bush had constructed a classical enemy in the form of the axis of evil, and targeted all its aggression towards existing nations, Helen Lardahl Bentley was convinced that the attackers were far more dangerous than that.

They were people.

They had not been recruited to fight, like the terrified soldiers through the ages who had faced death for a flag and a country they would never see again. The battlefields were no longer drawn up by generals on both sides of the front, who basically fought with the same parameters for victory and defeat: territory won and battles lost.

America’s new enemies were individuals, with an individual’s experience, greatness and flaws. They did not live in one place, in one system, and they did not wave a visible flag. They did not go to war because they had been ordered to, but because of their own conviction. They were not bound together by the same nationality and sense of belonging, but by belief and distrust, hate and love.

America’s new enemies were everywhere, and Helen Lardahl Bentley was convinced that the only way to uncover them and render them harmless was to get to know them. The first thing she did in office was to establish the Behavioural Science Counter-terror Unit. Their remit was to transform dry facts and random intelligence into living images. The BSC Unit was to see people where the rest of the extensive domestic security system saw only possible attacks and potential terrorists, bombs and hi-tech equipment. By analysing, understanding and explaining what made men of different nationalities and from different backgrounds choose a martyr’s death in their collective hate of the US, the States would become better at forestalling them.

Warren Scifford had been allowed to choose from the most talented people. The group of nearly forty special agents included some of the best profilers in the FBI. Every single one of them had accepted eagerly.

But Warren had begun to regret his decision.

When one of the special agents had wandered into his office six weeks ago, with four sheets of paper in his hand, and in a quiet voice had shared his concerns with his boss, Warren Scifford had for the first time in his fifty-six years been truly scared.

A Trojan horse attack did not fit in with the picture they had drawn.

It didn’t make sense. It was neither spectacular nor symbolic. It would not generate terrifying, unforgettable images like those of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center. No hordes of people fleeing in fright and tears, panic and disbelief to frame in powerful TV images. The Trojan Horse would not attract attention to the enemy; there was no honour, no matter how twisted, to be gained from this.

The rest of the system had done everything it could to link al-Qaeda or related organisations to the Trojan Horse. Warren Scifford and his men and women had protested violently. Something wasn’t right, they argued. That wasn’t the way al-Qaeda operated. They didn’t think like that. And it certainly wasn’t the way they wanted to punish the US. As the BSC Unit had already been frozen out by everyone other than the President, what they said generally fell on deaf ears. After a couple of weeks of intense and focused work, trying to find a link with existing terrorist networks, without so much as a hint of success, it was concluded that Warren Scifford’s group had been right after all. Al-Qaeda was not behind this. The diffuse, incomplete information was therefore no longer of interest. The vast US intelligence apparatus received so much; there was almost too much to deal with. So as more incomprehensible and chaotic information about more potential attacks ticked in, every hour, every day, the Trojan Horse was parked in a quiet back alley.

But Warren Scifford was still worried.

And so was Madam President.

And now Warren was lying in bed in a Norwegian hotel room with a gnawing feeling in his belly. He read the memo for the fourth time. Then he got up and went to the bathroom. He took a lighter out of his pocket, held the document over the toilet pan and set light to it.

The thing that made him most uneasy was the feeling that someone was taking him for a ride.

For a few weeks now, he had been dogged by a nagging suspicion that the information was planted. Having thoroughly studied the document, which included all the new information they had received in the past twenty-four hours relating to the complex he had chosen to call Trojan Horse – searching up and down, left to right, until nothing made any sense any more – he was still completely at a loss.

The flames licked the paper. Small flakes of soot drifted down towards the white porcelain.

If everything was planted, the whole thing was a red herring. And if that was the case, the President could be the actual target. And in that case, they were facing an enemy they knew nothing about. Not Osama bin Laden, not the many terrorist organisations based in…

‘It can’t be true,’ Warren said out loud to himself, to interrupt his own thoughts. ‘No one has the apparatus to plant something like this. It’s too good to be planted.’

He had to let go of the last tiny scrap of the paper. He flushed the toilet. Small black flakes still clung to the pan, and he had to use the toilet brush to get rid of it all.

He went back to the desk and picked up a copy of the note that had been left in the President’s hotel suite.

‘We’ll be in touch,’ muttered Warren Scifford. ‘But when?’

He dropped the note suddenly as if it had burnt him.

He had to eat.

The clock on the TV told him that breakfast was now being served. It took him three minutes to pack up his office and put the locked suitcase back in the cupboard. Only the pile of coloured paper was left on the desk, with the three pens lined up like tin soldiers on top.

He put one of the mobile phones in his pocket before he left. It hadn’t been necessary to call anyone after all. And to be honest, he wasn’t sure who he should ring anyway.