Death In Oslo

XV

The American president had no idea what time or day it was any more.

She had tried to focus on the time.

They had taken her watch off and pulled a hood over her head as soon as they got in the car. She hadn’t resisted at all, as it had taken her by surprise. It was only when the engine started that she managed to pull herself together and estimated the journey to be just under half an hour. The men didn’t say a word in the course of that time, so she had at least been able to count without being distracted. They had tied her hands together in front, not behind her back. So, sitting on her own in the back seat, she could use her fingers to count. Every time she reached sixty, she grabbed hold of the next finger. When ten minutes had passed and she had no fingers left, she scratched herself on the back of her hand with a longish manicured nail. The pain helped her to remember. Three scratches. Thirty minutes. About half an hour.

Oslo was not big. A million inhabitants? More?

The weak red light on the wall by the locked door was the only thing that made it at all possible to see. She kept her eyes fixed on the red light and breathed deeply.

She must have been here for some time now. Had she fallen asleep? She had gone to the toilet in the corner of the room. It wasn’t easy to get her trousers down with tied hands, but she had managed. It was worse pulling them up. How many times had she been over to the cardboard box full of newspapers? She tried to remember, to calculate, to get an idea of time.

She must have fallen asleep.

Oslo wasn’t big.

Not that big. Not even a million inhabitants.

Sweden was the largest. Stockholm was biggest.

Concentrate. Breathe. Think. You can do it. You know.

Oslo was small.

Half a million? Half a million.

She didn’t think she had slept in the car. But afterwards?

Her body felt leaden. It was painful to move. She had been sitting for too long in the same position. She tried carefully to ease her thighs apart. She was astonished to discover that she had soiled herself. The smell wasn’t a problem, she couldn’t smell anything.

Breathe. Calm. You’ve been asleep. Concentrate.

She remembered the plane landing.

The town crept up the surrounding hillsides. The fjord forced its way into the heart of the city.

Helen Lardahl Bentley closed her eyes to ward off the red darkness. She tried to recapture her impressions from Air Force One on approach to the airport, just south of Oslo.

North. It was north of the city, she eventually remembered.

It helped to keep her eyes closed.

The forests surrounding the capital were far less wild and frightening than they were made out to be in the family stories that she heard on her grandma’s lap. The elderly woman had never been to the old country, but the picture that she painted for her children and grandchildren was vivid enough: Norway was beautiful and frightening, with rugged mountains everywhere.

It wasn’t true.

From the window of Air Force One, Helen Bentley had seen a different landscape. It was friendly, with rolling hills and mountains with snow on their north-facing slopes. The trees were starting to parade that luminous green colour that belonged to the time of year.

How big was Oslo?

They couldn’t have gone that far.

As far as she had understood, the hotel was in the centre of town. They couldn’t have taken her that far in half an hour.

They had turned quite a lot of corners. Maybe they were necessary manoeuvres, but it might just as easily have been to confuse her. She might still be in the centre.

But she might also be wrong. She might have counted wrong. Had she actually fallen asleep?

She had not slept in the car. She had kept a clear head and counted the seconds. When she twisted her hands, she could feel the three scratches with her fingertip. Three scratches meant thirty minutes.

The hood they had pulled over her head was clammy and smelt strange.

Had she fallen asleep?

Her eyes filled with tears. She opened them wide. Mustn’t cry. A tear fell from the corner of her eye and trickled down her nose towards her mouth.

Don’t cry.

Think. Open your eyes and think.

‘You are the president of America,’ she whispered through gritted teeth. ‘You are the president of the USA, goddammit!’

It was hard to focus on one thought. Everything was fuzzy. It was as if her brain had got caught in a loop that made no sense, with arbitrary images in an increasingly confusing collage.

Responsibility, she thought, and bit her tongue until it bled. I have responsibility. I have to pull myself together. Fear is an old friend. I am used to fear. I have gone as far as a person can go and I’ve often been afraid. I have never shown it to anyone, but my enemies have frightened me. Enemies who have threatened me and everything I stand for. I have never let myself be broken. Fear only sharpened my senses. Fear made me clear-sighted and wise.

The blood tasted sweet, like warm iron.

Helen Bentley had plenty of practice in managing fear.

But not panic.

It floored her. Not even the familiar iron claw, which was now clamped round the back of her head, could jolt her from the confused state of paralysed fear that had gripped her since she was taken from the hotel suite. The adrenalin had not made her sharp and clear-sighted, as it normally did in conflict situations or important TV programmes. Quite the opposite. When the man by the side of her bed had whispered his short message, the world stood still and the pain was so overwhelming that he had to help her to her feet.

She had only once before experienced anything like it.

And that was a long time ago, and should have been forgotten.

It should have been forgotten. I should have forgotten it by now.

She was crying now, sobbing silently. Her tears were salty and mixed with the blood from her bitten tongue. The light by the door seemed to be getting brighter and there were threatening shadows everywhere. Even when she squeezed her eyes shut, she felt the red, dangerous dark closing in on her.

I must think. I have to think clearly.

Had she fallen asleep?

The experience of losing count of time confused her more than she might have imagined. For a moment she felt like she had been away for days, but then she reined in her rambling thoughts and made another attempt to reason.

Listen. Listen for sounds.

She opened her ears and senses. Nothing. It was silent.

At the late supper last night, the Norwegian prime minister had told her that the national-day celebrations would be loud. That the whole city would be out.

‘This is the children’s day,’ he had told her.

Trying to reconstruct an actual event was something solid. Something to focus her thoughts on, so that they didn’t detach and swirl around like leaves in the wind. She wanted to remember. She opened her eyes and stared straight at the red lamp.

The Prime Minister had stammered, and used bullet points.

‘We don’t parade our military forces,’ he said with a thick accent, ‘as other nations do. We show the world our children.’

She hadn’t heard any happy children’s shouts since she came to this empty bunker with the horrible red light. No brass bands. Nothing other than complete silence.

She couldn’t get rid of her headache. The way she was sitting, with her hands tied in front of her with thin strips of plastic that bit into the skin on her wrists, prevented her from performing her normal ritual. In desperation, she realised that the only thing she could do was to let go of the pain and to hope for salvation.

Warren, she thought, apathetically.

Then she fell asleep, in the middle of the worst attack she had ever experienced.