Death In Oslo

XXXII

Abdallah al-Rahman was woken by his own laughter.

As a rule, he slept heavily for seven hours, from eleven at night until six in the morning. But on the odd occasion, a feeling of unease woke him up. A stressful feeling of not having trained enough. Sometimes life was too hectic, even for a man who had learnt to delegate as much as possible over the last ten years. He owned a total of three hundred companies of varying sizes all over the world and they all required different kinds of follow-up from him personally. Most of them were run by people who didn’t even know he existed, in the same way that he had long ago recognised the expediency of concealing the lion’s share of his companies with the assistance of an army of lawyers, most of whom were American or British, who lived on the Cayman Islands and had impressive, luxurious offices and anorexic wives whom he almost couldn’t be bothered to greet.

Naturally, at times there was too much to do. Abdallah al-Rahman was nearly fifty and needed two hours’ hard training every day to keep himself in the shape he felt a man like him should be in; another benefit was heavy, effective sleep. When he didn’t train, his nights were restless. But fortunately, that was very seldom.

He had never been woken by his own laughter.

He sat up in bed, astonished.

He slept alone.

His wife, who was thirteen years younger and the mother of all his sons, had her own suite elsewhere in the palace. He visited her frequently, most often in the early morning, when the chill of the night still hung in the walls and made her bed even more inviting.

But he always slept alone.

The digital characters on the clock by his bed showed 03:00.

Precisely.

He propped himself up on his pillows and rubbed his eyes. Midnight in Norway, he thought to himself. They would just be starting the day that would be Thursday the 19th May.

The day before the day.

He sat completely still and tried to remember the dream that had woken him. It was impossible. He couldn’t remember anything. But he was in a remarkably good mood.

One thing was that everything had gone as it should. Not only had the abduction been carried out according to plan, but it was obvious that the finer details had also worked. It had cost him money, a lot of money, but that didn’t bother him in the slightest. It was a higher price to pay that so many in the system had to be burnt. But that didn’t really matter either.

That was the way it had to be. It was the nature of the game that the hand-picked and well-groomed objects could only be used once. Some of them were far more valuable than others, of course. Most of them, like those he had hired in Norway, were just petty criminals. Hired and paid for a job just around the corner, then no need to think about it any more. Others it had taken years to hone and prepare.

Some, like Tom O’Reilly, he had looked after personally.

But they were all dispensable.

He remembered a joke that a braying, rosy-cheeked Swiss man had once told during a business meeting in Houston. They were sitting in the top storey of a skyscraper when a window-cleaner was lowered down in front of the vast panorama windows in a gondola. The corpulent businessman from Geneva had said something about how it would have been better to use one-off Mexicans. The other participants had looked at him askance. He had burst out laughing and described the queue of Mexicans on the roof, each with a cloth in his hand. They would throw themselves over the edge one by one and would each clean a stripe, the end result being you were done with both the window and the Mexicans.

No one laughed. They should have, being Americans. They didn’t find the joke in the slightest bit funny, and the Swiss man was embarrassed for about half an hour.

If you were going to use people, it would have to be to greater use than window-cleaning, Abdallah had thought.

He got up. The carpet – the fantastic carpet that his mother had knotted for him and that was the only possession he had that he would never, under any circumstances, sell – felt soft under his bare feet. He stood there for a few moments, digging his toes into the plump, cool silk. The play of colours was wonderful, even in a nearly dark room. The glow from his clock and a narrow slit of subdued light from the window was enough to make the golden tones change as he slowly crossed the carpet on his way to the enormous plasma screen. The remote control was on a small hand-made gold-chased metal table.

When he had turned the TV on, he opened a fridge and took out a bottle of mineral water. Then he lay back down on the bed, well supported by a sea of cushions.

He felt excited, almost happy.

The goddess of good fortune always smiled on the victor, Abdallah thought as he opened the bottle of water. He could never, for example, have anticipated that Warren Scifford would be sent to Norway. He had initially seen it as a serious disadvantage, but now it seemed to be the best thing that could have happened. It had proved far easier to break into a Norwegian hotel room than to get into the FBI chief’s flat in Washington DC. It had, of course, not been strictly necessary to give back the watch, once the redheaded escort girl had found out what she had been amply paid to discover.

But it was a neat detail.

Just as the sound studio in the West End of Oslo was. It had taken a long time to find it, but it was perfect. An abandoned and isolated cellar storeroom, in an area where people barely registered what their neighbours were up to, as long as they didn’t stick their necks out and had enough money to be one of them. The best thing would, of course, have been for Jeffrey Hunter to kill the President before he locked her in the storeroom. But Abdallah hadn’t even considered it. It had been necessary to take some tough measures to get the Secret Service agent to assist in the kidnapping of a person he had dedicated his life to protecting, so it would have been completely impossible to get him to kill his own president.

And what was possible was best, in Abdallah’s view. The sound studio appeared to have been the right choice. Driving far out into the countryside would have been risky; the more time it took before the President was locked away, the more risky it was for the project.

Everything had gone smoothly.

CNN were still running round-the-clock news programmes about the kidnapping and its consequences, interrupted only by a bulletin at the top of every hour with other headlines, which basically interested nobody. Right now, they were talking about the New York Stock Exchange, which had plummeted in the past couple of days. Even though most analysts believed that the sharp drop was an ultra-nervous reaction to an acute crisis and the market would not continue to fall so dramatically, everyone was gravely concerned. Particularly as oil prices had taken an equally sharp upturn. Rumours were buzzing in political circles of a hyperfast cool-down in the already tense relationship between the US and the most important oil-producing countries in the Middle East. You didn’t need to be particularly politically informed to realise that the American government was primarily focusing its attention in its investigation of the kidnapping on Arab countries. Persistent claims, coupled with a particular focus on Saudi Arabia and Iran, had resulted in hectic activity for the countries’ diplomats. Three days ago, before Helen Bentley had disappeared, the price of oil per barrel had been forty-seven dollars. An elderly gentleman with a hooked nose and the title of professor gave the TV presenter a glowering look and declared: ‘Seventy-five dollars within a few days. That’s my prediction. A hundred in a couple of weeks if this doesn’t cool down.’

Abdallah drank some more water. He spilt a bit and some of the ice-cold liquid ran down his naked chest. He shivered and his smile widened.

A much younger man back in the studio tried nervously to point out that Norway was also an oil nation and that the extremely wealthy small country on the periphery of Europe could therefore potentially earn billions from the disappearance of the President.

The embarrassed silence that ensued in the studio did nothing to diminish Abdallah’s good mood. A senior adviser to the Federal Reserve then gave the whippersnapper a thirty-second lecture. It was true that Norway stood to gain from a higher oil price, in isolation, but the Norwegian economy was so integrated and dependent on the global economy that the fall on the New York Stock Exchange, which had of course spilled over into stock exchanges the world over, was also catastrophic for them.

The young man gave a forced smile and checked his notes.

These are the true American values, Abdallah thought. Consumption. We’re getting closer now.

Having spent sixteen years in the West – six in the UK and ten in the US – he was still astounded when he heard otherwise educated people talking about American values as if they really believed that they were about family, peace and democracy. This had been a central theme during the election campaign the year before. The debate on values was Bush’s only ticket to re-election. The electorate had already begun to tire of war and was more open to a president who would get them out of Iraq with their collective dignity intact, so George W. Bush tried to make the bloody, unsuccessful and apparently endless war in Iraq into a question of values. The fact that more and more young American boys were being sent home in coffins covered by the flag was the price they had to pay to preserve the American Ideal. In Bush’s rhetoric, the continued fight for peace, freedom and democracy in a country that most Americans didn’t care two hoots about, and that was more than ten thousand kilometres away from the closest domestic shore, had become a fight to protect key American values.

For a long time, people had believed him. For too long, they started to realise when Helen Lardahl Bentley came sailing into the election campaign and offered a better alternative. The fact that it would prove far harder than Candidate Bentley anticipated to withdraw from the hell that Iraq had become for the Americans was another matter. The US still had full forces present in the country, but Bentley had now been elected.

Abdallah stretched on the bed. He picked up the remote control and turned the volume down a bit. The programme switched over to the CNN team in Oslo, who looked like they’d set up camp in some kind of garden in front of a low, Eastern European-looking building.

He closed his eyes and cast his mind back.

Abdallah could still remember the fateful conversation as if it had been yesterday.

It was during his time at Stanford. He was at a party and as usual was standing on the fringes, with a bottle of mineral water, watching the noisy, laughing, dancing, drinking Americans through half-shut eyes. Four boys, who were sitting at a table groaning with half-full and empty beer bottles had called him over. He dithered a bit before sauntering over.

‘Abdallah,’ one of them laughed. ‘You’re so bloody smart. And not from here. Sit down, man! Have a beer!’

‘No thank you,’ Abdallah had replied.

‘Listen,’ the boy continued. ‘Danny here, who’s a bloody communist by the way, if you ask me…’

The others howled with laughter. Danny ran his fingers through his long, messy hair and then smiled as he raised his beer bottle in a sloppy salute.

‘He says that all this talk about American values is bullshit. He says we don’t give a damn about peace, the family, democracy, the right to defend ourselves with weapons…’

His memory blanked on the basic key values, and he paused for a moment while he waved his beer bottle around.

‘Whatever. The point that Danny-boy wants to make is that…’ The boy hiccuped, and Abdallah remembered wanting to leave. He just wanted to get away. He didn’t belong there, so he was never really included in anything on American soil.

‘He says that we Americans basically have only three needs,’ the boy slurred, and tugged at the sleeve of Abdallah’s jacket. ‘And they are the right to drive a car wherever we want, whenever we want and cheaply.’

The others laughed so loudly and made such a noise that more people started to come over to see what was going on.

‘And then there is the right to shop wherever we want, whenever we want and cheaply.’

Two of the boys were now lying on the floor clutching their stomachs, rolling around with laughter. Someone had turned the music down a notch or two, and a small crowd had gathered round to find out what it was that was making the second-year students laugh so much.

‘And the third thing is,’ the boy shouted, getting the others to say it with him, ‘to watch TV whenever we want, to watch whatever we want, and cheaply.’

More people laughed. Someone turned the music up even louder. Danny got up and gave a deep and exaggerated bow, holding his right arm over his stomach and making a gallant sweeping gesture with his left arm, the beer bottle still in his hand.

‘What d’you reckon, Abdallah? Is that what we’re like?’

But Abdallah was no longer there. He had slipped away unnoticed, between the giggling, drinking girls who eyed his body with curiosity and made him go home long before he had planned to.

That was back in 1979 and he had never forgotten it.

Danny had been absolutely right.

Abdallah was hungry. He never ate at night, as it was not good for the digestion. But now he felt that he would need something in his stomach if he was going to get any more sleep. He picked up a phone that was built into the bed frame. After two rings, he heard a sleepy voice on the other end. He gave his order in a quiet voice and then put the phone down.

He leant back again in the bed with his hands folded behind his neck.

Danny-boy: a long-haired, unkempt, sharp Stanford student who had seen reality so clearly that, without knowing it, he had given Abdallah a recipe that he would use more than quarter of a century later.

Abdallah al-Rahman knew all about military history. As he had had no choice but to take on responsibility for his father’s business empire very early on, the possibility of a military career was lost. He had always dreamt of being a soldier, particularly as a boy. For a period he had studied and read about all the old generals; the art of Chinese warfare, in particular, fascinated him. And the greatest strategist of them all was Sun Zi.

A beautifully bound copy of the 2,500-year-old book, The Art of War, always lay by his bed.

He picked it up now and leafed through the pages. He himself had commissioned a new Arabic translation, and the book he held in his hand was one of only three copies that he had had made. He owned them all.

It is best to keep the enemy’s state intact, he read. To crush it is the next best thing. For to win one hundred victories in one hundred battles is not the acme of skill. To subdue the enemy without fighting is the acme of skill.

He stroked the thick hand-made paper. Then he closed the book and laid it carefully back in its usual place.

Osama, his old childhood friend, only wanted destruction. Bin Laden believed that he had won on the 11th of September, but Abdallah knew better. The catastrophe on Manhattan was a massive defeat, but it did not destroy the US; it only changed the country.

For the worse.

Abdallah had bitter experience of that. Over two billion dollars of his assets had immediately been frozen in American banks. It had taken him several years and vast sums of money to free up most of the capital, but the effect of a complete, sustained stop in some of his most dynamic companies had been disastrous.

But he had pulled through. His business dynasty was complex. He had lots of legs to stand on. The losses in the US were to some extent offset by the rise in oil prices and successful investments elsewhere in the world

Abdallah was a patient man, and business was his greatest priority after his sons. The months went by. The American economy could not exclude Arab interests for ever. It wouldn’t survive. In the years immediately after 2001, he had to some extent extracted himself from the US market, but then a couple of years ago he had felt that the time was right to invest again. And this time, the investment was bigger and bolder and more important than ever.

Helen Bentley was his chance. Even though he had never trusted a Western person before, he had seen a strength in her eyes, something different, a glimmer of integrity that he chose to trust. It looked like she was heading for a victory in November 2004 and she seemed to be rational. The fact that she was a woman never worried him. On the contrary, when he left his meeting with her, he felt a reluctant admiration for this strong, sharp woman.

She betrayed him only a week before the election, because she saw that it was necessary if she was going to win.

The art of war was to crush the enemy without fighting.

To fight the US in the traditional sense was futile. But Abdallah had realised that the Americans really only had one enemy: themselves.

If you deprive the average American of his car, shopping and TV, you take away his joy in life, he thought to himself, and turned off the TV screen. For a moment he saw a picture of Danny at Stanford again, with his crooked smile and a bottle of beer in his hand: an American with insight.

If you take the joys of life away from an American, he gets angry. And this anger starts at the grass roots, with the individual, with those who struggle to survive; the person who works fifty hours a week and still can’t afford to have dreams other than those that are fed to him from the TV screen.

With this thought, Abdallah closed his eyes.

They won’t close ranks this time. They won’t direct their rage at the enemy, at someone out there, someone who isn’t like us and who wants to hurt us.

They will snap and fight upwards. They will turn against their own. They will turn their aggression on the people who are responsible for everything, for the system, for ensuring that things work, that cars can drive and that there are still dreams to cling on to in their otherwise miserable existence.

But there is chaos at the top. The commander-in-chief is missing and her soldiers are running around like headless chickens, with no direction, in the vacuum that is created when a leader is neither alive nor dead but has just vanished.

A confusing blow to the head. Then a fatal blow to the body. Elementary and effective.

Abdallah looked up. The servant came in silently, carrying a tray. He put the fruit, cheese, bread and a large carafe of juice down by the bed. Then he disappeared again, giving a faint nod at the door. He had not said a word and Abdallah did not thank him.

Only one and a half days to go.