Death In Oslo

XI

The young man who was sitting in front of a monitor in a tiny office close to the Situation Room in the White House noticed that the characters and numbers were starting to dance on the screen. He closed his eyes hard, shook his head and tried again. It was still difficult to focus on one row, one column. He gave his neck a massage. The stringent smell of old sweat rose up from his armpits and made him drop his arms in shame and hope that no one would come in.

This wasn’t what he had gone to university for. When he got a job at the White House, two years after qualifying as a computer engineer and having worked in the commercial sector, he couldn’t believe his luck. Now, five months on, he was already bored. He had demonstrated his abilities in the small computer company that had headhunted him after graduation, and had thought that it was his indisputable talents as a programmer that had made the Bentley administration poach him.

But now, nearly six months later, he felt he had been little more than a runner.

And he had been sitting in a stuffy room with no windows, sweating and stinking, for twenty-three hours, staring at codes that flickered on the screen. He had been asked to create some kind of order in the chaos. It was important that he kept focused.

He pressed his fingers against his eyes.

He was so exhausted that he was no longer sleepy. It was as if his brain had just stopped. It didn’t want to do any more. He felt like his own hard disk had logged out and left the rest of his body to fend for itself. His hands felt numb and a stabbing pain in his lower back had been bothering him for hours.

He breathed out slowly, and opened his eyes as wide as he could to try to get some moisture. He should really get something more to drink, but it was another quarter of an hour before he could take a break. He must try to have a shower.

There. There was something there.

Something.

He blinked and his fingers moved like lightning across the keyboard. The screen froze. He lifted a reluctant hand and ran his index finger along a row from left to right, before he started to hammer on the keyboard again.

Another screen came up.

It couldn’t be true.

It was true, and he was the one who had seen it. He had discovered before anyone else, and suddenly he didn’t regret switching jobs any more. Once again his fingers moved busily over the keyboard. Then he pressed Print, grabbed the phone and waited in suspense for the next screen.

‘She’s alive,’ he whispered, forgetting to breathe. ‘She’s fucking alive!’