Death In Oslo

II

Madam President was finally alone. She had a headache clinging to the bottom of her skull, as she always did at the end of a day like today. She sat down carefully in one of the cream armchairs. The headache was an old friend, a frequent visitor. Medicine didn’t help, probably because she had never disclosed this problem to a doctor and therefore had never used anything other than over-the-counter painkillers. Her headache came at night, when everything was done and she could finally kick off her shoes and put her feet up. Read a book, or maybe close her eyes and think about nothing before falling asleep. But she couldn’t. She had to sit still, leaning back, with her arms out from her body and her feet firmly on the ground. Her eyes half closed, never fully; the red darkness behind closed eyes just made the pain worse. She needed a bit of light. A sliver of light between her lashes. Loose arms with open hands. Relaxed torso. She had to shift her attention as far away from her head as possible, to her feet, which she pressed as hard as she could into the carpet. Again and again, to the beat of her pulse. Don’t think. Don’t close your eyes. Press your feet down. And again, and again.

Eventually, in a delicate balance between sleep, pain and wakefulness, the claws at the back of her head slowly loosened their grip. She never knew how long an attack would last. Generally it was about a quarter of an hour, though sometimes she stared in horror at her watch and could not believe that that was the time. Occasionally, it was only a matter of seconds.

As was the case this time, she realised when she looked at the alarm clock.

She tentatively lifted her right hand and wrapped it round her neck. She continued to sit absolutely still. Her feet were still pulsing against the floor, heel to toe and back again. The cool of her palm made the skin contract across her shoulders. The pain had really vanished, completely. She let out a sigh of relief and got up as slowly as she had sat down.

The worst thing about the attacks was perhaps not so much the pain as the fact that she felt so awake afterwards. Over the past twenty years or so, Helen Bentley had learnt to accept that sleep was something she sometimes just had to do without. She could go for months on end with no pain, but the armchair scenario had almost become a midnight ritual for her over the past year. And as she was a woman who never let anything go to waste, not even time, she constantly surprised her colleagues by how well prepared she was for early-morning meetings.

The US had, unwittingly, elected a president who normally had to make do with only four hours’ sleep. And if it was up to her, her insomnia would remain a secret that she shared only with her husband, who had learnt after many years to sleep with the light on.

But now she was alone.

Neither Christopher nor her daughter, Billie, was with her on this trip. Madam President had gone to great pains to stop them. She still cringed when she remembered the astonished disappointment in her husband’s eyes when she made the decision to travel alone. The trip to Norway was the President’s first official visit abroad after having been sworn in, and it was of a purely representative nature. Not only that, it also was to a country that her twenty-one-year-old daughter would have had great pleasure and interest in visiting. There were a thousand and one good reasons why the family should go, as originally planned.

But she had made them stay at home, all the same.

Helen Bentley took a few cautious steps, as if she was afraid that the floor wouldn’t hold. Her headache had definitely disappeared. She rubbed her forehead with her thumb and index finger as she looked around the room. It was the first time she had really noticed how beautifully the suite was designed. It was done out in cool Scandinavian style, with blond wood, light materials and perhaps a little too much glass and steel. The lights in particular caught her attention. The lamp bowls were made of sand-blasted glass. Though they were not all the same shape, they harmonised with each other in a way that meant that they somehow belonged together without her understanding why. She ran her hand over one of them. A delicate warmth seeped through from the low-wattage bulb.

They’re everywhere, she thought to herself and stroked her fingers over the glass. They’re everywhere, and they’ll look after me.

She could not get used to it. No matter where she was, whatever the occasion, whoever she was with, with no consideration for time or discretion, they were always there. Of course she understood that it had to be like that. But equally, she had realised after barely a month in office that she would never actually get used to the more-or-less invisible bodyguards. The bodyguards who were around her during the day were one thing. She quickly learnt to accept them as part of daily life. She could distinguish them from one another. They had faces. Some of them even had names, names that she was allowed to use, even though she realised that they were likely to be false.

The other ones were worse. The countless invisible ones; the armed, concealed shadows that constantly surrounded her without her ever really knowing where they were. It made her feel uncomfortable; a misplaced sense of paranoia. They were watching over her. They wished her well, to the extent that they actually felt anything more than a sense of duty. She thought she had prepared herself for life as a target, until some weeks before she was sworn in as president, she realised it was impossible to prepare yourself for a life like this.

Not completely, anyway.

Throughout her political career, she had focused on opportunities and power, and judiciously manoeuvred herself in that direction. She had of course met with opposition en route, professional and political, but also a fair dose of ill will and agitation, envy and malevolence. She had chosen a political career in a country with a long history of personified hatred, organised slander, unprecedented misuse of power, and even assassination. On 22 November 1963, as a horrified thirteen-year-old, she had seen her father cry for the first time, and for some days afterwards had believed that the end of the world was nigh. She was still a teenager when Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King were killed in the same tempestuous decade. But she had never actually thought of the assassinations as personal. For the young Helen Lardahl, political assassination was an abominable attack on ideals, on the very values and attitudes that she greedily lapped up. Nearly forty years on, she still got shivers down her spine whenever she heard the start of the ‘I have a dream’ speech.

When two hijacked planes ripped through the World Trade Center in September 2001, she therefore interpreted it in the same way, as did nearly three hundred million of her compatriots – it was an attack against the American ideal. The close to three thousand victims, the unbelievable material damage, the permanent change to the Manhattan skyline all merged into a greater whole: the American dream.

Thus every victim, every courageous firefighter, every fatherless child and every broken family became a symbol of something far greater than themselves. And this made it easier for the nation and those left behind to bear the loss.

That was how she had experienced it. That was how she had felt.

Only now, now that she had taken on the role of Target No. 1, had she started to understand the underlying deceit. Now it was she who was the symbol. The problem was that she didn’t feel that she was a symbol; she was more than that. She was a mother. She was a wife and a daughter, a friend and a sister. For nearly two decades she had worked solely towards achieving this goal of becoming the President of the United States. She wanted power, she wanted possibility. And she had succeeded.

At the same time, the deceit had become increasingly clear to her.

And it could be very bothersome on sleepless nights.

She remembered one of the funerals she had gone to, in the way that they had all attended funerals and memorial services – senators and congressmen, governors and other prominent figures, all wanting to be seen to be sharing the Great American Grief, in full view of photographers and journalists. The deceased was a woman who had recently been employed as a secretary in a company that had its offices on the seventy-third floor of the North Tower.

Her husband could not have been much more than thirty. He sat there, on the front bench in the chapel, with a toddler on each knee. A little girl of about six or seven sat beside him, stroking her father’s hand over and over, almost manically, as if she already understood that he was about to lose his mind and needed to be reminded of her existence. The photographers concentrated on the children: the twins, aged one or two, and the lovely little girl, dressed in black, a colour that no child should have to wear. Helen Bentley, on the other hand, stared at the father as she passed the coffin. What she saw in his face was not grief, or certainly not grief as she knew it. His features were distorted by despair and anger, pure simple fear. This man could not understand how life would go on. He had no idea how he was going to manage to look after the children. He didn’t know how he was going to make ends meet, to have enough money to pay the rent and school fees, to have the energy to raise three children on his own. He had achieved his fifteen minutes of fame because his wife had been in the wrong place at the wrong time and was now absurdly exalted as an American hero.

We used them, Helen Bentley thought to herself, and stared out of the panorama windows that faced south over the dark Oslo Fjord. There was still a strange, pale blue light in the sky, as if it wasn’t quite ready to accept the night. We used them as symbols to make people toe the line. And we succeeded. But what is he doing now? What happened to him? And the kids? Why have I never dared to find out?

Her guardians were out there. In the corridors. In the rooms around her. On the roof and in parked cars; they were everywhere, looking after her.

She had to get some sleep. The bed looked inviting, with a big, down-filled duvet, like the one she’d had as a child in her grandmother’s attic in Minnesota; when she was blissfully ignorant and could close the world out simply by pulling a checked duvet over her head.

This time ‘the people’ would not close ranks. That was why it was worse and so much more threatening.

The last thing she did before falling asleep was to set the alarm on her mobile phone. It was half past two, and bizarrely, it was already starting to get light again outside.