Simonsen shook his head.
Troulsen broke in, this time with a positive contribution: “I’ve gone out and bought twelve cell phone start-up packages. They’re in Arne’s office. Just put your SIM card in one of them and write your new number on the board.”
“Good thinking but it’ll have to wait. Did they say anything at the exchange? Is there any point in going down there?”
“Not in the least. They’re running around like chickens with their heads cut off and speaking in technical tongues, but the reality is that they are as powerless as the rest of us. It’ll only get better when people stop calling.”
“And when will that be?”
Troulsen shrugged. Simonsen looked over at Pedersen. He, too, had a blank expression; he held his arms out and shook his head.
“So we just wait it out?”
It was a rhetorical question. Neither of the two men answered but both avoided his gaze. Simonsen stood there silently for a while, then left suddenly without saying anything else.
*
He came back to the office an hour later. The atmosphere in the room had not changed significantly since he’d left. Troulsen was idly leafing through some reports and Pedersen had turned back to his betting sheet.
Simonsen managed to get life into them by saying, “The situation has been as good as resolved. We can count on having normal communications within the span of an hour or two. Let us use this time to find out how we should proceed with gathering information about Mr. Northeast and Mr. Southeast when the serious calls resume. We should probably assume it will take an extra day before we get it sorted out. I also want to know how far we have come with Thor Gran. And last but not least, you can put your SIM cards back in your regular phones.”
Pedersen asked with some astonishment, “What’s happened? Why has it stopped?”
“It hasn’t stopped completely yet, but there has been a significant reduction. Shall we get to work?”
Troulsen ignored this and turned on his television. He found the news channel, where a picture of Simonsen in his younger days filled half the screen. A slightly lisping female announcer’s voice asked, “But doesn’t this cast the police in a less-flattering light, that the public can even think of engaging in something like this?”
The static-filled telephone connection only partly concealed Simonsen’s profound irritation as he said, “Don’t you understand what I’m telling you? I couldn’t care less how it casts the police. Tell me what you’re going to do if you’re attacked on the way home.”
“I’m the one who’s asking the questions.”
“No, you’re not. You’re the one who’s had a burglary. It’s your child who’s been abducted. It’s your car that’s been plowed into by a drunk driver. And what do you want then?”
The hesitation was two seconds longer than it should have been. Two seconds only magnified by the fact that Simonsen had hung up and thereby ended the interview.
CHAPTER 41
On Sunday, all hell broke loose.
The five doomed men stared at the reader from the front page of the Dagbladet. Each of them was pictured in his last few seconds except for one who was already dead. The thick blue nylon rope was clearly visible on all. Fear emanated from their eyes and sold more copies of the paper than the most notorious royal scandal ever had. No sympathy was to be found among the editorial staff. The headline clearly took a position against the victim and read succinctly, in thick black print, JUDGMENT DAY. The newspaper carried an insert of eight pages, a photo montage that displayed the film sequences Anni Staal had received almost frame by frame, so that none of the juicy details escaped the reading public.
Anni and the publisher were standing outside the main entrance of their workplace, waiting. It was nine o’clock and the street was deserted, misty, and gray in the cold morning.
Anni tried a third time: “Are you sure you don’t want me to participate?”
Her most senior boss gave a huge yawn. It had been a long night and he was tired. “Yes, Anni, I’m sure. You should show yourself and then leave. They shouldn’t think you’re hiding. I don’t want to risk them ordering a search for you or whatever it is they manage to think up. Tell me about the atmosphere.”
“The atmosphere?”
“In the newsroom, among the people, around. They say you can hear the grass grow.”
Anni Staal brushed the praise aside. It was laid on too thick. “They say so many things, but the links to our Web site are glowing red or whatever it is that links are. There have been one hundred thousand hits and that’s just the beginning. The whole IT department has been called in to manage the situation. They have already boosted our server capacity in order to hold down the video-download time.”