It was three-fifteen in the morning and the bright inspiration of checking the security camera videotapes had evaporated like water in the desert sun. Gant rubbed his hands tiredly through his hair as the manic jerks and rushes of overalled men — like figures in a cartoon which no longer amused passed on the television screen. There were four cameras covering the hangar, one of which he had already realised was unserviceable. Of the other three, Halvesson seemed to operate them more by whim than routine. Maybe he watched hired movies on his little bank of four screens, rather than the hangar. Maybe he was just a dead-end in a dead-end job. There was a bitter kind of life, or at least its after-images, in the airless office; photographs of a younger Halvesson wearing the kind of well-cut suit he couldn't afford on a security man's pay, beside an elegant wife. Children, too a series of snapshots either framed or pinned to the wall which measured the ordinary suburban changes of any family anywhere. The measure of disillusion, loss of prospects. Children growing sullen and apart, the houses in front of which they were captured becoming smaller, less well tended. Scrubby lawns.
Halvesson didn't care any longer, maybe not about anything except the wife whose illness had caused him to panic.
Gant yawned. Halvesson's failed life was like a grubbiness on his clothing and skin. He rubbed his arms. He wasn't going to find anything, except by luck.
Olssen's figure dashed dementedly across another unlabelled videotape, gesticulating like a puppet in conversation with Jorgensen and another man. Often, Halvesson didn't switch on the timer and the recordings didn't always carry a date or time. Daylight became darkness once again, as on a speeded-up film of clouds or plants growing. A Boeing became, almost suddenly, a McDonnell Douglas, then an Airbus. The timer came back into operation and Gant slowed the replay.
The day before yesterday, darkness-something alerted him, a noise beyond the airless cubbyhole of the office. The skittering of something. A rat, probably. Two nights ago, and the Vance 494 was at the corner of the screen, undergoing its service. His finger paused at the buttons of the video machine. Too early, too late…? The camera swung robotically and the airplane was displayed. He stopped the tape. Jorgensen climbing into the electrics bay. The gantry hugging the 494's waist like an old-fashioned corset. The time in the bottom corner of the screen read a little after eleven. Olssen walked out of view, towards his office. Gant's chair squeaked as he became more tensely interested in the silent movie of the recording. Outside the office somewhere, he heard rat noises again.
Ignored them… The camera's perspective included the entrance to the hangar.
Through those doors… "What's he doing now?" Roussillon whispered.
Behind him, Oslo airport was silent, lit like a deserted sports stadium. He waited, then heard:
"Security office. He's watching the security screens. Could be replaying the tapes—?"
"Keep secure. Wait for my order."
Roussillon switched off the RT. He had two men already inside the hangar.
Gant was alone. He brushed his long hair away from his forehead. The night was pleasantly cool, outside. He turned and leaned his elbows on the high bonnet of the four-wheel-drive hydraulic platform, a Land Rover with a bent arm ending in the fist of the cage behind the driver's cabin. Through the night glasses, the hangar doors, wide open, were sheened with light.
Then he murmured to the remaining two members of the team: "OK move in.
No noise. Kill him in there if you must and bring the body out."
The two men slipped away, their dark overalls like assault garb in the night, their faces newly smeared with black. Roussillon watched them, as if they were moving across a monochrome television screen, dodging and scuttling towards the hangar. In another minute, they had disappeared inside. Was Gant armed?
Unlikely. Roussillon smiled. There was something pleasurable, something one could taste on one's tongue, about the known identity of the target that it was familiar by name, by repute, within the shadow pool of the intelligence community. Something satisfying, too, in that the body would be weighted and dropped into the Oslofjord as perfunctorily as they would have done any anonymous victim.
His own service, DST, had given him carte blanche. He could concur with instructions from Fraser, from Winterborne. That was the nature of his freedom, that his actions could always be denied with utter conviction by his superiors, by the minister, the Elysee. The business of the state in this matter lay solely in preventing revelation.
Balzac-Stendhal's dealings with Aerospace UK, the subornation of EU Commissioners, one of whom was a Frenchman and a possible future Prime Minister of France, the diversion of EU funds, must not be allowed to become public. There was no question of the moral rectitude or otherwise of the actions of a French conglomerate or a French politician.
Roussillon lit a cigarette and savoured the acrid smoke, sweet-smelling on the faint night wind.
A figure in the hangar doorway, his shadow falling darkly behind him as the lights caught him. Tall, broad-shouldered, a heavy face thickly moustached. The man was wearing a leather jacket, a check shirt and denims above high-heeled boots.
He was evidently, somehow theatrically, American. What would be expected, looked for.
Gant watched the man move in slow-motion, watched Olssen approach him.
Eleven-twenty, two nights ago. Olssen and the American-dressed figure spoke to one another. Gant leaned forward until the figures became grainy and unfocused as they slipped to one corner of the screen and then regained its centre as the camera followed its arc. Halvesson hadn't bothered with a close-up, maybe he hadn't even been watching the monitor. Gant pressed the button to halt the tape.
American…? An easy walk, the man's bag swinging loosely at his side. A confident actor already commanding his stage. Gant continued to stare at the screen for perhaps two minutes.
That was the saboteur, the man who called himself Massey. The frozen image caught him in half-profile an anonymous grey face above a well-muscled body.
He didn't know the man. He knew of maybe three or four people who had the skill to bring down the 494s in the way this stranger had, but he had no idea how many there really were. How many had been shown the door by the Company or the Bureau and who were out there, working for private companies and corporations, Vice-Presidents in charge of Industrial Espionage, V-Ps for Sabotaging Rivals.
That was this guy's game.
Angry that the elation of discovering the right stretch of videotape had so easily vanished into the sand of the man's anonymity, Gant stood up and stretched. He'd have to take the tape with him who'd miss it? and watch it over and over, ask around, get still shots printed off it.
His hand gripped the back of Halvesson's swivel chair and he leaned towards the screen, letting the images move in slow motion once more, then in real time, then slow motion… He caught, like the trace of cigarette smoke in an empty room, something familiar about the man's posture, his movements, but it was just like trying to grab at the dissipating smoke. He turned away from the screen as he returned the tape to real time, and looked at his watch. Three-forty. He was bushed, his body leadenly remembering that he had slept little or not at all for forty-eight hours. The littered office, the photographic measurement of Halvesson's subsidence into failure, the TV screen, all irritated him.
He turned towards the windowed wall of the office that overlooked the hangar-movement. A flicker as if someone's shadow had entered the edge of eyesight so that he wasn't certain he'd seen anything.
He had. A darkly dressed figure hurrying, bent almost double like someone ill or wounded, vanishing beyond the Boeing. Rat noises…