I closed my eyes and whispered that I would prefer not to be disturbed just yet.
The angel nodded sympathetically, tucked the cloud in tighter around me and disappeared to the clatter of wooden clogs. The sound of voices in the corridor reached my ears before the door closed behind her.
I touched the bandaged wound around my throat. A few fragmented moments appeared in my memory. The tall, thin man’s face above me, the back seat of a car driving at great speed down winding roads, two men in white nurses’ uniforms helping me up onto a stretcher. The shower. I had been on my back having a shower! Lovely hot water, then I had drifted off again.
I felt like doing the same now, but my brain informed me that this luxury was very provisional, that the sands of time were still running, that the earth was still turning, that the course of events was inevitable. That they had just decided to wait for a while, hold their breath for a moment.
To think.
Yes, it hurt to think, it was easier to desist, to be resigned, not to rebel against the gravity of fate. It’s just that the stupid, trivial course of things is so irritating that you simply lose your temper.
So you think.
There was no way it could be Greve waiting outside, but it might be the police. I looked at my watch. Eight o’clock in the morning. If the police had already found Sindre Aa’s body and suspected me, it was unlikely they would send one man who would then, in addition, wait outside politely. It might be an officer who simply wanted to ask what had happened, perhaps it was because I had left the tractor in the middle of the road, perhaps… Perhaps I hoped it was the police. Perhaps I had had enough, perhaps all I could do now was save my skin, perhaps I should tell them everything as it was. I lay examining my feelings. And felt the laughter bubbling up inside me. Yes, an EXPLOSION!
At that moment the door opened, the sounds of the corridor reached me and a man in a white coat strode in. He was peering at something on a clipboard.
‘Dog bite?’ he asked, raising his head and smiling at me.
I recognised him instantly. The door slammed behind him, and we were alone.
‘Sorry I couldn’t wait any longer,’ he whispered.
The white doctor’s coat suited Clas Greve. God knows where he had got hold of it. God knows how he had found me; as far as I knew my mobile phone was at the bottom of a stream. But both God and I knew what was awaiting me. And as if to confirm my apprehensions Greve stuffed his hand in his jacket pocket and pulled out a pistol. My pistol. Or to be more accurate: Ove’s pistol. Or to be painfully accurate: a Glock 17 with nine-millimetre lead bullets which fragmented on impact with human tissue, splintering up in such a way that the collective mass of lead takes with it a disproportionately large mass of flesh, muscle, bone and cerebral matter which – after passing through your body – it plasters over the wall behind you like something not dissimilar to Barnaby Furnas’s paintings. The muzzle of the pistol was pointed at me. It is often alleged that your mouth goes dry in situations such as these. It does.
‘Hope it’s alright if I use your pistol, Roger,’ said Greve. ‘I didn’t bring mine with me to Norway. There’s so much hassle with planes and weapons nowadays. Anyway, I could hardly have anticipated -’ he opened his arms – ‘this. In addition, it’s pretty good that the bullet can’t be traced back to me, isn’t it, Roger?’
I didn’t answer.
‘Isn’t it?’ he repeated.
‘Why…?’ I started with a voice that was as hoarse as a desert wind.
Clas Greve waited with a genuinely interested facial expression for me to go on.
‘Why are you doing all this?’ I whispered. ‘Just because of a woman you have only known five minutes?’
He furrowed his brow. ‘Are you referring to Diana? Did you know that she and I-’
‘Yes,’ I interrupted to be spared the continuation.
He chuckled. ‘Are you an idiot, Roger? Do you really think this is about her and me and you?’
I didn’t answer. That was what I had thought. That it wasn’t about trivial matters like life, emotions and people one loved.
‘Diana was only a means to an end, Roger. I had to use her to get close to you. Since you didn’t take the first bait.’
‘Get close to me?’
‘You, yes. We’ve been planning this for more than four months, ever since we knew that Pathfinder was going to look for a new CEO.’
‘We?’
‘Guess who.’
‘HOTE?’
‘And our new American owners. We were – to be quite frank – a bit on our uppers, economically speaking, when they came to us this spring. So we had to accept a couple of conditions for what perhaps looked like a buyout, but in reality was a rescue operation. One of the conditions was that we would deliver Pathfinder to them as well.’
‘Deliver Pathfinder? How?’
‘You know what I know, Roger. That even though, on paper, it is the shareholders and board of directors who make the decisions in a company, in practice it is the CEO who is in charge. Who in the final analysis determines whether and to whom the company is to be sold. I led HOTE by consciously feeding the board with so little information and so much uncertainty that they would choose to trust me at all times. Which, by the way, was to their benefit, regardless of what happened. The point is that every relatively competent leader with the confidence of the board will be able to manipulate and persuade a gang of semi-informed shareholders to do exactly what he wants.’
‘You’re exaggerating.’
‘Am I? To my knowledge, you make your living from doing just that, talking round these so-called directors.’
Of course, he was right. And it confirmed the suspicion I had had after herr Felsenbrink in HOTE had recommended Greve so unreservedly for the post of CEO to HOTE’s greatest rival.
‘So HOTE wants to…’ I started.
‘Yes, HOTE wants to take over Pathfinder.’
‘Because the Americans have made it a proviso for getting you out of a fix?’
‘The money we HOTE shareholders have received in our accounts is frozen until the buyout conditions have been fulfilled. Although nothing of what we are discussing now appears anywhere in print of course.’
I nodded slowly. ‘So all that stuff about your resigning in protest against the new owners was just a masquerade to make you appear a credible candidate to take over the helm at Pathfinder?’
‘Right.’
‘And when you’ve got the job as CEO at Pathfinder your task is to force the company into American hands?’
‘Not sure force is the right word. When Pathfinder finds out in a few months’ time that their technology is no longer a secret to HOTE, they will see for themselves that they have no chance on their own and that cooperation is the best way forward.’
‘Because you will have secretly leaked this technology to HOTE?’
Greve’s smile was thin and as white as a tapeworm. ‘It is, as I said, the perfect marriage.’
‘The perfect forced marriage, you mean?’
‘If you like. But with the combined technologies of HOTE and Pathfinder we will capture all the defence contracts for GPS in the western hemisphere. And a couple in the eastern into the bargain… It’s worth a bit of manipulation, wouldn’t you agree?’
‘And so you had it planned that I would get you the job?’
‘I’d have been a strong candidate anyway, don’t you think?’ Greve had taken up a position at the foot of the bed with the pistol at hip height and his back to the door. ‘But we wanted to be absolutely sure. We soon found out which recruitment agencies they had contacted and did a bit of research. It turns out that you have something of a reputation, Roger Brown. If you recommend a candidate, that’s it, people say. You certainly hold some kind of record. So, naturally enough, we wanted to go via you.’