Breath whistling in and out through nostrils and mouth, thigh muscles pumping—contract, relax, contract, relax—toes gripping inside boots and wearing raw against wet wool. Sweat running down my belly.
It was when each stride started coming shorter than the last and the pressure was on calves, not quadriceps, that I realized I had reached the floor of the valley and was starting up the other side. I turned left and ran north.
The valley trail under the trees was so dark I would have missed the place but for the suddenly alien scent of tires and good-quality leather getting wet. Then there it was, windshield streaming in the rain, both front windows open.
It was when I sat down on civilized leather, when I turned the key and the dark and the rain were outside, that the pain snapped like a gin trap on my back, biting down so hard it seemed to drive its teeth into my lungs and tear my breath apart. The headlights shining into the rain started to recede, as though I were on the back of a train heading into a long tunnel.
I slewed the Volvo to a stop outside the seter and stumbled in. It was two o’clock in the morning. The phone was on the table. I couldn’t remember the phone number of the Hotel Bristol. I called information. They could not understand me.
“Oslo,” I repeated. It sounded muddy and slurred. I shaped the next words carefully. “Hotel Bristol. Kristian VII’s gate.”
They gave me the number. It sounded like surf crashing in my ears.
“Again. Please. Give me the number again.”
“22 41 58 40.”
I had no pen, no paper. 22 41 48…no, 58. 22 58…I called again. The same woman. She gave me the number again. 22 41 58 40. I tapped it in carefully. It rang and rang and rang. Blood dripped down my back.
“Hotel Bristol.” Bright, young, male.
“I need to talk to one of your guests, Julia Lyons-Bennet.”
“Perhaps I could take a message.” His voice started to slide away. I breathed deep.
“No.” I had to hold on. Just another minute, another two. “I have to speak to her, now.”
“It is after two o’clock. In the morning.”
“I am not drunk. I am not in a different time zone. This is an emergency. Please put my call through.”
“After ten p.m. it is our policy that guests—”
“I wish to speak to the night manager.”
“Ma’am, the—”
“Get the night manager.”
He put me on hold. Pain pulsed like a candle under a glass sucking in oxygen and flaring, using up the oxygen and dying, sucking more and flaring; heating my nerve to a white-hot wire. I walked, very slowly, very upright, to the kitchen. Hold on. Hold on for just another minute, another two. I had to tuck the phone under my chin while I opened the cupboard and pulled out half a loaf of bread and a pot of sweet jam. I couldn’t cut the bread with just one hand, so I jammed it between my hip and the counter and tore off chunks, which I dipped straight into the jar. It tasted like dirt, but I chewed and swallowed, chewed and swallowed. Still on hold. The refrigerator yielded a wedge of yellow cheese wrapped in wax paper. My hearing came back in a tumble of discrete sounds: the prickles in each exhalation as it left my lungs, the creak of bone in my elbow as I shifted slightly, soft slap of white paper against cheese. The clarity of delirium. Just another minute, another two.
The phone suddenly seemed to open out as the night manager punched the hold button to off and the myriad hums of a computerized office on standby filled the earpiece. He—and I could tell it was a he from the harmonics of his inhalation—drew breath, but I spoke first.
“My name is Aud Torvingen. To whom do I have the pleasure of speaking?”
“Rolf Lothbrok, the night manager.”
“Rolf, if you check your records you will find that Ms. Lyons-Bennet and I stayed with you two weeks ago. It is vitally important, urgent, that I speak to Ms. Lyons-Bennet now. Not later, or soon, but now.” The carbohydrates were metabolising now, hitting my bloodstream, and everything sparkled. Even my words seemed clear: cool, measured, precise. Rolf must have thought so, too.
“Very well, I’ll put your call through.”
A click. Purring electronic ring. Another. Again. On and on. Endless. The carbohydrates were cascading through my system. I disconnected, pressed the redial button.
“Put the manager back on,” I told the flustered young night clerk. “Rolf, she must have turned off the ringer. I want you to go knock on her door.”
“Ms. Torvingen, it is absolutely against our policy to disturb a guest.”
“This is an emergency.”
“Then may I suggest you call the police?”
He had reached the place where the officious become immovable, and the telephone was not a sharp enough tool. I switched tactics. “Rolf, this really is terribly urgent, but I think I know a way you can help me, if I may presume upon you for a favour.” Julia was safe in bed in a well-run hotel. I could be there before breakfast. “If you’re not too busy, perhaps I could persuade you to take down a note and slip it under her door where she will see it as soon as she wakes in the morning.” Where she would see it, bright and incongruous against the carpet if she got up to answer the knock of a strange man in the middle of the night. “Please, Rolf, could I ask you to do that?”
“I…well, perhaps I could do that.”
“Oh, thank you. The message is to read: ‘Very urgent, take all precautions, call Aud immediately, repeat, immediately.’” He scribbled industriously. I was very, very thirsty. I wanted to say more, but I knew the Rolfs of the world. Any mention of blood, of danger or bullets on the fjell would prompt an immediate withdrawal because it would mean I was a crazy woman: such things did not happen in Norway. “Please add…” What? Don’t talk to two men called Ginger and McCall who have been sent to kill you? “Please add my love. Please underline the words ‘very’ and ‘all.’”
“Very well.”
“And…Mr. Lothbrok”—make him feel big and clever and in charge—“you will see to that right away, won’t you? I just couldn’t sleep until I know she’s got the message. You’ll put it under her door?”
“As soon as I put the phone down, Ms. Torvingen.”
“Thank you, thank you very much.”
Then I suggest you call the police. Oslo police are typical Norwegians—everything one at a time, in the right order, by the book. They would show up at the hotel, ask a few questions, maybe wake Julia and talk to her. Julia would be safe—for tonight. The police would also show up here. They would surround me. They would want to know how I got shot. They would ask whose car it was. They would not let me talk to Julia. And when they stopped surrounding Julia because they thought I was crazy, I would be in a hospital cell, unable to protect her. No, not the police. Julia was safe for the night; Rolf and his staff were sticklers for protocol, wouldn’t tell anyone her room number; and she would see the note when she woke up in the morning.
I needed water, painkillers, heat, more food, in that order, but they would have to wait. I needed to think. A man from Atlanta had hired three Americans to kill Julia. It had to be Honeycutt, or his blackmailer. If it was Honeycutt, he had to be acting on his own; the cartel would have used their own people. Locals. But how had Honeycutt—or the blackmailer—known we were in Norway, and how had he known where to start looking? I should call Annie, but she would have questions and I had no answers. Nothing made sense.
Think about it later. What mattered now was Julia, and for that I would need help. Local help who were not too fussy about the law.
It was nearly three in the morning, an hour earlier in London. I picked up the phone again and called a number my mother had given me when I first left home, one I had never had to use. She answered on the third ring, alert. “Yes.”