A Memory for Murder by Anne Holt

Author:Anne Holt [Holt, Anne]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Atlantic Books

The Resilience Meeting

Karstein Braaten was in the habit of coming early to the twiceyearly meetings with the Resilience Minister. He was a punctual man and it was hit or miss whether the Vestfold train would be running to timetable. On two previous occasions in the past three years he had been forced to take a taxi home from Tønsberg station at the very last minute to pick up his car in order to reach the capital in time.

Today the train had not only departed, it was also on schedule. Karstein had so much time to spare that he had taken the subway from Jernbanetorget to Nydalen and strolled all the way up to the Maridal lake and back. He had never walked along the footpath flanking the winding Akerselva river, and it was slightly longer than he had envisaged. On the way back he had jogged the final stretch.

Karstein Braaten was a slim and fairly fit man for his age. In the time it took to negotiate security clearance and be escorted up to a large conference room in the Ministry’s suite of offices, his pulse had returned to resting rate.

He took the seat he had been allocated for many years. That had been in 2012, the year after the government quarter had been blown up by an extreme-right-wing terrorist and the Ministry had been forced to find temporary office space. For eight years the government’s various ministries had been spread throughout Oslo. Even at the first meeting, Karstein Braaten had been a veteran in the Directorate for Public Security and Resilience. Behind his back they called him Smiley, he knew, even though he was neither short nor stout and did not wear heavy-rimmed glasses. The nickname, after John le Carré’s famous intelligence agent, had probably been given to him because he looked as if he always harboured weighty secrets.

And indeed he did, but there were not so many who knew that.

The assignment he had been given in 2012 was somewhat ambiguous, at least in his opinion. He had to continue in charge of the anonymous office at the Directorate in Tønsberg, working on analyses and writing reports. In addition he now had to probe more deeply. He had been noticed, he was told by the then Minister of Justice from the Labour Party. From his very start in the Armed Forces’ Research Institute at the exact time the Berlin Wall fell, his superiors had noted Karstein Braaten’s unusually observant eye for social trends. By education he was both an economist and a political scientist. He did not draw attention to himself and rarely spoke without being asked. The figure he cut was just as grey as the clothes he always wore, an anonymous, childless divorcé who lived his life through watching others and analysing the behaviour of the populace.

After 22 July 2011, the Norwegian state of readiness had been completely exposed. Although it had no significant consequence for anyone other than the families of the slaughtered and all the young people forced to go on living with the deep after-effects of trauma, in Karstein’s view.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.