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car.
    I hunched my shoulders and headed in the opposite direction. Fine. It was, as I said, a lot to hope for. And now at least I knew that he had worked out how I was thinking of solving this. With him dying rather than me.
    Either way, it meant I had to go back to Plan A.
    The reason I had started with Plan B was that there wasn’t a single thing I liked about Plan A.

CHAPTER 9
    I like watching films. Not as much as reading books, but a good film has something of the same function. It encourages you to look at things differently. But no film has managed to persuade me to take a different view of the advantages of being in the majority and being more heavily armed. In a fight between one man and several others, in which both parties are pretty much prepared and armed, the one who’s on his own will die. In a fight where one party has an automatic weapon, whoever has that weapon will win. This was the result of hard-won experience, and I wasn’t about to pretend it wasn’t true justso I wouldn’t have to go and see the Fisherman. It was true. And that’s why I went to see him.
    The Fisherman, as I’ve already said, shares the heroin market in Oslo with Daniel Hoffmann. Not a big market, but because heroin was the main product, the customers were good at paying and the prices were high, the profits sky high. It all started with the Russian route—or the North Passage. When it was established by Hoffmann and the Russians in the early seventies, most of the heroin came from the Golden Triangle via Turkey and Yugoslavia, the so-called Balkan route. Pine had told me that he had been working as a pimp for Hoffmann, and that because ninety per cent of the prostitutes used heroin, getting paid with a fix was just as good as Norwegian kroner for most of them. So Hoffmann worked out that if he could get hold of cheap heroin, he’d be able to increase his takings from their sexual services accordingly.
    The idea of getting hold of cheap gear didn’t come from the south but the north. From the inhospitable little Arctic island of Svalbard whichis shared between Norway and the Soviet Union, who each run coal mines on their respective sides of the island. Life there is hard and monotonous, and Hoffmann had heard Norwegian miners tell horror stories of how the Russians drowned their sorrows with vodka, heroin and Russian roulette. So Hoffmann went up and met the Russians, and came back home with an agreement. Raw opium was shipped from Afghanistan into the Soviet Union, where it was refined into heroin and then sent north to Archangel and Murmansk. It would have been impossible to get it across to Norway, seeing as the Communists guarded the border with Norway, a NATO country, so carefully—and vice versa. But on Svalbard, where the border was only guarded by polar bears and temperatures of minus forty degrees, there wasn’t a problem.
    Hoffmann’s contact on the Norwegian side sent the goods with the daily domestic flight to Tromsø, where they never checked so much as a single suitcase, even if everyone knew the miners were bringing in litre upon litre of cheap, tax-free spirits. It was as if even the authorities thought they deserved that much of a bonus. Obviouslythey were the ones who claimed in hindsight that it was naive to think that so much heroin could be brought in and shipped on to Oslo by plane, railway and road without anyone knowing about it. And that a few envelopes must have ended up in the hands of public officials.
    But according to Hoffmann not a single krone was paid. It simply wasn’t necessary. The police had no idea what was going on. Not until an abandoned snow-scooter was found on the Norwegian side of the island, outside Longyearbyen.
    The human remains left by the polar bears turned out to be Russian, and the petrol tank contained plastic bags holding a total of four kilos of pure heroin.
    The operation was put on hold while the police and officials swarmed around the area like angry bees. A heroin