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when he flew from Amsterdam. Too much risk. After it had been discovered how deeply involved the South American crews were in cocaine smuggling to the Schiphol Airport, all crews, regardless of airline, risked having their hand luggage checked and being subjected to a body search. Furthermore, the arrangement had been that, on landing, he would carry the packages and keep them in his bag until later in the day, when he flew an internal flight to Bergen, Trondheim or Stavanger. Internal flights that he
had
to make, even if it meant he was forced to absorb delays from Amsterdam by burning up extra fuel. At Gardermoen he was on the air side all the time, of course, so there was no customscheck, but occasionally he had to store the drugs in his bag for sixteen hours before he could deliver them. And deliveries had not always been without risk, either. Public parking lots. Restaurants with far too few customers. Hotels with observant receptionists.
    He rolled up a thousand-krone note he’d taken from an envelope he’d been given the last time he was here. There were specially designed plastic tubes for the purpose, but he was not that kind: He was not the heavy user she had told her divorce lawyer he was. The sly bitch maintained she wanted a divorce because she did not wish to see her children growing up with a drug-addict father and she had no interest in watching him snort away their house and home. And it had nothing to do with flight attendants—she couldn’t give a damn, had stopped worrying about that years ago; his age would take care of that. She and the lawyer had given him an ultimatum. She would take over the house, the children and the remnants of the inheritance he hadn’t squandered. Or they would report him for possession and use of cocaine. She had gathered together enough evidence for even his own lawyer to say that he would be convicted and dumped by his airline.
    It had been a simple choice. All she had allowed him to retain were the debts.
    He got to his feet and went to the window and stared out. Surely they would be here soon, wouldn’t they?
    This was quite a new arrangement. He was to take a package on an outward flight, to Bangkok. God knows why. Fish to Lofoten, as they said in Norwegian, and so on. Anyway, this was the sixth trip, and so far everything had gone without a hitch.
    There were lights in the neighboring houses, but they were so far apart. Lonely habitations, he thought. They had been officers’ quarters when Gardermoen had been a military base. Identical single-story boxes with large, bare lawns between the houses. Least possible height so that a low-flying machine wouldn’t collide. Greatest possible distance between the houses so that a fire following a crash wouldn’t spread.
    They had lived here during his compulsory national service, when he had been flying the Hercules transport planes. The kids had run between houses, visiting other children. Saturday, summer. Men around the barbecues wearing aprons and holding aperitifs. Chatter coming from the open windows, where the women were preparing salads and drinking Campari. Like a scene from
The Right Stuff
, his favorite film, the one with the first astronauts and the test pilot Chuck Yeager. Damned attractive, those pilots’ wives. Even though they wereonly Hercules pilots. They had been happy then, hadn’t they? Was that why he had returned? An unconscious urge to go back in time? Or to find out where it all went wrong, and make amends?
    He saw the car coming and automatically checked his watch. They were eighteen minutes late.
    He went to the coffee table. Breathed in twice. Then placed the rolled-up note against the lower end of the line, bent down and sniffed the powder up his nose. It stung the mucous membrane. He licked his fingertip, ran it over the remaining powder and rubbed it into his gums. It had a bitter taste. The doorbell rang.
    It was the same two Mormon guys, as always. One small, one tall, both wearing their