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John's paranoid comment about Pedro made Bjorn curious to find out more about the man, so he looked him up on the wed first thing on returning to his room after dinner. Bjorn typed in Pedro's full name in the search field of his browser, and immediately got up several matches, the top one being a short encyclopaedic article on Wikipedia. However, it did not say much more about the man than that he was a wealthy Portuguese investor. And the picture included in the article was clearly dated since it showed a man in his thirties while his birth date put him in his mid fifties.

Bjorn looked through some of the other pages found by the search engine, but there was very little more on the man. The only page that seemed to be personal, in the sense that Pedro must have had a say in it, was a page for a company called Lance Securities, for which he was the CEO. His name was also listed among top shareholders in various company reports, supporting the Wikipedia claim regarding the man's wealth.

The description of Pedro as CEO of Lance Securities was even more brief than the Wikipedia entry, and it used the exact same picture, which made Bjorn think that the dated picture might be the only one of him. And this curious reluctance to show a more recent picture did indeed make Pedro's existence seem obscure, if not right out fraudulent. Bjorn had to admit that John had a point when he doubted Pedro's existence. But Pedro was surely not unique in wanting to keep a low profile, and concluding that someone does not exist merely because that someone does not want to keep a high profile was stretching the imagination quite a bit towards conspiracy paranoia.

Bjorn saw no immediate reason to go along with John's hypothesis, but he could not readily dismiss it either, so he let the idea linger as unlikely but plausible while he proceeded to look through news articles on the man. Most of the articles were old and about things that Bjorn was well aware of, but one stood out from the rest, not so much because it came up as related to Pedro, but because it was posted on the Lundby Gazette's online pages.

Bjorn knew that the Gazette had an online version, but this was the first time he had come across it on the web, and eager to see what it had to say about Pedro, he clicked on the link which brought up a professional looking blog. The layout was clean cut and simple, and the advertisements were small and discrete. The article itself was only a few hours old, and mentioned Pedro as part in a dispute with the stall owners down in the village square.

Apparently, someone had distributed leaflets to the stall owners to inform them that the village square was owned and controlled by Pedro, and while the stall owners were free to set up their stalls without having to pay anything at the moment, this was about to change. All stall owners would soon have to pay a "symbolic" sum to Pedro for the right to set up their stalls.

This announcement had made several stall owners furious, claiming that they were the true owners of the land on which they had put their stalls, and that they would refuse to pay any "tribute" to Pedro. However, Pedro's claim to the land was in his view a legally binding consequence of having received the right and duty to maintain public properties for the Norwegian government in Lundby. But the protesting stall owners did not buy this line of reasoning, accusing Pedro instead of neo-feudalist rent seeking.