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Monday, September 1, 2014

113

With Thomas in the room, it was suddenly as if the whole thing with Frank's gun was settled and sorted out, including the strong suspicion that Frank was somehow compromised or corrupted. And when Ante and Thomas left for the kitchen, Bjorn did not immediately see any problem with Frank's gun being left at the coffee table in front of him. However, Bjorn soon felt like going up to his room, and feeling it a little too irresponsible to leave the gun unattended in the living room, he brought it with him to the kitchen.

"Isn't it better if you keep this gun with you until Frank comes down to pick it up?" Bjorn asked as he put the gun down on the dining table.
"Why not leave it on Frank's spot?" Thomas suggested from over by the counter where he was preparing a sandwich for himself.
"Like here?" Bjorn asked, pushing the gun over to Frank's regular spot.
"Yeah, like that."
"And that's all right with you, Ante?" Bjorn asked.
"Sure! Why not?" Ante answered as if the whole discussion was without consequences as far as he was concerned.

Bjorn smiled. Ante's sudden change of temperament was amusing, considering how anxious he had been. And Ante smiled back in unspoken recognition of this.

Thomas' cluelessness regarding the significance of the gun had clearly been both refreshing and uplifting as far as Ante was concerned. And Thomas' continued ignorance as he headed for the glass cage with his sandwich and thermos with freshly made coffee, was putting Ante back into his usual careless and happy self. However, Bjorn did not stay behind to chat with Ante. Instead, he followed Thomas out in the hall before heading up stairs to his room.

Bjorn wanted to find out more about Rogue Justice. The way it had been mentioned in the Gazette was strangely obscure, and its business model seemed far fetched to say the least. Bjorn knew that he would not be able to keep his mind off the subject before doing at least some research on it, so small talk with Ante, no mater how pleasant this usually was, was of little interested to him at the moment.

Back in his room, Bjorn felt completely at ease as he sat down in front of his computer. He could see cars down by the fjord driving back and forth between the village and the port, and he was reminded of the article in the Gazette predicting an unusually busy weekend with record number of bargain hunters coming and going. And he could also see Nora's place in the distance. The large boulder next to it made it easy to pick out among the houses along the distant shoreline.

Bjorn turned on his computer and typed in "Rogue Justice" in the search field of his browser.

Nothing of relevance came up on his screen, so Bjorn added the word "assassins" to the search string to see if this gave a better result, but this search returned an even sadder looking list.

"So it does not exist, then?" Bjorn thought to himself. Then he changed the word "assassins" with the word "blacklist", more out of idle curiosity than anything else, and immediately got up the address of the recently created web site for registering all sorts of bickering and complaints.

Bjorn clicked on the link to the Blacklist, and was surprised to see how much it had developed since the last time he looked at it. People had clearly been busy adding people they disliked to the web page, and the first page that Bjorn found himself reading even had a list of "most wanted criminals".

There was a banner in a bold font stressing that all of the bellow mentioned people must be considered innocent until proven guilty, but on clicking on a few of the people in the list, there was no doubt that they were all guilty of grave crimes. Two of them had pictures of themselves grinning from ear to ear as they held up severed human heads, and a third had a video attached to his name showing him executing a bunch of kids by shooting them in the back.

Bjorn found the collection of evidence so sickening that he stopped clicking on the links to them, and focused instead on the written accusations and the demands for retribution.

Not too surprisingly, the top ten list was filled entirely by mass murderers from far off places like Mexico, Columbia, Congo and Syria. However, when he narrowed the list down geographically to Lundby and surrounding areas, Bjorn was surprised to see public officials being listed among the most wanted, with the single most sought after "criminal" being the head of the child protection services in Alta.

Bjorn clicked on the link to see what the complaint was, and was not too surprised to see the accusation of kidnapping being levied against her. It is after all the job of the child protection services to act forcefully at times to save children form their abusive parents, and it is inevitable that some of these parents feel strongly about their loss of custody over their own children. To accuse the head of this social service in Alta of kidnapping was in other words nothing short of low level bickering.

However, the list of plaintiffs levying charges against this particular woman was surprisingly long, and looking through the list Bjorn was struck by how many of the plaintiffs were shamelessly exposing themselves with a resent picture of themselves and with their full name and address for everyone to see. "Where is the shame?" he wondered as he eyed the list with quiet curiosity. "Didn't it use to be the ultimate shame to be judged unfit to raise a child? Didn't people use to come up with all sorts of excuses and avoid the subject all together if their child was taken away from them by the state?"

"Not any more, evidently," Bjorn concluded as he finally reached the end of the list, where to his shock a familiar face was staring right at him. It was the woman who insisted on being let into the colony the other day, and Bjorn realized on seeing her that he had in fact enabled a crime by letting her in. This woman was most certainly running away from the authorities, and a danger to her daughter. And he had let her into the colony without mentioning this to anybody but Ante.

Bjorn clicked on the picture, getting up the full details on the woman. Her name was Cecilie, and her address was still unchanged from the one she must have had in Alta. And her accusation levied at the head of the child protection services in Alta was that of attempted kidnapping of her daughter.

There was no more information on the woman, and Bjorn was about to leave the page when he glanced over at the right column with its add for Lance Securities. The ad was unchanged. However, a thin black banner appearing directly underneath the ad for Lance made it look somewhat altered.

He looked at the banner, and got another surprise. "Rogue Justice" it said in deep red letters on the black background, as if deliberately making itself hard to find. Bjorn clicked on it and found himself redirected to a website with no name. The URL field did not contain a name of a website, but an IP address, followed by a few slashes separated with some more numbers.

The odd looking address only added to the sense that the website was deliberately hiding in the very darkest corners of the web, and when Bjorn poked around on the screen, he realized that the webpage was nothing but a single image. The little text there were was clearly meant for purely human interpretation, deliberately using hard to read fonts to make image recognition software incapable of reading it. And the only text on the page was a cryptic message which required some thinking in order to be recognized as an e-mail address. The rest was a series of images making it clear to the determined reader that the service provided by the webpage's owner was indeed that of a hired gun.

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