174

Bjorn felt a sting of discomfort on seeing the red banner above Cecilie's passport details. His suspicions were at once confirmed, and it did not feel good. The woman was a fugitive, and he had let her into the colony.

He sat back in his chair, focusing again on the view ahead of him. "It's a good thing I kept this to myself," Bjorn thought. "I'd better keep this a secret between Ante and me."

Bjorn's eyes were drawn to the little gray ship patrolling the straight. It moved a little to the side as the ferry entered the bay. And soon after, a fishing boat appeared. The ferry headed towards the port, the fishing boat towards Ane's factory.

The coastguard did not interfere visibly with any of the two boats. The ship just laid there idly in the water, and the lack of activity felt reassuring. The rules concerning the colony had been tightened, but business went on as usual. The appearance of the coastguard did not signal a great shift in policy, just a general tidying up of loose ends. People had been slipping into the village. People who should not be there, and no one was to blame for it. Bjorn was surely not the only one having let somebody in who should have been arrested.

He returned his focus to his PC. He typed in Einar in the search field and hit return. And up came a list of two people. The top one, appearing with a red frame, was the Einar he had met in the village. Bjorn clicked on the name, and sure enough, there was Einar's passport details, complete with a red banner.  "Warning:" it read. "Immediate arrest on charges of: Murder (1 count), Assault (6 counts)."

So, there he had it. Definite proof that someone had let in a true criminal, much worse than Cecilie. Bjorn felt strangely relieved by this fact. He was not the only one having inadvertently done something wrong. "How about Katinka?" Bjorn wondered, suddenly curious to know how many criminals he had actually come across down in the village.

Having first misspelled her name, using Cs instead of Ks, which returned nothing, he then got up a single suggestion. And sure enough, her name had a red frame too. He clicked on it, and there she was, wanted on charges of three counts of assault. Bjorn made a search for Roger. "Fraud, embezzlement, and copyright infringement."

"How about David?" Bjorn wondered, eager to see what the Department of Justice might have on him. Bjorn got up a relatively long list, but Bjorn recognized David's face immediately. He clicked on it. "So he is from Lebanon," Bjorn thought to himself on seeing David's foreign passport. "Wanted by Interpol, no less, on charges of drug trafficking."

"The village is indeed full of desperadoes," Bjorn concluded, focusing again on the mountains across the fjord.