It was of course still possible that the page was some sort of prank, but the mention of Rogue Justice in the Gazette and the ad in the Blacklist gave Bjorn a strong feeling that it was in fact a real service. Contacting whoever was behind the e-mail address would almost certainly lead to a serious response which in turn could result in the violent death of a person.
It was an unnerving thought, and the way the ad had appeared right next to the names of people who in some cases were merely doing their job, added to the sense that this whole thing was getting out of control, that Lundby was full of crooks actively involved in all sorts of criminal activity.
The prostitution, the drugs, the protection rackets, and now even hired guns ready to kill for money; the village was quite obviously in the hands of the Mafia, and if not stopped pretty soon, who could know where this would end?
Bjorn turned off his computer. He got up from his chair and stretched his body to relieve himself from the tension that had built up while he was hunkered over his PC. Then he took a final look at the village before drawing the curtains. He turned on the TV and sat down in his bed to get some rest before dinner.
Something very sinister was going on in the village, and Bjorn got a cold lump in his stomach from thinking about it. He and his colleagues were after all at the very front line should anything happen. Maybe his "bunker boys" colleagues were right after all, that some sort of conflict was inevitable, and that the checkpoint would in fact be attacked one day. Terrorist attacks were after all becoming increasingly common. Police stations and army barracks were going up in flames every day in various hotspots around the world it seemed, and here he was at the very front line of an out of control village, full of armed people, some of whom evidently feeling entitled to kill whomever they have a grudge against.
Bjorn flicked through the channels on his TV in search of something soothing, skipping quickly past anything with even a hint of violence in it. But feeling edgy from thinking about Lundby, he had no patience for pure silliness either, so he found himself changing channels quite frequently until he finally landed on a documentary about kids who had been saved from kidnappers. And although the subject matter was violent in a way, there was something soothing about the topic. Good people had come to these kids' rescue, and here they were, safe and sound, and ready to talk about their ordeals.
With so much violence and destruction going on in the world, it was good to be reminded of the many heroes out there taking it upon themselves to make the world a better place. And the part of the documentary that Bjorn had landed on was particularly touching. A brother and sister were sitting on a sofa, flanked by their parents, telling the interviewer that if it had not been for their guardian angels, they would have been living in perpetual fear of their would be kidnappers.
Bjorn found the term "guardian angels" quaint but fitting. "What better word to describe people dedicating their lives to saving children?" he thought as he listened to the kids parent narrating their side of the story. Bjorn clicked on the info button on the remote control, and sure enough, the documentary he was watching was simply called "The Guardian Angels". And although he at this point realized that he was watching a program about the child protective services, he did not change the channel, despite having just realized that he had failed in preventing Cecilie, as she called herself, from entering the village with her daughter.
Bjorn was fascinated by what he was watching. The heroic nature of the work the "guardian angels" were doing was inspiring, and Bjorn wondered for a while if he should take it upon himself to find Cecilie and her daughter, and bring them back to Alta to meet with the angles. Or better still, find out where they were hiding and simply report this to them.
But there was something artificial about the documentary that slowly grew on him. A strange sense of unease as the stories, a little too extreme to be entirely believable, unfolded and revealed that the parents were not in fact the parents of the children, but their foster parents. And that the kidnapping was not so much a kidnapping as a desperate attempt by the children's biological parents to escape the child protection services.
If these guardian angels were so keen to help, why the drama and the sudden impulses to bring in the police to forcefully take the children away from the parents. Was there really an epidemic of child molestation by biological parents against their own children out there? Did the better safe than sorry attitude that these angles were promoting really make sense?
And then, much to Bjorn's amazement, the woman in charge of the child protection services in Alta appeared, and Bjorn could not help think of the long list of complaints against her as she sat there smugly bragging about the hundreds of children she had personally saved.
"Hundreds?" Bjorn thought in disbelief. "Hundreds of children saved in an area that has less than ten thousand children." And why on earth was this woman, of all the so called guardian angles out there, the one to get so much positive attention in the documentary? It seemed odd that a person who evidently is much feared and clearly hated by many should get such an opportunity to brag of her achievements.
She even got the honour of making the closing statement for the documentary. The interviewer asked urgently and passionately who would save the children if it was not for guardian angles like her. And the head of the child protection services in Alta nodded with a knowing smile, adding rhetorically "who indeed?"
And with this question in mind Bjorn was left pondering its implications as the list of credits appeared on the screen. It was easy for him to think that they may be overdoing things a bit in Alta, but did he have any better solutions? He was no expert in these matters, and what did he know about child molestation? And the evidence was there. Children were being saved, and who would do this if not the angles?
But Bjorn did not get any time to think more about this. It was dinner time, and Ante was knocking on doors, telling everybody to come down to the kitchen to take part in the feast.
And eager to join Ante and his other colleagues Bjorn rose quickly from his bed, which made him suddenly feel dizzy, just like last night at the casino. But Bjorn was too eager to go down and eat to worry about this, and after having steadied himself against the wall for a moment to regaining his balance, he simply made a mental note that he had to talk to a doctor one of these days.
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