Simon’s criminal bargain with the twins

Simon Kefas’s criminal bargain with the Twin joined Simon’s private desperation to a larger criminal network embedded in the police, commercial finance, and the trafficking trade. Simon’s access to the Twin offered a way out of financial crisis, but the bargain spread corruption to Ab Lofthus, placed both men under the Twin’s influence, and ultimately led Simon to arrange his best friend’s death. His later repentance and campaign against corruption did not undo that betrayal; they made the bargain the defining source of his guilt and penance.

The Twin and the hidden network

For years, police officers heard rumors of a mole inside the force who passed information to the person directing much of Oslo’s drug and sex trafficking. Simon recalled that the existence of both the mole and the person behind the network had long been discussed without proof. He identified that figure as the Twin, a name that concealed a criminal partnership rather than a single, readily understood operator. The eventual account of two corrupt officers working together clarifies the force of that concealment: as one was active, the other could have an alibi, making the pair harder to suspect as a unit.

The Twin’s reach extended beyond police information. Simon later accused Iver Iversen’s property company of doing business with the Twin, laundering proceeds from drugs and trafficking in exchange for fictitious losses that enabled tax savings worth hundreds of millions of kroner. The accusation places Simon’s bargain within a network where police access and business arrangements served related criminal interests. The account also connects the network to the trafficking of enslaved girls: Simon challenges Fidel Lae over the use of dogs against a girl attempting to escape. The evidence does not establish that every criminal operation described was directly ordered by the Twin, but it shows the scale of the violence and exploitation around the system with which Simon had allied himself.

Simon’s entry into the bargain

The bargain began against the pressure of debt and personal loss. Simon’s relationship with Helene had become chaotic because of his gambling debts; after Ab Lofthus came into Helene’s life and she moved out with him, Simon was heartbroken. Learning that Helene was pregnant intensified his collapse. He gambled recklessly, lost everything, and approached the Twin when he felt he had nothing left to offer but his soul. Else later describes Simon as believing that shame, degradation, and self-loathing dulled his other pain, almost as a form of mental self-harm. The arrangement therefore brought him not simply money or criminal access, but a chosen punishment that deepened the suffering from which he had sought escape.

Simon’s position was unusual because he knew who the Twin was and how to contact him, while the Twin did not know the identities of Simon and Ab. Their information reached him through telephone calls and letters, and later through computers. This separation between contact and identity allowed the mole arrangement to function while preserving anonymity. It also made Simon a crucial intermediary: he could enter the Twin’s criminal orbit and then draw Ab into it, although neither man’s safety was secured by remaining useful.

Recruiting Ab and becoming a mole

Simon brought Ab into the bargain when Ab and Helene were struggling with debt as the banking crisis drove interest rates up and threatened their home. Ab initially refused and threatened to report Simon to their superior. Simon overcame that resistance by invoking Ab’s responsibility to his son, arguing that the boy would suffer for his father’s pride and grow up poor. Ab gave way. Simon later remembered watching his friend be consumed by the choice, while also admitting that Ab’s corruption made him feel less alone. That admission exposes the bargain’s intimacy: Simon did not merely recruit a colleague for practical advantage; he drew his closest friend into the same moral ruin so that he would not bear it by himself.

Ab’s diary records the arrangement from inside the police force. He writes that the two men had turned a blind eye to drug dealing, human trafficking, and murder, and recognizes their partnership as a way of staying above suspicion. Their anonymous communication relied on separate stolen computers taken from the evidence room and Hotmail addresses; messages and physical drops still left risks. In one instance, Ab collected an envelope taped beneath a bench at Broker’s Restaurant on Bogstadveien and feared he had been noticed. The Twin also wanted Simon to rise through the police ranks, offering help with advancement in exchange for greater access to sensitive information and greater usefulness. The diary shows that this was not an isolated exchange: the bargain sought to convert police careers and institutional access into continuing services for the criminal network.

The rupture and Simon’s betrayal

The partnership could not accommodate both Simon and Ab indefinitely. The Twin wanted his mole to advance in the police, and Simon came to believe that only one of them could occupy that position. Else recounts that Ab was willing to kill Simon to take the single place. Simon contacted the Twin first, claimed that Ab knew about both of them, and insisted the threat was urgent. He described the two men as being like identical twins locked in the same nightmare, each trying to kill the other. He then acted before Ab could do so: Simon killed his best friend.

Simon’s account of the betrayal is presented not as a justified solution but as the decisive moral cost of his bargain. The fear of losing his position with the Twin and the immediate danger from Ab explain the circumstances he faced, but they do not erase that he chose to eliminate the friend he had first recruited. The earlier decision to make Ab share his guilt thus returns as the crisis that gives the arrangement its lethal consequence.

Repentance and the long aftermath

Simon eventually stopped being a mole and repented. Else connects that change to the point at which he had lost everything he feared losing, after Helene’s death; with nothing left to protect, he could no longer use fear as a reason to continue. He spent the rest of his life doing penance and making amends, relentlessly pursuing corrupt officers like the man he had once been. That work left him lonely, and he regarded the loneliness as deserved rather than inviting sympathy for himself. His description of self-loathing as the hatred encountered each morning in the mirror gives the bargain a lasting daily aftermath: leaving the network did not mean escaping its memory.

The bargain’s significance lies in the way it converts private ruin into institutional betrayal. Simon’s gambling losses and heartbreak help explain why he sought the Twin, but the consequences extend far beyond him: he recruits Ab, helps sustain anonymous police infiltration, and finally kills the person whose fall he helped bring about. His later pursuit of corrupt officers is both an effort to repair the damage and a continuing measure of its depth. The relationship with the Twin ends as a criminal association, but its central debt remains in Simon’s grief, guilt, and lifelong penance.