Goma is the point of arrival and precarious operating base for Harry Hole and Kaja Solness as they pursue leads amid an armed conflict. The city is rendered through practical obstacles rather than a broad survey: uncertain hotel plans, roads controlled by guerrillas, a threatened population, rough streets, and the looming presence of the Nyiragongo Volcano. These conditions turn each movement through Goma into part of the investigation’s risk.

Arrival and the Investigation

Kaja wakes with her head against Harry’s shoulder as their plane begins its descent into Goma. They have been travelling for twelve hours from Oslo; another six hours remain before a flight from Zürich is due to land with Juliana Verni aboard. The arrival therefore establishes a timetable as well as a destination: Harry and Kaja have to act in the interval before the next passenger they are watching reaches the city.

Their work in Goma is tied to following Lene Gabrielle Galtung and anticipating where she may stay. Harry proposes a division of tasks: Kaja will watch the arrivals and follow Lene if she is collected, while he waits outside in a taxi because Lene knows him. The plan is deliberately cautious, but its assumptions are uncertain. They do not know whether Lene will be met or where she will go, so the airport and the city beyond it become linked stages in their surveillance.

Isolation and Restricted Movement

The investigators cannot rely on a confirmed hotel booking. According to information Kaja has obtained, only two hotels in Goma are still operating, and neither has a reservation under Lene’s or Juliana’s name. The absence of a booking leaves the team without a straightforward destination to watch and makes the question of lodging part of their effort to predict Lene’s movements.

The surrounding roads sharply limit those predictions. Guerrillas control routes to the west and north, while the nearest town to the south is eight hours away. Harry considers whether Tony Leike has pursued Lene simply to take her money; the immediate context is that the mining project is at a critical stage. Whatever Tony’s purpose, the geography described to the investigators makes Goma feel less like an open hub than a place hemmed in by danger and distance. A missing hotel reservation does not merely complicate the plan: with routes constrained, it leaves fewer obvious alternatives for where Lene could go.

A City Under Threat

On arrival, Harry hires a taxi driver for the day. The man introduces himself as Doctor Duigame, explains that he studied English literature, and invites Harry to call him Saul. They agree on a price quickly, and Harry pays one third of the agreed dollar amount in advance. Saul’s name, language skills, and familiarity with the streets make him an immediate practical link between the investigators and the city, but the conversation soon exposes how precarious that link is.

Saul tells Harry that Joe has gathered his family, taken a car, and headed toward Uganda. Goma is under siege, Saul says, and he believes the people there will be killed; he is also preparing to leave. Joe’s escape in a good car offers a possible chance of getting out, but Saul cannot present it as a secure route or a certain survival. The warning gives the city’s danger a personal scale: people are making urgent choices about whether to stay, flee, or wait, while Harry’s investigation requires him to move deeper into the same threatened environment.

Streets, Ruins, and the Volcano

The journey from the airport takes Harry toward a street below a burned-out church. He recognizes a church tower rising from the ruins left by the Nyiragongo Volcano, then asks Saul to wait while he continues the rest of the way on foot. The scene places the recognizable landmark beside the immediate demands of the case: the taxi can bring Harry close, but not all the way to his destination.

Kaja later travels north by taxi beneath a night sky illuminated by the volcano, whose glow makes the stars fade and casts the surroundings in a diffuse, blood-red light. About fifteen minutes later, the taxi reaches a road compared to a bomb crater. Oil lamps hang outside a shop; Kaja cannot tell whether the electricity has gone out again or whether the neighbourhood has no power at all. The uncertainty is part of the scene’s texture, not a confirmed explanation for the darkness. A small stone house and two Range Rovers provide visible landmarks, while passing mopeds and music from a doorway mark the street as inhabited even amid its damaged surface and unstable services.

Narrative Significance

Goma serves as more than a backdrop to the pursuit. Its airport makes the investigators’ timetable legible; its scarce hotels and blocked routes undermine their ability to predict the people they are following; and Saul’s account of flight and siege reveals the cost of remaining in place. The volcano and the damaged church tower give the landscape a persistent visual presence, while the bomb-crater road and uncertain power supply bring that scale down to the conditions of ordinary movement. In Goma, Harry and Kaja’s attempt to control an investigation meets a setting in which other people are already making urgent, uncertain decisions about escape.