Norwegian Police Security Service

The Norwegian Police Security Service is defined in the novel through its extraordinary digital reach and strict limits on who may use it: a covert search system can connect scattered records, but access is reserved for the service and restricted to crises. Harry Hole’s past work for the organization gives him a surviving password, turning its tools into a clandestine means of pursuing the murder investigation while ordinary inquiries might expose the team.

Mandate and Investigative Method

Harry recalls working with the service while developing possible threat scenarios for the Robin case. The method was to search for connections without speaking to anyone. Rather than begin with interviews that could alert a suspect, investigators could use a NATO-based search engine to scan material accessible through the internet. Its reach is described as extending across the network, allowing investigators to look for relationships among records that would otherwise appear unrelated.

The system is not presented as an ordinary police database. Harry describes hidden internet backdoors established through MILNET before ARPANET was opened to commercial use in the 1980s. Trojan programs update passwords, codes, and extensions whenever a user goes online, enabling searches across flight bookings, hotel reservations, toll-station passages, and online banking. He tells Katrine Bratt that the system has existed since 1984 and that his old password still works; he has already tested it.

Access, Secrecy, and Risk

The service’s access rules are central to the system’s dramatic importance. Harry says that only the Norwegian Police Security Service is permitted to use it, and then only in crisis situations. Searches can be traced back to the computer from which they were made. If Harry or another officer at police headquarters used the system for the murder inquiry, that trace could expose the unauthorized search and create a risk of criminal prosecution.

Harry therefore asks Katrine Bratt to conduct the searches from a shared computer at a psychiatric clinic. She recognizes the implication: her status as a patient, rather than her credentials as an investigator, would make her a convenient person through whom to disguise the search. Harry confirms both the intended cover and his confidence that she can keep the matter secret. The arrangement shows how the service’s safeguards constrain the investigation even as its technology offers a powerful route around conventional investigative limits.

Use in the Murder Investigation

The searches connect records belonging to women whose relationship to the cases is not initially apparent. Katrine finds that Adele Vetlesen, a missing 28-year-old from Drammen, bought a Norwegian State Railways ticket from Drammen to Ustaoset for November 7. Borgny Stem-Myhre bought a ticket to the same mountain region for that date, departing from Kongsberg. The shared destination and date provide a concrete link between two women whose cases had not yet been joined by the investigation.

A further transaction search identifies payments from Iska Peller’s account on November 20 for two beds in each of four mountain huts, with a day’s walk between them. The final hut, Hävasshütte, was only half a day’s walk from Ustaoset, and the records place the pair there on November 7. These details turn the system’s broad surveillance capacity into a specific investigative result: travel and lodging data reconstruct a shared route and direct attention to the mountain-hut setting.

Institutional Role and Narrative Significance

The service itself does not appear as a visible field team in these scenes. Its presence is instead carried by the search engine, the access rules, and Harry’s former connection to the organization. That distance gives the service a double function: it represents state power capable of seeing deeply into private transactions, while its restrictions force the investigators to conceal their use of that power.

The resulting method also changes how the murder inquiry gathers knowledge. Harry’s earlier practice of seeking connections without interviews is adapted to a case in which speaking too openly could compromise the investigation. The system supplies the documentary links that point toward Ustaoset and Hävasshütte, but its use depends on secrecy and a carefully chosen cover. The Norwegian Police Security Service is therefore significant less as a conventional police unit than as the source of a potent, tightly controlled form of investigative visibility.