The Rotten State: A John Flynn Thriller

by Stewart, A. J.

“Peder’s not home?” asked Gorski.

  “No. He has errands. He will return. We will go to the market. You may come, if you wish.”

  Gorski nodded and bit into his toast.

  “How long have you lived here?” asked Flynn.

  “I grew up here.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes. My father was one of the original members of the community.”

  “But your parents are no longer here.”

  Begitte frowned. “How do you know?”

  “We saw them at the funeral yesterday. We saw them leave. Their car wasn’t in the lot out front when we arrived, and if this is their house, they would be here now, surely.”

  “Oh, this is not their house. I did not grow up in this house. Peder and I bought this place. But you are right. My parents moved away, to the coast in Jutland.”

  Flynn sipped his coffee. It was like flavored water, not mainlining caffeine like espresso.

  “How did you meet Peder? Was he out here too?”

  “No, we met in Copenhagen. At university. We both studied computer science.”

  “He was always good with computers,” said Flynn.

  “Yes. He prefers tinkering with hardware more than the software side of things, which is my specialty.”

  “Is that what you do?” asked Gorski. “For a living?”

  “Yes. I do programming and web design.”

  “In Copenhagen?”

  “No, I work remotely from here at home.”

  “You prefer it out here?”

  “It’s home.”

  “So you guys knew each other before?” said Flynn.

  “Before?”

  “Before the Legion.”

  “Oh, yes. After university Peder did his national service, but it was only six months, and he felt there was more to do.”

  “Why didn’t he stay in the Danish military?” Gorski asked.

  “You don’t know?”

  “No, we never really spoke about our pasts.”

  “Really? In ten years?”

  Gorski shrugged. “In the beginning it was sort of taboo, as if each man’s reason was his own, and then later, it didn’t matter.”

  “That’s strange,” she said. “But he said he felt like he wanted to do more, and during his time in national service he never even left Denmark.”

  Both men nodded without speaking. Flynn sipped his coffee.

  “Would you like more toast?” asked Begitte. “Some eggs?”

  “Eggs are good,” said Gorski.

  “I have hard-boiled, or I can fry some.”

  “Hard-boiled is fine for me.”

  Begitte took a couple of boiled eggs from the small refrigerator and peeled them, cut them in half, and put them on a plate. Gorski dug in while Flynn finished his coffee and watched Begitte. Her movements were deliberate and economical, as if she knew exactly where every calorie came from and how each would be spent.

  Begitte noticed him watching, and they looked at each other for a moment. Her expression was serious, as if she had something to say but not the words to articulate it.

  The banging on the front door broke her gaze from his. She strode into the vestibule and opened the door. Flynn heard someone speaking outside. It was a female voice, rushed and breathless, but in Danish, so Flynn only picked up one word: Peder. Begitte said something in reply, and then the voice shot back in rapid-fire Danish.

  Flynn was watching the doorway when Begitte stuck her head back inside.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I must go.”

  “Is everything okay?” Flynn asked.

  “No,” she said. “The bad men are back.”

  Chapter Four

  Flynn and Gorski were off their stools and moving before Begitte had a chance to say any more.

  “What bad men?” Flynn asked.

  “At the old house,” she said. “You saw it. The burned house.”

  “Yes.”

  Begitte stopped by the open door and slipped her shoes on. Flynn and Gorski pulled on their boots without lacing them up and followed her outside. Flynn recognized the woman waiting there from the wake the evening before, but he didn’t know her name.

  “These men work for a—what is the English word? A developer?”

  “Like a builder?”

  “Yes. They want to take the land and build apartments on it.”

  Begitte strode across the lawn that separated the houses from the common building, cutting an arc across the top of the invisible clockface.

  “Don’t you own this place?”

  “The houses, yes. The land is leased.”

  “So how can they develop it?”

  “They cannot. But they think they can make us leave.”

  Begitte stormed ahead, and Flynn took in the burned house as they approached. Two men, wearing reflective vests over their work clothes, had positioned surveying equipment on either side of the debris. One man was setting up a theodolite where Flynn was approaching, while the second man held a ranging rod on the far side.

  But Flynn was more interested in the other three men. They weren’t dressed like surveyors or contractors or builders. They were like replicas of one another rather than triplets: blond hair, neat and pushed up in a little tuft at the front; all around six feet, give or take an inch; broad across the chest and shoulders under matching black puffer jackets.

  “Hvad laver du?” yelled Begitte as she neared the men.

  It got the attention of the closest puffer jacket, who turned and held out his hands.

  “Vi vil ikke have problemer,” said the guy.

  Flynn slowed, and the woman who had raised the alarm caught up to him.

  “What did he say?” Flynn asked the woman.

  “He says he doesn’t want trouble.”

  That wasn’t Flynn’s impression. He was no expert on the subject, but he had witnessed a few surveys performed in his time. Most of them were French military, setting up camps and forward operating positions. He’d worked once with the US Army Corp of Engineers and seen those guys survey, grade, and set up a camp for five hundred soldiers—complete with roads—inside of two days. And while all of them had used equipment similar to the guys Flynn was watching now, none of them wore puffer jackets.

  The three guys in the jackets were not focused around the remains of the house but were spread out in a line that tightened as it became apparent where the threat was coming from. And they clearly saw Begitte as that threat. They were wrong about that.

  Begitte marched up to the closest guy. She didn’t appear afraid despite his considerable size, and she got right in his face. Flynn didn’t understand her words, but he caught their meaning just fine. The surveyors had no business being there, and she was telling them just that. Flynn glanced at Gorski, who stood with his hands in his pockets, relaxed as if watching ducks play on a pond.

  Flynn stood back. It wasn’t his home, and it wasn’t his place to interfere. Begitte appeared to have the situation in hand, and she was capable of making her point without him or Gorski getting involved.

  Begitte yelled at the guy, who shook his head in response. He said something in return that was plainly not what Begitte wanted to hear, because she stopped talking, waited for a moment, and then turned toward the surveyor. She paced over to him with the puffer jacket guy close behind. When she yelled at the surveyor, he looked at her but didn’t respond. Engaging her wasn’t his job, that much was obvious.

  Begitte reached the surveyor, and he took a step back behind his tripod. She remonstrated and pointed her finger at the road. Flynn knew the sign language for get out when he saw it. But the surveyor didn’t move, so she grabbed his tripod and yanked it away from him.

  The guy in the puffer jacket put one hand on the tripod, the other on Begitte’s arm, and prized the two apart. Begitte released her grip on the tripod and spun as she pulled her arm away from the guy. But now he was determined, so he regained his hold and then grabbed her other arm and dragged her away fro
m the surveying equipment.

  Flynn strode forward and yelled, “Hey!”

  His voice was loud and deep and drew the eyes of all three puffer jackets. But Flynn’s attention was on the immediate threat, the guy manhandling Begitte. The two guys on either side closed in toward Flynn, as if to intercept him, but they were too slow or too indecisive to stop him.

  “Take your hands off her,” said Flynn.

  The middle guy dropped one hand from Begitte’s arm but not the other, and he frowned hard at Flynn.

  “You do not live here,” said the guy. It was part statement and part question. Flynn’s English was a giveaway, the accent definitive. The guy clearly wasn’t expecting it and balked.

  “I said take your hands off her. I won’t be asking again.”

  The guy didn’t loosen his grip. “This has nothing to do with you.”

  “You just changed that.”

  Flynn watched the two guys on the flanks close in. They weren’t going to grab him, not yet, not at first. It was a show of strength. Three big puffer jackets working as a team would convince most opponents that the battle was not worth fighting. But Flynn wasn’t under any illusion that they couldn’t fight. They were big guys, and their mass was equally distributed across their chests and waists, no excess flab in their bellies. They wore the look of enlisted men—perhaps they had done the minimum national service, and they hadn’t gone completely to seed after leaving.

  But they were operating with their own assumptions, most of which were flawed. He figured their math would be wrong for a start. They saw three on one, when Flynn knew full well that when it mattered it was actually three on two. He also knew that two on two was a dead-set certainty, because the guys labored under another false assumption: that Flynn would fight fair. A decade in the French Foreign Legion had taught him many things, and one of those things was that fighting fair was for losers. Fairness was a good theory in an election, but not on a battlefield. Flynn’s word was his bond, and he’d stand by it every time, assuming, that was, that you had earned it. If you hadn’t, if you were the enemy, there were no rules.

  Flynn moved at pace without running directly at the guy holding Begitte. The instinct would be to try to pull her back, to get out of harm’s way. He would bet all the cobblestones on the Avenue des Champs-Élysées that the guy would anticipate this as Flynn’s first move. But in Flynn’s experience, the best way to remove someone from harm’s way wasn’t to remove them at all. That was plan B. Plan A was to eliminate that which would do them harm.

  He timed the last two steps like a striker times their run at the football. Flynn was left-handed but right-footed, so his second to last step ended on his left foot, and as it did he pivoted and reached out his left hand to continue the illusion that he wanted to grab Begitte away from the guy but not so far as too disrupt his balance. He was fully side-on when he came level with Begitte—the classic southpaw position—his left foot planted, his right ready to pivot, his eyes on Begitte but his attention firmly on the puffer jacket in front of him.

  Flynn spun hard, and by the time the guy realized that Flynn wasn’t reaching for Begitte it was too late. Flynn drove his momentum through his core, forward through his shoulders, and rammed his fist home into the guy’s face. The guy’s nose exploded on impact and his head snapped back viciously. The force of the punch launched him upward and onto his back with a solid thunk.

  He wasn’t unconscious. Probably not, anyway. If Flynn had wanted that, he would have thrown an upper cut into the chin—much more likely to send the brain into meltdown. But a full-frontal punch to the nose was designed for theatrics. Lots of blood caught the eye of even the most seasoned professional, and it made them pause. The pause was the objective of the punch, and that pause would be the reason they lost.

  Flynn allowed his momentum to swing his body around so he was facing the second of the puffer jackets, the one who had been on Flynn’s right. At that moment, the guy would have mixed emotions: he would be shocked by his buddy going down in a bloody mess but confident because, despite the loss of one man, it was still two on one, and one of those two was now attacking Flynn from behind. The guy looked at the bloody nose on the ground and then moved forward, a vicious snarl on his lips. He advanced quickly toward Flynn and then, without warning, he stopped and put his hands up into a boxer’s ready position.

  Flynn didn’t stop, but he knew why the guy had; he was keeping Flynn’s attention while the third puffer jacket attacked from the rear. But Flynn was supremely confident that such an attack would never eventuate.

  Two things happened at the same time. Flynn got within parrying distance of the second guy and put his fists up to match his opponent and catch his eye, but instead of engaging in a boxing match, he propped on his left foot and kicked his right foot into the guy’s left leg. When he drove the knee backward, the man’s leg hyperextended and he collapsed with a howl. As he did, Flynn heard a bone-cracking crunch as the puffer jacket behind him hit the ground.

  Flynn spun in place and glanced at the third guy, who lay at Gorski’s feet, holding his knee. Gorski had clearly gotten him from the side; his leg was bent like a chicken wing. Flynn checked on the first guy to make sure he wasn’t regrouping, but he was preoccupied with not drowning in his own blood.

  Gorski turned to the surveyor, who crouched behind his tripod and put his hands up.

  “Time to go,” said Gorski.

  The surveyor nodded and picked up his tripod without closing it. His assistant on the other side of the rubble ran around the ashes of the house toward their vehicle. Flynn intercepted him.

  “Did you all come together?”

  The guy shook his head.

  “You’re going to need to drive these boys home,” said Flynn.

  The assistant hesitated. He didn’t want to wait for the big guys on the ground. He wanted to leave, and do it now. But Flynn’s face told him that wasn’t an option, so he nodded reluctantly.

  Gorski was organizing the removal. He sent the woman who had raised the alarm to retrieve a towel, which he then threw to the guy with the busted nose. He sat forward with the towel over his face and soaked up the blood.

  “You’re the only one who can stand,” said Flynn, “so you’re going to have to help your buddies out.”

  He shot Flynn a look of anger, but he slowly stood and helped the guy Flynn had taken down to his feet. Flynn walked behind the two puffer jackets and the survey assistant to the lot at the front of the property, where they found the surveyor waiting by a white van emblazoned with the words Lund Konstruktion.

  The puffer jackets ignored the van. The busted nose helped his buddy into the back of a black Land Rover. Flynn then directed him back to the remaining man. As the busted nose walked back, he repeatedly looked at the bloody towel, and Flynn got the sense that he was getting ideas about renewing the fight. Flynn dropped back a couple of steps so the guy couldn’t surprise him.

  They reached Gorski and the chicken wing, who was now sitting up but still holding his knee and in considerable pain. The busted nose waited for a moment, perhaps tossing around his options, but he must have decided he didn’t have any, so he helped his buddy up, and together they limped back to the Land Rover. After depositing the chicken wing in the back, the surveyor’s assistant started the car and took off.

  The surveyor was already in the van, engine running. Flynn and Gorski followed the busted nose as he walked around and got in the cab. He lowered the window and looked at them.

  “You will pay for this,” he said. He was a real tough guy, saving his chat for when he was already in the van.

  “If I see you again,” said Flynn, “you won’t be hobbling like your pals. You’ll never walk again.”

  The guy snarled, and the surveyor hit the gas. The van skidded on the gravel and then sped away.

  Flynn and Gorski kept their eyes on the van until it was lost from sight, then turned back to the houses. Begitte and the other woman stood by the common house, w
atching them.

  Chapter Five

  Flynn and Gorski walked back toward the common building, but Begitte and the neighbor turned and strode back to their homes well before they got there. The two men found the door to the Thorsens’ house ajar, so they entered and removed their boots.

  Begitte was in the kitchen fixing more coffee. Flynn and Gorski took their stations at the counter but said nothing. Flynn watched Begitte. He knew what she was doing. Anyone and everyone who had served in a military capacity knew what she was doing. It was called make-work. Tasks developed to give soldiers something to do. Bored soldiers thought too much about their circumstances, and thinking about their circumstances only brought trouble—for their leaders, for politicians, and with each other. So armies everywhere liked to keep their troops busy. The French Foreign Legion had favored marching. Flynn and Gorski had marched what felt like the circumference of the planet, but there was also field training, weapons training, squaring-away quarters, and cleaning latrines.

  They had already had coffee, and there was no request for or offer of more, but she was busy creating work in the way people got busy with menial tasks when they wanted to avoid something else. Begitte poured water into the machine and studiously focused her attention away from Flynn’s eyes. Her face was stern and troubled.

  Flynn wondered if they had overstepped the mark. He and Gorski had taken down the three puffer jackets without hesitation. It was years of training kicking in. He had stood back until the busted nose laid his hands on Begitte, and then he had acted. He had warned him, but the guy had not listened. There was no point in half measures—it was him or them. That was always the way. But now he wondered if Begitte didn’t want the help. Perhaps she thought she had it under control. Perhaps she actually did, although Flynn didn’t think so. She was fit and lean and capable, that much was obvious, but she was no match for three big guys. No match at all. So Flynn was comfortable with his decision to act. Faced with the same scenario a hundred more times, he would react the same way on a hundred occasions.

  He wasn’t sure Begitte agreed. She suddenly came off as frosty, as if they had brought more trouble than they were worth. Although he believed in his course of action, he felt an apology might be in order, or at least an explanation.