The Rotten State: A John Flynn Thriller

by Stewart, A. J.

  “He’s a junior reporter. He covers food, hence the opening.”

  “You told the American where to find him?”

  “I had to. He was going to find out anyway.”

  “So why was the American looking for this Olsen?”

  “He said he had spoken to Helle Poulsen.”

  “He spoke to Poulsen?”

  “Yes, sir. I didn’t get the sense he knew much. It felt like she had referred him to Olsen for whatever it was he wanted to know.”

  “All right.”

  She was a reporter. She wanted to know who the American was and what he wanted to know. She wanted to know why Poulsen had gotten a job offer out of the blue to work on a plum desk in Washington. She had a lot of questions. She was smart enough to not ask any of them.

  “I’ll take it from here,” said the man.

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Good work.”

  She walked out of the copy room and sat at her cubicle. Investigative journalism was a dying business, and the ones that would be left were the ones with access. And access had a price. A price she had now paid.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Gorski watched through the window as fields gave way to the urban buildings of Stenløse. Thorsen drove the van along Frederikssundsvej but didn’t get to the center of town. The kind of place they were headed for was familiar to Gorski, and it was always on the outskirts of town, as often as not on the second street back from the main road, behind the brand names that took the best real estate.

  He saw a Citröen sign, and then Thorsen pulled off route 211 as they entered the town. Stenløse was clearly a much bigger place than Østvand and even larger than Veksø, where he and Flynn had disembarked the train. Stenløse looked big enough to house ten or fifteen thousand people.

  Thorsen drove one block into a light industrial area that was flanked by apartment housing. The buildings were all squat and mostly painted white, as if the entire area had gotten a deal on a paint shipment, but the shipment had been delivered decades ago. The paint was dirty and old, and the road cracked and tired. All the buildings bore signs that were amateurish if not hand-painted, and Gorski knew what they were for even if he couldn’t read the language: auto body repair shops and mechanics and tire stores. Such businesses tended to congregate in one area like immigrants to a new country, usually behind the car dealerships that sold the new versions of the vehicles the mechanics would later repair.

  The van stopped on a corner. Begitte slid the rear door open and jumped out.

  “I will come to you when I am done,” she said.

  “Okay,” said Thorsen. She slammed the door closed, and he pulled away.

  “There’s a grocery on the other side of the main road,” Thorsen said by way of explanation. He drove one block farther and then turned right into an empty lot beside one of the ubiquitous white buildings. Gorski noticed a service alley that ran behind the building, and on the other side of the alley, a chain-link fence held the thick woodland at bay.

  Gorski slipped out. Between the van and the fence was a pile of abandoned tires. Beside the white building were two vehicles, one a compact car with no wheels and the other an ancient four-wheel drive with no hood or seats. There was a collection of rusted engine blocks that had been there so long, grass was growing from inside them, and old springs—long strips of steel from some kind of small truck—had fanned out like a deck of cards.

  It was a dump, and Gorski knew it was Thorsen’s kind of place. In the Legion, Thorsen’s mechanical prowess had become legend. He fixed everything—vehicles, sheds, ham radios, computers. Once, in France, he repaired an old woman’s sewing machine, and in Africa, he rebuilt a pump that had ceased retrieving water from a well. Even when there was nothing to repair, he would take things apart and rebuild them. He could rebuild a jeep engine like most soldiers could fieldstrip a rifle.

  They walked around to the front. There appeared to be two businesses in the long building, but the second had gone bust years before—the dirt was so thick on the windows they were opaque.

  Thorsen stopped in front of a single door for the other business. There was no telling what kind of business it was, not from the front. There were no posters in the windows, and the sign above the door was nothing more than three long fluorescent tubes.

  “He doesn’t speak much English, so we’ll talk in Danish,” said Thorsen.

  “You want me to stay out here?”

  “You can come in, but you won’t understand.”

  “It wouldn’t be the first time.” Gorski grinned. “I’ll wait for Begitte. Will you be long?”

  “A little while. He found two carburetors that might work, so we need to measure them.”

  “Okay.”

  Thorsen went inside the dark space that appeared to be as much warehouse as storefront.

  Gorski looked around outside. It was a quiet street in a quiet town. No foot traffic, and the only vehicle down the street was theirs. It was the kind of place people went to for a specific item or service. He put his hands in his pockets and walked back around to the side of the building, past the van and the rusted engine block. He went over to the chain-link fence and peered through. There was a section of trees, thick as a forest but no more than forty meters deep. He couldn’t see through it, but he had noticed the housing subdivision on the other side from the main road. Perhaps there was a stream or some other geological feature in there that made that section unsuitable for development.

  Gorski glanced down behind the building into the tight alley. There was a lot of debris, garbage that had been collected by the breeze and deposited against the fence. He could see discarded cartons and wood pallets and what looked like a pair of handlebars. That caught his eye. Gorski had always been interested in motorcycles. His father had owned one as a young man and had been forced to give it up when his mother discovered she was pregnant; it wasn’t a practical means of transportation for a family. Gorski’s father would tell him stories of his rides—never about specific destinations but about the sensations: the feel of a breeze in his face and the sounds of a throbbing motor and blacktop against rubber. Gorski had loved those tales as if they represented another world, and when he got older he realized that they had. A world his dad had given up in order to be just that: Aleksy Gorski’s father.

  He had never considered giving up the life he knew for something so prosaic and yet so great. The opportunity had never arisen, and he wasn’t sure after all he had been through that it ever would.

  He wandered in behind the building and came upon a spiderweb so thick he suspected he might be able to climb it, but he wasn’t getting through it without wearing it all over himself, so he crouched down low and scooted underneath. He heard the sound of a distant vehicle as he stepped across the base of gravel and motor oil and found the handlebars were connected to a motorbike. Or at least the skeleton of one. The tires were gone, but the wheels remained, and the engine had been removed, leaving a gaping space under the fuel tank. The seat was cracked and weathered, and the padding underneath had been eaten away by time. There was a badge on the tank covered in grime, so Gorski bent down to wipe it off.

  That was when he heard the footsteps. The definitive sound of soles on gravel, light but purposeful, more ball of the foot than heel. Gorski snapped up to see the guy with the broken nose standing behind him with a knife in his hand. It wasn’t the kind of knife Gorski expected, not a hunting knife or a switchblade, or even a Swiss Army knife. It was a boning knife, a long and thin item designed to fillet a fish from head to tail. Not the greatest to use in a fight, but still a blade that could cut deep and end a life.

  The busted nose charged Gorski.

  Gorski’s first instinct was to run. One-on-one was not the kind of odds that worried him, but the knife had his attention. It extended the guy’s reach by a good twenty centimeters and made that reach more dangerous than any jab or hook. It didn’t matter where it landed—forearm, chest, head—it was all bad. And the gu
y had learned from his previous encounter with Flynn that Gorski fought dirty, so he wasn’t waiting around to engage. He drove forward, the blade thrusting toward Gorski’s stomach.

  Gorski sprung away from the first parry. The guy tried to get nice and close so he didn’t miss, and in so doing he failed to take advantage of his extra reach, and Gorski dove for the gravel. He landed on his shoulder and rolled with it and came up in a crouch, ready to move again.

  The busted nose slammed into the wall of the disused store and turned, angry now. He came at Gorski again, raising the blade high, aiming to chop down on his opponent. Gorski dug his hand into the oily gravel and waited: one step, two steps. Then he flung a fistful of the stones up at the raging man.

  There was no real harm to be caused, but a man with a broken nose tends to be overly protective—once bitten, as they say. So the big guy recoiled and brought his weapon down but kept moving. In the second that the guy was more focused on flying rocks than his opponent, Gorski drove up at him. He grabbed the guy’s arm with his two hands to drive the knife away, and then he kicked out with his boot.

  The guy was waiting for the boot. He sidestepped Gorski’s thrust and with his free hand connected with the side of Gorski’s body using a wide left cross. It rattled Gorski, and he felt it in his kidneys. He held on to the guy’s arm, pushing it away and turning him around like a dance partner. The guy wound up for a second punch with his left, one that Gorski suspected would be a good deal higher than the first and quite possibly definitive.

  He didn’t wait for it to land. He pushed himself up from the balls of his feet, straightening his knees and driving his head toward the guy’s face as he turned away from the coming impact. The top of Gorski’s forehead smashed into the guy’s cheekbone, and the guy’s punch swung into nothing. Then Gorski kicked out again for the knee, but the guy saw it coming, so he flicked his own legs back as if he were trying to backheel a soccer ball. He lost his balance and fell forward into Gorski.

  It was the worst possible place to be. On the ground was the losing position, every time. Gorski crashed backward and felt gravel dig into his scalp. Then the big guy landed on top, knocking the wind out of Gorski. The guy had no leverage, but he had mass, so he used his body to return the favor and smashed his head into Gorski’s cheek. Next the guy scrambled to sit on top of him, where he could now take control, and he grabbed his knife and drove it toward Gorski’s chest.

  Gorski pushed up as hard as he could, flailing his legs to try and buck the guy off, but Gorski’s hips were pinned and the effort did nothing but sap his strength. The long knife hovered over Gorski’s heart, and the guy leaned his shoulder into it so Gorski was now fighting strength and stamina and mass and gravity as the blade dropped slowly toward him.

  It was a sharp knife, honed over the years so that much of the blade had been worn away, so it pierced Gorski’s shirt and then his skin almost without pain. When it hit muscle, Gorski felt the sting, and the stamina left his arms, and the knife slipped into him.

  Then the guy flew off him with a sickening crunch. The knife flung out, and the guy hit the gravel. Gorski looked up. Upside down he saw a person standing over him holding a club of some kind.

  Gorski rolled over and winced at the pain in his chest. He looked at the guy with the busted nose, who now also sported a bleeding temple. Gorski pushed himself onto his haunches and looked at the person before him.

  Begitte Thorsen.

  She stood holding one of the steel truck springs like a baseball bat. Her face had lost what little color it had.

  “Are you okay?” she asked.

  Gorski nodded and put his hand to the wound in his chest. It hurt like hell, and it was bleeding steadily. He guessed the cut was an inch or two deep, not life-ending but not far from it.

  “Him?” Begitte asked, glancing at the other guy.

  Gorski crawled over and leaned across the man’s body so he could get a pulse on the side of his neck that wasn’t wounded. He felt a soft beat but was unsure if it was his or the guy’s, so he tried again. The man’s pulse was faint, almost not there. Gorski left his fingers in place until he felt no pulse at all.

  “Well?” asked Begitte.

  “He’s sleeping,” Gorski said. “He’ll live.”

  Gorski stood so Begitte couldn’t see the man. It wasn’t an obvious thing when a human went from barely alive to not alive at all. There was no visible aura that left the body, no last puff of air. But he didn’t want her to focus on her handiwork anyway, because once seen it was not easily forgotten.

  “I was coming from the supermarket,” she said, looking back along the alley toward the main road. Gorski followed her glance and noted the burlap shopping bags discarded on the ground at the end of the alley. Then he brought his focus back on Begitte and noticed that she was covered in spiderwebs.

  “I saw the car go past as it came from behind the hardware place there. He got out and went into the alley, and I saw the van and I just knew you were there.”

  “Thanks,” Gorski said. “I owe you one.”

  “What do we do?”

  Gorski took the spring from her grip. “I’ll take care of it,” he said.

  “But he needs a hospital or something.”

  “Don’t worry. He’s going to wake up with one hell of a headache, that’s all. You take your groceries and get in the van.”

  She frowned at him but clearly knew she was out of her element, so she slowly turned and walked back along the shadowed alley. At the end, she stopped where the sunshine began, picked up her shopping bags, and slipped around the side of the building toward the van.

  Gorski wiped the spring with his jacket and placed it by the motorcycle skeleton. He dragged the body and propped him up against the wall. It was obvious no one had been behind this building in a long time, and Gorski hoped that remained the case for just a little longer.

  He padded the guy down and found a wallet and a phone. He took them and walked farther down the alley. Gorski found the Land Rover parked in what had once been a driveway but was now covered in weeds. The driver’s side door was open. Gorski got inside and saw the keys in the ignition. He checked the center console and found a box of tissues, so he took a bunch, wadded them up, and tucked them under his shirt against the wound. He didn’t want to leave blood behind.

  He closed the door, started the vehicle, and pulled out onto the silent street. He drove deeper into the subdivision until he came upon two buildings that looked similar to the one he had come from, only deserted. He stopped behind one and checked that the Land Rover wasn’t visible from the woods.

  He took the keys and walked back to the van. When he got in the back, Begitte saw his blood-soaked shirt and crawled over the front seat to him. She took her own shirt off, leaving her with nothing but a bra, and held it against Gorski’s wound.

  Thorsen came out a few minutes later. He opened the rear liftgate, put his carburetor inside, and then walked around to the driver’s side. If he thought the sight of his wife in the back of the van wearing just a bra was strange, he didn’t let it show. He saw the blood on Gorski’s shirt and frowned at his wife. “What?”

  “Home,” she said.

  He nodded like he got the message loud and clear. He drove back to the cohousing community right at the speed limit.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  The restaurant was called Kød og Kartoffel.

  Translated, it meant meat and potatoes, which covered a lot of ground in Flynn’s experience. Protein and starch were the traditional foods of pretty much the entire planet. The protein changed from beef to lamb to goat to fish to soy, and the starch from potatoes to rice to polenta to pap to grits, but it was all a variation on a theme.

  Flynn had eaten a variation on it himself before he made his way to the opening. It was lamb with tzatziki and potatoes, with a double espresso that he enjoyed at a restaurant overlooking a large marina, and he couldn’t imagine how the new restaurant could do it any better. But he suspected
he wouldn’t be eating at the opening, so he chowed down while he could.

  He knew where he had to go and what it would look like because he had scoped it all out that afternoon. As soon as he had bought his map book in the Politiken bookstore, he set out on foot and followed the map north past the massive complex of Christiansborg Palace, a grand facility that would have looked at home in Paris. Flynn knew the palace housed the Danish parliament, the prime minister’s office, and the Supreme Court, so he tugged his cap down low and walked around the outside of Slotsholmen, the islet that the complex occupied entirely. He crossed the Knippelsbro—Knippels Bridge—and onto Christianshavn.

  Flynn marched up past the most famous commune in Denmark, Freetown Christiania. He recalled Thorsen giving him the brief history of it being the original Danish commune, but it looked like a rundown tourist haunt to Flynn. He kept on walking.

  He wanted the next island, or group of islands, called Holmen. He passed the modern Copenhagen Opera House and then turned into the interior where he saw the National Film School of Denmark. Outside he found a rack of rideshare bicycles. He used a prepaid credit card and a burner email address to rent a bike, and then he rode past the ferry terminal at the north end of Holmen and crossed onto Nyholm. The islands were reclaimed land and had been home to the Danish navy for centuries, but now only the islet of Nyholm hosted military facilities. The naval base was a secure facility, but the grounds were open to the public from sunrise to sunset, so Flynn took a look around. He rode past a navy vessel moored to the west of the islet and then circled back to scope out the restaurant across a small channel of water on its own islet to the east.

  Kød og Kartoffel was in a park with a view of what amounted to a lake. The restaurant was surrounded by grass on three sides, with a parking lot about fifty meters away, and by water on the east side. It wouldn’t be the easiest place to sneak in and out of. He wasn’t sure that anyone would be watching—he had lost Lund’s men, of that he was sure—but they had found him at the Rasmussen residence, so he wasn’t planning on taking any chances.