Iceland: An International Thriller (The Flense Book 2)

by Saul Tanpepper

  "Farid's brother?"

  "That was just a story. You know that, right? Farid told me his real brother and some fifty other people left Turkey on a boat crossing for Greece. Farid was too sick to travel. But that was months ago and there's no record Mahdi al-Haddad ever made it. The man you thought you were helping was part of the team embedded in the encampment to monitor the test subjects. He heard Farid's story when he arrived a month ago and assumed Mahdi's identity when you showed up asking questions. He figured to use you to help him recover Farid after he went missing."

  "So, the story he told me was true, just—"

  "Just that some of the details were switched. The easiest lies are those that most resemble the truth. He took advantage of your eagerness to help."

  "I wish you had told me what you were doing," she said. "It was Padraig who told me about the self-destruct program and the agents killing themselves rather than being interrogated. You had no right keeping it from me."

  "I had every right. I needed to shield you from—"

  "I do not need your protection."

  "Maybe not, but it still wasn't Padraig's place to tell you."

  "He said you would be angry."

  "I'll get over it. It's Nordqvist who deserves my anger, inserting himself into an active operation. He had no right to bring you in."

  "He was an old family acquaintance. I thought he meant to use me to publicize his next great success, the salvation of the refugees from terrorists, while he secretly stole the nanites, but I wonder if he was really trying to make amends for old wrongs against my father. But now he is dead, and I will never know."

  "I'm sorry."

  "I am not. He was an ass. His death does not change that."

  She heard him exhale and pull away from her in the gloom. He settled against the back of the cab, his head down and his arms resting on his knees. She could just make out his outline.

  She knew he was angry with her for coming, so she shifted the subject to Padraig. "The doctor did not seem very optimistic he will recover. He is worried that the spine may atrophy after being crushed for so long. He may be permanently paralyzed. It is partly my fault."

  "No! It's my fault."

  "I should have taken him to the hospital sooner."

  He didn't respond.

  A moan came from the other side of the truck bed where Farid lay, still bound and masked. Both she and Norstrom had agreed that it was too great of a risk to release him, not until they knew for certain no one was following them who could activate his nanites.

  As much for his protection as our own, Kurtz had said.

  He had turned his head toward them upon mention of his brother's name, and now his eyes, steeped with distrust, glistened as he watched the two arguing.

  "I don't blame you for killing them," she told Norstrom again after a bit. She didn't know why she needed him to hear it. Maybe because she didn't want him to think she was judging him. "Those men back there. They didn't deserve to live. You did."

  "I didn't kill them. But they did die."

  "The nanites?"

  "Yes. Kurtz must have triggered the self-destruct as he was making his escape. I would have preferred to take them alive. That's why I have to go back for Kurtz. He still doesn't realize the rest of the refugees are alive, but we can't assume he won't find out."

  "Or the saboteur? The one Kurtz claims turned them into killers in the first place?"

  "That is a lie. There is no saboteur."

  "I don't understand."

  "It's not one man. It's an organization— al Tadmir. Somehow, they're involved, whether with the company's blessing or not. And that is why I have to stop Kurtz. We need to know for sure what they plan on doing next."

  "I just wish I did not have to do this part alone," she whispered, gesturing at Farid.

  "You won't be alone, Angel. Just don't let Cheong dictate the terms. You have the leverage."

  They stopped when the sound of approaching footsteps reached their ears. A corner of the flap lifted again, flooding the darkness with light for just a moment. A plastic bag dropped onto the metal bed. More footsteps and the driver's door opened and slammed closed. Then the truck vibrated as the motor started up again.

  They remained in place while the driver waited for a signal.

  Norstrom crawled over and upended the bag. In addition to the food and water, there were three packages. Using his teeth, he tore the first one open and removed the phone.

  Angel watched, grimacing as he gingerly used his ruined fingers, the blackened pads where the nails had once been now looking like dark tattoos, to activate the phone. Despite his denial, it sure looked like he had been tortured.

  He added a phone number to the contacts, then shut it off and removed the battery.

  "Once you're at sea, turn this on and call Cheong to confirm. If he's true to his word, he'll arrange the rest. After that, toss it over the rail. Use it only the one time and for no more than a minute. Then, after you've arrived in Iceland, call me on the second phone. You know the number. Leave a message. Dispose of it, too, when you're done."

  With that, he grabbed the third phone and slipped out of the truck. No goodbye or good luck.

  A moment later, they were moving again.

  Chapter Thirty Seven

  Early December

  ATLANTIC OCEAN

  SOUTH OF ICELAND

  "How do you feel?" the captain asked. "Any better today?"

  Angel could barely lift her head from the inadequate pillow without feeling like she might throw up. Her whole body ached, as if it were on the verge of coming apart, especially her head. This was how it felt to have balloons inserted inside one's sinuses and inflated.

  "I will live," she moaned, and silently added, I hope. She wasn't sure.

  The rough seas of the past several days hadn't helped. And though the weather was once again calm, her stomach still hurt as much as her head, if that were even possible.

  The trip had begun just as uncertainly as it was about to end. She and Farid were taken to a small fishing shack on the shore in Gökçetepe where they were locked up inside in the dark and made to wait with no explanation or instructions. The day grew unbearably hot and the air thick and humid.

  The food and water they had carried in with them was soon depleted, although much of it spilled onto the filthy floor because of the difficulty Angel had in getting it into Farid's mouth through the wire cage on his mask.

  She could tell he was miserable about it, but he had given up complaining and resigned himself to the fact that she wasn't going to remove it or the restraints on his hands. Other than that, she tried everything she could to help him, but the resentment in his eyes did not diminish. And no amount of apologizing seemed to make any difference, even when she explained that she had also been tricked by the man claiming to be his brother.

  They had no conveniences. They were forced to toilet into an old tin can in one corner of the shed in each other's company, so that by the time night arrived, the stench was awful.

  Then they were taken out and rushed to the shore by a group of rough men with hairy faces speaking in a language neither she nor Farid could understand. There, they were shoved onto a tiny fishing boat, forced to lie down on the bottom, and covered with a heavy cloth that smelled of gasoline and rotten fish. The craft seemed barely seaworthy.

  "You come up now," the boatman finally told them after about an hour. They were soaked to the skin from the water that leaked in. It was pitch dark, and Angel saw that he had no obvious navigational aids. She feared that he was going to throw them over the side, and became convinced of it when he told them the plan had changed. "We go to Samothráki."

  "We're supposed to go to Athens," she cried, her voice swallowed up as much by the darkness as the emptiness of the open sea. "Not Samothrace."

  "No Athína! Is too far for small boat. We go to Samothráki, wait for bigger boat to take you two away."

  Barely twenty minutes after that the motor fa
iled, and despite repeated efforts by them both, they couldn't get it started again. Meanwhile, Farid sat and watched them without emotion.

  For eight hours they drifted, and there was no discussion, though it wasn't for lack of Angel's trying. So, when a large boat suddenly appeared out of the pre-dawn gloom, and a man with an American accent called her by name, she was relieved nearly to tears.

  They were taken aboard what appeared to be a fair sized yacht, where the captain filled her in on the news. The sudden uptick in terrorist activity around the world had grounded all commercial and private travel. "Instead of taking you to Athens for a flight to Iceland, we'll be sailing the entire way. Never been there. I hear it's beautiful. Anyway, assuming the weather cooperates, we should be there in eight or nine days."

  Angel was appalled to learn that besides the bombs in Istanbul, others had been detonated in a dozen major cities around the globe, killing tens of thousands of people in total. And when she asked about the target in Turkey, he told her it had been an apartment complex housing Turkish Police officers and their families. They had been targeted for fighting to suppress the radicalized groups which kept sprouting up around the city.

  She felt terrible for the victims, but she also knew that the simple coincidence of their proximity had allowed her and the two men to escape from Kurtz.

  The ship's crew seemed to possess some understanding of her situation. They knew better than to ask any questions and shied away from her whenever she wandered about. She was told that all cellular phones and wireless devices had been ordered shut off and locked away for the duration of the journey, just as she had insisted. Even their GPS device was shut down and their radio unplugged. As a result, they would be navigating the old fashioned way, by the stars, and keeping the shore within sight as much as possible off their starboard. It meant that the going was slow.

  There was, nevertheless, a certain welcome monotony to the journey which Angel came to relish in the beginning, a respite from the chaotic U-turn her life had taken, even though she was painfully aware that every minute spent aboard the boat was another minute of torment for Farid as he was forced to endure being chained to his bunk in a locked cabin.

  The weather held nicely for the entirety of their crossing of the Mediterranean, but changed dramatically as they headed north along the coast of Portugal, making the tricky passage over the open Atlantic northward to Ireland even trickier.

  The first days passed slowly and uneventfully, allowing her to recover from her injuries, and providing her with a chance to try and win Farid's confidence.

  On the fourth day, she convinced the captain to allow her to remove the restraints. They were far from shore on a strong vessel with a well-armed crew. There was nowhere for a man to escape to. The captain insisted that Farid remain inside the cabin, however, away from everyone else. And he posted a guard by the door with a rifle.

  That day, Angel brought Farid his lunch and waited while he ate it himself, his first meal not fed to him through the mask. She hadn't expected the removal of his bindings to immediately warm him to her and, as expected, he remained distant, a reluctant stowaway on a luxury boat to a place far from his home and family where, he had been told, he would finally be free of the shackles he neither understood nor believed were necessary. However, he tolerated her presence while he silently ate.

  She tried to explain in more detail how they had come to be there. She told him about the injections, that it wasn't medicine, and only then did he exhibit any emotion, growing angry when she told him it made him dangerous. He refused to believe it.

  She asked him to tell her how he had come to be in Istanbul. Finally, he relented. He told her about a man who had come to him after he brought his sick friends to the clinic. There was something in the way he told her that made her think he was holding something back, but she didn't want to push him too much and risk the tenuous bridge beginning to form between them.

  "What did he look like?"

  "Tall man, all in black clothes. Black pants, black shirt. Black coat. He tell us not to worry, that he will help us. He bring us to nice place to sleep and eat. He take care of sick friends, treat us nice. But I know he is not good."

  "What do you mean?"

  "There is a terrible feeling about him, a terrible look in his eyes. They are black, dark. He is a white-skinned man, but he is dark inside, dead. But also strong, like five men. I am thinking that he is not natural, this man. I grow scared and run away in the night. Finally, police find me, take me to prison. I tell them my name, who I am, and where I am from. They hold me until someone else come."

  "Who?"

  "Man who was at camp. He send me away on airplane, say I must now go home. But when I get there, they put mask on my head and tie my hands."

  Angel was sure that man had been the one she knew as Mahdi, the one who faked being Farid's brother.

  "How did this man find you?"

  "I do not know, except he say some woman give him help. I know that woman is you."

  Angel winced. She wondered if one of the calls she had placed to the prefectures had been returned. She had given them the numbers for both her phone and Mahdi's.

  "You know man who was with me and also tied up?" he asked.

  "Norstrom? The one who escaped with us?"

  "Yes. They take him away, and I hear terrible screams, and when he is coming back he is bloody and sick. Then they take me, and I am afraid. They put needle in my arm and take out blood. They show me terrible burning sticks and act like they will push them into my skin. They want me to tell them about the others."

  "The other refugees from the camp in Paris?"

  He nodded. "And also about my brother Mahdi— real brother, not man like you describe. And also Mahdi's son, my nephew, Yusuf. They leave on boat before me, many months ago, and leave me behind because I am sick. Mahdi tell me to take medicine like he did, but I don't want to. I don't think it is medicine, not like medicine I get in hospital."

  "The medicine they gave you in the hospital made you better?"

  He nodded. "Very fast. Two, maybe three days I am all better and ready to go on boat."

  She exhaled deeply, shaking her head. "The medicine makes you better, but it can also make you very sick. I am taking you somewhere where we can figure out how to make sure it does not make you sick, okay? It is somewhere you can be safe and not—

  turn into a monster

  —have to worry."

  She told him how there were people who were using those who had been given the medicine to do terrible things. "It is possible your real brother and nephew are still alive," she told him, reaching for his hand, which he withdrew, still not willing to allow her to touch him. "But they might have died at sea, either in an accident or intentionally. Either way, these people will try to find you. You are valuable to them. But this time, if they do find you, they will try to kill you."

  "But I do not have same medicine! It is different."

  "You said you were very sick, but then you got better very quickly. It is the same medicine."

  He grew angry again, and when she shouted back at him, he flew into a rage and began to throw anything not nailed down about the cabin. She was struck on the shoulder and was forced to call in the guards, who eventually managed to reapply the restraints. They had not been removed since, not even for meals. He was fed with chopsticks and drank through a straw.

  That same night of the outburst, there came three new arrivals to the boat. The first was a Frenchman, transferred from a smaller vessel sailing under a Spanish registration mark. They were still in the Mediterranean at the time, just about to exit through the Strait of Gibraltar, and upon boarding he immediately requested to be taken to see the captain. Angel learned only after she was summoned that Cheong had sent him with instructions for the next leg of their journey.

  His name was Alain Champlain and, like her, he was from Lyon. He asked if she had any further instructions regarding the safe delivery of the passenger. After he a
ssured her that the bunker had been prepared according to her specifications, and that there would be no wireless or cellular devices within several hundred meters of them the entire way, she told him that she needed nothing more.

  The second arrival was the storm, which rose so suddenly that the Spanish vessel was forced to depart without Champlain.

  The captain said that they would steam north with him on board. It would take another three days to get to Erris Head, but the storm was expected to clear by then. A crew would take Champlain in one of the smaller skiffs and drop him off at the port, where he assured them he would find his own way back to France.

  After the life boat returned, they would proceed north-northwesterly for another day and a half toward a small cluster of mostly-uninhabited rocks south of Iceland called Vestmannaeyjar Archipelago. There, they would finally debark to Heimaey Island, take the Landeyjahöfn–Vestmannaeyjar Ferry to the mainland, then head by private vehicle to a small town at a place called Hengill, where Cheong would be waiting.

  When she heard this, she told Champlain that the arrangements were unacceptable. They couldn't risk the ferry. It was too public. He would have to contact Cheong once he debarked and have him make other arrangements.

  The storm raged through the night, slowly growing in intensity. When the first dim light of morning penetrated the darkness, the air was so thick with rain that they could not see any more than twenty meters, and the waves were so high that the captain feared for their safety. He wanted to use the radio, but Angel pled with him not to turn it on.

  The third and final arrival was the flu, and it quickly spread throughout the ship so that they were all coughing and sneezing and vomiting by the time they reached Erris Head. Everyone from the cook to the captain and everyone in between was affected. Everyone except for Farid. Only the Syrian remained untouched. But though Angel told him it was proof of the nanites in his blood, he still refused to believe it.

  The weather cleared enough that it was decided to launch the small boat. Alain Champlain, however, would still not be on it, as he had expired from pneumonia during the night. Another man was delegated to take his place to convey Angel's request to Cheong. He and two others slipped out on high seas in a gray dawn light. After twelve hours, they had not returned and were assumed lost, and the captain decided to depart for the island anyway.