by Nick Petrie
“I sincerely doubt that,” the older man says. “Not if the price is right.”
“You want me to find someone to bomb the American Embassy in a hostile foreign country?”
“I would never suggest such a thing.” The older man has a slow drawl. “I surely wouldn’t want anyone to get hurt. Especially Americans.” He gives a thin, dry smile. “Not too many, anyway.”
“I’m sorry,” the baritone says, “but I need you to be more clear.”
The older man looks at the younger man. The younger man aims a thick finger at the camera. “You know what we want. Do what you did last time. Start a goddamn war.”
The video ends with the finger pointed directly at Erik.
* * *
—
He navigates back to the OPERATIONS folder. He clicks on the most recent file.
The video starts. Another motel room, as seen from a fish-eye lens somewhere high in a corner. Four men stand around the bed. “It’ll be the easiest thing in the world,” says a small man with his back to the camera. Erik spent a year at Oxford, and he knows an Irishman when he hears one.
A man with a shaved head and a heavy beard speaks. “Easy enough for the man staying on dry land.” Also Irish, Erik thinks. “Where do we get the goods?”
“If hard men like yourselves can’t find high explosives somewhere between Miami and Maracaibo, I’ve got the wrong lads for the job.” The small man lifts an athletic bag and drops it on the bed. “Operating expenses and a plan of the vessel. The first half of your fee will be wired tonight. We may require a second operation involving an RPG attack on a building in the city, for an additional fee. There’s no shortage of money to be made here. Are we agreed?”
“Aye,” says the man with the heavy beard.
The other two men nod. “Aye,” they say.
* * *
—
Erik returns to the main drive and goes to the PROJECTS folder and finds the newest file.
He clicks. A man sits on a steel chair, which itself stands on a broad sheet of black plastic. More plastic hangs from the walls behind him, held up by silver strips of tape.
The man wears a rumpled pinstriped suit. His wrists are tied to the arms of the chair with cloth strips, and his hair is plastered to his scalp. His eyes are swollen and red, as if sick with the flu or a bad hangover. Erik wonders if the man was drugged.
He stares balefully at the camera. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing? I’m a United States senator. Do you know the kind of shitstorm that’s coming down on you right now?”
For all his bluster, Erik can tell the man is shaken. He doesn’t know where he is or how he’s found himself in this position.
Offscreen, a voice speaks. It is mechanical, metallic, some kind of electronic voice modulator. It reminds Erik of a man in Blönduós who had throat cancer and needed a device to speak. “You were offered an opportunity. You did not accept. It appears you are a rare man of principle.”
The senator blinks several times. “Maybe I was too inflexible. We are all adults here. Tell me what you want.”
A wide-backed man steps into view. He wears a black tracksuit zipped to the neck, black leather gloves, and a black full-face mask with a white stylized skull printed on it. Almost no skin is exposed. Still, there is something about him that Erik finds familiar. The man is big compared to the senator, but his movements are tight and controlled.
The white skull glances toward the camera.
The mechanical voice speaks. “Begin.”
“Wait, no.” The senator’s eyes flick from the camera to the white skull and back again. He is hyperventilating. “Your offer was more than fair. Tell me again about the, ah, the opportunity. Please.”
A mechanical chuckle. “Unfortunately, the opportunity is no longer available. Now you are an example to others.” The voice sharpens. “Begin.”
The man in the skull mask steps behind the chair, picks up a thick roll of silver tape, and runs a strip around the senator’s head, covering his mouth. He is quick and efficient. The senator doesn’t even know what’s happening until it’s done. He screams through his nose and thrashes in his chair but he’s held helpless.
Erik puts his finger to the pause button but he does not allow himself to press it. He needs to know how bad this is. He needs to know why he is risking everything.
The man in the skull mask returns to the front of the chair, bends his knees slightly, and adjusts his shoulders. Then, his hands a blur, he hits the senator in the stomach, the groin, and the face.
The senator rocks back from the force of the blows, then curls in on himself. The skin of his cheek is split. Blood streams down his face. Snot bubbles form at his nostrils.
The white skull observes for a moment, a craftsman inspecting his work, then strikes again, this time more deliberately and with exacting precision. Then again. And again. The microphone picks up the exhalations of his effort, the flat smack of leather on skin, a faint animal whine.
When the white skull stops again, the senator’s face is no longer recognizable. He slumps in the chair. His breath sucks at the tape around his mouth.
The white skull looks back at the camera.
“Good enough,” says the mechanical voice. “End it.”
Erik does not want to watch this, but he is frozen. He cannot help himself. The video plays on.
The white skull cocks a fist. The senator’s eyes widen and he thrashes against his bonds. The chair legs rattle on the floor. The skull pauses for a brief moment, perhaps waiting for something. Perhaps saying a prayer, although that seems unlikely. Then the fist flashes down too quickly for Erik’s eye to follow.
It strikes the senator in the center of the throat.
The white skull steps back and lowers his hands. The senator’s thrashing increases. He is choking to death. The sound is horrible.
Erik forces himself to watch until the bound man is still.
Then he scrolls back to the beginning. He uses a screen tool to capture a picture of the man’s face from the first moments of the video.
He puts the image into the secure search engine.
There are thousands of hits. The man was the junior senator from Michigan. He was a former Naval officer and federal prosecutor known for his moral opposition to war. He was found beaten to death behind a bar outside Detroit.
Erik remembers following the story, which was in the headlines for weeks. The FBI’s inability to find the killer is considered a major failure of law enforcement. Michigan’s governor appointed the senator’s wife to fill out the remainder of his term. She has announced that she will run for his seat in the next election. Her fundraising is already at record levels.
Unlike her husband, Michigan’s newest senator is running on a platform of a robust national defense.
Closing the laptop, Erik feels a hole in his stomach that has nothing to do with the amount of coffee he has drunk. “This is bad,” he says.
Sarah doesn’t look at him. “I know.” Her hands keep moving on the keys.
“Have you seen any of these videos? They’re killing people.”
She doesn’t stop working. “I know.”
“Sarah.” He puts a hand on her keyboard to still her fingers. She finally looks at him. He can’t read her expression. He says, “What about us? I’m scared.”
“Me, too.” She moves his hand away. “I’m almost done.”
26
PRESENT DAY
Peter drove alone across a white, treeless plain punctuated by dark rocks. Distant hills gave the landscape a jagged edge. The wind gusted unexpectedly, a drunken giant shoving the Defender from its lane. The snow was up to his wheel hubs. The sun was a distant memory.
Highway One was called the Ring Road because it circumnavigated the island. If he drove far enough around its fourteen hundred kilometer le
ngth, he’d end up back where he started. Peter didn’t know if he should find that fact comforting or distressing. He figured that depended on where he was standing at the time.
The Ring Road bore little resemblance to a modern American highway. For most of its length, Highway One was just two lumpy, narrow lanes with only periodic yellow plastic markers poking up through the snow to indicate where the ragged asphalt ended and the untouched landscape began.
The only other traffic was the occasional tandem tractor-trailer running fast toward the safety of Reykjavík. The big Mercedes and Scania rigs were almost exactly as wide as their lane, and they didn’t move over or slow down for anything or anybody. When they passed, the heavy Land Rover shuddered like a toy, blinded in their wake for three or four heart-stopping passes of the wipers. Peter kept both hands on the wheel.
The coming storm had both complicated and simplified his plans.
Before he left Reykjavík, he’d pulled up Iceland’s weather website—www.weather.is—on Bjarni’s phone, trying to decide which direction to drive. The website was a public resource, created and maintained by the government because Iceland’s weather was so extreme and variable that it was often hazardous.
Hjálmar had told Peter that the most likely places to find Erik and Óskar were the farm and the fishing boat. The farm was on a peninsula jutting out into the Greenland Sea, about three hundred kilometers north of Reykjavík, but the weather website showed the north road closed by snow in five places. Peter didn’t want to get stuck.
Seydisfjordur, where the fishing boat docked, was seven hundred kilometers to the east, and the road was still clear, even if the weather map showed the rising storm as a giant white spiral, howling in from that direction.
Hjálmar had no reason to think Peter was dumb enough to run into the teeth of an arctic hurricane. He’d figure Peter was hunkered down in Reykjavík. He certainly wouldn’t mobilize much-needed officers during a storm emergency with no good cause. Or so Peter hoped.
Bjarni, on the other hand, was dumb enough to come after him. In that shit-brown Skoda. With one good arm.
Peter also liked the fishing boat as his first stop because the Norwegian had been run off the road after visiting there. He didn’t want to admit to another reason. There were only two fisherman uncles. He could handle two fishermen, couldn’t he? He wasn’t so sure about a half-dozen farmers descended from the same Viking stock that had settled Iceland eleven hundred years before, and spent the next ten centuries repelling Spanish pirates and Anglo-Saxon slavers.
Besides, if Peter didn’t find Erik and Óskar in Seydisfjordur, he could keep driving the Ring Road and approach the farm from the opposite direction.
It was six at night when he left Reykjavík. He hoped to get to the fishing dock by six the next morning.
* * *
—
Three and a half hours and 180 kilometers later, he stopped outside the town of Vik, his last guaranteed chance for gas until Höfn, almost 300 kilometers away. The roads weren’t recently plowed, but the fat-tired Defender was making reasonable time. Peter didn’t understand what all the weather fuss was about.
Vik was a handsome little seaside town, with a classic steepled white church on a hill framed by the angular mountain behind it, although both disappeared in a whiteout as he watched. The N1 gas station was minimal, just a pair of twenty-four-hour pumps on a broad, unplowed slab with no cover, standing beside a shuttered white concrete building that had seen better days. The building’s roof sported a giant Coca-Cola sign that rattled and shook with each gust of wind. The map showed the ocean less than a quarter mile off the road, but it remained unseen and unheard in the night.
Peter remembered the recommendation of the truck rental clerk and parked at the pump with the windshield facing into the gale. Even with the vehicle standing still, the sound of the wind against the skin of the truck was a low, eerie song played on a strange instrument. As he got out of the Defender, the wind tore the door from his grasp and slammed it shut. His open coat blew off his shoulders and flapped on his arms. The flying snow felt like birdshot on his exposed face and hands. He hoped there was an open bathroom somewhere. He didn’t like the idea of taking a leak in this breeze.
While the thirsty Defender guzzled, he fired up his new Icelandic phone to check the roads. The route north to the farm was still closed, and the route east to the uncles’ fishing dock in Seydisfjordur was still open. The time stamps were only thirty minutes old. The map showed dozens of the little yellow icons for storm conditions and blowing snow, but so far, the weather wasn’t too bad by northern Wisconsin standards.
Then he checked the forecast and saw that the giant white storm spiral had slowed offshore. It hadn’t even made landfall yet. Maybe Peter wasn’t giving Icelandic weather enough credit. But it just made him more determined to keep driving before the weather truly turned to shit.
When the Defender had drunk an entire gas card, he climbed back in the truck and found the Norwegian investigator’s number in Catherine Price’s papers. The time was an hour later in Oslo. He wondered if the Norwegian was the type to keep his phone on after work.
“Halló, Kristjan Holm.”
“Hello, Mr. Holm. My name is Peter Ash. Can we speak English?”
“It’s very late. What do you want?” Holm’s voice was thin and reedy, his accent faintly British, his irritation clear.
“I’m sorry to bother you. I’m working for Catherine Price. Looking for her grandson, Óskar, in Iceland. Do you have a minute to talk?”
Kristjan Holm didn’t say anything for a moment. Peter heard a mechanical clatter in the background, as if he’d ridden an old bicycle over a bump. That seemed unlikely given the time of year and the fact that Holm was probably looking at the same storm from the other side of the Norwegian Sea.
“Mr. Holm, do you remember the case?”
“Yes.” Peter heard the flare of a match and a sharp intake of breath. Holm had just lit a cigarette. “How far have you gotten?”
“Not very,” Peter said. “I found Erik’s cousin Bjarni.” Peter didn’t want to mention getting dosed with MDMA and then beat up. It was embarrassing enough to have lived through it. “I’m on my way to Seydisfjordur to talk with Erik’s uncles.”
The Norwegian took an impossibly long draw on his cigarette. Peter could hear the crackle of the burning paper. Another draw like that and Holm would be down to the filter. Maybe he smoked the filter, too. “How many people do you have?”
“Just me,” Peter said.
Holm gave a short chopping laugh without a shred of humor in it. “Did you not read my report? Are you this unintelligent? Or perhaps you simply have a fetish. You like pain.”
“Bjarni told me Erik and Óskar were dead.”
Silence for a moment. Maybe he was blowing smoke rings. Then, “Do you believe him?”
“The police have been looking for a year. It might explain why they can’t find them. What do you think?”
“If you are asking if they are good policemen, I would say yes. If you are asking if they are corrupt, I would say no. Iceland has little history of that. You have met Hjálmar, yes? The other police I have met are like him. Very professional.”
“Hjálmar thinks the best places to look are the fishing boat and the farm.”
“There are more places to hide than the police might consider, or have the people to search. If you look, you will see many abandoned farm buildings still holding back most of the weather. Or one could build a turf house, the way Icelanders did during the settlement time, and for centuries after. However, both the farm and the fishing boat offer work and the protection of family. I think the farm less likely because if Erik and Óskar are found, there is a legal risk to the family. But as I said, there are other possibilities. The police don’t have the manpower to search every broken-down farmhouse or caravan.”
“Nei
ther do I,” Peter said. “So if Erik and Óskar are alive, the farm and the fishing boat are my best bets. But if they’re dead, who’d have killed them?” Peter heard the mechanical clatter again. If it wasn’t a bicycle, what was it?
Holm said, “Normally I would think the family. But every member of Erik’s family defended him to me, denied that he was involved with his wife’s death. So maybe it wasn’t the family.”
“Or maybe you didn’t talk to the right person.”
“Correct. Maybe it was Erik’s uncles. He brought the police to their doorstep. Hjálmar believes they are smugglers, by the way. Maybe that’s why they came after me, too.”
“Or maybe it wasn’t the family,” Peter said. He told the Norwegian about David Staple from the State Department, trying to keep Peter out of the country, and Bjarni’s claims about two men looking for Erik. “Maybe it was someone else. That would change things.”
“Yes. It would mean that Erik didn’t kill Sarah.”
“I talked to Phil Moore, the Washington, D.C., detective,” Peter said. “He’s convinced Erik killed her. Although he couldn’t give me any kind of motive for the murder.”
“Detective Moore only thinks about his retirement,” Holm said. “You have to find Erik. Maybe he’s dead, maybe he’s alive. But if you find Erik, you’ll find the boy.”
“Do you think they’re still alive?”
“I hope so,” Holm said. “Besides, if they are dead, why would someone want you out of Iceland? Unless there is something still to discover.”
“Good point.” It was helpful, talking to the Norwegian about this. Better than just bouncing ideas around in his own head. Peter missed Lewis. “Listen, why don’t you join me here? You must want to hit back, after they ran you off the road like that.”
Holm cleared his throat. “You have no idea what these people are like.”
“I’m learning,” Peter said. “But you’ve already met them. I could use the help. How long would it take you to get here?”