The Wild One

by Nick Petrie

  Erik doesn’t answer. They are lying, of course. They want much more than they’re saying. Erik knows too much. He wonders when they will understand that they can just break a window and reach inside. But of course, he realizes, they already know that.

  “We even have the URL of the server,” the Irishman continues. “But not the encryption key for access. That’s quite a large number, is my understanding.”

  “I never saw that.” Erik knows he needs a better answer to save Óskar, but he can’t come up with anything.

  On the other side of the door, the Irishman talks on. “A 256-bit protocol, our expert calls it. Says the software generates the key at random, then scrambles the numbers beyond retrieval. Quite clever, that. The software’s instructions are to print a paper copy before it’s scrambled.”

  “That’s what she did,” Erik says. “She printed a copy. But I don’t know where she put it.”

  “Now, lad, I know that’s not exactly true. See, our expert has your printer also. According to its datalog, the last pages printed were a chocolate cupcake recipe, five weeks past. So that encryption key was quite a mystery.”

  Erik holds his breath.

  “Until I was informed,” says the Irishman, “that your Óskar is quite good with numbers. Has a perfect memory, I’m told. And he’s gone away with his dad. You bought him a plane ticket. You went through customs.”

  Erik cannot speak. Óskar’s grip tightens. He makes the high keening sound of profound distress.

  The door crashes again, louder this time. They’re hitting it with something, a stone or a fallen timber. The metal is weak, it won’t stand up, not for long.

  “Come on, be a good lad. Open up. Give us what we want. We’re your only chance at livin’.”

  For Sarah, the content of the videos, and how they might be used to start a war, was her primary motivation. But Erik doesn’t even think of that now. All he can think of is Óskar.

  What they might do to get those numbers out of his head.

  What they will surely do once they have what they want.

  Erik doesn’t have a weapon. Why didn’t he think to get a weapon?

  Because he’s not a fighter. He’s just a programmer.

  But he’s also a father, and he will protect his boy. If all he can manage is to buy a little time, he will do that.

  He scrabbles through the kitchen drawers. In one, he finds their only knife, a short blade he’s used for peeling potatoes. In another, he finds an aluminum frying pan. These are not real weapons, but they will have to do.

  Another crash against the door, harder this time. Can Erik kill a man? He doesn’t know. To save his son, he will try.

  He looks at Óskar. “Get your coat and go to the back.” A curtain closes off the sleeping alcove, where a wide rear window looks out at the mountains. “When you hear me shout, you climb out the window and run. Just like we practiced. You run and you don’t stop. You don’t look back. You run all the way to amma Yrsa’s house. I’ll be right behind you, I promise.”

  Óskar’s eyes are huge.

  “I love you, son. Now go.”

  Blinking back tears, Óskar slips on his coat and picks up his Lego backpack. He climbs on the convertible couch and unlatches the sliding glass. Erik reaches back and tugs the curtain across the opening.

  There is another crash and the caravan door buckles at the lock. Then it peels open and cold air floods in.

  The small man bounds up the short steps with a grin on his face and Fitzsimmons right behind him. Erik raises his little paring knife in one hand and the frying pan in the other.

  The pale man also has a knife.

  His hand moves faster than anything Erik has ever seen.

  He cries out in pain. The last thing he sees is the pale man turning to Fitzsimmons. “The kid is running. Go get him.”

  * * *

  —

  Erik is not alive to see the two men run up the mountain after Óskar. Trailing only by the length of a football pitch, they crash through the snow in their low boots. Their coats are good, but their thin socks and city pants are soon wet, then turn to ice. The wind cuts right through. Their chests heave with effort and their skin burns with the cold. They’re not gaining on the boy, but they’re not falling back, either.

  The men are reassured to see that the boy is also not dressed for this weather. He wears pajama bottoms and no hat, yet carries a small bookbag on his back. But he is light enough to run on top of the crusted snow, and he must know their intentions, because he runs full-out.

  He does not stop to rest.

  He does not look back.

  As if he knows exactly the manner of red death on his heels.

  The boy is a Viking, after all.

  The snow falls harder. The clouds drop lower. The men’s legs tremble and ache. Ahead of them, the boy fades to a ghostly shape. Then he disappears entirely.

  The smaller man stops, hands on his knees, breathing hard, and looks over his shoulder. The clouds are so thick that he can no longer see the barn. His own footprints are disappearing.

  He says, “I don’t believe I care to die in this godforsaken place.”

  The taller man stops to consider and catch his breath. The weather is only getting worse. “Think he’ll come down?”

  “Come down to us or freeze to death up there, he’s dead regardless. There’s no shelter for kilometers in any direction.”

  Their mission is to recover the encryption key, or, failing that, to vanish the man and boy. The second option seems most likely now.

  “We wait below,” says the taller man. “Give it twelve hours. He won’t last twelve hours.”

  “Agreed,” says the smaller man. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

  They make their way downslope, following their own fast-fading tracks. They move the silver Mitsubishi behind the barn, then return to the caravan and step over the cooling corpse.

  They make hot chocolate on the little stove. Their wet clothes steam by the heater.

  They take turns watching out the rear window.

  The boy never returns.

  Mission accomplished.

  54

  PRESENT DAY

  Sir, we’re still on mission.” Wetzel held the phone to his ear as he slumped in the back of the Jeep. He didn’t feel well at all. Fitz’s ketamine injection had kicked in, and Wetzel could tell that the size of the dose was going to be a problem.

  “You said that last time.” Brunelli’s voice was razor-sharp. “Mistakes have consequences. Tell me why this isn’t yet another fuckup.”

  Wetzel felt a flutter of fear but kept his voice calm. “Yes, we missed him at the bar, but to be fair, he appears to have slipped a police roadblock, too. We know where he’s headed. The new plan still holds.”

  “You said that last time, too.”

  They had been reactive from the start, Wetzel had to admit. First, Sarah Price’s accidental discovery of the video records, and her resulting moral outrage that forced Wetzel’s hand. Then Erik’s unexpected instinct for survival.

  When Seamus and Fitzsimmons reported that Erik and the kid were dead, Wetzel thought he’d contained the problem. True, he hadn’t been able to track down Sarah’s hidden server, but with the kid dead, the data would be locked behind an unbreakable firewall. Eventually, when no further payment appeared, the hosting company would shut down the server, reformat the drives, and all that evidence would vanish.

  But then the backpack showed up in Reykjavík Harbor, and Catherine Price had driven them nuts with her renewed conviction that the kid might still be alive. At her insistence, Brunelli had instructed Wetzel to put a plan in motion. He’d connected Catherine with Ash, then put David Staple on a plane to Iceland to flash his State Department creds at the locals. It seemed easy enough to get Ash sent back to the States, where Fitz wou
ld cut him into pieces and bury him in a shallow grave.

  When the customs police had refused to cooperate, Brunelli had dug into the details again. Under his relentless grilling, Seamus and Fitz had admitted that they hadn’t actually seen the kid die, had only assumed he was dead because they’d lost him in a blizzard. Wearing his backpack. Maybe, Seamus had offered, the backpack had washed down to the ocean with the kid’s dead body?

  Brunelli, who didn’t like sloppy work or loose ends, had gone ballistic. If Fitz and Seamus hadn’t been so useful, and so necessary at that stage of the operation, Wetzel was fairly certain Brunelli would have told him to kill them both. As it was, Wetzel was sure that order would come before too long. Brunelli didn’t like witnesses, either.

  The secondary plan, then, was for Seamus to follow Ash until he found the kid or determined that the kid was actually dead. Wetzel had even put Seamus on the same plane as Staple, figuring that even if Staple did his job, Seamus could put the repaired Mitsubishi back on the ferry to England, eliminating that old liability. Wetzel still hadn’t thought that Ash would be a problem. When Seamus had reported finding Ash in an alley, drunk and beaten half to death, Wetzel had worried whether Ash would be any use at all.

  Ash had surprised everyone by confronting Staple at the embassy. In retrospect, it was a sign of how difficult Ash would be to control, but at the time, Wetzel had just considered Staple a poor tool that had outlived its usefulness. When he told Seamus to eliminate the arrogant prick, Seamus had performed perfectly. The next day, Staple was a news item, Ash was a wanted man, and Wetzel had a new narrative.

  It would have been easier if they could have taken him at the bar, moved him to the farm, and kept him sedated until they got what they needed from the family. Then they’d sink him in the bathtub and slit his wrists. The evidence would show that Peter Ash, decorated but damaged combat veteran, had overmedicated himself, murdered an entire Icelandic family, then taken his own life in a fit of remorse.

  Even with Ash still under his own power, Wetzel knew the plan would work.

  “Sir, the mission is sound,” he told Brunelli. “Ash is running on fumes. We’ll take him at the farm and improvise the rest. I’ll call you when it’s done.”

  The police wouldn’t look too closely if they had a good story. The police never did.

  55

  As Peter climbed into the little Winnebago, the static flared and the walls closed in.

  He aimed his pocket flash around the space. He found a single dark, crusted island on the carpet and an arterial archipelago on the window glass, but no second stain. A year after the murder, the unmistakable smell of death was faint but clear.

  He felt a wave of dizziness and flashed back to that hot, dusty street. He stood beside Big Jimmy Johnson and stared into a blue Toyota Camry, where a family of four lay destroyed at his orders. The father behind the wheel, the mother with her children on the floor in the back. Blood and gobbets of flesh everywhere. Already the flies had begun to gather.

  Then the children blinked their eyes.

  They stirred from their rest and pushed aside their mother’s arms.

  He knew they were dead. He could see their ruined bodies. But now they reached for him.

  He crashed out of the camper and fell to his knees in the snow, trying to catch his breath.

  Finally, with shaking hands, he strapped the bentwood snowshoes to his boots, then hoisted his pack and started walking. He was nowhere near a hundred percent.

  Headed upslope with the ruined barn and the dark ocean at his back, he put the waking nightmare from his mind and concentrated on what he’d seen in the old Winnebago. That single stain on the floor.

  Bjarni was telling the truth. Erik was dead.

  But maybe not the boy, not yet.

  Not if Peter could help it.

  As he climbed, the dizziness returned twice. He felt a sharp pain in his head and the world faded to gray. He wasn’t sure, but the spells seemed to be getting longer. He told himself they were power naps. Behind him, the storm was already erasing his tracks.

  He skirted a rock ledge and arrived at a broad saddle where the land rose on two sides. He consulted his folded map, found a route forward, and walked on.

  The world faded twice more as he worked his way toward the high promontory he’d seen when he first drove into the valley. Each time he emerged from the blankness, he found himself someplace he didn’t quite recognize, walking ahead of marks in the snow that he didn’t remember making.

  He didn’t understand why a simple infection would make him feel so funky. Maybe he’d caught the Icelandic flu. It didn’t matter. He’d get over it. He kept moving.

  Finally he arrived at the great knobby scarp that leaned out over the hayfields and farm buildings five hundred meters below. The arctic hurricane hurled itself across the dark abyss of the sea. Snow arrived horizontally, and the wind rattled the sleeves of his fancy new coat. Sweating, he checked the thermometer on his zipper pull. Thirty below. Measured in Celsius, but still impressive.

  In the hard white crust of the outermost tip of the crag, he used Bjarni’s folding shovel to dig himself a sheltered observation post. Behind him, huge dark fins of basalt poked up through the drifts, as if sharks the size of submarines circled just below. He counted back and realized he’d only slept maybe five hours total in the last three days.

  Through his binoculars, the farm jumped into focus. In the ambient glow, it looked like something out of a picture book. Bright strands of Christmas lights hung along the eaves of the main house. Circular hay bales stood in long snowmounded rows. Drainage trenches divided the fields into neat rectangles. A half-dozen cars and trucks wore fluffy white hats, including Bjarni’s Skoda and the uncles’ Dacia.

  Waiting, he munched frozen trail mix. He tried to make coffee but his Jetboil refused to ignite. His sweat cooled and he pulled his tent from his pack, thinking to shelter further from the storm. A gust plucked it from his hand and wrapped it around a high outcrop, where the wind played it like a tireless, talentless teenager with a new drum set.

  Finally, as daylight seeped through the falling snow, a line of police cars appeared on the Skagaströnd road and streamed up the long driveway to the farm. Hjálmar had gotten new tires and mustered reinforcements. Officers leaped from their cars and ran to the house and barns. This would probably take a while.

  Then the real world faded again and he found himself on that hot, dusty street, his tactical vest heavy on his shoulders. Big Jimmy was at his back. The faded blue Toyota was full of broken glass and ruined flesh. The dead children blinked up at him, then climbed out of their mother’s bloody arms. They opened the car doors and stepped into the street, their mother on their heels, all of them reaching for him.

  Peter should have been hot, but instead he was cold. His fingers were numb, and the tip of his nose burned. He opened his eyes and it was dark again. Hours had passed. His body shivered uncontrollably. The infected wound on his head was leaking down the back of his neck.

  He raised the binoculars and glassed the farm. The police cars were gone.

  Good, he thought. He couldn’t stay in the open any longer.

  He clambered to his feet, fumbled into the snowshoes, and hoisted his pack. Then began the descent into the ring of farm buildings arranged like a fortification against the outside world.

  If the police were gone, Brunelli’s people would be coming. Peter had to get there first.

  Other than that, he was out of options.

  His plan was simple.

  Knock on the door.

  Start talking.

  Hope for mercy.

  56

  Half-blinded by the storm but cushioned by drifted snow, Peter followed the course of a fast-falling stream. As he walked, the world came and went, again and again. Sweating and shivering at the same time, he realized his fever had spiked. It
was possible that he’d overestimated the healing power of exercise.

  The land flattened and the stream widened as it wandered toward the sea. He turned toward the farm buildings, walking the bank of a laser-straight drainage trench with steep-angled sides, maybe five feet wide and five feet deep.

  From above, he’d seen the cars parked at the largest farmhouse, so he walked in that direction. Lights shone from the eaves, and a wall of windows glowed with warmth and heat. He was looking for a place to cross the trench when the world vanished mid-stride.

  It came back slowly. He lay face-first in a cold crust of white, snowshoes tangled behind him, his backpack weighing him down like a thousand years of history. The drainage ditch had turned the corner of the meadow, but he’d kept walking in a trance and fallen to the bottom. His limbs felt weak and his head hammered like a roofing crew on meth. Judging by the snow accumulated on his coat, he’d been gone for a long while. Racked by fever tremors, it occurred to him that, if he passed out again, he might never wake up.

  He heard a low noise and looked up.

  At the rim of the trench, a dog peered down at him and growled.

  This was a sheep farm. Of course there was a damn dog.

  It was black, brown, and white, shaggy with its winter coat. One eye was dark, the other light. It had no collar. An Australian Shepherd, maybe forty pounds but looking bigger with all that fur. It watched Peter with its ears up, alert, as if hoping Peter would do something interesting.

  “What are you looking at?” Peter’s entire body ached. The snow swirled dizzyingly. It might not have been the snow.

  The dog came to its feet and bounced down to the trench bottom without apparent effort. A meter away, it dropped its shoulders slightly, intent and growling again.

  “Give me a break.” Peter swiped at the animal, but it evaded him easily. Not that he wanted to hurt the animal. Or could, in his current state.