The reference to those events made Karla suddenly feel strange in her stomach. “Great,” she added with a sneer, trying to cover her discomfort. “Now I have my own personal stalker.”
“Not me, for heaven’s sake!” Hayden said in exasperation. “Lars!”
“I don’t believe a word of it,” she snapped. “You just want to cover up the fact you can’t keep away from me. This Lars is just a… just a figment of your imagination!” She suddenly remembered what he had said. “And what do you mean—not you for heaven’s sake? Don’t you want to stalk me?”
Hayden’s face showed utter confusion. “W-what? I didn’t mean… what? No! That’s not what I’m talking about here! Please try and understand. This is important.”
“How do I know you didn’t have Maarten’s phone all the time and you used it to follow me?”
“So, at least you accept that Maarten was tracking you.”
She shrugged, a sulky expression on her face. “S’pose,” she replied. “Anyway, how did you find me?”
“I was at Euston. I saw you boarding a train to Holyhead. You’re Irish, so I reckoned you’d be making your way to Dublin. I stole Lars’s car and—”
“Oh, wait a fucking minute,” she interrupted with a cynical laugh. “You stole a car and came all this way, just on the bloody chance I might be on a ferry to Dublin? And I guess you just happened to have your passport on you.”
“Getting into places where people don’t want me to be is a speciality of mine. Anyway, why the ferry, for god’s sake?”
She shrugged. “It’s easier at times. Security’s not as tight. No-one’s ever tried to hijack a ferry. How else did you think the IRA got back and forth so easily? Anyway, Uncle Coilin wasn’t ready for me, and I needed some time to think.”
“Who on earth is Uncle Colin?”
“Coilin. He’s a better man than you’ll ever be, and that’s for sure. Uncle Coilin taught me everything I know.”
“Like how to dress up like a tart and trick your way into stealing what’s not yours?”
She slapped him for that—a hard, decisive blow across the face that clearly stunned him. “Don’t you ever—ever—say a bad word against Uncle Coilin, or I’ll tear your eyes out and chuck them overboard to go and look for my bloody phone! He’d show you a thing or two if he was here. You may think you’re a big fella, but he can chew up a dozen like you for breakfast.”
“I don’t know,” muttered Hayden, rubbing his face somewhat pathetically. “I keep myself in pretty good shape.”
“You’re a lover, not a fighter,” retorted Karla. “I can tell.”
“How can you tell? You’ve never seen me fight.”
“I can just tell. Your nose isn’t broken, for one thing. And, let’s see, I’ve landed three good blows on you now and you haven’t retaliated once.”
This made him frown. “I’d never hit a woman,” he murmured.
“That’s why you’re not a fighter.” She turned away, watching the wake of the ferry as it ploughed on its way through the Irish Sea. A frown crossed her face and she turned to look at him again, her face becoming increasingly furious.
“A tart, that’s what you’d like, isn’t it.”
“What?” Again he was confused.
“A tart, like that Chantelle. You’re such a pig!”
“I don’t… I don’t know what you’re talking about. What the hell has Chantelle got to do with this?”
“You men are all the bloody same!” she hissed, rising to her theme now. “A pair of big tits and nothing between the ears—that’s all you want from women!”
“Jesus, Karla!” Hayden stared at her in utter disbelief and Karla could feel hot tears beginning to rise in her eyes. That simply made her more furious.
“You just treat us like we’re pieces of meat!” she began to howl. “Just because you’re handsome and you’ve got a big dick, you think you can do whatever you want!”
Slowly, Hayden’s expression began to change. “You’re jealous,” he said quietly, then more loudly, his tone becoming accusatory: “You’re bloody jealous! That’s what this is all about, isn’t it?”
“I am not!” she sneered. But as soon as he had said the word something inside Karla had risen up beneath the tears and anger, an ache that made her want to cry in a different way. Why oh why did she suddenly feel so miserable?
Cautiously, Hayden came forward. “You’ve got to listen to me,” he said, his voice quiet and calming. As he reached out to touch her, she flinched away. “Look, Maarten set up your phone to track you. Who’d have thought it, but he had more cunning than either of us would have given you credit for—”
“Wait a minute!” Karla said, something he’d told her just registering. “You saw me catch the train to Holyhead? You were at Euston?”
“Yes!”
“How the hell did you get there?” she asked, incredulous.
He stepped back and slapped his hand to his forehead. “God give me strength!” he hissed. Then, looking at her directly, his blue eyes almost piercing into her: “That’s what I’ve been trying to explain. Lars found me after you’d gone. He untied me and made me drive to Euston. That’s where your phone said you’d be. He was going to find you and then he was going to kill you—and me as well.”
“A likely story,” she sneered, but something inside her was uncertain now. “I don’t know how you got yourself free, but if anything you say is true, it’s that my phone had been tampered with and you were using it to follow me and take back the Wallenstein.”
“I don’t care about the bloody Wallenstein!” Hayden yelled, his hands raised to his head in frustration.
“What?”
As his hands fell back down, his shoulders slumped in resignation. “I don’t care about the Wallenstein,” he said, his voice much quieter now. This made Karla clutch her bag to her chest much more suspiciously.
“Then why are you here?”
He sighed. “Okay, I admit, when I escaped from Lars—”
“This fictitious creation of yours.”
“When I escaped from Lars, my first thoughts might have been for the diamond. But… but I realised pretty quickly that he was going to be able to find you much more easily than he would me. I knew he was after me, and he didn’t have any means of tracking me. But with Maarten’s phone, he’d be able to find you wherever you were. And I’d let him take it. I knew that I couldn’t live with that… with what would happen if he found you.”
“I can handle myself,” she replied, trying to sound more confident than she felt. Something about what Hayden was saying was starting to make her feel very strange inside.
He shook his head firmly, looking at her determinedly. “No, you couldn’t. Okay, okay. If I’m honest, the last time I was in a fight was in sixth form, when Tucker Fry found out I’d had sex with his girlfriend—and I didn’t come out too well in that, though I wasn’t quite the man you see before you today.” He sighed. “Lars is a killer. I don’t know what he did to Maarten, but I know that if Boeckman’s haven’t gone to the police and they’re using someone like him then they probably don’t want anyone to know that their diamond’s been stolen.”
Karla’s head was spinning. “No, none of this makes sense,” she mumbled, unable to look at Hayden. If he had come here to warn her… Her heart leaped at the thought and immediately she crushed it, unwilling to entertain such a hope. “You’re just here for the Wallenstein!” she snapped angrily.
Again he sighed. Reaching out, he placed a hand on her shoulder very lightly, and she felt the slight pressure of his fingers through her coat. For reasons she couldn’t explain, that lightest of sensations made her tremble.
“About that diamond you took,” he began to say gently. “There’s something you need to know…”
“Ah! Mister Carter! We meet again. And you are Ms Pietersen, I presume.”
The voice was quiet, clipped—and clearly foreign. Karla looked up, as did Hayden, to face a tall man, dressed i
n black, with dirty blond hair, cropped very close to his overlarge skull. She could see immediately that his nose had been broken and healed poorly some time in the past. His eyes were as grey as the winter sea, and though he smiled something about his lined face made her shudder.
“Oh, Christ!” muttered Hayden.
“Who the hell are you?” she asked.
“I believe that Mister Carter has already begun to explain to you who I am, Ms Pietersen. I’m Lars Torkelsen, and I’d be very grateful if you would return the Wallenstein to me now.” He raised one gloved hand in front of him, the fingers extended towards her.
In his other hand, he held a gun.
Chapter Thirteen: Lars
It was Hayden’s voice that Lars recognised.
The night had been an immensely frustrating one for Lars. After he had lost Hayden near Euston, drawing far too much attention to himself when he’d fired into the back of the fleeing car, he’d had to lay low for a while and get as far away as possible from the police who seemed to turn up to the shooting with surprising alacrity. He’d always harboured a barely-concealed contempt of the “British bobby”, but this lot seemed much sharper and more alert, no doubt one of the irritating side effects of a decade or so of terrorist threats.
At least he still had Maarten’s phone although, he realised with some irritation, the charge on it was beginning to diminish more rapidly than he would have liked. That, however, simply focussed his attention on the task in hand: he was still able to track Karla Pietersen, and the phone showed him that she was heading north out of London. She must have been on a train.
By the time he had managed to steal a car and head out in the direction he presumed she was heading, the signal of the phone confused him slightly. His automatic assumption was that she would head somewhere else in London, or perhaps to Heathrow if she was leaving the country. Yet when the train passed through Birmingham and began to head out into Wales, he wondered where on earth she could be going.
It was only when he was in full pursuit of her that the answer began to dawn on him: Hayden Carter had made some passing reference to the fact she was Irish. Was she meeting someone from Dublin to pass the Wallenstein to? Or was she herself intending to travel by ship?
Driving through the night at full speed, he slowly made progress in his chase. Hayden was an irritation. When he located the Pietersen woman he would have to track down that man and kill him, but in the meantime the location of the Wallenstein was more important. After that, he could tie up all the loose ends: Hayden would have to go but he wasn’t sure yet what to do with Maarten. The dutch gemstone cutter had proved surprisingly resilient for such an unassuming man.
That didn’t matter. He drove among the shadows of the mountains of Snowdonia, which reared up on either side of his car (it had been a mistake to steal a Nissan, he told himself, for all that it was easy to break into: he’d have done the journey in half the time in a proper vehicle). They reminded him with some nostalgia of the fjords and peaks of his homeland, but when he arrived in Holyhead itself he’d considered the town a dump that he would be pleased to leave as soon as possible.
At that point, his frustrations had grown rather than diminished. Maarten’s phone seemed to indicate that Karla was somewhere near the ferries, which made sense. Presumably she was waiting to board a ship or meet someone from it. And yet the app seemed incapable of picking up her position with decent accuracy. He had been in a bar where the phone told him she was located, but although there were several women present, including one very good-looking brunette, none of them matched the description he had of Karla.
He had managed to sneak onto the ferry before Maarten’s phone died on him, and for an hour or more he stalked between the decks, his grey eyes hunting back and forth as he searched for his prey. He knew she had to be here—but where?
His surprise, when he heard Hayden, was considerable. What was he doing on this ferry? Had it all been some elaborate bluff? Were Karla and Hayden working together?
Drawing his gun from its holster beneath his arm, Lars moved out onto the deck. He could see the tall figure of Hayden Carter bending down slightly as a fierce woman snarled responses back at him. He recognised her immediately: it was the brunette he had seen in the bar. If this was Karla Pietersen, then either she had changed her appearance or Maarten had lied to him.
“Ah! Mister Carter!” he called out. “We meet again. And you are Ms Pietersen, I presume.”
The woman looked up first, as did Hayden, and he smiled at the pair of them.
“Oh, Christ!” he heard Hayden mutter while the woman asked angrily: “Who the hell are you?”
Despite the gun he was pointing at them, she did not appear particularly frightened—unlike Hayden who had some better idea of what Lars was capable of. “I believe that Mister Carter has already begun to explain to you who I am, Ms Pietersen. I’m Lars Torkelsen, and I’d be very grateful if you would return the Wallenstein to me now.” He held out one hand towards her, but she simply pulled her bag more tightly to her body.
“If you think, after all I’ve been through to get this, that I’m simply going to hand it over to you, then you’re very much mistaken.”
Lars’s smile tightened. For a second his irritation was matched by a growing respect—even arousal. This woman really wasn’t frightened. Instead, she merely flicked her head up and began to walk away.
He was much quicker, however. In a few, long strides he had covered the space between them and pushed the barrel of his Walther PK into her back. “And, Ms Pietersen, if you think I’m not willing to use this because of the attention it might bring, you are very much mistaken.” As Hayden came up instinctively to grab Lars, the Norwegian pointed the gun briefly in the other man’s direction. “If necessary,” he said, his voice low and ominous, “I’ll kill both of you and simply take the Wallenstein.”
Now, at last, he felt the woman’s body stiffen. “Ms Pietersen, Mister Carter,” he said, smiling more broadly. “If you would like to go through there.” He gestured with his free hand towards a door that led from the deck.
Meekly, the two of them went ahead and Lars followed, closing the door behind him. They had entered a small cabin that was brightly lit and he stood with his back to the door, letting them see the gun in his gloved hand.
“Where were we?” he asked in a falsely convivial manner. “Ah, yes. I believe that you were about to give me what I have followed you such a distance to find. I can’t say that I’ve ever been tempted to visit Wales before, but after a night in Holyhead I shall not be repeating the pleasure any time soon.”
“Boeckman’s sent you, didn’t they.” It was Karla who spoke. Lars nodded.
“What have you done to Maarten?” she asked.
“He’s in a safe place—for the time being. I am surprised at your concern, Ms Pietersen, if after all this it turns out you have been working with Mister Carter.”
She said nothing in response to this at first, and Hayden simply watched him warily.
“What I don’t get,” said Karla at last, frowning slightly, “is why they sent you.”
Lars bristled at this. “What do you mean? Don’t you think I’m up to the task?”
Hayden was watching the two of them, his eyes flicking back and forth. Karla shook her head. “No, it’s not that. I’m sure you’re… very good. But why a Norwegian? I mean, you’re not exactly the go-to choice for international hitmen.”
“And that’s precisely why I’m in such demand,” Lars replied, finally understanding her. “As a nation we are so calm and civilised that no-one expects us to do anything out of the ordinary. But then, we’re also serious and meticulous—trustworthy. I mean, a culture that produced Ibsen and Edvard Grieg is hardly going to be anything other than sober and reliable.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Hayden chipped in. “I mean, you also had Abba, so it’s hardly all doom and gloom.”
“That was Sweden, you idiot,” Karla hissed, glancing sideways at Ha
yden in annoyance.
He scowled at this. “Who are you calling an idiot?”
“Mister Carter,” Lars intervened, waving his gun casually to stop their babbling before it got out of hand. “When first I met you, you were naked and strapped down to your bed, so I don’t think you are in any position to convince us of your intellectual abilities.” He remembered the look on Hayden’s face when he’d wielded a knife over him: it didn’t matter how big a man you were—and Hayden was certainly sizeable in that department—every male carried in him a castration anxiety that could, as it were, cut him down to size. That thought made Lars chuckle.
“What’s wrong with you?” Karla asked, frowning as she regarded him.
“I was just thinking that it’s only when you hold a man’s balls in your hand that you know what kind of man he really is. Isn’t that true, Mister Carter?”
Hayden blanched at this, and Lars was pleased to see that he looked as though he would be sick, but Karla grimaced in disgust.
“You know,” she said, “that just sounds ever so slightly gay.”
Lars scoffed at this. “If you’re thinking to unbalance me with homophobic remarks, Ms Pietersen, I wouldn’t bother. We Scandinavians got over that a long time ago.” He turned his attention to her more fully. She was quite fascinating, this beautiful young woman with her long, dark hair and sensual figure. While Hayden was trying, unsuccessfully, to mask his fear, she appeared to be much less perturbed. He was going to enjoy taking the Wallenstein off her and, for a moment, even pondered how much he would enjoy it if she resisted him.
That, however, was a distraction—very unprofessional and very un-Norwegian of him. “By the way, I’m curious,” he continued. Neither of them were going anywhere. He could take the diamond at his leisure and leave their bodies to be found after he’d disembarked from the ship. The Walther PK had a silencer attached so it wouldn’t attract undue attention. If anything, his biggest concern was that their corpses would be found before he had chance to leave the ferry. He might as well take the time to have a few questions answered. She looked up at him, her green eyes large and quite enchanting.
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