The Stockholm Syndicate

by Colin Forbes

  Talking of high pressure..." Cottel mopped his damp forehead as he called Beaurain. The Belgian replied at once with great clarity.

  "The big R.," Cottel began, referring to Viktor Rashkin, 'had a Merc with CD. plates waiting to pick him up. Our friends have followed. Funny thing, when I watched the passengers disembarking earlier I couldn't spot him through the glasses."

  It was just one of those throwaway observations you make, particularly when you have been keyed up, when you are short on sleep, when you thought you had blown it and then found you hadn't. The Belgian's reaction was tense, almost explosive.

  "Listen to this description, Ed. A grey-haired man of medium build. Probably a snappy dresser, could even be wearing a velvet jacket with gold buttons. Rimless glasses. May be wearing a skull-cap like Orthodox Jews go in for."

  Cottel stared at the microphone open-mouthed, then got a grip on himself. "A guy just like that got into a beat-up Volkswagen as the limousine took off. I didn't take much notice of him - and he wasn't carrying a Danair bag."

  "He wouldn't be," Beaurain informed him. "You wouldn't recognise him, but Dr. Benny Horn has just arrived in Copenhagen. You're waiting now for the flight bringing in Sonia Karnell from Stockholm? Good. I think we're all going to meet up at the house on Nyhavn. And good luck - no-one has yet located Harvey Sholto,"

  "You think he's in the city too?" Cottel asked grimly.

  "He has to be."

  For the first time in weeks the weather changed as they approached Nyhavn. The sky clouded over, a faint hint of mist drifted in from the sea and, as they arrived at the familiar basin of water, the seamen's bars on the left and tourist shops on the right, it began to drizzle. A fine spray of moisture descended on the tangle of ship's masts in the basin. The stones in the street were moist. The convoy of three cars drove a short distance past the end of the basin, out of sight of Nyhavn, and then parked.

  "They may have watchers observing Horn's house," Beaurain warned, 'so our first task is to locate them and take them out."

  "May?" Louise queried. "The Syndicate always has watchers."

  "That was before this morning."

  "But they still had Kastrup airport staked out with men," she objected. "You had to get Marker to send out a whole team to pick them up."

  "That was because Rashkin was coming in. He would have phoned Copenhagen from Bornholm and asked for protection - heavy protection - to be laid on after what happened to Kometa. But the Syndicate in Europe is coming to the end of its resources, its power is broken, the leaders went down with the Soviet hydrofoil."

  "Then who are we expecting to see at the house on Nyhavn?"

  "Hugo."

  Palme opened the suitcase from the arms deposit flat in Prinsesse Gade, and handed out weapons and ammunition. All hand-guns were equipped with silencers. He conferred briefly with Max Kellerman.

  "There is a man watching from the flat almost opposite - there. I'll take him. Then there is a man on the deck of a fishing vessel making too much of looping up coils of rope. He's moored outside Horn's place. You take him."

  It was very quiet in the drizzle as Palme and Kellerman moved off down different sides of the basin, both of them adopting a sailor's way of walking, merging with the odd man who even at that hour came staggering up the steps from one of the basement bars. Palme went into the building and up to the first floor flat where he had spotted his watcher. He kicked the flimsy door in and let the force of his own momentum carry him straight across the sparsely furnished room. In his right hand he held a Luger with a silencer. A man who had been staring out of the open window, sprawled on a sofa, grabbed for the automatic weapon by his side. Palme shot him twice and peered out of the window.

  The seaman tending coils of rope had disappeared from the deck of the fishing vessel. In his place crouched Max Kellerman who was now doing the same job. It put him immediately facing the front door leading into Dr. Benny Horn's house.

  A few minutes later he signalled to Beaurain and Louise as they stood looking into the window of an antique shop. The area was clean. And, standing on the top step and close to the front door of Horn's house, Palme had found the right skeleton key to open the expensive security lock. He walked in ahead of Beaurain and Louise, Luger extended in front of his body, eyes flickering up the narrow staircase, along the narrow hallway, his acute hearing sensitive to the slightest sound. The place smelt empty to Palme; occupied not so long ago but empty for the moment.

  The calm waters of the shipping basin were dappled with drops of fine rain - and Max Kellerman laboriously coiled rope on the deck of the fishing vessel. Louise stepped over the threshold of Dr. Benny Horn's house and Beaurain closed the door.

  "The place is clean."

  In an astonishingly short space of time Palme had checked the ground floor, run upstairs, checked the first floor, returned to the hallway, vanished down a flight of steps behind a door leading to the basement and reappeared to make his pronouncement. He was a big man, Louise thought, yet he could move with the grace and speed of a gazelle.

  "A kind of library room at the front," Palme explained, pointing to a door. "Bookshelves from floor to ceiling, heavy lace curtains masking the window overlooking the front ... Kitchen and dining-room at the back with rear door on the first floor opening onto a fire escape down into a small yard. There is an exit into a side street from the yard. One of the gunners found it and stationed himself there. No-one gets in here without us knowing."

  "Then the front room to await our guests?" Beaurain suggested.

  Outside the drizzle continued to fall and Max

  Kellerman ignored the fact that he was getting wetter and wetter.

  Sonia Karnell was the first to arrive at Nyhavn. She arrived in a taxi from Kastrup Airport, paid off the driver and climbed the steps, the drizzle forming a web of moisture on her jet black hair. In her left hand she had the key ready; in her right she carried a suitcase and from a strap dangled a shoulder-bag.

  It was the shoulder-bag Louise Hamilton was studying as she kept well back inside the library room and watched through the heavy lace curtains. Beau-rain was also inside the room, standing pressed flat against the wall close to the opening edge of the closed door.

  "She's suspicious of something," Louise hissed.

  The Swedish girl had looked back at the deck of the fishing vessel moored to the quay. She saw the wrong man coiling rope. She saw Max Kellerman.

  Kellerman reacted instinctively. From under a fishing net he raised the barrel of his sub-machine gun, one of the weapons Palme had distributed from his arms deposit. No-one else was close enough to see it. Karnell saw it. She turned the key, dived into the hallway, slammed the door shut behind her and leant for a moment against the side wall. Louise walked out of the library room.

  "Hello, Sonia. A long way from the Rådmansgatan."

  Louise was holding the pistol aimed point-blank, but the Swedish girl was either a suicide case or guessed these people did not want the sound of shooting yet. She leapt at the English girl like a tigress, dropping the suitcase, her hands extended like the claws of an animal. She aimed for the eyes. Louise hit her with the barrel of the pistol across the side of the temple. Karnell felt the side of her face and blood oozed between her fingers, the colour matching the tint of her nail varnish.

  "Drop the shoulder-bag, Sonia," Louise ordered. "Slowly - try and grab your weapon and I'll shoot you in the stomach."

  She watched while the shoulder-bag dropped on the hallway floor to join the suitcase. She was alone with the girl; Beaurain had remained invisible inside the library room and Palme had not shown himself at the top of the narrow staircase. It would be easier to scare the guts out of Karnell if the girl thought she was alone with Louise. Then Louise got it! Of course! A signal that the coast was clear, that it was safe for Horn to come inside when he arrived. Of course!

  "What's the signal?" Louise asked viciously, advancing closer so that Karnell backed against the wall.

  "Signa
l?"

  "You stupid bitch!" Louise raised her pistol. "And you had good bone structure! This gun should re-arrange it so no man will look at you, let alone ..."

  Louise's mouth was slightly open, her teeth clenched tight; her gun arm began to move, the gunsight aimed to rake over the bridge of Karnell's nose, which like the rest of her was perfectly shaped. Karnell screamed, "The front room ... a card in the window ... it means everything OK. Come on in!"

  "What card?"

  "In the drawer..." In her terror she pushed past Louise, ran into the library and opened a drawer. Louise was close behind her but the only thing Karnell took out of the drawer was a postcard of old Copenhagen. Running to the window, she pulled aside the curtain, perched the card on the window and let the curtain fall into its original position.

  Then she saw Beaurain for the first time.

  "You know - don't you?" she said.

  "I know," Beaurain agreed, 'so now we just wait." Louise body-searched the Swedish girl but the only weapon she was carrying was a pair of nail-scissors. Presumably she would have found a weapon in the house, given time.

  Harvey Sholto came to Nyhavn unseen and took up his position unnoticed. Flying in from Copenhagen on the same flight as Sonia Karnell, he mingled with the other travellers on arrival at Kastrup, selected a cab, gave the driver careful instructions and a generous tip, then settled in the back seat with the tennis bag he had collected from a locker at Kastrup.

  His large bald head was concealed beneath a black beret and he was wearing a shabby raincoat he had taken from the suitcase he had left inside the locker. Most people asked to guess his nationality would have said Dutch or French.

  "I drop you here?" the cab driver checked.

  "Yes. And don't forget where you pull up for a short time. I want to surprise my girlfriend as I explained."

  "Understood."

  The cab had stopped a few yards before Nyhavn came into view round the corner and Harvey Sholto stepped out and left the cab parked at the kerb. The drizzle suited him well; it linked up with his shabby raincoat. He paddled past the end of the basin and walked down the left-hand street, past numerous seamen's bars. He drooped his shoulders, which made him appear a shorter man.

  He walked head down, like a man absorbed in his own thoughts, but his eyes were everywhere. The place had to be crawling with that bastard Beaurain's troops. Yes, he was pretty sure one of them was stationed on the fishing vessel moored to the quay outside Horn's house. The cab arrived just in time before the man looked up and saw him, crawling past Sholto as though unsure of its destination.

  Aboard the fishing vessel Max Kellerman slipped one hand under the net concealing the sub-machine gun. There was something wrong about this cab. He watched it crawl past, reach the end of the basin, and then stop. No-one got out. It just stopped while the driver gazed up the basin. The driver!

  Out of the corner of his eye Kellerman watched while the driver took his time over lighting a cigarette and flicked the match into the water. Kellerman revised his opinion. The man was due to pick up a fare and was early so he was enjoying a quiet puff and a few minutes' peace. The cab drove off out of sight.

  It was during this charade that Harvey Sholto slipped into the doorway Palme had gone through himself before killing the watcher on the first floor. The sight of the dead body shook him, but only for a second.

  He next dragged the sofa over to the window to act as a back support. From the tennis bag he took the Armalite rifle which was separated into its various components and assembled the weapon. At this range the telescopic sight he screwed on was superfluous, but Harvey Sholto was a careful man.

  Checking that everything was arranged to his satisfaction he settled down to wait. They were all coming to the house on Nyhavn. As Cottel mounted the steps he would blow him away with one shot. Then he need only lower the firing angle a few degrees and he could blow away the man on the deck of the fishing vessel before he recovered from the shock. He lit a cigar and willed himself to stay still.

  The Volkswagen also crawled alongside the Nyhavn basin, but this vehicle was moving down the tourist-trap side of the street. When Kellerman saw it coming he ducked out of sight. At the wheel Dr. Benny Horn drove on past the entrance to his house and then parked at the kerb. Clambering out of his ancient vehicle, he adjusted his skull-cap, screwed up his face at the drizzle and walked back to the house with the plate bearing his name. Like Sonia Karnell he had the key in his hand when he reached the top step. Inserting it, he walked inside and closed the door. Beaurain appeared from the open doorway leading to the library, holding his Luger and aiming it point-blank the new arrival.

  "Welcome at last, Viktor Rashkin,"

  Ed Cottel, who had followed Sonia Karnell from the airport and then lost her in a traffic jam, was further delayed by a puncture in one of the busiest sections in the city. He was then delayed by traffic police until he persuaded them to use the transceiver in his car to call headquarters. Eventually he found himself a cab.

  In the first floor flat on Nyhavn, Harvey Sholto was satisfied he could do the job. He had stood well back in the shadows of the small room and zeroed in the Armalite telescopic sight on the front door of Horn's house. It was like taking candy from a baby. Then he saw the cab approaching on the other side and took a firmer grip on his weapon.

  The cab blocked off his view while Cottel was paying off the driver and Sholto took one final puff on his cigar and ground it under his large foot. The cab moved off, Cottel glanced round and then mounted the steps. Sholto zeroed in on the centre of his back and between Cottel's shoulder-blades, slightly to the left. His finger took the first pressure. He spoke under his breath without realising he was doing it.

  "It's been a long time, bastard, well, here it comes."

  It hit Harvey Sholto in the middle of the chest, lifted him clear off his feet and jerked him ceiling wards like a manipulated marionette. In mid-air his large body jack-knifed. Gravity brought him back to the floor which he hit with a tremendous thud. He lay still, outstretched, like one of the chalk silhouettes police draw to show where the corpse was found.

  It was the cigar smoke which had attracted Kellerman's attention to the open window originally. Little more than a wraith, dispelled by the drizzle as soon as it came into the open air, the movement of the smoke had been sufficient for him. Someone was waiting inside the room supposedly occupied only by a dead man. At the sight of the rifle

  aimed at Ed Cottel he had sprayed the window with one short burst from his sub-machine gun.

  Beaurain pushed the man with the skull-cap against the wall of the passageway and stuck the barrel of his Luger into his prisoner's throat. Cottel slipped into the house, and at the head of the staircase Palme appeared. Louise closed the door and Beaurain ushered Horn into his own library, followed by Ed Cottel.

  "Sharpshooter opposite," Palme explained as he came down the stairs. "His target was Mr. Cottel. Max took him out."

  "Viktor Rashkin?"

  They had entered the library and it was Louise who repeated the name Beaurain had used with incredulity in her voice. Beaurain used his left hand to remove the skull-cap, to tug free the wig of false grey hair. The rimless spectacles he unhooked and threw on the floor.

  "It's not as though he needs them to see. Let me introduce Dr. Benny Horn, better known as Viktor Rashkin, First Secretary at the Soviet Embassy in Stockholm. And we mustn't forget other people know him as Dr. Otto Berlin of Bruges and Dr. Theodor Norling of Stockholm. A trio of eminent and murderous dealers in rare books."

  The light in the library was dim. It would always be dim behind the heavy lace curtains, but the drizzly morning made it even more difficult to see. Louise had no trouble seeing what she still found almost incredible stripped of his guise as Benny Horn, the man she was staring at was a young forty, eyes intensely observant, his prominent cheekbones Slavic, and even with Beaurain's gun at his throat he exuded an air of authority and confidence. He met her gaze boldly. Then Beaurain s
aid something else and Louise thought she saw a flicker of fear for the first time on Rashkin's face.

  "This is also Hugo, controller of the Stockholm Syndicate and the man who masterminds bloodbaths like the Elsinore Massacre,"

  "Are you sure?" Louise began. "Why the elaborate deception?"

  To give him three different "front" men for dealing with the members he was recruiting for the Stockholm Syndicate. No-one at the outset would be happy dealing with a Soviet Communist. But most important of all to fool the Kremlin - especially Comrade Leonid Brezhnev, his patron."

  This time Louise, who was studying Rashkin closely, saw all expression leave his face; it went completely blank. Beaurain was striking very close to home.

  "And why would he do that?" Louise asked.

  "Because he was going to defect from Russia once the Syndicate was set up!" The accusation came viciously from Sonia Karnell who had remained silent up to this moment. "Billions of dollars you said we would have, and now look where we are!"

  "Shut your trap," he told her. It was the calm, detached manner in which he uttered the words which Louise found so frightening. And Rashkin did not look frightened. She noticed Palme had left the room with Ed Cottel after a whispered remark from Beaurain. They were alone with Rashkin and his Swedish mistress, Sonia Karnell. Why did the Russian still seem so confident?

  "He was going to defect," Sonia repeated. "He knew he'd never make the Politburo with all those old men standing in his way. He deceived the Politburo - and Brezhnev especially - into believing he had formed a directorate while he remained at a remote distance as Hugo. Once the Syndicate was organised we would leave for America and run it from there. Yes he's Hugo. And yes, he secretly worked with Harvey Sholto who used the J. Edgar Hoover files brought up-to-date to persuade key Americans to join the Syndicate. Not that they were reluctant when they realised the enormous non-taxable profits they'd make."