Spy Out the Land

by Jeremy Duns

  The car came to a traffic light and he forced his eyes open again, worried he might nod off. His body had initially reacted to Claire and Ben being taken with the classic acute stress response, fight-or-flight: accelerated heart-rate, nausea, sweating, tunnel vision, the lot. But now he’d both fought and fled, his body had hit a brick wall and he was in a state of hypo-arousal, overcome with a feeling of lethargy and unreality, almost as though he were watching himself from outside.

  He sat up straighter. He didn’t want to return to fight-or-flight mode, but he had to regain his energy and lucidity. The first thing to do was address the fears he was trying to suppress head on. Chief among them were the recurring visions of Claire and Ben either dead or being subjected to torture. If he were going to be any use, he had to accept that both were possible, but that neither were likely. If the men in the masks had wanted them dead, they would have shot them on the island when they had the chance. They’d shot at him, and they had killed the Hanssons without any apparent compunction, but they hadn’t aimed their fire at Ben or Claire. So they must want them alive. Hold on to that fact. Hold on to it, and don’t let go. It means this is a kidnap, which means there’s a very good chance they’re still alive and being kept in good health. It means the men want something. You just have to find out what it is.

  He smiled bitterly at his optimism. Just.

  The car was approaching the address he’d given and Dark asked the driver to let him off on the corner. He paid him and waited until he had left the area, then walked up to the apartment block. He scanned the names on the push-buttons until he found the one he was looking for and pressed it firmly. Thirty seconds passed, and then a voice came through the small speaker.

  ‘Hello?’

  ‘It’s Erik Johansson. Please let me in. It’s an emergency.’

  A moment later, he was in the lobby of the building and bounding up the stairs.

  Weale went with Morelius and two of his men in an unmarked Saab. Twenty minutes later, they parked opposite the bakery in Gamla Stan. The younger officers marched towards the building and Weale followed with Morelius, his right hand reaching to check his Makarov was in place behind his jacket.

  Karl Vesterlund was a small man with piercing blue eyes, somewhere in his seventies. He showed no surprise or even anxiety at being raided by the security services, and Weale wondered if he might no longer care whether the authorities questioned him. They walked into a small, cluttered living room, but there was no sign of any forgery work being done.

  ‘Where’s your office?’ Morelius asked in an even voice. ‘We can tear down the walls, you know.’

  Vesterlund shrugged, and Weale realised he was simply resigned to having been detected – he had expected the day to come eventually and was mentally prepared for it.

  He unhooked a lever from a bookcase and it slid away, revealing a doorway, then led them down a small flight of steps into a cramped room that contained a desk, a chair, several bright lamps, ink, tape, scissors, a microscope and disordered piles of paper, many of them small, familiar-sized booklets.

  ‘My study,’ Vesterlund said with a rueful smile.

  Morelius showed him the Finns’ photograph of Dark, and he leaned down and peered at it. He shuffled over to a filing cabinet and took out a ledger, which he placed on the desk and started leafing through until he found what he was looking for – a small stamp-like photograph that he offered to Morelius.

  ‘Here he is.’

  In the apartment block in Hägersten, a lanky young man stood on the landing peering out of the flat. He was dressed in nothing but a pair of white underpants. Dark recognised him: it was Jonas, the boyfriend Marta had supposedly broken up with so disastrously that Claire had needed to rush round to offer comfort. So perhaps that had been a lie, though to hide what he didn’t know. But Claire had consulted with Marta about that, so hopefully it wasn’t the only thing she’d taken her into her confidence about.

  Jonas started to speak but Dark lifted a finger to his lips and hurried him back into the flat. The living room was small but well ordered, with orange and pink Marimekko curtains and two lounge chairs in birch, chrome and leather. Expensive, tasteful stuff, confirming his suspicion they were middle-class dropouts, no doubt funding their rebellion with their parents’ money. He walked through to find Marta Österberg standing in the kitchen in her nightdress.

  ‘Erik? You look different. You’ve shaved. You said there was an emergency?’

  ‘I need to talk to you about Claire. She and Ben are missing.’

  She stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Someone’s kidnapped them, and I need to find out who. Claire had a false passport, and I think you or someone else in your organisation arranged it for her. I know we’ve never seen eye to eye, but I need your help. I need you to tell me her real name and anything else you know about her past. Please.’

  Marta met his gaze with an appraising one of her own. She had indeed never liked him: he was arrogant and apathetic, and she couldn’t understand what Claire saw in him. But his desperation rang true, and she couldn’t think of any plausible reason for him to invent such a story anyway. Jonas was trying to catch her attention out of the corner of her eye, but she decided to trust her own instincts.

  ‘Her name is Hope Charamba. That’s all I know.’

  ‘Is she Zambian?’

  ‘I don’t know, I’m sorry. Who’s taken her and Ben? Have you informed the police?’

  Dark ignored her, his mind racing ahead.

  Hope Charamba.

  It meant nothing to him, and could be from any country in Africa for all he knew. He needed someone who did know. His mind suddenly grabbed at a memory – a large reddish face in the Lagos heat. Yes. Of course.

  He did some swift calculations. After Kurkinen had dusted off his pride and the bruising around his windpipe, he would have sent Interpol all the names on his passports as well as the photograph they had taken of him. There was a chance Interpol would have sent out a wide enough alert that someone in London could have recognised him. If so, the Service would now also be looking for him. It was a slim chance, but he had to consider it nonetheless. And if it were the case, they would have provided the Swedish authorities with a photograph of him unshaven.

  He probably had a window of only a couple of hours to get out of the country before the newspapers and radio and everything else conspired against him making it out without being spotted, but he had a major problem without a passport. It would be relatively easy to visit another Scandinavian country – he wouldn’t have to show a passport at either end – but that wasn’t going to help him get to Belgium. One solution would be to find the old chap in Gamla Stan and ask him to make him another passport, but that would be time-consuming and potentially very risky.

  ‘Who made Hope’s passport?’ he asked Marta.

  She threw her hands up and shook her head. ‘Why does it matter?’

  He glared at her.

  ‘A man called Vesterlund.’

  ‘An old man, lives above a bakery in Gamla Stan?’

  She nodded, and Dark swore under his breath. But perhaps there was a chance.

  ‘How well known is he?’ She peered at him, not understanding, and he tried again, willing her to follow the speed of his own thoughts. ‘Is it possible the authorities know about him?’

  She hesitated for a moment, then shook her head – but the hesitation had given him all the information he needed. She wasn’t sure, so Vesterlund was out. Even if Säpo didn’t already know about him, they might be able to track him down and apply some pressure until he told them about his most recent visitor, and the name on the passport he had made for him. He thought for a moment, staring into Marta’s puzzled, almost angelic-looking face. She was beautiful enough in the classical Scandinavian way, but did nothing for him and apparently the same applied in reverse as he’d never had any inkling she found him attractive. That didn’t surprise him, but he couldn’t for the life of him understand
what she would see in someone like . . .

  Jonas. He looked over at him, still standing by the door in his briefs, watching. He was in his early thirties, pigeon-chested and with a weak chin. But his colouring and the general set of his features were close enough.

  ‘Where’s your passport?’ Dark said. ‘Your emergency one, I mean. You must have one.’

  The young man glared at him. ‘I think perhaps it’s time you left.’ He looked across at his girlfriend, his arms folded.

  ‘Claire and Ben are missing,’ Dark said, also looking to Marta. ‘Please.’

  She took a deep breath, and then nodded. ‘Go and get it, darling. Quickly.’

  The office in Kungsholmen was thick with the fug of cigarette smoke, and some of the men were rubbing their eyes, the hours of concentration taking their toll. Weale, paradoxically, felt more awake than he had done in days. His concerns about his cover had faded now he’d passed muster with the Swedes, and his focus had become more intense. He was starting to panic that he’d lost Dark.

  The old forger Vesterlund had been turned over to the police to be arrested and charged, but he hadn’t given them any serious leads. He had admitted to having made Dark the five passports he’d had on him in Helsinki, but claimed to have had no other contact with him. Weale was an expert in weighing the reliability of such testimonies from his work with captured terrs, and in his judgement the man was telling the truth.

  Morelius had placed a couple of his men on watch outside Vesterlund’s flat in case Dark came calling, but Weale’s instincts also told him that that possibility wasn’t on the cards now. Dark might have used more than one forger, or be visiting another one at that very moment. He might already have left the country. Weale hoped to hell he hadn’t – he didn’t relish the idea of having to tell Harmigan he’d lost sight of the target.

  He tried to think through what he would do in the other man’s shoes. Dark’s overriding concern must be to find out why his family had been taken, and from there try to figure out by whom. But Weale had no idea how much the girl had told him of her past life, and she would be up in the air with Voers and the others by now so he had no way of checking.

  ‘We’ll find him,’ said Morelius, sensing Weale’s frustration. ‘We’re watching the ports very closely.’ He indicated the banks of computer screens his men were huddled around, most of which showed closed-circuit television stills.

  ‘We’re linked to every customs post in the country here, and they all have the photographs of Dark that Interpol and your colleagues in London provided. We’ve also tightened the usual restrictions on travelling within Scandinavia at the request of your prime minister, so even within the region he would have to show a passport – provided he hasn’t already got through, of course.’

  Weale wanted to ask why the hell they had such an idiotically lax system in the first place, but bit his tongue. His eye had been drawn to one of the screens, which had just started showing images of passports in rapid succession.

  Morelius followed his gaze. ‘Yes, that’s something new from the customs people at the airport. They have it in Berlin, too, and a few of the larger American cities. Each customs official has a glass plate under their desk, and they place passengers’ passports on it when they go through.’ He mimed the movement with one hand. ‘A linked computer in their control centre scans the page, rather like a photocopy machine, and we can access the resulting image from here. But it doesn’t help us much in this case because it takes twenty minutes or more for the images to get here. Even if we did happen to spot Dark’s photograph among them, by that time his flight would already have left. Perhaps in a few years this system will be of use, but today . . .’ He shrugged his shoulders.

  ‘But we have access to all the flight manifests,’ said Weale. ‘So if we match the name on the passport with the manifests we can figure out where he’s heading. Do you get every single one of these photographs sent here as a matter of course?’

  ‘From Arlanda airport, yes. But we’re talking about thousands of passengers. Are you proposing to look through them all to try to spot him? If I can be direct with you, the idea seems a little desperate. This isn’t something that can be done with the naked eye.’

  ‘Why not? That’s how the passport officers are doing it. I suggest we set up what is in effect a separate customs post here, double-checking every scanned passport image as fast as we can manage. Dark will know we’re looking for him by now, and he’ll also know that to get out of Scandinavia he’ll have to use a photograph that looks enough like him to get through customs, but not enough like the photographs we’ve circulated to have him stopped. But with all due respect to your customs officials, I think our judgement as to how he might disguise himself is probably more sophisticated. We can also order the information here: start with the easiest and work outwards to the harder stuff. So let’s filter out all Caucasian male passengers between the ages of, say, thirty and sixty, and start looking at those.’

  Morelius clicked his fingers at one of his men.

  ‘Not bad, Mr Collins,’ he said when he had given the instructions. ‘I’m starting to understand what Sandy Harmigan sees in you.’

  Chapter 39

  Paul Dark paid the taxi driver and walked through the revolving door into the main concourse of Arlanda airport. He quickly found an overhead monitor and saw that SAS had a direct flight to Brussels departing in three hours. He was about to approach the airline’s desk when he sensed something strange about the space directly around him. It took him a few seconds to see them – uniformed soldiers were discreetly patrolling the perimeter of the concourse, armed with machine-pistols.

  His stomach tightened. The coincidence was too great: they had to be here because of him, and that meant someone had worked out who he was. And to get the usually placid Swedes to bring troops in, it had to be someone who had a hell of a lot of clout. CIA? Or Service? The latter was the most likely explanation, as they had the most information on him. Who was Chief now? Still Innes, perhaps. He was a safe choice.

  He turned away from the desk. Airline check-in staff usually just glanced at your passport photo as they tapped in your details, but the soldiers meant full measures were in place, so they would also have been put on the alert for him. There would probably also be passport checks at both ends now. So he had to think again. Could he take a non-commercial flight – sneak onto a freight, perhaps? He quickly dismissed the idea. Fewer people meant identifying himself would be even more difficult. His one advantage was the crowd: those chasing him had to find him in the haystack of the hundreds of thousands of people travelling around Europe.

  Further down the concourse he spied a bookshop with a stand outside containing the day’s newspapers, and he walked towards it to put more distance between himself and the soldiers. He was stopped short by a frame on the wall that featured enlarged reproductions of all the front pages. The British and other international papers were running with two stories: the Portuguese had lost control in eastern Timor, and three people had been killed in an explosion in a pub in Armagh. But the Nordic evening papers and late editions were leading with a different story: him. The front pages of Expressen, Ilta-Sanomat, Aftonbladet and Aftenposten all featured the same two photographs of his face: the one taken just hours earlier in the coastguard station in Helsinki and one of him clean-shaven – an old Century House pass, he thought. The headlines in each language proclaimed he’d murdered his girlfriend and son and was now on the run and might kill again at any moment. Aftonbladet had the most striking cover, making the most of the fact Claire had worked for them by using a smiling photograph a colleague had taken of her at her desk with Ben seated on her lap making faces at the camera. ‘HAN DÖDADE DEM – HITTA HONOM!’ was the headline: ‘He killed them – Find him!’

  So they were playing it like that. Not ‘sought for questioning’, not ‘a prime suspect’, but that he’d actually killed them. His jaw clenched at the tactic, but he could hardly expect Queensberry rules.
>
  He retreated to one of the seating areas, his mind racing through his rapidly narrowing options. After he’d given Marta and Jonas a graphic description of what might happen to their friend and his son if they didn’t give him all their assistance, he’d persuaded them to part with two spare passports, a fresh set of clothes, an attaché case, some cosmetics and enough of their parents’ kronor to buy him the plane ticket and anything else he needed for the next few days. But it had taken him time to persuade them, valuable time, and after a while he’d felt he couldn’t afford to spend any more of it in case he missed a flight.

  So he’d taken the taxi here. He’d been right about the flight, because if he had delayed much longer he’d have missed it, but the security cordon was much tighter than he’d bargained for. They’d set up the sort of measures reserved for a terrorist on the loose: armed troops and a major media alert. No doubt they had arranged radio and television broadcasts, too, in which case he’d been lucky the driver hadn’t heard or seen any and driven him to the nearest police station.

  The check-in time for the flight was in just over an hour, and he didn’t even know if there were any seats left on it. But the next direct flight to Brussels wasn’t for another couple of hours, and indirect routes would take even longer. And the more time he took, the worse his odds of getting through. It was now or never.

  He stood abruptly and walked to the bathroom area, locking himself in one of the stalls. He removed Jonas’s leather jacket and shirt and hung both on the door hook. Then he took Marta’s box of Jane Hellen hair bleach from the attaché case, and as he leaned over the basin applied a dose of the bleach into his scalp and eyebrows. The instructions said it would take forty-five minutes to turn him into a ‘platinum blonde’, but his hair was too dark for that to work and it wasn’t what he wanted anyway. He estimated fifteen minutes should be enough for the desired effect, and noted the time on Kurkinen’s wristwatch, which he was still wearing.