Holy Terror

by Graham Masterton

  ‘I don’t remember. “Don’t say anything to anyone.”’

  ‘Listen to that accent,’ put in Conor. ‘“Don’t say any-thung to any – wern.” Western Texas, if you ask me.’

  Magda said, ‘I want you to relax, Toralf. Right now you’re worried. Right now you’re feeling very tense. But if you let yourself go deeper, if you really relax, you won’t have to worry about telling us anything. It won’t be you at all. You – you’ll be asleep. Your mind can talk to us by itself. Your mind trusts us, Toralf. Your mind knows that we can keep your secret perfectly safe.’

  Toralf’s eyes closed. His head tilted back a little. His mouth opened and he began to breathe deeply and harshly.

  ‘Where are you going, Toralf?’ Conor asked him. ‘Why do you need to take your sweater?’

  At first Toralf said nothing, but then Magda approached him and took off his leather cap. She started to stroke his forehead with the tip of her middle finger, and ssh him. ‘Where are you going, Toralf? Where are you taking all of those boxes? Mr Branch wouldn’t mind you telling us. Dennis wants us to know. You want to please Mr Branch, don’t you?’

  ‘He says to call him Dennis. He says everybody is equal under God.’

  ‘Well, he’s quite right. You’re equal and I’m equal and my friend here, he’s equal, too. And because we’re equal, he wants us to know what you know. He wants you to tell us where you’re going.’

  Toralf twitched his head and began to look agitated. As a precaution, Conor stepped forward and lifted the gun out of his pocket, a little Browning .22. It wasn’t a guaranteed manstopper but you wouldn’t want a bullet between the eyes. Magda raised one finger to indicate that he should stay as still as possible. She was taking him deeper and deeper and she didn’t want his trance disrupted.

  ‘Come on, Toralf. You don’t want to keep Dennis waiting, do you? He wants you to tell us where you’re going and he wants you to tell us quick.’

  Toralf staggered and swayed. He swayed so much that Conor thought he was going to fall over. He opened his mouth three or four times without saying anything, but then he whispered, ‘Tromso.’

  ‘You’re going to Tromso? That’s way up north. I mean, that’s way, way up north. Why are you going to Tromso?’

  ‘God told Dennis what he must do. Dennis has to go to Tromso.’

  ‘And why does Dennis have to go to Tromso?’

  ‘To find the sword. Dennis has to find the sword.’

  ‘The sword? What sword?’

  Toralf extended both arms as if he were holding a double-handed broadsword and made a sweeping gesture from side to side. ‘The sword of the angels. To cut down the sinners.’

  ‘Are you going to Tromso, too?’

  ‘Of course. Dennis has promised to give me the glory.’

  ‘Kid’s brainwashed,’ said Conor. ‘Swords, angels, glory. Jesus Christ. Ask him how he’s getting to Tromso.’

  ‘We fly,’ said Toralf. ‘Dennis chartered a plane from Wideroe. We leave twenty-one hundred. “Don’t say anything to anyone.”’

  ‘I don’t think he’s going to tell us much more,’ said Magda. ‘I don’t think he knows much more.’

  ‘In that case you’d better wake him up and send him on his way.’

  Magda leaned close to Toralf’s ear and whispered something to him. Conor paced around the empty apartment feeling tired and gritty-eyed and angry at himself for allowing Dennis Evelyn Branch to escape him so easily. At least they knew where he was going, but they still didn’t know for sure what he intended to do, or how close he was to doing it. What was the sword, to cut down the sinners? And where did Dennis Evelyn Branch think that he was going to find it?

  ‘When I count to three, you will wake up,’ Magda told Toralf. ‘One – two – three – you’re awake!’

  Toralf opened his eyes, and immediately smiled at them. ‘Well,’ he said, cheerfully, ‘I’m sorry I disturbed you. I’d better pick up my sweater and get going.’

  He went into the bedroom, whistling a little tune. He came back with his sweater under his arm and shook them both by the hand. Conor looked at Magda and shook his head in disbelief.

  ‘Come on, we’d better leave, too,’ said Conor, once Toralf had gone. ‘It looks like we’re on our way to Tromso tomorrow.’

  They waited for the elevator to come back up. Conor said, ‘What did you say to him?’

  ‘I told him to forget he ever saw us, and I told him to forget he ever had a gun.’

  ‘And he will?’

  ‘Of course. One of my greatest talents is post-hypnotic suggestion. I could hypnotize a man, and then three weeks later, at precisely four o’clock, I could make him prick his finger with a pin.’

  They stepped out of the apartment building into the street. There was a black VW Jetta parked at the curb. It hadn’t been there when they first arrived, so presumably it was Toralf’s. Conor looked left and right and saw Toralf with his shoulders hunched, walking toward Trondheimsveien.

  ‘Where the hell is he going?’

  Magda shrugged and turned away. There was something about the way she did it that aroused Conor’s suspicions. He took hold of her shoulder and demanded, ‘Where’s he going, Magda? What have you told him to do?’

  ‘I told him nothing. What do you think I am?’

  Conor hesitated for a second. Then he started walking quickly after Toralf, shouting out his name. ‘Conor – leave him!’ called Magda, but Conor shouted, ‘Toralf!’ yet again, and broke into a jog.

  Toralf had almost reached the intersection with Trondheimsveien. Conor was only 50 feet behind him, but he didn’t seem to hear. Without hesitation, he stepped off the curb and walked into the traffic. It wasn’t heavy, but it was fast. Two cars blared their horns at him and another skidded wildly sideways to avoid hitting him.

  Conor reached the curb. ‘Toralf!’ he yelled. ‘Toralf, wake up!’

  But Toralf was oblivious to everything around him. A bus was approaching with the sign JERBANE-TORGET on the front. The driver blew his horn and flashed his lights. But instead of carrying on walking, Toralf stopped, and faced it.

  ‘Toralf!’ Conor roared at him. But the bus hit him with a crunching thud, and he flew across the street, arms and legs flying, almost as if he were turning celebratory cartwheels. He ended up in the gutter, face down, and by the time Conor reached him his blood was already flowing down a drain. A middle-aged woman was kneeling beside him, one hand helplessly stretched out above his head.

  ‘Don’t touch him,’ Conor warned her, taking out his phone. ‘What’s the emergency number?’

  ‘For ambulance, 113.’

  Magda had reached him by now. The bus had pulled over to the side of the road and most of the passengers had disembarked and were shuffling around in silent shock. Conor looked up at Magda and said, ‘He’s dead.’

  ‘Yes,’ she replied, with a challenging stare. ‘Like Ramon.’

  Conor stood up. ‘Did you do this?’ he demanded.

  Magda gave him the ghost of a smile. ‘Even if I did, how could you possibly prove it?’

  As they flew even further northward, the sun began to set, until it was nothing more than a faint halo of orange light behind the clouds. By the time they crossed the Arctic Circle it was dark, and it was only 4:35 p.m.

  Eleanor slept most of the way. Their pursuit of Dennis Evelyn Branch was beginning to take its toll on her, and this morning Conor had tried to persuade her to stay behind in Oslo, or even to go back to New York. But she was adamant. ‘I’ve never given up on anything I’ve set out to do, not ever, and I’m not going to start now. Besides.’

  ‘Besides what?’

  ‘Just besides, that’s all.’

  Magda drank two vodka-tonics and stared out of the window at the gathering gloom. ‘This is like the end of the world,’ she said. ‘The place where the Snow Queen and Santa Claus live.’

  Conor didn’t answer. He was still angry at Magda for Toralf’s death. The longer he stayed with her
, the less he seemed to know her. Her personality was all shadows and reflections. Yet she was very alluring in a strange, outdated way. He could imagine her in Paris in the days of Toulouse-Lautrec, or Berlin in the 1930s.

  He tried to read the NorskAir brochure from the seat-pocket in front of him, but it had a special Norwegian dullness all its own. ‘Massive erosion during the Ice Age scoured the fiords and the lakes, which are the deepest in Europe, and formed a scattering of islands along the coast, over one hundred and fifty thousand of them. There is a treacherous tidal current between the islands, the Maelstrom, which was said in legend to suck ships down to the bottom of the sea.

  ‘Along with storms, avalanches and floods, such dangerous natural phenomena led to a wealth of supernatural stories about trolls and giants. Norse mythology also had its destructive gods, like Thor, with his mighty hammer; and Woden, who took the bravest of the dead from the battlefield so that they could enjoy an afterlife of feasting in Valhalla, the Hall of the Slain.

  ‘Most of all, the Norwegian imagination was stimulated by the long dark winters, when storytelling was the only form of entertainment.’

  They circled the island of Tromso – a sparse scattering of lights in the Arctic darkness. As they came in to land, the plane was buffeted by a gusty east wind – a wind that blew all the way from northern Russia. The ground crew who waved the aircraft on to its stand were bundled up like polar explorers.

  Inside the small terminal building, it was uncomfortably warm and glaringly lit. A few passengers were sitting around waiting for flights to Stavanger or Bergen – miners in jeans and reindeer sweaters and tired-looking businessmen in fur-collared parkas. There was also a family of Sami, or Lapps, in traditional costume, their faces burnished by a lifetime of summer sun and winter cold.

  ‘Where do we go from here?’ asked Eleanor, lighting a cigarette and inhaling deeply.

  ‘First of all we find out where Branch and his people are staying.’

  ‘Oh, yes? And how do we do that?’

  Conor walked across to the Wideroe airline desk, where a blond girl in a gray sweater was laughing with a balding, dark-haired man.

  ‘Excuse me… I’m looking for a customer of mine. He flew up here today from Oslo. I was supposed to give him some schematics for his equipment but I was held up in traffic and I missed him.’

  ‘What name?’ asked the girl, checking her computer screen.

  ‘Branch. Dennis Evelyn Branch. But he may have been traveling under his company name, GMM.’

  The girl rattled her keyboard. ‘Sorry. There was nobody on that flight called Branch. No GMM, either.’

  ‘Well, he had a whole lot of equipment with him. Boxes. Laboratory glassware, that kind of stuff.’

  ‘Oh, ja,’ the man put in. ‘I remember him. The handlers dropped one of the boxes and there was a big argument. They had to fill out insurance forms, all that kind of thing.’ He went to a gray steel filing cabinet behind the desk and pulled out the second drawer. ‘Here it is … William Graham. Northern Scientific, s.a.’

  What a nerve, thought Conor. An evangelist extremist traveling under the pseudonym ‘Billy Graham’.

  ‘Do you have an address?’ he asked.

  ‘Sure. Breivika Havnegata 22.’ He took out a map of Tromso island and pointed to it.

  ‘One more favor,’ said Conor. ‘Can you recommend a good hotel?’

  Outside the terminal building it was so chilly that Eleanor wrapped her scarf around the lower part of her face, so that only her eyes looked out. The wind made a thin, penetrating noise like somebody whistling between their teeth. All three of them had invested in winter coats and scarves and gloves before they left Oslo. It wouldn’t be long before northern Norway was plunged into months of cold and overwhelming darkness.

  A taciturn taxi driver in a dirty white bobble-hat took them to the Walhalla Hotel. He continued to hold out the palm of his hand until he considered that Conor had given him a sufficient gratuity. He even handed back 73 öre, which he obviously considered to be an insult.

  ‘Asshole,’ said Eleanor, vindictively, as he drove away; and both Conor and Magda looked at her in surprise. ‘Well,’ she shrugged. ‘You don’t stop having opinions, when you grow older.’

  The Walhalla had been described by the girl at the Wideroe desk as the ‘finest hotel in Tromso’. It was a bland 1970s building with a wooden-floored lobby and a row of subtly lit alcoves containing painted murals of northern Norway: reindeer, Lapps, the Jostedalsbreen glacier, and the North Cape, the Nordkapp, the very extremity of Europe.

  There was a Troll Bar with fake icicles and trolls and a Viking Restaurant with a longship and shields. Conor could see guests helping themselves from the usual koldtbord, as well as fiskebollor and lutefisk – fish marinaded in lye – which he had already decided was a challenge to the palate rather than a meal.

  They were checked in by a man in a brown nylon shirt who never smiled. Eleanor went directly to her room for a shower. ‘I’m bushed,’ she said, kissing Conor on the cheek. I’ll see you in the morning,’ she said, tenderly. Conor went along to his own room and unpacked, and then went down to meet Magda in the Troll Bar. He couldn’t think of sleeping, not just yet. His head felt as if it were full of broken glass. By the time he got there, Magda was already sitting on one of the hairy reindeer-hide barstools, dressed in a tight black turtleneck sweater and tight black leggings, flirting with a huge muscleman with cropped blond hair and eyes like the arrow slits in a medieval castle.

  ‘Conor – this is Birger. He’s an iron miner.’

  Conor shook hands. ‘How’s it going, Birger?’

  ‘Well, sir, winter’s coming. Very depressing.’

  ‘So, what’s the answer to that?’

  ‘Two answers. Women, and akvavit’

  ‘Ha! Ha!’ said Magda, and slapped his shoulder.

  ‘Actually, I don’t usually stay for the winter. I go to Italy, to work in the iron mines. The pay’s not so good but the weather’s warmer.’

  ‘So what’s holding you back this year?’

  ‘There’s a rumor going around that somebody wants a special job done, and that they’re prepared to pay three times the going rate, plus a five thousand krone bonus if it’s finished on time.’

  ‘Oh, yes? What special job?’

  ‘I don’t know exactly. Up north.’

  They were already 210 miles north of the Arctic Circle, and Conor found the idea of going even further ‘up north’ to be almost unimaginable.

  ‘It’s some kind of excavation,’ said Birger. ‘They approached another miner I know. They said they were looking for men who didn’t have families and who didn’t mind taking a risk.’

  Conor beckoned to the waitress. ‘What’s it to be? Akvavit?’

  ‘Well, no, I’ll have a Budweiser if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Make that two,’ said Conor. Then he turned to Birger and said, ‘These people… the ones who want this excavation done. Do you have any idea who they are?’

  Birger shook his head, but said, ‘My friend said they’re new here in Tromso. This is not such a small city, forty thousand people, but the herring people know everything that’s happening in the harbor and the canneries; and the teaching people know everything that’s happening at the university; and the holy people know everything that’s happening at the cathedral. The people who study the Aurora Borealis – well, they’re a little bit cuckoo but they know everything that’s happening at the place where they keep a watch on the Northern Lights. So you only have to know one of each of them and you know everything that’s happening in the whole of Tromso.’

  ‘Do you think you could ask your friend where I could contact them?’

  Birger swallowed his beer, leaving himself with a foam mustache. ‘Why do you want to know? You don’t look much like a miner.’

  ‘Me? No. But I have a lot of experience when it comes to digging.’

  ‘Ah! Archeologist!’

  ‘Something like that.�
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  * * *

  Conor and Magda had an early dinner together in the Aurora Restaurant. Candles twinkled on every table in red glass lamps, and a trio played plangent instrumental versions of old Barbra Streisand songs. A fresh-faced young waitress with thick ankles asked Conor if he would like to try molje, one of northern Norway’s specialties, but it turned out to be fish, liver and cod’s roe, and Conor decided against it.

  Instead he chose a plateful of fried Sami reindeer with mashed potato, mountain cranberries and gravy, which was the most appetizing meal he had eaten since he arrived in Norway. Magda had a small salad with eggs and beetroot and yellow cloudberries.

  Conor said, ‘I asked the desk clerk for a weather forecast. The temperature tomorrow is supposed to be way up in the threes.’

  ‘They always say that revenge tastes better when it’s cold.’

  ‘I find it difficult to believe that revenge is all you want out of this. You weren’t exactly complimentary about Ramon, after all.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what I thought about Ramon. Nobody should be allowed to murder him and get away with it. Anyhow, I want the money that I was promised.’

  ‘And how much was that?’

  ‘If everything went well, a million.’

  ‘You know that if I manage to retrieve the money, it’ll have to go back to the people who paid it.’

  ‘One pathetic little million won’t make a difference. Or even two pathetic little millions. One for me and one for you. You deserve it, don’t you think, after everything that’s happened to you? You’ve lost your home, your job, your freedom.’

  She reached across the checkered tablecloth and held his hand. Her fingers were cold, her silver rings colder still. ‘You’ve even lost your woman.’

  They held each other’s gaze for a long, long time. Conor wasn’t at all sure what it meant; or what he felt about her. But then she smiled and looked away and said, ‘I’d better go to bed. We have some bad men to find in the morning, don’t we?’

  Chapter 27

  Breivika Havnegata 22 turned out to be one of half a dozen single-story wooden buildings in a small scrubby industrial park three miles north of the city center, next to a junior school. The children were out in the playground with their woolly hats and gloves, screaming and laughing. Through the birch trees, Conor could see the slate-black water of Tromsoysundet, the fiord that separated Tromso from the mainland. The air was chilly and the sky was a milky pearl.