Long Way Home

by Tom Crown

  “They were so much trouble when they were together.” Katia looked at the photo, and for a brief moment she smiled fondly. Then she turned somber again. “They were grabbed off the street on their way home from school.”

  “Abducted? Just like that?”

  Katia nodded. “They always remembered how it happened, and they never stopped trying to escape. They never blamed themselves. They always talked about it, all the time, the best ways to escape. We told them to wait for the right time, but they always asked us if we had ever found the right time. And we hadn’t. But there still could be a wrong time.” Katia looked at the floor. “I’m not making any sense.”

  Ryan raised a hand to touch her in a gesture of support, but couldn’t find the right way to do it. He pulled back again. She glanced up at him, and then her gaze drifted to something over his shoulder.

  Ryan turned around. Jenny was standing in the doorway, her eyes hard and suspicious.

  Katia turned and walked to the bathroom, and closed the door behind her.

  “What?” Ryan asked, looking at Jenny again.

  “You really should get some rest,” she said.

  “Yeah?”

  She nodded once, sympathetically, but something about the calculating look in her eyes gave him pause. He knew he was out of his depth here. He could handle death and destruction, if it came to that, but he couldn’t keep up with the subtle expressions that played across the faces of these people he now trusted with his life.

  Maybe he was just imagining things. Still, he didn’t have a history of being overly cautious. He had a history of recklessness and of repeating past mistakes.

  He looked at the laptop again. Katia’s photos were still open on the screen.

  Five girls.

  He took a deep breath and instantly felt the oxygen enter his blood. Rest would have to come later.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  JENNY WAS BALANCING on the threshold to the bedroom as she studied the computer screen in front of Ryan. The disturbing photos were impossible not to look at, but her attention was really on the keys to the Land Rover that lay on the desk. Ryan was still staring at her, so she did her best to remain thoroughly unaffected by the scrutiny. The keys were what she wanted. If Katia could take them, so could she, especially when her objective was to get them all out of serious trouble they didn’t even know they were in.

  Ryan had zoomed in on a picture of the barn. It was the old Larsson farm, now run down with the paint peeling off the building and the yard overgrown with weeds. Jenny had been a fellow classmate of their youngest girl, Jasmine, who was adopted from South Korea as a little baby. The Larssons were very religious, and it had been a quiet home, but not in a bad way at all. Theirs had been a peaceful quiet, like walking alone in the forest in the summertime when the sun never set.

  Jasmine had always enjoyed showing photos from her mother’s missionary trips to Africa and Asia, and told the adventurous stories that went with each and every one of them. It wasn’t always Jasmine’s mother who had traveled, more often it had been one of the young pastors from one of the nearby towns, but Jasmine had always retold the third-hand stories as if she’d been there herself.

  The trips had seemed more dangerous to Jenny toward the end, after the war in Syria and all of that, but perhaps that had just been her own childish understanding maturing to better grasp what awaited her out in the world. Still it had seemed as if the people in church had gotten more conscious about the risks and dangers as well. But that had been around the time when Jasmine and she had finally lost touch. High school. Mats. Very different crowds.

  “Do you want to take a look?” Ryan asked, gesturing toward the laptop screen. “I think you should.”

  Jenny took a step forward, realizing as she moved that the Larssons were probably where her first true glimpse of the outside world had come from. A glimpse that was real, with people she knew, people from her own town. TV shows and movies had meant very little. It was the stories she had heard and the photos she had seen that had made her want to leave. It hadn’t started with the music or teenage rebellion. It had begun before that, when she was a child at the Larssons.

  “I know this place,” she said and leaned closer to the screen. “A friend of mine used to live there. But it was a long time ago. Before all this.” She pulled back, noticing Steve’s keys on the table again. She’d almost forgotten about them.

  Ryan looked toward the bathroom door that Katia had closed behind her. “They still keep five girls locked up there,” he said. “We need to figure out what to do about that.”

  Jenny nodded.

  “I’ll go get Steve.” Ryan got up and shot her a hard stare. “Then I want you to tell me everything you know about this.”

  Jenny nodded again, afraid her voice would break if she spoke. She could hear Katia in the bathroom, turning on the shower, and finally she was alone. She looked at the photos on the screen once again, of course the Larsson farm, but also the close-ups of young women, peering out from behind dirty windows. She didn’t know what to do about any of that, but she did have a concrete option in front of her in the form of the keys to the Land Rover. It could get them all out of trouble and maybe ease the situation for the girls in the photos as well.

  She looked around. Ryan was with Steve out in the kitchen and couldn’t see her.

  She grabbed the keys from the desk and quickly opened the nearest window. The vehicle was right outside. She could get to it in seconds. Going back through the hallway would take longer and would probably only lead to more discussions. Maybe she wouldn’t even make it outside, now that Katia had brought them so much to talk about.

  She leaned out the window to determine whether Katia could see her from the bathroom window, which was also open. Katia had just turned off the shower, and steam was swirling around the window. Summer wasn’t hot here, just warm enough for mosquitoes to breed and for people to endure staying and sticking it out for another year.

  Jenny was hesitating about the decision she had to make.

  She swung one leg out the window, leaned far outside, and looked at the bathroom window again. She saw Katia inside, standing with her back to the open bathroom window. The mist was now clearing off the dusty glass, and Jenny could see Katia’s bare back. She gasped when she saw the horrible scars and burns that patterned Katia’s skin, a dozen of which was clearly visible from where Jenny was standing. She felt her pain against her own skin, or at least a pale illusion conjured by her mind at the sight, and she realized Katia had suffered again and again the very acts Jenny had barely been threatened with once or twice.

  She stared at the image for a moment and then pulled back inside. She looked at the photos on the computer screen of other girls in the same horrible situation. So this was what Mats had been involved in. What Jenny had closed her eyes to over and over again.

  Steve and Ryan entered the room. Jenny was still halfway out the window, her intent obvious.

  Steve looked at the keys in her hand.

  “I’ve talked to them,” she blurted out. She had to come clean. There was no other way to do this. She leaned inside and took a step back into the room.

  “Who?” Steve asked, surprisingly cold in his delivery. “Who did you talk to?”

  “The Russians. At the hospital. They pushed me into a restroom and shoved my head against the wall.” She raised her hand and felt the back of her head. “They told me I had to give them money.”

  “What?” Ryan asked, stepping closer. “When?”

  “The Russians?” Steve asked, his eyes suddenly hard and narrow. “Why didn’t you tell us?”

  “They came for Katia?” Ryan continued, stepping closer still.

  “Yes! No! Not for Katia. Nothing like that.”

  “Like what?” Ryan asked. “Do they know she’s here?”

  “No! This has nothing to do with her! Well, some of it does, of course, somehow, but it’s my... It’s Mats, that stupid son-of-a-bitch!” She pulled out
the money from under her clothes and threw it on the desk, scattering the pens and papers and memory cards to the floor. The tape hurt her skin, even though only a fraction of it had come loose.

  She sank down on the bed. “I didn’t know what he did. He was always working. And he always had money. I didn’t know!” She had known. But not this. She hadn’t known all this. She had known the law was being broken and that things would end badly. But she hadn’t thought much beyond that point. She had known it was wrong, like everything else that Mats did was wrong, but she had let it be after that. She hadn’t looked deeper. She hadn’t wanted to.

  “But what?” Ryan began. “He owes them money?”

  “Yes, that!” She gestured toward the money on the desk and the floor. “And they said they wanted it right away. So that’s why I...”

  Katia opened the bathroom door and looked out. Jenny felt herself blushing.

  “It’s not Mats’s money,” Katia said. “Some of it, maybe, but not all.”

  “I took it from your bag,” Jenny said. “Fifty thousand of what was there. They said they were going to kill me.” Jenny tried to remember the exact words they had used, but she couldn’t recall what they had explicitly said they would do to her. Perhaps they had. It wasn’t something she wanted to think about, but she knew what they could do, and now what they had done to others. She wrapped her arms around herself, feeling vulnerable and ashamed. And she felt her face growing hot.

  Ryan picked up some money and studied it, as if some additional damaging information might reveal itself there. Finally, he looked up. “So how would you meet them to make this delivery? Did you already have a plan?”

  “I don’t know. I was going to drive back into town. They gave me a number to call. I haven’t tried it.” She put the keys down beside her and placed the note with the phone number next to the keys.

  “We could call the police,” Ryan said, but he didn’t sound very convincing.

  Katia was already shaking her head. “They wouldn’t know what to do about this,” she said. “It’s not only the girls. It’s weapons and other things. These are very dangerous people.” Katia was touching her dress, as if to make sure it fully covered her scarred skin. Jenny watched her with new understanding.

  “So what should we do?” Ryan asked.

  Katia went to the computer and zoomed in on a photo of Alex and Roman outside the barn until it filled the entire screen.

  “That’s them,” Jenny said. “Alex and Roman.”

  “Those two?” Steve asked and looked closer. “It’s the guys from the forest.”

  “They’re the only ones left now,” Katia said, nodding.

  “Which means they must leave the girls alone if they go into town.” Ryan looked at Jenny. “It was more than one guy, right? You met both of them?”

  “Yes. Both. But I didn’t meet them. They pulled me into a room.”

  “But it’s still was only two men,” he said. “So they have to leave the girls alone when they go into town, right?”

  “I don’t know!” Jenny said, speaking louder than she’d intended. What he said was reasonable enough, but she didn’t want to push him faster in the direction she saw he was heading. What he was planning, what Katia was encouraging in her own subtle way, was very dangerous for everyone involved, and Ryan was moving much too fast. Still, it wasn’t Jenny’s place to protest anymore. She desperately looked at Katia for support, but the girl’s eyes were only shining with hope.

  “If you go,” Katia said, looking at Jenny, “and you give them the money, the rest of us could go to the farm and get the girls and take them away from there.”

  “Shouldn’t we get more people involved?” Ryan asked. “Not the police, I know, but someone else?”

  “No,” Jenny said and shook her head. “Not until we’re far away from here.”

  “I think she’s right,” Steve said. “We’re all outsiders in one way or another, and we haven’t had much luck with the locals.” He looked at Jenny. “Present company excluded, of course.”

  Jenny looked down.

  “All right. Then we need a plan.” Ryan looked at Jenny. “What if you’d make the phone call and pretend? You wouldn’t meet them, or give them any money, nothing like that. We shouldn’t give them anything. We’d just lure them out, lure them into town, away from the farm.”

  “They’d hunt us down,” Jenny said.

  Ryan turned to Steve with a dark look that seemed to communicate a solution to that problem, a violent and definite solution, an absolute commitment. She suddenly wondered what these men were capable of, if challenged. She wondered what any man was capable of, given half a chance.

  “Will you go after them?” Katia asked, with obvious hope in her voice, urging them on.

  Ryan looked at Steve again, and they both nodded, the two of them suddenly ready to go to war.

  Jenny studied their faces and saw that there was no going back now. At least Ryan hadn’t mentioned the photos of Mats to anyone yet, and hopefully he would keep it that way. Mats was dead already, and she didn’t want any more shame added to what she was already feeling.

  “All right,” Ryan said and looked at Katia again with a decisive nod. “Let’s do it.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  RYAN TRAINED HIS camera on the barn and shot a series of close-ups, zooming quickly between windows, doors, a tractor, and the roof of a house farther back. Knowing the details of this landscape could mean life or death for them, and somehow he felt up to the task. It was as if he’d been waiting for this moment ever since his capture in Afghanistan. After he’d awoken with his head banging against that floor, a cloth over his head and his arms behind his back, somewhere in the back of his mind he’d been longing for a confrontation with death and evil ever since. A confrontation he’d be prepared for this time around.

  He panned the camera across the barn again, along the chimney, down the drain pipes, compiling anything that might turn out to be useful to them. He studied the details, everything he could find, yet he also understood what he was doing would never be enough. He was making his observations from a single vantage point at a single point in time, and that didn’t cover enough of what they needed to know when they launched their raid.

  “Can you see anyone?” Katia asked.

  Ryan felt her lying next to him on the moss-covered ground, her eyes on him, keenly observing his expressions. He shook his head without taking his eyes from the viewfinder. He moved his focus from window to window, but was unable to see any activity inside. They had known it would be difficult from this distance. There should be only two men left now, and five girls, and he hoped any reinforcements would take days or even weeks to arrive. He tilted the camera downward and found the van he’d seen towing the wreckage into the forest. The men were still somewhere on site, as far as he could tell.

  He moved back a few feet down the slope and turned around. Steve and Jenny were standing farther back, at the foot of the slope, but out of sight from the barn. Jenny was holding Mats’s rifle, the Remington model 700, but aiming it prudently at the ground below. Seeing her with the rifle made him think how terribly things had evolved over the last twenty-four hours, as if they were all charging along with a morbid momentum, bringing destruction with them wherever they went.

  But putting it that way wasn’t right. He couldn’t and shouldn’t blame anyone else. He was the one. He’d been doing this on his own for some time now, searching for trouble, it seemed, all over the world. And now here he was, with his new friends, about to launch an attack on armed mobsters that were neither Taliban nor Al Qaeda, but instead the closest approximation he could possibly find in the Lapland forests.

  The first step in this perhaps ill-conceived plan for freedom, retribution, and whatever else they were really up to had been to go back to the waterfall to get the rifle from his rental car. The drive there had been tense and silent, the narrow track through the forest already holding too many memories, of the chase, the crash,
and leaving Mats dead in that burning wreckage. It was impossible to live like this, packing a lifetime of danger and wrongdoing into a day or two. The mind lost track of cause and effect, time itself all got mixed up, and you started to slip.

  And how they were slipping.

  He could feel the envelope with the gruesome photos hot against his chest now, rubbing against his bruises, and he still hadn’t had time to figure out how those fitted into all this. He had smashed a window to get inside the car, and then folded the envelope inside his jacket before he moved his belongings to the Land Rover and finally left the car behind in the forest. In a different life such damages would have been enough to cause him serious financial worry, but now it didn’t even matter. Lead and steel mattered, and flesh and blood.

  He turned and looked at Steve and Jenny now farther down the slope.

  “It looks like they’re home,” he said. “If you’re ready, it’s time.”

  Steve put a hand on Jenny’s arm. “You ready?”

  “I’m never going to be ready.”

  “We could do it some other way,” Steve offered. “We could call the police.”

  “No. No. They’d have to call in people from Stockholm, and it’d take days.”

  Steve nodded and stepped closer. “We’re right here with you.”

  “I’ll do it,” Jenny said. “I’ll do it. I just need a couple of seconds to think.”

  Ryan like the way Steve handled the situation, without pushing, but actually comforting her. He wouldn’t have had the patience, wouldn’t have said the right things, and he wouldn’t have gotten her to do what he wanted her to do. Steve was a leader, as well as a team player, and he knew how to steer things along and achieve just about anything he wanted. He inspired confidence. Ryan needed that, in his own raging confusion.

  Jenny handed the rifle to Steve and pulled out her phone. Her hands were trembling.