by Mark Parragh
“Our data is safe as long as the man remains in Iceland.”
“Not exactly. Our data is isolated only as long as the man remains out of communication.”
“Correct,” said Einar. “I assume the signals team is prepared to intercept any efforts to transmit the data. But I don’t believe he’ll make such an attempt. The plan was to recover the recording device and physically carry it out of the country. That plan failed, and we disrupted his escape. I don’t believe he has access to a communication link that would suffice. Certainly not in the remote countryside where he is.”
“Perhaps,” said Arnason. But he didn’t sound particularly mollified.
“Our new strategy will be to screen the towns and roads. Whether he wants to leave the country himself or make a broadband connection, he must reach a more developed area. That leaves him very few choices. We have resources in Reykjavik. But I still think he’s making for Akureyri. I’m headed there to intercept him. My other teams are sweeping the farms and watching major intersections.”
“Very well, Persson. The board agrees with your analysis. Keep your men on the roads and set your trap in Akureyri. We will expect regular updates.”
“Of course, sir.”
And then Arnason was gone. Einar swore and put the phone back in his pocket. The cool wind whipped around the corners of the building and whistled in the eaves. In the distance he could just make out a silver semi trailer moving along the Ring Road the better part of a kilometer away. Between them lay nothing but broken ground and sparse grassland.
Where the hell was the man managing to hide himself?
It didn’t matter now. Einar’s new plan was sound. There were only so many ways to move in the countryside. He had men patrolling the few road junctions, checking the remote farms. If the intruder somehow made it past them, he would head for Akureyri, and Einar himself would be waiting there for him.
It would work. It had to work. His own personal stakes were growing with each passing hour. He didn’t want to think about what would happen to him if he allowed a data breach of this scope on his watch. It wouldn’t be good.
Einar made his way back around the building. The helicopter sat waiting beside the fuel tanks, sleek, ominous, gleaming in the sun. Iceland was a small country. Einar could be in Akureyri within an hour if he left now. If his men located the intruder out here somewhere, he could be back on the scene just as quickly. Between the helicopter and the SUVs, his team had the advantage of mobility.
It was just a question of where the man would turn up. He couldn’t stay out there forever.
Chapter 25
They rode for an hour or more. Crane had nothing to say, and Halla kept her thoughts to herself. They rode through grassland spattered with pale brown and green. The terrain rolled gently. Sometimes they would pass small stands of brush or a lone sapling. Crane could see mountains in the distance—dark, craggy shapes streaked with snow.
The fence was the first human thing he saw. A line of weathered wooden posts strung with rust-colored wire. It looked like it could have been there for decades. There was no obvious indication of why this particular land was fenced off. Beyond it, the terrain rose gently to a low crest. Crane assumed there must be a farmstead on the other side. Halla turned them to the right, and Crane spotted a metal gate.
“Your place?” Crane asked.
“My friend Mori,” said Halla. “His sheep graze here. He has a Land Rover.”
Crane nodded. Halla was nothing if not simply spoken. She slid down off the wild horse and patted it affectionately. It nickered happily and wandered off to a nearby hummock of grass. Halla gestured for Crane to dismount as well. He did, feeling odd twinges in muscles he was unaccustomed to using.
Halla took Agnarögn’s reins and led her through the gate. When Crane was through, she closed it behind them, and they walked up the slope. From the top, Mori’s farm was laid out below them. Crane saw a group of low buildings around a gravel driveway that led out to the road. A few dozen sheep wandered along the fence near the driveway, and a tractor sat parked outside the barn. The small river he’d seen on his map wove a sinuous path down the far side of the road. Crane saw the Land Rover Halla had spoken of. It was an antique. The black Chevy Suburban parked in front of the house, however, was not. It had tinted windows and a deeply polished finish that gleamed in the sunlight. Crane looked for people but saw none.
Halla had stopped cold. Crane put a hand on her arm and murmured, “down.” She nodded and led Agnarögn back down the slope until they couldn’t see the house any longer.
“Your friend has company,” said Crane. “That doesn’t look like one of the locals.”
Halla said nothing. She was looking at Crane.
“That’s not what the police drive around here either, is it?”
“It is not.”
There would be two of them, Crane guessed. They would be inside with the owner, asking if he’d seen anything. Strangers moving across the land. Signs someone had been prowling around his farm. They probably had a story about some horrible thing he’d done.
“Does your friend live alone?” he asked.
Halla nodded.
“He’ll be okay. He doesn’t know anything. If we stay out of sight, they’ll figure that out and they’ll leave. If they do find us somehow, you hand me over, do you hear me? You pretend to believe whatever they tell you, and you let them take me.”
Halla looked shaken for the first time since he’d met her.
Crane moved back up the slope in a low crouch until he could just see the edge of the house and the cement walk out to the driveway where the Suburban was parked. He lay down on the ground and watched. A moment later Halla appeared and lay beside him with her rifle. Neither spoke. The sheep moved along the edge of a pasture in front of the house. The wind rustled through the grass.
Nothing happened for perhaps five minutes. Then Crane heard the front door open. Two men in black Datafall uniforms walked out to the Suburban. It beeped as one of them unlocked the doors with the key fob. They didn’t appear to be armed, but Crane knew they would have weapons in ready reach. He glanced over at Halla, but couldn’t tell what she was thinking.
They got in, and the Suburban pulled back out to the road and was gone.
“Come on,” Halla ordered. She was back in control again, moving him down the slope toward the farmhouse with small motions of the Sako’s muzzle.
They stepped up onto the porch and Halla knocked. There was no answer.
“Mori!” she shouted as she rapped at the door again. Then something in Icelandic.
A moment later, the door opened, and an older man in jeans and a battered brown sweater hurried them inside and quickly closed the door. They held a hurried conversation in Icelandic as Crane looked around. They were in a rather threadbare sitting room with a wooden floor, mismatched furniture, and walls painted a pale robin’s egg blue. Old family photographs looked sternly down at Crane from the walls—craggy-faced old women, and men with enormous white beards dressed in hand-sewn black suits. Through a doorway, Crane could see into the kitchen where a teapot was starting to whistle.
They were talking about him, obviously, both of them pointing at him from time to time, looking over at him as if he was about to explode.
“Did you kill a woman at a farm?” Halla said at last, in an accusing voice. “For food?”
So that was the role they’d chosen for him, the dangerous wanderer who would steal from you and kill you if you confronted him. He sighed and shook his head.
“I did not,” he said. “That is a lie.” He kept his words simple to be as unambiguous as possible.
“I didn’t believe them,” the man said. “They wanted me to think they were National Police. They didn’t say it, but that’s what they wanted me to think. But I knew better. They were not good men. I felt this. I am Mori,” he added, offering Crane his hand.
Crane shook his hand. “You’re a good judge of people, Mori,” Crane said,
with a snarky glance toward Halla. “What was it about them that set off your instincts? What did they do?”
“I am making tea for my lunch when they drove up,” Mori said. “They were very...” he searched for a word, finally saying, “dónalegur.”
“Rude,” said Halla.
“Yes, that’s the word,” Mori said. “I told them no one was here, but I thought they would search the house. Who are these men?”
“He says they are a company from the city,” Halla said. “Doing something bad, and he can prove it.”
“It’s right there in my pack,” Crane said, with a nod. “If you want to see what they’re so upset about.”
Halla and Mori traded a look, then Halla opened the pack.
“Wrapped in the black cloth,” Crane offered.
Halla unwrapped it. They studied the small box epoxied to a broken piece of circuit board, copper traces ending abruptly at the edge.
“What is it?” Mori finally asked in confusion.
Crane smiled. “It’s like a thumb drive.”
Mori nodded. He’d heard of those at least.
“The data on there proves they’ve been working on a system for breaking electronic locks. For reading people’s email. Getting into bank accounts. If that thing makes it out of the country, they’re finished.”
Halla and Mori looked at each other again. Crane could see them trying to decide whether they believed him. It was just a hunk of plastic, after all. He couldn’t really prove it was what he said it was.
“This is for the police,” Mori said at last.
“That’s where we were going,” said Halla. “I came for the Land Rover.”
Mori nodded and fished a set of keys out of his pocket. “You’ll need more gas for Blönduós,” he said, handing Halla the keys. “Tank in the small barn,” he added. “Just got it filled last week.”
Halla nodded. “Keep an eye on him.” She set the rifle and Crane’s pack down on a chair and went out. Mori watched her leave, then turned to Crane.
“Have a seat, John,” he said. “I’m missing my tea.”
Crane sat down and studied the sparse, bachelor decor of the place while Mori puttered in the kitchen. He came back a few moments later with two cups of tea. Crane took his with a grateful nod.
“You know you just left me alone in here with the gun, right?”
“Pff,” Mori snorted. “You’re not going to shoot me. Halla, she…” He nodded toward the outside. “She’s just that way.”
Crane sipped his tea. “What’s her story?”
“She lives on her father’s old farm back in the hills,” said Mori. “With that horse and some sheep. She’s half wild. Always has been. I used to joke her mother went out walking one night and met an elf on the trail, and that’s where she came from.”
Crane grinned. “You and her…” he said with a conspiratorial tone.
Mori waved him off. “Bah. The times I asked her to marry me. But she never would. When she has to go to town, she comes for the truck. And sometimes, when the winds are harsh…”
Crane heard Halla stomping back up the porch steps. He nodded to Mori. “I won’t let anything happen to her.”
Mori nodded thanks, and Crane got up, picked up the pack and the Sako. The door opened and Halla’s eyes widened when she saw Crane with the gun. But then he handed her the rifle and shrugged his pack over one shoulder.
“We need to move,” he said. “Mori, thank you for the tea. It’s just what I needed.”
Mori watched them from the door as they climbed into the ancient Land Rover and rattled off down the drive. Crane still saw him, a silhouette in the doorway, as they turned onto the main road and headed north.
Chapter 26
Georges found the woman running a shoestring charter operation at the far edge of the private aviation area. She spoke no English, and Georges certainly spoke no Norwegian. But she had a smattering of French, and so Georges was able to convey the idea that he needed to get to Grimsey immediately. In turn, she managed to get across that her name was Marit, and that she had a twin-engine Baron G58 that wasn’t doing anything to help pay for itself for the foreseeable future.
In the end, money proved the universal language. Georges suspected he had hugely overpaid, even for a zero-notice international charter. But that was what Josh’s ridiculous wealth was for.
They flew west into a sun that never truly set, over the dark void of the sea below. Georges sat up front, alongside Marit, with his bag of tricks in his lap. He had assembled what seemed useful from the things he’d brought to Iceland: a tricked-out laptop, a couple programmable radio transceivers, a smartphone that he’d jailbroken and tweaked with some custom apps, a pocket tool kit. At the last moment, he’d added an old Gerber Mark I boot knife he’d found in a toolbox aboard the Gulfstream. He hoped he wouldn’t find a use for it.
It was a long flight, with little to do besides stare out at the endless water and wonder if he’d made a terrible mistake. He knew nothing about Marit or her airplane. Perhaps she’d never flown over open water before. Perhaps she’d taken a job she was completely unqualified to do out of raw financial desperation. How would he know? He imagined them flying around the North Atlantic, searching in vain for Iceland until they ran out of fuel and simply vanished.
But in truth, he knew it was what could be waiting on the ground that had him imagining vague terrors. He was the one rushing into danger that he wasn’t really prepared for. He had no idea what he would find in Akureyri. Perhaps nothing at all. It was possible that they’d long since found Crane. He could be lying dead in the highlands someplace right now, waiting for hikers to discover his bones in another twenty years.
No, Georges told himself. He imagined the voice of a math teacher who had terrified him as a boy. He’s alive and he needs your help. You will find him and bring him out. Be a man. Go and do it now.
“Islande,” Marit said suddenly. Iceland. She pointed off to the left, and Georges could just make out a dark line of land riding on the sea. Georges clutched his bag and smiled at her. She’d gotten him this far, at least.
“Île Grimsey?” he asked.
She shrugged. “Une demi-heure.”
Eventually the plane began to descend, and Georges saw the island ahead. Grimsey was a bare, windswept plateau of deep green grass and sheer gray cliffs in the middle of the ocean. Seeing it, he wasn’t surprised the Gulfstream couldn’t take him there. The island was tiny. The airstrip—3,400 feet long, the pilot had said—appeared to run almost the entire length of the western coast.
Georges didn’t see a single tree. The whole island seemed bare. It was flat and tilted slightly so something dropped would roll west, cross the airstrip, and eventually end up in the sea. There was a lighthouse and a village of perhaps two dozen buildings at one end of the island. What kind of people chose to live in a place like this, he wondered. What the hell was he getting himself into?
The Baron hit the runway and rolled down to taxi speed with plenty of room to spare. He was here. Marit taxied back to the “terminal” end of the airstrip, where there was a low, gray, nearly windowless building and a metal frame tower holding a pair of dish-shaped microwave antennas.
There didn’t seem to be anyone to direct them, so Marit found a spot off to the side, where a pair of small planes were already tied down and covered in tarps, and slid in beside them.
The wind off the sea was brisk as they climbed out of the plane. It whipped the sides of Georges’ jacket away from his body, so he zipped it up and jammed his hands in his pockets. He wasn’t well prepared for the climate here, he thought. He wasn’t really prepared for any of this. He would have to improvise, the way Crane did. He took his bag from the cockpit and slung it over his shoulder.
“Well, you’re here,” said Marit in her spotty French. She seemed dubious that anyone needed to get to a place like this with the urgency Georges had claimed.
“I’ll take the ferry to the mainland and find my friend,” he
answered. “We’ll be back as soon as we can. You’ll wait, right?”
She looked around at the village and shrugged. “They must have a bar here someplace.”
They walked toward the town together. A woman on a bicycle appeared as they reached the end of the main street. So the place wasn’t abandoned at least. A sudden thought struck Georges.
“If my friend comes back alone, you’ll take him back to Stavanger, yes? His name is John Crane. He’s white, maybe 30, tall with dark hair.”
She looked at him for a long moment, as if unsure she’d understood.
“Are you going to be okay?” she asked eventually. “Are you in trouble?”
He nodded. “I’ll be fine. Just… just if he comes back without me…”
They found a restaurant with a bar toward the middle of one of the village’s two parallel streets and stopped out front. Marit looked at him, worried. “I can fly to Akureyri,” she said.
“No,” Georges shook his head. “It’s better you stay here. We’ll be back.”
She nodded. “Good luck,” she said. Then Georges hitched his bag up on his shoulder and headed off toward the small harbor and the ferry terminal.
Chapter 27
Halla drove along the narrow road by the river. The Land Rover rattled and squeaked. It was long past due for a suspension overhaul if nothing else, Crane thought. He sat in the cracked and scuffed passenger seat and watched the landscape roll by. They passed an occasional farm, but even those were sparse here.
“How far to Blönduós?” he asked after a long silence.
“Half an hour, maybe a little more,” said Halla. Then she fell silent again. Crane could see her grappling with uncomfortable thoughts.
Half an hour to Blönduós and the police. He needed a solid plan before then. For all his claims of innocence, he really didn’t want to trust his fate to the Icelandic police. He was an outsider here. And he had in fact broken into Datafall’s facility, done a significant amount of damage, assaulted several people, and stolen their property. His side of the story wouldn’t look especially good to a police officer. If it even got that far. Crane had no idea what level of influence Datafall would have over a small-town police department, but it was entirely possible that they’d place a couple calls up the chain of command and be told to hand Crane over to them.