Cage

by Lilja Sigurdardóttir

  But if she was going to be in the pay of the devil, it would be as well to make it worthwhile. Using the torch on her phone, she sifted through the pile of bills, adding up what she owed – something she had not dared to do before for fear of learning the overall picture. Then she doubled the total and emailed Agla.

  Agla’s reply arrived before any doubts had time to take root in María’s mind. Agla apparently did not see María’s fee as large, so María got to her feet and felt her way to the door in the darkness. The decision had been taken. She had let the establishment lead her by the hand, had sold her credibility and had become a stereotype – a tool of big business. On the other hand, Agla seemed to be looking into something that did arouse María’s interest. What’s more they seemed to be hoping for the same outcome: she was also hoping to get enough material to frighten the aluminium giants; the ones who were robbing Iceland.

  Twenty minutes later she was standing on Finnur’s front steps. She had deliberately not called her former colleague from the special prosecutor’s office to warn him, preferring not to give him an opportunity to hide himself away. The expression on his face when he saw her confirmed her suspicion.

  ‘A rare white raven,’ he said, gesturing for her to step inside.

  She shook her head.

  ‘This isn’t a courtesy call,’ she said. ‘I need some information.’

  He sighed.

  ‘You of all people should be able to appreciate my position,’ he said. ‘It’s not easy to speak to the press, and I can’t do so without specific permission.’

  ‘I don’t need to talk to you,’ María said. ‘I need a list from the Central Bank. It’s a list you can easily request and you don’t have to justify asking.’

  ‘My dear María—’ Finnur began in an avuncular tone, before she interrupted him.

  ‘I could say the same to you,’ she said. ‘You of all people should be able to appreciate my position, considering you initiated a certain investigation that resulted in me losing my job.’

  She had expected him to protest more vigorously, had assumed she would have to apply more pressure, but instead he hung his head and nodded. There was no doubt that he was plagued with guilt over her situation.

  ‘What do you need?’

  23

  It no longer became properly dark in the evenings, but as dusk stretched into a colourless grey, it was still difficult to see in the boiler room. Anton switched on his head torch, and Gunnar did the same. They had put together a few different versions of detonator and fastened each one to a stick of dynamite. Gunnar had made three little bombs by binding the rockets they had bought with tape to dynamite sticks, and Anton had prepared rather more sophisticated ignition systems using batteries, lengths of wire and the heads of matches to provide the spark. His detonator worked – he had tried it out a couple of times without any dynamite, but there was no telling how it would work when they tried it for real; and they couldn’t watch it as they would have to run some distance away before the explosion.

  Between them they had made a bomb using the ignition from a gas refrigerator. That was the closest they had been able to get to a remote control, but Anton was sure that the problem would be solved if they could figure out how to connect this to a clock. First they would have to test this version of the detonator to be sure that it would light the fuse.

  ‘What about Molotov cocktails?’ Gunnar asked, holding the petrol can that Anton had finally agreed to buy, hoping to satisfy Gunnar, who seemed to think that petrol was the solution they were looking for.

  ‘I reckon we shouldn’t make those until later; on the spot,’ Anton said. ‘We can take the can and the bottles with us, and make them up just before we set the explosion off.’

  ‘Isn’t it better to have them ready?’ Gunnar said, already tearing an old T-shirt into strips to stuff into the necks of the bottles.

  ‘I don’t want to be messing around with petrol in here,’ Anton said. ‘My dad’s upstairs.’

  Gunnar gave in.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘But if we have everything ready for the cocktails then we can go straight after school tomorrow.’

  Anton nodded. He had to admit to himself that he was looking forward to trying out the explosives, even though he wasn’t nearly as excited as Gunnar was. He switched off his head torch and turned up the radio. An MP he hadn’t heard of before was being interviewed on Radio Edda.

  ‘The problem is that radical Islam has knocked on our door. It’s already here in our countries, and it has little if anything to do with any kind of faith,’ the politician said. ‘Islam isn’t just a religion, it’s an all-encompassing philosophy of human relations that takes in everything – law, social affairs and not least how people relate to each other.’

  ‘We need to remind ourselves why we’re doing this,’ Anton said, and Gunnar nodded so energetically that the light on his head danced in the gloom.

  24

  ‘But where’s your income?’ Agla asked in bewilderment as she peered at the computer screen. She had decided not to let Elísa find any chinks in her armour. Instead she would act as if nothing had happened, so she had appeared in the common room before dinner and suggested they get her tax return out of the way. She had already arranged it with the prison officer on duty, who took them to the library and switched on the wifi with the strict instruction that they were only to work on Elísa’s tax return, and Agla wasn’t to let her anywhere near anything else on the internet.

  ‘There,’ Elísa said, pointing at the income column.

  ‘Do you have any unearned income?’

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘From associations or limited companies?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Profits, then? Where did you get money from?’

  ‘Just from the fish plant I worked in for a few months last year. And from the Boss, you know. Not that I’m going to declare that to the taxman!’

  ‘Are you telling me that this is the only income you had for the whole year?’

  The girl was clearly in a mess, and her declared income for the year was less than half of what Agla paid herself monthly. Judging by Elísa’s online bank account, there were a few debts to payday lenders already in arrears and in recovery, so the earnings from the Boss could hardly have been large.

  ‘If you like I can transfer a small amount to you so you can pay off all these debts and start afresh,’ Agla said. It irritated her to see these recovery notices over amounts that were hardly more than pocket money.

  ‘Are you so rich you don’t know what to do with your money?’ Elísa asked.

  ‘These aren’t big amounts,’ Agla replied.

  Elísa seemed to realise that she wasn’t joking.

  ‘No,’ she said, smiling awkwardly and dropping her eyes. ‘Don’t do it. I’d only go wild when I get out of here and blow it all on dope. But thanks, all the same.’

  ‘These small loans are all in recovery now, so they’re only going to get legal costs and interest piled up on top of them. You know that?’ Agla said, and made a mental note to herself to dispose of her shares in a payday lender. That particular investment, while low-risk and profitable, had suddenly given her a sour taste in her mouth.

  ‘I try not to think about it,’ Elísa said and shrugged.

  Agla looked at her carefully and tried to work out what she might be thinking, but didn’t get the impression that she was thinking about anything at all. In any case, she seemed to see no urgency to resolve her financial woes. A lock of tousled hair fell over Elísa’s forehead. Agla was filled with a sudden desire to reach out and tuck it behind her ear. There was something about that wild hair that made her long to tame it, comb it, make it follow some rules. Instead, she copied the numbers of the financial demands, opened her own online account and paid them all off in one fell swoop.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Elísa asked, peering at the screen with a blank look on her face. This girl had a personality all of her own, but was far from
the sharpest intellect Agla had encountered.

  ‘I paid off your debts,’ Agla said. ‘I can afford it and you can’t go on racking up interest while you’re in here and can’t pay anything off.’

  ‘Oh.’

  A single tear straggled down Elísa’s cheek, and that, combined with the untamed lock of hair, put Agla suddenly at a loss. It wasn’t the kind of amount worth shedding tears over; but then she had never been able to grasp why women were so sensitive about money. It had been the same with Sonja: she’d never let Agla pay for a single thing. And when Agla had bought the house – that was when she had freaked out and left her.

  ‘Don’t cry,’ she whispered. ‘It just annoys me, seeing that interest piling up.’

  ‘I’ll never have the money to pay you back,’ Elísa said and wiped away the tear from her cheek, much to Agla’s relief.

  She was about to tell her that it didn’t matter – which was entirely true – when she felt Elísa’s hot hand on her leg, too high up her leg.

  Once more, Agla felt as if she had been punched; in fact this time it felt more like a stab. How could she have been so stupid as to try and help this person? She never seemed to fail to wreck any friendly overtures with some clumsy response.

  ‘I don’t know what the hell you think I am!’ she rasped, then got to her feet and sounded the buzzer. It had been months since all these locked doors had got on her nerves, but since this girl’s arrival, she’d truly felt like a prisoner – constantly prevented from escaping Elísa’s attentions.

  25

  María was shredding the back page of the Fréttablaðið freesheet newspaper into little strips. There was no real point to this activity, it was just an outlet for the frustration that had welled up inside her when she saw the news item stating that the ethics committee of the journalists’ union had censured her for The Squirrel’s misreporting of a story. She had been certain that this had been forgotten long ago. It was true; she had jumped the gun, running a story before it was confirmed. But she had then deleted the post and apologised to all those concerned. She knew that someone had notified the ethics committee, but had no idea that they had examined the case. It came as a complete surprise to see this surfacing now, more than a year later.

  She got to her feet, went to the bathroom and turned on the shower, realising as she did so that Maggi would see the news item. He always made a point of reading Fréttablaðið. He would be sitting over his organic porridge somewhere, reflecting on how much of a disappointment she had been to him. As she stared at her own tired face in the mirror, she had, once again, the nagging feeling that she had also disappointed herself.

  She had once been so sure about her own qualities: her sense and determination; the fact that she didn’t let anyone pull the wool over her eyes. Ahead of her she’d thought she had a bright future in the justice system, plus a long, contented marriage with Maggi, and maybe two or three children.

  She was gripped by a sudden longing to call Maggi, to try and work out from his tone of voice whether or not he had read the item about her, but she managed to control the urge to pick up the phone. He had asked her to stop calling him. He couldn’t stand hearing any more tearful apologies, and in reality she understood his position completely. When she wallowed in self-pity, she couldn’t stand herself either.

  In the shower she opened her mouth wide, let it fill with water and screamed with all her might so that water spurted out in hot gushes. She had perfected being able to scream underwater, into a pillow and even into her elbow, ridding herself of all the tension and disappointment without scaring the neighbours witless. It was better to scream than to cry, and it was a sign of recovery that these days she screamed more than she wept.

  Out of the shower, she wrapped herself in a dressing gown, sat on the sofa with her laptop and checked her emails. Her despondency instantly vanished when she saw a message from an unknown sender. It was from a Gmail address made up of a series of numbers, but when she saw the document from the Central Bank in the attachments she knew right away who the sender was. She forwarded the list to Agla, got up and went over to her desk and plugged the printer in.

  In the bedroom she rooted through the pile of clean clothes, found jeans and a T-shirt, and decided that she could buy socks somewhere during the day and could get by without underwear, as she often did now. Her laundry system suited her perfectly, but would have shocked Maggi to the core. There were two piles on the floor – one of dirty stuff on its way to the washing machine, and the other of clean clothes that had come out of the dryer. The result was a circular flow of clothes; at some point, they spent time on her body as they transitioned from the clean to the dirty pile, like a hard-working official working his way through stacks of documents.

  The system didn’t extend to underwear, though. She hadn’t managed to keep that side of things under control and resorted to frequent purchases of economy packs of pink or light-blue knickers, which cost a fraction of what she had paid for the classy lingerie she had worn while she and Maggi had been married. Socks had become disposable items. There was no way that she could be bothered to pair them up.

  The printer had churned out the Central Bank’s list by the time she returned. The coffee left in the jug was cool, but she poured it into a mug anyway and sat down on the sofa with the printout.

  26

  Agla could make neither head nor tail of the Central Bank list that María had emailed her. She had repeatedly compared it to the data from the London Metal Exchange, and on the surface it seemed that the Icelandic smelter exported a healthy amount of registered aluminium through the LME system. The price level for these sales, however, was less than a third of what it should have been on the world market. The smelter’s revenues had therefore halved in size over the last three years. At the same time, though, large invoices were presented every month to the smelter by a company called Meteorite Metals, and the smelter paid them punctually.

  She looked up Meteorite Metals and found that it offered storage facilities for metals. She then went to the smelter’s annual report for the previous year and saw that practically all of that year’s aluminium production was recorded as an asset – it hadn’t been sold. This was looking highly suspicious. Agla’s conclusion was that the Icelandic smelter was producing aluminium but then simply shipping it overseas for storage.

  Agla clicked on a folder on her desktop marked Filed Invoices, which was where she hid the Tor browser, which she used when she didn’t want the prison authorities to know what she was doing. She keyed in her password, sent María a message on the Bleep app and waited for a moment to find out if she was online.

  Agla: There’s no sense in producing aluminium for years and leaving it in storage.

  María: Isn’t it a known business strategy to sit on assets to push the price up?

  Agla: Sure. But the price hasn’t risen.

  María: Weird.

  Agla: Yep.

  María: You saw Meteorite? What’s that?

  Agla: Seems to be for metal storage.

  María: Have you Googled it?

  Agla: Yes. Nice front page, but probably not much behind it.

  María: You mean it’s a fake company?

  Agla: Could be. Could you fly over and take a look?

  María: WTF? What would I do?

  Agla: Go there. Check that the company exists. Just keep all your receipts.

  There was a long pause before María replied.

  María: OK.

  Agla wondered whether María would find out anything interesting. It was very likely that Meteorite Metals didn’t actually exist and was just a brass-plate company used to hide a trail of money. Agla was familiar with how all this worked; she even owned a few brass-plate companies herself. She suspected that the scheme had been designed so that all the costs of producing the aluminium were borne by the smelter in Iceland, while the revenue went direct to a parent company overseas – which therefore paid zero tax in Iceland. She knew the kinds of tricks th
at could be played to make this happen. Whatever really lay behind all this, the scheme bore all Ingimar’s hallmarks.

  Elísa met her as she returned to the women’s wing.

  ‘Hey, I’m really sorry about last night,’ she said, following Agla to her cell.

  Agla’s only response was to shut her cell door behind her, but as soon as she turned round, the door opened again and Elísa put her head inside.

  ‘A closed door means that someone prefers to be alone,’ Agla said drily.

  ‘Yeah, I know. House rules and all that. I just…’ Elísa fell silent and slipped further inside. ‘I just wanted to explain, y’see, I’m not used to people doing anything for me without wanting something in return.’

  Agla sighed. Her own experience was much the same. Everyone wanted something for their efforts.

  ‘All I want is to be left alone,’ she said. ‘Shut the door as you leave.’

  ‘But, listen, I was only joking when I did what I did. I must’ve got the wrong end of the stick – I thought you were like me.’

  ‘Like you how?’

  ‘You know. Queer,’ Elísa said and giggled as if it were funny.

  Agla felt the anger growing inside her.

  ‘It’s none of your fucking business what I’m like or why I’m here, or anything else! Just stop being so nosy and leave me in peace!’

  27

  The north wind was so cold that they were both left with red faces and running noses by the time they took the turning off Hafravatnsvegur and set off along the track up the slope. Gunnar killed the moped’s engine and Anton gingerly dismounted. On the way it had occurred to him that if they came off the moped for some reason, they would be in real trouble – all the explosives they had prepared were in the pack on his back and there was a full can of petrol jammed between them on the seat. It wouldn’t need much of a spark to blow them sky high.