Antler Plan (A Konrad Loki Thriller Book 1)

by Joonas Huhta

  “I’m just a man who casts a skeptical eye over the stories that are either lies or unreasonably interpreted. Religious people should thank me for showing them their rotten condition.”

  Ruut riffled through the pages. “You’re right. People should appreciate every atheist, skeptic, pessimist, and dark mind out there because if correctly understood, you serve the Cause. You’re not anti-God—you’re anti-religion. Every religion is bound to become blind to its actions and routines: corruption, idiocy, anti-science, anti-unity and abuse of the children, young, and women. But you are ready to throw the beautiful baby out with the bathwater because the water is so dirty that you don’t see the baby in it.”

  “I’m sorry. Some things don’t deserve to get legs. And most deserve to be cut at the knees.”

  Ruut swallowed a laugh. “God’s porch light is always on for you.”

  “God’s infinite cabinet of unearthly delights awaits me then.”

  She leaned forward. “You honestly think that faith is sugarcoating reality?”

  “Like cotton candy,” Konrad replied, “sweet and easy to consume, but less than nutritious.”

  Ruut spat some angry clichés, and he feigned interest. He focused on rubbing his jaw, surer than ever that as long as there was religion, mankind was unfit to build a civilization with shared values.

  Ruut tapped a page of The Bible rhythmically with her index finger.

  Konrad read the line. “You shall commit adultery. What about it?”

  “Why did Oona want to share this information with you?”

  “Beats the hell out of me.”

  Ruut craned her neck to meet Konrad’s eyes.

  Konrad raised an eyebrow. “The Wicked Bible is worth a great penny. Perhaps she wanted me to sell it. But how did Gideon come to possess it?”

  Ruut’s phone rang. “Maybe Oona had paid him to deliver the package.” Locating her cell, she swung her jacket and melted snow fell on the page. “Shit.”

  Konrad stopped Ruut from drying the paper with her hand and signaled her to take the call. She started talking to her phone while Konrad swept the crumbles off a napkin and pressed the paper gently.

  His eyes flew wide open.

  The water scratched off a letter A. Underneath came forth a corresponding red letter.

  Konrad looked at Ruut who noticed it too and was letting the phone do the talking. She laid her phone on the table and sat, her gaze never leaving the letter. She then came to the other side of the table, stood so close to him that their shoulders touched.

  Konrad swiped the pages with the napkin. Another colorful letter revealed itself.

  Ruut wet her napkin in Konrad’s glass and went after him.

  More letters.

  Then a few more.

  All scaled in different colors.

  “A rainbow?” Konrad marveled. “Is this a gay bible?”

  Ruut was writing something down to her napkin. “Wait, they form a sentence.”

  Her handwriting was scrawling at best. Konrad asked, “What’s it say?”

  She wrote the line in big letters below the first. Together they studied the message and each other’s faces.

  A SIN IN TWO RACES.

  “I still get gay vibes,” Konrad said.

  “Haven’t you read The Da Vinci Code? Where every intellect, detective and cryptographer is brain-dead compared to Robert Langdon? Let’s try a different word-order.”

  Konrad shrugged.

  Ruut sat on the opposite side of the table. She started writing, and Konrad contemplated for a while how close to him she had edged into his personal space. They both started writing letters to napkins. Ruut went to pick up more. Konrad played with words and came to the conclusion he should start doing crosswords. For an extended period he was relaxed, something that usually only his research could offer.

  They spent fifteen minutes in silence, reorganizing the letters, eliminating the absurd and the inconsistent.

  “Anything?” Ruut asked.

  “Some words. Shall we compare?”

  “Show yours first.”

  Konrad showed his list in two napkins.

  Ruut whisper-read through the words and landed to an underlined three-word. “Wore satanic sin?”

  “How about you?”

  “I underlined one as well: Satanic ire sown.”

  Konrad planted a devilish grin on his face. “My kind of book.”

  Ruut squinted and poked out her tongue.

  “So, we’ve got Satan and Rainbow and a lustful commandment,” Konrad said. “We only need to invite God, and the party will go on forever. Who called you by the way?”

  Ruut shot a hand on her forehead. “Damn. It was my daughter’s principal. I need to go and pick her up. She reacts with her stomach when being bullied or feeling the threat of it. A simple mean word penetrates her skin and works like acid inside.” She rose, donning her outerwear. “If she only knew that even many adults bully each other in work, she might give up.”

  A stream of students entered the cafeteria. Konrad pressed The Bible against his chest, and Ruut was once again close to him, her perfume dancing the rumba in his head. “Shall we continue our demonology at a better time?”

  She blinked as if sharing a conspiratorial high five. “I wouldn’t miss the chance.”

  “If your husband doesn’t mind, of course.”

  “My husband is a domestic god. Not a jealous type, although sometimes I secretly wish he were.” Ruut rolled the ring between thumb and index finger and stared at the table, and through it. “I was a difficult companion to live with in the past. I got offended even on such innocent occasions when he happened to stare at an actress too long during a movie.”

  Konrad nodded. “We all must go through our uncertainties.”

  Ruut pulled a pink-white knit cap from her pocket and put it on. “That’s true. I didn’t trust my attractiveness, and I didn’t trust my husband. Now, thank God, mixed-up feelings are not the end of the world.”

  “Why do you thank God?”

  “For the same reasons as you do.”

  Konrad gave his head a shake, amused. “That’s a focus illusion. There’s a difference between talking to oneself and talking to oneself, believing that it’s God. Talking to ourselves relieves the feeling of loneliness and makes us smarter, like psychological self-programming.”

  “You don’t grasp faith.”

  “What else could it be than reinforcing the message we believe in? Faith is nothing more than tuning out distractions and controlling mixed emotions, focusing on our goal, being a good believer for example.”

  Ruut brought forth an inspective eye. “Obviously, we all strive for optimal performance. But faith is not schizophrenia. You don’t ask God for answers. He doesn’t give any. You don’t thank God for gratitude. He doesn’t care.”

  Konrad was flabbergasted. “If it’s not for answers and attention, why do people pray then?”

  “Simple,” Ruut said, smiling a good-bye. “God gives Himself.”

  “I see,” Konrad said.

  “No, you don’t. Now excuse me for I’m going to commit a sin.”

  “Are you planning to end the bullying?”

  Ruut mimed a baseball bat in her hands. She stage-whispered, “I’m going to whack these boys with a bat so hard that for a week they’ll spin and on Sunday they’ll fall.”

  “Yeah,” Konrad whispered back. “Play God Hardcore.”

  Ruut closed her one eye and raised a finger to her slightly curved-up lips. Then she left.

  Konrad plunged into loneliness. Darkness surrounded him on all sides. He exited the cafeteria, started walking toward his office. Halfway along a long corridor, a tall man with stern set jaw and relaxed shoulders walked past him with perfectly erect posture. He seemed boringly immune to any whims of destiny or cataclysmic events. But did the man rub his forehead or was it an army salute?

  A fresh flood of anxiety took hold of his body. Unpacking the office already build new maze
s and dead ends to his mind: the division of property at home that awaited him later was another Minotaur in the dark labyrinth of his brain. With The Wicked Bible in his hands, he felt punished, and buried by shame.

  Moments later at his office, he stared at nothing for half an hour. Then he took an old, battered medical bag from the shelf and put The Wicked Bible inside. The bag still smelled of the sweat of previous bearers. There were no last words, nor silent moments for the office, he just left the door open and exited the building in no rush.

  It was cold outside. He had forgotten to plug his Trabant’s block heater into an electrical outlet. Not without a campfire under the car would he be able to drive home.

  A bus parked behind him to pick up students. Shrugging, he walked in and edged all the way to the back of the bus. Before the bus jerked, a beautiful French-looking woman student with coyote brown eyes sat next to him. Konrad closed his eyes and leaned back. After a few minutes, the woman was leaning closer to him. Seconds later, she was sleeping against his shoulder.

  Konrad contemplated the woman.

  He gave a gentle push; the woman leaned against the window for a second, then she came back.

  With another shove, the woman swayed away.

  But this time, when she returned like a kitten searching for warmth, Konrad had the medical bag between them.

  6

  KONRAD ENTERED HIS home in the cloak of nightfall. A permanent twist in his chest was wrenching his heart out. In the kitchen, he dropped the medical bag on the table. Then he took a bottle of Renault Carte Noire Extra, filled a glass and emptied it while looking through it at the note Julia had left on the table.

  PACK AND LEAVE.

  Konrad contemplated their first meeting at the University in a copy room. It was the day he became a doctor. He walked into the room dressed in his best and only tuxedo and saw a pony-tailed woman struggling with a copy machine. Paper was stuck inside, so he helped her, and saved her. But then his cuffs got stuck in the machine, and she tried to help him in turn. They stayed in the small room for an hour, waiting for back up. They laughed and chatted, shared the stories of their lives, eventually waded into deep waters. The best day of his life. Half a year later they got married, happily confused about the sensation of love and bonding. A few years later they were only confused.

  Konrad poured another glass. He frowned. Their huskies weren’t in their cage outside. She had probably taken them to her father’s, who owned the biggest Safari company in Lapland.

  Konrad let the alcohol burn at the end of his tongue, tried to beat the pain before swallowing.

  Did they grow apart or were they ever truly together? He had been an answering machine, always reassuring his love to her. He grabbed the bottle and started carrying items he considered his own into the trailer in front of the garage. The snowfall was rain now, strong winds howling in the darkness of the woods and around the house. Snow was melting away.

  During the next hour, he emptied the bottle and filled the trailer. He slammed the cover closed. An unexpected scene unfolded before his blurred vision.

  The trailer slid down the hill. It struck a metal mailbox, booming like a shotgun blast, bending it like a backward cracked spine. Konrad rubbed his head, staggered to a carton box he’d forgotten to load and took out something heavy. Then he stumbled to the trailer and put it under the tire. “Don’t move!” He smiled. “Atta boy.”

  Suddenly a hollow sound of bells started ringing. Deep in the woods, reindeer were running, the bells ringing around their necks, the sea of antlers looking like birch branches moving in the wind. One of them had reflective paint sprayed onto the antlers, and it reflected light from a car’s headlights with weird, devilish effect. The idea must have come from Julia’s reindeer herder father.

  Something foul spilled into Konrad’s stomach. There was painfully much of his past life drawing away with the disappearing reindeer that he fell to his knees, and threw up.

  Next moment of some sort of clarity, he was lying in a snow bank. His body was numbed. Crawling back inside in the slush and dirt of the lawn was the weirdest trip since his birth, as though if he had crawled out of a cozy womb. In the hall, he caught a breath for a few minutes, stood up to his shaky legs and walked into the living room from a wall to another, and switched on the television.

  In the retrospect news, Kaspar Nyman was meeting the president. He took the lady’s hand to his and planted on it a bold, lingering kiss.

  Konrad fell on the sofa. He managed to switch channel before submitting himself to the spin of sleep. The voice of a newsreader spoke:

  …The many Russian airspace insults are still being left unanswered by the Kremlin despite Finland’s growing demands. Furthermore, Russia holds massive military exercises near the Finnish border, involving more than five hundred aircrafts, including new models in the Sukhoi jet fighter family. Fighter jets and bombers are also being practiced mid-air refueling from a tanker plane above the Arctic Circle. The planes are prepared with improved friend-or-foe system, super-maneuverability at low airspeeds, and destructive weaponry…

  Konrad opened his left eye and saw a familiar mustached face that even a child could draw from memory.

  Monopoly man.

  Viktor Vodyanoy—the president of Russia.

  Anxiety wrapped itself tightly around his chest. But his academic mind caught like grease-fire, wondering the quality and the gap between the global military toolbox and education toolbox. Less than 1 percent paid for the world’s weapons was enough to put every child to school, but the world leaders made sure that the world remained an altar of materialism by sacrificing education and care.

  No wonder why there was more instability, more war, and a greater likelihood of war in entire human history.

  A DARK MAN picked the lock of the professor’s back door lock of the house. Standing on a small hill, the house’s front windows looked over the sleeping, misty outline of Rovaniemi. An electrical failure had dimmed the city center. Patrick turned and took a glance into the woods.

  In the distance in a curvy forest road, a van’s headlights flashed twice.

  The way was clear.

  As clear as the Veteran’s orders:

  Seize the Bible.

  He removed his wet shoes, turned the door handle and slipped inside.

  Night vision on.

  Patrick noted dirt tracks on the lobby floor and black hand marks in the walls. A voice spoke somewhere in the back of the house. The voice was a woman’s, gentle and soft as falling snow. Slowly, it became more intense. He flashed a grin to a mirror he passed by. The television was left open.

  The pungent smell of alcohol wafted to his nose.

  Like stealing candy from a baby...

  He walked to the living room, feeling the sensation of being home after many years.

  He passed the television where the woman was starting to moan.

  The man was snoring on the sofa, uninterrupted.

  Sweet dreams, professor, he thought and went on with his search.

  7

  RUUT WAS DREAMING. Konrad’s forehead bore a horseshoe-shaped fold between his brow, sadness or grief written all over his face. But the skin in his neck mottled. There was something in the ground at his feet.

  An apple broken in half with a small object in the center of the halves.

  A prism.

  Konrad planted his feet wide apart, his hands clenching slowly at his sides.

  Ruut stared at him, tried to ask what he was doing, but her voice carried no sound.

  Behind Konrad and a great apple tree, a staggering sight materialized in the sky.

  A rainbow.

  Doing full circle.

  Konrad had closed the gap between them in a blink of an eye, his hands reaching around her neck.

  Ruut opened her eyes, dodged, fell from the bed. Adrenaline rushing through her body, her lips quirked up in half a smile as she realized she was in Netta’s room and saw red digits in a clock on the night stand.r />
  3:34 a.m.

  The fog began to lift.

  An apple, she thought. Could it be…?

  She listened and confirmed Netta was breathing. Gently, she smoothed strands of hair off the girl’s face. In Netta’s art class in school, they had just been talking about the father who invented the original color wheel. The rainbow was the primary element of her drawings hanged on the wall.

  She stood up, readily dressed for she had fallen asleep while putting Netta to sleep. She went to her work room, opened her Mac and wrote the publishing year of The Wicked Bible. Then she wrote a name in the Google picture search and checked the timeline.

  Building on the momentum, she took a pencil and wrote a note on paper:

  A SIN IN TWO RACES.

  Then she reorganized the words, drumming her feet against the floor.

  She stared at the result and compared it with the picture on the screen, and swallowed laughter with a hand over her mouth.

  She believed she had just discovered the original owner of The Wicked Bible.

  8

  KONRAD WOKE UP to a shadow falling across his face. A throbbing headache blurred his vision, and everything in his instincts told him someone had been staring at him.

  The red dot on the television sprang to life. Probably a short power failure had shut down the television and disturbed his sleep.

  He massaged his temples, rubbed his arms and thighs in a vain attempt to generate heat. Every position made the hangover worse. The sofa was ruined. Judging by the dirt and moisture it was like a wild pig had made love on it.

  A sneeze.

  A flu. Way to go, Konrad.

  He waddled to the kitchen and took a can of Fanta from the refrigerator. It collided with Finlandia Vodka, but as much as he wanted to continue his streak, even the sight of the bottle put him on the verge of vomiting.

  He opened the can and took a sip, counting the costs of his night-time packing adventure. The trailer rested against his neighbor’s mailbox stand. He turned away from the window, sat on the floor and leaned back against the wall.