Antler Plan (A Konrad Loki Thriller Book 1)

by Joonas Huhta

  “A message from Gideon,” she said, “‘I know who murdered Dad…’”

  The screen died.

  “Oh my God, is he going after someone?”

  “Hold on,” Konrad said, “We have to figure out what we are going to do.”

  “I’ll do some scouting.”

  “Don’t you think we should talk first?”

  She was already jogging away.

  Konrad said after her, “What if they capture you?”

  Ruut glanced over her shoulder, uttering a laugh, one of contempt. She pointed at her bicep and planted a kiss on it. Then she disappeared into the thicket like a shadow after a sunset.

  Fear and disbelief slithered through Konrad. She was like the most active force in the universe, but her stubbornness would get her killed.

  He sat under the tree to think through the sordid saga that led them here. How did he fall in love romantically with Oona in the first place? What the hell was he thinking? He wondered how far Julia had gone. Yes, their marital sex was occasionally infrequent and unexciting, but not always. He didn’t recognize himself in that morally gray area he had for so long lectured on and loathed in human nature. He wasn’t incapable of shame, as Julia had often insinuated, especially not in this case.

  He buried his head between his knees, wanting to shrink down enough to travel underground tunnels, curl up into a ball and be no use to anyone.

  But if Oona had already been questioned, what did she have to tell? What made her so valuable? And how did they find her in the first place?

  The idea that she could be a divine teacher was still a stretch. A software glitch of the brain, like the notion of afterlife. Some rare people possessed enough charisma to fit ‘exceptional human being’ category, but that was it.

  Oona’s smile had not been flirtatious, merely a suggestive line, like some bed-goddess of Victoria’s Secret, glossy, a passive doll of a human being. Where did the overwhelming attraction come from?

  And the more he thought about her, the more he had to look at things through the lens of Zen: Did anyone see Oona during all those mornings when they passed by each other? What if she came into being only on the day of the incident, after she had been questioned and probably killed?

  There’s no such thing as resurrection.

  He took the medical bag between his legs. A drop of water fell from the tree, flicking in a prism’s colors before landing on his hand. Trying to combine all the riddles and colors, he thought of sunlight he hadn’t seen in a long time. He thought of Newton, how the prism worked, and the essence of light. The seven-fold spectrum.

  The rainbow.

  An idea broke free. God created the world in seven days. The Newton riddle was hidden in the seventh commandment. In the colors of the rainbow. A rainbow represents the transformation of the God of wrath of the Old Testament into a God of love. Rainbows and God—they both beckoned ordinary people, but were not located at a particular place or distance. Neither was an object, neither physically approachable.

  Konrad took the membrane from the bag. Lennart’s words spoke to him:

  For the true Noaidi, the drum was a means of connecting with the dead.

  Was he supposed to connect with Oona?

  A gust of bitingly cold wind hissed through the trees. Konrad stood up. A snap of wood. He bolted around and saw Ruut in the tree line.

  She made a squeezed throat sound as if she had stepped on an iron bear trap and repressed her pain. Her paralyzed face was a blue-white mask, drowned and expressionless as if it were sculpted from ice.

  “Did you get lost?”

  She held her empty gaze at nowhere point, stupefied.

  Konrad closed in on her. “Ruut?”

  “For a moment I couldn’t see you,” she managed. “But now I can’t hear you.”

  25

  ONE OF THE DEEPEST of silences met Konrad in the woods. Misshapen branches densely weaved a canopy. The temperature was above zero now, no snow in sight.

  He had to leave Ruut in the glade to rest after she had mumbled something about impossible distances and a manifestation in the woods, something he had to see. According to her, they were trapped, somehow unreachable.

  Then she had started hyperventilating and repeating: “I need to find Gideon…”

  In the glade they were just sitting ducks waiting to lose their heads, any action was a better alternative.

  The oddest thing was that he couldn’t distinguish Ruut’s footprints trodden into the gray lichen. An eerie feeling also suggested that someone paced alongside him behind the overgrown and impenetrable wall stretching to his right.

  Armoring his heart against the unknown, he gained a small hill, but the woods gave way to harder obstacles: blackthorns and diabolical fish traps of juniper. Seeing traces of trenches made him think of the silent graves of war heroes and unspeakable memories of the veterans. Traumas were cruelly persistent; they lacerated areas in the brain that weren’t for communicating.

  Once again something stirred on his right. Probably the shadow of his own fear.

  Konrad strode through the tangle and came to a temple-sized boulder rock, relocated by glacial ice sheets during the Ice Age. The rocks would remain in their original position through infinity, for no man possessed the strength or interest to remove them. Only water could break one down into smaller pieces as it froze and expanded inside.

  The branches of spruces embraced his body softly, almost apologetically, like his mother’s sensitive mimosa plant, a shy touch-me-not species that folded inward on touch. Their long evolution shielded them from predators, re-opening when it was safe. Humans were much like such plants: not until an absolute guarantee of safety would they let down their guard.

  He had little problem with that too.

  Somewhere a woodpecker drilled into a tree.

  Tat - tat - tat.

  The sound came in groups, the sustained fire of a rifle. The sound was a hollow echo as if the tree’s spine were but sawdust.

  Konrad wanted to make sure he was walking in the right direction. He checked his pockets for pieces of metal and produced one from his broken reading glasses, and then heard his father’s voice inside his head. A memory came through his eyes. He saw his father placing a needle upon a leaf plucked from a birch and lowering it inside a hollow stump. Slowly, the needle and the leaf calibrated to point north.

  Taking the metal and a plucked leaf, he walked to a small water pocket in the ground. He took his case for reading glasses and plucked out the piece of silk fabric. Then he started rubbing and magnetizing the needle.

  It demanded about a hundred twists. The improvised compass confirmed that he was in the right direction.

  He trudged forward, knowing it wouldn’t be a long walk now. The familiar place was suddenly more foreign and different. Like a home after a divorce.

  Tat-tat-tat.

  The path wound slightly to left, to a small alley. Konrad knelt, lowering the leaf and the metal to a puddle. He checked his clothes for metal that would confuse the compass.

  The leaf spun.

  A foul, rotten stench wafted to his nostrils. A ripple of intuition stiffened the length of his body.

  Something dark was keeping an eye on him.

  A dark and cloak-ragged horse rider stood still, drawn from nowhere else than the red abyss.

  Konrad experienced full body tremors.

  The rider’s racked-yellow eyes were fixed on him, studying him quietly. From their narrow slots under the hood, the eyes had no humane message to deliver. The horse was older than a curse, skinnier than a death spell, and its death-seen eyes twice as mean. Steam rose from its nostrils as the horse exhaled.

  Konrad took a step backward, hyperventilating, but the rider clenched his fists and pressed heels into the horse. Retrieving the compass was an invitation to an open grave, so Konrad whirled and bolted toward the glade.

  He ran.

  The twigs and branches tore through his clothes into skin. The hasty hoof b
eats were gaining the slippery, leafed ground, the horse flying like a sin on the wing of the past world. Only a few leaps separated Konrad from the glade, but the spreading shadow closed in behind him, engulfing the trees.

  A heartbeat before it would run him down, Konrad threw himself through the last remaining spruces…

  His lungs howled, and his teeth clang together with an audible crack as his head hit the ground.

  Quickly, he covered his head with his arms, shielding himself from claws and blows. The moment melted, flew past.

  The door to the woods stood still, opened, only wind-twisted branches. On his back, Konrad scanned and listened to the bushes, hearing Ruut’s vague footsteps approaching. Her calling of his name felt like a distant dream. But despite the dizziness and his relocated heart racing in his throat he understood what he saw.

  The ground around him was littered with twigs and brown and yellow leaves as if the horse and rider had exploded and vaporized.

  26

  THE LOOMING RESULT of Gideon’s plan wrenched at his gut like barbed wire. Crawling on a pipeline under a bridge, he balanced himself on the slippery, icy metal. There might be no return.

  His cell phone buzzed, probably the tenth time in the past hour. Ville’s parents took him for a criminal mind and bad company.

  Only Ruut knew the place where he positioned himself on a rocky pylon under the bridge. A hiding place he found years ago with Ville. He had called the police and the emergency teams to get them to safety.

  He couldn’t see what triggered their interest in the place. Perhaps the stories that the worst scum, heroin addicts, and drunken teenagers spend their time below the bridge, drawing them like it was an exciting show. Some illusion of detachment. He worked to keep himself sober, but couldn’t resist a dose of cannabis when it was offered. His loneliness was partly caused by his refusal to drink.

  Breaking sweat from his forehead, he yearned for a relaxant more than ever.

  The enemy car stood by the shore parked next to a blue house. Through his camera’s viewfinder, there was occasional movement of light and shadows. Surrounded by stone and metal almost doubled the sense of freezing, so he thumped his feet and shoved his hands into his jeans. The coldness gnawed his energy. His stomach protested with intensifying growls.

  A light appeared outside the house.

  An engine fired up.

  Gideon looked through the camera and saw only one headlight moving.

  A snowmobile.

  In the light that shone toward the river, Gideon saw a shape of a man that stood guard. The man gestured in Gideon’s direction, giving orders to the driver on the snowmobile.

  All of the sudden he didn’t feel cold anymore. His legs went weak, and his heart raced.

  The snowmobile moved on the ice with the steady speed of a train.

  He looked at the route back over the pipelines; thoughts of fleeing rose and he sought a realistic timeline to leave. But the closing sound froze him still. As far as he could estimate, he had only thirty seconds. He texted to Ruut:

  They killed dad and now they’re coming to me!

  Gideon reconsidered. Erased the text, and called Ville. But, realizing the stupid choice and loss of time, he called Rebecca.

  Pick up, pick up…

  “Gideon!” Rebecca exclaimed and suppressed her voice to a hush. “Ville’s dad is furious. He has been calling me all evening, sending threat messages. I told him that you jumped on the train to Helsinki.”

  “Listen to me,” Gideon said. “I’m in trouble. I can’t speak much. I’m at the Bridge, and the killers are close. I’ll leave the line open. Record the call.”

  “Shit. What have you got yourself into? I’ll switch on the voice recorder app.”

  “Do it.”

  Speaking with Rebecca brought him to his senses. The more Rebecca would hear, and hopefully record, the more it increased his chances to stay alive. He would scream every detail—clothes, tattoos, scars, accents. It was a combination of Ruut’s paranoia and criminal catechism of how to survive a while longer in the hands of the enemies.

  Whining through the whirling fresh powder snow the snowmobile moved like a torpedo on a destruction course with the bridge. The driver parked it to a blind spot and killed the engine. The man quickly worked on the trailer with a black cover.

  Acid burned a hole in Gideon’s stomach.

  Dad’s ice hockey bag.

  Thickening pulse hammering at his temples, Gideon shifted on the pipe to the other side and stared down. The man hardly made a sound as he effortlessly carried the bag under the bridge near the stone pylon. He left it two meters from the dark waters. Then he disappeared from Gideon’s sight, only to return with a long piece of wood.

  Gideon wanted to scream in horror.

  A man’s voice carried out of the bag as though his mouth had been taped.

  The driver gave the bag a push with the stick.

  Panic spread in Gideon’s body.

  “No!” The second his words came out Gideon pressed his head against the pipe in tears.

  “What is it?” Rebecca said.

  The man in the bag and the driver fell silent. Tears fell down on Gideon’s cheeks. Then the driver gave the second push. And the third.

  Splash of water.

  An inhumane muted scream sprang out, black and cold.

  Then silence.

  Gideon waited for the driver’s next move. The engine fired up again. The driver stared into the blackness, then studied his wrist watch.

  Gideon took his camera, clenched his teeth together and took a photo. The noise of the shutter made him swear.

  The driver turned his snowmobile and sped off. While Gideon stared at the red tail light behind the rising spray of snow, he took his camera and studied his photograph on the screen.

  Zooming.

  The picture was mostly dark, but a line of text at the side of the snowmobile was familiar.

  Ounasvaara ski team?

  Was there a place left where they hadn’t infiltrated?

  The battery of the phone had died.

  I have to find my mother.

  27

  THE SKY WAS sleet and snow with no sun peeking above the horizon. Konrad tried to avoid thinking of it as their destiny ahead, the stage set for black.

  Ruut made a rope out of black willows, cutting, weaving, and lashing them together with bare hands. She tore the willows from their place by putting a stone next to a willow, then bent the stem upon the stone, and hit it with a sharp rock. Ceaseless determination. The sound of the horse’s hooves returned to haunt Konrad, but it didn’t seem to bother her.

  Repeatedly looking over his shoulders, Konrad let out a heavy sigh of exasperation. Their escape options came down to a few powerful words: tunnel, lock picks, disguise, sheets, fire, fake seizure… Usually he enjoyed prison break-out stories, carving a prison officer’s key from memory or squeezing through a tiny food slot. It settled warmth into his stomach to hear that some people escaped from maximum security. But now the rope of sheets for a vertical escape was to be, as she put it, ‘the line of willows for a horizontal escape.’

  “Help me out.” Ruut dropped him a bunch of willows as if he were her squire.

  “What are these willows for again?”

  “You mean Black Mauls. They are not just willows; they have specific names. Black Mauls are suitable for ornaments and furniture, but also make the skeleton for domes, tents, and arches.”

  “Wait a sec. If a child asks you how babies are made, obviously you don’t share everything that you know about fucking. You just answer the question.”

  Ruut concentrated on testing the hold and strength of the knots. “Escaping.”

  “Are you planning to spank the enemy with a thirty-meter whip?”

  “Fifty-meter.”

  “You’re just going to ignore those things prowling the woods?”

  Ruut tested the knots. “I take it as a sign from God. A test of our faith.”

&
nbsp; “You’re testing my faith. One of the horsemen of the apocalypse comes knocking at your door, and you’re like, ‘Oh, nice to see you, Jesus, you look exhausted, would you like a cup of loose leaf tea?’”

  “Exactly why we’ll not regard its presence as nothing new. The Wicked Bible forecast all this.” Ruut’s hands made a quick hangman’s noose. “Unless you have a better idea?”

  Konrad spread his hands.

  A bee flew through the thick air hanging between them. Ruut leaned back, quickly hid behind Konrad’s back. She clutched at her necklace.

  “Fearing bees, are we?” Konrad said over his shoulder.

  She flushed bright pink. “You said it was going to get colder. I didn’t expect to see one.” Then her face hardened like a stone, void of expression. “Follow me.”

  Darkness fell already. Konrad walked behind her to the dim solemn wood, past the wall of spruces. They stopped when they could still see the glade behind them. While Ruut tied one end of the willow rope to a short and boughless, but robust and erect, pine; the trees around them bore an aura of foreboding and unease.

  Ruut released a sigh. “Here goes nothing.” The wheel of the rope ran over her shoulder as she strode forward.

  They made slow progress. Despite the overhang of the boughs and spiked whip-splashes, he followed her determination as she chose trees by circling once around them. The idea started to come alive. They needed the straight line. The woods gave no room for error; orienting was impossible.

  “I feel we’re supposed to find something back at the glade,” Konrad said.

  Ruut’s body language spoke otherwise.

  Konrad frowned. “Why do you care about teens so much?”

  “Because of the Freudian slip.” Her voice spat the name as she brought her face close his. “Everyone hates teenagers. We can thank Freud for that. And all other experts and scientists, who put forward negative conceptions.”

  Ruut marked another tree with the rope and strode on.

  “You may be onto something,” Konrad said, walking a pace behind, “but most teens know only to snooze and booze. You must at least admit that Freud was on to something. The young are different. And indifferent. Go Goth—that’s their overall contribution.”