Meltwater

by Michael Ridpath

  ‘You’re probably right.’

  ‘I’m not saying you’re not on the right track. But go gently. If you can’t find out by direct means, go indirectly. I have every confidence in you. Now, you had better get cracking.’

  Jóhannes had spent a couple of hours at his desk, going through his father’s documents, trying to get them into some sort of order. There were some parts of Benedikt’s life that Jóhannes knew very well. Others would require a little more research, such as his childhood at the farm of Hraun. And then there were the mysteries. Like the one that had erupted the year before Benedikt’s death.

  Benedikt’s last novel, his best in some people’s estimation – including Jóhannes’s – was entitled Moor and the Man, published a few months before his death in 1985. A powerful scene in the book described how two boys, friends from neighbouring farms, had come across the father of one of them having sex with the mother of the other one in a barn. A month later the boys were playing by a lake, when they saw the woman’s husband dumping a heavy weight in a sack into the water. That evening, her lover never returned home. He had been murdered.

  What interested Jóhannes particularly was the rumour that had sprung up in the Snaefells Peninsula that there were parallels with the disappearance of Benedikt’s own father, Jóhannes’s grandfather, from his farm at Hraun in 1934. That mystery had never been solved: some people thought he had run away to America, some that he had fallen into the fjord by Hraun. And then, after reading the book, some felt he had been murdered by a neighbouring farmer.

  Benedikt didn’t live long enough to deny the rumour and as far as Jóhannes was aware it had never been substantiated. Jóhannes’s own provisional opinion was that Benedikt had simply invented a solution to a problem that had haunted him from his childhood, but there was no doubt that more research was needed.

  As Jóhannes sorted the documents, one particular piece of paper forced itself to the top of the pile.

  It was a letter Jóhannes had received two months earlier from a former pupil whose late grandfather had been a friend of Halldór Laxness. The pupil had been going through his grandfather’s papers and made an interesting discovery. In 1985, when Halldór himself was a very old man, he had written to the pupil’s grandfather from Búdir, a hotel on the south coast of the Snaefells Peninsula, over the mountains from Hraun. The pupil had enclosed a photocopy of Halldór’s letter with the relevant passage highlighted. It was dated 14 November 1985, only a month before Benedikt was murdered.

  Jóhannes read it through, although the paragraph was so familiar he had probably memorized it by now.

  I saw an extraordinary thing yesterday while riding through the lava field with the stable boy. Benedikt Jóhannesson was involved in an altercation with a man with a shotgun. For a moment I thought that the man would actually shoot Benedikt. The stable boy – Hermann was his name – was quite brave, he rode down and somehow calmed things down.

  I had no idea that Benedikt was staying at the hotel. I looked out for him at dinner that evening, but he must have left.

  Odd.

  Odd indeed. And something Jóhannes had been meaning to clear up. He had got as far as checking with the Hotel Búdir. There had indeed been a stable boy named Hermann employed by the hotel in the 1980s. What was more he was still there: now he was in charge of the stables attached to the hotel.

  Jóhannes could sit in his chair and mope about his lost teaching career all day.

  Or he could get off his backside and do something.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  ‘YOU KNOW WHO’S behind this, don’t you?’

  Erika and Dieter were sitting on the bed in her room with her laptop open in front of them. Erika was sipping a can of Red Bull, Dieter Coke Zero. They were on encrypted Skype to Apex. Although Apex could see Erika and Dieter, they couldn’t see Apex: he had his video camera turned off. Erika still had no idea what he looked like. Dieter liked Skype: because it had been developed in Sweden, his theory was that the CIA had never had the chance to build a backdoor into the software through which they could eavesdrop. Apex had his doubts about that, but then Apex always had doubts.

  The door was shut. Zivah and the others were having breakfast downstairs in the living room.

  ‘Who?’ Erika asked.

  ‘Mossad, of course,’ said the Australian.

  ‘We don’t know that,’ said Erika.

  ‘No – we never know who is watching us, do we? But it’s not the Chinese, is it? And Mossad are mean.’

  ‘How would they know we’ve got the video?’

  ‘Good question,’ said Apex. ‘But I suggest you all get out of Reykjavík right away before anyone else gets killed.’

  ‘No, Apex. We are publishing this. And we are doing it in the next week. For Nico’s sake.’

  ‘Hey, Erika, you don’t want to mess with Mossad.’

  ‘Apex, we will mess with anyone. No one can intimidate Freeflow into not publishing. No one.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’

  ‘What do you care?’ said Erika. ‘You’re safe in some pit in Melbourne or Sydney or wherever you are. We’re the ones who are taking the risk and we have decided we’re running with this.’

  Erika was aware of Dieter’s bulk beside her. She knew she could railroad Apex as long as Dieter didn’t back him up.

  ‘We could publish it right now,’ the German said. ‘Just put it up on the web for everyone to see. Get it out there. Then there’s nothing they can do to us. It will be too late.’

  ‘No,’ said Erika. ‘That’s a non-starter. We used to do that, remember, and no one ever took any notice. Journalists are pathetic, they need to be told what’s exciting and why.’

  Dieter nodded. Their original Darfur leak had been met with total indifference until Erika had stirred things up, telling people where to look.

  ‘Plus, we don’t know it’s genuine yet,’ Erika continued. ‘We have to make sure it’s authentic or they’ll crucify us. We need to get people double-checking the facts on the ground in Gaza. We need to get the websites up and secure, with back-ups if the Israelis launch cyber attacks on them. We need editing, commentary, a coordinated release. Samantha Wilton in tears at a press conference. We need to make maximum impact with this video. Otherwise it will just be flitting around on the edge of the Internet: the Israelis will dismiss it as some daft conspiracy.’

  ‘She’s right,’ said Apex. ‘If we are going to publish it, we need to do it properly.’

  ‘Oh, by the way, I think the CIA is on to us,’ said Erika.

  ‘Are they following you again?’ Apex asked.

  ‘Worse than that. After the police took us to some police station in the middle of nowhere an American showed up. He had a police badge and he spoke Icelandic, but he also spoke English perfectly. With an American accent. He claimed he was some kind of cop on secondment, but he sounded like a well-educated kind of cop to me.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Apex.

  ‘Are you sure our computers are safe?’ Erika said. ‘Viktor’s holding out against a warrant to search them, but he might fail.’

  ‘Quite sure,’ said Apex. ‘Or at least ours are. Military-grade encryption. Even the CIA won’t be able to read them. But you’d better check that the volunteers don’t have anything on theirs. And of course the police can always read notes written on paper.’

  Erika trusted Apex. She had her whole life on her laptop, but everything was encrypted and backed up on a cloud of servers in Germany, Sweden and Australia. The passwords were in her head.

  ‘I made sure that none of the volunteers has brought their own laptops into the house,’ said Dieter.

  ‘Once you are all working on the video, shut everything down as soon as the police appear,’ Apex said. ‘Once when I was a kid I got raided in Australia by a SWAT team trying to catch me red-handed logged into a network.’ Apex chuckled. ‘Scared the wits out of my mum, but I heard them coming.’

  ‘We’ll be careful,’ said D
ieter.

  ‘What about finances?’ said Erika. ‘We’re going to need some cash here. Can you send us some over, Apex?’

  ‘Ah.’

  Erika glanced at Dieter. She didn’t like the sound of that. ‘What do you mean, “Ah”?’

  ‘With Nico gone, there isn’t any money.’

  ‘Hold on. That can’t be right! I thought we had back-up procedures so if something happened to him, you and I would still have access to Freeflow’s accounts.’

  ‘Oh, yes, those procedures are in place. We can access the accounts. The trouble is . . .’

  Erika didn’t like the sound of this at all. ‘The trouble is what?’

  ‘The trouble is there is nothing in them.’

  ‘Even in the reserve account in Guernsey?’

  ‘Even in that.’

  ‘But Nico didn’t tell me we had run out of cash?’

  ‘For the last couple of weeks he had been using his own money to run Freeflow. Out of his personal bank account. Which will now be frozen.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Erika. ‘That’s a problem. Shit! Shit, shit, shit, shit!’

  Money. Money was always Freeflow’s problem, always had been, always would be.

  Dieter and Apex were silent. ‘OK,’ Erika sighed. ‘Let’s think this through. The rent on this place is paid in advance, right, Dieter?’

  ‘Yes. And in fact there will be a deposit returned when we leave.’

  ‘Good. I’ll need some cash for my air fare out of here to the press conference in London. I guess everyone else has return tickets. We’ve got all the computer equipment we need here from volunteers. Do you need to buy anything else?’

  Dieter shook his head. ‘Nothing major.’

  ‘OK, so it’s just groceries and the air fare,’ said Erika. ‘We can get by for a few days, at least until we publish the video. That should crank up the donations.’

  ‘Not quite,’ said Dieter.

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘The Swedish ISP who are hosting our site. They know there is going to be a surge of traffic, and possibly denial-of-service attacks when we go live and they want payment before then. They are sending through an invoice to me today. Nico was going to do a bank transfer as soon as we received it.’

  ‘How much?’

  ‘Fifteen thousand euros.’

  ‘Can’t they wait a week? Don’t they trust us?’

  ‘They trust our ideals,’ Apex said. ‘I’m not sure they trust our finances.’

  ‘Damn!’ Erika put her head in her hands. She knew none of the three of them had fifteen thousand euros. Dieter was maxed out on his credit cards. It was years since any card company had allowed her credit, and Apex didn’t cough up money however hard one pleaded.

  But . . . She had an idea.

  ‘Apex. Can you hack into Nico’s account? Transfer the money across?’

  ‘No.’ Apex’s voice was firm.

  ‘You mean no, you can’t do it, or no, you won’t do it?’

  ‘Of course I can do it. But I’m not going to. It’s stealing and you know I don’t do that. I’ve never done it. And I know what you’re thinking, Erika, but don’t you dare ask Dieter to do it either.’

  Dieter flinched next to her. Dieter and Apex were old friends, and old enemies. As teenagers in the late eighties on different continents they had met up on a West German chat channel called Altos, where they discussed their hacking exploits. Apex had hacked into NASA, the US Air Force Strategic Command and British Aerospace; Dieter into the US Department of Defense’s Network Information Computer, Deutsche Telekom and the French Commissariat of Atomic Energy. But they all played by some straightforward rules: leave a system the way you found it, don’t change it, don’t damage it and don’t steal from it.

  Nevertheless, Dieter had been prosecuted in 1991 and spent two years in a German prison, where he met some people who persuaded him to use his skills to download credit card details, which he did by the thousand once he was released. He was caught again, and spent some more time in jail. Apex had felt personally betrayed by Dieter’s time on the dark side, as he saw it, and when Dieter was released for the second time, Apex persuaded him to go straight. Since then, the two of them had developed freelance jobs as computer security consultants, testing supposedly secure websites for vulnerabilities.

  For both of them, Apex especially, their integrity as defined by their own code was everything. Erika knew that.

  So she gave up.

  ‘OK. Well, I’m just going to have to find fifteen thousand euros. Dieter, you had better get to work on everyone’s laptop before the police get here. Apex, are you happy our system is secure now?’

  ‘Yes, but I’d better work on backing everything up with Dieter before we download the video.’

  ‘OK, guys,’ said Erika. ‘Let’s get to it.’

  Outside, in the dining area, the others were waiting for Erika with cups of coffee and bowls of Cheerios, which seemed to be Iceland’s cereal of choice.

  Erika noticed the priest, her clerical collar firmly attached. Viktor was there as well. ‘Are you back already?’ she asked Ásta.

  ‘Yes, I got here about an hour ago.’

  ‘Did you go up the mountain?’

  ‘I did. With the snow last night, it’s going to be difficult for the police to find anything. I saw Nico.’

  ‘Hadn’t they taken him away?’ Erika couldn’t bear to think of her friend left lying up there on the glacier all night, in the cold and the dark, all alone. She shuddered.

  ‘No,’ said Ásta. ‘Forensics people are crawling over everything. What is happening about Nico’s family? Do you know them?’

  Erika sighed. ‘I’ve met his wife once when I stayed with him in Milan, but I don’t know her really well.’

  ‘Who is going to tell her?’

  Erika felt a pang of guilt. ‘The police said they would, but I never got around to giving them her number last night.’

  ‘Do you want me to handle that?’

  ‘Yes please,’ said Erika. ‘Did you tell that American anything about the Gaza video, the CIA guy?’

  ‘No, I didn’t.’

  Erika noticed that Viktor was smiling, proud of his niece. And so he should be. Ásta had been involved with Freeflow for less than a day and already her loyalty was impressive.

  ‘And by the way, Magnús doesn’t work for the CIA,’ Ásta said.

  ‘How do you know?’ Erika asked.

  ‘Because he told me.’

  ‘I see,’ said Erika, not bothering to contradict her. So priests were gullible, what else was new? She was just pleased Ásta had taken the problem of Nico’s family off her hands. ‘Can we expect the police soon, Viktor?’

  ‘They are trying,’ said Viktor. ‘I’ve just come from the District Court. They wanted a search warrant, but I put up a good case against it.’

  ‘The Icelandic Modern Media Initiative?’

  ‘That’s correct – the right of you guys to protect your sources. The judge is thinking about it: I can’t guarantee that he won’t grant the search warrant, but I might be able to protect your computers.’

  ‘The computers are safe. Encrypted. Unbreakable.’

  ‘Hmm.’ Viktor looked thoughtful. ‘We might let them have that then – a good bargaining chip. But you should make sure the house is clean in case they do get a warrant.’

  ‘OK. You hear that, everyone? If you have made any notes or printed out anything you shouldn’t have done, I want it burned in the next thirty minutes.’

  ‘And the ashes flushed down the toilet,’ said Dieter.

  ‘I’ve got some notes,’ said Zivah. ‘Translations of the audio.’

  ‘That definitely needs to be destroyed,’ said Erika.

  ‘If you need to keep anything, I can scan it in first and we’ll back it up remotely,’ Dieter said.

  Erika looked around her new team: Viktor, Zivah, Dúddi, Franz, Ásta. Which, if any, of them had fifteen thousand euros? Viktor was the obvio
us candidate. The best way to play him was to make an appeal to all of them and hope he might approach her later. She hated taking advantage of volunteers like this, but there was no choice.

  She explained Freeflow’s financial situation and their requirements for the next few days. Ásta immediately agreed to provide groceries, as did Dúddi, who also said he would come up with any necessary computer equipment. The idea of either of them coughing up fifteen thousand euros was clearly absurd.

  ‘I can cover your air fare to London,’ said Viktor.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Erika coolly. She held his gaze.

  He wasn’t going to offer more, she could see that. A few hundred dollars, but not thousands. He would twist arms and call in favours with his well-placed friends, but he wouldn’t give Freeflow real money.

  Was that because he didn’t have any? Erika had heard of Iceland’s kreppa. She imagined that there were many middle-class lawyers and businessmen who were overwhelmed by debt. Was Viktor one of them? Or did he have tens of thousands stashed away somewhere?

  She could see in his eyes that he wasn’t going to tell her.

  ‘I’ve only got a few thousand shekels in my savings account,’ said Zivah. ‘About a thousand dollars, maybe a bit more. You can have that if you really need it.’

  ‘That’s great, Zivah,’ said Erika with a smile. ‘Thank you. It’s a start. We have to begin somewhere.’

  She glanced at Franz, the Swiss guy. Maybe he would be good for another couple of thousand? She had never met him before; he was a contact of Dieter’s from somewhere on the Internet. He was in his early twenties, short, with curly black hair and a chubby face. If he wasn’t still a student, he couldn’t have been out of college for more than a year or two.

  ‘I don’t even have that much,’ said Franz. ‘I could give you maybe five hundred euros.’

  Erika smiled weakly. She knew even that amount could be a lot of money for a young guy.

  She glanced at Viktor again. He looked down at his tanned hands.