by Rick Acker
Gunnar debated calling Finn Sørensen, but he glanced at the clock and realized it would be about two in the morning in Norway. He picked up his Rolodex and flipped through it idly. Who do I know in the US who might know about berserkers? Then he realized the answer and smiled. “Markus,” he said aloud.
When his sons were in college, Gunnar had required each of them to take at least one Scandinavian-oriented class, preferably one focused on international business. Tom had made the most of the opportunity, enrolling in an economics class during a month-long exchange program in Copenhagen. He had even managed to land a part-time job at the Copenhagen stock exchange. Markus, on the other hand, had sulkily chosen the least useful course he could think of—a poetry seminar deconstructing ancient Norwegian sagas. Maybe it hadn’t been so useless after all.
He picked up the phone and dialed Markus’s number. “Hi, Mom,” Markus said a moment later.
“It’s your father.”
“Oh. Hello, Dad. What can I do for you?”
“Do you remember that college course you took on the Norse sagas?”
“Yes,” said Markus slowly. “I actually took a couple of them. I have a minor in Scandinavian literature.”
“Did you ever learn anything about berserkers?”
“Well, yeah. They’re in a lot of the older sagas. Why do you ask?”
“Do you remember the drug I was developing when I left the company?”
“Not, uh, not really.”
“The one that came from an ancient Norwegian plant found in a cave? The one that was potentially a huge breakthrough for the company?”
“That rings a bell, but I don’t remember any of the details. Sorry.”
Typical. Gunnar suppressed his irritation and said, “Well, a friend of mine in Norway found the cave, and he thinks the berserkers used it. He thinks they ate this plant to make themselves into super warriors. The company is testing a drug made from the plant, and I’d like to know more about berserkers so I can know how the drug is likely to affect people. I called you because I thought you might be able to help.”
“I guess I should have listened more closely when you talked about work over dinner.” Markus laughed nervously. “I saved some of my old textbooks. Should I, uh, go see if I can find something useful?”
“Please.”
“Okay, hold on.” The line was silent for several minutes. Then Gunnar heard the thump of books landing on a table and the rustling of pages. “All right, here we go. This is from Thorbjörn Hornklofi; it’s part of a conversation between a raven and a Valkyrie after a battle. The Valkyrie says, ‘Of the berserkers’ lot would I ask thee, thou who batten’st on corpses: how fare the fighters who rush forth to battle, and stout-hearted stand ’gainst the foe?’ Then the raven responds, ‘Wolf-coats are they called, the warriors unfleeing, who bear bloody shields in battle; the darts redden where they dash into battle and shoulder to shoulder stand. ’Tis men tried and true only, who can targes shatter, whom the wise warlord wants in battle.’”
“That sounds like a lot of what I found,” replied Gunnar. “Is there anything more specific about them? Anything that indicates whether they were mentally unstable?”
“Let’s see.” Gunnar could hear more pages flipping. “Well, they went into some sort of frenzy during battle and no army could stand against them,” Markus continued. “I’m not finding much about them during peacetime. There was a wise King Ivar who was a berserker, or he had been one, anyway—he was a paraplegic by the time he became king.” More flipping. “And some other kings kept berserkers in their courts, but it’s not clear whether they were advisors or bodyguards, or maybe both. These are really old sagas and they’re garbled in places. Plus, the berserkers were ancient history before any of these were written.”
“Really? I hadn’t realized that.”
“Yeah. The sagas were handed down orally for a long time. There’s not much written record from Scandinavia before about 1200, and the berserkers were outlawed about two hundred years before that.”
Gunnar chuckled drily. “I’d hate to have been the one who had to enforce that law.”
“No kidding. I remember one of my professors saying he wondered how the government pulled that one off. Maybe that was around the time this plant went extinct; I’ll bet the berserkers were a lot easier to deal with once they could no longer take their secret wonder drug.”
“Good point,” replied Gunnar. “I’ll bet you’re right about that. So, would these sagas have been written by the descendants of the people who outlawed the berserkers?”
“Probably. The sagas would have existed in oral form for a long time before that, though.”
“But would you agree that whoever wrote the sagas—and whoever decided which ones to write down—probably was no friend of the berserkers?” persisted Gunnar.
“That’s probably fair,” agreed Markus. “Any berserkers left would have been outlaws. They also would have been followers of Odin, and Scandinavia had been Christianized by that point. Most of the saga writers show a bias in favor of Christianity and against the old Norse gods.”
“So there are no firsthand accounts of berserkers from unbiased sources, right? All we have are stories written down centuries later by authors who probably didn’t like berserkers?”
“That’s pretty much right,” agreed Markus. “Sorry I couldn’t be more helpful.”
“No, that’s fine. This was actually very helpful. Thank you.”
“You’re welcome. And, uh, good luck with the drug and Uncle Karl and, you know, everything.”
Elena and Noelle were leaving in less than two days, and there was a lot left to do. For Noelle, it was mostly work: there were boxes of documents to copy and send back to America. As soon as Henrik called to say that the office was empty, Elena drove Noelle over. Henrik and Einar were there waiting to help, so Elena decided to go take care of a few last-minute things.
Her first stop was at the historic Nasjonaltheatret, where she picked up a ticket and English program notes for an abridged version of Peer Gynt that was playing there that evening. Then she hit the shopping district for one last visit.
This time she wasn’t shopping for herself—she had to buy gifts for her parents and several other relatives whom she would be seeing during a weekend stop in Russia before flying back to the States. She had already decided that her parents would get sweaters. The other relatives were harder to shop for; the men would be happy with anything that said “Norway” on it, but the women would require more thought. They couldn’t each get the same thing—that would mean that Elena didn’t care enough to shop for them individually. However, their gifts had to look like they had cost almost exactly the same, otherwise Elena would appear to be favoring one relative over another. Also, whatever she bought had to be stylish enough to hold up her reputation as the glamorous member of the family who had been an international athlete and now lived in America.
She briefly considered getting something for Sergei, but decided against it. Their dinner together on his first night in Norway had gone as well as she could have hoped, and he had seemed like he was still interested in her, but nothing ever came of it. He never made any effort to be alone with her, and whenever they were together, he was friendly, but nothing more—though every now and then he would say something or look at her in a way that made her suspect that he was holding himself back.
Part of her wanted to give him a signal that she was interested, just to see how he’d react, if nothing else. But the other, wiser part knew that it was better just to let him go. If he was still interested, he would take the initiative. If he wasn’t, there was no point in pursuing him. So she didn’t get him a gift.
She finished her shopping by six thirty, grabbed a quick dinner, and went to the theater. The play started at seven thirty and ran until nine thirty. The play itself was a little disappointing. It was the story of an amoral Norwegian peasant named Peer Gynt, who traveled around the world having cartoonish adventures a
nd behaving badly toward a series of women who nonetheless loved him. The rest of the audience seemed to be enjoying themselves, however, so Elena suspected that she might have enjoyed the play more if she spoke Norwegian. But she did like the sets, and the dance scenes were fun to watch. Also, the musicians in the orchestra pit did a great job with Edvard Grieg’s incidental music—most of which Elena had heard before and liked, but hadn’t realized was part of the play.
She left the theater, walked back to the hotel parking garage, and got her car. The sun was nearing the southwestern horizon and was in her eyes as she drove toward Bjornsen Norge. She squinted at first, but as she got close to her destination, a column of smoke obscured the sun and relieved the strain on her eyes. She assumed the plume came from one of the factories and power plants that dotted Oslo’s industrial waterfront, but then an ambulance screamed past her and drove off toward the smoke at double the posted speed limit. A cold wave of fear washed over Elena, and she floored the accelerator.
Her fear grew into panic as she turned the corner onto the street leading to Norge’s parking lot and got her first view of her destination. Flames licked out of the windows of the office portion of the building, and thick clouds of black smoke billowed skyward. In the middle of the parking lot stood the Haugelands’ green Volvo station wagon. Beyond it, closer to the building, two fire trucks were surrounded by a crowd of firefighters pouring thousands of gallons of water onto the fire from high-pressure hoses. And a few yards from the fire trucks, the ambulance that had passed Elena had just pulled to a stop in front of two bloody forms lying on stretchers on the grass outside the building. Between the stretchers sat Henrik Haugeland, a dazed and vacant look on his face. As Elena drove up, she caught a glimpse of Noelle’s thick, auburn-brown hair tumbling over the side of one of the stretchers.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
THE AFTERMATH
Elena stood in the hospital lobby, staring at her cell phone. She had already dialed the number but had trouble bringing herself to push the “Call” button. She took a deep breath to calm herself and pressed it. She brought the phone to her ear and listened. It rang twice and she almost hoped her call would go into voice mail, but it didn’t. There was a click followed by a familiar voice. “Hello. Ben Corbin.”
“Ben, it’s Elena.”
“What’s up?”
“I’m at the hospital. I—”
“What happened?” asked Ben urgently. “Where’s Noelle?”
“She’s been shot in the leg and she has smoke-inhalation injuries, but the doctor says she’ll be okay. She’s in preterm labor, though. They’re trying to stop it, but they don’t know if they can.”
“Shot? Smoke inhalation?” repeated Ben, his voice rising. “What happened?”
“I’m not really sure. I . . .” Elena closed her eyes and forced the words out. “I wasn’t there.”
“Where were you?”
“I was, well, I dropped off Noelle and then I went out shopping for my family,” she confessed, fighting back tears. “Then I went—”
Ben cut her off. “Never mind. I’m going to get over there as fast as I can. Call me if there’s any news.” There was a click and the phone went dead.
Elena reflexively dropped the phone into her purse. She found an isolated seat near a window where the last light of the dying day cast a fading glow on the nearly empty interior of the Rikshospitalet lobby. She put her face in her hands and started to cry.
“Takk. Hvis jeg husker noe videre skal jeg ringe deg.” Karl hung up the phone and gazed blankly at his computer monitor for several minutes, his mind whirling. The last thing he’d been expecting was a call from the Oslo Police District. What the officer had told him seemed surreal—Noelle Corbin apparently had made a secret visit to Bjornsen Norge with Gunnar’s old conspirator, Henrik Haugeland. Someone had shot her and Haugeland’s son and then set fire to the building. After the Cleverlad fiasco at the preliminary-injunction trial, Karl had no difficulty guessing what Noelle and Henrik had been doing, but who had attacked them?
A loyal employee who discovered what they were up to? No, too extreme. Plus, that didn’t explain the fire. A random criminal who broke into the building intending burglary, but was surprised to find someone there? That was possible; drug warehouses often had theft problems. Having found people—witnesses—in what he thought was an unoccupied building, the thief might have decided to kill them to avoid detection and then set fire to the building to destroy the evidence of his crimes. The police were leaning toward that theory, but Karl suspected that murder had been the intruder’s main objective from the start.
Was Cleverlad responsible? Karl had expected that George would eventually discover that the “Neurostim” he had received was fake, but the magnitude of his retaliation—if that’s what this was—surprised Karl.
Karl was half inclined to let the matter lie, at least for the time being. Insurance would cover the fire damage, and the Norwegian police probably would do a reasonably competent investigation, though he doubted they would catch the perpetrator.
Unfortunately, however, the perpetrator needed to be caught. Karl had no doubt whom Ben Corbin and Gunnar would suspect, and he could not afford to let them lay those suspicions out for a jury—or the Norwegian police. And how would that play out if the perpetrator was George or one of his henchmen? Karl frowned for a moment. Then his expression brightened as a new idea occurred to him. There was an opportunity here to make some real progress if the situation was handled right.
The phone rang again. This time, Gunnar’s number appeared on the caller ID. Karl let it go to voice mail, then played his brother’s message. “Karl, it’s Gunnar. I need to talk to you. Call me at home. It’s not about the lawsuit.”
Karl grinned humorlessly. Sure. Of course it wasn’t about the lawsuit; it was about the fire and shootings. And of course it would never occur to Gunnar or his lawyer to try to tell the jury about those. And Gunnar would certainly never use the threat of that prospect to pressure his little brother ahead of the trial. Well, Gunnar and his threats could wait. Karl would call him back when events had unfolded a little further.
Ben stood in the neonatal-intensive-care unit, looking down at his son. Eric Benjamin Corbin had been born while Ben was somewhere over the North Atlantic. He weighed barely four pounds and was pitifully thin and fragile-looking. Wires were attached to his tiny body in various places and ran through an opening in his incubator to a bank of monitors that displayed his pulse, respiration rate, body temperature, blood oxygenation, and several other vital statistics that Ben couldn’t immediately identify. Ben reached out and touched the hard plastic of the incubator. It was blood-warm, since Eric’s body could not maintain its temperature.
“He’s beautiful, isn’t he?” said Noelle from her wheelchair at Ben’s side.
“He is,” said Ben. “It’s such a relief to see him lying there and breathing and to have you here beside me. I was scared to death after Elena called. I prayed the whole way over on the plane. The guy sitting next to me asked the flight attendant for a different seat. I think he figured I was a terrorist or something.”
Noelle smiled up at her husband and took his hand. “Thanks—for praying for me and for getting over here so fast. I love you.”
He smiled back and squeezed her hand. “I know. I love you too. Is there anything I can do for you now that I’m here?”
She leaned her head against his arm. “You’re doing it now.”
They watched Eric in silence. He opened his eyes and stretched and moved his arms and legs randomly for a few seconds. Then he closed his eyes and went back to sleep. “He’s so tiny,” said Ben. “He looks like he would break if I touched him.”
“Dr. Bakke says he’ll grow a lot over the next couple of weeks,” replied Noelle. “She’s pretty sure that he’ll be fine, but for right now they want to be extra careful with him. He’s been through a lot.”
“So have you.” Ben glanced at the armed police guards outside
the nursery door. “I haven’t heard much about what happened. Are you up for talking about it?”
She sighed and rubbed her eyes. “Sure. I’ve already talked about it twice with the police. Last night, I was marking documents for Einar—Henrik Haugeland’s son—to copy. Henrik was in back looking at archived files. I heard Einar shouting and I went into the hallway to see what was going on. Einar was wrestling with some guy I’d never seen before and yelling at the top of his lungs. I ran back to look for a phone where I could call the police and try to get someone who spoke English, fast. I heard some shots from the hallway and then a few seconds later the guy burst into the room where I was. He pointed his gun at me from about five feet away. Just as the gun went off, Einar came through the door and hit the guy’s arm. The bullet hit me in the leg and I fell down. He and Einar started fighting for the gun again. Einar had already been shot; I could see blood on his clothes. Then the gun went off again and Einar was down too.” Her composure started to crack and her voice shook. “I could see the hole in his back where the bullet had just come out. It was awful.” She began to cry.
Ben bent down and put his arm around her. “That’s okay, babe. Sergei’s talking to the police right now. I’ll get a report from him. I shouldn’t have brought it up with you. Let’s talk about something that makes you happy.”
She sniffed and smiled through her tears. “Well, it would make me happy to hear you promise to change half of Eric’s dirty diapers and get up with him on half the nights.”
Karl sat in a wrought-iron chair on the balcony of his apartment, a glass of iced tea on a little table at his elbow. A light breeze ruffled the pages of the dossier he held, which had arrived an hour ago from Alex Geist’s firm. The first section contained a detailed biography of George Kulish. He had been born in Kiev twenty-six years ago to an unremarkable family. His father was an engineer and his mother managed a local grocery store. George’s teachers and parents had soon realized he was exceptionally bright and had done their best to give him a good education. They did a good-enough job for George to receive a scholarship to MIT when he was sixteen.
