Grendel's Curse

by Alex Archer

  Regardless, as Annja pushed down on the handle and opened the door, she couldn’t shift the sense of trepidation she felt.

  There were more signs on the other side of the door; someone had definitely been inside. The living space was a bigger disaster than it had been when she’d last been here. She wouldn’t have seen it if she hadn’t been looking for it; the differences were almost imperceptible—papers had been disturbed, the chair had been moved, a small cupboard door left open. It could all have been innocent. The laptop was where Lars had left it. Surely if someone had been in here looking for something they’d have taken it?

  Or maybe they’d just fired it up and deleted the incriminating file, Annja thought. It would have been easier, faster and less likely to raise any suspicions, whereas a stolen laptop would lead to even more questions.

  She made room for Una to join her inside, then opened the laptop.

  “Just like when he was a student,” she said as she looked around. “He was always messy. He used to have to crawl over his clothes in his bedroom.” She laughed softly at the memory. “Sometimes he could barely get the door open, and would have to jump from the doorway to the bed, but he wouldn’t let me move anything because he knew where everything was—or so he said. I always had my doubts. He used to have a sign on his desk about how a cluttered desk was the sign of a genius at work.” She poked at the piles, at the journals folded open on old articles, at the newspaper cuttings and stacks of CDs out of their cases. It was hard to believe that there could be any order within the chaos.

  Annja smiled and pressed the power button to start the laptop. The smile didn’t last long. The log-in screen asked for a password.

  She stared at the screen, annoyed with herself for not considering the possibility that he might have protected the files. “Any ideas,” she asked. “Favorite books, first pets, anything that Lars might have used as a password?”

  “Hmm, I know that he used to use his first girlfriend’s name, Kristina,” she said, spelling it out as Annja hit the keys.

  The speakers grunted and the entire screen shook as access was denied.

  There was no indication if they had three guesses or infinite ones before the system locked down, but Annja wasn’t about to risk losing the photograph—assuming Lars had even uploaded it.

  “No point in trying to guess,” Annja said. “Let’s just take the rig with us. I have a friend who should be able to get us in. Let’s grab everything you want before Inge decides to stick her head in here and ask more questions.”

  Una picked through his things, throwing his clothes into a sports bag. There were dozens of books but she only selected a couple of them—old well-loved books that had probably been with him for a long time, Annja thought. Amid the clutter Annja spotted a laptop bag. She packed the computer away.

  “Annja?” Una’s voice was shaky, barely controlled. Annja turned to see her holding a towel with a dark stain streaked across it. It was blood. A fair bit of it. But not to cause concern, was it? Not enough for him to black out on the road and cause the crash.

  “Looks like he cut himself pretty badly,” Annja said, examining the stain more closely.

  “He didn’t mention it when we spoke.”

  “Maybe he didn’t think it was worth mentioning.”

  “Do you think it could have been why he crashed? Maybe we’re wrong. Maybe it was just an accident.”

  “I don’t know...I don’t think so. It’s possible, but it doesn’t fit with everything else,” Annja admitted.

  “Everything else?”

  “We don’t really have time for explanations here, but I’m hoping the definitive answer to what’s going on is on here.” She held up the laptop bag.

  Una nodded. She took the towel back and stuffed it into a bin, then hurriedly finished what she was doing. Long before Annja had locked up and replaced the key beneath the stone, Una was already sitting in the car, clutching the stuffed sports bag on her lap.

  Annja clambered into the car and slammed the door. Before she’d even jammed the key in the ignition, Una asked, “Do you really think you’ll be able to do something with the computer?”

  “Not me,” Annja said, pulling away. She could see Inge in her mirror, standing there, looking confused. “But Garin, my friend, well, there’s nothing he can’t get done. If he can’t do it himself, he’s got people falling over themselves to do it for him.”

  “Must be nice.”

  “I’m not so sure. But it’s useful.”

  “So, you said you’d explain?”

  “Yes. Okay. Bear with me, I haven’t said any of this stuff out loud before, so... After I was supposed to see Lars, two men broke into my hotel room. At first I thought they were looking for something. But they weren’t. They’d come for me. One of them came back the next morning, before we met, and searched my room. I think he’d come to finish the job, but I wasn’t there.”

  “Oh, my God.”

  Annja concentrated on the road ahead. “There’s more. Johan, my photographer, took footage of a political rally a few nights ago—”

  “Karl Thorssen’s? Where the bomb went off?”

  “One of the men who came to my room was there, dressed as a paramedic. He’s dead now. There was another man there who died this morning in that fireworks factory explosion.” When she said it like that the links between the three dead men seemed painfully obvious: Karl Thorssen.

  “You think Karl Thorssen’s behind it all, don’t you?”

  “I do,” Annja said, as though making a solemn vow. “But I don’t have the proof.”

  “I never liked the man...” Una said. “I warned Lasse. I told him to stay well away. Men like him can’t be trusted. But he wouldn’t listen to me. He wanted to be the one to excavate Skalunda Barrow. It was all he’d ever wanted. He wanted to find Beowulf. And it killed him.”

  They drove back by the more circuitous route, avoiding the strip where Lars Mortensen had died.

  “I hope your friend can get into the laptop and that you find what you need. If there’s proof there, use it to bring Thorssen down. Then, maybe with one less fascist pig in the world, my son’s death might mean something. Please. Promise me you won’t stop trying to find the truth.”

  All she could do was to promise that she would do her best.

  That was all anyone could ever do.

  Even with the heavy bag of clothes and personal possessions that Una had packed at the caravan, she still insisted on being dropped off at the same place outside the police station, rather than being driven to her hotel.

  Annja spotted the old woman now among the crowd on the sidewalk, bowed down beneath the extra weight of the sports bag. Annja thought of their last conversation, and wondered if she would even find the truth Una Mortensen was looking for.

  23

  The cut wasn’t healing.

  Thorssen had sliced his palm on the sword. The gash wasn’t deep, but for some reason the blood refused to clot. It continued to seep through the Band-Aid he’d slapped over it, and then through the bandage he’d wrapped around it when that failed.

  His mother had fussed over him, concerned that left untreated it would become infected, and urged him to go to the hospital to have the wound cleansed and stitched. And though she only meant well, he lost his temper with her. Again.

  It was becoming harder and harder to control the fire inside him.

  He didn’t know what was happening to him.

  His thoughts weren’t his own.

  Too many times now he found himself closing his eyes, hearing the sounds of battle, smelling the sharp scent of blood. His pulse would race and his breath hitch, and he’d been unable to bite back the surge of power and the need to commit violence that went with it.

  He wasn’t himself.

  His mother fought back the tears, grabbing her coat and leaving the house.

  He let her go.

  He didn’t care where she went.

  He didn’t care if she came back.
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  The house echoed emptily around him as he walked through it.

  It no longer felt like home. It felt cold. Alien. Like it belonged to some other life.

  Thorssen retreated to the bathroom on the second floor, and peeled back the dressing that was now wet with blood. He teased it away from his palm, wincing as the gauze tugged at his palm, and tossed the bandage into the garbage. Gritting his teeth against the pain, he ran his hand beneath the hot tap, washing away the blood.

  There was no sign that the cut was going to close.

  Fresh blood bubbled up from the wound as he pressed the loose flaps of skin together.

  His mother was right; it needed stitching.

  But she was wrong if she thought he’d ever reduce himself to joining the great unwashed to be treated. No. Money bought certain privileges, including house calls. He made a call to a private clinic just outside the city and arranged for a nurse to come to the house. They promised that someone would be with him within half an hour.

  It was incredible that the blade’s edge could be as keen as it was after all that time in the ground; even the fact that the corrosion had somehow protected it didn’t make sense when he thought about it. It was the nature of things to decay. But Nægling defied nature.

  He had watched Ulric work on the weapon; he hadn’t honed the edge in the slightest. In point of fact, he’d remarked how he didn’t need to, and how it was in remarkable condition for such a rare and obviously old piece.

  The flesh around the wound had turned white, he noticed, and when he probed at it, felt soft with the swelling beneath it pushing the cut wider.

  Thorssen admired Ulric’s skill. Nægling was whole again. The two halves of the wooden hand had come together easily, their symmetry perfect in every detail. The completion of the binding had been painstakingly slow, the smith refusing to be rushed, working with the same calm precision until the last turn of the thin strip of leather was tightened and secured. Even then he wasn’t finished. The man had fussed and fiddled, making tiny adjustments that, to Thorssen’s untrained eye, appeared to be unnecessary, and made no obvious difference to his work, but finally he handed Nægling over, beautiful and complete for the first time in centuries.

  Karl Thorssen held the relic in both hands, feeling its weight, testing its balance.

  It was his sword.

  He relished the surge of heat he felt flare up the hilt.

  The smith kept his distance as Karl Thorssen cut the air with the blade again and again, feeling a power surge through him, filling him with a hunger that had to be sated. The blade had already tasted his own blood, the exposed metal slicing deeply into his palm when he’d tested it. Now it cried out for fresh blood. Now it cried out for the smith’s blood.

  Thorssen’s grip clenched even tighter around the hilt, forcing the cut in his palm wider still, allowing the blood to flow. The cut stung as the dressing caught in the leather, but the pain only served to make everything more real.

  The pain was immaterial. All that mattered was the sword in his hand and the rage it fostered.

  He swung again, causing the smith to stagger back a step, barely avoiding the blade as it cleaved through the air where his throat had been a split second before.

  “That was a little close, my friend,” Ulric said, laughing nervously.

  Thorssen closed the distance between them and swung the mighty blade. The tip of Nægling cut through flesh and hit bone, barely slowing the weapon’s arc.

  “What the hell...?” The man stumbled back again, desperately trying to step outside the reach of Thorssen’s swing, but the politician wasn’t about to let him escape so easily. The smith was another loose end that couldn’t be left hanging.

  Now that Nægling had tasted blood again for the first time in more than fourteen hundred years it demanded more, and more, and more, to slake its thirst, and Thorssen was only too happy to feed it.

  He and the blade were one.

  It was in him. Of him.

  It flowed through his veins.

  It nourished him.

  It drained him, feeding off him like some steely vampire in his hands.

  He hacked and slashed at the fallen man long after Ulric stopped screaming. Thorssen gave in to the blind frenzy, cutting, cutting, cutting. His wild swings chased Ulric into the afterlife.

  The smith’s remains were unrecognizable by the time Thorssen’s fury subsided.

  His sword arm hung limp at his side.

  He breathed heavily.

  Sweat matted his hair to his scalp.

  It was all he could do to maintain his grip on the sword.

  His clothes were soaked with the dead man’s blood. He could feel its warmth against his skin.

  There was still something inside him, an energy buried deep down, primal, primitive, wild. He roared to release it, raising Nægling above his head.

  Something was happening to him, something that was making him more than he was before. More than he had ever been.

  And he embraced the change.

  24

  Sometimes it took an element of luck to make everything go right.

  Tostig was only too aware of that. He would never turn his nose up at it, either. Luck could be the difference between nearly and done. Luck could be as simple as the wind direction turning, carrying your scent away from the dogs, to someone turning up in the right place at the right time.

  This time luck came in the guise of a call: Annja Creed had been out at the Skalunda Barrow with Mortensen’s mother. They would be returning to the hotel soon, giving him a place to wait and watch.

  He’d noted the positioning of the CCTV cameras inside the hotel and on the various floors, covering their angles and their blind spots. He knew where he could wait without being seen by hotel staff. Closing his eyes, he could picture the critical path that would take him across the lobby without ever showing his face to the cameras, to the stairwells beyond the bank of elevators, and Creed’s room upstairs, but he had no intention of taking a risk.

  His good luck continued fifteen minutes later in the form of Annja’s cameraman, Johan Cheander, striding toward the hotel.

  It was a question of neatness. Tostig had already decided that killing one of them dictated killing both of them, preferably together, and making it look like an accident. The body count was rising. That was a concern. And two more deaths in a matter of days would have the local police running around like headless chickens. It was an unfortunate necessity, though, and five dead or fifteen dead, it didn’t really matter so long as nothing could be traced back to him.

  The issue, though, was connectivity. These people had direct contact via one another’s lives. They weren’t random strangers. Their lives dissected at various key points in time, points that could be identified and prove telling because each and every one of them had links to one man: Karl Thorssen. There was no denying the finger of blame would be laid at Thorssen’s door sooner or later, and even if Thorssen didn’t care, Tostig did, because if Thorssen talked there was only one man he could talk about: Tostig.

  Which meant the relationship had moved into sudden death.

  It was time for the assassin to watch his back. Trust his instincts. Protect himself and plan an exit strategy.

  He slipped out of the car as the man approached, camera bag hanging over his shoulder, and opened the rear door, all the while careful to keep his face shielded from the lobby camera that just reached the sidewalk through the huge plate-glass windows.

  “Inside,” he said, motioning for Johan to get into the car. There was no subtlety to it; he revealed the gun in the waistband of his trousers, and pushed the cameraman toward the open door. Cheander tried to pull away, but then froze as recognition hit him. “Don’t do anything stupid,” Tostig said softly, hand on the gun. The cameraman seemed trapped, wanting to swing the bag at him, to run. He put a hand on the man’s back. The touch was enough to deter him from making a break for it.

  The man slid inside onto the ba
ckseat.

  “Wise decision,” Tostig said, closing the door behind him.

  No one was looking.

  “Facedown, hands behind your back,” he said, leaning into the car without getting in. “Don’t fight me and I won’t have to hurt you.”

  It was difficult for the man to maneuver, but fear made him supple. Tostig forced him down deeper into the footwell behind the front seats and yanked his hands back, slapping a pair of handcuffs on his wrists.

  It didn’t pay to take chances: he ran a hand over the man’s clothes. The quick frisk turned up a cell phone.

  He took it from him.

  Tostig had a small metal case in his pocket. The case held a syringe preloaded with something that would take Johan down fast. It was a fallback. He would rather not pollute the man’s system with anything that might turn up in an autopsy.

  The assassin had also replaced the fuel in the gas can and put it in the trunk. He liked to keep things simple. Every day household objects readily available from any hardware store were his murder weapons of choice. They tended not to rouse suspicion in the same way as rare drug cocktails would these days. They were flashy and obnoxious and would only ever lead to hot trails and big trouble. Why take the risk?

  Tostig slammed the door closed behind him and smoothed out the wrinkles from his jacket. He took a look at the phone.

  There were a number of missed calls from Creed. It would have been gratifying to phone her now and simply say, “I’ve got your man. What little is left of his life can be measured in breaths.” And hang up, but that wasn’t Tostig. It was too showy.

  He owed the cameraman for the Serb.

  And Tostig was the kind of man who honored his debts, on his own terms, in his own time.

  “What’s this about?” the man demanded as the car pulled away from the curb. Tostig had no intention of telling him. He wasn’t about to engage in conversation with the man. There would be no bonding. No begging. No reprieve. And, for once, the chance to kill two birds with one well-cast stone.

  He had just the place in mind.

  Having the cameraman’s cell phone made things a lot easier.