by Ronan Frost
He couldn’t think about it; letting doubt in was potentially lethal. It meant second-guessing everything. It meant micro-fractions of delay between mind and body as risks were calculated and put down. Those tiny slivers of time were the difference between making a landing and not.
Everything came down to instinct.
Rye had to trust who he was.
Or at least had been.
He reached out with his right hand still in the upward arc of his leap. The flames closed around him as he kicked through them. His palm hit the cross brace dead center, arresting his flight. He used his momentum to pivot his body, twisting hard so instead of facing out toward the street his body came around one-eighty, which gave him the chance to reach out with his left hand even as he let go with his right. He faced the window he’d just jumped through, painfully aware that there was nothing between him and the twenty-five-foot drop to the sidewalk.
His focus was on the release, eyes taking in every inch of the façade at once.
He grabbed for the window ledge with his left hand as his body slammed into the stone wall. The impact jarred through his ribs and knees.
His fingers started to slip.
Flames rushed over his head, the fire tearing through the apartment block. The smoke rose, billowing up in thick black clouds to shroud the front of the building. The fire’s appetite for destruction was voracious. It scorched deep into the red bricks, coating them black.
Rye heard people screaming down below, but there was no way he was about to look.
Three fingers carried his entire weight.
It was impossible to hold on for more than a few seconds.
The blistering paint betrayed him.
As he lost his grip, Rye adjusted his weight, kicking out with his feet and scrabbling around for any sort of purchase he could find.
He didn’t dare breathe.
Which was a mistake.
It was unnatural.
He needed to trust that his skills, rusty or not, wouldn’t abandon him when he needed them the most.
His toe caught on one of the letters of the bookstore’s signage, giving him hope. He used it to give him leverage for a precious second to change his grip, the fingers of his right hand fastening on one of the decorative bricks proclaiming the age of the building. It was enough. He clung to the side of the building, breathing hard, the cries of people down below urging him to safety. Nine times out of ten, ascending was easier than descending, but climbing to the roof wasn’t an option with the fire taking hold inside. It wouldn’t be too long before the entire place went up in smoke. There was no obvious fire escape set into the façade, unlike back home where fire regs demanded it. The only real option he had lay in a decorative trellis and the climbing plants pitting the surface of the red brick—but that still meant negotiating five or six handholds sideways across the sheer wall without falling.
The drop was far enough to do serious damage, even if he tried to control his fall.
He couldn’t hold on to the wall forever; his fingers were weakening fast.
Taking his weight on the toes of one foot, he felt out for a new handhold, reading the rough surface with his fingers.
He made it across. There was a small surveillance camera hidden within the climbing plants.
The trellis offered little reassurance; he felt the screws anchoring it to the wall pull away beneath him as he started down, and, still more than ten feet from the ground, was forced to jump.
Conscious of the portable drive in his back pocket, he landed badly, trying to protect it, and twisted his knee as he tried to roll with his body’s natural momentum.
He lay on his back, looking up at the flames billowing out through the shattered window.
Vic’s disapproving face loomed over him. The big man reached down. Rye thought he was offering to help him back to his feet, but as he reached up Vic ignored his hand.
“I think it’s obvious what Mr. Rask sees in you,” he said, retrieving the rolled-up canvas from inside Rye’s shirt. “We need to get out of here.”
A small crowd had gathered. Several people were on their cell phones, recording it for posterity or Twitter.
“Let’s go find our ride.”
FOURTEEN
Which was easier said than done. Ammar was nowhere to be found, and the sirens were on top of them.
Rye saw the flashing blue lights turn the same corner they had only a few moments ago. He pushed through the crowd, heading in the opposite direction. Voices yelled at his back. He didn’t understand the words but didn’t need to. “Come on,” he urged. Vic didn’t need telling twice.
They started to run.
The objection of the voices grew louder, but they were soon lost beneath the swell of sirens as more cop cars powered into the street, slewing sideways across the blacktop to form a temporary roadblock.
To the right, the yachts bobbed on the slight tidal roll of the water. To the left, a labyrinth of streets waited to swallow them whole. He turned and turned again, still moving away from the burning bookstore, trying to see Ammar’s taxi within the descending chaos, but neither it nor the man was anywhere to be seen.
“What’s the plan?” he called back to Vic.
“Distance first. We’ve got what we came for.”
“What about—?” He cast a lingering look back toward the barrier of cops and saw a couple of the onlookers pointing at their backs, and knew they were being sold out. They had no more than three hundred yards on the cops, which in a strange city was nothing. Without thinking about it, Rye darted down one of the narrow side alleyways that in turn led to an even narrower alleyway that ended in a series of steps seemingly carved straight into the side of the hill. There was a tunnel beneath the staircase. The nondescript façade marked it as either a nuclear bunker or a parking garage.
Rye took the steps two and three at a time, not slowing, not looking back. He pushed himself hard, arms and legs pumping furiously as he climbed. There were over one hundred steps rising to the next street. Only once he reached the top did he turn in time to see two uniformed officers starting up the bottom steps after them.
The climb was hardest on Vic. He was built for sudden explosive strength, not this kind of muscle-burning endurance. He imagined the stairs a couple of months later, with the snow in place. It didn’t bear thinking about. At the top of the stairs, the big man looked left and right, and made a decision: with an explosive burst of pace he charged toward one of the many glorious pre-twenties-decadence structures with their heavy oak doors and endless rows of buzzers keeping friend and foe alike out.
Sweden was a country struggling to reinvent itself—or at least, from what he’d seen of it, Stockholm was a city undergoing an identity crisis. Everywhere there seemed to be construction canvases hiding the work going on beneath as the city looked for a modern replacement to the brutalist architecture that had crushed the personality out of what had once been a beautiful place. The street they were on was one of the stubborn remnants of Germanic influence that predated those modernist monstrosities. Vic hit every single buzzer on the panel, top to bottom, knowing that someone would hit the door lock without actually asking who was there. He was right. Even as he was trying to convince a stranger to open the door, someone else triggered the lock. He pushed the door open and the pair of them hid inside.
The foyer was brown marbled stone, oak trim, and scuffed white paint. The problem was that the light came on as soon as the motion sensor was tripped, meaning the door was lit up like a big arrow pointing “This Way!” to the cops on their heels.
Vic didn’t hesitate: he half bent to pull his shoe off, then jumped to shatter the lightbulb with its heel, plunging them into the same darkness that claimed the rest of the street.
“Get away from the doors,” he said, leading them toward the back of the building. There was a second door that led out to a courtyard overlooked on all sides by apartments. He ran his fingers around the door frame. It took Rye a second to reali
ze he was reassuring himself there was no magnetic seal that once broken would trip an alarm. The door, he saw, was an ancient thing. And heavy. Still holding his shoe, Vic tried the door. It was locked. Without anything to finesse it, he had no choice but to put his shoe back on and kick out the lock plate. It took four blows, each surely loud enough to bring the full weight of the law raining down on them, but the wood splintered around the metal, and he was able to force the door open.
They faced the same problem in reverse on the other side of the courtyard, but before Vic could shatter one of the small panel windows above the lock, Rye had found an alternate way out: a stable-style set of double doors that weren’t locked. With a couple of streets between them and the scene of the crime, they were hardly out of the woods, especially given the lack of foot traffic at this time of night. They needed to find somewhere to disappear, even if only for half an hour or so, just until the immediate danger passed.
The streets around them were alive with sounds. Cars coming and going. Music, muted but definitely there. And voices. Drinkers. Exactly what they needed: a crowd of drunks to get lost in.
“This way,” Rye said, pointing in the direction of the noise. Vic understood what he was thinking. Sometimes it was just smarter to hide in plain sight. He nodded. They set off toward the night’s drinkers hoping there were enough of them to lose themselves among.
They turned a corner to see not one but two pubs with terraces filled with drinkers, dozens of people standing with glasses in hand, leaning against the yellow wall, while others sat around garden tables that spilled out into the street. The rise and fall of buzzed conversation welcomed them. Rye saw an empty table and steered Vic toward it. Vic sat with his back to the street, giving him a better view of who came and went around them.
A waitress came out to take their order, repeating herself when Rye said, “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Swedish?”
“No problem. What can I get you?”
“Two beers,” Vic said, keeping it easy. After all, they weren’t here to drink.
She left them to themselves.
Rye tried to scan the street behind him through the reflections in the window, but it was a futile exercise. Vic seemed relaxed enough, so he had to assume there was no immediate danger.
Two cops, both built like rejects from some Scandinavian Terminator movie, walked down the street. They walked in step, hands easy but never far from the guns on their hips as they approached the drinkers.
The empty glasses on their table were the perfect camouflage. Rye reached for one and cradled it in his hands, nursing it.
The cops fell into conversation with a couple of the guys leaning against the wall. Words were exchanged. It was impossible to tell what was being said, but the tone sounded almost angry.
Rye raised the empty glass to his lips, doing his best to listen—and realized that they were the only people not talking. “So, I really want to go to Abba, The Museum,” he said, suddenly, doing a little Keyser Söze, from the movie The Usual Suspects, thanks to the small sticker in the window that advertised the place.
“What are you talking about?” Vic asked, lost by the sudden non sequitur.
“It’s supposed to be great,” Rye said. “If you’re into kaftans and flairs.”
“I have no idea what you are talking about.” The big man smiled as the waitress returned balancing a tray with their drinks.
She put the glasses down on the table between them. Vic reached for his wallet, even though he hadn’t had time to change any money.
Rye looked from him to the cops and back to him as Vic took out his credit card. The waitress, he realized, had a handheld card reader in the front pocket of her apron.
She ran the card and handed the reader to Vic to put in his numbers.
One of the drinkers, a blonde propped up against the wall, raised her hand and pointed off in the opposite direction, nodding, and when questioned by the cops, nodding again more forcefully.
The cops worked their way back through the drinkers to the street and set off running in the opposite direction. Fast.
The helpful soul who’d sent them off on a wild-goose chase raised her glass when she saw Rye watching and offered him a flirtatious smile.
FIFTEEN
They were booked into a boutique hotel in the city, but Vic had no intention of staying there.
He wasn’t sold on staying in the city, period.
Instead, after their taxi driver had dropped them off at their hotel, they made a show of walking in but carried on straight through the foyer and walked out of a second set of doors on the far side, out of the view of the street just in case anyone was watching.
They walked two blocks on back streets before crossing the main street to check into another hotel under false names. When the receptionist asked for their passports, Vic slipped her five hundred bucks and said, “If you could find us an empty room that isn’t in the system, that would be excellent.” She didn’t seem convinced but pocketed the money.
“The room is meant to be empty, so don’t make a mess. You’ll need to be out before housekeeping arrives.”
“Of course,” Vic agreed.
“I don’t want to know what you’re planning on doing in there.”
“Sleeping,” Rye said, but the woman didn’t look like she was buying it. But then, this was a country where prostitution was a tax-paying career, and what went on between two consenting adults, same sex or not, was none of her business.
The first thing Vic did when they were in the room was call Rask.
He unrolled the canvas and laid it out on one of the twin beds. Rye studied it, not sure what, exactly, he was looking for. There was no obvious map. It was a curious artifact. There was a considerable amount of damage to the oils on the left-hand side, with the paint blistered and charred in places. Nothing about the image, which appeared to be heavily symbolic in nature, suggested it was any sort of treasure map. Part of the canvas was given over to a tree of sorts, though it was no natural tree, but rather more akin to a glass sculpture wrapped in pastel-shaded angel wings and lit by a gloriously golden sun. No, not one sun, he realized there were three of them, in a triangle, though two were faded and less obvious than the main one, and appeared to be wreathed in flames that encompassed all three suns. There were rocks, and shadow shapes within the landscape that were disproportionately built, arms too long, legs unnaturally jointed, that wore crowns like kings. The figures, with their crowns and spears, towered over smaller ones, easily half again as tall as them. The rocks were dusted with snow, meaning they must be part of some mountain range? A lot of the painting was too damaged to make out any real detail.
“We’ve got a problem,” Vic told Rask. The big man stared out through the window at the hotel farther down the main street.
Rye looked closer at one of the towering kings and changed his mind; the figure looked more like a knight. The entire image put him in mind of Arthurian knights questing after the Holy Grail, but he couldn’t have said why, exactly. Perhaps it was the way the angel’s wings seemed to form a chalice around the figures on the mountainside? The piece conveyed spiritual promise, but in truth it wasn’t particularly good. There was a partial signature: avatsky. The rest of Helena Blavatsky’s signature was lost beneath a ruptured bubble of oil.
“Okay, I’m putting you on speaker. I’m with Rye. We’re both fine, but someone beat us to the punch. As we pulled up outside the dealer’s an IED took the place out.”
“What about Christoffer?”
“Dead,” Vic said.
There was momentary silence, but Rask wasn’t mourning the dealer, he was thinking two steps ahead.
“Thirty seconds earlier and we’d have been in there,” Rye said, wanting Rask to understand the fine margins life and, in this case, death, turned on.
“But you weren’t, which is something we should all be grateful for. I assume the painting was destroyed in the blaze?”
“You’d be wrong,” Rye said.
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“Our friend here took it upon himself to run into the burning building,” Vic explained.
“I can see that,” a new voice came onto the line. “And so can half of the world, so I’d say you’ve got two problems, not one. Someone’s put footage of the new boy clinging to the front of the burning building up on Twitter. The thing’s going viral. They’ve got a nice close-up of your face, too, and don’t kill the camera until after Guuleed helps you back to your feet.”
“Meaning you can see him take the rolled-up canvas from me first,” Rye said, realizing what that meant.
“That you can. So, assuming the explosion wasn’t just bad luck and a gas main blowing,” that earned a snort from Vic. “It was set by someone who knew you were coming—”
“And if they see the video they know we’ve got the painting,” Rye finished for Rask, not liking the implications of where he ended up.
“Precisely,” Rask agreed.
“What do you want to do?” Vic asked.
“We need to get the pair of you out of there,” Rask said. “I’ll have Jeremiah see what he can find out about the bomber from here. You should relocate as soon as possible.”
“Already done,” Vic reassured him. “And even though our ride ditched us, we made sure our eventual taxi driver thinks we checked into the first hotel, just in case he sees the footage and realizes who his passengers were.”
“You can never be too careful. It’s a pity we can’t get eyes on the actual painting until you get back here.”
“It wasn’t the only thing I rescued from the fire,” Rye said. “There’s this.” He put the portable drive on the bed.
“I’m sure it’s fantastic,” the other voice said. “But given I can’t actually see what you’re talking about I’ll just have to take your word for it.”
“It’s a portable hard drive,” Rye said. “I’ve got no idea what’s on it, but it was attached to the rig that had been used to photograph the painting. So, I’m thinking it includes the scans the dealer was using for authentication.”
