The Rotten State
A John Flynn Thriller
AJ Stewart
Jacaranda Drive
To Helle, for two decades of friendship.
And Heather.
Chapter One
Outside Copenhagen, Denmark
They watched as the casket was lowered into the ground. Aleksy Gorski leaned against a gnarled tree that looked a thousand years old, while John Flynn stood at ease, hands behind his back. Both men had dumped their backpacks against the base of the tree. They weren’t hiding on the other side of the cemetery, but neither were they ready to announce their presence.
The congregation around the plot was larger than any field funeral with which Flynn had been involved but smaller than those he had seen held on bases around the world. There were forty-nine people present—Flynn killed the time by counting and indexing them. There were three he would have considered children—not babies, but yet to reach their teens. He classified eighteen as adults, a broad category that would have started with anyone in their late teens, had there been any, and ended at the point someone looked to be, in his opinion, old. The rest fell into that last category. The bell curve was clearly skewed toward an older population. Flynn suspected that outside the military, funeral congregations tended to be older. It stood to reason. Older people died at a greater rate, and those older people probably knew other older people. Since leaving the Legion, he hadn’t been to a funeral, so his evidence was based on assumption and this one anecdotal sample.
The body in the coffin was not an old person, however, according to the evidence at hand. Funerals had hierarchies: people positioned closer to the grave had been closer to the deceased during their life. Tears weren’t a good indicator—sometimes people who barely knew the departed were hysterical while close family were often stoic—so Flynn focused on the faces nearest the plot.
There was an old couple who might have been parents or grandparents, and a younger couple who stood tightly with them. The older woman was weeping quietly under a plastic poncho, and the man stood erect with his jaw clenched. The younger woman, who looked to be in her midthirties, stared into the middle distance from beneath a black umbrella. Flynn suspected that if she were the mother of the deceased she would be inconsolable. Which made her a friend, or perhaps a sister. This made the older couple the parents and put the deceased somewhere between twenty and forty years old. Which made the younger man holding the umbrella over the younger woman’s head the brother-in-law—and the only face that Flynn recognized.
The priest spoke without umbrella or headwear, allowing the misting rain to coat his thick hair. Flynn couldn’t hear the words, but he knew them, in general terms. He had been to more funerals than he cared to recall. It was part of a military career. Some had been his men, some had belonged to other units and other armies and other countries. Some had been in the cold of a French winter and others in the searing heat of Africa. Some were buried, and some were cremated, and others were memorialized without any remains. Now he stood in silence in a Danish field filled with headstones, the late spring drizzle giving such events as this the mournful ambiance they deserved.
When the priest was done, the gathered souls began making their way toward a ramshackle collection of vehicles. There was a minivan that took about a fifth of the people, and the rest carpooled in mostly older-model cars. A group of men who had been standing apart all got in the same late-model sedan. They all wore similar clothes—khaki trousers and suit jackets. Perhaps workmates of the deceased.
The closest family was last to leave. They all stared into the hole in the ground before them, then the younger man tugged at his wife’s arm and brought her back from wherever her mind had been. The woman touched the arm of the older man, and he in turn the older woman, and with heads bowed, they walked away from the burial plot.
Flynn watched them stop beside a well-used but clean Opel. They hugged, and the two men shook hands, then the older couple got in the car and drove away. The man and woman watched them until they were gone, then they got into an old red Toyota farm truck and drove down the short stretch of blacktop that led out of the cemetery.
Gorski pushed off his tree and glanced at Flynn. “What do you think?”
“Not today,” said Flynn. “Perhaps tomorrow. You agree?”
“I do. Can we get out of the rain now?”
The two men collected their packs and marched out of the cemetery. Flynn was relaxed. He was in no hurry. He and Gorski knew where the small farm truck had gone—they had seen pictures of the home from far above on Google Earth.
Flynn and Gorski marched into the small village of Østvand. They had taken the thirty-minute train ride from Copenhagen that morning under light clouds, but the rain had drifted in as they walked the several kilometers from the nearest station, in Veksø.
Østvand was a main street and a couple hundred meters of shopfronts, all dull brick, a building material that was obviously plentiful—all the houses that spread out from the main street looked to be of the same construction.
They passed a Spar market and a hair salon, plus a hardware shop that doubled as a seed store. There were posters in the window for small tractors and a plow that looked like a machine-pulled rake. Flynn paused briefly before a small café, but Gorski nodded onward toward a sign he had seen ahead.
It was a bar of sorts, the type of place Flynn remembered fondly from his days in the French Foreign Legion. Part pub, part café, part living room. They stepped inside and shook off the rain, then dropped their packs in a corner near the bar: out of the way but always within view.
There were three men up at the bar, all sitting in front of half-empty beers, vacantly looking up at a television that showed a football match without the sound. Another man and a woman sat at a table by the window. The only other person was the ruddy-faced man behind the bar. He pulled Gorski a Carlsberg, then moved to the espresso machine to make Flynn a coffee.
They sat at a table against the wall, one with eyes on the front entrance, the other on the rear. It was habit more than expectation. Gorski sipped his beer and nodded as if he were a judge in a competition who had just sampled the winner. Flynn took in the smell of the coffee and sipped the tart crema, and felt the caffeine coursing into his veins.
The two men sat without talking; long ago they had become comfortable with silence. They had known each other for seventeen years and for a decade of that had spent almost every waking hour together. All the necessary conversations had been had. Each man knew the other as well as he would ever know any human on the planet.
Gorski glanced at the football game on the television: a Europa Cup fixture—a Danish team against one from Turkey, stuck at nil-nil. There was a light rain falling. Flynn watched Gorski watching the game. Flynn had grown up playing the game his father called soccer on the streets of Brussels while his father had served at NATO. He had watched American football at home on the American Forces Network, an altogether different game that involved almost no kicking. His father had taught him and his brother the nuances of that game, and he enjoyed watching it, but he never truly understood that which he had not done himself. His father would have rolled his eyes at the goalless scoreline in the game on television, but Flynn understood that this football was more like warfare—the battle was long, and winning was in the taking of territory as much as the scoring of points.
When he finished his beer, Gorski took his glass and Flynn’s cup back to the bar and returned with two more drinks. As he sat, Gorski spoke.
“He says the closest accommodation is back in Veksø.”
Flynn nodded but said nothing. It would be about an hour’s march back into Ve
ksø, and the days were long this time of year. They had plenty of time.
Gorski sipped his beer and then pushed it away and turned toward the television. His eyes stopped on the door as it cracked open. There was no bell or buzzer, but the door was old and it creaked as the man stepped in from the rain. Gorski tapped his finger twice on the table, and Flynn slowly glanced across his shoulder.
It was the younger man from the funeral. He nodded at the barman and canvassed the room, then turned his attention to Gorski and Flynn. The man shook off his coat, walked across the café, and stood right before their table. He looked at Gorski and spoke in French.
“Que fais-tu ici?” he said.
“We were in the neighborhood,” replied Gorski in the same language.
The man shifted his eyes to Flynn.
“And you,” he said in English. “You’re supposed to be dead.”
Flynn nodded. “I was, more or less.”
He pushed his chair back and stood to face the man. Flynn was slightly taller and just a bit broader in the shoulders. Each man surveyed the other. There were new lines on their faces, but the rest was familiar.
“Mon adjudant,” said the man without a salute or a smile.
“Not anymore. It’s John now.”
Flynn offered his hand. The man took it, and they shook. Then the man looked back to Gorski, who stood, opened his arms, and bear-hugged him.
“Gorecki,” said the man.
“Gorski now.”
The man nodded and rolled his shoulders as if happy to be free of the embrace, and Flynn kicked out a chair for him. They sat, and the man looked over his shoulder to wave at the barman, who had already poured a beer he was waiting to deliver.
“What do you go by now?” asked Flynn. “I assume it’s not Peter Thorn anymore.”
“No, not that the French were particularly inventive with their nom de plumes. My name is Thorsen. Peder Thorsen. And you, mon adjudant?”
“Like I said, I’m not your adjudant anymore. This isn’t the Legion. There are no ranks here. I’m plain old John Flynn.”
Thorsen frowned. “John Flynn? So Jacques Fontaine was also not so original.”
“I don’t think they put a lot of time into it, no, but in this case, it’s actually me that’s not original. It’s not the name I was born with. I took my mother’s name after, you know, everything.”
Thorsen nodded. “Because you were supposed to be dead.”
“Right.”
“So that begs the question, John Flynn, why aren’t you dead?”
Chapter Two
Flynn sipped his espresso.
“Don’t get me wrong,” said Thorsen. “I’m glad to see you, old friends, both of you. But I never expected to ever see you again.”
“I never expected to be seen,” said Flynn. “As I am sure you suspected, I had to disappear after Iraq. Colonel Laporte ordered it. I went back to the United States. I had a life there, for a while. And someone came looking for me.”
“They found you? The ones who owned the container?”
“Yes.”
“Who were they?”
“On the ground, a familiar face. But at the top? I don’t know.”
Thorsen looked at Gorski. “And you?”
“My parents received threats. The threats were neutralized. But we thought we would check in on you, old friend. Just to make sure.”
“Have you had any threats?” asked Flynn. “Anything strange?”
Thorsen shrugged. “Many things are strange these days, but no, not threats, not like you say.”
“Not like I say?” said Flynn. “Have you been threatened in some other way?”
Thorsen sipped his beer. “There are many troubling things happening in our world, John. We are not immune to them. So you think they are still after the shipment we found?”
“Yes.”
“Why? How important can it be after all these years?”
“That’s one of the reasons we came,” said Flynn. “You were the only one of us to see inside the shipping container.”
“Only on a scope and only for a moment. All I saw were security measures. Very sophisticated, at least for those days. That’s why we couldn’t open it, not in the time frame we had. So what was actually inside? I have no more idea than you.”
The three men sipped their drinks in silence for moment, then someone at the bar yelled, and they all turned to the television. The Danish team had scored.
Flynn said, “Is it possible that they haven’t found you yet?”
“I don’t know,” said Thorsen, “but I’m not really hiding. Unlike you, I was never dead. I went back to my birth name and my home country. I’m not that hard to find. But they had interrogated me back in Aubagne.” Thorsen turned to Gorski. “We were all interrogated. You, me, Manu.”
Gorski smiled. “I remember.”
“But of course they learned nothing because we knew nothing,” said Thorsen. “We had been told you were dead, John. We didn’t believe it, but that was our story. I can only assume they learned all they were going to learn from me, which was nothing.”
“I hope that’s true,” said Flynn.
Thorsen shrugged. His face was serious, but Flynn recalled that he had always worn that expression, even after the punchline of a joke.
“I think the past is past,” said Thorsen.
Flynn smiled. “Then we should drink to the future, not the past, and then we should leave you to your life.” He lifted his glass.
“Where have you come from?” Thorsen asked.
“Veksø,” said Gorski, “via Copenhagen, and before that, Hamburg.”
“There are no hotels or hostels here in Østvand. You must stay with us tonight.”
“We can’t impose like that,” said Flynn.
“Impose? Did you not save my life?”
“And you mine. There are no debts to repay here.”
“I want you to meet my wife.”
“Why?”
“Because you were my brothers for more than a quarter of my life.”
“She knows about your time in the Legion?”
“Yes. We were not criminals like in the old movies. We fought the good fight. We found terrorists, John. We saved many lives.”
“You told her we found terrorists?”
“No, not exactly. I said we fought terrorists. I said the details were not something to share. She respects that. I know she would love to meet you.”
Gorski leaned in. “Correct me if I’m wrong, old friend, but weren’t you just at a funeral?”
Thorsen’s already serious expression darkened. “Yes, my brother. I saw you at the cemetery. There is a wake at our common house right now. You must come.”
“That doesn’t sound like a great time,” said Gorski.
“It’s no problem,” said Thorsen. “You will say hello and have some food. We have accommodations for you. You can retire whenever you want, and we will catch up tomorrow. I insist.”
Thorsen stood. Flynn glanced at Gorski, who shrugged.
They took their packs from beside the bar and followed Thorsen out into the rain, which hadn’t intensified but hadn’t gone away, as if it were pacing itself.
Thorsen led them to the small truck that Flynn had seen at the cemetery. Although there were only two doors on the old Hilux, there was a small backseat, which Gorski clambered into.
They were out of the village within twenty seconds and then into farmland, the entire drive lasting no more than four minutes. The train ride from Copenhagen had taken them from the urban center through tightly packed suburbs and into the villages that had once been a decent horse ride from each other but now formed a ring of commuter housing around the capital. Veksø had looked like the point where housing gave way to agriculture, and the fields spread out around them. Flynn watched the green tracts of land as they passed by.
“It’s spring barley,” said Thorsen.
“What do you do with it?” asked Gorski.
&n
bsp; “It’s mostly grown for malting—for beer.”
“You guys must drink a lot of beer.”
“We do. But most of it is exported. Barley grows well here in Zealand. It used to be a major export.”
“But not now?” asked Flynn.
“Not as much. A lot of the farmland has been lost.”
“Lost to what?”
“Housing, mostly. Like a lot of cities, greater Copenhagen has grown.”
Thorsen pulled off onto an unpaved road that cut between fields of spring barley. The road ended ahead in what Flynn initially thought was a cul-de-sac—but as Thorsen pulled closer, Flynn realized that his idea was close but altogether wrong. There was a horseshoe of houses but they were not built around the road, which itself stopped in a solid dead end before the buildings began.
Thorsen directed the truck into a parking space that was under a steel canopy—one of ten spots on their side of the road. The canopied parking was replicated on the other side of the road, and the gravel dead-ended in between.
“Here we are,” said Thorsen. “Come on in.”
Flynn got out and held the door so Gorski could climb over the seat. They stood under the cover of the canopy and watched the light rain fall across the fields. Thorsen lifted their packs out of the back of the truck as Gorski looked up at the canopy.
“You get a lot of rain?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Thorsen.
“You must get a lot of snow in the winter.”
“Some, but not so much. Not like other Scandinavian countries.”
“So why the canopies?”
Thorsen shrugged. “Like you say, rain. Besides, we have solar panels on top.”
“They do much on a day like this?”
“No, but we get enough clear days to make it worthwhile. I set up a battery system. The panels and our wind turbine provide about twenty-five percent of our power needs.” He hefted one of the packs on his back and carried the other in his arms. “Come on.”
The Rotten State: A John Flynn Thriller Page 1
