Gorski didn’t care about the steel. He cared about the ships. Bigger ships meant deeper water. Not ocean-deep, but deep enough. Roskilde Fjord’s depth was only three to four meters in many places but deeper at the north end, where the ships came in and out. He found an open spot along the road and cut in between the trees. There were houses built along the fjord’s shoreline, but they were few and far between in this section, so Gorski slowly cruised toward the rocky beach, and when he saw the water lapping ahead, he pulled around and stopped the vehicle.
He left the Land Rover and walked back along the beach. It took him five minutes to find what he was looking for. A small dinghy belonging to one of the homeowners had been pulled up high onto the beach. There was a clamp designed to hold a small outboard motor, but in a concession to theft prevention, the motor itself was not attached.
Gorski didn’t need it. The boat’s owner had left oars on board, so Gorski dragged the boat back down through a sandy channel that had been cut through the rocks from repeated use, then pushed the boat out and jumped in.
Getting his bearings, he checked the stars to the east and to the south, and to the north he saw the hulking shadow of the furnace tower at the steel refinery. He paddled back along the shoreline until he reached the Land Rover, then he jumped into the water and dragged the boat up until it was wedged into the rocks.
The body was heavy and awkward. He pulled it out to the edge of the tailgate, then he crouched in a squat. He pulled the weight of the wrapped body onto his shoulders and then powerlifted it up. He stumbled across the rocks to the dinghy, then crouched again with the boat at his back and dumped the body inside. He retrieved the engine block and placed it with a thunk at the front of the boat.
He pushed the dinghy out into the water and jumped into the middle and, for a moment, thought the water was going to gush in over the sides, but the boat settled low in the water, and Gorski began paddling. He headed out toward a channel marker. When he got near it but not quite in the channel, he tied off the engine block to the body, and with an effort that almost ended him, he hefted the body overboard.
It floated beside him as he picked up the engine block. He felt the stitches Begitte had sewn split, and blood started oozing down his chest again. He grunted and lifted the block onto the side of the boat. He snapped his fingers away, and the heavy block dropped into the water like a bomb, pulling the body down with it.
Gorski didn’t wait around. He rowed as hard as he could back toward shore, checking his bearings as he went, and then he saw the Land Rover on the beach and kept going until he was about where he needed to be. He got in close to the shore, jumped out, and then walked the boat along until he found the sand channel, and he dragged the boat back onto shore, leaving it where he found it.
He wanted to run but didn’t have the energy, so he walked back to the vehicle. He spread another drop cloth across the driver’s seat and floor mat to collect water and sand and then drove out. He paused at the main road for a moment but saw nothing and heard nothing, so he lit the headlights and turned south.
Gorski thought about his old life on his way back. He had been part of a team that should never have worked but did, different nationalities and different languages all serving under a flag that wasn’t their own. But the team’s task was universal: find the worst terrorists and end them. His unit leader had been John Flynn, a man with a knack for putting himself in terrorists’ shoes and not above using their own tactics on them. Their unit was ultimately deniable—French-directed but not French themselves. Gorski liked to think they were an impossible mission force.
He thought about the tactics their foes employed. Terror covered a lot of ground, but Gorski had learned that the greatest terror wasn’t the acts of harm that they committed. The greatest terror was the unknown. After 9/11 no one felt safe in a tower. Rents in low-rise office blocks rose markedly. After the London subway attack, people questioned the safety of the Underground, and not just in London but on subways in New York and Paris and Washington DC. It was the unknown that created the real fear.
Gorski drove down a quiet country road that seemed to lead to nowhere. There were gated driveways every kilometer or so, and he slowed when the numbers got near where he wanted to be. He found the gated frontage to Lund’s estate and pulled the Land Rover across the width of the driveway, and then he killed the engine and got out. He took the key even though he suspected Lund would have a spare somewhere. Gorski rolled up the plastic in the footwell to carry it with him, then locked the doors and began the long hike back to the motorcycle in Stenløse, leaving behind the vehicle and the mystery of where the driver had gone.
Leaving Lund with nothing but unknowns.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Flynn wandered the streets in a random pattern until he was satisfied that he wasn’t being followed, then he took refuge in an alley behind what looked like a high-end furniture store.
He pulled out his phone, slipped the battery back in, and then waited for the phone to connect to the network. He didn’t want to be on the network long. Although he didn’t think his phone could be tracked, he couldn’t rule it out. Twice now someone had found him, once at the Rasmussen house and then at the restaurant. It wasn’t necessarily his phone they were tracking—he had removed the battery well before going to the restaurant—but it was a possibility.
The phone beeped to tell him he had a message. He hit the button to retrieve it and waited. Then he heard Gorski’s voice.
“C’est moi,” he said. “Code noir.”
The message ended and the line went dead, but Flynn didn’t need to hear more. He knew what it meant. Something was happening. Something bad. He checked his watch: 11 p.m. He had an hour to kill. He tried to sit still, to wait. He was good at waiting, usually. But he felt the walls surrounding the alley closing in on him, and the sky grew heavy in his mind. He took a deep breath and then another, but he felt his pulse quickening.
He marched. It was what he did. Marching not only got him from A to B, but it also put him in a trancelike state, clearing his mind and helping him focus. He walked around the neighborhood, passing packed-in buildings that gave old cities a sense of claustrophobia. He saw the lit signage of a convenience store and wandered in, and he bought a bottle of bourbon. It was a liquor that was as American as apple pie but could be found around the world. He nodded to the cashier and handed over the money and slipped the bottle inside his jacket, and then he marched out to find himself another dark alley.
This one was the delivery access for an office building. There was a light on over a rear exit, illuminating the doorway plus a meter on either side, not the shadows were Flynn sat down against the brick. He put the battery back in his phone at one minute to midnight. Twelve and twelve. Contact hours they had used in the Legion in case of emergency. One or the other would keep trying to make contact at twelve and twelve, noon and midnight, every day.
It only got halfway through the first ring when Flynn answered the call: “Flynn.”
“It’s good?”
“All clear. What’s the news?”
“The guy from the commune, the broken nose, he came back.”
“Following?”
“He got a little more active. Tried to butcher me like a goat.”
“You okay?”
“We’re fine. He’s not.”
“Affirmative,” said Flynn.
“And you?”
“I was followed at Møns Klint, two down. I lost two more later, but they picked me up at a house I visited this morning. I lost them again, but they were waiting at a meet I just had, or at least somebody was.”
“This just got real,” said Gorski.
“I agree. Is Thorsen armed?”
“What do you think?”
“Good.”
“What about you?”
“I will be.”
“Keep your eyes open.”
“I will. Keep them safe.”
“Don’t worry,” said Gorski
. “I haven’t had this much fun in years.”
* * *
Flynn didn’t head back into the center of Copenhagen. Instead he walked to the station and caught a train out of the city, north to the commuter town of Ordrup. It was late by the time he stepped off the train with a handful of weary city workers getting home from a long day.
He dropped his gaze to the platform, like everyone around him, and walked slowly, following people out of the station but falling behind as they moved away toward home, some on foot, some collected by waiting cars. It looked like a nice town: large homes on good-sized lots, lawned front yards, and late-model cars parked in driveways.
Flynn had consulted his map book while on the train, so he moved through the darkened streets by memory. A few minutes’ walk from the station he found what he was looking for. He unfolded the printout he had taken from the real estate agent in Gentofte and checked the address. It was perfect. A large hedge hid the house from the street, and he slipped quietly in through the gate, closing it gently.
Flynn liked real estate rental listings. They told him exactly where the vacant dwellings were, where a night’s stay could be had if a person knew how to go about it. He preferred single-family homes to apartments—there were usually fewer people around—and fully furnished rental homes, if possible. He checked the windows and the doors and found no alarm system, so he crouched by the front door and used his pick kit to unlock it.
Once inside he double-checked that there was no alarm keypad and no entry sensors on the door. He found nothing. He kept against the wall as he moved from the entry foyer into an open living area that spread across an island into a large kitchen. He saw no motion sensors, so he retreated and moved upstairs to sweep the house.
As expected, it was empty. Whoever had lived here was gone and no one new had yet taken on the lease. There was furniture—beds, sofas, lamps—but none of the items that a lived-in home had. No photographs, no art, no random socks or laundry baskets or piles of mail on the counter.
Flynn didn’t turn on any lights. He wandered around in the dark and then decided on his preferred room: upstairs, toward the rear. It was the smallest one, perhaps for a child or, in a family with multiple kids, for the youngest. There was a single bed the size of an army cot and a wardrobe. The walls were plain white, freshly painted after the removal of the last tenant’s posters and drawings and grubby hand marks.
He took off his jacket and laid it across the duvet, then he removed his boots and socks. He didn’t sit on the mattress, instead propping himself against the side of the bed on the floor. He slipped the bottle out of his jacket and sat it on the floor beside him. For a moment he stared at the white wall opposite, his vision blurring as he closed his eyes and the world closed in on him.
He broke the seal on the bourbon and breathed in deeply as the aroma swirled around him. It was the smell of times past, his father’s scent. The bourbon on his father’s breath as he relaxed after a long day at NATO, when Flynn would sneak out in his pajamas when his dad got home long after bedtime. His father, usually still in his uniform, would let him climb up into his lap for a hug—with the warm scent of the liquor on his breath—before ordering him back to bed.
Flynn saw his father in his mind’s eye on the last day, in the sunshine of a resort near Abu Dhabi. He heard their final conversation again, the argument, harsh words over his decision to pave his own way in the army rather than follow his father into the Marines. A gulf dividing them that would never be bridged after the terrorist attack, the explosion, his parents and brother gone.
A new name and a decade of service in the French Foreign Legion instead of a US Army career. He found his calling in hunting the worst of the worst, the terrorists all the world wanted. He saw battles and foxholes and good men dying in places no man ought ever visit, let alone perish. And then, almost as if it were inevitable, that too went bad and ended, and he found another name, that of his father and his mother: John Flynn.
He couldn’t escape the past. The heady scent of the bourbon surrounded him, and he longed to taste it, to drive the demons out, but his mind’s eye flew back again to the farmhouse in the Alps. As he lay drunk in the stable, the bad dreams beaten back for a moment, the house burned and the family who had taken him in perished. A family he could have saved but didn’t. Should have saved but couldn’t. Passed out and useless.
He saw the flames lap higher and heard the screams of his family, and of the family from the farm, a chorus of pain, the anguish of all those he had failed. He felt the desire to cry, but no tears would come. His heart beat so hard it might break, until his mind was overcome by fiery color and heat, and Flynn let out a loud guttural groan as the night caved in upon him.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The night was not going well for the leader of Alpha team. He watched the mark pull away from the water-bus dock and cursed his intel. Klaasen had told him the two men were meeting at the restaurant. He had failed to mentioned that at least one of them considered the meeting clandestine or that he would be prepared for their surveillance. The American getting away so easily was Klaasen’s fault, but he wouldn’t see it that way, the team leader knew that much.
He dispatched a man to cruise the city-side waterfront from Slotsholmen up to the Kastellet, but he wasn’t expecting to find anything. He ordered another man into position at the food critic’s apartment, and he pulled the rest of his men into a cordon around the restaurant.
Then he called the man who had once been his commanding officer. Neither were in the military anymore, but chains of command died hard.
“Yes,” said Klaasen, sounding like he had a mouth full of toothpaste.
“Who is this guy?”
He heard Klaasen spit and then rinse. “I don’t know who he is—that’s what you’re for.”
“You said he was meeting the food critic at the restaurant.”
“Did he not?”
“He did, but he was prepared. He was expecting us, or someone like us.”
“Are you trying to find a way to say he got away and not sound stupid doing it?”
“There are things you didn’t tell me.”
“There are always things I don’t tell you.”
The team leader shook his head. He knew the call would go like this.
“So what’s your contingency?” asked Klaasen.
“We’re doing a sweep, and we’re on the food critic. But if there’s something I need to know, now’s the time.”
Klaasen took a long breath. “The reporter, the critic, may have some information.”
“That he told the American?”
“No, I don’t think so. We think he may have been passed some information by another reporter. So how do reporters keep information? Not a verbal history.”
“Notes, interview tapes, flash drives maybe.”
“Right. Did the reporter give the American something?”
“My guy says the reporter typed something in his phone, but he gave nothing to the American.”
“What did he type?”
“We weren’t that close,” said the team leader, wanting to add that it was thanks to Klaasen. “But it was quick, not a long story. I think he gave him a phone number.”
“Why?”
“If there’s something physical like you say, I think the American wants it. You said he was looking for the critic at the Politiken office today?”
“Yes.”
“So it seems that they haven’t met. They probably spoke for the first time at the restaurant. If the critic has something, maybe he didn’t bring it. Maybe they plan to meet again.”
“A lot of maybes,” said Klaasen.
“Only one, really. The rest is a logical sequence.”
“Are you still trying to make it sound like you weren’t incompetent tonight?”
“We’re never incompetent, sir, but sometimes our intelligence sources let us down.”
He heard Klaasen suck in air, as if the back talk angered him. K
laasen’s temper had always been short, but ever since he had started wearing a suit instead of a uniform, his mood was always closer to the edge.
“Will you take the reporter down?”
“No, sir. We will have full electronic tracking shortly. We’ll know where he goes and what he says. Reporters never leave home without their phones. If they plan another meeting, we’ll be there. And we’ll be ready.”
“See that you are.”
Klaasen ended the call, and the team leader refocused on the restaurant.
An hour later Olsen came out the front door, his face lit by the screen of his phone. He stood around for a few minutes until a taxi appeared and drove him away. Two cars followed the taxi, both part of Alpha team. There was no weaving or mysterious U-turning. The taxi took a direct route to his apartment.
The team leader’s driver stopped on the corner just short of Olsen’s building, and the second car drove by and stopped a block farther. The team leader watched Olsen go into his building, and then he called his onsite man, who had come in his unsuccessful search for the American.
“Skyview, what do you have?”
“Full visual and microwave package. Cellular mini-tower is set up. Apartment is dark.”
“Subject is in the building.”
“Roger that. Hold. Light is on. I see subject. Audio is good. Setting up cellular capture.”
“Advise,” said the team leader. He waited while the small but powerful cellular tower his men had set up connected with Olsen’s phone. It worked like any other cellular tower, but because they could direct their signal at his apartment specifically, Olsen’s phone would connect to them first, and in doing so would allow them to copy and then track communications to and from his phone.
The Rotten State: A John Flynn Thriller Page 16
