The window wasn’t there. It had been lowered and left that way, as if the driver was talking to someone standing outside, except there was no one around to talk to but Flynn, and the driver wasn’t talking to anyone anymore.
There was a close-range bullet wound in the driver’s head. A good portion of his temple and left eye were missing. He was slumped sideways into the car, held in place by his seat belt. Flynn gave himself a couple of seconds to take in what he was seeing. It was like taking a snapshot. He didn’t have a photographic memory—he couldn’t recall pages of text or numbers or do any of those party tricks. His memory was eidetic; he could recall a single scene later as if he were still standing in front of it.
He let the exposure seep into his mind, and then the little alarm went off in his brain to tell him he had spent enough time standing next to a dead body. He turned from the car and looked back at the long road. He would have to walk north in order to get around the fenced helipad before he could get back into the city to the south, or he could climb the fence and run across the open expanse. There was no barbed wire on top of the fence because there was nothing worthwhile inside. He decided the fence would save time, so he stepped toward it.
The night exploded into light. Beams hit him from two angles—the gate into the port and the road around the heliport. He heard the roar of vehicles closing in fast, and he took one last glance at the fence. It was a tight chain link, not easy to gain a toehold in, and he decided that running wasn’t the solution.
He stood by the front of the little car until the headlights closed in and two sedans came screeching to a stop in front of him.
“Freeze!”
“Don’t move!”
Flynn put his hands up as he recoiled from the bright lights and noted that the demands were being issued in English. A man came out of the darkness and pushed Flynn onto the hood of the Volkswagen. He felt plastic ties forcing his hands together behind his back, and there was more yelling and another vehicle approaching. A cotton bag was pulled over his head, and he was yanked up off the hood and then pushed forward a few steps before his legs hit a floor pan and he fell forward into a van. His legs were tossed in behind him, and he heard a sliding door slam home. The van screamed forward, and he rolled across the floor as the van made a wide turn and headed away into the night.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
The room was cold and smelled of fermented barley. Flynn figured it was some kind of cellar, at least it had been once upon a time. They took his boots but left the bag on his head, and then a door slammed home with a solid metallic thunk.
He was alone. He could always sense the presence of another human. People gave off a buzz, like an electronic pulse. The brain thinking and the lungs breathing and the muscles twitching or being forced to not twitch. It all took energy, and that energy was palpable, if one knew the frequencies to feel for.
Flynn didn’t know how big the room was, but it didn’t feel large. He sat up and edged himself backward on his buttocks a couple of meters until he felt the cool touch of a wall, and there he rested.
He processed what he knew. The meet was a trap, as expected. The reporter had been bait and had been killed. That raised a couple of questions. Was he killed because he was expendable, because he could talk? Or was it because he was more useful dead? After all, Flynn would have turned up to the meet—or not—regardless of whether Olsen was dead. So they didn’t need to kill him unless he knew them, unless he had seen them, which was easily avoidable. And killing a person and getting away with it wasn’t the easiest thing. A gunshot made a lot of noise, and there were bodies to explain.
Unless they had an explanation for the body. And that explanation would focus around Flynn. He killed the reporter. They would have to come up with a story for the cops, but they had time to construct the narrative. Which told him one more thing: he wasn’t dealing with Lund’s hired muscle anymore. These guys were a step up. Which told him one more thing: they weren’t going to kill him, at least not right away. They wouldn’t need to set him up for Olsen’s murder if they planned on killing him too.
They left him alone for an hour. It was a reasonable amount of time. Enough time for the prisoner to stew and fret and fear, to run the worst-case scenarios through his mind a time or two. But it was also too short a time. It told him they were anxious. Flynn liked to leave his prisoners alone for four hours. He would only enter earlier if they were wounded and at risk of dying on him, or if they appeared to fall asleep. But four hours created a new normal. They got through the immediate fear and then started to convince themselves that maybe they were just a prisoner, nothing more. Then the interrogation would really begin, and the new normal would turn out to be anything but.
The door opened, and Flynn heard the footsteps of two men walk in before the door closed again.
“That damned bag isn’t necessary, is it?” asked one of the men in English. Flynn assumed this was the one playing good cop.
He heard someone step over to him, then they ripped the bag off his head.
He blinked hard. Flynn could see he was in a room the size of a two-car garage, and the walls were whitewashed rocks, not fancy red bricks. The floor was bare concrete. The guy who had removed the bag backed up toward the metal door. It wasn’t a cell door, more like a cellar door. It opened into the room rather than out. He was dressed in pressed black trousers, a blue button-up shirt, and a blue jacket that might have been from the top half of a suit. He had red hair and wasn’t built like a gym junkie. He was tall and lean and athletic, and Flynn suspected he could handle himself.
Definitely not one of Lund’s guys.
“Where am I?” asked Flynn. He didn’t expect an answer, but it gave him reason to look around the room as if he was dazed and confused. The wall on the opposite side from the door featured the end of a chute that was wide enough for a wine barrel or a beer keg to roll down. He suspected it started in a trapdoor at the floor above. He had seen such things before. He looked back at the two guys, who both stood near the door.
The second guy stepped forward, and Flynn realized he was the leader. He was in the same gear as his colleague except his trousers were khaki. Together they looked like traveling salesmen or those Silicon Valley workers Flynn remembered.
The leader sank to his haunches so he was eye level with Flynn, but he remained out of reach of Flynn’s socked feet. This wasn’t his first rodeo. He rested his elbows on his thighs and his jacket dropped open, indicating to Flynn he wasn’t armed right now. There was a holster under his left armpit, but it was empty. Good protocol. It wasn’t a smart play to enter a cell with a prisoner while packing heat. Bad things happened. Flynn assumed the guy by the door had also removed his piece, although he noted a discreet leather pouch on the guy’s belt that probably held pepper spray.
“What is your name?” asked the leader.
Flynn frowned and shook his head as though he was having trouble remembering something. Which was true. He was having trouble remembering, but not his name. Where had he seen this guy before?
“Jack,” he said.
“Jack,” repeated the leader. “Jack who?”
“Jack Thompson.”
The leader looked at the second guy, who opened the door and stepped out. Not great protocol, leaving his leader one-on-one with the prisoner.
“Where am I?” asked Flynn.
“The important question is, who are you?”
“I just told you.”
“Yes, you gave me your name. But who are you? You don’t have any identification on you, and this is unusual, yes? You are an American by your accent, I think.”
“Yes.”
“What are you doing in Denmark?”
“I’m a tourist.”
“A tourist?” The leader nodded and pouted as if this puzzled him. “So what was a tourist doing out in the ports in the middle of the night?”
“Looking for the Little Mermaid,” said Flynn.
“I see. The Little Mermaid i
s popular with the tourists, yes, but it is nowhere near the ports.”
“I got lost.”
“Very lost, it would seem.”
The latch to the door moaned and then opened. The leader didn’t get up, but he turned to see. Poor protocol. Flynn didn’t lash out. There was no point. He would just end up breaking his toes. He looked at the door instead. The guy with the red hair was standing there. Beyond him Flynn could see another room. It didn’t look much different than the one he was in, except there was a table and chairs and lockers against the wall.
The guy at the door spoke in Danish. The leader listened, then glanced back at Flynn and stood. He moved over to the door, and the other guy opened it wider to let him through. Flynn saw two more guys sitting at the table and another two standing on the far side with their backs to Flynn, as if working at a standing desk.
The leader looked back at Flynn as he stepped through the door and Flynn turned his gaze to the floor. The red-haired guy closed the door and Flynn heard the latch push back into place. He was left alone again as the pieces started to come together. He had seen the man before. He had seen a group of men in suit jackets and pressed trousers like that before. He had seen a sideways glance like that before, and now he knew where.
The men had been at Luna Fisker’s funeral.
Chapter Thirty
“We have the American,” said the team leader.
“Who is he?” Klaasen asked.
“We only just got here,” he replied, wondering how his old CO had learned about the takedown in the middle of the night. Perhaps he had other sources on the team, which the team leader would have to investigate.
“Keep me updated.”
“Of course.”
The team leader ended the call and looked at his man at the laptop computer. “So?”
The man didn’t look away from the screen. “There are many Jack Thompsons.”
“There are many men who could do your job,” said the team leader, tired and running out of patience.
“There’s no record of a Jack Thompson from the United States entering the Schengen area in the last thirty days. There is a John Thompson, but he was South African.”
“What else?”
“Google says there was a Jack Thompson who played American gridiron for Cincinnati. A quarterback.”
“Quarterback?”
“He’s the one who throws the ball.”
“I know that. Are you saying it’s our guy?”
“This guy looks Samoan.”
“So you’re wasting my time.”
The guy at the computer sank in his seat. “We should check his fingerprints.”
“Do you think?”
The guy nodded. “I’ll get the electronic kit from the car.”
The team leader shook his head and stepped to the guy standing at the tall table against the wall.
“You ready?”
“What do you want? Hard or soft?” The guy pulled a syringe out of a case and laid it on the table.
“Let me talk to him first, and I’ll let you know.”
* * *
Flynn had figured them for work colleagues, paying their respects to a workmate they liked but didn’t know intimately, hence standing apart from the graveside ceremony. But they weren’t paying respects, and they weren’t work colleagues. They, like him, had been watching Luna Fisker’s funeral from afar. But why?
He looked around the room. There was no furniture, only a thin mattress on the floor under the chute in the back wall. The door was hinged such that it opened toward where Flynn was sitting. It was time to move. He edged up the wall with his hands still behind his back until he was standing, then he nudged the mattress into the corner of the room so that he was at the far end from the door but closest to the hinged side. He wouldn’t have ordinarily sat directly under a chute designed to send beer barrels rolling down into the room, but he was confident that it hadn’t been used in a long time. He flopped down onto the mattress to wait.
It was only five minutes before the door opened again. No long wait, no sweating him. They wanted answers. So did he.
The bolt was pulled on the door, and then it cracked open. There was a slight pause as the guy looked at the spot where Flynn had been sitting and found nothing there. He pushed the door open a touch more and stuck his head in to look around. Poor protocol. He moved his eyes from the spot where Flynn should have been to the spot where he was, sitting against the far wall, on the mattress. The guy took that in for a moment and then pushed the door all the way open. He stepped inside and away so the team leader could come in.
“Making yourself comfortable,” said the team leader as he approached.
“Not really,” said Flynn.
The guy squatted down again. It wasn’t going to be a long interrogation session. There weren’t many people who could keep a squat for more than a minute or two without having their quads seize up, and this guy didn’t have unnaturally large leg muscles.
“So who are you, Jack Thompson?”
“Didn’t we do this already?”
“You gave me a name, but you see, there’s a problem. Nobody called Jack Thompson has entered Denmark. So how did you get here?”
“I walked.”
“You walked?” The team leader smiled. “From where?”
“Germany.”
“You walked from Germany? And how did you enter Germany?”
“I walked.”
“From where? You see what I’m saying? There’s no record of you entering the EEC. Which means you entered illegally, which makes me wonder why you would do that.”
Flynn said nothing.
“Are you a terrorist, Jack Thompson?”
“Are you?”
“No,” said the team leader. “I am Danish.”
“Doesn’t mean you’re not a terrorist.”
“I know who I am, and I have identification.”
“Let’s see it, then.”
“See what?”
“Your identification.”
The team leader frowned. “Why would you want to see my identification?”
“Because you assaulted me, kidnapped me, and now you’re holding me against my will. Why would you do that?”
The team leader dropped the frown. He dropped all expression. “Who are you working for? The CIA?”
Flynn said nothing.
“You are a foreign agent in our country,” said the team leader. “You don’t know how much trouble you are in.”
Flynn said nothing.
“What did the reporter tell you? At the restaurant? We know you met him there.”
Flynn said nothing. He watched the guy, watched the veins in his temple as they started to inflate as the frustration grew. And then Flynn realized they weren’t asking about the reporter’s death. They knew he didn’t do it. Which meant only one thing: they did it. They killed the reporter, and they knew they could hang it on him. It would give them a pseudo-legitimate reason for holding him, if they needed one. The length of time that states could hold terror suspects varied across the EU, but it was generally days in the first instance. Flynn knew from his own experience that a suspect could and would be held a lot longer if necessary, even if it directly contravened the law. He had personally been responsible for such detentions and questioning. So Flynn knew something else: even if they had created a seemingly legitimate reason to hold him, they would not want to talk about it. Not to the politicians, who always wanted plausible deniability, or to the press. Guys who refused to show ID never wanted people to talk. And they didn’t want to be identified.
Flynn had seen them all. Which gave him a very bad feeling. “He told me nothing.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“We were supposed to meet tonight, but you know that.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I really don’t care.”
“Yes, you do. You’re not that stupid that you wouldn’t care. I think you know what happens to te
rror suspects. Sometimes they are never heard from again.”
“You should be concerned about that.”
“I don’t think so. I’m not the terrorist.”
“All evidence to the contrary. A guy who refuses to show ID? That looks pretty suspicious.”
The guy smiled, but he wasn’t happy. “I am going to leave this room now. You might consider, while I’m gone, the interior of this room, because you could rot in here for a long time and no one will care. I will get what I want from you, sooner rather than later. I guarantee you that.”
“And you might want to consider if you were right. If I really am CIA and what the imprisonment of a US agent might do for your career, or your life.”
“Is that a threat?”
Flynn said nothing.
The team leader stood. “I’ll be back. With some friends.”
Flynn watched the second guy open the door, the team leader step out, and then the second guy follow him.
He waited for the metal latch to lock home, and then Flynn moved fast.
Chapter Thirty-One
If they really thought Flynn was a terrorist, then there was a protocol they would follow. He’d followed it himself many times. They’d tried the good cop–bad cop routine, rather halfheartedly. Then there was sensory or sleep deprivation. That could go on for days or weeks. If that didn’t work, or if time was short, step two involved drugs, which left fewer physical marks and could be effective if the subject was close to breaking anyway. But drugs were also hit-and-miss in getting results. There was no such thing as truth serum, so if a cell member had been trained well enough, they could lie through it. It was all a matter of believing what they said, truth or otherwise.
Which left step three. Physical coercion. Otherwise known as torture. There was electric shock and there was waterboarding, and there were knives and guns and the removal of body parts. Flynn had seen them all and done most of them. Sometimes, when the information was hot and the need was urgent, they would jump straight to step three, straight to the stuff that hurt. It was always faster, but there was a downside. The subject could never be left to talk about it. That meant permanent incarceration or disposal.
The Rotten State: A John Flynn Thriller Page 19
