The Rotten State: A John Flynn Thriller

by Stewart, A. J.

  She sipped her tea, and Keel sipped his. Flynn didn’t. The story wasn’t what he had expected. It was worse. But now he had a point he needed to get to.

  “Who were they?” he asked. “The boys.”

  Freja lifted her chin as if it were an act of defiance, as if for twenty years she had bowed her head in shame.

  “One I knew, the other I didn’t. He was a dark-haired boy. I never knew his name. I just remember the other kept calling him a madman. Madman this, madman that.”

  “And the boy you knew?”

  She let out a long, slow breath.

  “Victor Berg.”

  * * *

  Keel made more tea. His hands were shaking as he lifted the kettle. Flynn could feel the fury pulsing off him in waves. He knew that feeling. He had lived that feeling. He knew the end of that road was an illusion. There were better roads and better ways to get there. For people like Keel.

  “Luna told a reporter she had some kind of proof,” Flynn said. “You mentioned photographs being taken.”

  Freja sighed again. “Yes, but no. I remember before they left, the other boy—not Berg—came in and took the film out of the camera. It was one of those old film cameras, you know?”

  Flynn nodded.

  “He pulled the film out and exposed it to the light. That ruined the negatives, didn’t it. I think he might have even taken the roll with him.”

  Keel put fresh mugs of tea on the table and sat beside his wife. Flynn felt there was more to say but not with him in the room. The confession was done, the information garnered. He stood, and they watched him without moving.

  “You should tell Begitte,” he said. “Someday, when you’re ready. I think she should know.”

  “I can’t. I couldn’t.”

  “As you wish. Maybe in time.”

  Freja looked at him. “Will you do it?”

  “No,” said Flynn. “I told you, nothing leaves this room without your say-so.”

  “I’m saying so. Will you do it for me? Will you tell her? I don’t think I could face her. I don’t want my parents to know—I’m not ready for that—but Begitte . . .”

  Flynn nodded. “I’ll tell her. I’ll tell her what I’m telling you. There’s a lot of fault in this story, but none of it is yours, and none of it was Luna’s. I’ll see myself out.”

  He left them in the kitchen and walked down the hall. He had the door open when Keel got to him.

  “What happens now?” he asked.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean, I’ve never been this angry. Not ever. I just want to wrap my hands around their necks and—”

  “I know,” said Flynn. “So here’s what’s going to happen. Freja just unloaded a lifetime’s worth of pain and grief and self-blame. But there’s more to come.”

  “More?”

  “It’s out, and that’s a good thing. But she hasn’t really processed it yet. She’s only just admitted to herself what happened. There’s still a good dose of denial there inside. That’s going to end, and then there’ll be grief, and there’ll be anger. She’s going to be angry at herself and her parents and even you, for no reason and every possible reason. It might happen tonight, or tomorrow, or next year. But it will happen. And when it does, you know what your job is.”

  “I don’t know if I do.” Flynn saw tears welling in his eyes. Freja’s tears.

  “You’re gonna stand there and take it,” Flynn said. “She yells, you listen. She beats her fists, it’s against your chest. And then when she’s done, you’re going to be there like you have been all these years and you didn’t know it. You’re going to be there to prove to her every single day that not every man is Victor Berg.”

  Keel wiped his eyes and nodded. “He’s going to get away with it, isn’t he.”

  “No,” said Flynn. “No, he’s not.”

  * * *

  Flynn tossed his day pack across his shoulder, stepped down onto the path, and strode out the gate and away from the house. He marched down the street toward the blue Corsa. The two guys were sitting inside, waiting. They didn’t see him at first. They weren’t being that attentive. He could have snuck out the other way without them noticing. But he wanted them to notice. He wanted them to see.

  He slipped his pack down and fished around and wrapped his fingers around the knurled butt of the Heckler and Koch. He waited until he was halfway along the car in front of the Corsa, when he could see both guys and the full windshield. Then he pulled out the gun and aimed it at the car.

  Both sets of eyes went wide, and the men did the only thing they could. They tried to duck. But they were big and the car was small, and even then he could have double-tapped each of them in the head. But he didn’t.

  He fired once into the windshield, high in the center, just below the rearview mirror. He knew he was firing a European law enforcement–issued 9 millimeter, and like most of them, this one was loaded with hollow-point rounds as a safety measure. Fewer ricochets. Also less stopping power. But enough to pierce laminated safety glass. He knew the angle of the windshield and the hollow point on the round would cause the bullet to jag down about two inches from the point of impact. Right about face height, if the shot was either side of center.

  The bullet blew a neat hole in the glass and lodged in the rear seat. Laminated glass didn’t shatter like the tempered glass in the side windows. The guys stayed low, waiting for another shot to come. But there was no other shot. Flynn knew the guys would wait to make sure that he wasn’t just a bad aim and was coming in with more, but they wouldn’t wait long. The sound of a handgun was distinctive and loud and not the norm in the Copenhagen suburbs. They would want to get away before eyes looked through curtains and questions were asked and police were called.

  By that time Flynn would be out of the street and lost to them, leaving them with a nonverbal message for Hans Lund and, by default, Victor Berg.

  I’m coming for you.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Edvard Friis worked the phones. It was a large part of his job. He hadn’t envisaged spending so much time on the phone when he joined the Danish police force, and especially not when he applied for a secondment to Interpol’s National Central Bureau in Copenhagen. His remit was terrorism, specifically tracing the movement of money by terrorist organizations. Time in front of a computer screen was expected—so many calls on the phone was not.

  But he was on the phone again, and he had a good reason to be. Margret Zazou had called him personally from the General Secretariat in Lyon. His dream was to be seconded to the General Secretariat, to experience policing at the highest level at Interpol HQ, and if getting there involved hitting the phones, Edvard would hit the phones.

  He had driven out to the port in the wee hours to find nothing of interest and then returned to call funeral homes. Asking morticians to do a head count felt both unnecessary and degrading—for everyone, especially the deceased. But Danish people were compliant. That was how their society functioned. So despite the odd nature of the request, he waited on the phone for every funeral home to go and do their count and then return with the message that all was normal.

  Until it wasn’t.

  “I don’t understand it,” said Mr. Hendricksen, owner of the fifteenth mortuary Friis had called.

  “Don’t understand what, sir?” asked Friis.

  “We have the correct count.”

  “So what is the problem?”

  “It’s one of our corpses.”

  “What about it?”

  “I don’t understand,” Hendricksen repeated. “You should come here and see.”

  Edvard Friis did just that. He drove eight kilometers to the mortuary owned by Mr. Hendricksen, who was waiting at the front door. He took Friis through the neat, comfortable rooms at the front, all heavy drapes and plush carpet and the smell of cologne in the air, and through a staff door that revealed another world, one of linoleum and stark fluorescent lighting, stainless steel and the scent of formaldehyde.
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  Hendricksen led Friis into a cold storage room where two coffins rested on steel tables.

  “These people are to be cremated today,” said the mortician. He lifted the lid on one of the coffins and gestured for Friis to see. Friis wasn’t eager, but he craned his neck to look at the body inside.

  It was a man, maybe forty years old. It was hard to say given that the left side of his face was missing or, more specifically, appeared to have caved in.

  “What happened to him?” asked Friis.

  “He died in a car accident a week ago.”

  “So what is the problem?”

  “You don’t see?”

  “I see a badly injured face. I assume that’s how he died.”

  “Yes, he did. The load from a truck went through the window of his car. Very nasty. He was to have a closed casket anyway, but look here.” Hendricksen pointed at the man’s temple. “This was not here when he came in.”

  Friis looked closer. “It looks like a bullet hole.”

  Hendricksen nodded. “Come around, look at the back of his head.” The mortician lifted the corpse by the shoulders and neck with practiced efficiency.

  Friis stepped around him and looked at the rear of the man’s head. “It’s an exit wound.”

  “Yes,” said Hendricksen.

  “So he was shot?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you said he died in a car accident.”

  “He did. He was shot days after his death. There is no blood from the bullet because he had bled out so profusely from the accident, and rigor mortis had set in days before. This was most definitely postmortem. And the bullet went right through because his skull was compromised anyway.”

  “Did you report this to the police?”

  “Aren’t you the police?”

  “The local police.”

  “No. If you had not called, I would not have looked so closely. I finished preparing him two days ago. I would have just glanced in the casket to confirm we were cremating the right person at the right service, that’s all.”

  Friis thanked the mortician and asked him to delay the cremation until a forensics team could check it out, then he stepped out of the cold room and called Margret.

  “We have a man with a gunshot wound to the head,” he told her.

  “Olsen?”

  “Not unless he aged twenty years since death. And this man died in a car crash a week ago but was shot within the last forty-eight hours.”

  “Someone shot a man who was already dead?”

  “Yes, it would seem. Should I keep calling to track down Olsen?”

  “I don’t think you’re going to find Olsen in a mortuary.”

  * * *

  Flynn took the train north out of town. If anyone was looking for him, they would assume he had gone back into the city center, so he headed out until he was ready to contact Margret again. As the buildings flashed by the window, he thought about Freja and Luna. He knew the identity of one of the perpetrators but not the other. Who was the other?

  Berg was close to Lund, but Lund was an old fat man, and Freja had not mentioned the other person being old—in fact, she had called them both boys, which put them at slightly older than her and Luna. The other boy wasn’t Lund.

  It was a university friend of Berg’s; that’s what Freja had said. They were on a break from university. They were older and more sophisticated, at least in the eyes of fifteen-year-old girls. Berg knew the area because he had lived in the commune for a time—Freja said she knew him, but she didn’t know the other boy.

  It was becoming clear that this all linked back to the DSIS agents, to their team leader, Ager, somehow. Had Berg put Ager on Flynn to shut him up? Berg wasn’t a military guy, but he was in parliament. Perhaps he had his own enforcers on call. It sounded fanciful. Berg was on the track to power, but he wasn’t truly there yet. How would a nonmilitary guy get such contacts?

  There was one way to know: the numbers from Ager’s phone. One of them might belong to Berg, and Ager might be the link between Berg and the other boy. Or the other boy might be long gone, out of his life. There was no way to know, until he knew.

  Flynn took out the burner phone, put the battery in it, and called the number in Lyon.

  “Fontaine?” yelled Margret.

  “Oui. Do you have the owners of those numbers yet?”

  “I haven’t gotten a response on that just yet. It takes some time.”

  Flynn pushed the phone against his ear. He was having trouble hearing her. There was a lot of ambient noise. Noise, he knew, that wasn’t on his end of the line. It sounded like she was on an airbase, or the launchpad for a lunar rocket.

  “Can you get into Interpol’s National Central Bureau in Copenhagen?” she asked. “It would be easier to talk.”

  “I can’t right now, but maybe in a while.”

  “Okay. Let me know when you are there.”

  Flynn ended the call and pulled the battery out of the phone. None of what she was saying made sense. It was taking hours to find phone records for the two new numbers when she had gotten Olsen’s civil record in less than half that time. She knew his phone number, his address, and his lack of a driver’s license or car registration all in less time. Which told Flynn plenty. The owners of the numbers were important people. Too important to be telling someone like Flynn.

  And then she had asked him to come in. She had to know he wasn’t going to do that. The whole reason he had called her in France in the first place was because he didn’t trust the Danish police. If the DSIS guys were dirty, if they were playing a game with him, he had no way of knowing who else in the Politiet might be involved. So suggesting he come in was illogical. Interpol wasn’t some separate police force that sat above the national police forces of the world; it was made up of those police forces. Officers were seconded from national forces to serve terms with Interpol, either in their local National Central Bureau or often in the headquarters in Lyon, France. So the local Interpol office was intertwined with the Danish Politiet, which again raised the question of whom to trust and failed spectacularly to answer it.

  The answer was in the phone call itself. It made no sense because it wasn’t supposed to. Someone else was listening. Someone who would want to believe that the noose was tightening around Flynn’s neck.

  Flynn slipped the battery back into the phone and waited for it to come to life. There was no message, so he started walking, with no particular destination in mind. Marching helped him think. Movement was progress.

  Then the phone rang. It was an unknown number. The country code suggested Azerbaijan. He answered.

  “Yes,” he said in English.

  “Fontaine, it’s me,” said Margret.

  “You’re on a burner phone.”

  “Yes, and you left your battery in. So you got my message.”

  “Yes.”

  “What are you into?”

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning this thing is escalating, and it’s not looking good for you. So I repeat, what are you into?”

  “Until a couple of days ago, nothing. I was hiking, walking around, seeing the countryside, stopping off to visit an old friend.”

  “And what is he into?”

  “Nothing. He lives the quiet life. Why?”

  “Because we found a body.”

  Flynn winced. He was responsible for Olsen getting involved, and his death would visit him later, he knew that much for sure. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “Don’t be. It wasn’t Olsen.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We found a body ready for cremation, a guy who died last week in a car accident.”

  “What?”

  “He had considerable head trauma, and something new. A bullet wound, recently inflicted, postmortem by a week.”

  “They shot somebody who was already dead?”

  “It would seem. That feels strange, don’t you think?”

  “I don’t know what that means.”
r />   “We need to meet.”

  “You know I can’t come in right now. Your people here are seconded from the Danish police force. I can’t trust any of them.”

  “I know. I don’t mean at the bureau office.”

  “I’m not coming to Lyon anytime soon.”

  “No, I figured not. I’m in Copenhagen.”

  “Copenhagen? Since when?”

  “Since you pulled me out of the gym this morning and I was ordered onto a jet that landed about twenty minutes ago.”

  “You’re in Copenhagen,” he repeated.

  “I am.”

  “It’s that serious.”

  “Those two numbers you gave me? One is a secure cell that I can’t tell you the owner of because I don’t know who it is. The trace triggered a flag somewhere, and I got a call to leave that one alone. But the second one is actually public, so I’m not telling tales out of school when I say that number is a landline.”

  “Belonging to whom?”

  “Belonging to the office of the prime minister of Denmark.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Some days Klaasen missed the outdoors. He had time for hiking on weekends, and he did some mountain biking here and there, but spending the entire day outdoors was a luxury he no longer enjoyed. Being the leader of a special forces unit was an outdoor kind of job, even if it was often the desert. Now it was meeting after meeting under fake light with pale people who really needed to get outside more. The bureaucrats and pencil pushers that surrounded the business of governing a country were sometimes too much to take. He had to smile when he wanted to yell and occasionally yell when what was required was a bullet through the forehead. But at least he didn’t have to sleep in a hole in the ground.