The Rotten State: A John Flynn Thriller

by Stewart, A. J.

  * * *

  Flynn had pushed Olsen into the cellar and locked the door, then dashed around the table toward the medical guy’s desk. Someone had heard the noise—he and Olsen talking, or the latch being pulled and pushed, or the door opening—and they had started banging on a door. It wasn’t Olsen. He was probably too dumbstruck to move. It was the DSIS guys banging to be let out.

  As he reached the small refrigerator under the medical guy’s desk, Flynn glanced through the office door. It was dark, and there were no footsteps, but someone was descending. Someone had come through the door upstairs. He pulled open the fridge and found one of the syringes inside.

  He closed the fridge and slipped out the office door, careful to not touch it lest it make a sound. The basement outside was hard concrete and rock, and light from the anteroom created deep shadows. Flynn pressed in under the stairs, where he had tossed all the DSIS guys’ shoes, getting as deep into the shadows as he could.

  He saw the gun first. Held out in front, ready to sweep from side to side. Then a man appeared. He wore a light jacket, enough to cover his weapon but not enough to make him hot on a mild spring day. Flynn didn’t move. The guy slipped in through the open door and into the anteroom. Flynn stayed put. The guy swept the room, then stepped over to the door where the banging was coming from. The rock walls and solid doors were swallowing the sound. It was a perfect location for an interrogation.

  The guy stopped at the door and listened, then turned back and swept his handgun across the room one more time. He strained to turn the heavy bolt in the door, and then he planted his feet to give it a good pull.

  Now Flynn moved. He knew the bolt was heavy and hard to pull. Turning it had confirmed that fact for the guy, who now had to give it his full attention, feet splayed, concentrating on pulling hard, even with one hand.

  Flynn was tall but not a giant, and he was strong but not overly so. But he was nimble and fast. He swept quietly through the door and around the table, and as the guy gripped the bolt for his big pull, Flynn stabbed the syringe into his neck and pressed it down hard.

  It was a fast-acting drug used in medical practice to help people relax before they went under for surgery. In actuality, fast-acting meant a minute, and Flynn didn’t have a minute.

  But barbiturate wasn’t normally administered in the neck. Few drugs were. Things could go sideways. The wrong point could be hit, an artery nicked. Flynn had neither the time nor the inclination to care. These guys had escalated things. They had set the new terms of engagement, and now he was just abiding by their rules.

  The guy turned to fight, but the fight was sucked from him quickly, and he sank to the floor, propped up against the door.

  Flynn took his weapon and moved back to the other cellar. He pulled the bolt, pushed the door, and found Olsen standing in the middle of the room shaking his head. Again he made the motion to speak, but no words came out. Flynn gestured to him to step out. He seemed wary—he’d been pushed back inside once already, and he didn’t look eager to fall for it again. But he also clearly didn’t want to stay in the cellar. He stepped forward with the gait of a zombie and stopped as he reached the door.

  “Sorry about that,” said Flynn. “We had company. Come on out.”

  Olsen stepped into the anteroom and saw the man propped up against the other door. He looked at Flynn, unsure. He looked at the gun in Flynn’s hand.

  “Take off his shoes, and grab his wallet, phone, and ID.”

  Olsen frowned, glanced at the gun again, and did as Flynn asked, putting the items on the table.

  “Now, unbolt the door, but step back along the wall as soon as you do. I don’t want to accidentally shoot you in the head.”

  Olsen’s frown stayed firmly in place. He pulled the bolt with two hands. He wasn’t a strong guy, so it took a lot more work than Flynn thought it would. But he got it done and then jumped back.

  The weight of the guy leaning against the door pushed it gently open, and the guy fell over onto the floor, half inside the cellar, half out. One of the DSIS agents looked out at Flynn. It wasn’t the team leader, Ager, and it wasn’t the medical guy. One of the other guys had woken up. He looked ready to move until he saw the gun pointed at him.

  “Pull him inside,” said Flynn.

  “You don’t know who you’re dealing with,” he said.

  “But I’m figuring it out. Now pull him in.”

  The agent grabbed his sleeping colleague by the shoulders and dragged him into the cellar.

  “Now push the door closed.”

  “We need water.”

  “I’ll get you some. Now push it closed.”

  The agent pushed the door closed. Flynn stepped forward and bolted the door. Then he turned to Olsen. “Are you okay?”

  “Did you kill that man?”

  “No, he’s just asleep. Did they give you anything?”

  “No.”

  “You answered all their questions right away.”

  “Yes. Why shouldn’t I?”

  “No reason. Let’s go.”

  Flynn grabbed the new agent’s phone, ID, and wallet and dropped them in his pack. He strode to the door but stopped when Olsen didn’t follow.

  “You’re stealing his things,” said Olsen.

  “Borrowing,” said Flynn. “It’s evidence.”

  “Of what?”

  “They kidnapped you, didn’t they? Held you prisoner?”

  “They’re police; they can do that.”

  “Not without cause, not even for a terrorist.”

  “That’s what you are.”

  Flynn stepped back into the room. “What?”

  “You’re a terrorist. That’s what they told me.”

  “Who told you? The nice guys who kidnapped you and threw you in a cell for no reason?”

  Olsen said nothing.

  “Let me ask you this: did they show you ID?”

  “No.”

  “Wouldn’t the real police do that?”

  “I guess.”

  “If they wanted to lock you up, the real police would take you to a police station or a lockup, wouldn’t they? There’d be paperwork and bureaucracy. Not the disused cellar of an old café.”

  “I think it was a bar.”

  “I’m glad you’re still observant. So let me tell you what I have observed in the past twenty-four hours. I went to meet you, as agreed, at the library. These guys sent me a text from your phone saying the meet had been moved to eleven p.m. at the port.”

  “Why the port?”

  “Because nobody’s around near midnight.”

  “I’d want somebody around.”

  “So would most people. But I went, and you know what I observed? A car with a dead body in it. A body that was supposed to make me think it was you, and for a while I did. Do you think this is the behavior of normal police?”

  Olsen said nothing.

  “Listen, pal. I’ve done what I came to do. I wanted to make sure you were safe, because I kind of got you into this. But it’s a free country, and you have free will. You want to stay here and become that dead body that I saw, you knock yourself out. Me, I’m going to meet with a real police officer from Interpol. I’ll see you around.”

  Flynn hitched his pack onto his shoulder, picked up the new agent’s shoes, and strode out of the office and up the steps. He pushed out into the alleyway, marched down to the dumpsters, and tossed the shoes inside, then headed back out toward the street. He got halfway to the cellar door when it flung open.

  Olsen stepped out and looked at the empty street. He turned instinctively to check the alley, his face taut with anxiety, and saw Flynn.

  “I’m coming,” said Olsen.

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  The sun was just beyond its peak as Margret Zazou stood outside the grand opera house on Holmen. It was a modern architectural marvel, situated on the water’s edge across the harbor from the city center. The building itself was closed, but tourists and locals alike gathered in the for
ecourt and along the waterfront to take pictures and eat lunch on the lush lawns.

  Margret couldn’t see the rest of her team, but she knew they were there. She knew Jacques Fontaine would know they were there too. But she wondered if he knew what her orders were. She had been given a directive to arrest him. No ambiguity in the order, no subtext in the words. Arrest him.

  That was despite the fact that she couldn’t arrest him. Interpol wasn’t some independent police force, it was a network of police forces around the world. They assisted with cross-border investigations but did not arrest anyone. Yet that had been the directive. Arrest him.

  Which gave Margret pause. The one thing that had guided her career through all the murky gray between right and wrong was her belief in the process, the rule of law. The post-9/11 world was different than before, and the gray space had grown. The line between the good guys and the bad guys wasn’t as definitive.

  But to be given an order that her superior knew she technically could not carry out? Someone was panicking.

  She watched people enjoying the spring sunshine the way only people in a cold-weather climate could. It was no more than 20 degrees Celsius, but people wore T-shirts and sleeveless dresses and enjoyed sandwiches and sodas. Margret wondered if they knew about the gray area, or if they even cared. Morality was a societal construct derived from the values of millions of individuals. And it moved.

  Jacques Fontaine was a good example. There was no doubt in her mind that that was not his real name. She knew of the French Foreign Legion and of its tradition of changing soldiers’ names for the sake of anonymity. She knew what Fontaine had been doing when she had met him—tracking down deserters—and what he was doing when she ran into him later on.

  Then it had been terrorists he was hunting. Not dissimilar from her work, although with a very different methodology. She was fairly certain he had killed, not just in battle but in the pursuit of information. That was not something she could abide. But he had also found the worst of the worst, and governments had killed them. The world around her seemed to be at peace with that. Fontaine had killed some but saved many—maybe thousands, maybe millions. He saved lives by finding those who would commit more carnage before they had a chance to do so. Margret could not condone the process, but she could not fault the outcome.

  As she watched the people on the lawn, her phone rang. Not her burner. Her official phone.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Where are you?” asked Fontaine.

  “The opera, as requested.”

  “Go to the south lawn.”

  “I’m at the south lawn.”

  “Go to the waterfront.”

  Margret walked. She had suspected he would not meet her at the opera and had planned accordingly. She reached the harbor’s edge and scanned the water.

  “Walk toward the opera house.”

  “Okay.”

  “At the north end of the lawn, there’s a harbor bus dock. Go there.”

  Margret walked down the gangway and onto the platform where the harbor bus ferried people from the city to the opera and back again.

  “There’s a water taxi approaching with a yellow roof. Get on it.”

  She looked to the north and saw a boat coming into the dock. It had a small deck at the rear where passengers could alight and then a cabin with seats that could hold a party of ten. The water taxi pulled up alongside the dock but did not tie off. A man with short white hair and a bronzed faced stepped out of the cabin.

  “Margret?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, and he offered his hand to help her onto the vessel. As soon as she placed both feet on board, the man moved back inside and took the helm, pulling away from the dock and heading south down the riverlike inner harbor.

  As the boat pulled away, Margret watched two of her men run to the water’s edge and then turn and sprint toward waiting cars. She couldn’t hear much above the sound of the vessel’s engine, but she looked east and saw the police helicopter assume a position above the harbor.

  The inside of the taxi was more like a small bus. Jacques Fontaine was standing in the aisle near the rear. She stepped down into the cabin and stood near Fontaine, keeping two rows of seats between them.

  “Nice boat,” she said.

  “It’s dependable,” he said.

  “You’ve used it before?”

  “I have, as it happens.”

  For a moment she didn’t reply, then: “I have orders.”

  “No doubt.”

  “To arrest you.”

  “Interpol has arrest powers in Denmark now?”

  “To bring you in, then.”

  “Why? What law have I broken?”

  “There’s no record of you entering the country, so they’ll start there.”

  “They?”

  “The Danish police. They asked me to apprehend you because they thought you might run otherwise.”

  “I wonder why they would think that.”

  “Because they claim you killed a Danish national.”

  “Who?”

  “You know who. The reporter. Nils Olsen.”

  “But you know the dead guy isn’t Olsen. You know it’s a setup.”

  “I know the man in the mortuary isn’t Olsen, but I don’t know that Olsen isn’t dead.”

  Fontaine stepped out of the aisle in between the seats so Margret could see down the length of the cabin. The captain was at the front, guiding them through the harbor. Margret now saw there was another man sitting on a forward-facing seat but craning his head around to look at her.

  She knew who it was. She had seen his civil record. The man slowly stood in the aisle and faced her. He looked thin and tired and uncertain.

  “Mr. Olsen,” she said.

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not dead.”

  “No. Thanks to this man.” He looked at Fontaine. “He rescued me.”

  “From where?”

  “From the people who tried to set me up,” said Fontaine. “Crooked DSIS agents. Listen, we don’t have much time, so let me lay it out. Take a seat.”

  Margret took the aisle seat on the starboard side. Fontaine did the same on the port side, two rows forward. The window beside him was open, and a cool breeze floated in off the water, tousling his hair.

  “This all started with Victor Berg.”

  “Who?”

  “Victor Berg. He’s a Danish politician.”

  “Okay, I think I’ve heard the name somewhere. What of him?”

  “He’s a star on the rise. He’s got a populist platform that is playing well and getting him noticed. One of the media groups, Nyhedsdag, has been pushing him hard. A reporter from a rival paper, Politiken, went to the cohousing community where Berg used to live. She was doing background research on him, making sure they were on equal footing with their competition.

  “She talked to Luna Fisker and suggested that Berg was a hot property and that he might even end up prime minister one day if things fell into place. When she heard this, Luna flipped out. The reporter told me she thought Luna was erratic. Luna told the reporter that Berg was bad news, or words to that effect, and that she had proof. She didn’t specify the nature of the proof or the crime, but the reporter made a note of it. A note that she handed off to Nils here.”

  Olsen nodded hesitantly as if it was true but he didn’t want to be drawn into the matter.

  “So why give the notes to Mr. Olsen?” asked Margret. “What kind of a reporter does that?”

  “The kind that gets an offer out of the blue for a plum position on a Reuters desk in Washington, DC.”

  “Out of the blue?”

  Fontaine nodded. “But that’s not the whole of it. Shortly after meeting the reporter, Luna sees Berg at a rally in a nearby village. He’s rousing up support and selling folks on the idea of a land development project that will just happen to require the razing of the cohousing community.”

  “And Luna’s house, I assume.”

  “Th
eoretically,” said Fontaine. “But people saw Luna confront Berg at the rally. No one heard exactly what was said, but we can assume she raised the prospect of this proof of his wrongdoing.”

  “How can you assume that?”

  Margret looked to the front of the boat as it dropped into darkness. Fontaine glanced around as the shadow enveloped the vessel and they made their way under a bridge. He turned back to Margret.

  “I can assume that because a couple of days after that rally, the house that Luna lived in burned to the ground.”

  Margret felt her spine stiffen. It was proof of nothing, but she knew there was more. “Accidents happen,” she said.

  “I saw the burn pattern. It was no accident, although the fire brigade claimed it was electrical.”

  “Maybe you’re wrong.”

  Fontaine said nothing. They moved out from under the bridge, and the sun shone back in through the windows lining the cabin.

  “The electrical panel wasn’t the source. It was more or less undamaged. The fire barely reached it because it was on the outside of the house. But the heaviest burn was in a T shape from the back door into the two front rooms. Classic arson.”

  “Still not proof, Jacques. Not of arson and not of the existence of any evidence.”

  “Except that today I learned that there was evidence.”

  “Explain, and quickly.”

  “Luna Fisker and a friend of hers were raped when they were fifteen by two university students, one of whom was identified as Victor Berg.”

  Margret held her breath. He could be making it up, but she doubted that. Not him.

  “Who is the other alleged?”

  “Unidentified, as of yet.”

  “And this evidence, so called?”

  “The victim recalled one of the boys taking photographs.”

  Margret winced.

  “She said it was an old film camera and that one of the boys removed the film to destroy it.”

  “So . . .”