“The scar has stopped on the lawn,” said Gorski.
“I see him.”
Flynn didn’t need to shout. The night was quiet, a soft breeze and the quiet hum of dormant houses. He just projected like a lecturer in a classroom.
“You must really owe this guy,” he said.
The man on the lawn stood at ease. “Who’s that?” His voice was deep and authoritative.
“Oscar Madsen.”
“You think he’s involved now?”
“He’s why you’re here.”
“You think so?”
“Because of what his son did.”
“So you say.”
“I do,” said Flynn. “You have bad information.”
“I think you do.”
“You’ve been told the photographs were destroyed. That’s bad information.”
“Even if it is, what do you think is going to happen? Madsen owns the media. He is the media. He writes the narrative. People know what he wants them to know.”
“Only the ones not willing to listen to the truth.”
“Whose truth? Your truth?”
“Most of the media in Denmark is state-run. Madsen doesn’t control that.”
“No, he doesn’t. The prime minister controls that.”
Flynn said nothing. He was thinking, though. Thinking about terrorist and sleeper cells and spies and agencies with three-letter acronyms. How when a government wanted to infiltrate another government, they sometimes used sleeper agents. People who worked their way into positions of power but all the while represented another country’s interests. Governments tried it with terrorist organizations, but it was harder because the terrorists learned to organize in cells, where one hand didn’t know what the other hand was doing. Some governments attempted the same organizational structure where they could. One three-letter acronym didn’t know what the other three-letter acronyms were doing.
Except at the top. There was always a point where the cells came together. That was the influence point. That was where the sleepers were activated. Klaasen didn’t work for the prime minister. Not really. He worked in his office—he was chief organizer and strategist—but he was really getting his direction from someone else. Someone to whom Klaasen owed a debt.
Oscar Madsen. Madsen had fed the world the narrative of Klaasen the hero and squashed the war-criminal story. Now it was time to repay the favor, to make sure that Madsen’s preferred narratives, his world view, got into the media he didn’t own. Not that it would be easy. The state media didn’t always agree with Madsen’s view. So Klaasen’s job wasn’t just to implant Madsen’s narrative but to minimize other views, other opinions. To keep Madsen abreast when change was in the wind.
A spy. But not for another country. For a private citizen.
“So you don’t really work for the prime minister,” said Flynn.
“Of course I do. I assist and advise. I keep his affairs in order. It’s just that I will outlast him. He is subject to political winds that I am not.”
“Until people learn the truth.”
“There you go again with the truth thing. People don’t want the truth. They want confirmation of what they already believe. They want to know for certain that all they hold sacred is right and those who believe otherwise are undeniably wrong. We don’t tell them what to think; we just help them to confirm it.”
“No one is okay with rape.”
“Is that what you think? The evidence does not support you. People forgive every sin, even murder. Did your fellow Americans condone the murder of Osama bin Laden?”
“He was a terrorist, responsible for the deaths of thousands of people.”
“Yes, he was. But did he get a fair trial? Was it proven beyond reasonable doubt in a court of law? Do you even know what the evidence was? Or was he just hunted down and killed without due process?”
Flynn paused. He knew all about the process. He and his team had tracked and traced and bribed and killed to find him in Pakistan, and then they had watched and confirmed, every day under threat of discovery and painful death. Then the French government had handed over what they knew to the US, and the CIA had watched and confirmed, and then the SEALs had come in and did what needed to be done.
Flynn knew the process because he was a small part of it, and because he had witnessed it, watching from a post nearby, ready under orders from French President Sarkozy to go in after the SEALs if they failed in their mission. He didn’t have to go in. Those boys were good—the best there was. But he would have, no hesitation. If he had to do it again, he still wouldn’t hesitate. Not about the process, not about any of it.
“You think we were wrong to kill him?”
“No,” said Klaasen. “I would have done it myself, happily. But I would have done so knowing that people would forgive, because they wanted revenge so badly. But it doesn’t matter, because you are not going to test the theory.”
“I’m not?”
“Of course not. Because all you will do is tarnish the girl’s memory and hurt the family left behind. You’ll hurt everyone you think you’re helping, everyone except us. Because we know that under the right conditions, people will forgive anything. And we can create those conditions. Did it really happen? Are the photos fake? Is it libel? And if it is real, was it really consensual? Did she say no? Danish law requires it, to be charged as rape. Did the girl fight, or did she just change her mind about it later on? Or perhaps the narrative says it was the girl’s doing. She lured an inexperienced boy, she was wanton, she was a whore. She had the pictures taken to blackmail the boy because she knew who his father was.”
Klaasen took two easy steps forward, not demonstrably closer but a defined movement, part of a choreography.
Flynn could see Klaasen’s face now. Handsome but disfigured. Flynn mirrored his movement with two easy steps backward.
“See, people will believe what they want to believe, and they prefer to believe that a woman is a whore more than they want to believe that their institutions are fallible. The latter is an indictment on them, on their choice of leadership. It reflects badly on them, and they don’t want to be wrong. But a whore is a whore. You see? You’ll try to kill the weeds, but all you’ll do is kill the grass.”
Gorski burst into Flynn’s ear. “We’ve got two moving past Thorsen’s position on your right flank, and two on the left. They’re trying to sweep you up.”
“Lund’s four men are coming in between the houses on your left,” said Begitte. “They’re moving in tighter toward Lars’s front yard.”
“Confirmed,” Gorski said. “We have two of Klaasen’s on the right in the front yards, four of Lund’s in the yards on the left, and two of Klaasen’s in between, plus Klaasen himself.” Gorski paused. “Klaasen has a sidearm. He’s trying to act casual, but he’s itching for it.”
“Is he the only one with a shot at me on the steps?” whispered Flynn.
“For now. Not in a few seconds. You’re going to have all kinds of ammo pointed your way in about ten.”
Flynn tossed around the options. There weren’t many. He could take out Klaasen but then be open—very open—and the soldiers might not stop their mission just because the paymaster was down.
“It’s a good analogy,” Flynn said, buying time he couldn’t afford. “You are a weed.”
Klaasen smiled. “Let me guess—you’re a Weedwacker.”
“To hell with this,” said Gorski in the radio. “Everybody down, on my signal.”
Flynn heard Gorski fire.
Chapter Fifty-One
Gorski had the entire battlefield laid out before him like an old-time general, like Napoleon or Alexander the Great. On one side and toward the center, well-armed military-trained guys with good, time-tested tactics. A central position taking the focus of attention while they closed in on the flanks. They held the open end of the horseshoe and were going to sweep Flynn up like a fish in a net.
But Gorski knew something Klaasen’s guys didn’t. The
ir flank was being outflanked. Behind their left flank, as Gorski saw it, were Lund’s men. Four guys, not so well trained, not so well disciplined, but armed well enough with stubby weapons that might have been MP5s. Plenty lethal.
Klaasen’s men didn’t expect Lund’s, and Lund’s didn’t expect Klaasen’s. The difference was Lund’s four guys had probably seen Klaasen’s chopper come in. They might not have seen the men get out, but they could now see Klaasen’s men moving toward the lawn in front of the communal building. They could see they had guns. They were a most unexpected wrinkle. Their presence and Thorsen’s light signal had confused Lund’s men and made them change their mission parameters. So they lacked discipline.
Gorski turned his scope on Lund’s men. All four had moved into the front yards of the first four houses and then stopped, trying to understand what they were seeing. He moved his sights onto the second guy from the far end.
Gorski shot him.
He chose that one because once all hell broke loose, it would be a much harder shot with the guy being farther away. He didn’t hit the farthest guy because he wanted to make sure all four of Lund’s men knew that one of their own had gone down. He wanted them to hear the bullet hit flesh and to see the body drop.
He wanted them to see that because he wanted to use their lack of discipline against them. They were tough guys but reckless, hard but unfocused. They were big guys repurposed from Lund’s other businesses, guys in his flock, not trained mercenaries brought in for the job. Mercenaries would have training and discipline. They would have come in staggered, not in a line like a carnival game. They would have paused under cover of the houses to figure out what was going on, not stood in the front yards, open and waiting. They might have assumed the other unit was there to do the exact same thing, and they might have let them do it, achieving their objective without a shot of their own being fired. Heroes without risk. They might have taken cover and analyzed where the shot had come from, the location of the muzzle flash.
But they weren’t mercenaries, and they weren’t disciplined. They were now scared and focused on the guys with guns ahead of them.
Gorski saw Flynn run back into the building below him as Klaasen’s two guys on his left turned toward the roof, to the origin of the shot. Perhaps they thought he was shooting at them and he was just bad at it. It mattered not.
Lund’s men opened fire. It took one guy to lose it, to open up his MP5 and spray the lawn with rounds. His buddies joined in within a second.
The two soldiers on the left were dead before they even knew Lund’s men were there. Klaasen hit the grass, but Gorski couldn’t say if he was shot or not. The two remaining soldiers on the right knew their commander was between them and the firing line, so they used three-shot bursts rather than rapid fire. They were better shots anyway. The man closest to the first house stayed back and fired at the muzzle flashes he saw across the lawn.
The second soldier, closer to the parking lot, charged toward his fallen commander. He ran in a crouch, making his target as small as possible. Gorski thought it was pretty brave, running straight at gunfire like that. The guy didn’t shoot as he ran but was relying on his remaining partner to draw the fire. He couldn’t risk hitting Klaasen.
The guy reached his commander, and within a second Klaasen was up and running. He wasn’t hit, just evading fire. Klaasen ran, and the second soldier propped on one knee and turned his aim at the fire coming from the yard nearest to the parking lot.
His three rounds hit the chest of the guy on the first house’s lawn. That guy was done. The soldier turned his aim to the next guy, who was firing from the third lawn. He aimed at the guy, just standing there like he was behind some kind of force field. The guy’s head exploded before the soldier pulled his trigger, and he instinctively glanced at Klaasen, who was running away from him toward the big building in the middle of the horseshoe. Klaasen had his sidearm out and was firing as he ran. Perhaps it was a lucky shot, perhaps the old man still had some tricks. The soldier grinned at the decorated hero turned bureaucrat.
It was his last smile. The round from Lund’s final guy hit the soldier in the throat, and he fell back, his spinal cord severed, his day done.
The last of Lund’s men kept firing for a few more seconds until he realized that no one was firing back. Gorski watched him survey the scene. It was carnage but not totally. There was one soldier up against the first house on Gorski’s right, separated from Thorsen by brick and plaster. Lund’s man finally dropped down below the front fence of the yard. Gorski looked back to see the last soldier on the opposite side and took aim at him, but the guy pressed himself against the far wall of the house, out of Gorski’s view.
“Thorsen, we have one remaining bogey against the parking lot side wall of your location. Can you distract him?”
“Roger that.”
Gorski waited for Thorsen to exit the back door of the house and move along the back wall to the corner. He could peek around. The soldier was against the side wall of the house at the front corner facing the lawn. Thorsen could have swung around and shot him in the back. But that was one firing position too many. Gorski had watched it all go down. It looked like two opposing forces, all slain on the battlefield. A mystery bullet from Thorsen’s position would provoke the question of who else was here, who else fired?
Thorsen fired. He stepped out from the back of the house and fired his old Kalashnikov knockoff into the air. The soldier spun in position to return fire. He didn’t get the chance. Gorski shot him in the side of the head, right behind his ear.
* * *
Flynn watched Klaasen run up the steps to the communal building. He had been hit in the shoulder, but it was a nick, a flesh wound. He had held it as he got up from the lawn, but now he ignored it. A bomb had once exploded, taking half his face off. Flynn figured this was nothing to him. Klaasen dashed up to the front door. It was dark inside, the only illumination coming from the emergency exit signs. He pulled at the locked door.
Flynn stood back in the foyer, right in the middle of the space, open but unseen, the darkest part of the room.
Klaasen yanked again at the door. He took a step back from the glass and raised his sidearm. Held it high. He wasn’t trying to blast the lock open; he was aiming inside. But Flynn had stood in his position, and he knew what Klaasen could see.
Nothing.
Klaasen was working on instinct. He knew Flynn wouldn’t have run away. He’d be watching, waiting for the firefight to finish. Klaasen splayed his feet and fired into the door, punching tight holes into the glass as he peppered rounds along the left side of the foyer. Then he turned at the hips and fired again along the right wall.
Cubbies holding boots and slippers and coats exploded into wooden shards as Klaasen fired along the sides where he was sure the American would be. But Flynn wasn’t there. He was standing, his own feet splayed, a DSIS agent’s H&K USP at his side, right in the middle of the dark foyer.
Flynn raised his weapon and held it in a two-handed grip. Klaasen pivoted again, covering all bases, hitting the least logical place last, but certainly hitting it. He pointed his gun through the glass into the middle of the dark room. Right at Flynn.
He didn’t fire.
Flynn didn’t fire.
Klaasen’s head exploded in a hail of bullets that shattered the glass doors and sent Flynn diving. He hit the ground and rolled and came up ready. Klaasen was down, certainly dead. At the base of the steps below the entrance, Flynn saw one of Lund’s men from the blue Corsa. The driver. He held an MP5 to his shoulder, not firing now but not dropping his aim.
* * *
Thorsen saw Klaasen dash up the steps and, moments later, heard him firing at something Thorsen couldn’t see but knew to be Flynn’s position. Thorsen snatched up the rifle belonging to the fallen soldier and moved across the yard, keeping below the fence line. He popped up to see the last of Lund’s men appear around the side of the communal building. The man ran to the base of the steps up to
the entrance of the building, put his weapon to his shoulder, and opened fire.
Thorsen rested the soldier’s rifle on top of the fence and aimed. Lund’s man had stopped firing, but he was still aiming at something. Perhaps Klaasen, or perhaps Thorsen’s old unit commander, his brother, his adjudant.
Thorsen heard Gorski in his earpiece.
“He’s the last man standing. He might surrender.”
Thorsen looked through the scope at Lund’s man, the guy’s weapon still aimed into the communal building.
“Not today,” said Thorsen.
“Roger that.”
Thorsen shot Lund’s man in the ear, through and through.
Chapter Fifty-Two
The three men met on the lawn in front of the communal building, the sulfuric scent of gunpowder and propellant and cleaning oil in the air. Bodies were everywhere.
“Weapons used?” asked Flynn.
Gorski held up his rifle.
“I used that guy’s,” said Thorsen, nodding toward the yard from which he had just shot. “I gave it back to him.”
Flynn gestured at Gorski’s rifle. “This traceable back to you?”
Thorsen shook his head.
Gorski dropped the rifle beside Klaasen.
They walked around the building and back to Thorsen’s house. Flynn called Begitte out of the barley on the radio, and she met them at the front door.
“What happened?” she asked.
“We won,” said Gorski.
“I want to see,” she said.
“No, you don’t,” said Flynn.
“I want to see,” she said more firmly.
Thorsen put his hand on her shoulder and shook his head. She didn’t move, but she didn’t look happy.
“These men got what they deserved,” she said.
“Yes,” said Flynn.
“So why shouldn’t I see?”
“Because it makes no difference, and once seen, you can never unsee.”
The Rotten State: A John Flynn Thriller Page 31
