The Rotten State: A John Flynn Thriller

by Stewart, A. J.

  “I don’t want to unsee.”

  “Does your husband sleep well?” Flynn asked.

  “What?”

  “Does he sleep well?”

  She looked at Thorsen and then back at Flynn. “No.”

  “Because you can’t unsee. Even when you are right and they are wrong, you can’t unsee. That’s not what Luna would want.”

  “These are not the men who hurt her. These are the trained monkeys.”

  “Not trained well enough,” said Gorski.

  They moved inside. Thorsen locked away the remaining weapons and radios while Flynn and Gorski readied their packs.

  Begitte stood in the kitchen watching them.

  “These are not the men who hurt my sister,” she said again.

  Flynn pulled hard on a strap on his pack and turned to her. “I know. That’s why we have to go. The police will come, and questions will be asked, and time will be wasted. Klaasen said they write the narrative, but that only happens if we let them. We won’t let them.”

  Flynn wrote a quick note, folded it, and handed it to Thorsen when he came back.

  “Margret Zazou will come. Give her this.”

  Thorsen nodded and looked at his wife, stern-faced and immovable from the kitchen. Flynn hoisted his pack onto his back and shook Thorsen’s hand. He offered his hand to Begitte. She shook it across the counter.

  “How do we explain this?” asked Begitte.

  “You don’t. You got a call warning you—that’s why the others left. Then these men turned up. You don’t know who they are or what they want.”

  “Will the police buy that?”

  “No. But I have a feeling the questions will stop as quickly as they begin.”

  “Why?”

  “Because people don’t want to know.”

  Gorski settled his pack on his back and shook hands with the Thorsens and then followed Flynn out the back door. They climbed over the fence and cut across the field of barley, up a slight rise that wasn’t quite a hill. At the top they found a car. A tiny blue Opel Corsa. It had a bullet hole in the windshield, center and high, just below the rearview mirror.

  They tossed their packs in the back. Gorski drove. He turned around and headed back down the dirt track to the secondary road, and then he turned left, away from the capital and the sound of an oncoming helicopter.

  * * *

  Peder Thorsen sat on the front steps of their house with his wife. They had the porch light on, the only light in the area. They sat close together partly for warmth—the cool night air and falling adrenaline chilled them both—and partly because they both felt the need to be one.

  “Do you want to stay here?” he asked.

  “Stay?”

  “After all this. After Luna, after tonight.”

  “More than ever,” Begitte said. “You?”

  “More than ever.”

  “What about the others? It’s nothing without the others.”

  “They know the story, or part of it. But the windows we can repair. We can putty and paint bullet holes. The police will take the bodies away, and the others will never really learn exactly what went on. They’ll know there was a fight, they’ll know we won, but they won’t have to picture it.”

  “Is that why John wouldn’t let me see? Because I would picture it?”

  “Yes. The actions are bad, the memories are worse. People say the mind can imagine the worst. Those people haven’t seen the worst. It’s better this way.”

  Begitte nodded and put her head on Thorsen’s shoulder, and they waited.

  * * *

  The helicopter came in around the commune like the previous one had. It was a different chopper—it had side doors. Those inside looked down as the spotlight circled the horseshoe of houses. It looked like a movie set. People lay on the ground scattered across the front half of the community, none in the back, but it was the back where the only light came from.

  When the helicopter landed in the parking lot, Margret Zazou jumped out. She ran to the edge, away from the wind and the sound of the rotors. Two of her men moved ahead, weapons drawn.

  Margret slowed to a walk. It was over. It was all over. Whatever it was, whatever it had been, it was over. She had requested a helicopter from Fælledparken with an armed response team on board and had waited for it to arrive. They knew the flight path of Klaasen’s chopper, and it didn’t take Magellan to figure out where they were headed.

  There were bodies everywhere across what looked like a nice lawn. A ring of houses around a communal hub. She had read about such places. She liked the idea of the close community but didn’t like the idea of everyone knowing her every move. She lived in an apartment in Lyon and didn’t know anyone on her floor.

  She walked up the path around the large central building and toward the rear, where a solitary porch light was on. Her two men stood on either side of a couple sitting on the stoop. Their hands were behind their backs. Her men had handcuffed them.

  She stepped in through the front gate of a sweet little Danish-style house. A fairy tale of a place. She stopped before the man and woman and crouched down.

  “What happened here?” she asked.

  “We don’t know,” said the woman. “Some men came, and we heard gunshots, lots of them. And then it stopped.”

  “Are you the only ones alive?”

  “I think so.”

  “What about your neighbors?”

  “They are away,” said the man.

  “Away? All of them?”

  “Yes. We got a warning to leave.”

  “From who?”

  “Don’t know. We’ve had some trouble. With a local developer. People were scared, so they left.”

  Margret nodded and looked at the man. “I know you, don’t I?” she said.

  “I don’t believe we’ve met,” he said.

  She nodded again and looked away across the dark curve of houses. “Where’s Fontaine?”

  “I’m not sure who that is,” he said. “It sounds like a cabaret singer.”

  “It does,” said Margret. She looked up at her men. “Please go and get as many IDs as you can find. Let’s start figuring out who’s who.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” The two men strode away.

  Margret turned her eye to the woman. “You had a sister called Luna.”

  “Yes,” she replied.

  “I got a tip. About the car she drove out to Møns Klint.”

  “My sister didn’t drive.”

  “Apparently not. The car she allegedly stole was owned by a person who doesn’t exist and registered to an address that turns out to be a petrol station that knows nothing about said car.”

  “That’s odd.”

  “It gets more odd. The car was a city model called a Volkswagen Up. The same color and model was used to try to frame Font—” Margret stopped and smiled. “To frame an informant for a murder that never really happened. We found the car this evening in a wrecking yard, waiting to be broken apart in the morning. I believe the entire thing was orchestrated by a man called Klaasen. I suspect Mr. Klaasen may be on your lawn, among the dead.”

  “That would be a shame,” said the woman.

  “Indeed,” said Margret. “Trouble is, he works in a very powerful place, for people who might wish for an event like this evening’s to never have happened.”

  “I wish the same thing,” said the woman.

  Margret said nothing. She looked at the man. His name was Thorsen, according to his civil record. She had known him by another name.

  “What say you, Mr. Thorn?”

  “It’s Thorsen.”

  “Of course.”

  “I have a note for you. In my shirt pocket.”

  Margret leaned forward and pulled the paper from his pocket, unfolded it, and read it. Then she let out a long breath.

  “I’m going to uncuff you now,” she said. “Please go inside and don’t come out until I say so. We have some cleaning up to do.”

  Chapter Fifty-Thr
ee

  Margret Zazou knew it would be taken out of her hands. It was par for the course. Interpol wasn’t really its own agency, so when it came time to arrest and prosecute, the job was handed over to the relevant national authorities.

  The note told her where to find Ager and his team. She wanted time to interrogate them for herself, but Fontaine knew the way the game was played and insisted on local police involvement. There were calls from Brussels and calls from Lyon and finally a call from the office of the prime minister of Denmark.

  Ager and his team were handed off to Danish authorities. Margret protested, more for the record than anything. She knew it was no use. She knew that Ager and his men had probably killed Luna Fisker, but she would never find proof of it.

  Aksel Klaasen was never at the Østvand cohousing community. The prime minister’s office would announce that he died in his sleep as a result of old injuries sustained in the defense of Denmark.

  His assault team died in a helicopter accident during training exercises.

  Lund’s men weren’t so easily explained. No one in Christiansborg Palace felt the need to come up with a story of why armed men from a local developer would attack the houses he was attempting to raze in order to build a new development. Lund would be written up as a low-level organized crime figure gone rogue. Why his men turned on each other was anyone’s guess, but prevailing theory was money.

  Margret led a team of local Danish police to the Lund estate to arrest him on charges of conspiracy to commit murder. The Danish investigators found evidence of Lund’s widespread corruption. But Hans Lund had no plans to die in prison. He was offered a plea deal and sung like a canary.

  In the early hours the following day, Victor Berg was arrested on corruption charges.

  A representative of the office of the prime minister visited the community in Østvand. He assured Thorsen and Begitte that any damage to the property would be fixed immediately at the government’s cost. He further assured them that the prime minister was in complete agreement with the lower court ruling that the community was not subject to development because of a breach of lease. He suggested that a quasi-government entity would purchase the allotment from the farmer’s estate and offer the cohousing cooperative a lease in perpetuity while designating it a national heritage site as an example of a uniquely Danish living environment.

  * * *

  Victor Berg hated confined spaces. He liked palatial rooms with high ceilings. He didn’t love the outdoors, but he did like being able to see it. He couldn’t see it from his cell. He wasn’t doing hard time. He wore his own clothes and prepared his own food. Some of the prisoners were given leave from the facility, and in his time there they had all returned. He couldn’t imagine it. He wasn’t spending his days behind bars, even if other prisoners thought this was like a low-rent resort.

  He hadn’t been found guilty of anything yet, so the notion that he was imprisoned angered him. The court had declared him a flight risk despite him being a member of parliament. He was as Danish as they came. Where would he go?

  The truth was, anywhere. He would run for the hills of outer Mongolia if he had to, rather than be trapped with the dregs of society in prison. Most of his fellow prisoners were white-collar criminals who claimed they hadn’t done it. In Berg’s case it was true. He wasn’t corrupt. Money greased the wheels of democracy, that was all.

  But unlike the schmucks in confinement, Berg had an escape plan, an exit strategy. He knew things. He had dirt, and if forced to, he would use it. He started with Lund—the reason he was inside. But Lund had beaten him to the punch and had struck a deal. Apparently the prosecutors were more interested in convicting an esteemed member of parliament over prosecuting a small-time mafioso like Lund.

  Next was Klaasen. He was a bad guy who had done bad things. Berg knew only a fraction of it, he was sure. But Klaasen was dead, and no one was interested in prosecuting a dead man.

  Yet Klaasen worked for the prime minister—the shame alone would rock Christiansborg Palace. So the prime minister’s office was busy revising history as Berg sat in his cell doing sudoku. They were making Klaasen into some kind of modern-day martyr. The prosecutors would show little interest in challenging that narrative.

  In the end there was one: Mads Madsen. Berg had no desire to put his old friend in prison for having a bit of fun. But his rationale was sound: he would give evidence against Mads in return for unconditional release. He was confident that at trial Mads would be acquitted despite his own testimony. After all, as he recalled it, the girls had seemed like they were having a good time. Yes, they were a bit young, but Mads would get the best lawyers, and, save a little embarrassment, he would get off scot-free.

  Berg met with his lawyer in a bleak concrete room that at least offered a window. He told his lawyer to pass a message to the prosecutor. When the lawyer asked what it was regarding, Berg told him a plea deal. The lawyer asked the nature of the deal so he could better represent him. Berg asked if he was protected under client-attorney privilege, and his lawyer confirmed that their conversations were confidential.

  “It’s about Mads Madsen,” he said.

  The lawyer told him he would take it up with the prosecutors and arrange a meeting.

  The following day, Berg was reading in a room called the café—in which all the cutlery was fixed to the wall so it couldn’t be removed—when he got a message to meet with his lawyer.

  He was ready to go home. He could feel his skin drying out, and he longed for a glass of Burgundy. Berg went to the same drab meeting room. He opened the door, but his lawyer was not inside. Instead he saw a man built like a drinking straw.

  “I thought I was in this room,” said Berg.

  “Sit down, Mr. Berg.”

  Berg frowned. “Who are you?”

  “Sit down, please.” The man smiled. He’d never be in the movies.

  Berg took a seat. “Where’s my lawyer?”

  “You’ll see him again, at trial.”

  “Trial? You think?”

  “Yes, Mr. Berg. I’m here to outline your strategy.”

  “I already have a strategy.”

  “A better strategy, Mr. Berg. See, we know about your plan to attempt to incriminate Mr. Madsen.”

  “What? Who are you?”

  “That is irrelevant, Mr. Berg. What is relevant is that Mr. Madsen senior is not comfortable with that arrangement.”

  “He’s not comfortable with it? Well, he’s not in jail, is he?”

  “No, but you are, and that is all your own doing. So let me outline the strategy for you. You are going to take your medicine, Mr. Berg.”

  “Take my medicine?”

  “Yes. You will be tried, and Mr. Lund will give his evidence, and your lawyer will defend you with vigor. But you will not bring the Madsen name into it. You will not whisper it in your sleep. Who knows, you might get off. Probably not. Mr. Lund has been quite chatty. Regardless, you will not mention the Madsen name, even if you are found guilty.”

  “And why would I do that?”

  “Because prison is a very lonely place to die, Mr. Berg. Sometimes guards miss their rounds. An inmate could lie on the floor of the shower hall, for example, for hours, maybe days, with an open gut wound, watching their own intestines go crusty from oxidation. A very lonely place to die, indeed.”

  Victor Berg left the meeting room with an ashen face. He was a pale man who worked at being tanned. He had lost his color in seconds. He went to his cell, his new place of abode for however long, sat on his cot, and wept.

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  The children ran and splashed without care, and the adults did the same, looking silly and childish. Lalandia Rødby was that kind of place. It was a water park with pools and slides, much of which lay under the aquadome—a massive indoor complex that kept the air at a tropical 30 degrees Celsius.

  Flynn and Gorski watched the children get buckets full of water dumped over their heads and people shoot out of the slides and a
cross the pool like pebbles. The men drank soda and watched one family playing on a small slide designed for toddlers. The boy’s giggles were audible across the dome.

  The father caught his son at the bottom of the slide and then spun him around in the air. In doing so, his eyes fell on Flynn and Gorski, and he stopped. He spoke to the pregnant woman in the one-piece bathing suit with him, and she too turned to look at the men.

  They took their time getting out of the pool and toweling off to the protests of the boy, who wanted more, more! The father carried the boy as the three of them walked over to where the men sat.

  “Mr. Flynn,” said the woman.

  “Freja,” he replied. “This is my friend, Aleksy.”

  Gorski smiled and nodded hello.

  “Thank you for the tickets,” she said. “We’re enjoying ourselves. The hot pool is a nice relief.” She looked at her pregnant belly and rubbed it.

  “I’m glad.”

  “It’s really too much. We should pay you.”

  “Not my money.”

  “Whose, then?”

  “Let’s call it yours. Take a seat.”

  Freja Rasmussen sat down opposite them, and Keel sat beside her, wrangling their son, who had his eye on a cartoon character shooting water at other kids.

  “Thank you for what you did,” she said.

  “You’re welcome.”

  “Don’t think me ungrateful, but why did you call us down here?”

  “Copenhagen is a little hot right now.”

  “I understand, but I mean, why anywhere?”

  Flynn pulled out an eight-by-ten envelope and put it on the table between them.

  Freja stared at it for a moment, then asked what it was.

  “Proof,” said Flynn.

  “Of what?”

  “Of all that happened.”

  Closing her eyes, Freja put her hand to her mouth. She breathed in deeply and then opened her eyes, leaving her hand in place. “She was right?”

  “Luna?”