The Rotten State: A John Flynn Thriller

by Stewart, A. J.

  Freja nodded.

  “Yes,” said Flynn. “She had proof.”

  “Why did she keep it all these years?”

  “She was denied. She thought it would happen again. She hid the film away and tried to forget about it. Maybe she did, for a while.”

  Freja stared at the envelope for a little longer, then she dropped her hand from her mouth. “I don’t want it.”

  “I understand.”

  “Take it away.”

  “I can’t.”

  Freja frowned. “Why not?”

  “Because it’s yours. To do with as you please. Look at them, don’t look at them. Send them to a lawyer, a newspaper—”

  “No!” she said.

  “Burn them,” said Flynn. “The choice is yours.”

  “I don’t want them. That was the past. I have a life now. A great life.”

  “I can see that.”

  She shook her head to no one in particular, then she turned to Keel. “What do you think?”

  Keel looked at Flynn. “Will any good come of it?” he asked. “Will these men go to jail?”

  “For this? Maybe, but probably not. But one is now already in jail, and one has to deal with karma. And karma has a way of coming back.”

  “So you’re saying there’s no upside.”

  “It’s small, in my opinion. The downside, for you, is significant.”

  “What would you do?” he asked.

  Flynn noticed that the raw emotion he saw in Keel’s eyes the last time they had met was gone, replaced by a steely resolve.

  “If it were me, I’d move on. Like you say, you have something good now, and living well is the best revenge.”

  “That sounds like a Christmas card.”

  “I know, but there’s a lot of truth in it. Like I say, limited upside, plenty of downside. One’s in jail already. Do you want to live it again, through the media this time? I know I wouldn’t.”

  Freja stood. “I lived it once, and a second time when you came. I’m done with them. I have something they’ll never have, and I won’t let them ruin it.” She turned to Keel and grabbed their son, who clambered up into his mother’s arms. “Burn them,” she said, and she walked away into the pool with her boy.

  Keel sat for a moment looking at the envelope, perhaps wondering about the images inside.

  “Don’t,” said Flynn.

  Keel looked at him, stone-faced, and then he stood and picked up the envelope. He strode away, outside the dome and around the side. He found a fire pit, designed for sipping warm drinks on cold nights. It was abandoned on this glorious spring day. Keel hit a button that fired the gas and brought the flames to life. He waited for them to find their rhythm and then tossed the envelope on top. It took a long moment for anything to happen, and then the envelope caught. Flames flickered around the edges, curling the papers within. The photographic paper was hardy stuff, but in a couple of minutes they were reduced to burned pieces no bigger than coins.

  Keel waited for them to become ash. Then he turned off the gas and walked away before security came and asked what he was doing. He entered the dome and looked at Freja. He gave her a subtle nod and she reciprocated, then she turned away to play with her son.

  Flynn and Gorski didn’t move.

  Keel came over but didn’t sit. “I hope she doesn’t regret that.”

  “She won’t,” said Flynn. “But if she ever does, call me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “One day your children will be grown and moved out. It will be just you and her, and she may well look back on things and view them differently. If she does, if she truly regrets it, there are negatives. I have them hidden, never to be found. Unless she wants them. That happens, contact Peder Thorsen. He’ll know how to find me.”

  Keel looked at his wife and son playing. The child full of joy, the parent trying to be. “I think it’s better they stay burned.”

  “I couldn’t agree more.”

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Germaine Madsen watched her children play in a pool. This pool was in the back garden of one of their grandfather’s homes. The children were good swimmers for ten and twelve; they competed at school. But now they were cannonballing, trying to make the splashes reach their mother.

  Germaine was a lithe brunette with a French father and a Danish mother. She spoke four languages—two more than her husband—and had a postgraduate degree in business from the Wharton School in the United States.

  She was sitting under the shade of a large cantilever umbrella as her husband, Mads, prowled around the nearby lawn on his mobile phone. A butler came out through large French doors with an envelope on a silver tray. Germaine found that sort of thing preposterous, but it was all part of her father-in-law’s schtick.

  She took the large envelope from the tray, and the butler retreated without a word. Germaine again made sure the children were okay before sticking a long nail in the flap and tearing open the envelope.

  She pulled out some photographs. Black-and-white and poorly developed or poorly taken, rough and grainy and a touch overexposed.

  The first picture was a headshot of her husband from a couple of decades ago. He still had the same hair and eyes, but there were fewer lines on the face in the photograph. He was a handsome man when she had met him and still was.

  She slipped the second photo from behind the first and stopped dead. She checked that her children were all right and that Mads was still on the lawn, then looked back at the photograph. Where the first shot showed the true outside of her husband, the second showed the true inside.

  There was a girl on a bed. Mads on top, gleefully smiling at the camera. Germaine didn’t think she would ever get the girl’s face out of her mind. It was a look of terror, of horror. She didn’t know the girl, who no doubt would be a woman now, about Germaine’s age. It was clear in the photograph, though, that she was young, a child, and that she was anything but consensual in what was happening to her.

  Germaine flicked through the rest of the shots without looking at them properly. They all depicted shades of the same degradation, the same raw fear. She looked inside the envelope for some kind of note, perhaps a ransom request. There was nothing.

  She slipped the photographs back into the envelope and buried them at the bottom of her beach bag.

  Germaine had denied for the longest time that her husband was an animal. It hadn’t started until after their first child was born. First the rumors of infidelity that she chose to ignore—there was no proof, and people like to talk. But then things had gotten rough. He had wanted to do things she simply didn’t want to do, and she told him so. That was when the beatings started.

  She was a smart woman. She could leave. But her father-in-law would make it close to impossible for her to get a job. He’d run a smear campaign and take her children from her. He knew what kind of person his son was, but it never seemed to bother him. Perhaps behind closed doors he was the same.

  But now the beatings would stop. The old man wouldn’t allow the photographs to go public. But she wouldn’t leave. Not with a ten- and twelve-year-old. But once they were ready for university, ready to move away, she would make her move.

  Denmark was a communal-property nation in divorce, and despite the prenup she had signed, that’s how it would stay. She would take Mads Madsen to the cleaners, and he would let her do it, or he would face the consequences. She had time to plan. Years even. When she was done, she would take his career and his father’s business for her own.

  * * *

  Hans Lund walked out of prison and over to the waiting limo like a businessman disembarking a jetliner. There was no need for a name plate; only one person was coming out, so the driver opened the rear door, and Lund rolled inside.

  The driver knew where he was going, so Lund sat back and watched the bright day outside. He had no calls to make and no orders to give. He didn’t even know the driver’s name. It wasn’t one of Lund’s guys. His guys were all dead.
r />   Lund had taken a metaphorical beating and stood up to carry on. He was a fighter, had been all his life, and he wasn’t about to stop. He knew his business would take a hit. The local government agencies would be like hound dogs when it came to inspections of his businesses and developments. His rivals had probably already moved in to claim some of the business at the periphery of Hans Lund’s empire. The development at Østvand was now dead in the water.

  He had lost standing, lost face with his own people. He had broken the golden rule and spilled the beans to the prosecutors. But he wasn’t Sicilian, he didn’t give a damn about omertà or any of that Godfather nonsense. He had given them names and dates and times. He had provided written accounts and documents and audio and video of meetings with government officials and business owners and other various conspirators like Victor Berg.

  Lund didn’t care. It was survival of the fittest, dog eat dog. Sure, many of those co-conspirators would want him dead, and some might even try. But he wouldn’t make it easy. He still had money. Plenty still in Denmark, even after the raids and fines, and even more secreted away outside the EU. If push came to shove, Lund could easily leave Denmark and live out his life in luxury somewhere else. His wife loved Denmark and might refuse to come, but he wasn’t sure that was any kind of impediment.

  The gates to his estate lay open. The limo pulled across the empty gravel driveway and stopped below the front steps. The driver opened Lund’s door and helped the old man out. Such a task was not easy for a man of Lund’s girth. The driver closed the door, thanked Lund—for what, he didn’t know—and then drove away. There was no luggage, no welcome party.

  Lund labored up the steps and stopped at the door to collect his breath. He felt light-headed and blamed the garbage that he had been forced to eat in prison. His left shoulder ached—prison beds were not comfortable. A soak was in order.

  He pushed open the door. He had no keys on him, but it had been left unlocked. The house felt cold and cavernous. He called for his wife but got no response. He called for his butler and got the same.

  Lund used the balustrade to lever himself upstairs. He took a rest at the top and then walked to his large bedroom and into his private bathroom. The tub was a Japanese onsen tub, more like a spa without jets than a soaker tub, heated by geothermal springs. He couldn’t lie back in it, but at least he could submerge his entire body. Regular tubs made him feel like his midsection was a continent bursting up from the sea.

  He ran the water and then walked out and along the hall to his den. He went straight to the bar and poured himself a large Cognac. He took a sip of the fine liquor and felt the stress of the past days waft away. He wasn’t done; he knew that. There was testimony to give in court, and he wasn’t convinced they wouldn’t try to change the terms and get more out of him. But for now the Cognac melted all that away.

  Lund carried his drink back to the onsen and then stripped off his clothes. The water was hot—it was supposed to replicate the Japanese hot spring experience, after all—and he felt a slight burn as he lowered himself in. He sat on the built-in bench and rested his head against the edge, then gulped some Cognac down and took a deep breath. He felt infinitely better.

  And then he didn’t.

  He gasped for a second breath that didn’t come. He felt like he was choking, but that wasn’t it. Suddenly pain shot up his left arm and into the shoulder that had been causing him grief. He slammed the glass down and felt the liquor spill over his hand. Then, for reasons he would never understand, he thought about the barrels the Cognac had been aged in. About the coopers who had made the barrels, and about the hoops—the steel bands that ran around the barrels, holding them together. He felt as though a hoop had been placed around his chest.

  It was getting tighter and tighter. He tried to breathe, but it was nearly impossible with the massive weight on his chest. He spluttered and spasmed and tried to call out, but there were no words coming and no one to hear them if they did.

  Hans Lund clutched at his heart as he glanced out at the Cognac, the finest color he had ever known, as it faded away to nothing, like switching off an old television. Lund sank down into the water, nothing above the surface but his open dead eyes, like a silent hippopotamus.

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  George Ager was hot. He was surprised that anyone lived through a summer in Iraq. It was 43 degrees Celsius and somehow felt even hotter under the canvas shade, where Ager stood watching water getting loaded into the Spejdervogn M/95, a Swiss light armored vehicle based on the American Humvee.

  Despite the heat, Ager wasn’t complaining. Only a couple of months earlier he had thought he might die in a cellar in Copenhagen. Then the police arrived and rescued them and things got ugly.

  Klaasen was dead, killed in a hushed-up firefight. Ager didn’t need to read the action report to know the American was behind it. And with his commander dead, Ager became number one, but number one without any protection.

  Klaasen had been that protection. Not just his superior officer and his mentor, and not just his cash source, but his political point man. Klaasen knew how to navigate the corridors of power in a way Ager never would. Ager was a grunt, a boots-on-the-ground fighter, and he knew it. Even though he and his team had essentially joined the police force in the fight against terror, he still saw himself as a soldier.

  Now he felt like a soldier. Not roaming the streets of Copenhagen, stopping off for coffee or enjoying a glass of wine at the end of the day. Iraq wasn’t the war zone it had been, but it was still a place where a soldier was truly a soldier, and Ager felt lucky to be there.

  Why he was there was clear. The mission was to visit sites of importance to Danish commerce—cooperative oil installations, building and facilities depots, anything that a Danish company touched. At each site Ager would compile a security report. How safe were the people, was the infrastructure guarded, what were the terrorist or other threats in the area?

  It was hot and boring but easy enough. His team loaded up the Spejdervogn with water and supplies and headed out. They had no guide or interpreter on this mission. It was a straight shot along paved highway north from Baghdad and then east on a well-maintained and mapped dirt road. A couple hundred kilometers, half a day’s drive out, maybe less. The facility had a bunkhouse they could use until they returned the following day.

  Easy work. Almost unnecessary. The threats were diminished compared to when Ager had actually served in Iraq, and what remained was known and accounted for. Most facilities had passed muster easily. But their orders had come from the prime minister himself. At first Ager had thought it might have been a leftover command from Klaasen, perhaps a fail-safe to get his team out of Denmark if something bad should happen. As a result, they had weathered most of the fallout from a distance, but the orders coming directly from the prime minister made Ager wonder how much the PM knew and if he was on Klaasen’s side all along.

  They drove out fast along the highway with music playing and the air conditioning on full blast. As the flat, hard terrain flew by, Ager thought of grass fields and rain. He was confident this was his final mission. They would do the prime minister’s work, write the reports, and then bug out. With Klaasen dead, the incentive for staying in the DSIS was gone. As agents they didn’t make serious money, not the kind they got with Klaasen and his contacts. The future was private. They had enough cash between them to start their own gig, hang a shingle, so to speak. There was plenty of work out there for guys with their experience and comfort in working outside the normal parameters.

  When they reached the turnoff, Ager checked his map, and the guy at the wheel—who was now breathing better after having his throat smashed by the American—turned right onto a dirt road.

  The road had been some kind of camel track back in the day. The US Army had turned it into a road. They hadn’t bothered to pave it, but they had made it as smooth as a carpet, and the lack of rain or any kind of winter had preserved it.

  The driver started that s
ection cautiously, driving around 40 kph, but, finding the drive easy, he ramped it up. They would be at the installation in no time. They might even make it back to Baghdad tonight.

  The explosion was almighty. The IED blew a hole through the armored floor and flipped the vehicle over twice. Because the team wasn’t wearing any kind of restraints, they bounced around like pinballs inside a tin can.

  When the vehicle came to rest, it was upside down, surrounded by a plume of debris and red dust. From inside, visibility was zero. Ager took a breath to confirm he was still alive, but warning alarms were going off. Something below the knee felt wrong, and his head rattled and his vision was blurred. He could hear screaming from the back.

  They needed to move. The cowards who left improvised explosives didn’t usually hang around to watch, but there had been cases where the survivors had been taken. It was a bold move to take a NATO team, but bold moves were not unheard of in this part of the world.

  It hurt when Ager tried to move. He put his hand to his gut and found blood. Not good. He needed to get out of the vehicle and check his men, find the med kit. He glanced at the man who had been driving. The side window had been blown out in the explosion, and he had half fallen out when the vehicle flipped. Now he was only half a guy.

  Ager went the other way. He pushed the door open and dragged himself across the upside-down vehicle. Every inch was an effort, and every effort was half a liter of blood. He only made it part of the way out before he collapsed. One of his men pushed out through the rear door. He looked okay until he got all the way out. His leg was broken. White and red bone stuck out sideways below where his knee should have been. He dragged himself out onto the dirt and looked at Ager. His man was hurting. Ager couldn’t move.

  They were going to die in the desert.

  Ager willed himself to move. He didn’t have much energy or much blood left. He prayed to a god that he hadn’t thought about since his mother had stopped taking him to church as a teenager. Get me out, God, and I’ll be better. Neither of them believed a word of it.