Iceland: An International Thriller (The Flense Book 2)

by Saul Tanpepper

  Finally, she was able to talk to one of the registrars, who told her to fill out some forms. The search of the database, she said, would take at least two weeks, and that was only if the original application had even been processed and the information entered. And even then there was no guarantee. Errors could be made, as it was all inputted by hand. More than likely, the paperwork was still sitting in a pile somewhere on someone's desk.

  She left in frustration after providing both her own and Mahdi's cell phone numbers as contacts, then grabbed a quick sandwich and a drink at a stand outside a charcuterie. She took these to a bench beneath one of the cities countless marronnier d'Indes and sat down to eat. The horse chestnut tree seemed determined to shed itself of the entire season's output of leaves onto her head all at once.

  She scanned the sidewalks and street, eying especially the people who loitered about for no apparent reason. But no one seemed particularly interested in her.

  If she had a tail, as Norstrom had said, he was careful not to be seen. She supposed it could be a lie, though she couldn't understand why he would make such a claim, unless it was an excuse to reinsert himself into her life. Neither scenario was appealing to her, especially after the peculiar coincidences of the past few days.

  Maybe it was a sign telling her she had tried to reenter the world too soon. She wasn't ready for it. She was seeing connections to her past that almost certainly didn't exist, a sure sign her mind was still trying to deal with what had happened. And wasn't doing a very good job of it.

  She worried the delusions might grow into a paranoia and consume her, so she resolved not to let it. And that meant telling Norstrom once and for all to leave her alone.

  Not two seconds after entering the shop did Norstrom slip to her side, matching her pace. He wore jeans— clean, worn, and well-fitting. His shoes were black and nondescript. And he carried a small black bag in his hand, no larger than a book. No doubt it held a gun. There was no other place for him to conceal a weapon, and she knew he would be armed.

  A chime sounded as the door swung shut behind her, but the American was already pulling her away by the arm, guiding her swiftly through the crowded displays toward the back of the store and urging her not to speak.

  She wondered if he had a car waiting for them outside and was surprised when they didn't exit. Instead, he led her toward an unmarked door in a dimly lit corner of the shop. It opened into a short, narrow hallway and an unused stairwell. He stepped in without waiting for her to follow, though it was clear he meant for her to do just that.

  Watching the muscles of his back flex beneath his snug black t-shirt as he pulled himself up the stairs using the railing, she couldn't help wondering how long it had taken him to recover from his injuries. They'd been much worse than hers. At the moment, he showed no sign of the trauma, no limp or any weakness in his arms. The only difference she could discern was in his face, particularly in his eyes.

  "Where are we going?"

  "To talk." He sounded annoyed. Was it with her? Did he think she'd broken her promise not to speak to anyone about China?

  She started to shake her head in bitter denial, then stopped. She had kept her promise. She hadn't published the article she'd written. But what if the story had still gotten out anyway? It was there on her laptop, where anyone with access could find it.

  Jacques?

  She had never spoken to her brother about her experiences in China. It wasn't that the opportunity had never presented itself, although that was certainly true. It was that she knew how he would judge her. He would call her a fool for caring so much about the follies of men that she would recklessly place her life at risk. "People are inherently untrustworthy," he would say. "Companies even more so. This is exactly why you need to give it all up, denounce society. Let them fix it themselves."

  In other words, stay home and become a misanthrope like him.

  He was ill, she knew that. His mental state had been steadily deteriorating since the accident five years before— had, in all likelihood, begun long before that. His refusal to see a doctor didn't help. She had tried to get him treatment, but every time she broached the subject, his mood only worsened. She worried that any further urging would send him toppling over the edge he seemed to always be leaning too far over.

  They avoided each other as much as possible, which was a lot easier than it might seem, given that they shared a house. She kept to her schedule, not bothering to modify it. And in response, he adjusted his in order to minimize their interactions. He would venture out of his locked room only when he believed she was away or asleep.

  At night, sometimes woken from a deep slumber by her nightmares, she would hear noises in the kitchen, or the urgent tapping of his unclipped fingernails on his keyboard in his room at the other end of the house, so quiet was the night. She'd find dirty dishes left on the hallway floor the next day. Sometimes the front door would be left ajar, and she wouldn't know if he'd left it open leaving or coming back.

  They had not spoken more than a few dozen words over the past five months, and most of these were through the solid wood of his bedroom door. And while she mourned him slipping away from her, slipping away from the world in general, she just didn't know how to get him back. Nor did she necessarily have the will to try. Just making sure he had his medications and was properly eating drained her. And the few times she did confront him directly, it hadn't ended well. Afterward, she'd feel impotent and lapse into depression.

  But they still shared a connection. She knew he accessed her computer, searching for who knew what. She wanted to believe it was his way of reaching out to her without the commitment of that interaction. And, to be honest, she hadn't really minded, had even welcomed it. She even left him little messages, written not directly to him but meant for him to find, coded communications which she hoped would remind him that she still loved him and cared deeply. She would always be there for him, whenever he was ready to let her back into his life.

  He had to have seen the article.

  The question was, had he shared it with anyone else? Would he have posted it somewhere on the internet for someone to find, either in whole or in parts?

  Again, she shook her head. Jacques wouldn't betray her trust like that, no matter how tenuous their relationship might be. It would be too great a betrayal.

  "Is this about China?" she asked Norstrom, dreading his answer. But she needed to know.

  He kept climbing, spinning at each landing, the worn soles of his shoes scraping on the dust.

  "I already told you I do not want anything to do with you, Norstrom." It was a halfhearted shot, meant to elicit a pained reaction more than anything. But again he didn't respond.

  She knew it was no use. At this point, any complaining she did was no better than tilting at windmills. He would not allow her to manipulate him.

  Two nights ago she might have resented coming to such a realization. It was presumptive of him, even arrogant, to treat her this way. Two nights ago she told him in no uncertain terms to stay out of her life. And, emotionally, she still wanted that.

  Intellectually, however . . . .

  Intellectually, she knew something had changed. Two days ago, she would have sworn on a stack of bibles that the past was finally in the past.

  But now, she wasn't so sure.

  They exited on the fourth floor into an empty warehouse of sorts. The internal walls on this level had all been removed, leaving a bare floor of old plywood and columns to support the roof. There was no furniture. And save for a few crates, loops of electrical wiring, and other construction material, the space was empty. Plastic sheets hung from the rafters, covering the windows on all four sides, filtering the sun's slanting rays. The air was cold and smelled strongly of plaster and faintly of mildew.

  "Okay, we're alone," he said, finally turning to face her. "No one can hear us up here."

  "Then perhaps you would like to tell me what this is all about. What could possibly be so important that you would
drag me up here?"

  He studied her for several seconds. Finally, he sighed and invited her to sit, kicking two of the plastic crates together near the center of the room. "Since we last spoke, I've come into some new intel, disturbing intel."

  "About China?" she asked again. This time she was certain he would finally confirm her suspicions.

  "Not China, no. It's about your husband, Angel. David Eitan. We have reason to believe he may be helping to plan a terrorist attack."

  Chapter Seven

  REYKSHEIĐI GEOTHERMAL POWER STATION

  HENGILL VOLCANO

  OUTSIDE OF REYKJAVIK, ICELAND

  Seventeen large cardboard boxes sat on the floor of the office in Alvin Cheong's new apartment. They were flimsy, the corners and edges frayed and the lids coming undone from being reused as often as they had. Lengths of knotted twine, which he used to hold the boxes together, were carefully stowed in the corner for reuse.

  Cheong had resisted replacing the boxes with something more sturdy. He deplored synthetic materials, like the plastic crates so many others used. They contained carcinogens and were terrible for the environment, so he chose to avoid them as much as possible. The cardboard boxes still had a lot of use left to them.

  At the moment, they contained paper, reams and reams of it, printouts of every single document and every photograph his men had been able to collect from Angelique de l'Enfantine's house in Lyon and her apartment in Manhattan, as well as every available public record with the woman's name on it.

  He felt guilty for the excessive use of paper, but it was all recycled and would be recycled again when he was finished with it. After it was thoroughly shredded. But for now, it all served a very important purpose, to help him better understand the woman his bosses seemed oddly determined to recruit to their cause. The fact that nearly six months had passed since he had last spoken to her didn't seem to discourage them any.

  He was aware that those in his inner circle probably joked in private that he was just as obsessed as his superiors were, but he didn't care. He needed to do everything within his power to guarantee that she was exactly what they expected her to be and nothing else.

  Unfortunately, the more he pried into her life, the less he seemed to understand her. There remained certain details about her which defied his attempt to characterize, so the woman remained more of an enigma than ever.

  He occasionally grew impatient with this. It would be so much easier if he could just reach out to her directly, but his bosses had expressly forbidden him or any of his associates from initiating any contact with her. "Let her reach out to you," they said, adding that she would do so in time, an assurance he didn't share. "When she does, she will be fully invested, fully ready to accept our views."

  Some days he felt as if this were some kind of test, only he didn't know by whom. Other times, he grew so frustrated with the game that he wished his phone would just ring and she'd be on the other end of the call, telling him she was ready.

  Then there were the times when he wished he'd never heard about her, and he prayed he would never hear from her again.

  He pitied her. He understood that she'd been hurt terribly in China, both physically and emotionally. He didn't know the details, which didn't mean he wasn't curious about them. More to the point, he found it quite understandable that she would want to shun him because of what had happened. After all, he had been the one to put her there in the first place.

  And in typical infuriating fashion, his bosses fed him platitudes meant to placate him. He strongly suspected they knew what had happened there.

  He was well aware that the gaps in his knowledge were a primary reason she occupied his thoughts as much as she did— he craved answers, hated not knowing. But the stronger driver for him was his need to understand her, so that he could assure himself that the lingering doubts others had about her were unfounded.

  The frequency of enquiries made by his superiors at 6X didn't help, either. To them, she was an investment, a resource, or a liability, depending on the time of day or the circumstance. In all cases, she was inventory.

  The day he'd first met her, on Huangxia Island, they had provided him with her dossier but very little guidance, just one directive: hire her to investigate the crash. This was fairly standard practice for them. They rarely, if ever, explained why someone might be chosen to join their group, just as he had been recruited years back. And never before had he asked for more background.

  This time, however, breaking protocol, he did request an explanation. But they only provided him some vague rationalization, suggestions about how well connected she was. Once he looked at her finances, he suspected the real reason they wanted her was because of her family's fortune.

  If they had simply told him to mind his own business and do his job, as he'd expected them to, he might have dropped it. But they hadn't, and so he didn't. He suspected they wanted him to pry, perhaps as a means of measuring his level of commitment, and it made him even more suspicious of their intentions.

  And of her.

  If one thing had become clear to him in the past several months, it was that she was unreliable. He had monitored her brief respite in Marseille— a nurse at the clinic she visited and a maid at the hotel where she stayed were plants. They did not have direct contact, so he wasn't breaking any rules. What little information they provided him only frustrated him more.

  Then came her protracted recovery in Lyon, where weeks would pass without any sign of her, stretching the limits of his aggravation to unprecedented levels.

  It was quite clear to him that she was in a fragile state, that she could quite possibly break if pressed, and he wondered if his superiors knew this. What would they do if she did break?

  And then there were the moments when he thought it was all superfluous, that it was just that someone higher up in the organization was bored and playing games with him. Toying with lives — his and hers — while they waited for the inevitable end they all firmly believed would soon come. In such moments, he took solace in knowing that, regardless of whether he was right about her or wrong, it didn't really matter. None of it did. One person, or a thousand, or a million, couldn't change the self-destructive path the world was on. They were all just biding time.

  It was perhaps the most arrogant thing about the whole arrangement, that they might actually believe they could try and prevent whatever disaster might come. Or postpone it. How did it benefit anyone to know when and where and how it was all supposed to go down? If an event were so catastrophic as to endanger the entire world, what difference could one person make?

  His one enduring regret of his role in all this was that there would be no room in the bunker for Emily, the meek little assistant girl who attended to him while he was on the road, which, lately, was fulltime. But space was limited only to immediate family, and the restrictions beyond that precluded her addition. That was the stipulation for being among the few privileged enough to get a spot in the world's first apocalypse bunker of its kind. And even then, some of them, especially those with larger families than could be accommodated, were forced to make terrible choices, opting to exclude those members whose skills contributed less benefit to the community.

  True, more spaces would eventually open up in other bunkers as they came on line. But for now, this was the only facility ready to go, fully stocked and primed, calibrated and programmed and automated to be able to sustain life for a minimum of five years without any sort of outside interference and only minimal management from the inside. The real challenges would be social, not mechanical.

  The Hengill bunker could withstand anything but a direct hit from a nuclear device or a massive volcanic eruption, and both possibilities were exceedingly remote. After all, the volcano had been dormant for a thousand years, and who would even bother bombing such a strategically unimportant island as Iceland? The rest of the world might freeze or burn, suffocate or drown or succumb to disease, and he and his wife and some seven hundred and fifty ot
hers would survive in comfort — at least for the next eighteen hundred days — a pocket of vitality in a diseased, scorched, dead world.

  Hopefully, five years would be long enough so that they could figure out how to carry on afterward. How to repopulate. How to recreate civilization and make it better.

  Hengill was the first, but it wouldn't be the last, or even the best. No bunker was indestructible, which is why nine additional ones were currently being built or retrofitted. They were scattered across all points of the globe. Each would boast its own unique advantages; each possessing its particular vulnerabilities. Within the next two years, all were expected to become fully operational. Then, the world could end, but not before.

  Let's hope we make it that long.

  He chuffed at his own pessimism. The bleak outlook had become reflexive of late, echoing the dark outlook of his superiors. The more he saw of the world, the more clearly he saw how madly it rushed toward its own demise.

  Snap out of it, Alvin! It's not here yet, and there's still so much to do.

  He slumped into a comfortable chair and stared at the stack of documents he'd just removed from the latest box. The paperwork search was long and tedious, and after three weeks of poring over it, he felt like he'd hit a wall and was bashing his head futilely against it. It was so bad that after just ten minutes of sifting through the papers he needed a half hour of break.

  He could have his team comb through it, and indeed much of it had already been inspected, at least cursorily, by them. Those boxes were marked as low priority, and they were now the ones he was reviewing.

  He set the stack down and rubbed his eyes. "Music," he announced. "Wagner. Tristan und Isolde. Second movement. Volume setting five."

  The opera began to play through the speakers hidden within the walls. But he immediately silenced it, unhappy with the selection and unable to decide what he really wanted.