by Nick Petrie
Peter wasn’t going to wait around to get a closer look. He couldn’t ambush them with the snow revealing every track. Without any weapon more serious than the fish gaff or Bjarni’s folding shovel, direct confrontation was out of the question. For now, he could only outrun them. Down the road, he’d find a place to hit them.
He thought about what Ingo had said to Axel, on the boat, and the little bit of Icelandic Peter thought he’d understood. The word “farm.” With little else to go on, Peter decided that single word meant that Óskar was at the farm. He had four hundred kilometers to figure out the rest of it.
He pushed the Defender hard back toward Egilsstadir, watching in his rearview as the other vehicle faded ghostlike into the snowy distance. In town, he estimated his lead at fifteen minutes, then burned three of those minutes when he stopped to top off his tank. The next section of the Ring Road was the least populated and most desolate. While the pump ticked off the liters, he took the tinfoil off his American cell and waited for it to find the network. He didn’t know how much longer he’d have service.
His phone showed six texts. The first five were all from Commissioner Hjálmar, with time stamps going back sixteen hours. The tone was polite but increasingly insistent.
Mr. Ash was accused of assaulting an American citizen and government employee, which was a serious offense. He should contact Hjálmar immediately to tell his side of the story.
Mr. Ash would be late for his flight to America—he should contact Hjálmar immediately for a ride to the airport.
Mr. Ash had missed his flight. Hjálmar was happy to help him solve this problem and he should contact Hjálmar immediately.
Mr. Ash was out in the largest storm in twenty years. Conditions were dangerous and Hjálmar was concerned for his well-being. He should contact Hjálmar immediately.
Mr. Ash had not responded to any messages. Hjálmar was concerned he was in danger. Mr. Ash should contact Hjálmar immediately.
The man was relentless.
In fact, Peter was counting on it.
He texted back, Sorry I missed our lunch but your country is too beautiful to leave. I’ll buy you dinner when I get back to Reykjavík. He didn’t mention that he was going the long way around.
With that message, he hoped the commissioner’s tech people would learn his nearest cell tower and get Peter’s rough location. He didn’t want Hjálmar entirely in the dark. He was going to need the police to get Óskar free from Erik’s family.
Peter glanced at the road. Traffic was almost nonexistent in the deepening snow. Still no sign of the silver SUV.
He opened the last text, from an unknown number. This is Jerry Brunelli. You’re looking for my grandson, Óskar. We need to talk. I’ll meet you at the Hotel Borg in Reykjavík at four p.m. local time tomorrow.
Catherine Price’s husband was coming to Iceland?
Peter replied, On the other side of the country, can’t get back. Please call.
Brunelli responded immediately. Too sensitive for phone. The restaurant at the Hotel Kea in Akureyri, seven p.m. tomorrow. Not negotiable. On my way to Helsinki.
Brunelli was flexing his muscles. Peter had no idea why, but it didn’t matter. He hoped the man had found something. Akureyri was the second-largest city in Iceland, about three hundred kilometers away, and Peter had to pass through town on the way to the farm.
He’d planned to stop anyway. He needed to pick up a good coat, along with a few other things. He texted back, OK. See you then.
He wondered about Brunelli’s motives. What had he found that he needed to talk about in person? Or had Hjálmar asked him to set the meeting? Was Brunelli even coming to Iceland?
It occurred to Peter that he didn’t know enough about Jerry Brunelli.
34
Back on the Ring Road and headed north through deepening snow, Peter called the Norwegian, who sounded almost cheerful.
“Halló. I have made no progress. Only breakfast.”
“Norwegian pancakes?” A staple of Peter’s Wisconsin childhood, served with powdered sugar and homemade jam. He was hungry.
“French breakfast. Coffee and a cigarette.”
“You’re a gourmet. I have another request. Would you take a quick look into Jerry Brunelli, Catherine Price’s husband?”
A short, rasping laugh. “A quick look is all that is possible. I tried last year, when my legs still worked. I found very little.”
“He runs a political consulting business, there must be some public information, disclosure requirements, that kind of thing. He worked with Catherine’s first husband, right?”
“Perhaps you know more than I do. His online presence is minimal. No social media. The company’s public website is very small, just contact information and a few paragraphs of text. Not even a photo. To be honest, I just wanted to make sure he could pay my bill, so I looked mostly at his financials, which are substantial. Why do you want to know?”
“Catherine said he had connections. He’s coming to Iceland and wants to meet in person. It makes me wonder what his connections are.” Although now Peter was wondering why a political consultant would want a low profile. Wasn’t visibility one of the metrics of success in politics?
“I’ll look deeper,” Holm said.
After Peter turned off the phone, he rewrapped it in foil, then checked the rearview mirror again. He hadn’t seen another car since he’d left town.
The silver SUV could still be back there, the driver biding his time. Peter wouldn’t be hard to follow from a distance, either, with his tire tracks the only man-made marks on this snow-covered highway. It didn’t take a genius to figure out where he was headed, and there was only one way to get there.
Maybe they had a favorite place for running people off a cliff. Maybe they just planned to catch him on the Ring Road, a hundred kilometers from nowhere. Maybe their SUV had a harpoon gun mounted to the roof. They’d shoot him through the rear hatch of the Defender, then reel him in and cut him up for shark bait.
He was more worried about Ingo and Axel than he was about the weather. So far, Peter wasn’t terribly impressed by what Icelanders considered to be a big storm. Sure, they had some pretty good wind, but Peter had grown up on the shore of Lake Superior, where winter came early and hit hard, roaring down from Alaska and across the Great Plains.
His dad had put the plow on the pickup every October, and when Peter turned fourteen, it became his job to drive from neighbor to neighbor after a storm, clearing driveways and making sure nobody was stuck or snowbound. As an adult, while backpacking in the Rockies at high elevations, he’d been buried by fast-moving systems at least a dozen times. So Peter had seen his share of heavy weather.
An hour into his drive, the storm started to measure up to Wisconsin levels. The wind got stronger and the snow fell faster. He passed a barn with a cellular antenna bolted to the gable, but his phone had no signal, either due to the humidity or the cloud cover or some kind of equipment damage.
Visibility dropped. He slowed to fifty kilometers per hour, then forty. At thirty, he began to see what an Icelandic blizzard was all about.
The snow no longer fell, but came in dense wind-blown clouds that made it hard to see more than a few dozen meters in front of him. Sometimes he couldn’t see the nose of the truck from the driver’s seat. The phone was useless. He stopped frequently to clear the crust from his windows and wipers and headlights. He checked his back trail for the uncles, but the open country behind him had disappeared into swirling white.
Where the highway dipped down or ran in the lee of a long escarpment, the snow drifted high and only the tips of the yellow road markers showed the path ahead. Where the road ran across open sections, it was often scraped clean by the gale, so he could follow the dark river of asphalt laid out before him. In those sections, the wind was strong enough to shove the truck sideways, and slick black ice was oft
en indistinguishable from pavement. More than once he found himself turning a slow pirouette on the road.
Still, the Defender was capable as hell. Peter had plenty of gas. There were no headlights behind him. He was slow, but the uncles, if they were still behind him, were slower. He drove on.
Staring out the windshield, trying to see the road through the swirling snow, his mind wandered. He thought about the video of Óskar climbing the tree, and his mother vanishing into the leaves after him.
He tried not to think about June, and failed.
The truth was, he was beginning to wonder if she was right.
He’d lost faith in the Afghan and Iraq wars early on, when it became clear that they were fighting the wrong wars for the wrong reasons, without any real thought of the consequences. He’d gone to Memphis, and now Iceland, as a kind of atonement for his part in those conflicts. A way to give meaning to the things he’d done.
It had to be for something, didn’t it?
But maybe it was also a kind of punishment. Maybe part of Peter was afraid that, if he could put the war behind him so easily, if he allowed himself some kind of real life, it meant the war really had been for nothing, or less than nothing.
Maybe he wanted to prove he deserved to be alive when so many others had died.
He really should have gone to talk with Don in Springfield.
The back of his head was killing him. He needed coffee. He needed sleep. Sleep without dreams of the past.
June had said it before, and the more he thought of it, the more he thought she was right. He wasn’t going to stop dreaming of the past if he couldn’t imagine a dream of the future.
But he wasn’t sure he knew how to do that.
35
After three hours’ driving, the storm had become unlike anything Peter had ever experienced. He found himself skirting the edge of a broad plateau that vanished into a pale void. The wind blew hard enough to rattle the wipers and the defroster was losing the battle with the ice.
He came to a turnoff leading to a small picnic area, marked by a small blue sign with an icon of a picnic table and pine tree. This wasn’t exactly picnic weather, and no trees had grown on this barren plain for hundreds of years, if ever, but some earlier snowplow had cleared the drifts so the turnoff was passable. Peter needed to put some food in his belly, maybe close his eyes for a few hours, and he didn’t want to stop in the middle of the highway in a whiteout storm. If the plow driver had managed to turn around and get back to the road, Peter figured he could do the same.
As it turned out, snow wasn’t a problem. The pavement was polished bare by the endless wind. The surface gleamed in the last remnants of sun, with nothing between the pavement edge and the slope down to the wild, empty land beyond. On a nicer day, it actually would have been a great place for a picnic, and maybe a hike. The dashboard clock read 13:27.
The parking lot sloped gently downhill and away from the access road. Mindful that he needed an exit plan, Peter pulled around in a slow circle and parked at the highest, flattest spot with a straight path back to the highway. The wind came from basically the same direction, so he didn’t need to worry about his door getting bent back on its hinges. He left the engine running. Before getting out, he made sure every door was unlocked. It would be pretty stupid to get stuck outside his truck in this weather.
When he tried to open the door, the force of the storm pushed back like something alive. Adjusting, he pulled his hat down, shifted his center of gravity, put his shoulder to the metal, and stepped outside. The footing was slick and the wind gusted high. It blew the door shut and pushed him flat-footed toward the rear of the truck, his feet sliding across an invisible ice patch. He caught himself with a hand on the roof rack and looked down. The parking lot was not covered with asphalt, but with smooth black ice.
This was not a good place to stop. He pulled himself forward again, wrestled the driver’s door open, and hopped inside, pulling his legs out of the way before the windblown door cut them off at the knees.
That small shift of weight, along with a new blast of wind, was enough to start the truck moving. Sliding backward, an inch at a time, down the modest slope and away from the highway.
At first, the whole thing seemed to happen in slow motion.
The Defender’s big tires were an asset in snow, where their treads could grind and grab, but the size of the tires seemed to have the opposite effect on this slick ice. The weight of the vehicle created a thin layer of melt, which acted as a lubricant under the rubber. The tires weren’t metal-studded. The truck was dead weight on four rubber ice skates.
The hardest part, apparently, had been starting the slide. Once that inertia was overcome, the high-sided vehicle acted like a sail. With a slow, stately grace, the wind turned the truck broadside to the gale. The truck began to pick up speed.
Peter watched through the passenger-side window as the Defender approached the downhill edge of the parking lot. It was an eerie sensation, to be sitting behind the wheel but moving sideways. Soon, he thought, the tires would hit snow or exposed gravel and the truck would lurch to a stop.
The Defender slid faster still. As it got closer to the edge, Peter leaned into the passenger seat and peered out and down. From that position, the surface looked like the top of frozen rapids. The dark ice extended seamlessly onto the rough shoulder without losing any slickness. Beyond that was an equally smooth transition to the steeper slope that dropped twenty meters down to the empty open snowfield below.
Doing nothing wasn’t going to stop this slide. He put the truck into gear and eased off the clutch, giving almost no power to the wheels. Nothing changed. The shoulder got closer. He goosed it gently, but knew immediately that it was the wrong thing to do. The friction of the turning wheels increased the layer of melt between the ice and the rubber, which only added to the slickness.
The wind rose to a prolonged howl.
Outside the window, the world turned white.
The truck slid ass-first down the long embankment and into the deep, drifting snow.
36
TWELVE MONTHS EARLIER
The eastern horizon gleams crimson through the living room windows. Soon, the clock radio upstairs will begin to play WAMU, but neither Erik nor Sarah have been to bed.
While Sarah sits at the dining table and reverses course through the Prince’s system, erasing the evidence of her work as she goes, Erik roams the house until Óskar’s footsteps thump overhead. He thunders down the stairs in his Batman pajamas and announces that he is starving. “Like, to death, Dad.”
Erik leaves Sarah at her laptop and goes about the business of making breakfast. His little family may be standing at the edge of a cliff, getting ready to jump, but Erik finds a temporary calm in the simplicity of feeding a hungry boy. Óskar definitely has a Viking’s appetite.
Sarah’s fingers dance across the keyboard. Across from her, Óskar drains his glass of milk, then licks the wreckage of eggs and sausage directly from his plate.
“Óskar,” she says.
He looks up at her, caught in the act. “Mom. It’s the best tool for the job.”
She smiles too brightly. “I know, honey. Hey, can you do something for me? I need you to take a picture of these.” She walks around to slide the laptop in front of him.
Erik comes from the kitchen to look over her shoulder. Her screen shows the URL for the hidden drive on the mirror server, a web address almost two lines long and unintelligible to a human being.
“Click,” Óskar says. “Got it.”
Sarah opens a new window. This one shows a sixteen-by-sixteen grid of random three-digit numbers. The server’s access code.
“Wait,” Erik says. “Is this a good idea?” To involve Óskar, he means.
“You wanted security,” Sarah says. “If we keep no electronic or physical copy of the passcode, it prevents any kind
of side-channel attack. Without it, 256-bit encryption is essentially unbreakable. The mirror server data will remain intact even if they physically destroy their own server.”
“It’s okay, Dad.” Óskar glances at the grid of numbers, then turns to look at his parents, one by one. “This is a secret, right?”
Erik feels the breath go out of him right then.
“Yes, honey,” Sarah says. “It’s a big secret.”
“Then I’ll put it with pi,” Óskar says. “I already had four thousand.” He turns back to the screen. “Click. Now I have more.”
While the pit in Erik’s stomach turns into a black hole, he fills two travel mugs with coffee, then loads Óskar’s lunch in his Lego backpack while Óskar gets dressed and brushes his teeth. Sarah fusses with her laptop for a few more minutes, erasing the night’s work from her own equipment, then changes into a fresh work outfit.
At the door, she says, “It won’t look right if I don’t show up.”
“Call me afterward,” Erik says. “I want to know you’re okay.”
Sarah nods and heads for her car.
In two hours, someone will shoot her three times in the head.
37
PRESENT DAY
The Defender landed almost softly, with its nose pointed uphill. The wheels turned slowly on the slick slope, and the boxy rear end was jammed firmly in the high drifted snow. Peter would have preferred a harder landing. At least he’d be on solid ground.
He put the truck in neutral and climbed out his door and up to the roof rack, where he unstrapped the burly snow shovel and jumped off the back and into the bottomless drift. Up to his waist in the snow by the rear bumper, the big truck looming over him, he began to dig. Without the protection of the safety-yellow coat, he wore only a thick fleece top that was anything but waterproof.
