The Wild One

by Nick Petrie

  Yrsa reached out to the quiet blond boy. “Why don’t you stay with me for a minute, saeti.” She pulled him gently onto her lap and wrapped her arms around him. He buried his face in her chest. “What else are you carrying in that fine mind of yours, Óskar? Something your mom or dad told you?”

  “I’m not Óskar,” he said quietly. “I’m Alvar, remember?”

  “That’s his cousin in Toronto.” Yrsa hugged the boy tighter. “We borrowed Alvar’s name so we could keep you safe, right? And get you into school? Because you like school.”

  Óskar nodded.

  “Now, saeti, I ask again. Did your mom and dad give you something special to remember?”

  “It’s a secret,” Óskar whispered. He was no longer the wild, exuberant boy from Catherine’s video. Peter wondered if the damage was permanent.

  “You can tell me your secret.” Yrsa kissed his forehead. “Grandmothers are very good at keeping secrets.”

  Óskar gave Peter a skeptical eyeball.

  “I’ll put my hands over my ears,” Peter said.

  Yrsa glared at Bjarni and Thorvaldur, who also covered their ears.

  Óskar only spoke for a few seconds before Yrsa said, “Saeti, wait one minute.” Then looked at Peter. “Pen and paper, top drawer by the refrigerator.”

  When Óskar was done and Yrsa had double-checked her handwriting against Óskar’s memory, she gave the boy a hug and a kiss and sent him outside, where miniature Viking raiders were staging a snowball war with Ingo and Axel as their opposing kings. The boy ran up to enormous Axel, jumped onto his back, and pumped his fist in victory. Maybe Óskar would be okay.

  Yrsa sighed. “How did I not think to ask?”

  “How would you know? Erik has been dead for a year. You had no idea they were still coming for Óskar until four hours ago.”

  “Well, it’s better that we all know the secret,” Yrsa said. “That way they’re not after Óskar. They’re after all of us.”

  “Já, já,” said Bjarni. Thorvaldur nodded, too, a serving fork in his fist.

  Peter was really getting to like these Icelanders.

  “That reminds me,” he said. He went to his pack, opened the top compartment, and pulled out a small Lego bookbag. “I thought Óskar might want this. It washed up in Reykjavík Harbor.”

  Yrsa unzipped it and examined the contents. Someone, probably Hjálmar, had put the stuffed bear through the wash several times. The book, Where the Wild Things Are, was wrinkled and swollen, but dry. The Lego guys were still safe in their plastic peanut butter jar.

  “I’ve been wondering,” Peter said. “If Óskar made it here safe, how did his bookbag end up in the ocean?”

  “We gave it a Viking funeral,” Yrsa said. “Sent it to sea on a toy boat. The end of one life and the beginning of the next.”

  “The bag made it all the way from here to Reykjavík Harbor?”

  She shook her head. “From here, the ocean currents would take it to Norway. So we launched from Reykjavík. I wanted it to wash ashore in the city.”

  It took Peter a moment to understand. “You wanted the backpack found,” he said. “You wanted the people who killed Sarah and Erik to come back.”

  Yrsa pulled the rubber bands from her pigtails and shook out her gull-wing hair. “It was the only way to learn who our enemies were,” she said. “The only way to keep Óskar truly safe.”

  These goddamned Vikings.

  65

  While Yrsa and Karina got on the computer to figure out where Óskar’s secret led, Peter went to check the bodies, laid out behind the barn in the front loader of the big tractor. Bjarni and Thorvaldur stood silently while Peter searched the pockets.

  The two grad students each carried a Ziploc bag with a stack of króna notes and a cheap Icelandic burner phone, along with a cargo pocket filled with zip ties. Peter didn’t like the zip ties at all. The lurker carried twice as much money, two spare knives, and an expensive, encrypted sat phone.

  Peter tried to get them unlocked, but their facial recognition didn’t work, until Thorvaldur reached out his hand and rearranged the damaged faces. Even the lurker’s encrypted sat phone unlocked, a combination of poor operational security and excessive confidence.

  Only the lurker’s phone had anything on it. Four numbers. Two rang the grad students’ phones. The third number rang and rang, but never went to voicemail. The fourth number was answered on the second ring.

  “Where are you, laddie?” A certain tension in the voice.

  Peter smiled. “Hello, Seamus.”

  A pause. “I’m sorry, boyo, you’ve got the wrong number.”

  “Tell him I’m coming,” Peter said. “I’ll send you a text so you know what to expect.”

  The connection died, but Peter knew the Irishman wouldn’t dump his phone, not quite yet. Peter took pictures of three dead, ruined faces, then sent them with the words You’re next.

  Bjarni and Thorvaldur looked at the screen over his shoulder, then looked at each other. Thorvaldur said something in Icelandic. Bjarni raised his eyebrows.

  “What did he say?” Peter asked.

  “He says you must be a berserk, to defeat these three and the other one. A wild man, a fearless bear-warrior.”

  “Not fearless,” Peter said. “Just motivated.”

  Back in the farmhouse, they found Yrsa and Karina sitting at the table with a laptop, watching grainy video with their hands over their mouths.

  Peter said, “What is it?”

  * * *

  —

  As they talked, the news flickered on the corner television, a split screen. One side showed the lacquered newsman talking up the righteousness of the coming conflict, while the other side had footage of a vast carrier group gathering off the coast of Venezuela.

  If he was going to stop a war, Peter had to move fast.

  But he didn’t want to spook Brunelli or the dirtbag TV anchor or the oil executives or any of the others.

  The decision wasn’t difficult. Everything was easier when you knew good people.

  On the lurker’s encrypted phone, he typed in the server’s address and passcode, triple-checking the long string of numbers, then sent it to June Cassidy’s work email. The subject line read LOOK AT THIS RIGHT NOW.

  More than anyone, he trusted June’s ruthless journalistic dedication to the truth, along with her network at the nonprofit group Public Investigations, to get the information into the right hands in a hurry.

  Then he realized the unknown sender and the URL link might get his email dumped into her spam filter. He should just call her. Even if the idea scared the hell out of him.

  Her reaction was roughly what he’d expected, although the volume was louder. “What the fuck are you doing in Iceland?”

  Of course she’d seen the news about the murder of a U.S. State Department lawyer in Iceland. She was an investigative reporter. Peter’s name and photo would have been featured prominently, even with the buildup to war dominating the cycle.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s a long story.”

  “Then you goddamn well better start talking, Marine.” Her voice crackled, and it wasn’t the line. “I was fucking worried about you. Are you safe? Are you in jail?”

  He liked that she didn’t ask if he’d killed David Staple. “I’m good,” he said. “I miss you. Listen, did you get an oddball email?”

  A pause while she checked. “That’s you? What the hell is this?”

  “Do you still have contacts in the Pentagon?”

  Shouting again, she said, “I thought you were going to the fucking desert to fucking relax.”

  “June,” he said. “When trouble calls my name, you know I have to answer.”

  “Oh, fuck you.” He could hear the tears in her voice.

  “Trouble always knows where to find me?”
<
br />   “This is not fucking funny.”

  “Trouble sings a siren song I’m helpless to resist? Bad luck and trouble are my bread and butter? Trouble is my business?”

  “Goddamnit, you lied to me. I am really pissed off.” She blew her nose loudly. “We need to talk.”

  “We will,” he said. “I promise. And I’m sorry. But right now I have to deal with this. Will you get on the horn to your Pentagon contacts?”

  “Yes,” she said. And hung up.

  Peter sighed. She was right, of course. He was an asshole.

  He was grateful that his next call would be easier. He dug his old Icelandic burner out of his backpack, tore off the tinfoil, and found Catherine’s number. He got to tell her that Óskar was alive.

  A man’s voice answered. “Catherine Price’s phone.”

  “Who is this?”

  The voice was cold. “No, who the hell is this?” It was Novak, Catherine’s bodyguard.

  “This is Peter. We met in Portland, after Catherine asked me to find her grandson. Can I talk to her?”

  “No,” Novak said.

  “Why not?”

  “She’s dead.”

  Peter closed his eyes. “How did she die?”

  “She was mugged. In the District.”

  “And where the fuck were you?”

  “Getting the car.” Novak spoke without inflection, but Peter knew the ex-cop was furious. He held himself responsible. Peter knew exactly how he felt.

  Brunelli wasn’t wasting any time.

  Peter glanced at the television in the corner, now showing Icelandic news. The top story was the murder of David Staple. Peter’s face filled the screen, followed by shots of a series of police roadblocks on cold, snowy roads.

  Getting back to the States was going to be problematic.

  Even if Peter could make his way to an airport and charter a plane, he had no passport.

  He turned to Ingo and Axel, who had returned to the table with tall stacks of pancakes. “You boys want to go fishing?”

  66

  POTOMAC, MARYLAND

  TWO WEEKS LATER

  Jerry Brunelli paced through his house, from his office to the butler’s pantry to the kitchen to the dining room, hating how the ankle monitor chafed on his skin. As if he were a common felon, rather than an American patriot.

  The confidence of the U.S. Attorney assigned to his case amused Brunelli no end. The very fact that the judge had granted him house arrest was evidence that the machinery of his liberation was already in motion. He’d planned for this contingency as he’d planned for every other, with a complex decision tree accounting for every possibility.

  He’d once played this great global game in the White House. Although he now played on his own behalf, with an absurdly higher level of compensation, the larger goal was the same: the greater glory of America through the vanquishing of her enemies.

  It wasn’t like this war was unwelcome. Brunelli had done his government a favor by finding a way to sell it to the public. America loved a good war. More than that, America needed it. War provided jobs, boosted technological development, opened the way for corporate investment, and helped demonstrate American power to a world that had begun to doubt it. If this war didn’t happen, the next one would.

  Truth be told, Brunelli was only doing what his own government had done at least twice in the last half century, exaggerating conflict in the Gulf of Tonkin to escalate the war in Vietnam, then inventing nonexistent WMDs as a pretext for the invasion of Iraq.

  Brunelli had simply privatized this time-honored process. He was an innovator. He deserved compensation for his genius.

  The heels of Brunelli’s loafers echoed on the polished floors as he walked from entry hall to living room to grand ballroom. The house had been built by a railroad baron and enlarged several times. In the century before the last one, it was seriously considered for the vice president’s residence. Brunelli, to burnish his image and launder his reputation during his K Street years, had thrown lavish parties here, including an annual costume ball whose central conceit allowed anyone to talk to anyone.

  To that end, the house was an investment that had paid off many times over. After all, it was at one of those costume balls that Brunelli had met a certain Russian businessman and former GRU general who had given him the speck of polonium that Brunelli had used to eliminate his business partner, Ken Price. Dropped in a cup of herbal tea, the radioactive isotope had lingered in Ken’s system just long enough to give him metastatic cancer, leaving the widow Price and her inherited shares vulnerable to a sweetheart takeover and Jerry Brunelli in control of the firm.

  Of course, he’d needed to remove Catherine’s son from the equation first, but it was a small thing for a man of Brunelli’s capacities to arrange for a brake failure on an icy mountain road. He’d also kept young Sarah close first by hiring her fledgling business, then by sending her a steady stream of new clients. By biting the hand that fed her, Sarah Price had practically killed herself.

  He’d even maneuvered Catherine into demanding, as a condition of marriage, that he get out of lobbying for “consulting,” where the money was better and the oversight was minimal. Brunelli had been her white knight, riding to her rescue in a time of need.

  She hadn’t even signed a pre-nup. With her unfortunate death in a mugging, actually a carefully planned murder at the hands of Detective Philip Moore of the Metro PD, who had found a small gap in her bodyguard’s vigilance, Brunelli now owned it all.

  He was pleased to learn that Tom Wetzel and Fitzsimmons were missing and presumed dead, too. The ex-Marine that Wetzel had recommended to Catherine had not performed as promised. Rather than provide the ribbon to wrap up the entire Sarah Price problem, the man had somehow escaped the noose tied around his neck. As a result, Brunelli’s leverage had been leaked to the news and his carefully wrought casus belli had been upended.

  Of course, Brunelli had immediately set his contingencies in motion. He had a dozen more extralegal operatives coming. He had a telegenic academic expert asserting that the footage had been created from whole cloth with advanced technology. The prominent network personality, who had been so helpful promoting the war against Venezuela, was vigorously denying his sexual proclivities via an energetic social media campaign, claiming that the video was a smear tactic to attack his credibility. Significant technical evidence of Wetzel’s involvement, along with his mysterious disappearance, made him a fine candidate for the leader of the plot. Both Brunelli’s lawyers and his clients were working hard behind the scenes to make his own role vanish entirely.

  They had better, Brunelli thought as he completed the circle to his private office overlooking the pool and the Potomac. His time in the White House had served him well. He knew where too many bodies were buried. They couldn’t afford to have him talking to the press, or to Congress.

  Time for a drink. As he surveyed the selection of liquors on his bar cart, Brunelli’s mind returned to the ex-Marine.

  Brunelli’s ankle monitor, along with his legal troubles and the small army of federal agents occupying the grounds of his modest estate, were all due to this troublesome person. The fact that he was still at large was only a modest cause of concern, however. Given that the man was wanted for murder, with warrants for his arrest issued in Europe, Canada, and America, rational self-interest dictated that he was almost certainly saving his own neck rather than seeking out Brunelli’s own.

  Not to mention the fact that Brunelli’s extensive network was combing the earth for him at this very moment.

  Brunelli lifted the antique crystal decanter and poured himself a substantial measure of the fifty-year-old bottle of Macallan he’d bought at auction the year before. He raised the glass and let the flavor fill his mouth. The scotch truly did taste better because it was so expensive. He’d calculated the cost at ten thousand dollars a si
p. And worth every penny.

  He put his foot on the windowsill and scratched at the skin under the ankle monitor. Soon enough, this would be over and he’d go back to business as usual. He looked out at the floodlit night, raised his glass, and smiled.

  The high chime of breaking glass was the last sound he ever heard.

  67

  The elderly fishing boat, more rust than paint, rode the East Greenland Current toward Labrador, her high bow and narrow waist slicing elegantly through the waves. She carried extra fuel drums in her fish hold, and her cranes were pulled in and lashed down tight.

  Peter and Thorvaldur sat on deck behind the pilothouse, dressed in foul weather gear, heads together in conversation. Together, they remembered their wars, the men they had served with, the friends they had lost.

  Inside, the others watched developments on the satellite feed. Things had happened quickly after June Cassidy called her Pentagon contacts. The White House announced renewed talks with Caracas just twelve hours later. June’s story went live twelve hours after that. Then the shit truly hit the fan.

  So far, all the blame was falling on Tom Wetzel.

  Apparently, all the video files had been added to the server using his login and workstation.

  Jerry Brunelli was turning out to have a world-class shit-proof umbrella.

  * * *

  —

  In the four days it took Ingo and Axel to drive to Seydisfjordur and return with the Freyja, the Icelandic police had come back to the farm twice. Peter had taken a tarp and his new sleeping bag out into the snow to catch up on his sleep.

  Once she lost the Labrador Current, the Freyja headed south past Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and New England, always staying far enough offshore to avoid the attention of the Coast Guard.

  Ten days after leaving Iceland, Peter ran the orange Zodiac across twelve nautical miles of open water toward a small marina outside of Ocean City, Maryland. The waves were manageable and the sun was warm on Peter’s face. The mid-Atlantic coast felt like Bermuda after the icy run across the North Atlantic in a sixty-foot fishing boat.