by David Hewson
Buch shook his dry, cold fingers then watched him go.
Back through the endless corridors, into the Ministry of Justice, mind racing all the way.
Karina was at her desk alone.
‘The Prime Minister’s office called wanting a meeting,’ she said when he marched in. ‘I declined. I hope that was right.’
‘I suppose.’ Buch walked to his desk. ‘Who prepared the documents yesterday? After Rossing came in here and I asked someone to make a note of what I told you afterwards?’
‘Plough,’ Karina said. ‘I offered but he insisted.’
‘Who typed it? Which secretary?’
She tugged on her blonde hair.
‘Plough did it himself. He said they were busy with other things.’
‘Could someone have seen his report and warned Grue Eriksen?’
‘No! He printed it out and gave it to me. Then he went over to the Prime Minister’s office . . .’
Buch looked at her.
‘Oh for God’s sake, Thomas! It was about that post in Skopje. You’d intervened on his behalf, hadn’t you?’
‘And the office called him in?’
‘I don’t remember. Ask him when he gets back.’
‘Where is he?’
‘I don’t know. Now can we . . . ?’
He went through more papers, scattering them everywhere.
‘Who leaked that memo to Birgitte Agger? Did we ever find out?’
She folded her arms.
‘Plough looked into it. He didn’t get anywhere.’
Buch went to the nearest document mountain, started sifting anxiously through it.
‘Where’s the information on the military squad? Ægir?’
‘Thomas!’ Karina cried in a high, piercing voice. ‘What’s going on?’
Nothing in the papers. Buch picked them up, launched them at the sofa, watched them flutter round the room.
‘Calm down,’ she ordered. ‘I won’t talk to you if you’re going to be like this. I’ll walk right out of here . . .’
He kicked a pile of box files, stumbled to the desk. It was there all along. A list of the soldiers in Raben’s unit. Mugshots, profiles.
She followed, trying to reason with him.
‘Listen, Thomas. I know Plough was angry with Rossing. He’s never liked the man. But he didn’t want you to go for the Prime Minister because he thought you couldn’t win.’
Buch flicked through the pages. Myg Poulsen. Raben. Lisbeth Thomsen. Photos, brief service records and a few personal details.
A head shot he’d never really looked at before. There’d been no reason.
‘Does Plough have a son?’
She groaned.
‘He did. He died last year. Plough took it very badly.’
‘In a traffic accident, right?’
She nodded.
‘Plough lives in Nørrebro? What street?’
‘Baggesensgade. What’s this about?’
‘If I’ve still got a driver,’ Buch said, heading for the door, ‘tell him I’m on my way.’
‘And if not?’
Buch ran his fingers through his pockets, checked the wallet there.
‘Maybe you could lend me some money for a taxi?’
Karina Jørgensen handed over two hundred kroner then went to the desk and retrieved the file.
It was open at the squad member no one looked at.
Hans Christian P. Vedel. Killed in a car crash on the Øresund bridge. Suicide, the police said.
A picture of a serious, plain young man, gloomy eyes staring straight at the camera.
An address in Baggesensgade.
‘Thomas . . .’ she started, but Buch was gone.
Lund and Strange were in the first car to meet Jarnvig outside the underground facility.
The heavy iron door was open. A long staircase, lights all the way.
‘They’re in there. Raben went after him,’ Jarnvig said.
‘Is he armed?’ Strange asked.
The colonel nodded.
Lund got out her gun, Strange did the same. More cars were arriving. Two cops from the first ran over.
‘There are going to be more exits than this one,’ Strange told them. ‘See if you can pull up a plan or something. Make sure every one’s covered. Tell Brix nobody’s to enter until we’ve checked it out.’
The first officer looked uncertain.
‘If you wait a minute you can tell him yourself . . .’
‘My daughter’s in there!’ Jarnvig yelled.
Lund set off down the long stairs, gun ahead of her, listening. The place smelled like a gigantic mouldering tomb, the air stale and fusty.
Strange was soon with her. They half-ran down the first flight of stairs, stopped at the bottom. The place changed here. The floor was cracked and damp in places. The walls looked as if they’d been hewn from the native rock. At regular intervals there were doors that must have led to subterranean offices, barracks, storerooms.
‘How big’s this place?’ she asked as Strange went forward, looking left and right.
‘God knows,’ he murmured. ‘How the hell—?’
A distant sound. Footsteps, loud and rapid, hard to pinpoint as they echoed off the walls.
Strange looked round, listened, pointed to the right and they began to run.
Raben was deep in the bowels of the underground camp, checking every door. The ones he met were open. And then he got to a closed one. Red paint and the number forty-four on the outside.
Put his good shoulder to it, felt the old iron creak then move under his weight.
Through, gun in one hand, low and ready.
There was another section here, rooms and corridors. All part of the hidden tide of fury waiting to loose itself on a Russian army that would never come.
A noise not far away.
Her voice. Crying with pain and fear.
Raben leaned against the damp wall, brick here, not rock. Then he edged slowly, quietly forward, got to the end, saw bright lights beyond in what looked like a wide room to the right.
One brief moment of reconnaissance. His head flew round the door, flew back.
In that fraction of a second he saw them. Louise on her knees, hands tethered. Bilal standing, a gun to her head. The place was a generator room. Vast antiquated machines down one side. Places to run for cover.
Not that it mattered. Bilal was a good soldier too. The moment Raben stuck his head round the door he knew he’d been spotted.
After a while Bilal yelled nervously, ‘Step forward so I can see you!’
Raben stayed where he was.
‘Get out of there or I’ll blow her head off now.’
Raben walked straight out, hands down by his side, gun pointed at the floor.
Louise looked up at him with tired, terrified eyes. Her nose was bloody and bruised. Bilal’s fingers wound into her hair, his pistol hard against her scalp.
Said Bilal didn’t even seem frightened. Short dark hair, boyish face, regulation fatigues. Model soldier.
‘Put down your weapon,’ he ordered. ‘Drop it!’
Straight away Raben crouched down, placed the black handgun on the tiles, then pushed it across the floor, hard enough so it came to rest in front of Louise’s feet.
‘Where’s Arild?’ Bilal asked. ‘I told you not to come looking for me.’
‘Sometimes things don’t work out,’ Raben said with a shrug. ‘Let her go. You’ve got me now. Whatever it is you want. Take me. Not my wife . . .’
The gun came away from her head, pointed straight at his face.
‘If only you’d kept your big mouth shut! None of this would have happened.’
‘But it did.’
‘They weren’t civilians! They were Taliban informers. Bankrolling the bastards.’
‘The kids weren’t doing that—’
‘Don’t you lecture me about the kids! Don’t . . .’
Raben’s heart leapt. Bilal’s gun hand was steady as a rock. Then t
here were more footsteps and they were close.
Lund got there first. Walked to Raben’s side, watched Bilal’s gun turn to face her.
‘Stop this,’ she said as calmly as she could. ‘Put down the gun. Let her go. You can’t—’
His fingers wound more tightly into Louise’s greasy black hair. The pistol went straight back to her head. She shrieked with terror and pain.
‘No!’ Lund yelled, took a step in front of Raben, gun out, two hands on the butt, aimed straight at the man in the army fatigues. ‘Walk out of here. We can talk this over. I want to hear—’
‘You’re not army,’ Bilal spat back at her.
‘What’s this to do with Louise?’ Lund cried. ‘Leave her out—’
‘You’re not army! I did my duty. What I was told.’
One more step towards him. Gun steady. She was a lousy shot. Maybe he could tell.
‘I believe you, Bilal. I can help. But you have to let Louise go.’
Another step and Raben was edging towards him too.
Then the door on the far side burst open and Strange was walking through, weapon up, face taut and determined.
Bilal looked left, looked right, looked up for an instant, then at Lund. His fingers relaxed in Louise Raben’s hair. His knee pushed her forward.
‘Go,’ he ordered.
Lund didn’t watch as she half-stumbled to her feet then fell into the arms of her husband.
Something wasn’t right here.
‘Get her out, Raben,’ she ordered. ‘Get her upstairs and . . .’
Bilal was sweating. Weeping now. Strange had got in front, checking him over, gun steady all the time. Not taking his eyes away for a minute he edged round to stand next to Lund.
‘I just did my duty,’ the young officer repeated standing erect by the ancient generator.
‘Which was what exactly?’ she asked.
‘You’re not army,’ he said again but more softly this time.
He held his gun loosely by his side. No real threat. Lund walked closer.
‘They were just little things, Bilal. You deleted some radio recordings. Someone told you to. Who was the officer involved? What did the radio messages say?’
Without being asked he leaned down and let the gun fall to the floor. Then back to the stiff soldier pose again.
‘Good . . .’
He wasn’t listening any more. His eyes were ahead. Somewhere else altogether.
‘Lund,’ Strange said. ‘I don’t like this. Something’s wrong.’
‘Nothing’s wrong,’ she insisted, not that she believed it. ‘Come on, Bilal. Let’s get out of here. We can go back to headquarters. You’ll be safe. I’ll get you a lawyer. We can talk . . .’
He was unzipping his jacket. She watched and felt her blood run cold.
A belt there. Wires and packets. Pink sticks of explosive like fireworks. The familiar pineapple shape of a grenade.
Strange didn’t say any more. He raced away from the soldier, grabbed her by the jacket, almost picked her up as he pushed and shoved her back towards the exit.
A voice behind. Loud and certain. The words of an army man reciting a long-cherished refrain.
‘For God, King and Country!’ Said Bilal chanted.
The red door was getting closer. She could read the number forty-four. They were turning towards it.
The bellow of an explosion. The world turning the colour of fire. Something lifted her and Strange off their feet altogether, threw them into the corridor outside until gravity beckoned and the hard damp tiles bit at her body, her face and hands.
When she came to his arms were still over her, fingers holding down her head, shielding it, his body wrapped above hers like protecting armour.
Sparks flew around them. There was the smell of cordite and explosive. And behind that the fresh, sharp tang of blood.
Plough’s house was as inconspicuous as the man himself. A plain detached bungalow down a long drive, almost invisible from the street. Thomas Buch realized he’d no expectations of what it would be like. No idea how Plough, a quiet, introverted solitary man, lived.
The lights were on downstairs. The front door was open. He knocked then walked in.
A kitchen with half-washed dishes and empty cartons of microwave food. Then a chaotic living room full of packing cases. A map of the world on the wall. Shelves of books.
Two boxes stood open on the desk. Medals inside. Military, from service in Afghanistan.
A set of photographs in frames. Mostly the same face, a young man growing from schoolboy to manhood. Smiling, not the surly, uncertain figure in the army mugshot.
There was a resemblance there, Buch thought, as he picked up the nearest photo. If Plough smiled easily he’d look like this. Perhaps he did once. Long before Frode Monberg, Flemming Rossing and – it had to be faced – Thomas Buch entered his life.
It was hard to let go of the picture. Buch thought of his daughters, wondered if either of them would want a career in the army. It was safe money these days and there wasn’t much of that about. A way of paying off your debts to get through college. Security of a kind.
He heard familiar soft footsteps behind, turned and faced Carsten Plough.
‘I’m sorry,’ Buch said, putting the picture back on the desk. ‘I knocked but no one answered. The door was open.’
Plough was in a green and blue plaid shirt and jeans. He looked different.
‘Hans Christian Plough Vedel. Vedel was my wife’s name. In the army they always called him HC.’
The tall civil servant came over and looked at the photo.
‘He was the only one in the squad who got out unharmed. It was a miracle, or so I thought.’
Plough’s calm and gentle face creased with sorrow. He picked up some paperback books from the desk, tidied them into a neat pile.
‘Hans told us there’d been some kind of incident in the village. There’d been an officer, and some civilians were killed. Then the judge advocate came along and called him a liar. A lunatic, like that Raben fellow.’ A caustic smile, one Buch had never seen before. ‘It wasn’t possible, was it? A Danish soldier would never do such a thing.’
More books. Buch wondered if the man even knew what he was packing.
‘He changed his statement when the army leaned on him. But I think that made it all worse. You see.’ Plough tapped his head. ‘In here he knew he wasn’t mad. He was sure of what he saw. But the army said otherwise and the army didn’t lie. So I believed the army too, and Hans became sicker and sicker.’
There was a grand piano by the window. He picked some sheet music off the stand, tossed that into the box.
‘Then, a year ago, he drove the wrong way down the motorway to the Øresund bridge. And that was that.’
He went through the pictures one by one, shook his head as if to say, ‘Later.’
‘It was the end of my marriage. Things hadn’t been good since Hans came back.’ The shortest, most bitter of smiles. ‘I was a civil servant, you see. I was bound to side with authority. So afterwards I buried myself in work, even more than before. And then . . .’ A bright, vicious note in his voice. ‘One day Anne Dragsholm turns up asking for Monberg. My minister.’ A possessive finger pointed at Buch. ‘Mine. She knew Hans wasn’t lying, any more than Raben. Because Dragsholm had done something all the clever people in Operational Command couldn’t. She’d found the officer.’
More books. Then Plough carefully closed the lid.
‘I won’t forget that day. I sat outside on a bench eating my sandwich, drinking my bottle of water. Thinking I was the most loathsome, most despicable man on earth. Because my son had needed me and I’d thought him a lunatic and a liar. When all the time he was simply telling the truth.’
He lifted the box and placed it on the floor. Got another empty one. Fetched some more books from the cases.
‘I’m a loyal, gullible man. So I believed Monberg when he said he’d look into it. But then Dragsholm was killed, and still he did not
hing.’ A cold laugh that seemed out of character. ‘Instead, like a coward and a fool he tried to take his own pathetic life.’
‘And then you get me, the new boy, dumb and innocent, waiting to be fed a line,’ Buch said, alarmed by the venom in his own voice.
Plough looked offended.
‘What else could I do? I’d tried Monberg and he let me down. I had to lead you to the case. So I leaked the PET memo. Yes! Me! Quiet as a mouse Carsten Plough, the most discreet and reliable civil servant in Slotsholmen. I made sure Karina found Monberg’s private diary. I laid a trail of breadcrumbs for my fat sparrow and you followed them, Buch, every last one. More enthusiastically than I could ever have hoped.’
‘For God’s sake! You could have gone to the police!’
That bitter laugh again.
‘Eight days a minister and still so much to learn. Of course I couldn’t. Rossing had been pulling Erik König’s strings for years. The two of them were in cahoots long before any of this happened. König answered more to the Defence Ministry than he ever did to us.’
‘Then the Politigården . . .’
‘Who would have turned the case over to PET in an instant. Give me credit. I know the system. I invented half of it.’ The books had been forgotten. ‘But I had no proof. Not till yesterday. And then . . .’ The broadest, happiest of smiles. ‘I gave it to the Prime Minister.’
He beamed at Buch.
‘There was no hesitation on Grue Eriksen’s part. He didn’t dither, like you.’
Buch closed his eyes and groaned.
‘Of course not! He had his own skin to save.’
‘No. Monberg as good as told me. He had a meeting with Rossing. As soon as he returned, the case was closed. There and then.’
Buch picked up a paperback on the desk. A cowboy story. It looked familiar.
‘Thanks for giving me that,’ Plough said. ‘But it’s not to my taste.’
‘You should have told someone.’
‘Who would have believed me?’ Plough touched his arm, an odd and unexpected gesture in such a man. ‘Not you. Not in the beginning anyway. Thomas . . . I’m genuinely sorry for the way things turned out. But you and Karina will do all right.’
Another book. A guide to Manhattan.
‘When we talked the Prime Minister asked me whether I really wanted to go to Skopje. If there was anywhere else I’d prefer. So I said . . .’
