Everybody looked at him as he walked from the reception room through the open office spaces to the sanctuary of his own office. He had nodded and smiled but knew his smile was forced and that they all could see his fear. He feels exposed and vulnerable as if he were walking past all his employees stark naked.
His two large computer screens on his desk show the same picture. H’Allure’s stock prices are plunging like dead birds dropping out of a blue sky. The curve looks like a fever chart for a patient who has become well after being ill. The market is responding with instant fear since James Hampton, earlier this morning, dumped his forty percent of the stocks to a ridiculously low price, sending all the rest of the investors to call their dealers and demand they get rid of stocks in H’Allure. The stock price had dropped by sixty-eight percent in a few hours. How is that even possible? He asks himself. He knows the answer: any company’s stock value is due to psychology, and James Hampton had certainly created a fear that was felt throughout the markets.
He had called James Hampton so many times already this morning. His secretary had tried the number. However, they both got the same response, an automated voice message saying that this number was no longer in use.
For two hours, he sits there staring at the curves on his screens. He feels numb. His brain has stopped working. He gets up, grabs his coat, and leaves his office without a word to his secretary. He walks through the leaden atmosphere with a prayer that nobody stops him. Then he reaches the swinging doors and pushes them open as he breathes the fresh air and his brain kicks into life again. He walks briskly along the promenade that runs from the northern part of the office area to the old clubhouse of the Yacht Club, and when he reaches the clubhouse, he enters.
In a corner booth, he asks an old waiter for a coffee. The clubhouse has some of that old slowness and pompousness he recalls from his childhood home, and suddenly he is thinking of his dad, the great Marius Bang-Henriksen. Marius had come from a poor family but gained riches beyond that of anyone in his birth town, a fact he never tired of telling his sons. Niels had been proud of his father, even though he had always favored Jørgen, the eldest son. Even when Niels and Jørgen were growing up and working in the business, Marius had started them both off at the bottom of the company, soon promoting Jørgen, whereas Niels hung a few rungs behind.
When Marius died, Niels hadn’t been surprised that Jørgen was to be the new CEO and himself only head of legal. The old man didn’t even trust Niels with the company’s finances. Although he admired his father, he hated him too, hated him because the old man never imbued him with any self-respect or confidence. Niels had barely made it through university. He was never any good at sports, and all the financial schemes he cooked up in a desperate attempt to earn his father’s respect dwindled to nothing or resulted in losses. How he had managed to find and hold onto his wife never ceased to surprise him. She was the one good thing in his life.
Since Jørgen’s suicide, he is at the head of the table, and the company is falling. He, Niels, the youngest son, has just squandered his inheritance. The thought is unbearable, so he signals to the old waiter that he needs a drink, a strong one, even though it is still mid-morning. He feels dead to the world, and to himself.
Chapter 38
Tires hit gravel, and Francis hears dogs barking. Next, the car doors are opened, and he is grabbed by the arm and yanked out of the car. Wet dog snouts with hot breath examine him, all jumping, barking and circling him. By their bark, he determines they are large dogs. He stands still, willing his mind to be at rest and to appear friendly and non-threatening. The dogs grovel. How many dogs are there? He can distinguish at least three different tenors, maybe four.
Strips are put on his ankles, and his arms are jerked to his back, secured by strips as well. He can’t see, he can’t walk, and he can’t use his arms or hands. He is helpless. Only his mind is still his own. The dogs having done their job, he is hoisted by two men, their arms under his armpits, his feet dragging across gravel.
He forces his senses to the utmost: listening for traffic, yet there is none; only the quietness of the late winter countryside reaches him. The wind gently shakes naked tree branches, and he notes the smells of wet earth and decay. His heart sinks as he realizes that he and his captors are far away from any human sounds or smells. They are somewhere isolated, naturally. His captors have chosen a remote location with no risk of people interfering in the vicinity. He would have done the same.
His captors move him inside a house that smells stale and musty as if it hadn’t been used for a long time. When Francis’s feet find purchase, he is allowed to shuffle along between his captors. From the softness under his soles, he concludes the floors are carpeted.
“Bring him in here!” a female voice says.
The humiliation, the dehumanization, the treating him like a bag of cargo has begun, all by talking about him in the singular third person. A thing is easy to hurt, so much easier than a human being. And much, much easier than a human being with an identity. Stay human! His instructor’s voice says again. But how?
A sense of helplessness hits him with a force so violent that he gags. One of his captors forces his grip on Francis’s upper arm so that Francis’s feet stumble when he crosses the threshold into another room, into the room where the woman’s voice originated. Francis knows he will remember this room for the rest of his days, no matter how few days that might be.
The floor appears to be tiled, and the acoustics have just become harsher. Where are they? A kitchen? A bathroom? The smell of dusty old furniture grows stronger as he is thrown into what feels like an old lounge chair. He knows with a certainty that feels almost like relief that he has arrived at the worst place in his life.
“Hello, Francis,” a voice says calmly, casually, and powerfully.
The last time Francis heard this voice was when he and Jo stood as witnesses to arrest the owner of this voice: George Schwartz. He is Francis’s longtime nemesis and the surrogate father of de Lingua. It had been during the murdered monks’ case where Schwartz and Francis butted heads again. That round had gone to Francis. The roles were reversed this time.
When Jo had murdered de Lingua in a restaurant, she been using Saxitoxin and acted without his, Francis’s consent. He had been livid when he realized the danger she had put herself into. He knew that de Lingua was like a son to Schwartz. Francis had done the best he could to protect Jo by giving her a new identity. It worked so well that Schwartz had come after him instead. There could be only two reasons for this: either Schwartz wanted Francis dead, or he wanted the name of de Lingua’s killer. Francis was willing to satisfy the first wish, but not the second—never the second.
His mind is forced back to the present when they go to work on him. He screams, he cries, he moans. And he talks. Of course, he does. Everybody talks! He hears his instructor yell. But he doesn’t beg. He never begs. And he never tells them anything personal. Just stuff from past operations. Does he put people in danger through his telling? Yes. Everybody does! His instructor yells. Everybody talks, everybody puts someone in danger, regardless of what the romance of movies and books indicate. Except, as in Francis’s case, except when the love is so deep that it is hardly even conscious. Francis will give up anybody, but not his closest team, and least of all the killer of de Lingua. His Jo, his prime agent, the far too secret love of his life. He will never give her up.
Chapter 39
Thomas’s voice is heavy with regret. “Fuck! We should have respected the signs. It’s not as if we weren’t warned: first in Alexandria and then in Marrakesh. I’ll get the night shift on locating him through his microchip immediately.” Thomas does not question her sudden authority. Instinctively, he knows that she has rightly taken on a leadership role and that for all their bitchy competitiveness, he has no trouble following her lead. “I’ll call you back as soon as I know anything.”
“Thanks. And Thomas…do hurry!”
Her next call is to Dhammakarati, who
pants slightly as if he has come straight from a run. She doesn’t ask. As she expected, the monk is calm in the face of this catastrophe and, like Thomas, Dhammakarati doesn’t question her sudden authority. He promises to get a team together at once.
The next half hour is taken up by logistics. Thomas calls back and reports that the chip in Francis’s buttock is working and that they have tracked it to a point 160 km away. He provides visuals of a delipidated farmhouse, unfortunately only from the front. However, they do learn that the house has no immediate neighbors. This information makes sense. Speaking with Dhammakarati again, Jo decides to use the chopper for faster access to Francis. Her secret fear that Francis might already be dead is partly allayed by the fact that they’ll be getting there as quickly as possible. Finally, she calls Angela and tasks her with advising the doctor they use for discreet attention to staff and victims alike. Angela is also to contact the helicopter pilot and have him ready the chopper at the helipad in Kastrup.
Logistics aside, she makes herself another expresso and sips at it while devouring two thick slices of buttered bread. Who knows when she will have the opportunity to eat again? She is calm. Her body is strong, elastic, ready. Her feelings for Francis are, for the most part, put aside. All she allows herself to feel is the strong directing sensation of the unmitigated importance of reclaiming Francis. But nothing else. No fear, no sadness. Just strength and purpose.
Strength and purpose. Two words her master never tired of drilling into her. Strength and purpose, the twin-engine that can take you anywhere and can make you do anything to anybody.
Her hands meet automatically in front of herself, and she inclines her head. So strong was the impression left by her master that she almost involuntarily performed this ritualistic greeting whenever she thought of him deliberately.
She had spent three years training with him in a small, dark room in the inner city. The room was less than three by three meters, and yet while there, it seemed as if all of history, all of the universe, all the pain, all the longing and desire in the world was in the room with her, surrounding her, and challenging her. She came face to face with her past and her future there, with the dark side of her soul and with the angel and goddesses within her. She’d never experienced anything as tough, as challenging, and yet as liberating in her life. The first year was unbearable, the second year hardly less so, and the third year she began to understand the destructive ways of the ego.
In that small room, where daylight was kept out by heavy curtains, and where the smell of incense was ancient and unsettling, the floor covered in tatami mats—a testimony, she guessed, to the master’s obscure martial arts background. She had clenched her teeth through impossibly challenging yoga postures, abandoned her reasoning during scary breathing exercises, and flitted between dark, horrible places and patches of light during her hours of meditation.
She wondered about him, her master, who was not so tall, nor buff, yet capable of flying through the air, of jumping several meters into the air without any apparent effort. Her master always dressed in kimono jacket and dark, wide trousers; in addition, his head was shaved except for a thick tuft of hair on top, which he wore oiled in a long braid reaching almost to his waist. On occasion, he would remove his jacket to demonstrate certain pranayama exercises in order for her to watch his abdomen while he moved the air in and out of his powerful lungs. Seeing him half naked was to look at something only half human. He had a lean torso and arms, with muscles rippling under smooth brown skin that was covered in dark tattoos, the likes of which she’d never seen before.
By appearance, he was of another time, hardly human, yet his language betrayed a modern, working-class background. She guessed he was a man who had not come easily nor by choice to his current level of skill. Rather, he had been forced to learn to survive. Something in his lack of empathy made it clear to her that whatever she’d suffered, it was nothing compared to what he had been through.
He could be gentle as a mother, as tough as a drilling sergeant, and as ruthless as a schoolyard bully in his one aim, which was to break her spirit as she knew it and replace it with something new.
Only whatever her new spirit became, she found the waiting excruciating. Leaving the well-known behind, with nothing new to cling to, was by far the most difficult experience of her life. Never had she been tested like that before.
She loved and hated him with equal force. On a few occasions, during particularly vexing sessions, she had even resorted to physical violence with a desire stronger than anything she’d ever known before—to kill him, knowing all the while that her skills were no match for his. He fended her off easily and with disregard as if she had been a fly he was swatting away, which was even more humiliating. He was her mother, her father, her god, her deliverer—and her executioner, her jailer, her tormentor.
The cold shower makes her skin tingle and redden: the blood is pulsing in her body. She dresses in black running gear, even down to her running shoes. In a backpack she puts her gun, her favorite knife, her black balaclava, and her baton. The corridors are quiet. Nobody is around, and she prays she can get to the carpark without attracting any unwanted attention.
She parks a distance away from the helipad and makes her way there on foot. Dark figures are milling around the chopper. Dhammakarati meets her. He doesn’t introduce the three other men. She doesn’t need and doesn’t want to know their identities. They are dressed in dark, loose Chinese style clothing like the monk, moving around with stealth and litheness like shadows in a concrete world. Only the glint in their eyes is visible.
The chopper’s wings start spinning and roaring. The noise muffles Jo’s awareness of anything but this trip, this rescue mission. She runs crouching and climbs into the helicopter’s spacious interior. Here, she sits down next to Dhammakarati on the bench that runs along the sides of the cabin. She straps herself tight and puts on her noise-reducing earplugs.
The chopper lifts and sways like an elegant, massive bird. Before the city lights are behind them, she hears Dhammakarati’s voice in her ear, “If we land right outside the house, we will get there sooner, but miss the advantage of surprise by landing some distance away and then covering the rest of the distance on foot. What do you want to do, Jo?”
“Land as close as possible!” she says into the mouthpiece. He nods, not giving his own thoughts. He never does.
The chopper has not reached the ground when the team jumps out and immediately makes for the house. Jo makes to come after them, then checks herself. She needs to stay clear. For all her training, she will only get in their way.
The full moon lights up a run-down garden in front of a farmhouse that has seen better days. The roof has caved in several places, paint has peeled, and many windows are broken. It seems to Jo as if the house has given up its spirit after having been abandoned for such a long time. And now Francis is somewhere in that house, according to the readings Thomas sends her of the little chip that is located in Francis’s buttock.
The air is cool to her hands and the small part of her face that is not covered by the balaclava. A chill runs down her spine, and she breathes deeply, never allowing any kind of insecurity to intrude on this mission. She has made the right decisions so far. She watches as the four men move like huge cats, lithely and stealthily toward the house. Two of them disappear behind the back of the house while the other two crouch on either side of the front door. She can no longer distinguish Dhammakarati from the rest. They are one lethal group of similar movements.
The noise from the chopper has created activity inside. She can see shadows moving and lights turned off. Then the two men in the front jump sideways onto the door. It gives. Shooting begins. Voices shout and curse alongside more shooting. Then she hears only quiet.
For a moment, Jo doesn’t breathe. Then she watches a dark figure come out of the front door. He is clutching his side, and as he gets closer, Jo can see blood seeping through his fingers. Then another figure comes out of the house.
Adrenaline is pumping clarity and strength into her mind, her veins. When the last two members come out, they are carrying a prone body. She knows it is Francis and she imagines that he is alive. She doesn’t know, of course.
Chapter 40
The team has made a makeshift bed out of blankets on the floor of the helicopter. They lay Francis down as gently as if he were a baby. Jo feels a catch in her throat at the sight of these people who are more lethal weapons than men. They make way for her, and she kneels by Francis’s side while one of them administers first aid to their prone leader.
His face is a mess: eyelids swollen; bruises on his cheeks and forehead; split lips; a red, angry welt around his neck. She smells the stench of human waste and fear. Francis, the dandy, the attractive bachelor, has shit and pissed himself.
She calls his name, though he doesn’t react. She slaps his cheeks several times, angry now. “Wake up, Francis. Damn it! We got you out. Wake the fuck up!”
His eyes open, unfocused, not recognizing her. His eyes close, but a word slips over his lips. One word that tells Jo all she needs to know.
Schwartz! She sits back on her heels, searching Dhammakarati’s eyes for his assurance that everything is going to be all right.
He nods.
She rips open Francis’s shirt. His nipples are bloody. The soft part of his stomach is covered in bruises. Tears fill her eyes. She starts removing his pants, but Dhammakarati reaches out a hand and stops her. In his eyes, she realizes that Francis would never forgive her for seeing his humiliated, tortured body. She strokes his cheek and moves away, leaving her friend and master to the capable hands of medic-trained killers.
Game of Revenge Page 15
