Ice Islands, page 10
A snow clump fell from a tree and splattered in his track, maybe shaken out by the vibrations from an approaching helicopter, a large two-engine flying in from Finland, the same route along which Rake’s smaller one had just flown. These were government people. It wasn’t a situation to fight his way out of. It could be one to escape from.
Two police vehicles drove down the single-track road to the airfield and pulled up by the station wagon. Rake counted six: four in the dark blue uniform of the Swedish police; two plain-clothed, one with a black trench coat, the other with a green cold-weather jacket and waterproof pants. They were in a hurry, wanting to assess before the helicopter landed. Two men searched the station wagon, taking out the Ziploc bag, holding it up to show it had been abandoned. Eyes shifted toward the hillside, then back as the large aircraft came into land. Three men got out. Rake recognized none from earlier in the day. One strode forward to shake hands with the plain-clothed Swedish police officer in the green jacket. They pointed up toward Rake.
There was a brief discussion before four began following Rake’s tracks up the hillside, two from the police vehicles, two from the helicopter. Rake would have ten minutes, possibly fifteen, and he didn’t plan to end up in anyone’s custody. He switched the encryption code on his satellite phone, turned it on, checked his surroundings, his arc of vision, and made the call.
NINETEEN
Washington, DC
The internal intercom warbled on the wall on Carrie Walker’s small studio apartment. It was too early in the morning for visitors. She ignored it; someone must have pressed a wrong button. Carrie was working on the case of Ronan, the young craftsman from Rake’s home Alaskan island of Little Diomede, whom she had talked to Rake about when he was on a plane to God knows where. Why was she getting involved, she wondered. Sure, the gentle, mild-mannered Ronan stood accused of rape. Almost certainly, the accusation was false, she told herself. But you never really knew. There was a raft of people, solid organizations, more experienced than her, that could take up his case. She was doing it because she hadn’t slept well, because Ronan was Rake’s community which, right now, she preferred to her own solitary, soulless, career-driven one. This was her third night back in Washington after yet another failed relationship with a colleague who should have made a perfect husband, except it didn’t unfold like that and she fled.
In the early morning darkness, lamps from the Watergate Complex shone across quiet Virginia Avenue. Whatever light, noise, pollution, Carrie liked curtains and windows open, a rebellion against her grumpy father who savored darkened rooms with musty air. She had found physical trauma medicine too disruptive, her work in conflict zones too draining, the repetitive hopelessness of violence. She switched from trying to fix broken bodies to fixing broken minds. That’s what she told herself. But, like a million other therapists, she wondered if it was really to try to understand her own character, work out what she did and why.
Carrie envied Rake. Fancied him like hell, too. Loved him even. She had once worn his engagement ring, and that hadn’t worked. Her fault or his? She felt safe and excited when he was around. His confidence irritated and perplexed her. How he could live without a shred of self-doubt, where nothing was questioned? She wasn’t even sure if Rake experienced emotion. Sure, she understood how being raised on a remote, cold island, cut off from everywhere, with wild weather and a small community, made a person think in a certain way. She got why he liked the military, the discipline, the certainty. She understood why some people sought conflict. But Rake hadn’t. The military was a well-worn escape route from communities like his, and fighting was what soldiers did. But Carrie herself had gone looking for conflict. The day they had met in Afghanistan, she had been treating a patient blown apart by a car bomb. Rake had physically lifted her away to protect her from a second blast, certainly saving her life. He reassured her that her patient had no chance of survival.
‘How the hell do you know that?’ she had yelled at him, shaken, afraid, guilt-ridden.
‘I know,’ he had said. ‘And so do you.’
He was right. They dated after that, or, to be accurate, they had sex then dated. There was something she had never pinned down. She didn’t feel restless with Rake – that her life was slipping away – as she did in her experiments with affluent doctors whom her mother and her sister wanted her to marry. But she could only ever take Rake so far. At some stage, the human mind reflects and plans. Rake didn’t, which was why he infuriated and attracted her so much.
The intercom buzzed again. Carrie stepped across the reindeer-skin rug that Rake had given her long ago and picked up the receiver.
‘Carrie, it’s Jesse from downstairs.’ Jesse was one of the overnight concierges. ‘A strange one, so I won’t be asking questions.’
‘Thanks, Jesse. Go on …’
‘You know Norman?’
‘Yes.’ Norman was another concierge.
‘Your Rake called Norman on his personal cell. I didn’t even know they knew each other.’ Rake would know Norman because he was renting an apartment one floor down from her.
‘Rake asked Norman to call me, to call you, and patch you and Rake together through the intercom,’ continued Jesse. ‘If that makes sense, I can do it.’
‘Do it.’ Her stomach gripped. In a lover’s sense, she was excited he was calling her. But the roundabout way he made contact frightened her in a professional way. She poised herself, like in the emergency room, to rapidly process information and make decisions. She loathed herself for liking it, and Rake for calling out of the blue, and because she knew he was about to use her.
‘Thanks, Jesse, Norman. We can take it from here.’ Rake’s voice was measured and clear. He would have had the foresight to set up this system, both simple and complicated. Carrie heard a click. She and Rake had a private line. She heard wind.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Carrie, a dumb question, but a natural one.
‘I need you to do something.’
‘OK.’
‘Activate a pre-paid. Call Harry Lucas. Link us in if you can. If not, tell him I need orders. Next few minutes.’ Rake spoke slowly, made sure he enunciated syllables that would cut through static and background noise. ‘Have you got that?’
‘Yes. But why should Harry pick up from—’
‘He will.’ In the locked drawer on the table where she was working, Carrie kept four or five disposable phones, mostly used now to work dating sites. When she had told Rake, he helped her make them more secure. He must also have given the number to Harry Lucas for situations like the one unfolding now.
Where are you? she thought. What’s going on? How much danger are you in? She fired up a phone, flipped through to Harry Lucas’s contact and called his personal number.
Lucas picked up. ‘Carrie?’ His tone was urgent.
‘I have Rake.’ Carrie spoke in a measured, familiar, focused tone, set from years of handling up-against-the-clock emergencies.
‘Ozenna?’
Rake went straight in. ‘What the hell happened?’ Every word bulged with restrained anger.
‘My orders were overturned. You know that.’ Lucas sounded tired and defensive.
‘What was the flight plan of the Swedish helicopter that brought me out?’
‘To Uppsala, then a plane to RAF Lakenheath, in England.’ A roar of static cut through the line.
‘Didn’t happen. It dropped me at an airfield on the coast. Did you leave a vehicle and dismantled cell phone for me?’
‘I did not.’
‘A military helicopter has landed. The Finnish and Swedish police are tracking me.’
‘How long do we have?’ It was an automated question. Carrie sensed Lucas was out of octane. Something had gone badly wrong.
‘Five minutes at the most.’ Rake’s tone was the opposite. He was fired up, and when Rake got like that he could be very dangerous. Carrie knew. She had seen it.
On the coastal Swedish hillside, four thousand miles away, Rake listened to Harry Lucas. He needed the American government to bust him out and expected nothing in the coming minutes. He reached for his pistol, flattened himself in what little undergrowth there was and watched the men tracking him. They were good, moving steadily uphill checking for footfall, snow disturbed on branches, looking for shadows where they shouldn’t be. He had hoped for time to reach the summit, get a view, examine escape routes. He sensed that wasn’t going to happen, that they had found his trail and spread out to encircle him. He was watching two, but the two others were missing. Then, they came for him.
From outside his arc of vision, a tracker leapt forward, stamping his boot on Rake’s gun hand. Pain ripped through his arm, up his shoulder to his neck and throat, making him retch. A blow struck the left side of his face. Men surrounded him. They wore white woolen hats and masks, surrounding him. None was the four he had logged climbing the hill.
Rake had never adopted the mindset that – when cornered – a good soldier takes some of the enemy with him, whatever the odds. His aim was to stay alive. His weapon was kicked away. Arms grabbed his shoulders and pulled him to his feet. Two rounds were fired into the satellite phone. It was flung down the hillside.
One unsheathed a syringe, not the hospital type, but the heavy-duty emergency one designed to penetrate denim and canvas and get to the human body fast. He met Rake’s gaze. A professional doing his job. He checked Rake’s right hand which had been holding the weapon. Most right-handed people are also right-footed. This was about sedation, not cruelty. He anticipated getting the syringe in his left thigh, where bruising would have less impact. He relaxed the muscles there. The syringe cut through cloth. He felt the breaking of the skin and the insertion. Strength drained from him. His vision blurred. His mind fogged.
TWENTY
Harry tried the line set up with the National Security Council. Silence. He called Petrovsky’s direct line only to be told that he was unavailable. He messaged Petrovsky’s private cell phone, ‘Pick the fuck up and now!’ He gave it thirty seconds and called.
‘We’ve lost contact with Ozenna,’ snapped Harry.
‘Are we good with Grizlov?’ Petrovsky shot back.
‘Did you hear what I said?’
‘Russia is our priority.’
Harry wasn’t even going there. ‘We’re not going to be good with Grizlov, Nick, until you fix whatever’s going down in Sweden.’ He had called Stephanie, his ex-wife and Grizlov’s confidante. Detecting the urgency, she cleared her schedule and was on her way over.
‘Sweden. Like what?’ Petrovsky’s tone became hesitant. Harry’s speech analysis screen showed undulations of red, green, blue and yellow graph lines, indicating that Petrovsky’s hesitancy was genuine: He didn’t know about Sweden.
‘Gunshots on the hillside. I arranged for Ozenna to fly to Uppsala. They dropped him somewhere on the coast.’
Silence from Petrovsky. A siren in the background. Harry’s tracker put the National Security Adviser on K Street, heading east toward the White House.
Harry said, ‘You told me you were taking responsibility for Ozenna.’
‘Not responsibility. I said we would be taking Ozenna from here.’ Lines dipped and rose on the screen. The black one reflected Petrovsky’s actual words. Other colors handled emotion. The software’s artificial intelligence picked out traits in each syllable: happiness, anger, fear. It processed the information like a human brain, analyzing mood, behavior, veracity. The more the software taught itself about a subject, the more it honed and defined character profile. There was not much on Petrovsky. He had been a surprise appointment, new to the job, and he kept a low media profile.
‘Taking him from here, meaning that you would have him gunned down,’ accused Harry.
‘No. No, absolutely not.’ The graphs had Petrovsky fully on the defensive.
‘Then, don’t mess semantics about responsibility.’ Harry’s tone was jagged.
Petrovsky hardened. ‘The President will mess with whoever he wants, however he wants.’
‘Then tell him this, Nick, and listen hard. I will fuck with him, too. John Freeman cut me out in the middle of an operation that is crucial to American security.’
‘That’s our decision.’
‘The government needs to bring Rake Ozenna back home, now, and alive, or I’ll tell Steph to turn around and go back to what she was doing.’
‘Don’t you threaten—’ Petrovsky was grasping.
‘You want this off tomorrow’s PDB, Nick. Your call.’ The graphs showed a man way out of his depth. Petrovsky didn’t reply, nor did he close the line. Harry said, ‘Freeman’s predecessor signed off on what Ozenna and I have been doing. There’s a White House paper trail which your boss hasn’t even asked to see. If what we’re hunting goes down badly, the American people will want to know why, and I will tell them.’
‘Then tell me what it is?’ Petrovsky wavered on each word. He hadn’t read the file, probably hadn’t had access.
‘Are you loyal messenger or useful idiot? I know what you’re not, and that’s a presidential adviser working in the national interest.’
‘If it’s such national interest, why are you withholding?’ Petrovsky’s tone showed some restored confidence, Harry’s attack prompting him into a sharper defense.
‘I report directly to the President of the United States. I’ll tell Freeman. Not you. Set up the meeting.’
‘Threaten like that and you’ll never work in this town again.’
‘I will. But you’re on borrowed time. It’s your ass that goes down in history. Not mine. Not the President, because he’ll cover his ass with sweet-smelling lavender all the way and put his shit all over yours.’
Petrovsky said nothing. Traffic and distant sirens drifted down the line.
‘Call whoever you need to and get Ozenna back.’ Harry softened his tone. ‘Fifteen minutes from now, I will ask Stephanie to go see Grizlov. That’s the deal, Nick. Then get me in with Freeman.’ Harry stopped abruptly and allowed a beat for Petrovsky to respond. ‘Thank you.’
‘And, if I’m to handle Stephanie, you need to reinstate my clearance. It’s not done yet.’
‘We’re doing it.’ Petrovsky closed the call as Harry’s surveillance flashed that Stephanie was approaching the front door. Good for Steph. Impossible to live with, rock solid in a crisis. Harry topped up his tepid coffee, his mind racing from his exchange with Petrovsky. Yes, he had threatened the President of the United States, and he needed to. He tapped a couple of keys that opened up lines to alert him on Rake Ozenna. There was nothing.
Stephanie knew Harry well enough to recognize his mental as opposed to physical exhaustion. She had seen him with both. And that he needed a shower and change of clothes. He opened the door with a smile, a genuine relief to see her. She was wearing a dark blue overcoat with a long, gray cashmere scarf, and her favorite Russian hat made from cat fur with flaps over the ears.
‘Yuri Mishkin?’ Harry asked as he showed her in. ‘Does he ring a bell?’
‘No, and not even a peck on the cheek?’ She hooked her scarf around a coat stand near the door. ‘No, “how are you?” A glance to say how great I’m looking, even if I’m not.’ When Harry had summoned her, she had pulled on a pair of denim jeans with a heavy-duty blue cotton shirt and, for the cold, a woolen ski hat and Ugg boots, which she now kicked snow off.
‘You’re looking great, Steph,’ said Harry.
‘Thank you.’ She gave him a full smile. She was keeping her dark hair short, had lost those pounds put on when holding down big jobs, had taken up a mild gym and jogging routine and won back her figure. She looked around, part ex-spousal, part curiosity. Some years ago, Harry hired a designer to furnish and kit out the apartment. He had asked her opinion, and she reminded him that the last thing he needed was an ex-wife’s stamp on the place. She had never been here. It wasn’t big. He kept it in fair shape, but not great. There were scuff marks on the walls, stains around the coffee machine. The furniture was sleek, not sexy. The bedroom door was closed.
‘You look as if you’ve had an all-nighter and more.’ She stood outside the secure door as Harry opened his work area, with its iris scans, fingerprints and barcodes.
‘Mishkin,’ he repeated, bringing up a young man’s mug shot to a large screen. ‘Yuri. Russian academic, early thirties, non-resident fellow at the Russian International Affairs Council.’
Stephanie frowned and stepped closer to the screen. She looked at a carefree, youthful face with hair flopping over his brow, like she might imagine her son, had she ever had children. ‘Nope,’ she muttered. ‘But I’m sure I’m about to find out.’
‘He’s dead.’ Harry pushed his hand back through his closely cropped dark hair. ‘He’s been murdered at a no-name, no-place peace conference, that won’t ruffle hair on a camel’s back.’
‘Here, in DC? In London, which is why I’ve been called in?’
‘The Åland Islands, between Finland and Sweden.’
Stephanie knew the Åland Islands. ‘Britain negotiated a treaty in the 1920s. A think tank operates there, studying conflict resolution.’
‘That’s the one.’
‘And this Yuri Mishkin?’
‘Throat cut.’
Stephanie rested her hand on the wall. Work with Harry was never straightforward. ‘Then give me ten seconds of your attention and tear yourself away from your bloody screens and tell me what it has to do with me.’
Harry swiveled around, his face glaring with anger, as if Stephanie was someone else. He quickly mellowed. ‘Yuri Mishkin was Sergey Grizlov’s son.’
A tremble ran through Stephanie. She sat on a steel office chair pushed against the back wall. Harry’s workstation was arranged like an aircraft control panel, with five screens, a large one flanked by smaller ones, two on each side. They showed maps and graphs. There were banks of switches, keyboards, phones, headsets and gadgetry.
