Ice Islands, page 7
Sara took off her boots and lay on her side on the sofa, her feet tucked beneath her. She kept the blanket around her, gripping the sides, like she had with her scarf. She watched Rake crushing ice into a steel container, half cup, half bucket, another thing cramped into his rucksack. He used his long-bladed Fairbairn-Sykes knife to take strips off a log for kindling, and laid the pieces in the fire over a firelighter and cotton wool.
‘I can do this.’ Sara swung her legs to the floor. ‘I’m good with campfires. It’s one thing they taught us at that bloody English school.’ The way she pronounced ‘bloody’ emphasized her English accent.
Rake eased back and allowed her. He needed Sara to speak, best in her own time. She rearranged the kindling, took out the cotton wool, inspected it and put it back in a different place. She broke the firelighter into smaller bits. ‘What about the smoke?’ she asked.
‘The weather’s whipping up. It’ll be fine.’ Rake handed her a pack of matches. She riffled through, inspecting them. She struck one and lit the fire, touching it on firelighters and cotton wool in five places before tossing the match into the flames. Her face filled with new color, she turned to face him. ‘Who are you, Ozenna? Tell me that and I’ll tell you something you want to know.’
It was quicker to agree than argue and telling her was an offer of trust. ‘My full name is Major Raymond Ozenna. My home unit is the Alaska National Guard. I grew up on an island in the Bering Strait that is on the border with Russia, just south of the Arctic Circle. South of there come the Aleutian Islands, which lead down to Japan.’
Sara looked intently at him, assessing, curious. He had her attention.
‘I don’t have brothers or sisters I know about. I don’t know where my parents are. It happens a lot in those island communities. And, yeah, I look more Chinese than European American because I am like the Ainu. I am a native, an Eskimo – indigenous, or whatever white people want to call us. I don’t care because I know who I am.’
‘That’s it? You know who you bloody are so everything’s all right?’
Rake flashed a quick smile. ‘It means I don’t have to screw around with this identity shit.’
‘You’re funny,’ Sara returned the smile. ‘And you’re scary.’ Each of her hands held a side of her scarf, which she pulled tightly down from her neck. ‘You risked your life for me.’ Her face filled with new color, she turned to face him. ‘I think I should tell you about Yuri Mishkin. Who he was and why he was killed.’
THIRTEEN
As Sara talked about Yuri Mishkin, she became excited, hesitant, vulnerable, layers of protection peeling away. She tightened the thermal blanket around her. Rake squatted on his heels, arms resting on his knees, hands warmed by a mug of coffee. If Sara were right, every dynamic changed. It could explain Harry Lucas’s flip-flopping instructions, the professional manner of the killing, the brutality, not unlike the violent messaging left by Michio Kato in the vineyard mansion in Portugal. Sara sucked in her cheeks and warmed her hands around her cup of coffee.
‘You’re certain?’ Rake asked. ‘Yuri Mishkin was son of—’
‘Yes. Yuri was the son of the Sergey Grizlov, President of the Russian Federation, who everyone thinks is a childless bachelor.’
‘How did you find out?’
‘Before he came, we talked a lot. We liked each other. We set up a special line just for us on one of those new social media platforms. I told him about my family and, one day, out of the blue, he told me who he really was.’
‘And you believed him?’
‘I did because I trusted him. But I checked some things he told me about his mother and he sent me an old newspaper cutting of her dating the President. Yes. I did believe him. He was smart, kind of lost and, with the island thing, it made sense.’ Curled up on the sofa, Sara sipped her coffee and put the mug on the floor. ‘For a long time, his father knew nothing about him. His mother is Tatiana Mishkin. You can look her up. She is a virologist who specializes in diseases under the Arctic permafrost. But she’s also deputy speaker of the Duma. She’s quite famous.’ Sara cast a glance at the window, where new clouds blocked sunlight. ‘Are we all right?’
‘We’re fine,’ said Rake. ‘Bad weather makes us safer.’
Sara nodded, seemingly reassured. ‘There’s nothing on Google about Yuri and his father. Tatiana told no one until Yuri insisted that she contact President Grizlov, who agreed to a meeting. He must have been lonely in that bleak old Kremlin castle all by himself. He and Yuri met, and they got on well. Yuri was a good-time guy. Like his father, he loved women. He knew how to enjoy himself.’ Her gaze darted up toward Rake with a sad smile. ‘In the bar that evening, last night, my God, just last night. In the bar, Yuri told me how his father had said …’ She set down her coffee mug. ‘It was difficult at first. Yuri didn’t know what his father thought about him. They never hung out together and, one day, they were in one of those massive rooms with statues and murals in the Kremlin and Sergey Grizlov tells Yuri that he’s going to get him a proper job. If his son had enough time to track down his miscreant of a father, then the least his father could do was to get his son on a career ladder. That was when Yuri knew his father cared about him.’ Sara fell silent, her eyes on the fire. ‘Yuri was offered his research job and he was asked to do a paper on the Kuril Islands, our Northern Territories. His brief was to find a way through, a win-win for Russia and Japan.’
Rake moved a log in the stove and felt a soft waft of warm air and new flames lighting up his face. Grizlov was using his son to open an initiative on the islands dispute which, if successful, would change the power canvas of Northeast Asia. Sooner or later, Yuri Mishkin’s identity would have become public knowledge.
‘If you search the Kuril Islands, you won’t find much,’ said Sara. ‘Actually, I didn’t find it. A friend of Michio’s sent me the link. I looked at the paper. It wasn’t very good.’ Sara picked up her cup. ‘Yuri filled it with naïve conclusions. He wasn’t a scholar. But he was advocating a solution, so I asked him about coming here and he said “yes” straight away.’
Rake could see why Yuri would agree, a good-time guy invited for a week away by a beautiful Japanese woman. Sara was alerted by Michio, suggesting that he did know who Yuri was and that he used Sara to set up the killing. ‘How long after making first contact did you find out Yuri’s true identity?’
‘Several weeks. We got in touch August. It’s now late January. Must have been November.’ Flecks of hail hit the windows and were loud on the roof. Sara flinched. She slid off the sofa and sat on the floor, near Rake, in the arc of the fire’s warmth. Glass shook against a blast of weather. ‘Are you sure it’s OK here?’ she asked again. ‘Sounds like we’re getting blown away.’
Rake studied each of the surveillance images on his phone. The cameras were holding their positions even against the havoc of the new weather. The landscape blurred and cleared, part hailstorm, part fog, part clarity, all moving like a kaleidoscope, shapes and colors, light and darkness, merging and separating within seconds, gusts howling like a bad orchestra. In the worst squall, his visibility would be less than twenty yards, no time to react. Like he had anticipated, the hut was both shelter and a trap.
‘For now. We’re good,’ he reaffirmed.
‘I didn’t kill him.’ Sara lowered her head. Her fingers played with loose scraps of wood fallen on the hearth. Her voice was suddenly drained of energy. ‘I didn’t. I couldn’t. I liked him. You have to believe me.’
Rake’s phone lit up, meaning Harry Lucas. He needed to speak with him, but not with Sara listening, because he would land Lucas with hard questions that needed answering. Did Lucas know about Yuri Mishkin? Had he sent Rake to the Åland Islands knowing shit was about to go down?
‘I’ll be back in a moment,’ he said casually.
He opened the door to screaming wind coming straight in from the sea. It flung hailstones into the cabin. The fire flickered. Sara put her hands over her ears like a child afraid of noise. Rake stepped out, head bent, and edged his way to the back of the hut to a patch which was loud but shielded. He connected his earpiece.
‘Yuri Mishkin?’ began Lucas, as if in a briefing room.
‘Did you know?’ snapped Rake.
‘You know?’
‘Step back, Harry.’ Rake barked Lucas’s first name, breaking usual formalities and making sure his hard tone made it through the wind. ‘The son of the Russian President has been murdered at exactly the same place and time that I am assessing a new asset who happens to be the sister of a target you and I have been tracking.’
‘Did Sara kill Mishkin?’ broke in Lucas, his calmness contrasting with Rake’s sharpness.
Rake didn’t answer. ‘This is no fucking coincidence, Harry. Either you didn’t know, or you sent me into a shit-fight which is still going on. Before I say anything, you tell me what the fuck is going on.’
‘Freeman is trying to shut us down. My authority is compromised. SUPO withdrew their support as you were heading to the ferry. The White House has instructed you and Sara to give yourselves up.’
Lucas spoke in short, factual sentences which made sense to Rake. If Lucas was shut down so was Rake, except he didn’t plan on handing Sara over to anyone until he had a clearer picture. He had shot a cop and run two roadblocks. A Finnish prison cell wasn’t on his schedule for the day. Giving Sara and himself up wasn’t going to happen without guarantees.
‘I am on assignment to you, Harry. What are your orders?’ He would decide whether to obey them.
Lucas answered with another question. ‘Is Sara talking?’
‘In bursts. She’s frightened and protective.’
‘Did she kill Mishkin?’
‘No. She wouldn’t be capable.’
Wind drowned out Lucas’s next words. Rake asked him to repeat.
‘How secure are you?’
‘Could hold until nightfall.’ Loose snow swept low across the landscape. Through fog, Rake saw white water whipped up between ice floes on the sea. If they came, now, it would have to be by land. No boat or aircraft could make it. ‘Could be exposed in the next five minutes. You need to get Sara and myself passage out of Finland. I can’t fix this in the field.’
In a second, the wind vanished. Fog swept away. Hail stopped. Rake felt the warmth of winter sun on his face.
‘Ozenna, you’ve gone quiet.’
‘Do they know where we are?’ The new quietness around him was enough for Rake to hear Lucas tapping keys.
‘Not that we’ve picked up.’
‘Your weather reading?’
‘You’ll have forty minutes of this, an hour max. Then back to cloud and snow.’
Forty minutes was enough time for Rake and Sara to be captured. He examined the expanse of the rock he was on, the edge of the forest, the sea with white-water waves subsiding and gulls wobbling in flight with the weather change. He let a plan formulate. ‘I’m taking orders from you, Harry. If the White House or army tells me different, then I’ll comply.’
‘Appreciate that, Ozenna. Our focus remains Michio Kato. Get Sara to open up, and about her twin, Kazan. Anything on the family.’
Rake had left the hut in a storm and, minutes later, stood in clear sunshine under a cloudless sky.
‘A helicopter can get in here,’ he said. ‘Right where we are. Get one, Harry or they’ll come for us, and it’ll only take minutes.’
FOURTEEN
Rake scraped ice off the windows, identifying blind spots. The brilliant clear day was vanishing, visibility patchy again. A person could cover ground from forest to hut in seconds. Sara Kato busied herself around the hut as if it were her new home. She found a drawer filled with old, scratched kitchen utensils, including a torn white T-shirt which she used as a cloth. She was settling, less darting eyes, more accepting, more trust in Rake. He began checking his weapons, a routine military process that a soldier goes through in down-time, casually, a second nature thing to do, reminding her he was there as a soldier who could keep her safe. He started with the SIG Sauer, dropping out the magazine. She looked across, curiously, and Rake asked her firmly, straight out. ‘I need to know about your family, Sara.’
The eyes darkened in on themselves like an armored wall. ‘What about them?’
‘Your father is a powerful businessman.’ He paused to gauge her reaction. She concentrated on cleaning the tines of a bent fork with the old T-shirt, hair falling over her face.
‘Could there be any connection to Yuri’s murder?’
‘How the hell would I know?’ Sara polished hard.
‘Anything at all come to mind? Any deal with Russia that has gone bad?’
She looked up angrily at Rake, ‘I have nothing to do with my bloody family. Got it. Zilch. They don’t want me. I don’t want them.’
Rake said nothing. She set her gaze on the fork and rag again. ‘They sent me away to school. They rejected me because I was a girl. Not just anywhere, but to that boring English countryside, about as far away from Tokyo as you can get. My parents didn’t tell me. They were too scared. Michio told me. He’s my older brother.’
He was in, and Michio was in play. In those few sentences her cadence went from angry to brittle to beginning to talk. The situation in the hut gave them a short decompression, the adrenalin drains when the mind brings in a different world, thoughts of loved ones, memories, sanctuary.
‘Michio. Your brother. What did he say?’
‘The first time just that I was being sent away to boarding school in England and that our father had appointed a guardian who would take me into his family. I couldn’t really take it in. We were at my Shichi-Go-San. Do you know what that is?’
‘I don’t.’ Rake added three rounds to the SIG Sauer magazine to replace those he had used.
‘It’s a celebration day for children to have a healthy life. First at three, then boys at five and girls at seven. My ceremony was held at the Yasukuni Shrine. Do you know that?’
Rake did. The shrine commemorated Japanese military heroes, including war criminals, the sort of place the Kato network would feel at home.
‘A bit,’ he replied quietly. ‘What happened there?’
Sara abruptly stopped cleaning cutlery. Had he used the wrong tone? Too fast? She left the fork on the workbench, squatted down and opened a cupboard underneath. ‘Ah! There it is.’ Reaching inside, she brought out a yellow plastic dustpan and floor brush, stood up, looking around for an area to sweep. Rake pointed to the hearth, strewn with wood chips.
‘No, not Michio.’ She held the brush in the air like a flag. ‘Kazan told me first. He’s my twin and he is always horrible to me. He ran up to me, yelling, “Goodbye, stupid sister. You’re going away, and I never have to see you again.”’
Rake stayed quiet. She sank to her knees and began sweeping. ‘Yasukuni means peaceful country. But it’s about war. So, it’s twisted from the start, names and names and names of dead people killed in wars. More than two million. It’s like a palace with rooms, and open spaces and gardens. My father took me there for my ceremony but ignored me. He didn’t speak to me once. Not once.’ Sara dropped the brush on the hearth. Her hands trembled, her face flushed red. ‘I should stop. I’m saying too much. It makes me angry, and I don’t even know you.’
‘Keep telling,’ Rake said gently. ‘Then I’ll tell you how I get angry about my father.’
‘All right.’ Sara’s eyes lit. ‘On your island? What about your father?’
‘Yes. We’ll share.’
‘Deal. I want to know about anyone who has a father as shitty as mine.’
‘You’ll get chapter and verse.’ Rake checked each of the surveillance cameras. Thick snow. A deer ambling. Nothing else.
‘I began bawling my eyes out,’ said Sara. ‘I didn’t know what Kazan meant. I didn’t know then how some Japanese families are. No hugging. No show of affection. I was still a child with all the love to give and receive, and my brother was sneering at me. He was so nasty, and he called me a cry baby and he was glad I wouldn’t live in Japan anymore. My mother came over, not to me, but to Kazan. She reprimanded me, saying that this was my special day and I had to behave and not cause problems for people. She took Kazan back to her group. Michio was with my father. He saw me all alone, crying, ran across and gave me a big hug. He was so warm and nice that I cried more. Really cried. He took me to a food stall and bought us both a red and white manju, that’s a sweet rice wrapped in bamboo leaves and a lychee ramune. That’s a soft drink. See how well I remember. We sat on a bench, and he asked me what was wrong. I didn’t want to say because I didn’t want to know. He asked if Kazan had told me about my new school. I remember sucking through the straw even though it was just air left in the bottle.’
‘What did your brother say?’ Rake brought his Beretta 93R machine pistol out of his rucksack, for which he had three twenty-round magazines.
Sara watched as he stripped down the weapon. ‘Michio told me I was being sent away. I asked him why, and he said they wanted me to understand Western culture. I asked why he and Kazan didn’t need to know about that, too. Even at seven, I knew that Western culture was in America and not England. Kazan and Michio went to Gakushūin, the school for the elite I told you about, where the imperial family goes. Gakushūin takes girls. So, I could have gone. So, I asked him again and he said he didn’t really know. Our father had commanded it, and no one dared question him. Michio thought it might have been because the old man hated the way women were becoming more powerful. He couldn’t handle the thought that his daughter might be able to run his family business. But it might have been because of this.’ She cupped her hands around the sides of her face. ‘Like I described. That Ainu bloodline has come through prominently in my features.’
