The Valkyrie Project, page 13
He kissed her before they reached her door, holding her just close enough to feel her breasts against his chest, but no closer. He was certain he had only to slide his hand from her waist to her buttocks and pull her tight against him, and all that he had thought about for days, all that he wished for whatever weeks or months might be left to him, would be his unhesitatingly. He kissed her as long as he dared, then eased back on his heels.
“I’ve no choice but to be circumspect tonight,” he said. “There’s a lot of work I have to do before tomorrow.”
He wasn’t lying to her.
She pulled back to look at him. Some of her hair had loosened and fallen over her right eye.
“And you are tired,” he said. “Very tired.”
“Yes,” she said.
“And tomorrow is tomorrow.”
At that she merely looked at him silently, then turned slowly and reached into her bag for her room key.
“Good night,” he said, but she only closed her door softly in response.
Spencer stayed in his own room until he was sure she was fast asleep. Then he quietly called the desk and asked that no telephone calls go to either room until eight A.M. He changed from his sportcoat to a dark sweater and watch cap he had bought in Reykjavik. There was going to be one more sailor creeping about Iceland that night.
He took everything from his pockets but his room key, a penlight, and his old army knife, which held a screwdriver in addition to a razor-sharp blade. If he were caught by the wrong people, he prefered being an anonymous thief to a trespassing American. The hall was empty. Taking the “Do not disturb” sign from the rear of his door, he slipped it onto the front of Elisabet’s. The lovers must have their idyll. In a moment, he was walking down the darkened street, just another wandering fisherman. Spencer was beginning to feel less an amateur at this game.
There was no one at the back of Krog’s house, just the weary policeman at the front. Spencer supposed that, in a really sophisticated operation, the KGB would have a full-fledged surveillance team here in place, complete with infrared scopes, rifle microphones, poison dart guns, the works. But not in Iceland, in so small a town. Their belief in Krog’s return would have to be as slender as the sleepy policeman’s.
An IRA man in Belfast had taught him how to pick a lock, but Spencer hadn’t practiced the art since he and Chesley had once locked themselves out of their home some two years before. It took him ten minutes to manage Krog’s.
Like most of the homes Spencer had been in in Iceland, Krog’s was quite expensively and modernly furnished. As he made his slow progress from room to room, Spencer found everything arranged in neat and orderly fashion, but not in a manner that might indicate the objects were much used. The police search had been quite thorough. The kitchen silver was in what was obviously the wrong drawer but set in neat, symmetrical piles.
Cupping the penlight, Spencer ran its tiny beam over the contents of the living room bookcase, looking for loose papers, or books or folders that might contain them. As he feared, he found nothing. No doubt the police had taken everything there was. The same proved true in the study. Returning to the living room, he suddenly realized the anomaly.
Krog apparently subscribed to a number of engineering and scientific magazines. They were all kept in neat and orderly stacks on the bottom shelf of the bookcase—except one. It was in the study, the only magazine in the study, a copy of Scientific American. Glancing at the intricate diagram on its cover the first time, Spencer had felt a twinge of recognition. Now he remembered. Turning to the cover article, he saw that Krog had underlined numerous passages throughout.
A noise. The scrape of a shoe sole against concrete. Spencer froze, clicked off his light, held his breath. There was another sound he couldn’t distinguish.
With the most careful of treads, he stepped backward, turning, pausing at the study doorway, peering slowly around the side. A silhouette filled the living room window.
Spencer fought his accelerating heartbeat, taking a deep breath, waiting, listening, studying the dark figure at the window. It was the policeman. It had to be the policeman. No one else would be so obtuse. Was he going to enter? Or wasn’t he going to bother? What if he did?
Spencer would be no good in a struggle. Despite his height and erstwhile strength, he was a dissipated man, and, though he had been in a few brawls in his time, he would be no match against a trained policeman. There was his knife, his sharpened four-inch blade. Whether he was capable of killing was a question that still fascinated Spencer, but he was not about to answer that question with the life of an innocent Icelandic policeman. No wonder Laidlaw did not want him armed.
So there was only one alternative: surrender, give himself up, sheepishly, foolishly, right there in the house of Geir Krog. And ruin everything. Laidlaw would have him back in Washington within hours.
Could he kill? Wasn’t he the terminal man? What had he to lose? He’d be doing his duty, just as the policeman was doing his. A trained agent would do it.
Spencer would not. The policeman had moved from the window. There was no further sound at the door. There was no one moving around the side of the house. Going to the study window, Spencer saw that the policeman had returned to his unhappy post across the street. Spencer slipped the science magazine under his belt, pulling his sweater down over it. He dared not linger any longer, but he didn’t think he needed to.
The article was military in content, highly technical and complicated, something about directed-energy weapons-lasers, and a device called a charged-particle beam projector. Spencer would read it at more leisure.
But the cover had already told him a great deal. The diagram was exactly the one he had seen in the green-covered file on Laidlaw’s desk in Langley. All that was missing was the word “Valkyrie.”
Spencer’s return to the hotel was without incident. Elisabet’s door seemed secure, and nothing in his room had been touched. He put the magazine in his suitcase, dimissed the thought of rousing Elisabet, and fell soundly asleep.
Elisabet hardly spoke during breakfast. The inordinately uninteresting tour of the Laxa power plant did not help. Afterward, as Spencer drove hurriedly to Krog’s neighborhood, she became more animated. “How do you plan to go about this?” she said.
“Why, I thought I’d go right up to Krog’s house and knock on the door.”
She smiled, a little.
“I’m quite serious,” he said. They parked in front of Krog’s house and started toward the door. The policeman across the street—presumably not the one from the night before—was on them in an instant. Spencer at first acted dumb, then belligerent, waving some of his Washington press cards in the other’s face. Elisabet, conciliatory, calmed each down in turn, explaining. The policeman scrutinized one of the press cards, studying the photograph as though Spencer might be waving someone else’s Washington press card about.
“Talk to whomever you want,” said the policeman, handing back the card. “But stay away from this house.”
“Tak,” said Spencer cheerily. “Tak very much.”
They worked the street, and then a corner grocery, and finally a restaurant. Only a few people were willing to speak with them, but three of these had been fairly friendly with Krog; one, Krog’s regular chess partner. All expressed sincere disbelief that Krog could have committed the murder. So, in his responses, did Spencer. He left the strongest possible impression with each of them that he, a visiting American who had appeared out of nowhere, thought that this great and good man had been set up, that it was a gross injustice, that he was distressed about it because he had wanted more than anything to talk to Mr. Krog for his article, that he wished there were something he could do to help Mr. Krog, but that he had to return now to Reykjavik and the Hotel Thor.
As they drove from town, the road before them curving for miles around the shoulder of the huge mountain, Elisabet said what he had been expecting. “I am not a stupid woman, Mr. Spencer.”
“Great heavens no, Miss Bjornsdottir. You have a mind as beautiful as the rest of you.”
“Just what was going on back there?”
“Just a little American newspapering.”
“I speak English perfectly, Mr. Spencer. I am quite familiar with American newspapers. What on earth does ‘newspapering,’ as you call it, have to do with what went on in Akureyri? You asked crazy questions. You talked more than they did. You didn’t seem to care about your political theory at all. What were you doing?”
“As one of the world’s great newspapermen, my dear, I learned long ago that you never find anything out by asking someone a direct question. You must be oblique, disingenuous, picking up scraps of this and that, squirreling them away. You mustn’t charge but circle like Indians, around and around, till you find your opening. Then move in.”
“Move in on what, Mr. Spencer?”
“The story.”
“But what story?”
He rubbed his chin, frowning, gripping the steering wheel tightly with his left hand, completely serious now. “I don’t know.”
She left him alone after that, uncomfortably silent and keeping much to her own side of the seat. He was unhappy about that, yet grateful. He was trying to think.
There was a distraction. It had nagged at the periphery of his vision and his mind for several miles. Finally, reaching the summit of the mountain pass that separated the Akureyri region’s valleys from those to the west, he put aside his thoughts to deal with it.
A gray Mercedes-Benz sedan. Sometimes it lagged as much as a mile behind; other times it would surge forward to within a hundred yards, the two figures in the front seat clearly visible as men. Icelandic police would not drive in a Mercedes. The CIA preferred helicopters and milk trucks filled with recording equipment. The KGB couldn’t be so obvious.
He calmed himself. This was, after all, the only highway. It was natural that they would speed up and slow down when he did. The road was gravel and wound through mountains. They would understandably be reluctant to pass. Doubtless two Akureyri businessmen on their way south, or engineers. Krog had owned a Mercedes.
Spencer increased his speed by about five miles an hour. The Mercedes did the same.
When at length they passed the village of Blonduos, Spencer abruptly spun the Bronco into a sliding U-turn and headed back into town, pulling up at the restaurant where they had taken a late lunch the day before.
“Coffee,” said Spencer to the startled Elisabet. “Got to have some java. I stayed up too late last night.” Elisabet, irritated, went off to use the bathroom. He went to the window, as though to enjoy once again the expansive view of the sea, and glanced down the road. They were there. His view of the car was partially obscured by a parked truck, but the color and the outline of the fender and hood were unmistakable.
After his abrupt maneuver, he had gotten an excellent glimpse of the driver and a fair view of the other man. They were not businessmen or engineers. He had seen men with faces like that in Beirut, Belfast—even Saigon, aboard innocent little motor scooters.
He and Elisabet were in trouble—deadly serious awful trouble. There would be just as much danger getting back to Akureyri as there would be continuing on toward Reykjavik. Police from Akureyri would take forever to come, if they would respond at all to such a ridiculous plea. Driving a Mercedes was not illegal in Iceland.
He could use the sanitized line in Glasgow for an emergency call to Laidlaw. But then what—sit and sip coffee till the Marines landed?
He would make a run for it. The big brave terminal man, armed with his deadly army knife-cum-screwdriver, would do the courageous thing. Easy. What was not easy was deciding what to do with Elisabet. Leaving her behind in the village would be foolish. As Laidlaw would put it, she might be viewed as “contaminated.” Those two thugs might be just as content to take her first and go after him at leisure. He would have to keep her with him. Certainly, that was what he wanted to do, whatever the risk.
“In the next few minutes,” he said, as they got back into the Bronco, “some very strange things are going to happen. Please just do as I say, and worry not.”
“Jack, this is becoming tiresome.”
“Dear Elisabet, there are worse things than tiresome.”
With that, he began turning into the street, nonchalantly, as though they really had just stopped for coffee, as though they had not the slightest notion that the ubiquitous Mercedes might be lurking just down the street. But instead of returning to the road to Reykjavik, he suddenly spun the wheel and roared off toward the north and a side road that swung down along the shoreline. He had studied the map, and this road was ideal. After a few miles, it cut back to a branch of the main highway at a point where he would have a choice of heading north onto the huge Skagafjordar peninsula, east to Akureyri, or south to Reykjavik. There was even a dirt track he could take back up into the mountains. If he could get enough of a lead on it, he could escape the Mercedes completely.
Which is why he did not take that ideal road. The Bronco simply was not fast enough. Instead, as soon as the body of the parked truck obliterated his view of the Mercedes in the rearview mirror, he pulled swiftly between two houses, bumping over the gravel and grass that separated them and sliding to a stop at the rear of the largest. As he hoped and expected, the Mercedes soon went speeding by.
An Icelandic woman was standing at the back door, holding a kitchen towel.
“Is Mr. Olson here?” said Spencer politely.
The woman only stared.
“I’m sorry,” said Spencer. “I’m looking for Mr. Olson. I must have the wrong house. Tak. Bye-bye.”
He drove back out onto the street ever so slowly. Also as he hoped and expected, the Mercedes had vanished.
Clear of Blonduos and once again on the road to Reykjavik, Spencer drove as fast as he could—perhaps a little faster-maintaining the most precarious balance between traction and centrifugal force. Notwithstanding his need to concentrate, Elisabet wanted to talk.
“What is this all about? What was that car?”
“The car was a lovely new Mercedes-Benz sedan, what exact model I can’t say. It followed us out of Akureyri. It contained two of the unloveliest gentlemen you have ever seen. And I would not be surprised if they wanted to kill us, or worse.”
“What?”
“As to what this is all about,” he said, skidding badly in the deep gravel of a curve, “I quite honestly cannot say exactly. The story I came here after does have to do with electric power. Krog is involved. But it’s more than that. It started in Washington. I can’t tell you the rest. Although it’s apparently much more serious and important than I had thought. Our friends in the Mercedes seem to be taking it very seriously.”
“Jack, you are a newspaperman, aren’t you?”
“I am. I have the liver to prove it.”
“But …”
“Newspapermen sometimes get mixed up in things. I appear to be mixed up in something.”
The Mercedes was behind him again in twenty minutes. Though near enough, the men did not try shooting at him. Once more he began to doubt his own judgment. Perhaps they were only Icelanders, friends of Geir Krog. No. He had seen Krog’s quarters, looked at his books, talked to his chess partner. Krog did not have friends like this.
“They’re with us again,” he said. “The old tundra fox here is not as foxy as he thought.”
She looked back, anxious, but not afraid. He could go anywhere with this woman.
“What was that last little village we passed?” he said, flooring the accelerator. “The one with all the goats.”
“Sgaggeres,” she said, trying to hold the map steady.
“Is there another one soon?”
“Yes, but it’s across that little river from us. We won’t go through it.” It passed to their right, off in the distance, their last help. The Mercedes now filled his rearview mirror. But for some rolling ridges and depressions, the land ahead was relatively flat, and the road should have cut directly through it. But instead it swept to the right in a long curve. Spencer remembered. They were at what Elisabet had called the “enchanted place.” Braking sharply, he swung the Bronco off the road and onto the soft, spongy earth. Then, jamming the transmission into four-wheel drive, he ground and lurched up and over the first slope.
“We know that if we keep going we’ll reach the road again,” he said. “But they won’t know that. They won’t know what to do.” He was afraid they would just drive on to the next village and wait. But they weren’t as smart as that. They were, in fact, quite dumb. They had decided to follow him.
Reaching the top of the first slope, they decided on something that was not so dumb. One of them began shooting.
Spencer pulled Elisabet down onto the floor. She crouched on her knees, her head on the seat beside him. When he wasn’t shifting gears, he rested his hand on her hair. But mostly he shifted, spinning and bouncing and swerving the big vehicle over the undulating surface. The Mercedes would struggle on the climbs but gain on him on the level. The goon hanging out the sedan’s right window was aiming very carefully.
A bullet—a large nasty bullet—shattered the rear window, but the angle was high. Spencer looked back and saw that it had torn a big exit hole in the roof.
He roared over another ridge, slewing the Bronco from side to side as he descended the following slope. Just ahead was another ridge, and beyond that a huge saucerlike depression. It seemed a different, darker shade of green from the surrounding turf. And its surface was perfectly flat, or seemed so.
“Are there bogs in Iceland?” he said.
“A few,” she said, lifting her head slightly to look up at him.
Another shot from the Mercedes missed.
“Like the bogs in the English moors?”
“Yes,” she said. “They are all over Iceland. The wider they are, the deeper.”
If bog it was, it wasn’t for wading. Spencer pressed Elisabet’s head back against the seat again.
“Hold on tight.” He took that next, last ridge as fast as he could get the Bronco to go, all four wheels leaving the ground. At the same time he slammed the car into reverse, so that when they landed, the wheels spun backward, slowing their mad careen down the slope enough for Spencer to swerve to the right, just missing the oozing border of that ugly, deadly muck. As Spencer churned the Bronco half-side-ways along the bank, the Mercedes came soaring over the ridge, the man in the window firing another missing shot. The car landed askew and spun, rolling, into the bog. Fearful of more shooting, Spencer kept going, snaking up the slope and over the ridge until the bog and its new guests were out of sight. Then he stopped, leaning his head back over the seat and breathing heavily, wishing his heart would stop its maniac pounding. Elisabet sat up beside him.
