The Valkyrie Project, page 14
“I’m going to go back and make sure of them,” he said, when his breathing had returned to something approximating normal. “Stay here.”
She said nothing, but there was a wild, excited look in her eyes.
Spencer trod his ground carefully, remembering the lessons of a dozen army patrols in as many countries. Crouching, he made a slight circle of the great bog, climbing the slope and peering over the rim of the ridge at a point much removed from where the Bronco had left it.
The Mercedes was on its side, two-thirds submerged and sinking. Spencer could not see the driver, but the other man was half out the open window, holding his gun with one hand, clinging to the door frame with the other. He seemed to be trying to get out, but there was nowhere for him to go. The car was ten or twenty feet from the edge. There was nothing Spencer could do, no way to help.
Help indeed. He should be enjoying this. He found that he was at least fascinated by it, in the clammy curious way he had been in Vietnam. How far was he from the sinking car? A hundred feet? A hundred fifty? He could see the doomed man’s face so clearly. So stoic, so quiet, looking about vaguely like a dying elephant before his collapse. All was so still.
All at once, the man began to scream. A few moments later, the bog mercifully shut him up.
“What was that?” said Elisabet, when he returned to the car.
“They’re gone,” Spencer said. “They’re at the bottom of the bog, wherever that is.” He opened the rear door on his side and unzipped his suitcase. Never in all his whiskey-sodden days had he needed a drink so badly.
“Can you drive this thing?” he asked. “Get us back to the road?”
“Yes, I think so,” said Elisabet. “What are you going to do?”
Spencer dug his hand into the folded clothing until he touched the cold glass surface of the bottle he had yet to open on this trip. Then he moved his hand away.
“I’m going to read a magazine,” he said.
Elisabet had surprisingly little difficulty getting them back to the road. As they skidded down onto the gravel again, she shouted something in Icelandic out the window.
“What was that?” he asked.
“I was just saying thank you to the elves and trolls and giants,” she said.
He smiled and returned to the Scientific American. It was entirely too technical for every word to hold his interest, but he read the introductory passages, and all those Krog had underlined, as well as all the captions. He got the idea. Mankind had come a long way since the crossbow. The particle beam weapon was a crossbow that could hit things twenty-five thousand miles away.
He awakened slowly, not knowing how long he had slept, conscious only of the fact that they were no longer moving. He opened his eyes. They were parked among a great many large rocks near the summit of a bluff. It was late afternoon, but the gloomy overcast that had enveloped their day had pulled apart to admit great shafts of sunlight, suffusing all around him with a golden glow.
Elisabet was outside, standing up at the top of the bluff, her heavy sweater opened to the wind. Spencer joined her.
“Where are we?” he asked. “Why have you left the road?”
“We’re not far from it,” she said. She raised a finger to her lips. “Be still.”
They were overlooking a gigantic amphitheater of a valley, a shallow, mirrorlike lake at its center, the valley’s vividly green sloping sides rising to moss-covered rocky escarpments that in turn reached like cathedrals into a sky of towering clouds.
Elisabet stepped back against him, resting her head against his shoulder, taking his arms and crossing them around her waist. Strands of her hair blew up against his face.
“How did you find this place?” he asked.
“There are a thousand such places in Iceland,” she said. “You have to come upon them at the right time.”
He held her more tightly, pressing his face into her hair. She reached and lifted his hands to her breasts.
“And tomorrow is tomorrow,” she said.
He did not hesitate. His body was throbbing so with blood and warmth he could feel none of the cold. Gently rubbing her breasts, he could tell it was the same for her. He kissed the back of her neck through her hair, then took the folds of her sweater and pulled it back and down. Faster, more urgently, he worked at the buttons of her blouse. Her skirt slipped from her legs—he knew not how. Still with her back to him, she moved away, stepping to the edge of the bluff.
Sometime soon, some endless many times, he would share with her the sundry and marvelous tender little secrets he had learned in a lifetime that until this moment seemed so misspent. But now, in this crystalline instant, he would simply take her, with quick, deep thrusts, pressing himself against her until there was moisture between them and then holding her as tightly as this strange mossy earth held these rocks, and then holding her as softly and gently as he knew how, gazing at the light of the golden slanting sun upon her skin, until they felt the cold again, and the wind.
It was many minutes before they felt the cold.
She was so childlike. He could not imagine that he had ever thought her cool and forbidding, that she could ever have disliked him. He stood up and started to look toward the valley.
“No,” she said, taking his hand. “It will not be the same.”
She had brought a thick Icelandic blanket for the trip and, with the back window shattered, it proved very useful.
He started the engine.
“Your name is John,” she said. “Not Jack, but John.”
“Yes.”
“Then I will call you John.”
She had reached the bluff by means of an old summer road. By the time they had retraced its path to the gravel highway, it was dark enough to turn on the lights.
“We have such a long way to go before Reykjavik,” she said.
“We are not going all the way to Reykjavik,” he said. “We shall go only as far as Borgarnes on the coast.”
“And what will we do there?”
“Visit a sea captain.”
9
Like their Viking forebears, Iceland’s Coast Guard captains were highly independent in their operations, judging their duty where they saw it best. When Captain Ragnarsson heard from his wife that his American newspaper friend from the cod war was in Iceland and wanted to see him, it was a simple matter of anchoring the Heimdallur that night off Borgarnes, his hometown.
Spencer had told Ragnarsson’s wife he only needed the answer to one simple question. Iceland was a long way to come to answer one simple question, and as Ragnarsson remembered, Spencer was not a man to ask simple questions.
Ragnarsson had had more than a dozen foreign journalists aboard his gunboat during the cod war, including a French woman who attempted to seduce at least half his crew, and an alcoholic Dutchman whose luggage contained little more than Bols gin and Dewars scotch. At one point, Ragnarsson had a BBC television crew aboard, videotaping a battering contest with one of the British frigates and cheering all the while for the Icelandic.
The captain remembered Spencer best. He had been the only American to sail with the Icelanders during that nasty conflict, and he had written about Ragnarsson and his little ship for more than two million American readers—a number difficult for an Icelander to comprehend.
But more than that. As can sometimes happen in the compelling circumstance of a battlefield or a few violent days at sea, the two men became fast friends. They had not communicated much in five years, but the Spencer now sitting on Ragnarsson’s couch sipping hot tea was little changed from the man standing boldly on the bridge slugging down whiskey as their gunboat rolled wildly in forty-foot seas.
Ragnarsson’s house was a cozy one, lacking only a cheery fire to place it on England’s Dorset coast. Ragnarsson had a cozy, cheery wife to match—plump, dark-haired, with a smile that never left her eyes, always busy with something, now bringing more tea.
As she set it down, Ragnarsson looked at Spencer and Elisabet. “I’m sorry,” he said. “You would of course like some whiskey.”
Spencer, his arm around Elisabet, hesitated, then leaned back against the couch. “No, thank you,” he said. He moved his arm to hold her more closely.
Spencer began edging toward what had brought him to Ragnarsson’s house. He wished somehow he could talk to Geir Krog. That horrible murder. Could Krog possibly have done it? Could Krog possibly still be in Iceland? Or had he escaped? As a veteran Coast Guardsman, did Ragnarsson think it was remotely possible for Geir Krog to have escaped to sea?
“I thought you had only one simple question?” Ragnarsson said.
“That’s it,” said Spencer.
“The answer is no,” said Ragnarsson. “I was patrolling the east coast that night. There were up to force-twelve winds. No small boat could have survived ten minutes. You remember what that kind of weather is like.”
Spencer nodded.
“Could there have been a larger boat?” he asked. “Could Krog have stowed away?”
“We encountered only one vessel putting to sea that night,” Ragnarsson said. “A small but very hardy Polish trawler. The Waldemar Dulski. It came out of the fjord where the murder was done, but it was not big enough for anyone to have stowed away unseen by the crew.”
“Unless Geir Krog had Polish friends,” Spencer said.
“We followed them, wondering what they were doing at sea in such a great storm,” said Ragnarsson. “They ignored our offer of help, saying they were en route to their home port of Gdansk. Further out to sea they made a rendezvous with one of those big Russian factory trawlers—the kind that your navy finds so suspicious. I think they passed something by breeches buoy. I’m not sure. We watched them for a while, then sought shelter for the night in a nearby fjord. At that point they were beyond my jurisdiction. And I have learned not to meddle with Russians.”
“Did you report this to the police?” Spencer asked.
“I am the police,” Ragnarsson said. “The detectives, the uniformed policemen, the county judges, the Coast Guard—we are all the same.”
“Did you report this to those investigating the girl’s murder?” Spencer said. “Does Magnus Andersson know?”
“If he checked my report,” said the captain. “I file regular reports.”
“But you didn’t seek Andersson out to tell him this?” said Spencer.
“As I said, Jack, I’ve had problems with my superiors for meddling too much with Russians.”
“Could Krog have been on that boat?” Spencer asked.
“Ask yourself,” said Ragnarsson. “Why would he have a Polish trawler standing by so he could kill a girl he had just met a few hours before? Anyway, that Russian factory trawler did not leave the area. It came to Reykjavik. It is in the harbor now. The Stolypin, I think.”
“Krog must still be in Iceland,” Elisabet said.
“Still in Iceland,” Spencer said. “And the Polish trawler may have had nothing to do with it.”
Ragnarsson remembered the glimpsed face in the window of the wheelhouse, the unpleasant voice over the radio. “Or everything to do with it,” the captain said.
The conversation moved on to happier topics. Ragnarsson brought out the bottle of whiskey and poured himself a glass. Spencer and Elisabet still declined. A few minutes later, they went to bed—in a room as cheerful and cozy as the living room, with a curtained window looking out upon the sea and a warm heavy quilt upon the bed. They climbed beneath it naked but did not make love. To hold Elisabet close and warm beneath the thick down quilt—and sleep—was enough for Spencer.
But a dull, thudding throb at the back of his head would not let him sleep. Throb throb throb. Dead dead dead. The blade still hung over him, ever lower.
Chesley was the last woman he had told he loved and meant it. He could have spent the night telling Elisabet a thousand times. But he would not. Not yet. Maybe never.
It was snowing in the morning, and Spencer and Elisabet drove across the new Borgarnes-Akranes bridge unable to see anything but snow and water on either side. When they reached Reykjavik, the sun was shining through the snow. Spencer explained the shattered window and bullet-pierced roof to the rental car agent as some sort of freak accident. The agent appeared to believe him, but he charged him an additional two hundred dollars anyway and warned him it could be more. Spencer had neglected to take out sufficient insurance.
Outside Elisabet’s apartment, Spencer only took her hand. “Go to your detective,” he said. “If he is not aware of Captain Ragnarsson’s report, tell him everything the captain told us. And ask him for protection. Tell him that, thanks to me, you may be in danger. It’s the truth.”
“I’ll be safe,” she said.
“When this is over. In the meantime, ask Magnus Anders-son’s help.”
“All right. Do you really mean to go to Egilsstadir today?”
“Yes. I want to see Krog’s cabin,” he said. “I’ll call you as soon as I get back.”
“And we shall have dinner.”
“And we shall have dinner.”
“And tomorrow is tomorrow.”
He squeezed her hand. With snow falling into their hair, oblivious to the pedestrians stepping around them on the narrow sidewalk, they looked at each other. There was no need to kiss.
Spencer’s next stop was not far—a small leather goods shop on Bergstada Street. It was fairly chic by Icelandic standards, as the price tags indicated. The woman who came out of what appeared to be an office in the rear was extremely handsome-hair so blond it seemed nearly white, pulled back tightly into a tidy Nordic bun. Her blue eyes were wide and friendly, very intelligent, set above wide-boned cheeks. Her skin tanned and weathered from too much sun and wind. Her full figure must have been spectacular when she was a girl. Had there been no Elisabet, Spencer would not have wanted for a female interest in Iceland.
“Mrs. Kekkonen?”
Her eyes discreetly informed him that he was presumptuous to consider her married just because of her age, which was near his own. Her smile forgave him. He liked her at once.
“I am Evi Kekkonen,” she said.
“I’m John Spencer. A friend of George Peterson. He arranged for a package to be sent here for me.”
“Oh, yes,” she said. “It came yesterday. All very rush. Many, many stamps and postage markings.” She went back to the office. Through the doorway, Spencer saw what looked to be stairs, doubtless leading to living quarters above.
“It’s heavy,” she said, setting the package on the counter.
“Books,” he told her. This was ludicrous. Why would anyone rush books to a tourist in Iceland—at an address other than his own hotel?
“They must be quite valuable.”
“Yes. Have you a bathroom?”
Of course. The tourist would like a bathroom in which to read the valuable books he had had rushed to him from America. But he wanted to open the package there. Outside, or even in his hotel room, it could arouse curiosity.
Evi Kekkonen’s lovely eyes were brimming with inquiry, but she remained courteously discreet. Perhaps George Peterson sent many nutty friends there. “This way, please,” she said. For such a large-boned woman, she walked with an easy grace.
Alone in the bath, Spencer locked the door and tore open the wrappings. The pistol was intact and undamaged. He inserted the loaded clip and stuck it into his belt behind his back. The wrapping paper he stuffed in the wastebasket. No one was going to search Evi Kekkonen’s wastebasket. All that remained was the disposition of the hollowed-out books. Obviously, they could not go in the wastebasket.
A wonderfully intelligent idea occurred to him. It was a leather goods store; he would buy a briefcase to carry them in and thus explain to any loitering sailor in a watch cap why he had come to Evi Kekkonen’s. And if the briefcase were searched? How would he explain the hollowed-out books? He would put something logical in them. He would stop at the government liquor store and buy some pint bottles of whiskey. Wasn’t he the alcoholic journalist?
He bought the most expensive briefcase she had—just because he liked her.
The Icelandair flight to Egilsstadir was in one of those small, cramped, and occasionally terrifying commuter passenger planes that Spencer had habitually avoided using in the United States. The view, however, was magnificent, the flight path taking them past the still-smoldering volcano Hekla and the northern rim of the great Vatnajokull glacier. Somewhere in that icy, barren wilderness was Geir Krog.
At the little Egilsstadir airport, Spencer called into town for a hired car. While waiting, he made his daily check-in call to Perspective magazine in New York, collect. His conversation with Clepich lasted less than three minutes. All that mattered was Clepich’s last comment: The deadline might be moved up. They wanted Spencer’s Iceland article as soon as possible.
Spencer left his car and driver in the little village of Heklafjordur and walked up the long hill to Krog’s cabin. He was surprised to find it unguarded.
Even the most sensational crimes were solved only through a high tolerance for frustration and tedium. Day after day, Magnus Andersson had examined and reexamined the same details, the same statements, the same evidence—finding nothing new, making no progress. Then a man believed to be Krog—and it absolutely had to be Krog—had stolen an airplane from the Egilsstadir airport and utterly vanished. Andersson had gone to Egilsstadir. He and his detectives had interviewed more than two dozen people. Andersson had studied the ranges and flight characteristics of small aircraft. He had had the surrounding area thoroughly searched. But in the end, all he knew was that Krog had stolen an airplane and vanished.
