The Valkyrie Project, page 21
He tilted back in his chair, swiveling slightly to the side to glare at a framed mercator projection of the world on the wall. Except for the map—and photographs of Thorn’s family and Thorn himself, dressed in an Air Force uniform—the office walls were decorated with surprisingly tasteful modern paintings.
“I’ve got to pull John Spencer,” he said. “I’ve got to put Ice One on hold and let NavInt take over. I half-expect that before the day is out I’m going to get orders to shut down our whole fucking station.”
“That might be for the best, William.”
Thorn ignored this. He tilted even farther back and chewed on his cigar for a long moment.
“You might be wise to leave Spencer in place and just remove Whelan,” Mendelsohn said.
“I’m not going to pull Spencer yet,” Thorn said. “Hugh went underground in Brussels and we’ve lost communication. I’m not going to pull an agent without going through his control.”
“What will the deputy say about that?”
“I’ve got the order out. He ought to be satisfied with that. SOP is SOP. How are you coming with our mole?”
“Mole plural,” said Mendelsohn. “As Hugh suggests. I detect several. There, here. I believe the navy is involved.”
“Jesus.”
“I have no names.”
“You know why this happens?” said Thorn. He brought his hand down hard on the desk top, scattering cigar ash over his papers. “This happens because all the great minds around here never pay any attention to little places like Iceland, that’s why. We’re almost as bad as the State Department!”
“I would advise you to shut down Iceland station, Bill. All of it. Immediately. I myself would find it useful to have a conversation with Whelan and that young man of his, Baker. They’ve let matters get too far out of hand.”
“I don’t want to do anything until I talk with Hugh,” Thorn said, rising. “Come on. Get your files and we’ll drive over to the safe house. I could use a beer.”
Commander Richards, wearing civilian clothes and jammed into a rented Volkswagen, sat parked half a block from the Polish embassy. In the car and on foot, he had been following Truscott much of the morning. The stops had included the American embassy, which was authorized, and the bar of the Hotel Thor, which was not. Throughout this tour, Truscott had been carrying a rolled-up magazine, which he gripped very tightly.
Making what he hoped was an intelligent guess, Richards had turned the Volkswagen off the street he had been following Truscott along, sped around the block, and pulled up here, near the embassy of Poland. Truscott had already passed by the Soviet embassy. Perhaps Richards would have better luck here.
Truscott came around the corner and then crossed the street, looking both ways for more than cars. There were no pedestrians in view. Reaching the embassy door, he paused, then darted inside.
He was out again in five minutes, peering around the doorway, then hurrying away. Richards gave him another two minutes, then turned the Volkswagen around in the street and sped away, reaching Keflavik in less time than he would have thought possible.
Even if Truscott were only minutes behind him, minutes were all that Richards needed. He slipped into the petty officer’s room, shut the door quietly behind him, and went quickly for the laundry bag. The pornographic books were just where they had been, but the message about John Spencer was gone. Richards checked twice.
Truscott came out of the embassy without that magazine.
Magnus Andersson had been to the hospital to see his superior, who would be back at his job within the month. That was far from soon enough.
They had recovered the car from the bog in the north. There were two bodies in it, as Elisabet had said—the driver a Latvian resident of Iceland, the other a man with a Czech passport. The latter had taken a room in Akureyri for the entire month. In it, Andersson’s men had found a suitcase containing two extra pistols, ammunition, several wiretap devices, an infrared night scope, and a small amount of plastic explosive. Either customs or the Coast Guard had been less than vigilant.
Autopsies showed both men had drowned. The car had been rented in Reykjavik, to the man with the Czech passport. That was all Andersson knew.
The airplane Krog had stolen had been found on a hillside south of Reykjavik, near Grindavik. Except for crumpled landing gear and a bullet hole through the upper fuselage, it was remarkably undamaged. Krog was apparently as good a pilot as his reputation indicated. And there was no doubt now that he had taken the plane. His fingerprints were all over it.
His fingerprints were also found in Evi Kekkonen’s apartment and store. There was no doubt in Andersson’s mind that Krog had been there shortly before her murder and that Krog was now in Reykjavik or near it—hiding with friends or holed up somewhere in the hills to the east, north, or south. Anders-son had sent teams of detectives around to those on his list of Krog’s known friends in Reykjavik, and they, of course, had found or learned nothing. He had the Coast Guard’s Fokker patrol plane and helicopter fly searches over the countryside. As he expected, they detected no sign of Krog. A distant campfire had been sighted by a farmer, but it was put out shortly afterward and could not be located in the daylight. Not since the days of medieval outlawry had anyone been so elusive.
As the newspapers had it, Krog was no better than a medieval berserk. All Iceland must believe that he had gone crazy and was killing women out of some lunatic frenzy. At least two other women Krog had known—and slept with—had asked for police protection and were receiving it. Hundreds of others who had not known Krog were just as nervous. The minister of justice was almost distraught. If Krog was costing the Workers’ and Farmers’ Party votes, as the American Spencer seemed to believe, his being at large was also hurting the government politically. The minister wanted him apprehended by the election, or else.
Andersson wasn’t sure he’d be able to accommodate the minister—or that he wanted to. The two dead men in the bog had made up his mind: Krog was not the killer. But the minister of justice would not find the acting superintendent’s surmise exactly sufficient. Neither would the newspapers, and neither, in his hardheaded policeman’s way, could Andersson himself. Doubts did not close files.
He went to his office window, clasping his hands behind his back as he gazed off in the direction of downtown Reykjavik. Elisabet was in the United States, but she could be no more distant from him if she were back in her apartment—or sitting here in his office.
Krog seemed an instrument of the gods, the vexing gods. Andersson had had his cold dark life turned warm and bright and beautiful by one evening’s encounter with Elisabet. The next morning there had come the murder and Krog, and Andersson’s life had been a misery ever since. Krog had brought Spencer to Iceland. And Peterson. Andersson was certain of that. Krog was the reason for the two men in the bog. Krog was the reason for terrible things yet to come.
Bring Krog in and it would all go away. He was sure.
Spencer would go away. He’d see to it.
But now he needed Spencer to bring Krog in. It was the lamentable truth.
Andersson returned to his chair with a weary sigh. Loosening his tie, which he almost never did, he opened the huge file once again. He would do what the wisest policemen always did when frustrated: Go back to the beginning.
He went back to the Heklafjordur reports and statements. He was so tired of them, had read them so many times, that each word brought a vague pain. He let the words blur and began to skim, then suddenly stopped. Sitting up straight, he reread the paragraph he had just finished. It was part of the statement made by the drunken old fisherman down by the Heklafjordur wharf. He said he had seen three strangers come off the Polish trawler. Three.
The grocer had seen just two.
Jahn was still dressed in dirty sailor clothes, for he had just returned from the harbor waterfront, where he had helped excite the daily mob of anti-NATO protesters into a binge of throwing stones at the Bacchus. There had been injuries, which were all to the good, and a few arrests, which guaranteed press coverage. Iceland was a piece of cake.
Gorushchenko was late, obnoxiously late. Irritated, Jahn finally got up from his chair and began to pace about the cellar room. A new case of vodka had been brought in. Jahn opened one of the bottles and filled a tall glass. He took it back to the table and began looking through the American men’s sex magazine that had come his way that morning. There were a few admitted flaws in the socialist system, and the official opposition to such magazines was one of them.
Jahn pulled out the centerfold just as Gorushchenko came through the door. He laid the magazine upon the table faceup and open. Gorushchenko, frowning, glanced at it without changing his expression. Looking at Jahn’s glass, he found one as tall and filled it. He drank a third of it in one gulp, belched, and swore.
“I am due a progress report, Colonel,” he said, reaching for his cigarettes.
“We are making progress.”
“Ah, yes. The murder of that Finnish woman. An article about this in several American newspapers, written by John Spencer. Have you read it?” He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a telecopied clipping.
Jahn waved his hand. “I read that,” he said. “No worry.”
“No worry? Yes?” Gorushchenko’s cheeks creased with the faint touch of a smile. He sat down clumsily.
“Both the murder and the news story will attract Krog’s attention,” Jahn said. “They are provocative. They may bring him to the surface.”
Gorushchenko grunted. He looked at the centerfold upside down and grunted again.
“Spencer is without doubt an agent for the CIA,” Jahn said. “I have received confirmation of this from our American sources.”
“Yes? And you will now finally eliminate this Spencer?”
“I have always had the option to eliminate Spencer. But he is our best route to Krog. We must keep him alive for that.”
Gorushchenko leaned closer. Jahn could see food between his teeth as he opened his mouth to speak.
“Listen, you Prussian bastard,” he said. “You are supposed to be the tidy one. Clean and neat, they said. Trust everything to Jahn, they said. He will see you through.”
He leaned even closer. “I want things neat and clean and tidy, you prick. I want those people dead, soon!”
Jahn, flushed, restrained his temper. “It’s more complicated now,” he said. “Spencer has brought a friend here, an Icelandic-American lawyer named George Peterson. He’s the honorary Icelandic consul in Baltimore. Spencer has gone to Luxembourg, ostensibly to procure data for his article, apparently to contact more friends.”
“‘Apparently’? Don’t you know?”
“We had a man on him. He was found in the Alzette River with his throat cut, just hours ago.”
“Spencer did this?”
“Possibly.”
“Kill him!”
“Not until we have dealt with Krog. Krog knows a great deal, Herr Botschafter. More than I believed. He sent another letter to Peterson which we retrieved from his hotel. It said more than I should like to see written down anywhere concerning postelection agreements for Polish aluminum plants.”
“You’ve recovered this letter?”
“The letter, yes. But that’s the last we know of Krog. He named a rendezvous in the letter. We waited there, but no one appeared.”
“You should not have killed the Kekkonen woman, you stupid piss brain!”
“Herr Botschafter! Must I remind you of your orders? Of my orders? If I fail, you may stuff me down the crater of volcano Hekla. If all goes well—and all is going well—we shall both soon be enjoying daschas in some warm and pleasant clime.”
Gorushchenko glanced down at the magazine. “Does Krog know about our charged-particle beam weapons?”
“I believe so.”
“Will you get to him in time?”
“Of course. You know my credentials, Herr Botschafter. I am tired of having to remind you of them.”
“You should not have killed the Kekkonen woman. You should not have killed the girl on the east coast. Now that there are people among us whom it is imperative that you kill, you do nothing. You are provoking me, Colonel Jahn.”
“You carry out your assignment, Herr Botschafter, and I will carry out mine. There is no need for any more of these meetings. Our conversations are the same. I am going to notify my general of my problems. I plan to request complete autonomy, or transfer.”
Gorushchenko glanced one more time at the magazine. Jahn, rising to leave, snatched it away.
14
The Icelandair DC-8 banked for its approach to Keflavik over a west of Iceland basking in deceptively bright sunshine. Spencer stepped off the airplane into a bitterly cold wind that slapped at his clothing. He might as well have been in Chicago.
He wished he were in Chicago.
In Reykjavik he stopped at the bookstore near his hotel for the latest newspapers, then went directly to his room. As best as he could determine with his meager Icelandic, there was nothing new. The conservatives in power were promising drastic action against inflation. Erikisson had made a flat promise to reduce it by half.
Peterson was not there and had left no message. On the odd chance that Elizabet was not still in the United States, he called her apartment, but there was no answer. He stretched out on his bed, looking through the newspapers more slowly, wondering whether Karin would call. Wherever she was, she did not.
Everyone was expecting Krog to come to him except probably Krog, the phantom out in the wilds, who still might not know a Jack Spencer existed. Spencer had a new plan to seek him out—two, in fact, but both required George Peterson, and Karin. And there was a third possibility.
He drained his glass. He would place a newspaper advertisement in the “Help Wanted” columns: “Wanted, electrical engineer; knowledge of sailplanes, chess; travel to America.” If Krog were anywhere in Iceland, he would be reading newspapers. He would be reading every newspaper he could find or steal.
Could the KGB know of the powers of advertising?
Sverrir Axelsson saw Spencer coming out of Kvoldbladid’s advertising office. There was no avoiding him. Later, over two glasses of Iceland’s pointless beer, there was no avoiding the obvious question.
“What are you advertising for?” Axelsson asked. “A house? You’ll find there’s quite a waiting list.”
“Why should I be advertising for a house?” Spencer said.
At first, Axelsson responded only with his strangely boyish grin. “For you and Elisabet Bjornsdottir,” he said finally.
Spencer had been thinking about Elisabet much of the time, but he had never thought about a house.
“Elisabet has a very nice apartment,” Spencer said.
Axelsson could go and read the ad for himself. Axelsson was a very smart man.
“I placed a help-wanted ad,” Spencer said.
“Help-wanted ad? You need help with your story? I will help you.” He grinned again.
“Trusting you’ll keep this confidential,” Spencer said, waiting until Axelsson nodded, “I’m using the ad as a sort of code. I’m trying to get someone to contact me.”
“Geir Krog,” said Axelsson.
Spencer’s hand trembled. “What?”
“Geir Krog, I said,” said Axelsson. “I meant it as a joke, but I see by your face that it is not. You are trying to reach Krog.”
“My bureau in Washington is very interested in the story,” Spencer said. “It’s got everything—politics, NATO, sex, the chase. I’m going to try for an interview.”
“Once again you involve yourself in our affairs, my friend.”
“Strictly business. A good story.”
“My paper is running an editorial addressed to Krog,” Axelsson said. “It asks him to give up and come in.”
“We call that ‘ivory towerism’ in America.”
“It is an appeal to reason.”
“Do your people think he’s a murderer? Do they know anything the police don’t know?”
Axelsson shrugged. “No one thinks he killed the Kekkonen woman. Not even in the Dark Ages was there ever a murder like that in Iceland. But Krog has to come in. People are becoming frightened. It will affect the election.”
“That’s my theory,” said Spencer, “but I can’t get anyone around here to buy it.”
“I do,” said Axelsson. “All this is mixed up with the election, as were the troubles down at the harbor. It’s as bad as it was during the cod war.”
“Protest demonstrations.”
“A near-riot yesterday,” Axelsson said. “There may be another one today. I have to go down there now. Would you like to come?”
Spencer couldn’t take any more fruitless waiting in his hotel room. “Sure,” he said, rising. He stopped. “Sverrir, you won’t tip anyone off about the ad? I’m using a box number at your paper for responses.”
“If Krog should walk in himself, of course I can’t guarantee anything,” Axelsson said, smiling. “But if something comes in, I’ll let you know immediately. And only you.”
Some long low clouds were streaming among the mountains up the coastline to the north, but the strong south wind seemed to be keeping them away from Reykjavik. There were whitecaps in the harbor, even on the sheltered side of the crowded quay. Spencer and Axelsson stood on the black gravel shore opposite, watching the crowd build and press closer to the policemen guarding the frigates.
Spencer had witnessed mob confrontations in the Memphis ghetto, at the 1968 Chicago convention, in Bogside and Belfast, in Mexico City and Teheran. Now Iceland. There was a dreadful, wearying sameness to them, the same theatrics, the same undercurrent of menace and incipient mayhem, the same chants uttered seemingly in the same language.
“There’s a rumor the NATO flotilla commander wants to pull out and end this ‘goodwill visit’ early,” said Axelsson. “But the British captains supposedly will have none of it, not for the sake of these demonstrators.”
“Rule Britannia,” said Spencer.
The mob grew larger but seemed content to chant and mill about. Someone was carrying a wooden horse’s head on a pole.
