The Lure

48 Execution

Petrie was on his second coffee when he heard the distant sound of a vehicle. From the bedroom verandah, he watched a white Transit van toiling up the hairpin bends, occasionally crashing gears. He felt a sudden surge of nausea, for a panicky moment wanted to run into the mountains, had to consciously go through the icy logic again.

He thought they probably wouldn’t kill him here, in Callaghan’s place. More likely they would string him along, tell him some story about transporting him through desolate routes to the safety of the States in exchange for the disk. That way they would keep him docile all through the desolation until the last moments.

The weather had worsened; the fluffy clouds over the peaks had reared up into towering black cumulus, and grey streaks under them told of falling snow.

The van turned into the driveway and pulled to a halt. There was slush under its mudguards. Elmonet was printed on its side, with a red arrow giving the impression that Elmonet was a courier service. However, the two men who stepped out didn’t look like couriers and it didn’t take two men to deliver a parcel. One of them, a man with a neat black beard to match his black T-shirt, looked up but gave no nod or wave.

Executioners aren’t required to be friendly, Petrie thought. He took a last look at the mountains before turning back into the chalet.

‘I’m Amos.’ The man had an American accent and a neutral handshake.

‘Of course you are. I suppose your friend is Obadiah. Do you want coffee?’

‘No, thank you.’

Of course not. All that DNA left around.

‘But finish yours.’ The man wasn’t trying too hard to be friendly but that might just have been tiredness after a long journey.

‘Thank you.’

Petrie thought, This is bizarre. Civilised conversation with the man who’s about to murder me.

‘Well, Dr Petrie.’ The man leaned back perilously on the kitchen chair. Tom could hear footsteps on the floor above. ‘I understand you have a disk.’

‘Uhuh.’

‘And where is it?’

Petrie sipped at his coffee. ‘Somewhere safe.’

The man grinned. ‘Posted to a friend, maybe?’

‘There’s always that possibility, although that would just shift the burden. Not that a friend or anyone else could read it. We encrypted the message. The password is as long as your arm. Even the NSA would take centuries to get into it.’

‘I see. And where is this electronic key, Doctor? Somewhere safe, you say?’

Petrie tapped his head.

The man’s smile had a trace of sadness. ‘I wouldn’t call that safe, my friend, not at all.’

Petrie didn’t respond. Vashislav had set up a duress password, one which would instruct the computer to erase the disk. For contingencies, the Russian had said. The disk’s equivalent of a suicide pill.

‘The deal is that you give us the disk and we get you to the States.’

Someone was clattering down the open-plan stairs. ‘And as I say, the disk is no good without me. It’s both or neither. How do you plan to do that?’

‘The High Tatras straddles Poland, Russia and Slovakia. Here we’re very close to the border with Poland. There are lots of trails, this being a National Park. Some of the routes are used by Russian Mafia for drug-running into Poland. Assuming you have the disk here, the plan is to take you across the border to Cracow and then on to Warsaw.’

‘What happens in Warsaw?’ Petrie asked.

‘You do have the disk here? It sure complicates life if it’s in Bratislava or someplace.’

‘Tell me what happens in Warsaw.’

‘Don’t fence with me, friend. We’re here to help. In Warsaw I have contacts. You’ll stay snug and cosy in a flat in the Old Quarter for a couple of weeks while we fix up documentation. After that it’s a one-way ticket to New York.’

It was all reassuringly plausible.

‘Okay, the disk is here. I’ll get it.’

There was a tap on the door. A tall man in his mid-thirties was waving a silver disk. ‘Is this it?’

Amos said, ‘There’s no time to waste. Contrary to anything Callaghan may have told you, this is not, repeat not, a safe house. People will be checking up on him and this is an obvious place to check out. Bad people could arrive here at any moment.’

‘Maybe they already have, Amos.’

Amos gave Petrie a thoughtful look. ‘Well, I guess you’ll just have to trust us on that.’

‘What about Callaghan and Alice?’

‘They’ve been taken care of.’

Petrie slid into the passenger seat. The van smelled of stale cigarettes and the floor was covered with sweet papers. Amos took the wheel with a grunt, wiping a clear patch on the windscreen with his hand. Obadiah sat in the back, and slammed the door shut. He was clutching a black canvas bag. Petrie tried not to think about what it might hold.

The road levelled and joined another narrow one taking them north. The churning black cloud on the horizon had now reached the zenith and looked remarkably like a Plinian explosion from some volcano. Amos put his foot down and Petrie fantasised that they were fleeing from a pyroclastic flow. He’d have preferred that.

The High Tatras, Petrie was learning, consisted of forested tracks, chairlifts and ski slopes. Many of the side roads were closed. There was a trickle of cars and the occasional bus. From time to time Obadiah, his finger on a map, would issue some terse instruction. Apart from that he was effectively mute. Maybe, Petrie thought, Obadiah saw himself in the traditional mould of the Western hero; others gabbled, he rode god-like and aloof like Gary Cooper.

Following a one-word instruction from Obadiah, Amos turned left and was confronted by a track with a chain across it. Obadiah said, ‘Road’s closed.’

Amos gave Petrie a look. Petrie jumped out and unhooked the chain. He thought that a closed track through a dense forest was the perfect place for murder. He wondered how long it would be before his body was discovered, whether it would be identified. He wondered what Priscilla and Kavanagh and his parents would think as his absence stretched from days to weeks and then to months. The snow was about three inches deep and light flurries were coming down.

The road was steep and the van slithered its way up through the forest track. More than once it threatened to leave the path. The pyroclastic flow had finally caught up with them and the falling snow thickened as they ascended. Amos was gripping the steering wheel and pushing his face up against the arc of visibility created by the wipers. Petrie looked into the forest but saw only darkness. He could easily have jumped out and run.

After about twenty minutes of climbing, a beep came from inside Obadiah’s black bag. ‘Message.’

Petrie had forgotten all about Vashislav’s phone. Obadiah seemed to think the message was public property. He read it aloud:

‘You’re just good friends?’ Obadiah asked. Petrie ignored him.

‘Who’s this Unur?’ Amos wanted to know.

‘Forget it,’ Petrie snapped. ‘How can the stupid woman be broadcasting like this? I warned her.’

‘Your friend won’t last,’ said Amos. ‘Not more’n a day or two.’

And how long have I got? Petrie kept the thought to himself. They drove under a pair of thick metal cables. The trees were thinning and then the van was suddenly above the treeline, and the road was levelling out. There was a building with narrow slotted windows and a tall control mast studded with little antennae. The snow around it was pristine and there were no cars.

Amos said, ‘This is it.’

Icy air blew around the van as he slid open the door. Petrie stepped out. His heart was thudding in his chest. They were on a plateau. Conifers fell steeply away on all sides. A single-file track led down through the trees, pointing to the north — he thought it was the north. On the horizon, beyond the track, he could make out a line of peaks, glimpsed through the snow flurries.

Amos caught Petrie’s look. He said, ‘Poland.’

The van door slammed shut. Obadiah, with his black canvas bag.

Petrie said, ‘It’s cold.’

‘After you,’ said Amos, pointing to the track.

There was nothing else to be done. Petrie headed down, snow getting into his shoes and wetting his feet. He heard the men at his back, their breathing heavy with exertion. He wondered when it would come, what it would be like.

Petrie wondered, and he thought, and he hoped.

He wondered about the signallers. Were they living creatures, human-like? Were they thinking machines, having supplanted organic life millions of years ago? Was he right about the probe in the Oort cloud and was the probe in it just an insensate robot, some super-powerful computer? Or by some trick of time beyond imagination, did the signal really come from the Whirlpool galaxy, sent to us before we existed?

He thought, what a way to end! To have been offered the interstellar hand, to have almost touched it, and yet to have sunk back into the slime.

And he hoped that, when they got to Freya, she wouldn’t suffer.

The corpse was sprawled stomach-down on a flat, icy boulder, as if it had been kneeling before execution. It wore a black hooded fleece, heavy gloves, thickly padded trousers and furry, knee-length boots. Its face was expressionless. Its lips were thin and cruel, and its small black eyes stared unblinkingly ahead as if fixed on the Hardangerfjord far below.

The waters of this fiord were black and heavy, and speckled with little ice floes. Across the water, mountains glowed white under a sky dotted with stars and auroral curtains, dancing and shimmering, silent and awesome. Up here, on the roof of the world, Thor and Odin were a tangible presence.

In the Arctic cold, any corpse more than a few hours old would have solidified. Cracks would have split its internal organs and its cell walls would have burst, as the water they held expanded and turned to ice. But then, in the near-dark, something moved. It was a slow, careful, barely discernible movement, but it was there: a finger and thumb were adjusting a black, knurled knob. The corpse was alive after all.

The man standing next to the prone body was identically dressed, except that a scarf covered his mouth and nose. He was shivering violently and flapping his arms. The scarf muffled his voice, but failed to conceal its tension. ‘Range?’

The corpse pressed a button and frosty breath drifted through the line of a red laser beam. ‘Two kilometres. Just under.’

‘Can you do it?’

‘Of course.’

‘Cold air’s denser. Bullets have a different trajectory.’

‘You live and learn.’

‘Look, if you miss…’

‘I don’t miss.’

‘… she’ll run like a jack rabbit. You’ll only get one shot.’

‘Shut up.’

‘I can’t stand much more of this cold.’

The rifle, on a little tripod, was a precision instrument. It had been custom-built by the Tanyard Springs gunsmiths in Texas. From its origins in their Honey Grove factory, it had travelled in the boot of a car to Colombia, for service with one of the major drug families who had been having trouble with a judge. From there it had crossed water to Kingston, Jamaica, where it had seen action from the roof of a Trench Town slum. Then it had travelled back to the States where, for a few hours, it had lived in a large South Carolina mansion. In an attic of this house a fine lasergrip sight, product of the Crimson Trace Corporation, had been added to the barrel. Having been fired just once — its owner regarded repetition as bad business practice — the rifle crossed the Atlantic in a private yacht to Northern Ireland, part of a large consignment of rifles and pistols. Its trail then led to a flat in the Fifth arrondissement in Paris and at last, by train and car, to seventy degrees north, inside the Arctic Circle.

The rifle was loaded with a single bullet, reflecting the marksman’s confidence. While the 300 FAB Magnum was a popular choice amongst his peers, the rifleman preferred a 173 grain HV. This was purchased from a source in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. It was a 30-calibre bullet, with an exit speed of 3650 feet per second, quite capable of stopping an elephant or piercing body armour. In a few minutes, if all went well, the powder in the bullet would be detonated and the shocked vapour would propel the soft-nosed head through the cold, dense air on a precise trajectory to the target’s skull, spreading brain and bone fragments across the gritted road.

‘Switch off the laser, you fool. You want someone to see it?’ The man stopped flapping his arms and picked up his night-vision binoculars. A thin road, already gritted, led into the town below from the left. At the town’s entrance was an open yard. In it, half a dozen big diesel trucks were throbbing, the noise drifting faintly up to them. Steam from their exhausts rose up to roof height and disappeared into the blackness. Over the door of a single-storeyed building in the yard, harsh lights illuminated the words Henrik Hedstrom.

There was nothing to say what business Henrik Hedstrom was in. For all the waiting assassins cared, Henry Headstrong was Santa Claus. What mattered was that the target had hitched a lift in a Hedstrom truck and was heading this way; that she would get off either in the street or the yard; and that for a few moments, while she was saying her farewells to the driver, she would be a static target.

The man said again, ‘I’m going to die of fucking cold.’ He swung his binoculars to the right. Next to the yard was a post office, and then a two-storeyed timber house, glowing yellow in the streetlights. Pastel-coloured wooden houses lined the road, which hugged the fiord to the point where a massive rocky outcrop hid the view. At intervals there were boat-houses, and a mile away a pier jutted into the dark water. Smoke from overnight fires curled into the sky. In a few houses, chinks of light filtered through shuttered windows. One room had its shutters open and lights on, and it blazed into the darkness like a searchlight. The man peered into it, hoping to see something interesting like a woman undressing, but there was only shabby green wallpaper and a wooden dressing-table to be seen.

Somewhere below, a dog howled, wolf-like; answering howls came from around the little town. The noise died down. ‘What if he takes her past the yard?’

The corpse grunted. ‘Will you shut up? You want me to miss?’

‘Not with what we’re paying you.’

The marksman said, ‘It’s not enough. I’m losing my nuts.’

His nervous companion had no time to wonder if the statement was intended literally. His binoculars were picking up headlights, far to the left, where the road appeared round the edge of a mountain. His mouth was dry with fear and he could hardly get the words out: ‘Here she comes.’