Michael Ridpath - 66 Degrees North

‘You have to tell her not to,’ said Sindri. ‘She’ll just get herself locked up.’

‘She thinks there might be another victim,’ said Björn. ‘She wants to stop us before we get to one.’

‘She thinks , she doesn’t know ,’ said Sindri.

‘Yes. But she’s going to talk to them. I know she is.’

‘So what are you going to do?’ asked Ísak quietly.

Björn took a deep breath. ‘I’m going to take her away for a couple of days. There’s a hut I know in one of the mountain passes near Grundarfjördur. It’s totally isolated. If I can keep her there for tomorrow and the day after, that will be long enough.’

‘Until we’ve dealt with Ingólfur Arnarson you mean?’ said Sindri.

Björn nodded.

‘How are you going to persuade her to go there?’ Ísak asked.

Björn winced. ‘Charm. Persuasiveness. And if that doesn’t work, Rohypnol.’

‘Rohypnol? Where did you get that?’ asked Sindri.

‘A mate in Reykjavík. A fisherman.’

‘You have dodgy mates.’

Björn shrugged. ‘Don’t we all?’

‘OK,’ said Ísak. ‘That’s fine for the next couple of days. But what happens after that?’

The student was really irritating Björn. But that was the key question. ‘Ingólfur Arnarson is our last target, right? The climax. Once he has been dealt with I can persuade Harpa there is no point in going to the police. There will be no one left at risk. All she will be doing is putting herself and the rest of us in jail.’

‘Do you think she’ll go with that?’ asked Sindri.

‘She might.’

‘And if she doesn’t?’ Ísak asked.

Björn shrugged. ‘I don’t know. It seems to me the police are going to catch us anyway. They are getting closer. They’ve started asking questions about Ísak. Once we’ve got Ingólfur Arnarson maybe we should just accept what’s coming to us.’

‘No!’ said Ísak. ‘When we started this we never intended to give ourselves up at the end. That’s why we chose to operate abroad. The aim was always to walk away once we were finished.’

‘Maybe we’ll start something,’ said Sindri. ‘You know, a real revolution, not a pots-and-pans one.’

‘I think it will take more time,’ said Ísak. ‘It seems to me that the people are too busy apologizing to the British.’

‘How do you know?’ said Sindri. ‘You’ve been in London.’

‘I can read the Icelandic news sites on the Internet.’

‘Yeah, well, there’s other stuff on the web. Some people are getting really angry. There’s an Icesave meeting this afternoon. We’ll see what happens there.’

‘Are you going?’ said Ísak.

‘Of course I’m going,’ said Sindri. ‘I want to be there when it happens.’

Ísak leaned forward. ‘Look, Sindri. I believe that capitalism is dead as much as you do. But whereas Marx and Engels thought it would die through oppressing the workers, it turns out that it is strangling itself through debt. And it’s here in Iceland where there is way too much debt. We’ve OD’d, we’re the first to go. But it’s going to take time for the people to realize that. Which is why we mustn’t be caught. We need to be around for the next few years to see the revolution through.’

Björn watched the two of them argue. He had no views on a revolution. The idea had appealed briefly at first, but all he had really wanted to do was to make sure that the bastards who had ruined his country were brought to justice. Not all of them, that was impossible, but enough of them to make the point.

‘Which brings me back to Harpa,’ Ísak said. ‘We need a better plan.’

‘Like what?’ said Björn. ‘You’re not suggesting we kill her, are you?’

Ísak held Björn’s eyes.

‘Of course Ísak isn’t suggesting that we kill her,’ Sindri said. ‘Are you, Ísak?’

‘No,’ said Ísak, without conviction.

‘Because she’s a totally innocent bystander,’ Björn said. ‘I mean Julian Lister deserves it. Óskar deserved it. Even Gabríel Örn deserved it. But not Harpa.’

‘Of course not,’ said Sindri. ‘Let’s figure it out once Ingólfur Arnarson has been dealt with, eh?’

They agreed to leave the Pearl one at a time. Björn went first, he had things to do.

Sindri and Ísak stared out over the airfield and the Atlantic beyond.

‘You know we are going to have to do something about Harpa,’ Ísak said. ‘Once he drugs her and drags her off somewhere, she’s not going to keep quiet.’

‘She might,’ said Sindri.

‘She won’t,’ said Ísak. ‘You know she won’t.’

‘We can’t kill her, Ísak. Björn’s right. She’s innocent. I can convince myself that killing Óskar or Julian Lister is necessary, that they deserve to die. But not Harpa. She was just the wrong person at the wrong time.’

‘Sindri, it would be nice if the world worked like that, but you know it doesn’t. If a revolution is to be successful, its leaders must be ruthless. You know that. You’ve read your history. Lenin, Trotsky, Mao, Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, even the Africa National Congress in South Africa. There are times when innocent people have to die for the revolution to succeed. Sure, you keep those deaths to a minimum. But you don’t back away from them. Because if you do, you are letting down the people.’

‘Yeah, but this is Iceland, not Russia.’

‘Sindri, I’ve read your book. Three times. It’s good, it’s very good. My father is a member of the Independence Party. He was a Minister. I’ve seen the complacency of the establishment in Iceland, the way they have been seduced by the capitalists, the way that what was one of the most decent, egalitarian societies in Europe has changed into one of the most unequal. My father and his mates were responsible for that. Capitalism is a sickness, and our country has got that sickness very bad. We’re close to death.’

Sindri frowned.

‘You can’t be squeamish, Sindri. You of all people should know that. You taught me that. From the moment that banker Gabríel Örn died, we crossed a line. We can’t go back over it now, not after Óskar Gunnarsson. We’re committed. But at least we are doing it all for a purpose. Don’t sabotage that purpose now. Otherwise everything else we have done becomes a waste of time. Then we really will have been murderers.’

Sindri shook his head and folded his arms. ‘I won’t be a part of killing anybody.’ He corrected himself. ‘Anybody who’s innocent.’

Ísak smiled. ‘Fair enough. I’ll take care of it. I’ve got to disappear anyway, I may as well go up to Grundarfjördur. If I don’t do it there will be no revolution. Capitalism will crush Iceland. And it will be our fault. We will be responsible. Are you going to stop me?’

Sindri didn’t say anything. He avoided Ísak’s eyes.

‘I’m going now,’ said Ísak. ‘You leave in another ten minutes.’

IDENTIFYING THE NURSE was easy. Árni showed the photograph to the woman at reception in the National Hospital. ‘Oh, that’s Íris,’ she said. Within a couple of minutes Árni was in a quiet corner of one of the endless corridors, talking to the woman with the round face and the snub nose.

‘I remember him,’ the nurse said. ‘He’d got tear gas in his eye. He was in quite a lot of pain, that stuff is no joke. He had this idiotic idea that I should get two raw steaks and place them on his eyes. He said he knew where to get some. He was quite insistent.’

‘Did you do it?’ asked Árni.

‘Of course not,’ said the nurse, glancing at Árni as if he was an idiot.

Árni smiled encouragingly. That happened to him quite a lot. Smile and move on, was his motto.