Arnaldur Indriðason - Operation Napoleon

She would handle this alone, at least to begin with. She did not dare to go to her friends or family for fear that her pursuers or their henchmen would be waiting. Only a few minutes had elapsed between her conversation with her brother and their appearance on her doorstep. Perhaps they were tapping her phone. But why? Did it have something to do with Runólfur? They had killed him, after all, and he had been raging about a conspiracy; about the Russian mafia.

She knew only one man who could tell her about soldiers.

Taking care to keep out of sight, she peered over at her own house. There was no sign of the police or anyone else; everything looked quiet, domestic, unremarkable. When she reached the main road she hailed a taxi, one which fortunately accepted cards.

‘Where to?’ he asked.

‘Keflavík Airport,’ she replied, casting a nervous glance out of the rear window.

VATNAJÖKULL GLACIER,

FRIDAY 29 JANUARY, 2100 GMT

Ratoff did not see them land but heard the thuds as they collided with the ice on their headlong descent into the crevasse. It was pitch dark on the glacier, the moon hidden behind thick clouds, the only light emanating from the headlamps on Ratoff’s tracked vehicle and the snowmobiles. By the time they had reached the crevasse, one of the young men was unconscious, the other dead. Ratoff ordered his soldiers to push their snowmobiles into the chasm on top of them, after which his men set to work obliterating their tracks. Once this was done, Ratoff dropped Elías’s phone into the crevasse after him.

In the end he had forced Elías to give up the salient facts about Kristín, information which he duly passed on to Ripley and Bateman. Elías had held out for a long time but Ratoff was good at his job. The boy had surrendered everything about his sister’s friends and colleagues, where their father lived and how he often made long trips abroad, and about Kristín’s ex-boyfriends, the lawyer and his circle; even about their mother’s death a few years earlier in a car crash. He revealed how his sister had taken a postgraduate degree in California and how, despite sometimes visiting friends abroad, she hated travelling in Iceland and that trips into the interior were her idea of hell. Elías had told Ratoff everything he wanted to know, before finally begging for mercy. But by then his friend Jóhann was dead. The last thing Elías heard before he lost consciousness was Ratoff whispering the news in his ear that his sister was dead too.

Ratoff’s men laboured away at clearing the ice from the German aircraft, working in four-hour shifts, sixty men to a shift. They were well on schedule; more and more of the fuselage had been uncovered until they could now see into the passenger cabin through the first of the side windows. When Ratoff returned to camp, he walked over to the German plane and spent a long time peering through the window. He could dimly make out shapes on the floor that might have been bodies. He was summoned to the communications tent and straightened up. Ripley was on the line.

‘She used her debit card to pay for a taxi to Keflavík, sir,’ Ripley informed him. ‘Did her brother say anything about Keflavík?’

‘Why the hell is she going to Keflavík?’ Ratoff asked. ‘What happened at her place? How much does she know? Surely the logical move would be to go to the Reykjavík police?’

There was a short pause on the line.

‘She knows there’s a strong possibility that her brother’s dead,’ Ripley admitted hesitantly. ‘She may also be under the impression that someone’s trying to murder her because of a conspiracy involving the Reykjavík police, the Icelandic foreign ministry and the ministry of justice.’

‘Are you out of your goddamn minds?’

‘We underestimated the job, sir. It won’t happen again.’

‘Won’t happen again?’ Ratoff hissed. ‘It should never have happened in the first place!’

‘We’re just leaving her father’s apartment now. He’s not at home. She left a message on his answering machine and we’re taking it down to the embassy to get it translated.’

‘She knows too much. Far too much.’

‘What about Keflavík?’ Ripley asked again.

‘She may be on her way to the base. Her brother mentioned an ex-boyfriend there. She ditched him suddenly and they haven’t met in a while, but it’s possible she will look to him for help or information now.’

‘Understood, sir,’ Ripley said.

‘Don’t screw up again.’

‘Understood,’ Ripley repeated.

Ratoff gave him the man’s name and hung up, then stepped out of the communications tent and looked over at the plane. Like other members of Delta Force, he was dressed in thick, white camouflage and snow goggles which he had pushed up on his forehead, warm gloves and a balaclava. There were no names or ranks, no indications of any affiliation or any other markings on their clothes, nothing to connect them to the unit.

Carr had not told him exactly what the plane contained and he burned to know more. He knew something of its history, knew that it had taken off from Germany at the end of the war, heading for Reykjavík, and had hit bad weather and crashed. But he had no idea whether Reykjavík had been the intended destination or if the plane had been scheduled to continue, perhaps all the way to the States. Nor did he know the identity of her passengers.

He returned thoughtfully to the wreck and peered into the passenger cabin again. Ratoff had been trying to fill in the blanks by guesswork but knew it was futile; he would not be able to satisfy his curiosity until he could get inside. Turning away, he went back to his tent. An image floated into his mind of the boy’s face as he told him his sister was dead, of the torment in his eyes before he darkened them for ever. But the young men’s deaths had no impact on Ratoff. He calculated for collateral damage in all his assignments and in his view they amounted to nothing more. He would complete this job to his full satisfaction and any obstacles would have to be eliminated. Carr had asked if they were young – he was obviously getting soft in his old age. No doubt he would ask the same thing when he was informed of the woman’s death.

He gave orders to be put through to Carr.

‘We believe she’s on her way to the US base in Keflavík, sir,’ he said when Carr came on the line, ‘and I have a good idea who she’s going to meet.’

CENTRAL REYKJAVÍK,

FRIDAY 29 JANUARY, 2100 GMT

The meeting was extremely formal, despite the choice of venue. By special request of the US military authorities, the prime minister and foreign minister of Iceland were now seated face to face with the admiral from Keflavík air base, in his capacity as the most senior officer in the Defense Force, and the general, who was temporarily discharging the office of US ambassador to Iceland during the abrupt and unexpected absence of the regular incumbent. The ministers had been summoned to the meeting with an unceremonious haste that might be interpreted as high-handedness if the circumstances did not turn out to be exceptional. The Icelanders had been given no information about the reason for the summons and discussed a number of possible scenarios as they travelled in the prime minister’s car to the city centre hotel suite where the meeting was to be held. They were inclined to believe that it heralded an unexpected presidential visit, remembering that they had been given practically no warning when the summit meeting between Reagan and Gorbachev was held in Reykjavík in 1986.