66° North (34 page)

He took it back to the table he had been occupying for the last twenty minutes. He was in the café in the upper reaches of the Pearl, a grey bulbous building squatting on top of Reykjavík’s hot-water storage tanks. It was situated at the summit of a small hill overlooking the whole city. It had been chosen because the approach road up to the building from the main thoroughfare was open and empty. Impossible not to spot a car following you.

It had taken him a little longer to reach Reykjavík in the pickup than on his motorbike, but Björn had driven fast. He tended to drive fast when he was tense. And there was no doubt he was tense. He would soon be face-to-face with Harpa. He hoped he had the courage to see his plan through.

Through the broad expanse of glass he looked west out across to the sea, itself gleaming a pearly grey in the sunshine. In the
foreground was the irregular crossed triangle of the runways of the Reykjavík City Airfield. And the spot where Björn had dumped Gabríel Örn’s body nine months before.

But before he faced Harpa, Björn had some people to see. Where the hell were they?

‘Björn! How’s it going?’

Björn felt a heavy pat on his shoulder, and turned to see Sindri and behind him the neat figure of Ísak.

‘Let me get some coffee,’ said Sindri. ‘We have a lot to talk about.’

‘W
ERE YOU FOLLOWED
?’ Sindri asked Björn as he sat down with his coffee.

‘No. You were right, this is a good place.’

‘We’ve got to make sure the cops don’t see us together,’ said Sindri.

‘I don’t understand what Ísak’s doing here,’ said Björn, frowning.

‘He just arrived back in Iceland yesterday,’ said Sindri.

‘Why?’

‘The British police might be on to me,’ Ísak said. ‘One of them came to my house to interview me. Wanted to know whether it was me who had been asking Óskar’s neighbours where he lived. She didn’t push it, but she’s suspicious. So I thought I’d come back here. Make it that bit more difficult for her.’

‘The cops here are asking awkward questions too,’ Sindri said. ‘There’s a big red-haired bastard called Magnús who won’t leave us alone. Some kind of American.’

‘I told my mother things were getting on top of me and I needed to get away for a few days,’ Ísak said. ‘Go camping in the hills. Sort myself out. I borrowed her car, she’s too ill to drive it these days.’

‘Did she believe you?’

‘She knew I was acting a bit weird, but she didn’t know why and I didn’t tell her. That’s the best way to deal with parents. Never explain. Keep them guessing.’ Ísak sipped his coffee and glanced at Björn. ‘So, Sindri tells me there’s a problem with Harpa?’

Björn didn’t like Ísak, never had. He was too cool. Too self-possessed for a student. Sindri wore his passion on his sleeve. Ísak’s was in there, it had to be to do the things they were doing, but it was a cool, calculated determination to follow a carefully worked out plan. It was as if Ísak was trying to win an intellectual argument and willing to go to any lengths to prove himself right. Björn wasn’t trying to prove anything: he was just bringing justice upon those people who had destroyed his life and the lives of so many other Icelanders.

‘Yes,’ he said, turning to Sindri. ‘She’s got this idea that we, or rather you, Sindri, are behind the shooting of Óskar and Lister. She spoke to the kid Frikki the other day; he was the one who put the idea in her head. She suspected me as well, but she seems to believe my innocence now. Anyway, she wants to go to the police.’

‘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.’

I
DENTIFYING 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.

‘I gave him a solution of water and sodium bisulphate. Tear gas wears off of its own accord in a few minutes.’

‘Did the boy say what his name was?’ Árni asked.

‘He may have done. I don’t remember it if he did.’

‘You didn’t keep a record anywhere? Notes?’

‘No. Just treat one and move on to the next one.’

Pity, Árni thought. ‘Do you recognize any of these people?’ Árni asked, showing the nurse photos of Harpa, Björn and Sindri.

‘No,’ said Íris, studying them. ‘Actually, I think I recognize the big guy with the ponytail. I saw him wandering around in some of those protests.’

‘But you didn’t see him talking to the boy?’

‘No.’ The woman shook her head.

Árni pulled out another photograph, a still from the RÚV video showing Sindri standing behind the nurse as she tended the boy.

‘I see him now, but I didn’t notice him then,’ she said. ‘Or hear what he said.’

Árni replaced the photographs. ‘Thank you for your help.’ As he walked away from the nurse, he considered the next step. He wasn’t actually any closer to identifying the boy.

Suddenly he had a brainwave.

He turned. The nurse was just disappearing around a corner of the corridor.

‘Íris?’ He ran after her.

‘Yes?’

‘One last question. Where did the boy think he could get the steak?’

‘Oh, I remember that. The 101 Hotel. He said he used to work there as a chef.’

Björn drove the pickup to the bakery on Nordurströnd. He knew that what he was about to do would change his relationship with Harpa for ever.

But he had no choice.

Of course Ísak was right. Once Ingólfur Arnarson had been dealt with, there would be the problem of what to do with Harpa. But Björn had a plan for that. It was probably wishful thinking, but he would give it a try.

He loved Harpa, and he was sure that she loved him. They shared similar values. She hated the credit crunch and the people who had caused it as much as he did. She would understand what he had done. Perhaps she would join him.

In the hut where he was taking her there would be a lot of time to talk. Perhaps he could persuade her. Yes, he
could
persuade her. He had to.

He remembered the chance meeting with Sindri in the Grand Rokk three months before. Things would have been very different if he had just walked away then. But he didn’t regret what he and the others had done over the last couple of weeks. Someone had to bring the bastards to justice.

Björn and Gulli were having a beer in the tent outside the Grand Rokk, so Gulli could smoke. Although it was eleven o’clock it was June, and so still light. The drinkers were full of the midsummer hyperactivity that strikes Iceland at that time of year: a nation running faster and faster without sleep.

‘Björn? Is that Björn?’

Björn turned to see a large figure with a broad leather hat and a ponytail. ‘Sindri!’ He stood up and shook the big man’s hand.

Sindri glanced at his companion and Björn introduced his brother. Sindri was a little drunk, Björn was a little drunk, Gulli was very drunk. Sindri and Björn talked about this and that, but not about January. They did exchange rants about the bankers. Gulli watched them, knocking the beer back steadily, not really paying much attention.