Rebekka Franck - 03 - Five, Six ... Grab Your Crucifix (22 page)

Later Anders told Bjarne that he needed people like him. If Bjarne wanted to he could help him start a new movement, what he believed would be a new wave in Christianity in this country, maybe even the world. Anders had visions of saving people all over the world and reaching out to the lost ones.

Bjarne really liked that too.

So Bjarne told him about his childhood town of Arnakke where his parents owned a big property. He told them most of the land had been used as a campground for schools but it had been closed off for years now. Bjarne told him his parents owned that land and that they could move in there and begin rebuilding it for a small monthly payment.

So the next day they had gone to see Bjarne’s dad who was so thrilled to see his son again and see that he was free from the bondage of drugs and now had found Jesus and wanted to become a Christian and help others.

“You can stay in the camp as long as you want,” his dad had told them. “I’ll help you rebuild it. I’m just so happy that my boy is finally back,” he had cried.

That’s how “The Way” ended up in Arnakke and now since Bjarne had inherited the property he was now also the rightful owner of the camp. That was how he managed to leave the church again after almost fifteen years. That’s why the Priest had to let him go without stopping him like he normally did.

When and where it all went wrong at the camp, Bjarne Larsen couldn’t tell, but somehow along the way they all got lost. Bjarne Larsen tried on several occasions to point out that he disapproved of the way they treated the young people, how they were used as forced labor, of the way they weren’t allowed to leave and especially how they treated that young girl who couldn’t help it.

“She is mentally ill. She needs medication,” he kept telling them. But no one listened. He tried everything to help her and got the idea that maybe she suffered from some sort of brain damage caused by the exposure to radiation while she was still in her mother’s womb. But he couldn’t get them to listen to his arguments, and then they came up with that horrendous idea to impregnate her.

Bjarne Larsen sighed when he heard the water boil. He got up from his chair and searched for the coffee in the cabinet. He never liked thinking about what had happened back then, but it wasn’t healthy to keep things like that bottled up inside. That they all had sex with the girl wasn’t the worst part for him, the worst part was that he had participated. Bjarne hadn’t said no and he had regretted that all of his life. You could call it peer pressure, you could call it fear, but Bjarne knew the real reason why he hadn’t said no.

Because he wanted to. He wanted to have sex with that girl. Oh, the realization of your own weakness, it hurt so bad, so deeply. The pain and the anguish of regretting your past had almost eaten him up afterwards.

Once the night was over he had cried and punished himself with the whip again and again, punishing himself for this secret pleasure, this desire that could be born from nothing but evil.

That was when he realized that they were in fact the ones that had evil living inside of them. All these religious hypocrites were in fact pure evil. He was evil. That realization made him leave the church and the camp during the night.

He had only been back once since. To reclaim was what rightfully his.

Chapter 48

I called Gunnar Moll at the SIS first thing in the morning and told him about the water post and how I suspected it was the source that had contaminated my dad. Gunnar Moll was very happy to hear from me and told me they would send a team out there immediately to seal it and examine the area.

“If it’s in the water at the post then it might be the source of what has contaminated the people in the camp.”

“That’s what I thought,” I replied. “But what I wonder is how it got into the water in the first place?”

Bjarne Moll cleared his throat. “Well that is a good question, since polonium-210 is not something you come across every day. It’s very difficult to get a hold of. Polonium in large quantities can only be used by the government of a country that has military or civilian nuclear facilities. Only a few countries produce polonium. One of them is Russia because the country produces polonium for industry.”

“So that’s why they think the Russian government was behind the death of Alexander Litvinenko?”

“Precisely,” he answered.

“So what you’re telling me is basically that this can’t be an accident? It can’t accidentally have spilled into the water?” I asked.

“No it can’t. Someone must have put it there for some reason. Someone poisoned that water.”

“But if the water is contaminated then why didn’t anyone else in the area get sick? Why is it only the people living in the camp? And why only some of them?” I said.

“That’s a also a good question. We’ll have to look into all that. I alerted the police after the doctor discovered that they had a patient who was killed by polonium and the forensic lab is now testing the bodies to learn if the three others also were killed by it. They decided to evacuate the camp and I have a team at the hospital in Holbaek right now cleansing all of the church members. That’ll give us time and room to investigate the water up there as well.”

We drove the kids to the hospital to be with my dad who was thrilled to have some “intelligent company for once,” as he put it. After talking a little with Dad we drove to the local police station and told them all we knew. They were very interested and Officer Frederik Knudsen who was in charge of the investigation listened carefully and wrote everything down on a notepad. We told him that we thought the church members were being killed and that we feared that Bjarne Larsen would be the next victim. Isabella was already in a safe place at the hospital so I wasn’t worried about her.

“Those are the last two who were part of the leader group back then,” I said.

Officer Knudsen nodded slowly and pensively. I got the sense that he didn’t quite believe us even if he wanted to.

“Listen,” I said. “We know it’s a strange story, but polonium 210 is not something that appears by a coincidence. Someone has put it in the water up there to kill those people. Four are dead already.”

Officer Frederik Knudsen leaned backwards with a deep sigh. “I am very interested about the story about the girl Edwina and we will certainly look into that. If what you’re telling me is true, then it is very serious. About the other stuff, I hear all you’re saying, but the problem I’m facing is I just received a phone call a minute before you stepped into the police station from the SIS telling us the water is clean. There is no contamination of the water in the camp. Not of polonium 210 or anything else. The water is clean.”

I looked at Sune. He shrugged. “I don’t understand,” I said. “I was so certain.”

“Well, all I can do is look at the facts and they’re telling me that if these people were killed by polonium 210, they didn’t get it through the water. The SIS did find some by that water-post you told them about. But only very little and it was on the post, on the handle, not in the water.”

“It had to have come into the camp from somewhere else,” I mumbled. “I still feel we should talk to Bjarne Larsen.”

Officer Knudsen nodded. “I have a few questions for him of my own. I’ll go with you.”

Chapter 49

Bjarne Larsen’s hands were shaking slightly when he pulled out the cups from the cabinet. He wanted to use the nice ones like his wife always did.

It had been hard the last couple of weeks, trying to get by on his own since his wife Elisabeth had left him. He was still wondering why she had chosen to leave him like that after thirteen years of marriage. He had met her two years after leaving the church and had considered the years following as the happiest years of his life. But Bjarne had refused to tell Elisabeth about his past and questions kept popping up in her, even if she knew he would get mad and sometimes even violent when she brought up his past, she would do it anyway from time to time. Bjarne had no answers to give her, only that he wasn’t very proud of his former life, but that was his past now. Yet she kept asking.

Then finally seven weeks ago he had decided to tell her everything. He told her about Afghanistan, the drugs, about Anders Granlund, the church and even what they had done to that girl.

Elisabeth had looked at him with tears in her eyes. She hadn’t spoken a single word for almost half an hour. Then she had gotten up from her chair and gone upstairs only to return with a suitcase in her hand. She hadn’t even told him she was leaving. She just looked at him with wet eyes, touched him gently on the cheek, then walked out the door and never looked back. Bjarne hadn’t heard anything from her since. Not a phone call, not a postcard or an e-mail. Not even a message on Facebook where he had tried to track her down by constantly checking her account. But she hadn’t posted anything, not a status, not even a whereabouts. Bjarne didn’t know where she was or if he was ever going to see her again.

That was when he had decided it was time to do something. He had thought about it for years, but like the coward he had always been, he hadn’t done anything. Now he became determined. It had already ruined too much for him. It was time to get rid of the past.

Eliminate it.

Bjarne put down the cups from Royal Copenhagen that they had inherited from Elisabeth’s mother. His hands were still shaking, something they had done a lot lately. Bjarne feared it might be beginning of Parkinson’s disease that his dad had suffered from until he died more than ten years ago. He kept postponing the inevitable visit with the doctor. He was afraid of what the doctor was going to tell him. Bjarne focused on keeping them still. It helped sometimes if he was really concentrating. At other times it only made things worse.

Bjarne sighed deeply while remembering his dad. How he had high hopes for Bjarne. He had tried to teach him about farming and wanting him to take over the farm. But Bjarne didn’t want to. He wanted to change the world, he told him, just before he left for Afghanistan. Little could he have known that the people he met in Afghanistan were nothing but scum, introducing him to drugs and later on weapons. They wanted him to fight with them to take back their country, they said and promised him lots of opium and LSD if he decided to go with them. Then they showed him an arsenal of weapons and bombs and told him they were going to overthrow the king and make way for the country’s first president. The king was about to leave on a trip overseas and that was when they were going to do it. Bjarne ended up helping them, fighting for what he believed was their freedom. They managed to do it and changed the history of Afghanistan. Later when the Soviets and the Americans both began spreading their influences in Afghanistan, Bjarne and his friends fought for the Soviets and were heavily provided with weapons and artillery from the Russians - along with all the drugs they wanted of course. Once the Soviet soldiers invaded Kabul Bjarne was forced to leave even if he had been on their side. It was all good the same, he had thought back then. Drugs had become harder to get a hold off and he was tired of fighting a war that wasn’t his.

Bjarne’s hands were steadier now and he managed to pour the coffee into the pot without spilling. He found the bowl with sugar and warmed some milk in the microwave. There were still a few cookies left that he placed neatly in a circle on a platter. It all looked nice, almost like when Elisabeth had prepared it for guests coming to their home. Bjarne felt a pinch in his heart. Boy, he missed having her around the house. He even missed her nagging. Was he ever going to see her again? He thought as he took off the lid of the small transparent vial carrying the expensive silver powder. Almost without shaking he poured some into a spoon and poured it all into the pot with the burning hot coffee.

“Tasteless and odorless,” he mumbled when he turned it with the spoon. “Impossible to trace before it’s too late.” That was what his Afghani friends had told him when he travelled back to see them and asked for help. It was probably stolen from a Russian nuclear reactor, he suspected. It cost him a huge fortune, but it was worth it. It was even more concentrated and a larger dose than what was used to kill that KGB agent, Litvinenko, they said. Even so he had certainly been surprised at how fast it had killed his old friends. The choice of poison was genius in that polonium, carried in a vial, could be carried in a pocket through airport screening devices without setting off any alarms. His friends had assured him that once ingested, the polonium would create symptoms that didn’t suggest poison. It would target the spleen and liver first since those organs were much smaller than the rest of the body. Once concentrated in those vital organs there was no turning back. It would soon bring severe damage to the nervous system. Within minutes, the patient was going to suffer severe vomiting, dizziness and headache before falling unconscious. Seizures and tremors were common as well and they would also lose control of muscle movement. The victim would certainly die within hours of these symptoms.

Bjarne Larsen felt more confident now that it was done. He put the lid back on the pot and wiped away a drop of sweat from his forehead. Then he put the vial back in the cabinet and closed it.

He lifted the tray and began walking towards the living room where his guests were waiting for him by the fireplace.

Chapter 50

Unfortunately they had brought a police officer with them. Bjarne Larsen had at first been a little taken aback by it, but then felt it left him with no choice. They all knew too much and it was only a matter of time before they figured everything out.

He couldn’t have that. Not now when he was almost done. He had almost gotten away with it and they weren’t going to spoil that. There was no way he would let them.

Bjarne Larsen smiled and tried to put down the tray on the table in front of them. His hands had started shaking again and he almost dropped everything, but luckily the young man with the Mohawk got up and grabbed the tray for him.