The Secret Servant (24 page)

T
he lights of the Great Belt Bridge, second-longest suspension bridge in the world, lay like a double strand of pearls over the straits between the Danish islands of Zealand and Funen. Gabriel glanced at the dashboard clock as he headed up the long sweep of the eastern ramp. The trip from Copenhagen to this point should have taken no more than two hours, but the worsening storm had stretched it to nearly four. He returned his eyes to the road and put both hands firmly on the wheel. The bridge was swaying in the high winds. Ibrahim asked again if the weather was truly a good omen. Gabriel replied that he hoped Ibrahim knew how to swim.

It took them twenty minutes to make the eight-mile crossing. On the Funen side of the bridge, a small seaside rail station lay huddled against the storm. A mile beyond the station was a roadside gas station and café. Gabriel topped off the Audi’s tank, then parked outside the café and led Ibrahim inside. It was brightly lit, smartly decorated, and spotlessly clean. In the first room was a well-stocked market and cafeteria-style eatery; in the next was a seating area filled with stranded travelers. There was much animated conversation and, judging from the large number of empty Carlsberg bottles scattered about the pale wooden tables, considerable drinking had taken place.

They bought egg sandwiches and hot tea in the cafeteria and sat at an empty table near the window. Ibrahim ate silently, while Gabriel sipped his tea and stared out at the car. Thirty minutes elapsed before the cell phone finally rang. Gabriel brought it to his ear, listened without speaking, then severed the connection. “Wait here,” he said.

He stopped briefly in the men’s toilet, where he buried his Beretta and phone in the rubbish bin, then went into the market and purchased a large-scale map of Denmark and an English-language tourist guide. When he returned to the dining room, Ibrahim was in the process of unwrapping the second egg sandwich. Ibrahim slipped it into his coat pocket and followed Gabriel outside.

“Here it is,” said Ibrahim. “Lindholm Høje.”

He was hunched over the guidebook, reading it by the light of the overhead lamp. Gabriel kept his eyes fastened to the road.

“What does it say?”

“It’s an old Viking village and cemetery. For centuries it was buried beneath a thick layer of sand. It only was discovered in 1952. According to the book, it has more than seven hundred graves and the remains of a few Viking longhouses.”

“Where is it?”

Ibrahim consulted the book again, then plotted the position of the site on the road map. “Northern Jutland,” he said. “Very northern Jutland, actually.”

“How do I get there?”

“Take the E20 across Funen, then head north on the E45. Lindholm is just after Aalborg. The book says it’s easy to find the place. Just follow the signs.”

“I can’t see the road, let alone the signs.”

“Is that where they’re going to leave the woman?”

Gabriel shook his head. “More instructions. This time they’ll be written. They say they’ll be in the ruins of the longhouse, in the corner farthest from the museum entrance.” He looked briefly at Ibrahim. “It wasn’t Ishaq this time. It was someone else.”

“Egyptian?”

“He sounded Egyptian to me, but I’m no expert.”

“Please,” said Ibrahim dismissively. “Why did they make you get rid of your telephone?”

“No more electronic communication.”

Ibrahim looked down at the map. “It’s a long way from here to Lindholm.”

“Two hours in perfect weather. In this…four at least.”

Ibrahim looked at the clock. “That means it will be Friday morning, if we’re lucky.”

“Yes,” said Gabriel. “He’s running us up against the deadline.”

“Who? Ishaq?”

A very good question,
thought Gabriel. Was it Ishaq? Or was it the Sphinx?…

It took four and a half hours to reach Lindholm and, just as Gabriel had feared, the guidebook’s assurances that the cemetery was easy to find turned out to be false. He drove in circles for twenty minutes through a neighborhood of matching brick houses before finally spotting a postcard-sized sign he had missed three times previously. It was obscured by snow, of course; Gabriel had to climb out of the Audi and brush away the flakes, only to learn that in order to reach the site he had to first scale a formidable hill. The Audi handled the conditions with only a single episode of fishtailing, and two minutes later Gabriel was easing into a car park surrounded by towering pine. He shut down the engine and sat for a moment, his ears ringing from the strain of the drive, before finally opening the door and putting a foot into the snow. Ibrahim stayed where he was.

“You’re not coming?”

“I’ll wait here, if you don’t mind.”

“Don’t tell me you’re afraid of cemeteries.”

“No, just
Viking
cemeteries.”

“They were only warlike when they took to the seas,” Gabriel said. “Here at home they were largely an agrarian people. The scariest thing we’re likely to run across tonight is the ghost of a vegetable farmer.”

“If it’s all the same to you, I’ll just stay here.”

“Suit yourself,” Gabriel said. “If you want to sit here alone, that’s fine with me.”

Ibrahim made a show of thought, then climbed out. Gabriel opened the trunk and removed the flashlight and the tire iron.

“Why are you bringing that?” asked Ibrahim.

“In case we come across any Vikings.” He slipped the tool down the front of his jeans and quietly closed the trunk. “They made me leave my gun back in that service station, too. A crowbar is better than nothing.”

Gabriel switched on the flashlight and set out across the car park with Ibrahim at his side. The snow was six inches deep and within a few steps Gabriel’s brogans were sodden and his feet freezing. Thirty seconds after leaving the car, he stopped suddenly. There were two sets of faint tracks in the snow, one set obviously larger than the other, leading from the car park into the burial ground. Gabriel left Ibrahim alone and followed the footprints back to their point of origin. Judging from the condition of the snow’s surface, it appeared as though a small truck or transit van had entered the lot from a second access road several hours earlier. The larger of the two occupants had stepped into the snow from the driver’s side of the vehicle, the smaller from the passenger side. Gabriel crouched in the snow and scrutinized the smaller prints as though he were examining brushstrokes on a canvas. The prints were feminine, he decided, and whoever had left them had been wearing athletic shoes. There was no evidence of any struggle.

Gabriel rejoined Ibrahim and led him down a footpath into the site. The cemetery fell away before them, down the slope of the hill toward a vast inland bay in the distance. Despite the snowfall it was possible to discern, in the glow of Gabriel’s flashlight, the outlines of individual graves. Some were mounds of stones, some were circles, and still others were shaped like Viking ships. It was not difficult to find the far corner of the longhouse; all Gabriel had to do was follow the twin sets of tracks. He crouched down and probed with his bare hands beneath the surface of the snow. A few seconds later he found what had been left there for him, a small plastic ziplock bag containing a portion of a detailed map. He examined it by the glow of his flashlight. Then he stood and led Ibrahim back to the car.

“Skagen,” said Gabriel as he drove slowly down the hill. “They want us to go to Skagen. Well, almost to Skagen. The spot they circled on the map is a little to the south.”

“You know this place?”

“I’ve never been there, but I know it. There was an artist colony that formed there in the late eighteen hundreds. They were known as the Skagen School of painters. They came there for the light. They say it’s unique—not that we’ll be seeing any of it.”

“Perhaps this is another good omen,” said Ibrahim.

“Perhaps,” said Gabriel.

“Will the ambassador’s daughter be there?”

“It doesn’t say. It just tells us to go to a spot along the North Sea.”

“Was she in the burial ground tonight?”

“They wanted me to think she was,” Gabriel said. “But I don’t believe she was there.”

“How can you tell?”

“Because the woman got out of the vehicle and walked into the cemetery on her own,” Gabriel said. “I saw Elizabeth at the moment of her abduction. She wouldn’t have walked in there on her own. She would have fought them.”

“Unless they told her she was about to be released,” said Ibrahim.

Gabriel gave him an admiring sideways glance. “You’re not bad,” he said.

“I was a professor once,” he said. “And I love detective novels.”

S
he did not know the duration of her journey, for she had tried to think of anything but the clock. It was but a few minutes, she told herself. It was the blink of an eye. She had told herself other lies as well. She was in a comfortable bed, not a wooden box that smelled faintly of fish. She was wearing faded blue jeans and her favorite sweater, not the same dirty tracksuit she had been wearing since the morning of her capture. She could see her favorite mountain range through her favorite window. She was listening to beautiful music. The rest were just scenes from a bad dream. She would wake soon and it would all be over.

She had been prepared for the appalling discomfort—Cain’s note had made it abundantly clear what lay in store for her—but the earplugs had taken her by surprise. They had robbed her of one of her most potent weapons, the ability to hear what was taking place around her, and had reduced her world to a monotonous droning. She had been left with only one sense, the ability to feel motion. She knew that they had driven at high speeds and at moderate speeds, on good roads and bad. Once she’d had the sensation of being in a large city surrounded by people who did not realize she was only inches away. Now she felt certain they were on an unpaved track, in a place near the end of the earth.

They stopped suddenly—so suddenly that her head was pressed painfully against the end of her coffinlike container—and a moment later the droning of the engine went silent. Several minutes elapsed before they finally removed her from the vehicle, and several more passed before she finally heard the screech of the nails being removed by the claw of a hammer. Cold salty air streamed over her face as the lid came off. Hot tears spilled involuntarily into the fabric of her blindfold as she was lifted to her feet. No one spoke to her as she was led inside the new hideout. No one asked about the condition of her arrhythmic heart as she was placed on the cot in her new cell. When the door closed on her again, she removed the blindfold and the earplugs and gazed at a new set of white walls. There was a plate of food—bread, cheese, and chocolate because she had been good during the drive—and there was a yellow bucket for her toilet. She had no idea where they had moved her but was certain of one thing. She could smell the sea.

T
he road from the Baltic port of Frederikshavn to Skagen was abandoned and barely passable. Gabriel sat hunched over the steering wheel for mile after mile as a string of silent snowbound towns flashed past. Their names were full of strange consonant combinations that even Gabriel, whose first language was German, found impenetrable. Danish is not a language, he thought resentfully as he plunged through the gloom. Danish is merely an affliction of the throat.

After leaving the town of Ålbæk, a seemingly endless moonscape of dunes opened before them. The cutoff toward the summer resort town of Kandestederne lay near the northern end of the wasteland; Gabriel, after making the turn, saw a single set of freshly made tire tracks in the snow. He suspected they had been left by the same vehicle that had been at the cemetery in Lindholm Høje.

They sledded past a few small farms, then entered another expanse of dunes—vast dunes this time, dunes the size of foothills. Here and there Gabriel glimpsed the outlines of cottages and small homes. There were no lights burning, no other cars, and no other signs of life. Time, it seemed, had stopped.

The tire tracks bent to the right, into a narrow road, and vanished behind a curtain of snowfall. Gabriel continued straight and stopped a moment later at a small car park overlooking the beach, next to a boarded-up café. He started to switch off the engine, then thought better of it. “Wait here,” he said. “Lock the doors after I get out. Don’t open them for anyone but me.”

He took the tire tool and flashlight and walked over to the café. There were fresh footprints all around—two sets at least, perhaps more. Whoever had left them had come to this spot from the dunes. One set of tracks led down to the beach. They were identical to the ones he had seen at Lindholm. The woman’s.

He glanced back toward the Audi, then turned and followed the tracks across the beach. At the water’s edge, they disappeared. He looked left, then right, but could see no sign of them, so he turned around and headed back to the car. As he drew near, he could see that Ibrahim was leaning forward awkwardly and had his palms pressed to the dashboard. Then he saw a set of fresh tracks leading from the dunes to the rear passenger-side door of the Audi. Just then the window slid down halfway and a gloved hand beckoned him forward. Gabriel hesitated for a few seconds, then obeyed. Along the way he made a slight detour in order to examine the prints. Size six, he reckoned. Adidas or Nike. A woman’s shoe.

He had been wrong about the brand of the shoes. They were Pumas. The woman who was wearing them looked no older than twenty-five. She wore a navy blue peacoat and a wool hat pulled down close to her dark eyes. She was seated directly behind Ibrahim and had a Makarov pointed at his spine. Her hand was vibrating with cold.

“Why don’t you point that gun at the floor before someone gets hurt?” Gabriel said.

“Shut up and put your hands on the steering wheel.”

She spoke very calmly. Gabriel did as he was told.

“Where’s Ishaq?”

“Ishaq who?” she asked.

“Let’s not play any more games. It’s been a long cold night.” He looked at her in the rearview mirror. “Just tell us where we can find Elizabeth Halton and we’ll be on our way.”

“You are the Israeli, yes? The Zionist pig who killed our comrades in Hyde Park?”

“No, I’m an American pig.”

“You speak very good Arabic for an American pig.”

“My father was a diplomat. I grew up in Beirut.”

“Really? Then speak English for me, American pig.”

Gabriel hesitated. The girl leveled the gun at the back of Ibrahim’s head.

“You’ve made your point,” Gabriel said.

She pointed the gun at Gabriel. “I should kill you now,” she said. “But you’re fortunate. You won’t be dying tonight. Others have already laid claim to your life.”

“Lucky me.”

She hit him in the back of the head with the gun, hard enough for Gabriel to see a burst of fireworks before his eyes. When he reached reflexively toward the wound, she hit him again, harder still, and commanded him to put his hands back on the wheel. A moment later he could feel something warm and sticky running along the back of his right ear.

“Feel better?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said sincerely.

“Let’s get this over with, shall we?”

“Turn the car around,” the woman said. “Slowly.”

Gabriel eased the car into gear, executed a careful three-point turn, and headed inland.

“Make the first left into the dunes,” the woman said. “Then follow the tire tracks.”

He did as she instructed. The road was wide enough for only a single car and led to a colony of cottages tucked within the dunes. The cottages were small and wooden and abandoned to the winter. Some were painted Skagen yellow; others inexplicably had grass growing on the roof. Gabriel navigated only by the amber light of the parking lamps. The blood was now running freely down the side of his neck into his shirt collar.

He followed the tracks up a small humpbacked hill, then plunged down the other side and saw another knoll ahead. Fearful of becoming lodged in the snow, he kept his foot on the gas and heard a loud crunching sound when the car ran aground at the bottom of the dip. He gunned it hard up the next hill and swerved to the left, then glided down the other side into the drive of the farthest cottage. A silver LDV Maxus transit van was parked outside, lights doused. Gabriel came to a stop and looked into the rearview mirror for instructions. The woman jabbed Ibrahim in the back with the barrel of the Makarov and told him to open the door. When Gabriel reached for his own latch, she hit him in the back of the head for a third time.

“You stay here in the car!” she snapped. “We’ll give the woman only to Ibrahim—not you, Zionist pig.”

Ibrahim unclasped his safety belt and opened the door. The overhead light burst suddenly on. Gabriel put a hand atop Ibrahim’s forearm and squeezed.

“Don’t go,” he said. “Stay in the car.”

Ibrahim looked at him incredulously. “What are you talking about, my friend? We’ve come all this way.”

“It was all just a game to run out the clock. She’s not here. Your son has lured you here in order to kill you.”

“Why would my son kill me?”

“Because you betrayed him to the Crusaders and the Jews,” Gabriel said. “Because he is a
takfiri
Muslim and, in his eyes, you are now an apostate worthy only of death. You are worse than a Crusader—even worse than a Jew—because you were once a devout Islamist who has now renounced the path of jihad. The woman is taking you inside to be killed, Ibrahim. Don’t go with her.”

“My son would never harm me.”

“He’s not your son anymore.”

Ibrahim smiled and removed Gabriel’s hand from his arm. “You must have faith, my friend. Let me go. I’ll bring the girl out to you, just as I promised.”

Gabriel felt the barrel of the Makarov pressing against the base of his skull. “Listen to Ibrahim, Zionist pig. He speaks the truth. We do not kill our parents.
You
are the murderers, not us. Let him bring you the girl, so you can be on your way.”

Ibrahim climbed out of the car before Gabriel could stop him and started toward the cottage. The woman waited until he was several yards away before lowering the gun from Gabriel’s head and setting off after him. As they neared the entrance, a man appeared in the doorway. In the snow and darkness Gabriel could discern little of his appearance—only that his hair had been dyed platinum blond. He greeted Ibrahim formally, with kisses on both cheeks and a hand reverentially over his heart, and led him inside. Then the woman closed the door and the windshield exploded in Gabriel’s face.