Chasing the Storm (4 page)

Chapter 4

Croatia

April 21

The plane bobbed
across the Alps while the waitress rushed out sandwiches and coffee, then started floating down, over forested hills. There were just a dozen passengers, but Rygg could make out five languages among the conversations. They breasted a hill, and the city was in a basin below them, brimming with orange tiled roofs and green copper steeples. Flowerbeds made Impressionist stripes and whorls of color in the evening sun.

Zagreb airport was tiny: a couple rooms and a single baggage carousel. The guard didn’t open Rygg’s passport, just saw that it was Norwegian and nodded him through. Rygg had already spotted Lena. She waved at him through the glass, then came running up and gave him a big hug. “Anders!” she exclaimed, too loudly. “Is that all you have? Come!” She pulled him quickly out the door and into a waiting Renault. The engine was already running. Without bothering to put on a seatbelt, she slid the car into gear and pulled out past the line of taxis. She was wearing a blue dress the color of her eyes, that blue of other skies. And though her smile and embrace had been a pretense, he could still feel her thin arms around his neck, could taste the small perfume of the hair that had drifted against his face.

“We are very happy you can come. You had a good flight?” she asked.

“It was fine,” he said.

“And it was no problem with your work?”

“I told them it was an emergency.”

“Good. They will not ask questions?”

“I don’t know. I’ve never done anything like this before. Played hooky.”

“Play hockey?”

“Hooky. Skipping school, you know.”

She giggled suddenly. “I am sorry. My English.”

“It’s fine. I’m just trying to impress you with a bit of American slang that I picked up once.

It’s stupid. Sorry.”

She shook her head. “No problem, Torgrim. I do not speak English like you and Marko.”

“Where did he pick that up?”

She just shook her head again.

They were moving down a long boulevard, whipping side to side to pass the Peugeots and Opels.

“So why am I here?” he asked.

“Marko will explain. Are you hungry, Mr. Rygg?”

“I had a sandwich and coffee on the plane.”

“Good. Then we will go.”

“Where to?”

But she didn’t answer. Instead, she turned off the boulevard, and they were moving through narrower streets, past brick walls decorated with gaudy, chunky graffiti. The street they were on started climbing, twisting past a cemetery and a couple churches, then abruptly entered forest. It was dark and wet, and she switched on the lights. They drove across a ridge, past some sort of castle, then down, through thicker forest. The car rocked side to side, taking the bends.

They drove for half an hour, down through diminishing forest, then turned into a long gravel drive. After a mile or so, they came to a low farmhouse-looking building. A ramshackle fence enclosed thick grass on one side, and there was a small barn on the other. A forested mountain rose behind the house, its peak erased by dark clouds.

Marin came out of the house. His arm was in a sling. “Mr. Rygg. I knew you would come,” he said, grinning. Rygg got out of the car and Marin embraced him with one hand.

“Where are we?” Rygg asked.

“The middle of nowhere!” Marin told him. “Come. Come inside.”

They entered through a foyer, and Marin ushered him into a long room with a row of windows along one wall and a raw wooden table in the center. It smelled of wood smoke. A colossal fireplace gaped at the far end.

Marin’s arm was out of the sling, though he still moved stiffly. “Sit, Mr. Rygg.”

“Call me Torgrim.”

“Torgrim. And I am Marko to you, please.”

On the table was a loaf of crusty bread, cheese, a knobby, white-dusted salami, and a crate of beer bottles. Marin opened beers and passed them around – there didn’t seem to be any glasses – and Lena began slicing the bread and cheese and salami. Rygg accepted a plate from her and made a sandwich. Marin, he noticed, did not eat.

“We have been waiting for you, Torgrim. Waiting to begin.”

“Begin what?”

“Well. Our evening meal. And our … our project, as well.”

“Your project. Tell me about that.” He took a bite.

“First, Torgrim, I am going to ask you some questions, if that is all right?” Marin handed him a beer.

“Ask away.” Rygg noticed that Lena had taken out a sheet of paper and a pencil.

Marin nodded. “These are questions for our security.” He moved his hand, palm up, in a small circle, connecting the three of them. “First, did you receive any phone calls or email messages in the past week? Since we last met. Anything out of the ordinary, I mean?”

Rygg thought, then shook his head.

“No visits from the police?”

“No.” He thought about the break-in, and decided that it wasn’t any of Marin’s business.

“Did you tell friends, your wife, about this trip, or about what happened in Hamburg? The shooting?”

Rygg shook his head again, then held up a finger. “No, I mentioned to a girl, a woman, that I’d met a Russian man. Didn’t talk about the shooting.”

“What was her name, please?”

Rygg told him. Lena wrote it down.

“And you told her what, exactly?”

“Nothing. I mean, not your name, nothing about the shooting. Just that I’d met an interesting Russian man.”

“And that was all?”

“I guess I told my ex-wife I was going on a trip, but not to where. And my boss thinks I’m in Germany again. That’s it, though.”

“So you just left everything behind, got on the plane on short notice to meet a couple of complete strangers and you didn’t even tell your mother, ex-wife, or best friend?”

“Kind of, yes. I don’t really have that many friends and my mum is dead. I needed to get away from work for a while.”

“Hmmm …” Marin nodded. “Good,” he said. “We will go over this again, later.” He lit a cigarette. “Now, Torgrim, you are tired, but you are also curious, I think. And I want to tell you what this is all about. But first I will need a promise from you. You will understand later why the promise.”

“What is it?”

“First, we have asked you here to help us.”

“Why me?”

“Your background. Your skills. Your anonymity.”

“I’m just an out-of-shape businessman. I’m far from being the athlete I was back in the days.”

“Exactly. We would like you to do a small job for us. Similar, perhaps, to the jobs that you do for your company. In fact, identical in many ways, but with a single small detour. And you will of course be paid, very handsomely. We have money.”

“Money is not why I’m here.” Why
am
I here? he wondered. But he knew exactly why he was here. He was here for the things his money couldn’t buy – for the passion in Marin’s face, for the blue of Lena’s eyes, for the ability to calmly sew up your own bullet wound. For the spark that had been missing for many years now.

“Nevertheless,” Marin said.

“All right, so what is it? What’s your job?”

“I will tell you. But first, I need a promise from you. Torgrim, I need your assurance that, whether you agree to the job or not, you will never divulge its nature, and you will never tell anyone about our project.”

“You’re criminals.”

“No. No, we are the opposite.”

“You’re certainly not the police.”

“Not the police, either. But we are the good guys, I can assure you of this.”

Rygg sat for a moment, looking at Marin. All he had was his gut feeling, and the hankering for action. He shrugged. “All right, Marko. You have my word.”

Marin nodded. Then he said, “Good. Now, we have very little time. Bring your beer.”

Rygg followed them down a hallway. Marin unlocked a door. In a bedroom, a boy sat at a computer, playing a game. He had a headset on. Marin tapped his shoulder and he jumped. He was eighteen or nineteen, perhaps, but with smooth china skin and hollow cheeks. His eye-sockets were purple with weariness. He stood and laid a pallid hand in Rygg’s. “This is Sasha,” said Marin. “He is our hacker.”

“Hang on a minute. Are you guys … this whole thing isn’t one of those Russian internet scam deals …”

Marin laughed. “We are not criminals, Torgrim, as I have told you. But in order to operate in Russia, in these days, you need a hacker. So we have Sasha. Now, sit on the bed.” Rygg sat. Marin said a few words in Russian to Sasha, then turned off the light, so that the room was lit by the glow of the screen. Sasha switched on a projector, and the wall across from the bed swarmed with animated sharks. Then they were watching the BBC. A pert Indian newswoman was talking about the hijacked ship – the
Alpensturm
– and there was the image of the ship he’d seen everywhere, with its spiky mast things, and the map tracing its passage from Kaliningrad into the middle of the Baltic. “You have seen this, I am sure,” Marin murmured.

“Yes. So did they ever figure out what was on the ship?”

“Well.
They
did not.” Marin gestured at projection with the remote.

“But you have? Is
that
what this thing’s about?”

“Let me start at the beginning,” Marin said. “Or one of the beginnings – I don’t know. We are still trying to understand what is happening. I am a … a journalist, as I told you. Some kind of journalist. I do research, I make interviews, I publish reports. All to do with Russia, of course. Now, as part of my work, I have Sasha watch bank accounts of a number of Russians. Several thousand, actually – mostly businessmen, government men. It is not very difficult, in these days. It can be difficult to trace transactions, but just watching the numbers is quite simple. So, last year in October a bank account in Switzerland suddenly grows, pa!” He raised his hand from his lap to head height. “From one million dollars to four hundred million. Four hundred million dollars! It is the bank account of a nobody, perhaps somebody who does not exist. What is happening? I look everywhere, I talk to my friends. Some deal must have happened, something must have been sold, but I can find no traces. Some Kalashnikovs here, some small missiles there, many drugs of course, but four hundred million – not possible! Finally I give up. I can’t find who sent this money. Five months pass. I am working on another project. Then in April, three days before you found me in Orfeoplatz, I receive a message from a man in Kaliningrad. He wants to meet me in Hamburg. In person. He says he has information that I will find interesting.”

“Information about what?”

“Information. That is all he said. He would only tell me in person. Face to face. Well, I get many messages. In Russia I am not unknown. People tell me this and that. And this man I would have ignored, maybe. But the next day we see on the news, a ship was hijacked in the Baltic. I was very surprised when I saw this news. Pirates in the Baltic? There have been no pirates in the Baltic since the 1700s. And the ship supposedly is carrying timber. Boards of pine wood. What do these pirates want with pine wood? Suddenly I am very interested in this man from Kaliningrad. So we make a date to meet in Hamburg. I fly. And I was walking to meet him when the incident occurred in Orfeoplatz.”

“Right. So where was the ship headed?”

“Originally, it was going to Algiers. Let us look at the timeline so far.” He gestured to the projected image. “On April 2, the ship left Kaliningrad, supposedly with its load of timber. It was tracked as far as here—” A blinking red line marked the spot near Sweden. “In the early morning of April 4, the ship was boarded. One of the crewmembers managed to send a message to a friend in Tallinn, who passed it to the media, for quite a lot of money. The boarders were apparently Swedish commandos. But Sweden immediately denied this. The next day the captain sent a message to the ship owners that the ship had been hijacked. From here—” The blinks moved farther west. “The ship traveled to here. And then the AIS went off.”

“Where’s the
Alpensturm
registered?”

“It is technically Maltese. That is, it is owned by a Maltese-registered company called Alpensturm Commercial, Ltd. This in turn is a subsidiary of a Finnish company called Vialane Shipping, which is owned by a Russian of Lithuanian background, Lev Gavlik, who operates out of Moscow.”

“And you think the four hundred million …”

“Yes. I think that whatever was bought with that money is on the
Alpensturm
. And I think that whatever is on the
Alpensturm
is worth twice that amount, since it is normal to pay half up front, half on delivery.”

“So what’s on board?”

“Ah. This is the question, of course. This is why you are here. What could fit into a ship the size of the
Alpensturm
that is worth eight hundred million dollars? It can only be one of two things: drugs or weapons. I think it is probably not drugs. Drug smuggling is common. Why would he contact me about drugs, unless there was a political connection? So drugs are unlikely.”

“Weapons, then. So how are you going to find out?”

“An excellent question. Especially as the ship has now disappeared. You have heard this? Vanished! A whole ship!”

“And your contact? Is he dead?”

Marin got off the bed and switched on the light. He sat on the desk beside the computer and looked at Rygg, with that intense look of his.

“He is not dead. He was watching, you see. He saw the shooting and escaped. He managed to contact me.”

“And now?”

“Hamburg has become very dangerous for me, as you have seen. They will be watching for me at the airports. But I need someone to go back to Hamburg. I need to find out what is on that ship.”

April 22

Rygg woke midmorning, in a camp cot in an otherwise bare room. The room was filled with white light, and he lay for a couple minutes looking up at the raw, adze-hacked timber of the roof, the crazed plaster. The walls were whitewashed, lumpy, and gritty. He sat up and parted the curtains. Not twenty feet away, Lena lay on a blanket on the grass. She was wearing nothing but a pair of black panties. Her breasts were small, with small neat nipples, and her silk hair was spread out across the grass behind her. She was reading a thick book. Abruptly, she swiveled her head and caught his eye, and he jerked back. But she set down the book and walked over to him and tapped on the glass. He opened the window. “You would like breakfast, Mr. Rygg?” she asked. He nodded mutely. She walked away. The skin of her back was very pale against the dark green slopes.