The Ice House (22 page)

37

He got the wrench from behind the ladder and started to take deep breaths. He would have to dive down to find the ends of the pipes. Now that there was less difference between outer and inner water pressure it should be easily possible to get them back on. But just then he heard something. The background noise was less now, because the water was above the intake pipes. He could hear voices from the other side of the hatch.

He pushed himself off the ladder – his head going under for a moment – and over to the bulkhead. Beneath the water his feet scrabbled to find the iron rib curving down below him. He managed to stand on it, pushing himself back into the furthest corner, so that he was braced against the outer hull, with a firm enough footing, the water up to his chest. He was about three metres along from the hatch, a metre back, and could hear them turning the release levers. He leaned back and tried to steady himself, held the wrench with both hands just under the water.

The light flooding through as the hatch was raised blinded him momentarily. If they had come through immediately, stepping onto the ladder, he would have been helpless. But instead he had a few seconds to recover before he saw hands on the rim, heard someone shouting in. A moment later a head peered through, at an angle, trying to look for him. It was the big security guy, looking in the opposite direction. Behind him Carl could sense movement in the play of light and shade. He heard someone saying in English that the compartment was almost flooded.

The head disappeared, then a foot appeared, feeling for the ladder, one trousered leg followed by the other. The man cursed in Russian, telling those above that the water was freezing. One of them told him that he should get out, that they had to get in and shut off the intakes. But the man kept coming down. He was in up to his chest, descending quickly. As his head got below the level of the hatch he stopped to look around and behind. But it was too dark – Carl could see him squinting into the gloom, no more than three metres away, cursing the water and the darkness, but knew he couldn’t see a thing. He shouted up for something – a flashlight. Carl changed his grip on the wrench, holding it like a pole-vaulter, both hands on it, to his side. The water was reaching his upper chest now. He held his breath.

There was a delay while they found a torch and passed it down. As the man switched it on Carl brought the long wrench out from under the water, holding it at head height, pointed right at the guy. The guy heard something and swung the torch towards Carl, blinding him, but by then Carl was already thrusting forward, pushing off with his feet and getting as much force into it as he could.

He rammed the wrench against the side of the man’s head. The man gave a strangled grunt, the torch dropping into the water, plunging them back into darkness. Carl sank beneath the surface. He heard a frantic splashing noise around his ears, then scrambled backwards, kicking against the inner hull with his booted feet. He couldn’t see anything now. But he knew he had hit the man’s head very hard.

He came up again, breathed, then had to drop the wrench to find a handhold on the bulkhead. He expected to see the man coming for him but instead saw only the ladder and the light through the hatch. For a second he was confused. Could the guy have got back out so quickly?

Something heavy rolled on the surface a couple of metres to his right, a hand raised and thrashing at the surface. The guy was over there, beneath the surface. The blow must have stunned him, dropped him into the water. There was room to get past him, if he was quick, so he kicked off the outer hull, got his hands on the rungs and heaved.

He expected to see a gun pointed in his face as his head came up through the hatch, or feel the guy’s hands tugging at him from below. Instead he saw two startled, uniformed crew ­members backing off. No weapons. He got his feet clear without being pulled back and risked a glance back down. He could hear frantic splashing, but couldn’t see anything.

He stood with some pain in the stiff knee – the one he’d banged falling into the compartment – and heard the water pouring off him. He wasn’t sure if the guy down there was fully conscious or not. He wanted to do something else, to take him out of the picture, stop him giving chase, or at least shut the hatch on him, but there was no time. The crew members were both silent and frightened, watching him like he might be armed, backing away as he came towards them. He pushed past them without saying anything and started to run as best he could along the corridor.

He took the companionway at the end two steps at a time, almost slipping in the water coming off his trousers, feeling the knee loosening up. He could hear a loud bellowing back by the hatch now. He didn’t know what deck he was on, or how many decks there were, but saw another companionway directly ahead and went straight up.

He came out onto a floodlit deck, open to the sky, at the stern, a round swimming pool in front of him, no one using it. He went round it to the starboard side and saw he was a deck higher than where the gangway would be. He ran past crew struggling to loosen one of the mooring lines and leaped a small rail to drop two metres to the deck below. As he landed, a pain shot up from his knee and for a few seconds he was stuck. Ahead he saw two suited men running towards him. He realised that the gangway had been hauled in.

He climbed awkwardly onto the guardrail right next to him and leaped across the metre gap, landing badly on the concrete dock, rolling, jarring his shoulder. As he stood, his left leg gave way, the knee refusing to take any more weight. He started to limp away, people shouting at him from the boat. He risked a look and saw the suits standing at the guardrail, one of them speaking into a radio, the other pointing at him. The line of Mercs was gone but there was still a small group of bystanders. He elbowed his way through them and kept going, headed for where he’d left the bike. The sky was dark already.

38

The flight to Helsinki was full aside from business class. She got a ticket using the credit card Drake had given her, in the name of Alice Rogers. It was very expensive. The girl at the counter said her nose was bleeding, and pointed at it – not out of human concern, but because they had rules about it. Julia asked for some tissue and poked it up the nostril, telling the girl it would stop in seconds. A couple of days before, she realised, she would have felt terrified that the girl would suspect something. She had killed two men, was travelling on false papers, paying with a credit card that wasn’t hers. But she felt no fear at all. Not any more.

She felt a new kind of cold-bloodedness. She didn’t think anyone was going to stop her, or even look for her. How would they know she was here? There wouldn’t be adequate enough descriptions of her, because everyone had been looking at the crash. There might be images of her on
CCTV
systems, but that would take more time to process, and she would be airborne in thirty minutes, on the last flight to Helsinki for that day.

In the coffee bar nearest the gate she drank three coffees in fifteen minutes, sitting by herself at one of the tables, trying to put together everything that had happened. She placed both phones on the table in front of her and watched as the one Drake had given her flashed every five minutes with a message from him. But she didn’t trust Drake now, didn’t trust Michael Rugojev either. They had brought her to London and Rebecca wasn’t here. They had brought her to the wrong place.

Rebecca was in Helsinki. She knew she was in Helsinki not just because Jones had told her that but because she had searched through Molina’s phone and found the number she had been called from while standing outside Bowman’s apartment. Whoever it was had been careless, because the number had been communicated with the call, like it was recognised by the device. Maybe it was in the phone’s memory already, in some bit of it she hadn’t managed to find. It was a mobile number with a country code: 00358. That was the country code for Finland. She had been almost certain of it as soon as she saw it, but to be sure she had sat at an Internet terminal here and checked, so there was no doubt now – she had been speaking to someone in Finland. Someone who had said,
I wish it didn’t have to be like this
.

She drained the last dregs of the last cup of coffee as she thought about that voice. She could hear it in her head now, clear as day. It brought a foul taste to her mouth, made her feel like she would start shivering again. In front of her, across from the coffee bar, they had just announced boarding for her flight.

She stood up, pulling the jacket around her and fastening it.

I wish it didn’t have to be like this
. The line had been clear – like he was speaking into her ear, right there beside her, an intimate kind of threat. He had spoken quietly, calmly. Why hadn’t she recognised him immediately?

Because she hadn’t expected to hear that voice. She had expected Zaikov’s voice, a voice she would never recognise because she had never met or spoken to Zaikov. But it wasn’t Zaikov who had taken Rebecca and tried to kill her. She knew that now. Because she had recognised the voice – she knew exactly who it was.

39

The bike was in sight when it happened. He was walking, quickly but carefully, on the twisted knee, just over the Esplanadi at the other side of the market. There were no stalls there now, the space was empty, the wind whipping litter across the cobbles, but the road he had crossed was full of the night-time, rush-hour traffic, a glare of headlights. He had asked someone the time and been told it was quarter past six, so he was in a hurry. He had less than an hour to get up to the conference centre, maybe not even that if someone told Zaikov he had escaped. It was feasible Zaikov would react to that, feel a need to take precautions.

He turned the corner past the City Hall, saw the bike about one hundred metres ahead, still there, then felt it in his chest: a quick flutter, followed by a pain that lanced into his left arm. It was severe enough to stop him. He put a hand up and could feel his heart doing something, beating too hard, too fast, too uneven. An effect of the electricity, he thought, willing himself to dismiss it.

He stepped forward to continue, sure it would wear off, but right then he felt it stop – felt his heart actually stop. He could feel the pulse, hear the beat in his ears, then it just stopped. In the split second between it happening and the rush of wrenching fear that followed, he took a deep breath and collapsed gently to the ground. He was on his knees before a wave of blackness swept over him, like he was fainting. Then he was gone.

A fraction of a second later he was conscious again. That was his impression – but it can’t have been accurate, because he was on his back now, with a circle of anxious faces looking down at him, someone saying something to him with quiet concern, another person pressing down on his chest, starting the CPR routine.

His eyes cleared and he sat up. He heard gasps of relief from someone.

‘We thought you were dead,’ a man said.

Carl focused on him, saw a police uniform. ‘I’m OK,’ he said, confused, unable to even place where he was. He took deep breaths, put his hand up to his chest. The heartbeat was there, beating normally, a little fast, but regular.

He muttered thank you to the group, or something like that. His head felt fuzzy again, disorientated, like it had been right after they had tasered him. He could remember that immediately, the tasering, then most of the rest – where he was, where he had been going – but other things were lost: the wider situation. In view were a couple of men, a woman, the policeman. Behind the policeman a police bike, stopped at the kerb, blue light flashing.

‘You cut your head as you fell,’ the policeman said, in broken English. ‘I called an ambulance. Just in case.’

Carl brought his hand up, put it on the gash behind his ear, felt the wet, warm blood. But that was from before, from falling into the bilge of the boat. He remembered that now as well.

‘I’m OK,’ he said, in Finnish. ‘I think I just tripped up. I don’t need an ambulance.’

‘You weren’t breathing,’ the woman said. ‘For about ten seconds you weren’t breathing.’

He tried to stand up, got to his knees, paused to make sure he wasn’t going to collapse, then stood. He looked around, saw his bike, further up the road. He laughed, trying to make light of things, thanked them again. He could recall he was in a hurry, but not why. Get to the bike, get going. Get away from the policeman. Work it out later.

But would the policeman stop him getting on the bike? He was already losing interest, Carl thought. He had turned away, started speaking into a shoulder-clipped radio, talking about some traffic situation somewhere. Carl thanked them again and started to walk off. This was Finland. People didn’t speak much, not even to people they knew. No need to hang around discussing it. He said something curt, more in keeping with the national character. Thirty metres further on he looked back and saw them walking off, two of them speaking to each other. The policeman was still on his radio. Somewhere in the distance he could hear an ambulance siren. How long had he been lying there?

At the bike he turned the corner, not going anywhere near the machine. He leaned against a wall, out of sight, sank down on his haunches, listened to his heart. Was it going to happen again – that it would just stop like that? If it happened when he was on the bike he was fucked.

He tried to remember where he was going but for a minute or so nothing came into his head. Then he recalled the gun, in the box of the bike. He had to get to the conference centre where Zaikov was. That was what he had been trying to do.

He walked over to the bike, looked left. The police bike was already gone. He unclipped the helmet and put it on, got on the bike and tried to look for the keys in his jacket. The jacket was soaking. Had they asked him about that – the policeman, those people? He couldn’t remember. He was shivering now. He no longer had the fleece beneath the jacket. He found the keys under the seat, where he had left them.

He started the bike, pushed off. If he felt the flutter again he would stop, immediately, call emergency services. He paused, slowed, put his foot down, searched for his phone. But they had taken his phone. He couldn’t contact anyone. He wanted to contact Viktor, to ask him something. Something important. But what? That was gone. He had to try to remember it. And something else – something teasing at the back of his mind, something they had said on the boat.

He rode all the way to the Kalasjatorppa conference centre with the feeling persisting that his brain wasn’t working properly. But not the part of it that coordinated his driving. He drove fast, weaved between cars, used the throttle, had no problems staying on the bike and reacting to traffic. That wasn’t it. The sensation was of a gap behind all that. He could do everything on the surface as if he had already recovered from what they had done to him, but behind it all he wasn’t placing thoughts where they should be, or in the right order. It was an abstract feeling of unease.

So he drove with urgency, but when he got to the hotel and saw the rows of Mercs parked up in the big turning circle, with chauffeurs holding doors open and men coming out, he just sat there, in the road, astride the bike, the engine ticking over, not knowing what he was meant to do now.

Get the contract cancelled before they send someone new to kill her.
He remembered the contract. But how? Was he meant to shoot Zaikov – would that do it? There had to be a reason why he had the gun.

He felt confused, unclear about what was required. He put his hand on his heart again, under the jacket. It seemed OK, but he was breathing in short gasps. He looked around, squinting into the headlights on the road behind him, then remembered a whole chunk of details – what had happened on the boat. They hadn’t given him a chance to speak about Rebecca, but they weren’t going to cancel anything, clearly. So he needed to put them in a situation where they were
forced
to consider that. Zaikov was going to travel to the house on the island of Kaskisaari – Viktor had told him that – so if he was going to do something he would need to get there ahead of him. Or find somewhere on the way there, somewhere where he could force things. He needed time with Zaikov, in safety. Time to convince him. Viktor’s way had failed, now he would fall back on something more traditional.

He didn’t wait to see if Zaikov was in the group getting into the cars. Viktor had told him Zaikov would go to Kaskisaari, so that was that. He turned the bike round and took it down to the coast road, driving more carefully, looking for a police presence but finding none. He crossed the bridge to Kuusisaari, the first of a small chain of islands that extended out into the bay – Kaskisaari was the last. The bridge was only a couple of minutes from the conference centre. The traffic was still heavy here because you could use this route to get across the bay to Espoo, a large residential area. There was nowhere anything could be attempted in seclusion.

The second bridge took him over to a larger island – Lehtisaari. Here there were more trees, but still too much traffic. At a junction he took the turn signposted for Kaskisaari and very quickly the traffic was thinning out. Now there was nowhere to go except Kaskisaari. You could get cars over there, but not off the other end, where there was only a footbridge. But even before he got near the bridge over to Kaskisaari, he was driving through light forest, no houses around. He slowed down, pulled over. They would come this way, driving through the trees. If Viktor was right, they would travel by this route.

He followed a footpath and eased the bike across the sparse forest floor, then cut the engine and got off. He propped it behind a stand of bushes and opened the box. He kept his ears on the road as he got the pieces of gun out and put them together, blind almost, in the light of the moon coming through the branches above. He snapped the magazine in and pulled the bolt. He could hear cars behind him.

He went down low and got back to within five metres of the road. He found a spur of land crested with big old birch trees and lay down flat amongst the leaf litter. There were streetlights on the road but the nearest was thirty metres away. He steadied the gun on the ground and took aim. He saw a headlight poking through the trees, coming from the direction of Kaskisaari. It was a van, travelling slow. He watched it pass, could clearly see the driver concentrating on the road. As it disappeared he was left in silence. In the distance he could hear traffic on the big Lautasaari bridge, about two kilometres away. He waited.

He tried to estimate the minutes. Five minutes. Then ten. The cold was seeping into his wet clothing, coming up from the ground. He was shivering. What was he doing here? He asked himself the question and started to think it through. They would come down the road in a cavalcade of cars. There would be at least three cars. Zaikov wouldn’t be taking chances. The first and last would contain security people. But they wouldn’t be armed, not here in Finland. Or maybe they would. It was possible. It was also possible the cars were armoured. But even without those issues, how would he stop them? Shoot out the tyres? That wouldn’t do it, not if the drivers were professional – they would keep going on the hubs. Kill the engine? He doubted that was certain, even at this range, not with this gun, not if the cars were armoured. They would just keep going, once again, get across the bridge to Kaskisaari, inside their compound there.

He rested his head on the ground. He didn’t know what he was doing. This wasn’t his thing. It wasn’t even a gun he knew how to fire properly. And anyway, were they even going to come here?

The thought freed something up. Viktor had said they would come here. Viktor had set up the meeting with Zaikov. He started to shake and knew suddenly that he had already made a terrible connection, seconds before he had it laid out in his head.

On the boat, they had said something that he thought he hadn’t understood, but his brain gave it to him now, crystal clear. The younger one – Andrei Zaikov – had come in with the bat and demanded of the father if it was some kind of joke, otherwise what had brought him, Carl, there, to them, into their power? And the father had snapped something back at him, very quick. Carl had heard it but hadn’t understood. But he could understand it now, understand it perfectly. Zaikov had said, ‘He has been given some stupid story about a girl and a contract.’

A stupid story about a girl and a contract.
That was what Carl had just told Zaikov that he was there about. A stupid story? The truth was right there in the way he had said it, not to Carl, but to his son – so no need for lying or pretence. The story Carl had told him, about the contract on Rebecca, had sounded stupid to him. As if it weren’t true.

There was no need to remember more, but he did. He remembered the son looking down at him, the baseball bat perched on his shoulder, then turning back to the father and saying, ‘His brother says we are village idiots, shit-kickers, but we would never do this to our own.’

They had known he was coming, and they had known who he was, just as Viktor had said they would. But someone had convinced them that
he
had killed Uri Zaikov.

He stood quickly. The road was very silent and he knew at once that Zaikov was coming nowhere near this island. He was waiting in vain. It was possible Zaikov didn’t even own a house
here. Zaikov had never heard of the Spanish contract, never heard of the girl he was meant to have contracted Carl to kill.

We would never do this to our own.

He started to run back to the bike.