A Death in Sweden (7 page)

Chapter Thirteen

Whether it was the air or the quiet, or just a low-level exhaustion that had crept up on him these past weeks, he slept deep and sound, more soundly than he had in years.

When he woke it was because of a dream that tipped over into reality—his son was there in the room with him, shaking him awake, “Papa, Papa,” and in his dream state he didn’t see at first that it was Martinez’s son, not his own. And as his consciousness took hold he was weighed down all over again by the sadness of remembering.

He shook himself out of it and jumped out of bed. It was after nine and Inger was out, her bedroom door open, bed made. He showered, dressed, made himself some breakfast. She still wasn’t back by the time he’d finished, so he walked through the woods to Fillon’s house, thinking she might be there.

The guy in Stockholm had told him how much colder it would be up here, how dull at this time of year, but once again, there was a clear blue sky overhead, and a gentle warmth, albeit paper-thin.

Even before he stepped into the little clearing, he knew Inger wasn’t there. There was just something about the house that spoke of its emptiness. But there was nothing much to do until she got there, so he sat at the top of the wooden steps and waited, enjoying the peace and the feeling of time slipping away from him.

Within a few minutes, he was so embedded within the calm of the place that he almost didn’t want her to come, just wanted to sit there feeling the sun’s steady progress. Perhaps that was how easily it took hold, the ease with solitude that had surely governed Jacques Fillon’s existence.

Dan had been there twenty minutes or so before he heard a car and stirred himself, almost as if coming out of a shallow sleep. It approached along the road, then turned and drove more deliberately, somewhere off in the woods. It took Dan a little while to work out that it had driven up to their cabin.

He heard two car doors open, then the cabin door, the sounds travelling cleanly on the faultless acoustics of this northern air. He couldn’t help but imagine two of Brabham’s men, a scenario in which Inger had tipped them off, unlikely as it already seemed.

But he smiled then as he heard Per and Inger talking, their voices unmistakable. Their conversation sounded like a short negotiation and Inger seemed to give way before the two car doors shut again and the car pulled away.

Inger had no doubt wanted to walk through the woods to Fillon’s place, and Per had insisted on driving her, because Dan listened now as the car made its way slowly out onto the road, a short stretch at normal speed, then the same slower crawl to the clearing where he was waiting for them. Inger had probably been right, and would have been quicker walking.

She waved at him from quite a distance, then again as they got out of the car. Dan stayed where he was, sitting on the steps, while they all said hello to each other. Perhaps she hadn’t tipped off Brabham, but he was still curious about where she’d been and why she was acting so nervously.

As if answering his unspoken question, but a little too eagerly, she said, “I had some things I needed to do, so I called Per. You were still sleeping.”

He nodded, noncommittal, and said, “I slept really well.” He looked at Per and added, “You have good air up here.”

Per looked uncertain how to respond and said, “It’s the only air I know.”

“Then you’ll have to take my word for it.” He looked back to Inger. She seemed to be waiting for him to follow up on her excuse, asking what it was she’d been checking, but he said only, “Ready to get to work?”

“Sure.” She turned to Per, saying, “Thanks for the ride.”

“Anytime,” he said, and took that as his cue. They said goodbye to him and watched as he got in the car and drove off, Inger standing, Dan still on the step.

Once the car had disappeared from view, she turned to look at him, and Dan stared back for a second before he said, “Can I trust you, Inger?”

“Of course.”

“No, I mean, can I really trust you? I know you have your own agenda here, and that’s fine, and I don’t mind you going off with Per to do whatever it was you needed to do. I just need to know that I can trust you, that your agenda doesn’t involve helping other people to bring me down.”

She threw her hands up, as if to ask how she could answer that in any way that would convince him, but then said, “You can trust me as much as I can trust you. That’s all I have.”

He smiled and stood up, and involuntarily she took a step back before making an effort to look more relaxed. He hated that she was uneasy around him, perhaps even afraid, particularly when he had more to fear from her than she did from him. And ironically, her noncommittal reply had eased his mind more than any earnest assurances would have done.

“That’s okay then. I didn’t mean to put you on the spot, but you can understand me being a little touchy.”

“I should have left a note. It wasn’t anything that concerned you.” She looked around then and he could see she desperately wanted to draw a line under it. She clearly made an effort to sound breezy and positive as she said, “So, should we check the sauna first?”

He nodded and gestured for her to lead the way, but stopped almost immediately, not looking at the sauna ahead of them, but at the back of the house. He’d been tired the day before, but he still should have spotted it, and the guy who’d come up from Berlin
really
should have noticed.

“He has a satellite dish.”

She turned, looking at Dan first, then at the dish which was no ordinary domestic installation, but high-spec.

“Most people have . . .” She stopped, the significance of it hitting home, and then she said, “But why would he need one?”

“Exactly. No TV, no computer.”

“There must be a hidden room, in the cellar, maybe . . .”

“Or in the garage. Remember what Per said—when the postman came he was usually working in the garage.”

They started walking towards the garage, and now that they’d seen the dish, Dan was seeing the whole place differently, more critically.

He pointed and said, “Why did he take the bus every day when he’s got a pretty new SUV sitting there?”

She looked, the nose of the vehicle poking out of the garage, but said, “Who knows? Maybe he just liked taking the bus. Maybe he went for a drink each day and didn’t want to drive.” But they’d reached the garage now and she pointed to the ground in front of it, a couple of deep, hard-baked ruts, the evidence of rainy days past. “That’s interesting, though, like he’s had it parked part of the way out a lot of the time.”

They both crouched down together, and looked under the truck. There was something there. At first it just appeared as if a rectangle had been carefully etched onto the smooth surface of the garage floor and it took Dan a second or two to realize what he was staring at; the flush lip of a concealed trapdoor.

Inger said, “Could it be a pit, for working underneath the car?”

He could tell in the tone of her voice that she didn’t believe that. This had to be it—the satellite dish, the whole careful anonymity of the place, there had to be more and this had to be it, the truth of Fillon’s identity. And, crucially, they’d found it first.

Dan stood again and said, “I’ll look in the cab for the keys—we need to move this thing.”

“No, I saw the keys on a hook, in the kitchen.” She was already walking, but turned, clearly excited by the discovery, and said, “Maybe that’s why he didn’t take the jeep to town, because he didn’t want to leave the door exposed.”

Dan nodded and walked into the garage, looking at the old wreck of a bike that filled the floor space behind the SUV. It was a Harley, but ancient and in pieces, with various tools surrounding it on the floor, as if Fillon had just been disturbed in the middle of a major job.

And in truth, Dan doubted that Fillon had ever really worked on the bike at all. It was obvious when he considered how scrupulously tidy the house was, that this was just for show, the appearance of a time-consuming pastime, the perfect explanation for always being out here if anyone called.

He was still looking at it when he heard Inger’s footsteps padding lightly but swiftly across the grass. She held the keys up to show him, then jumped in the cab and pulled forward. The vehicle had spent so much time in those well-worn ruts over the years that he saw the front of it sink down as the wheels found their second home.

He released the handle and pulled up the hatch as Inger got out of the SUV and came back to join him. He saw concrete in the dark below, and for a moment he was disappointed, fearing she’d been right after all about the work pit. But then he noticed it was a set of steep concrete steps, and he couldn’t help but smile to himself, triumphant, as lights came on automatically, inviting them underground.

“Now
that
is quite something.”

Inger seemed equally impressed, but said, “Maybe it was already here when he bought the place, you know, like a nuclear shelter.”

“Maybe.” Maybe. But Fillon had been making use of it, for whatever it was that had occupied him all these years, for whatever it was that had spooked Brabham enough to send someone up here from Berlin. It was all here, beneath this garage and this carefully crafted mundanity.

He started down the steps, one flight to a small landing, then another flight in the opposite direction, a metal handrail the whole way down. The depth suggested Inger might have been right about the pre-existing fallout shelter, likewise the heavy metal door they were faced with at the bottom.

She was close behind him and said now, “That’s a relief—I was thinking he might have a keypad or something.”

The door had a simple, if heavy-duty, handle, but Dan said, “I think you’re right about the nuclear shelter—I guess being able to lock it from the inside is the important thing. Besides, look at the way it’s hidden. He didn’t need security.”

Dan lowered the handle and pushed the door open. The lights in the room beyond flickered into life and they stepped inside. Whatever it had been in its former life, it was set out now like a busy office, probably not unlike the one Inger was used to working in.

There was a desk with a computer on it, paperwork, filing cabinets, corkboards around the room, all of them full of papers and photographs, news stories, notes. It was an astonishing thing to see, because Jacques Fillon might have been living in obscurity for the last twelve years, but he’d also been working on something for all that time.

And the nature of the scene in front of them was unmistakable. Fillon’s real consuming passion all these years had not been a motorbike, and he hadn’t spent his evenings reading from his library of books. This was clearly an investigation in front of them, and even at first glance, Dan instinctively knew what he was looking at—it looked like Fillon had spent these last twelve years investigating a crime.

Chapter Fourteen

“He did this,” said Inger, standing in awe. Dan looked at her, and she met his eye and said, “You asked yesterday, what did he do? Well, here’s your answer. He did this.”

Dan nodded, taking in the room which looked like a nerve center for half a dozen operatives. Yet everything, every printout, the corkboards bursting with information, the filing cabinets that he suspected were all full, all of it was the work of one man’s diligence, one man’s obsession.

Inger went to the desk, where she sat down and started to work through the drawers. Dan walked over to one of the corkboards. Even at first glance, he could see that the board related to Bill Brabham, a picture of the guy in the middle of it, though he wasn’t someone Dan recognized.

The next three boards were dedicated to Brabham’s children. One son, Harry, was a South Carolina congressman, the other, George, was co-founder of an Internet company in Silicon Valley. The daughter, Natasha, was an attorney in DC.

Charlie had known these kids when they were young, but Dan doubted he’d have been able to shed much more light on them—their trajectories seemed all too typical for the offspring of the Washington elite. The fact that Fillon had dedicated boards to them just seemed to underline the totality of his obsession with Brabham.

“Now I know why Bill Brabham sent someone up here, because our friend Jacques Fillon seems to have had a real problem with the guy.”

“John Redford.”

“Sorry?” He turned to look at her, and saw that she was holding up an American passport.

“Jacques Fillon was John Redford. Is the name familiar?”

Dan shook his head but walked over and looked at the passport. It had expired, naturally, and the picture was fifteen years younger and a whole lot more alive than the mug-shot he’d seen of Fillon’s corpse. Redford’s corpse. But given the nature of passport photographs, the guy looking out at him was barely less mysterious than he’d been in death.

The Redford of the passport was just an anonymous-looking guy in his late thirties, almost the same age as Dan was now, brown hair, nondescript features. Neither his face nor his name struck a chord, but that was hardly surprising given how long this guy had been out of circulation.

“I wonder if he was Jack Redford. Per said everyone called him Jack.” For some reason, that brought an unwelcome flashback of Jack Carlton in the moments before he’d died on Charlie’s deck, triggering a slight but nagging regret, though in truth he could only regret the details because none of them, not even Jack, would have expected any other outcome.

“So, he’s Jack Redford. It would be better if you check with Patrick White than if I send it through my office.”

“You think someone could tip off the CIA?”

She was quick to say, “No, but we don’t know who Redford was, any more than we knew who Fillon was, and we don’t know what he did, so it’s possible anything I do will trigger an alarm.”

“I’ll speak to him later. First, I want to work out what this guy’s been doing here.” He handed the passport back, but she put it on the desk and stood, joining him in looking over the boards.

Some of them seemed random and unconnected except in tangential ways. One was covered by a map of Paris and clippings about the murder of a student. Another dealt with various stories of alleged corruption or suspicious trading, surrounding defense contracts, oil licenses, and intriguingly, Internet stocks.

A third board seemed to deal exclusively with people who’d been murdered or who’d disappeared for perceived political purposes. Dan felt his thoughts jar when he noticed the disappearance of Ahmad Habibi listed among them. It was quite possible that Brabham had pulled the strings on the Habibi job without Dan knowing about it, because he had no doubt Brabham was the thread linking all these stories.

There was only one serious problem. Dan could see what had happened here. Jack Redford had been involved with Brabham in some way, had known of his guilt in some activity or other, a knowledge dangerous enough to send him up here, but looking at these boards, it seemed Redford had become obsessed with Brabham’s entire family, as if he’d wanted to find dirt on all of them, destroy all of them.

The worst-case scenario for Patrick White, and definitely for Dan, was that Redford had lost his grip on reality, his obsession tipping over into insanity during all these years of self-imposed solitary confinement.

Inger had moved on, and he heard her opening the drawers in a couple of the filing cabinets.

“Dan, there’s enough material here to . . . I mean, tens of thousands of pages, and that’s without searching the computer. This is ten years’ work, far too much for you and me to sift through. And we have no way of knowing what’s important.”

That was true enough. Dan imagined Jack Redford looking at this room and knowing exactly what it all meant, the pattern that linked it all together. But he’d never imagined anyone else looking at it, so there was no key, there were no instructions, because Redford hadn’t needed them.

Dan went back to the picture of Bill Brabham, the same smart corporate blandness of so many CIA station chiefs, the same glassy-eyed half smile. Redford had known something damning about Bill Brabham, but he’d never had the proof and had spent the last decade trying to find that proof or some other way of bringing him down.

“Do you think this is a new board he was starting?”

Dan turned and looked over to where Inger was standing. It was a corkboard on the other side of the room, but with just one large photograph in the middle of it. He walked over. It was a print of something like a yearbook photo, though it looked as though Redford had printed it himself on photographic paper.

The subject was a girl or young woman, dark-haired, pretty, a partially formed smile that gave her an air of timidity. It was frustrating, because Inger could be right, this might have been a new board, representing a new lead, but they had no way of knowing who she was or how she fitted in to the rest of it.

Dan shook his head, the sense of bafflement even greater than before they’d known who Fillon really was.

He looked around now and said, “Why don’t you see what’s behind the other doors and I’ll take a look at his computer?”

“How will you know the password?”

He looked at it and said, “I doubt he used one, for the same reason the door wasn’t locked.”

“Maybe you’re right.” She hesitated a moment and said, “It’s strange to think, he imagined he’d be back here later that day, that he’d pick up where he left off. Though I guess that’s true for all of the ones who died on the bus.”

He nodded, conscious that a handful of the people he knew had also set out one day or other in the last few months and never returned. It could equally happen to him one day soon, and it was perhaps even more poignant that Dan would leave no great half-finished project.

She walked along to one of the additional doors at the far end of the room and Dan booted up the computer. As he’d suspected, there was no password, and he brought up Redford’s Internet history easily enough.

That was where he encountered his first surprise. Redford had been on a Baltimore news website looking at a story that covered Mike Naismith’s hit-and-run death.

That was the only one of the recent deaths to occur before the bus crash, but it could only have been a few days before. It was astonishing that Redford could have made the link so quickly, because Dan guessed the only reason he would have been interested in Mike Naismith’s death was if he’d believed there was a connection with Bill Brabham.

Was someone tipping him off? That was one possibility, that he’d still had contacts, still had a steady drip-feed of information from his former life. Dan doubted it though, doubted that someone so determined to disappear would have left a thread running through the maze. More plausible somehow, was the prospect that Redford had simply been good at this, the top of his game, master of all this information.

Inger came back out of the door, making for the other that faced it, but said, “Kitchen, bathroom, two small rooms with bunks, but the bedrooms are unused. This place is pretty big.” She opened the other door and stepped inside, and Dan heard her say, “Wow.”

He pushed away from the desk, realizing as he did that Redford hadn’t quite been the master of all this information, in that he clearly hadn’t yet found the thing he’d needed to bring Brabham down. That was key, because there was a good chance it was the same thing Dan needed to safeguard his own future.

When he stepped into the room, Inger was still standing motionless, just looking out at the stacks of shelves. It was bigger than the main room, “the office” as Dan already thought of it, and had probably been designed as the storage room for the people hiding out down here.

Redford had also used it as a storage room, but for someone looking at starting Armageddon rather than surviving it. There was a lot of weaponry in there, of almost every conceivable type, including some heavy-duty explosives. But there was also an incredible amount of electronic equipment, from small components right up to pieces of machinery that Dan couldn’t even begin to identify.

Dan said, “I don’t know what he was planning, but it would have been something to behold.”

Inger still hadn’t moved, but said now, “How did he get hold of all this stuff without anyone noticing? How did he get it here?”

The logistics of it weren’t so hard to imagine. It was an enormous amount of kit, but he could have easily brought it in little by little over a couple of months and no one would have thought anything of it, even if there’d been anyone to see him unloading his SUV.

More interesting was what the sophistication of both the weaponry and the electronics said about Redford. They’d suspected it already, of course, not least because of the interest shown by Brabham’s people, but this was certainly a more definitive declaration of that truth.

“He was one of us,” said Dan. “This guy was clearly one hell of a specialist. He knew how to get hold of stuff, knew what he needed, was able to do it all without ever once appearing on the radar.”

The day before, Dan had imagined this guy leading his half-life up here, traveling by bus and tinkering with his old motorbike, and he’d felt a mixture of fear and contempt at the thought of such an existence. Now, without knowing much more about him, he couldn’t help but admire him and wish he’d had the chance to meet him.

Again, he thought about what might have happened had the man who wasn’t Jacques Fillon not died on that bus. What endgame had he been working towards, how much of the equipment in front of them was part of it?

And at another level, thinking of the picture of Bill Brabham pinned to that board out there, Dan wondered how much of Redford’s plan he could resurrect himself, and what his chances might be of seeing it through. Dan and Jack Redford had never known each other, but fate had put them on converging paths and, even without knowing the history of it, Dan knew that he had no choice but to make this his investigation now.