Frozen Assets (12 page)

Hardy stood up and dusted himself down with a smile.

‘I hope that's all in order,' he said to the whimpering man on his knees, one shattered arm cradled in the other. ‘I wouldn't like to come back and do the same to the other one. Ready, Matti?' he asked with a smile.

14

Thursday, 11 September

The percolator spat and hissed while Gunna spread slices of bread with butter and then layers of ham. Forcing her thoughts elsewhere, she wondered how long Sævaldur would be able to hold Gústi the Gob with no real evidence to back up his suspicions.

With Laufey away from home for the week, Gunna found that she hated being in an empty flat and wondered when Gísli would be back. Although Gunna worried about him working at sea, she reflected that the trawler was a fine ship with an unbroken safety record and that crossing a busy street was probably more hazardous than working on deck among an experienced crew. She debated whether or not to call Laufey, but decided that the girl would probably see it as interference.

With nobody else in the house, cooking was too much trouble. She toyed with the idea of a takeaway, but felt slightly revolted by the idea of the stodgy pizza that was all Hvalvík could offer.

She placed four sandwiches on a plate and opened the fridge to search for mustard. Right at the back, a half-full bottle stared at her. It called suddenly, sweetly, insistently, telling her that one glass would be fine, that she could handle a small one.

Gunna quickly picked up the mustard jar and shoved the door closed, but the image of the cognac bottle remained with her as she ate at the table while the TV news reported four people escaping from a house fire in Akureyri.

She ignored the whisper from the fridge when the next item appeared. This time the chairman of a union commented that housing conditions for overseas workers employed to build a power plant in the east of Iceland were far below standards required and the work camp would have to be shut down if things did not improve. The camera swung and she recognized the young man she had interviewed at Spearpoint's offices, now sporting a goatee and almost invisible frameless glasses. She turned the sound up quickly as the banner at the bottom of the screen read ‘Jón Oddur Finnbogason, Spearpoint'.

‘. . . really can't comment on these allegations,' blustered the pale young man with the fringe of ginger beard.

‘But surely you must have checked the accommodation that these people were going to be living in before they arrived?' a reporter asked.

‘Of course. Everything was vetted at the project's preparation stage. We carried out extensive checks.'

‘And did you do this personally?'

‘We have representatives on the ground who do this kind of work on the company's behalf and this was entrusted to them. As far as I'm aware, this was all done satisfactorily.'

‘But your company didn't send anyone personally?'

There was silence for a moment. ‘No. As I have already said, we have representatives who—'

‘Jón Oddur Finnbogason of Spearpoint.' The reporter had cut the young man off in mid-sentence as the camera tracked to a huddle of sorry-looking sheds crowded between the half-built steel skeleton of a hangar and a gaggle of trucks. A second later the picture flashed back to the studio.

‘And now, a light aircraft made an emergency landing this afternoon at Bíldudalur. There were no injuries, but the aircraft has been badly damaged. Investigators are already on the scene and the airstrip at Bíldudalur is closed until flights hopefully resume tomorrow . . .'

She quickly muted the sound as the phone rang beside her. ‘Gunnhildur.'

‘Ah, good evening. Gunna?' a gruff voice asked.

‘That's me.'

‘Er. Hi. It's Steini.'

‘Steini? Sorry . . .'

‘Steini the diver.'

‘Ah, right. Hi. Anything else about that car in the dock at Sandeyri?'

She heard him muffle a cough. ‘Well, no. Actually . . . No, nothing new there. I was, er, wondering if you'd like to meet up for a drink or even a meal or something?'

Gunna sat in surprised silence for a moment. ‘That's good of you to ask, Steini, but . . .'

She thought for a moment. Steini and Raggi had been good friends and she was suddenly terrified of reopening old wounds.

‘What did you have in mind?' she asked finally.

‘If you're not busy this evening, there's a place in Grindavík called the Salt House that does a fine seafood buffet on a Thursday evening.'

Gunna felt an unaccustomed fluttering in her stomach, chuckled and quickly stopped herself.

‘Old ladies like me don't get that many invitations,' she said. ‘See you there in an hour?'

She snapped off the TV and marched to the kitchen with her plate and mug. She placed the crockery in the sink with the rest of it. Alone in the flat, she hadn't bothered loading the dishwasher all week. The cognac bottle in the fridge whispered its sweet promises through the door, but now she dismissed them sternly. Gunna breathed deep, and made for the shower.

15

Saturday, 13 September

It was already a hot day and the marchers had gradually discarded more and more clothing as the sun rose higher in the summer sky. With bare arms, midriffs and legs displayed everywhere, Skúli felt uncomfortably overdressed in heavy jeans and an anorak.

Anticipation had been building up for days as the march drifted slowly out of Reykjavík and gathered way, straggling past the last of the houses and shops and on to the open road. Under a glaring sun in an azure sky, the marchers sang and chanted while around them the bilberry-covered tundra gradually gave way to black rock and lingering pools of still water.

By the time it reached the top of the first pass on the way to Hvalvík, the march had doubled in size as brightly dressed people joined in handfuls and carloads, swelling the procession to a respectable band. As it approached the outskirts of Hvalvík, TV news stations began estimating the size of the march in thousands and also reported that several groups of activists arriving from Britain, Germany and Scandinavia had been detained at Keflavík airport.

Certain that this would be tomorrow's lead story, Skúli felt nervous about covering something so visible and volatile, made up of such a large number of people he felt an uncomfortable empathy with.

He wondered where Dagga was. This was a story big enough to warrant two of them covering it, as well as the freelance photographer Reynir Óli had been forced to agree to hire for the day.

Behind them somewhere was a support car that Skúli hoped would not be too far away. Ahead of him was Lára with a heavy camera over one shoulder and another at her eye as she took pictures of a tall young man in an oversized green bowler hat who juggled red, white and blue balls, winking suggestively at her as he loped along ahead of the Clean Iceland banner at the head of the march.

‘Any luck?' an out-of-breath Dagga asked as she caught up with Skúli.

‘Not a lot.'

Dagga pulled a sheet of paper from her shoulder bag and tried to read it without slowing her trot. The sun was high in a perfect blue sky and a miasma of dust kicked up by many feet hung in the still air.

‘There's a woman called Ásta who's supposed to be the media contact, but her phone is dead or out of range and I can't reach her. Then there's this Kolbeinn who's supposed to be in charge of the schedule, but it doesn't look like there's a schedule anyway, so maybe he's not here either.'

‘I suppose we can get a few quotes from some of the marchers and then take police quotes from the TV reports.'

‘How about your policewoman friend? Isn't she likely to be round here somewhere?' Dagga asked.

‘Gunna? I expect so.'

Skúli looked up to where a helicopter swung into view and swooped low as the procession waved at the cameras levelled at them.

‘Police or TV?' he wondered.

‘Channel Three, I think. Must be nice working in TV, just a quick jaunt in a helicopter and back home to do a ninety-second report.'

The procession picked up pace as it approached the sprawl of Hvalvík. At the Please Drive Carefully sign a hundred metres outside the village's furthest house, a small group of police officers stood resolutely in the middle of the road.

The marchers whooped as the procession drew to a halt and the group at the front went ahead to confer. Lára stepped forward and was rewarded with a scowl from the senior police officer and a grin from the juggler as she raised her camera.

‘We're just going straight through the town and out the other side. Anything wrong with that?' the juggler demanded.

‘I'd like to know where you're planning to go after that. I'm warning you right now that I will have no alternative but to make arrests if there is any trespassing on private land.'

Skúli had his recorder in his hand and tried to edge closer. Apart from the calm senior officer, the five police officers appeared ill at ease. Lára shot half a dozen frames of the juggler and the senior policeman facing each other, and this was enough for one of the younger policemen, who detached himself from the group.

‘Who are you?' he demanded.

‘Press,' Lára retorted. ‘You know that, Gummi.'

‘Press cards?'

Lára pulled out a wallet, flipped it open in front of his face and quickly closed it again. With a touch of pride, Skúli showed his very new press card.

‘Identification?' the policeman snapped at a tall man who appeared to have come from nowhere.

‘Very sorry. I don't speak your language,' the man replied smoothly in English.

‘Papers, please. Do you have a press card?' the policeman asked more politely this time and the man delved into an inside pocket to draw out a laminated card.

‘From Germany?'

The man nodded.

‘Newspaper?'

‘News magazine.'

‘OK.'

Satisfied that he had done his duty, the policeman rejoined the group where the senior officer and the juggler were still sparring.

‘Are you able to assure me that there will be no attempts to enter private land?'

‘This is an entirely peaceful protest. I can assure you that Clean Iceland has no intention of carrying out any illegal acts.'

‘I'm pleased to hear it. But before I can allow you to carry on with this gathering, I have to be sure that there is no intention to provoke a confrontation. If I have reasonable suspicion, then I will prevent you from continuing.'

‘You mean you're prepared to stop a peaceful gathering making its way along a public road? I'm sure that will look good on the news, and there's more than just a few local hacks here today,' the juggler pointed out.

Skúli felt a close presence and glanced sideways at the tall man with German press credentials.

‘Can you tell me what they are saying?' the man murmured.

‘Well, it's just a game really,' Skúli replied. ‘They want to go up to the construction site and the police can't really stop them.'

‘Why not?'

‘Like the guy in the hat said, it's a peaceful demo and unless they have a really good reason to believe there's something illegal likely to happen, then they can't stop them from using the road.'

‘Is that enough?'

‘Yes, probably,' Skúli said slowly. ‘It's hard to say how the police will handle this and it's not easy to see exactly who's in this group. I think there are a lot of people here who aren't part of Clean Iceland.'

‘Who, then?'

‘There are people here from Asia and South America, places where InterAlu already does business. And there seem to be some kind of professional activists, people who were at that big camp at Heathrow airport in England last year.'

‘Do you know which ones they are? They might be worth talking to.'

‘They're everywhere. Most of the foreigners are experienced campaigners. Hey, which magazine did you say you were working for?' Skúli asked, turning to find that the man had silently disappeared.

The march drifted cheerfully past Hvalvík and along the gravel road to the smelter site on the industrial area. A bevy of police cars preceded the marchers and a small convoy of cars followed, with an ambulance bringing up the rear. The music died away and the mood darkened as the village dropped out of sight and they approached the chain link fence where Gunna and Haddi were waiting for them with a group of men in high-viz jackets behind the fence. Skúli was suddenly glad of his anorak as a cloud bank blotted out the sun.

The colourful crowd gathered at the fence around the site where they joined hands and chanted slogans. There was little for the police to do other than watch and stop a group from lighting a fire to grill hot dogs.

A low podium of crates and planks was erected and a small sound system rigged up so that representatives of Clean Iceland could speak to the whole gathering. A Green Party MP spent too long at the microphone and by the time he had finished, the crowd were becoming restless. Then the juggler stood up to take the microphone, speaking in clear but accented English.

‘We're here today to protest against an environmental crime that is taking place in our country and against our will. Unfortunately the members of the government who have allowed this to happen by giving away the birthright of the people they were elected to serve are not here today,' he declaimed in a ringing voice. ‘We invited them. We invited the Minister for Environmental Affairs, Bjarni Jón Bjarnason, to meet us here. We had hoped these people would be here to answer our questions, but it seems they have better things to do. Other business to attend to. More national assets to sell off to big business. More dirty deals to be done.'

He paused. The crowd roared. The juggler's voice rose in fury.

‘These men and women are guilty! These people are criminals! They'll sell our birthright and line their own pockets with a lot more than thirty shitty pieces of silver and expect us to keep quiet and accept this! I'm warning you here and now,' he said as his voice dropped.

‘Warning you here and now,' Skúli muttered, scribbling down the juggler's words in his notebook, even though his recorder was running. Lára stood behind him shooting frame after frame, trying to capture the depth of the juggler's passion. The man's eyes bulged in anger and the veins along the side of his neck stood out like wires.

‘We do not accept this. You will be made to answer for these crimes and there will be much to answer for. Mark my words, Bjarni Jón Bjarnason and your cronies, one day you will be called to account for this.'

He swept an arm behind him towards the silent bulldozers and the arc of broken ground inside the fence where the vast steel-framed building was taking shape. He stepped down, drained, as the crowd whooped and cheered.

A grey woman in a traditional sweater took the stage and spoke sensibly about how successful the march had been, before asking people to start returning to Hvalvík and the buses that had been ordered to take them back to town. With evening upon them, the crowd moved willingly and Gunna let herself relax. She raised a hand to the site manager, who had spent the day standing with his posse of booted heavyweights inside the wire, and got into the station's better Volvo with Haddi at the wheel.

‘Job done, no problems, eh, Haddi?'

‘Pleasant enough day out, I suppose.'

‘Home, then, if you please.'

‘Very peaceful. It's hard to predict what these freaks are going to do, but they were fine,' Haddi grumbled, annoyed by the disturbance to his normal routine.

‘Oh, come on. It's not as if we have a problem with these people. I'd rather deal with this lot than the Saturday night drunks.'

‘No, not me. Give me drunks any time rather than these weirdos. When you're dealing with pissheads, you know exactly where you stand.'

‘Haddi, you're getting old. There's no hurry back, we'll just keep behind them and make sure there aren't any stragglers. All right?'

Skúli composed his piece in his mind for the Sunday edition. This would be a front page, ‘reports Skúli Snædal, crime correspondent', he thought.

Dagga and Lára walked ahead, wondering where their support car had gone.

‘Good photos?' Dagga asked.

‘Not bad at all,' Lára replied, scrolling through them and holding the camera up so that Dagga could share them.

‘He's good-looking, isn't he?'

‘Who?'

‘Kolbeinn, the juggler guy,' Lára said. ‘Didn't you notice him? I couldn't stop taking pics of him without his shirt on. Gorgeous, I thought.'

‘Passionate type,' Dagga agreed. ‘Great-looking and has no idea of it. Hey, Skúli, what do you think? Lára was saying that juggler is just luscious. She reckons he can leave towels all over her bathroom floor whenever he wants.'

‘Well, I wouldn't know . . .' Skúli muttered, flushing and dropping back behind in embarrassment.

‘Well, I don't know,' he heard Dagga say. ‘I like that young policeman you had the pics of this morning.'

‘Gummi? Very young and innocent, I thought.'

‘Nothing like teaching a young dog new tricks. I was hoping he'd take my name and address.'

Skúli rolled his eyes and let himself drop even further behind.

As the marchers made their way home and night began to fall, heavy cloud rolled in off the Atlantic and settled low, shrouding the hills and hugging the mountainsides. It was almost fully dark as two figures emerged from the hillside overlooking the construction site, hauling themselves from shallow hiding places scooped in the ground where their friends had half-buried them.

They silently made their way to the part of the fence where security cameras had the most awkward angles to cover and quickly snipped at the wire until a hole big enough to crawl through had been made. Inside the compound they vanished, returning without the backpacks they had set out with. They rapidly patched the fence to hide their tracks and vanished back up the slope where they unearthed a pair of mountain bikes that had been hidden for them in the loose gravel. Swinging legs over, they bounced down the track towards Hvalvík.

They were long gone when flames began to lick hungrily at the row of trucks and bulldozers, as well as the site manager's new Landcruiser, which the activists had felt was just as legitimate a target.