The Swede (22 page)

“Are you married?” he asked.

“If I’m married?” Shauna said, stretching up. “What is it the airmen say, here at Garcia—”

“Two stopovers from home, and you’re good to go. I’ve heard that too.”

She laughed, a little wary. “So why do you ask?”

“Because I wondered.”

“No, you didn’t. You pay far too much attention to details, and you’ve seen the wedding ring.”

“It comes on and off.”

“No, I had it on until we got to San Diego. Then somewhere along the way, it came off. So you’re wondering to whom?”

“We’re getting there.”

“He’s a member of the House of Representatives in Washington, from North Carolina. Impressive, huh?”

“Doesn’t say much.”

“We have no children.”

“That says more.”

“Sometimes the ring performs its function, sometimes not. At the office in New York, I’m married, and not to just anyone, and he needs a wife. But he knows more about the lower back of his speechwriter
than he does about mine. There is nothing we pretend about, at least not to each other. And here on Garcia, there’s no point in being married.” She pushed her hip toward one side, and her hand with the shoes toward the other. “If you’re wondering,” she said then, “I had one of those pilots up in the room here the other night. Not when they were all drunk, I mean a few evenings before. But he hesitated too much, so he had to go.” The hand holding the shoes sank. “And you? Are you as free as you appear to be, in all your guises?”

“Completely. Or yes, I also live with someone who doesn’t particularly care what I do with strange women.”

“Who would lose the most if I invited you into the shower?”

“You’d do that?”

“So you think. Are you good?”

“You’d be shouting yourself hoarse.”

He smiled, she laughed it off. They parted.

B
ut Grip didn’t go into his room. He went downstairs again and out into the parking lot. There he stood leaning against a wooden post with his hands in his pockets until the last light in Shauna’s window went out, and then he went back into the lobby and sat down at the computer. He had everything nearly ready. It would only take a minute. To the fact file on Maureen Whipple, he added a few lines about what the woman had actually engaged in, her trail of screams and tormented souls. He clicked send, and the screen blinked. The rest was up to Vladislav.

He logged off, but remained seated. Dragged his fingers along the leaves of an artificial flower that stood next to him and broke out in a cold sweat. Conscience, anxiety, the flimsy hope: everything converged on him at once, and drops fell slowly down his back and
his neck. He felt himself go pale. Someone seeing him would have thought he’d suddenly fallen ill. He hung over his knees on his elbows, completely exhausted. Soon enough, he thought, his breathing would be calm again, and he’d have only the dry mouth left. He just had to wait it out. A few more breaths, and he’d be able to pull himself together.

Later, as soon as he got back upstairs, he pulled off a long strip of toilet paper and dampened it in the sink. Inside the room, he’d left everything from his desk on the floor—now it was a quick thing to wipe down the shiny surface. He did it thoroughly, the edges too. Making the last traces of white powder disappear. Earlier in the day, he’d sat there and crushed forty chloroquine phosphate tablets by hand, between two spoons, which he then used to fill the cavity of a ballpoint pen. He’d spilled some, he’d been in a hurry to get out of there, but now it was clean. Grip opened the window and threw the paper ball into the bushes. Put his desk back in order, and lay down, naked.

G
RIP HAD HIS USUAL APPOINTMENT
, went dutifully to the white cell block. Just as expected, he was stopped before he got to the monitoring room.

“Not today,” said the young, unfamiliar face who cut him off, while another man thoroughly studied Grip’s ID card. The atmosphere was edgy, nervous.

“Where’s Stackhouse?”

“Not today, we said.”

Grip grabbed his ID card and turned on his heels. No one said anything as he opened the front door and disappeared again. In other words, he wasn’t yet suspected of anything.

Because someone had in all likelihood been found dead in his cell. No wounds, no ropes, simply cardiac arrest. A weakened man, years of isolation and torture, it happened all the time. One could think.

Chloroquine phosphate. Thirty malaria pills killed most perfectly healthy people, forty was foolproof. Possibly in under an hour. The hard part was not the nausea or cramps, but the anxiety. Even if the soul wants to die, the body never does. He just hoped that N. had gone through with it. That he’d kept himself from making noise when his heart rhythm grew irregular, when the beats flip-flopped, and that he’d screwed the top back on the pen. If so, it would be a hard one to trace. A life that ends with a period. Cardiac arrest.

Sooner or later, someone would come looking for Grip—that would determine his future. He sat alone under the faded advertising parasols on the officers’ club terrace.

It took a couple of hours.

“Out there,” he heard someone say from within the club, and then heard the determined steps of a familiar pair of shoes, heading for the terrace doors. Shauna Friedman sat down opposite him with folded arms and glared. She took off her sunglasses, rocked a few times in her chair but didn’t say a word, just stared straight at him.

“So then you know,” she said at last. Her tone was hard, her skin pale, her eyes sharp.

“I know nothing, but I can imagine.”

“He’s dead.”

“They didn’t let me in earlier.”

“Flat on his fucking bunk, staring straight up at the ceiling.” Shauna looked around. Farther down on the terrace sat two young officers who’d come out just before, each with a beer. “You two,” she said, raising her voice, “you can go.”

They disappeared without a word.

“One guess,” said Grip when their backs disappeared into the house: “cardiac arrest.” With obvious irony in his voice, he added: “Given everything the man has gone through.”

“Hey, I’ve heard that shit so many times before. It was the first thing Stackhouse said. His crew has left such a trail of crap that they immediately started burning their bridges. Hard to know if they did something, or were just surprised. And here you sit, seemingly untouchable, in the sun.”

“Imagine that.”

“Did you deal under the table with Stackhouse?”

“Stackhouse hated me from day one. It was you who brought
me here, remember? If you think something stinks, get an autopsy done on N.”

“Hell yes, it stinks. But you know as well as I do that the moment he’s no longer alive, no one wants to know him, not even us obviously, except as ashes scattered far out to sea.”

“You can keep fighting your windmills,” continued Grip. “I’m going home now.”

“There are no flights. And even if there were, you will leave when I say so.”

“Are you keeping me here?”

She didn’t pay attention to his question. “Windmills—what do you mean by that? A stupid idealist in a purple bra—is that it?”

“So you’re holding me hostage?”

“A Swedish citizen has died under unclear circumstances.”

“A person who spoke Swedish will soon be burned into ashes, dissolved in lime, or simply thrown into the sea. After that, the man, the body, or even the designation N., never existed.”

“You’re their messenger boy.”

“You’re wrong.”

“And you’ll stay here.”

“I’ll contact my superiors. They’ll send a plane.”

“Give me something. I have a thousand reasons to keep you.”

“I’m from Sweden. We remain neutral.”

“Give me something!”

Not much more was said.

T
he next day Grip didn’t go to the cell block. Instead he borrowed a beach chair from the hotel and sat on an inhospitable patch of grass overlooking the harbor.

Time passed. The sun burned over his arms. Shauna, he hadn’t seen her since the day before. What did that mean?

What did Stackhouse believe about N.’s death? Or did he simply think he had one less problem weighing on him? Did anyone understand? Was the pen being analyzed, or had it simply been thrown out?

He sat and drank beer out of his cooler, waiting to be arrested at any time. Light beer; he didn’t want to cloud his thinking. Shauna or Stackhouse would come. Come walking down the road, that’s the way he saw it. With one or two men, like when the police have located a lost child. It mattered, whether it was Stackhouse or Shauna who came. He just couldn’t make up his mind which way. But whichever it was, he would . . . It was the picture of Ben that came to him. Always the picture of Ben, looking over his shoulder when Grip came home to him, the skewed, easy smile. The few real moments. That was the life he had to protect. No matter what.

Evening came. Grip felt dehydrated despite all the beer. Were they keeping him under surveillance? He wasn’t being paranoid, he was just surprised that nothing had happened. Were they expecting something from him? He folded up the chair, took his cooler, and started walking.

At the officers’ hotel, he wrote a note and asked the man at reception to make sure that Shauna Friedman got it. He wrote that the Swedish security police and the Ministry of Foreign Affairs wanted to know immediately when he could be expected to leave Diego Garcia. It was nonsense. He hadn’t even been in contact with them. Had he tried, he probably would have been told that he had to travel on whatever flights the Americans made available.

Perhaps his bluff nevertheless got him home. The next day he received a note in reply, saying he should be at the airport with his
bags no later than six o’clock that evening. His sunburned arms smarting from the day before, he packed up, and reception said his room bill was already taken care of.

O
n the tarmac were a half-dozen black B-52s lined up and a single off-white passenger plane from the US Navy, the same kind he’d flown in on the way to Garcia.

“Mr. Grip?”

He nodded, and a crew member helped him aboard. A few more uniforms arrived and took seats in the large cabin.

Last came Shauna.

“Here,” she said, handing him a bunch of tickets and reservation confirmations. She avoided looking at him. “You’ll take the same route back, ending up in San Diego. Then you’ll fly domestic. They couldn’t find you anything direct to New York, so you’ll have to go through Atlanta. A night in a hotel out by Newark, and from there, SAS to Stockholm. Then you’ll be home.”

Grip thumbed through the stack, then nodded and waited for her to say something more. Around them, empty rows of seats. Shauna sat on the outer armrest in the row opposite.

“No,” she said. “I won’t be coming with.” Behind her, a crew member checked off the few passengers on a clipboard and gave it to the cockpit.

“The first thing you said inside N.’s cell,” she began then, “was something about not lying.”

Grip looked out the window and gave the impression of searching his memory. “I said I wouldn’t lie or make false promises,” he said, looking up at her.

“And did you hold to that?”

“Yes.”

“And now I say the same. No lies, no false promises. We have maybe five minutes left before they throw me off. No matter what is said, I will leave, and you will get to go home. All the way home.”

Grip didn’t move a muscle.

“I’ll start,” she continued. “N. no longer exists. His body, everything, is gone.”

“There you go,” said Grip. He fingered the ticket for New York to Stockholm. At any moment, Shauna could terminate all flight preparations, he knew that. Through the window, he saw the fuel truck pull away from the airplane.

“Stackhouse,” said Shauna, “is busy making a smokescreen, suggesting that N. could have come from anywhere. His being Swedish didn’t fit into the picture, not for Stackhouse. Everything around N. is disappearing, there’s nothing I can get to.”

“Does it matter?” said Grip. “We have no interest in resurrecting him, not in this way. For us, he was already dead.”

“But he was tortured . . .”

“Thoroughly and long.”

“The CIA regrets it, claiming that others were at fault. That in other countries, things got out of control.”

“You mean that’s what they tell you, when you have to investigate the matter?”

“Something like that.” Shauna was silent, moved some debris on the floor with the tip of her shoe. Then she asked, “Did Americans torture him?”

“You want to know what I think?”

“What you know.”

Grip looked at the clock.

Shauna continued: “Don’t we have a common interest in solving this
kind of puzzle?” She waited a moment. “Do you like names? We can play names. One that turns up occasionally is Maureen Whipple.”

“Is that so.”

“Yes, she has been seen where she shouldn’t be.” Shauna gave a quick nod. “Do you know anything about her?”

“Not much.”

“Not much—still, that’s a start. During your weeks with N., of course you learned more than what we overheard. You found a way to talk to him.”

“Hey, time to go,” shouted the crewman in the aisle. Shauna raised a sympathetic hand but remained seated.

“Stackhouse,” she continued, “wanted to keep you here. As of yesterday, he became quite forceful about it. That’s why I’m sending you off. The heat’s on Garcia, it fuels all kinds of desperation. Stackhouse’s world teems with terrorists, and he’s willing to go quite far to keep his machinery operating.” She let it sink in for a second. “I received a report from Washington yesterday concerning Maureen Whipple. For Christ’s sake, if you know anything about her . . . You get to leave, but I have to have something, to hold off Stackhouse.”

“Maureen . . . ,” began Grip.

“Now you damn well . . . ,” cried the crewman to Shauna.

“One second.”

There was a roar as an engine started up.

“Maureen Whipple,” Grip began again, “is one of N.’s torturers.”

“He was able to identify her?”

Grip nodded. “The shit is yours to dig in. She belongs to you. Clearly, it’s her assignment to drown people or let them be raped by dogs.”

“Not is—perhaps was—her assignment. She was found murdered yesterday morning, in the woods outside her home, somewhere in West Virginia.” Shauna pushed a finger into her own chest. “Someone drove a stake straight through her. Like a vampire. Fat headlines, a thousand questions.”

Grip couldn’t bring himself to give more than a surprised nod.

“Now means
now
, we’re closing,” roared a face sticking through the doorway at the front of the cabin.

Shauna stood up.

“Had N. himself had the chance to do it,” said Grip then, “he wouldn’t have hesitated for a second.”

“Someone obviously took his chance for him. The stake was pierced through a piece of paper quoting the White House’s assurances that torture does not occur”—Shauna looked toward the door and added absently—“in the war on terror.” She nodded, to herself, making a decision. “Yes,” she said then, “N. is dead. I only wish that you and I had had the chance to sit down and talk about the others as well.”

“About Adderloy and Mary?”

“About them and Vladislav. Especially Vladislav.” Then she left, didn’t look back once as she disappeared down the aisle and out the door.

The plane rocked, began to taxi. Eventually, they came to the end of the runway, turned around. Sat there. The waiting that followed was excruciating. To get away from the island—Grip could have pushed the airplane himself.

Then came the engines powering up, and the brakes released.