The Traitor's Story (29 page)

“Right, of course. Is there somewhere we could talk in private, Mr. Harrington?”

“I’m staying here, so there’s my room, but before we go anywhere that isn’t a public place, how about telling me who you are, who sent you, how you knew I was here, and above all, what’s in the briefcase.”

“Right, of course. My name’s Robin Forrester, I’m from the British embassy, and the briefcase is for you. I can’t tell you who sent me.”

“Then you can take your briefcase back to the British embassy and leave me to enjoy my little holiday.”

Forrester looked impressed in some way, and said, “I was told you’d say something like that. I was also told to tell you that I’d been sent by your friend from the Berkeley hotel.”

“Okay, let’s go.” They walked toward the elevators, and stepped into the first available car and stood in silence as it started to move.

Finn found himself amused by this turn of events. In that final exchange with Karasek, he’d accidentally talked about “my business,” forgetting it hadn’t been his business for six years. Now it seemed he wasn’t alone in forgetting that. He stood there as the elevator ascended, a courier of sorts standing next to him, and it all had a sense of terrible familiarity, as if he’d never left this hotel, as if everything that had happened in the last six years had melted away.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Once they got to Finn’s room, Forrester put the briefcase on the desk and finally released his grip on the handle. Finn looked at him, studying the way he was dressed before saying, “You’re not at the embassy, are you? You flew in this morning. Were you on the same flight as me?”

“I think so. I was in economy, though. How did you know?”

“You’re not wearing a scarf. There don’t appear to be any gloves in your coat pockets. You’re just not dressed the way you would be if you were based here. You flew out from London, where the weather is balmy, and you still can’t quite take in how cold it is here.”

Forrester grimaced. “It is a little colder than I’d anticipated, but I’ll be flying back this afternoon.”

“Okay, let’s see what’s in this case.” Finn walked over to the desk, but Forrester immediately looked uneasy.

“Then I should go, Mr. Harrington. It’s not for me to know what’s in the case.”

“No, you can stay.” He went to the far side of the desk and turned the case so that Forrester wouldn’t see the contents, then beckoned him closer. “It’s not a bomb, is it? Because if it is, we both go together.”

“Of course it’s not a bomb.”

“How do you know? You don’t know what’s in it.”

“Because that’s not the . . .” He stopped, realizing Finn was toying with him. “Sorry, I’m a bit slow today—that early flight and—”

“Don’t worry about it, Robin.” Finn flipped the catches, opening the briefcase and looking inside. A gun in a shoulder holster, spare magazines, a map, and a few sheets of paper. The top sheet had the details of Ed Perry’s location. A separate printout showed how to get to it—the place was out in the sticks. “So, Perry’s here in Finland.” Forrester didn’t respond.

He wondered at Louisa’s change of heart, but then noticed a small envelope and opened it. There was a single sheet of notepaper inside on which Louisa had written,
I’m so sorry about your friend
. He nodded to himself, and put it back in the envelope.

He took the map out now, studied it, then checked his watch. Even allowing for the weather, it was probably a ninety-minute drive, which would leave him with an hour of daylight if he left soon.

He looked at Forrester and said, “Is there anything else, Robin?”

“Two things. Firstly, there’s a car for you in the hotel garage. If you ask the concierge, it’ll be brought round for you.”

“Good, although I won’t need it until tomorrow.” He looked at his watch again and added, “Looking at the map, I wouldn’t get there in time today.”

Once again, Forrester looked slightly uneasy, not wanting to hear anything more than he needed to. That unease probably prevented him from seeing that Finn was feeding him a line, just in case word got back to Perry.

“The other thing is a message from the person who sent you the c
ase. She said, and I quote, ‘The foreign national should be left alone.’”

Finn nodded and said, “Any idea who the foreign national is?”

Forrester shook his head, lying reasonably well. “I presumed you would know who she was talking about.”

“I do, but unfortunately the foreign national in question jumped from the top of a fourteen-story building about half an hour ago.”

Rather than looking troubled or questioning whether he’d really jumped, Forrester frowned and said, “I didn’t think there were any fourteen-story buildings in Helsinki—it’s quite low-rise.”

“When a man’s determined to kill himself, he’ll find one.” Finn smiled, letting Forrester know they were done here. “Thanks for the case. Don’t miss your flight.”

“Of course. Thank you.” He leaned forward and shook Finn’s hand, then turned and walked to the door. Just before he closed it behind him, he raised his hand in a wave.

Finn emptied the contents of the briefcase onto the desk and studied the map in more detail, checking his watch to make sure he wasn’t wasting too much time. He was determined to keep the initiative, and that meant getting there this afternoon.

There were two printouts, not one; the second, which he hadn’t
seen at first, was a satellite image of the property. It was a summer
house set on a small lake, surrounded by forest. From both the photograph and the map, it looked like a private estate, with nothing resembling a village or settlement anywhere close.

Possibly it was Perry’s own place—from what little he could determine from a picture of the roof and a small wooden jetty protruding into the lake, it didn’t look grand enough for Karasek’s tastes. What Finn couldn’t understand was why Perry would go there now, with the country still in the grip of winter.

Was it the most simple explanation—that he’d gone there because he knew Finn was coming after him? In that regard he’d chosen well: a place that was remote, where Perry would have the advantage over anyone who didn’t know the terrain.

Finn put on the holster, gathered up everything else, and headed back down to the lobby. The same concierge smiled as Finn approached him.

“I understand I have a car in the hotel garage—could you have someone bring it around?”

“Of course, right away, sir.”

“Thanks.” He strolled away from the desk, thinking through this apparent change of heart from Louisa.

In some intangible way, it seemed too reminiscent of Sparrowhawk, an operation that had been hastily yet intricately planned, in which so many players had been unaware of the total truth, and yet from which Perry and Karasek had walked away unscathed. And now here she was using Finn a second time to try to bring Perry down.

For a moment, he even wondered if Louisa was setting him up—handing him the gun, the car, the directions, luring him into a trap in the middle of nowhere, the perfect place to dispose of a body, allowing them all to go on as they had been before.

It was nonsense, of course—a touch of paranoia to go with all the other reminders of his old life. Louisa Whitman had wanted to eliminate Perry for a long time. And perhaps she’d been moved by Jonas Frost’s death, but she wasn’t doing this because Finn had proved the moral case, but because it was expedient, an easy way of erasing one of their own without getting their hands dirty. No wonder Forrester had wanted no knowledge of what was in that case.

He saw a jeep pull up outside and a valet jump out of it. He walked forward, took the keys, and got in. He was about to arrange the maps on the passenger seat when he noticed the satnav on the dash. He turned it on and saw that there was only one route programmed into it: the Hotel Kämp to Perry’s place on the lake. And he smiled—even if they were setting him up, at least they were doing it in style.

Chapter Thirty-Six

The farther he got from Helsinki, the more fiercely winter seemed to be still holding on. For the first three-quarters of an hour, he’d made such good time that he thought he’d been overcautious in judging how long it would take him. But then he turned onto back roads, and his progress almost came to a halt.

The snow looked like a solid crust over the earth, particularly where the trees opened out into sweeping meadows that stretched flat and white to isolated farmhouses. The sun was falling away to the south and west behind him, but now that he was away from the city, it seemed harder to believe that a few glorious days would be enough to allow a thaw to set in.

By the time he reached a turn off the road, finding a gate in the deer fence and a track beyond it, he reckoned he only had half an hour of daylight left. In among the trees, the snow was already taking on its own shadowy darkness.

He closed the gate behind him and drove on, slowly, keeping the jeep as quiet as possible on the final approach, relieved that they’d chosen petrol for him rather than diesel. He drove for ten minutes more, then saw what at first he thought to be a clearing up in front and the house off to the right-hand side.

The clearing was the lake, and out here the ice had not melted. The house was bigger than he’d imagined, wooden and brightly painted in yellow and green. There was a single light showing in one of the rooms.

Finn stopped the car, sat for a moment with the engine idling, then turned it off. And all the time he watched the window with the light on, glancing now and then at the other windows, too, looking for movement and seeing none.

With the engine off, the silence was overpowering, and he realized his attempt to drive slowly along the track had been pointless. Perry would have heard him even before he’d reached the gate, and he certainly would have heard him in the thirty seconds he’d sat with the engine idling.

Yet he hadn’t looked out. That meant one of two things, either that Perry wasn’t curious because he knew who his visitor was, or that he wasn’t in the house. Finn checked his mirrors, the forest behind him now looking as if evening had already arrived. He turned casually from side to side too, but if Perry was outside, he wasn’t anywhere close.

Finn stepped out, leaving the door open, the jeep itself between him and the house. He strolled to the back as if checking for something, looking out into the woods behind the house. Then he turned and walked the other way, finally stepping to the front of the car, giving up his partial cover.

As had always been the case in the past, his senses tricked him with what followed. Did he hear the distant hammer crack first, or the whistling firework sound that told him the bullet had missed? The whistle of the bullet had been close, creating the illusion that he’d felt the air moving, and then it had splintered into one of the trees beyond, snow falling in a hushed shower from the branches.

Finn dropped to the floor and scuttled behind the jeep, placing himself behind the front tire. A little snow was still toppling down from the tree that had been hit, and he drew an imaginary line from the contact site, through where he’d been standing, projecting onward to give an idea of Perry’s direction. It had been a rifle shot, but with so much tree cover he guessed Perry could only be a couple of hundred yards away.

Another shot rang out through the still winter air, the round hitting the side of the jeep, but not at the front, where Perry
knew Finn was taking cover. The shot had hit near the back, then
another. Finn knew what Perry was up to, and now he regretted that they’d given him petrol instead of diesel
.

A fourth shot came as Finn sprang away from the jeep toward the trees. He heard and felt the dull roar of the petrol tank going up before he’d come to a stop. He didn’t hesitate now, scrambling quickly to his feet and darting away from the burning vehicle, back along the track he’d driven down, cutting into the trees, putting on speed even in the snow.

He heard another shot ring out, but it was blind, nowhere close to where Finn was running. Perry had lost him, and now Finn was deep into the trees. He stopped, keeping a tree between him and the area where he assumed Perry must be hiding. He took his gun from its holster, dropped to his knee, and looked out from the cover of the tree, completely motionless.

He stared for a few seconds, seeing nothing. Then he spotted a disturbance in the air—Perry’s breath billowing out into the cold. He was obscured by a tree, but there was the hunting rifle leaning against that same tree. Perry was probably looking through binoculars, scanning the deepening woods for signs of Finn, no doubt becoming more nervous with each failed scan of the terrain.

Perry and the gun were about thirty yards away. Finn looked at the snowy path between him and his target, scanning the gentle undulations for signs that there were obstacles over which he might trip or stumble. It looked clear. He checked his pockets, making sure he had quick access to the spare magazines.

Finn started running, fast, covering ten yards before Perry realized something was amiss. Even when Perry’s senses kicked in, he probably didn’t know where Finn was, only that there was the sound of movement. He reached down for the gun, but Finn was ready.

He fired off a couple of rounds, deafening in the chill stillness of the woods, one getting lucky and hitting the stock of the gun, knocking it to the floor. Perry recoiled and set off, darting away through the trees. As Finn reached the abandoned hunting rifle, three of four shots sounded in quick succession, blind. It was covering fire from Perry even as he continued to run, inadvertently letting Finn know that he also had a handgun.

Finn stepped out from behind the tree, studied Perry as he weaved desperately away, then fired a single shot down the central line along which Perry was moving. Occasionally, a shot like that proved lucky, but it wasn’t what Finn was expecting and it wasn’t what he got. He stepped behind the tree as Perry responded with another desperate volley of shots.

Perry was running away from the house, and Finn wondered where he was heading. It didn’t look like a strategy, more like a panicked escape, but if that was the case he was surely heading in
the wrong direction, unless he intended to run all the way around the
lake and back again.

Finn sprinted after him, waiting thirty seconds before firing off another round. The same volley came back. Finn wondered what he was carrying, how many bullets in a magazine, whether he had spares—possibly not if the gun had been only a backup for the hunting rifle.

He repeated the same actions: sprinting, a single round, taking cover. A shot came back, the closest yet, clattering through the snow-covered branches to the left of where Finn stood, but it came alone. As the thunderclap of the first shot faded, Finn heard the failed click of the next.

He looked out and saw Perry running, a sudden change of direction, toward the lake. If he’d had another magazine, he would have stayed out of sight until he’d reloaded, or he’d have run on, changing it in flight. Perry was out of ammunition, and if Finn had read him right, he was trying to cut back along the lakeshore to the house.

Finn fired a shot off to his left, aiming about twenty yards in front of the line Perry was taking, then set off after the bullet. Perry, sensing that he was about to be intercepted, made what seemed like a calamitous decision; Finn listened in amazement as he heard Perry’s hard footfall stamping across the ice.

Finn ran faster, spotting him a few paces before reaching the open shore. Perry was about ten yards out on the ice, just about to cross Finn’s line of sight. And Finn could see his reasoning, at least, because it was a shortcut back toward the house, but no less ill-judged for that.

Finn fired a shot into the ice in Perry’s path, and watched as he came to a stumbling halt, staring down at his own feet for thirty seconds, getting his breath before slowly turning to where Finn stood at the edge of the lake.

Two bullets, thought Finn, he had two bullets left in this magazine
and he had to make them count, because changing the magazine at this point wasn’t an option.

Perry was wearing a heavy parka but no hat, suggesting he’d left the house in a hurry once he’d heard the car. But he’d known in advance that Finn was coming, that was certain, and he looked back at Finn as if he’d expected nothing less.

“How did you know I was coming, Ed?” Perry didn’t look inclined to answer. “What—you just guessed that if I killed Gibson and Taylor, I’d probably want to come after you and Karasek?”

“Gibson!” It was obvious he’d known that Gibson had been playing both sides. “You know, Louisa isn’t the only one with undercover sources—and mine know what they’re doing.”

“Hasn’t helped you, though.” Again, Perry didn’t seem inclined to respond. “Why couldn’t you just leave me alone, Ed? I left six years ago. You should have just left me alone.”

Ed nodded, glancing to his right, and Finn wondered if he was judging the distance, working out if he could make a run for it.

“I didn’t set out to come after you, Finn. Karasek was the one who was obsessed, the sick bastard, even after all this time. But imagine how I felt when I found out you’d been in business with Naumenko all along. Finn Harrington, falling on his sword to try to expose me, letting people think he was a traitor, the ultimate double-bluff . . .”

“I was never a traitor, Ed. I was corrupt.”

“And there’s a difference?”

“I thought so.” Across the lake the ice cracked, splintering and grinding against itself. Finn looked toward the noise, then back at Perry. “It’s a long time since you were in the field, Ed, and that was a poor decision, going out on the ice.”

Ed was dismissive as he said, “That cracking doesn’t mean a thing—I know this lake, I know how strong the ice is.”

“That wasn’t what I meant. I’m sure the ice is strong enough, but it still doesn’t give you any cover.”

Perry looked down at the ice before meeting Finn’s gaze again.

“I’m asking you not to do this, Finn. I’m not asking for myself. I have a wife now, I have . . .” His throat seemed to snag. “I have a baby girl.”

Finn found himself wondering how old Perry was—mid-f
orties, he guessed—and said only, “I didn’t know that.”

“She’ll be two in June.” He shook his head and looked across the ice to the house, stubbornly out of reach. He sounded emotional as he said, “It’s all I was trying to do, Finn. When I found out about the money, I . . . It wasn’t about you, it was about my little girl, security for her, her future.”

Finn felt sorry for him suddenly. He looked small and vulnerable standing out there on the ice, a man desperate to be with his young family. And thinking back to the way he’d been in Tallinn, the care and concern he’d shown for his people, Finn could imagine him making an indulgent father. If only that had extended to the children of other families.

Perhaps Perry sensed that Finn’s resolve was weakening, because he said now, “We can end this here, Finn. We’ve both made mistakes, but . . . I’m just asking you to show some compassion, that’s all. Show some compassion.”

Finn nodded and thought back to Tallinn again. He thought of Katerina and wished he’d asked Alex after all. He wanted to know that something good had come of her, that maybe she was the one person in the world who was still grateful that he had walked into her life.

He raised his gun, took aim, and shot Perry in the chest. Perry staggered back a little, then fell to his knees. Finn stepped onto the ice and walked toward him. He looked down at him. His eyes were looking as if at someone lying on the shore, his mouth moving through a silent attempt at final words.

Finn could think of some final words of his own, of the many things he’d wanted to say to Perry but hadn’t. But what was the point of final words between them? What had been the point of any of it?

He raised his gun and shot Perry in the head. The wound didn’t produce much blood and the body crumpled sideways onto the ice. Finn stood looking down at it for a moment or two, then across the lake. The woods looked lost in night now, and even the sky was falling away into a deeper blue.

He turned and walked back to the shore, and along the shore to the house. There was a Volvo in an open garage to the side of it. Finn went inside the house and checked the kitchen first, then the other rooms, looking for the keys. He went back outside and found them in the ignition of the car.

He drove back to Helsinki, taking it easy in the darkness, stopping a couple of times to off-load the gun and then the unused magazines. He left the car on a side street and walked the final leg back through the city center to the hotel.

He hesitated in the lobby, looking through to the bar, which was lively as ever, but he didn’t go in—it would only remind him of Harry and the days when this had all seemed like fun. It was time to go home. He booked a seat on the early flight to Geneva the next morning. In every sense, it was time to go home.