The Game

TWENTY-THREE

The pickup was a rugged Toyota Land Cruiser modified to cope with the unpredictable and sometimes extreme weather and diverse geophysical conditions of Iceland. The tyres were extra large and could handle snow, rock and sand and provided the height necessary to cross the many glacial waterways. The fuel tank had one hundred and fifty per cent of the standard capacity for the long distances it would need to cover. The vehicle was also equipped with GPS and VHF radios, additional lights, high-powered winch and air compressor.

Wipers swung back and forth to fight the relentless sleet from sticking to the windscreen glass. Fog lights bounced off the waterfall of partially frozen raindrops and the world beyond was an impenetrable mass of grey. The cab’s temperature was pleasant thanks to the Land Cruiser’s heating. The FM radio managed to pick up a single station that ran a talk show Victor didn’t understand more than a few words of.

He gathered that the host was discussing global finance with a banking expert, but between the weak signal and Victor’s limited understanding of Icelandic, they could have been discussing pretty much anything. Still, it was something to pass the time.

It had been two days since he’d left Muir and he was about fifteen kilometres south of the small town of Húsavík, heading south along the main road that looped around the coast, linking Húsavík with Akureyri. Each town had fewer than five thousand inhabitants, and they were as remote as human civilisation was ever likely to, or would want to, get.

Another kilometre and Victor slowed. Visibility was poor through the sleet and in the featureless terrain, the turning would be easy to miss. Satellite navigation would have informed him when he was approaching it, but it would also inform anyone else with the resources to hijack a GPS signal. Victor had plenty of enemies capable of doing just that. He kept it disabled.

He didn’t see the turning until he’d reached it, whereupon he headed off the highway onto a track, heading east, slowing down further because the track was un-surfaced and uneven. He flicked off the wipers now he wasn’t driving into the sleet and he could see the landscape extending away into the distance. The terrain was flat with no elevation or depression for at least ten kilometres in every direction.

Victor liked what he saw.

He applied the handbrake and turned off the engine some thirty kilometres from the coastal road that linked the two towns. He pulled up the hood of his coat, opened the driver’s door and stepped outside. The sleet had eased but had been replaced by raindrops that didn’t fall down but were pushed horizontally by the wind and peppered his face. The ambient temperature was somewhere around minus two, but the wind chill pushed it down much further.

A building lay approximately three hundred metres to the north. It was a two-storey cabin with a triangular red-tiled roof that extended down almost to the ground. Little but Icelandic moss grew tundra extended to the horizon to its south, east and west. To the north were mountains, but no area of high ground within anything close to a rifle’s effective range.

Victor drew an FN Five-seveN handgun from a pocket of his coat and racked the slide to put a high-velocity 5.7 mm round in the chamber. He approached the cabin, seeing no signs of recent vehicles or people but the sodden ground made any such signs difficult to spot.

When he was two hundred metres away he circled the cabin, keeping low and moving quickly because there was no cover, only the downpour to help make a shot from the cabin more difficult. Seeing no evidence of visitors, but aware the snow made his tracking attempts unreliable, he sprinted towards the building, moving in a line that offered the best protection from gunmen at the windows.

Victor reached it with no shots fired and proceeded to examine the exterior. The two doors were locked and the windows closed. He checked along the door and window frames and examined the ground before them. Nothing out of the ordinary. He double-checked everything.

He returned to the Toyota, and by the time he’d driven it three hundred metres and parked it close to the cabin the rain had stopped completely. Victor saw the sun shining and areas of pale blue sky appeared through openings in the clouds. He used his set of keys and unlocked the cabin’s front door.

He checked every room of the cabin, first the lounge, kitchen and bathroom on the ground floor and then the two bedrooms on the first floor. Each room was compact and had a minimum of furnishings. A diesel generator in a small shed outside the kitchen supplied electricity to the building and Victor spent an hour cleaning it and performing some basic maintenance before he could get it working. The kitchen contained a boiler supplied by water heated deep below the surface, and Victor started it up now the electricity was running.

He pulled back the weatherproof sheeting from the Land Cruiser’s trailer and heaved off a sack of smokeless coal, carrying it over his shoulder to the kitchen. He fed the stove with fuel and poured the rest into a coal cupboard. He made himself a cup of black tea and ferried in supplies from the pickup until one half of the lounge was full of boxes and bags and he was sweating beneath his coat.

The windows were the first areas that required modification. He would have liked to replace them with armoured glass, but it had proved impractical to have such specialist materials shipped to Iceland without attracting attention. Instead he drilled holes in the brickwork on the inside of the windows and screwed in metal frames, across which he stretched high-tensile steel mesh. The mesh wouldn’t stop a rifle bullet, but he had learned his lesson the hard way never to dawdle in front of a window, no matter how well protected he believed himself to be. He bolted steel sheeting to the insides of the shutters. He calculated that when the shutters were closed, the sheeting and mesh would stop all but the highest velocity rifle rounds.

It took him two days to finish the windows and another day to replace the door frames and doors with ram-proof steel. He fixed the original wood over the steel to disguise the reinforcements from outside.

The next morning he drove to Husavik to buy supplies and materials with which to continue his planned renovation of the cabin into a safe house fit for purpose. It would take some weeks until it was finished but with each day’s work it took on additional layers of protection. As soon as the modifications were complete he would leave it, returning only when he needed to lay low. He’d learned the hard way never to stay in one place too long.

Each morning he examined the doors and windows for tampering, and powered on a rugged custom-made laptop computer based on the model used by military personnel in combat situations. He attached the computer to a satellite phone and unfurled the mini dish. The encrypted signal was bounced via satellite to wireless receivers in Europe.

This time he hijacked the Wi-Fi transmission of a café in Bonn, Germany, and used it to access the email account he’d given to Muir so she could reach him.

On the morning of his sixth day in Iceland, he found a single email in his inbox: We need to meet.