Assassin

69

The road from Bjorkelangen to the lake at Tvillingtjenn described two sides of a crudely drawn right-angled triangle. The third side was formed by rough, heavily wooded country. That was the way that Maddy and Larsson took, hoping to make up time by cutting the corner. Their route was comprised, at best, of rutted, potholed dirt tracks. When they ran out Maddy had to drive between the trees, jinking between the biggest trunks and simply smashing the big Volvo through the lighter undergrowth.

If her technique on tarmac had been as impressive as it was terrifying, her off-road skill was something else again. Maddy drove at motorway speeds down tracks barely wider than the car, using the rally-driver's knack of drifting round corners in a controlled sideways skid, oblivious to the frantic scrabbling of the tyres as they swung out over precipitous hillside drops. She took hairpin bends using handbrake turns, locking the rear wheels and letting them swing round to push the car through an angle far tighter than its steering lock would allow.

'Are you sure you're not really Scandinavian?' Larsson shouted over the roar of the engine and the constant clattering of stones, solid rock and knotted tree-roots against the underside of the car. 'I thought we were the only people who were crazy enough to drive like this.'

Maddy didn't say anything. She was racing through the woods, heading directly towards the trunk of a massive old tree. Larsson suddenly realized that he had never been so frightened in all his life. He was certain that he was about to die. There could be no doubt of it. She was taking her revenge for his betrayal of Carver by killing them both.

The tree got closer and closer until it seemed to fill the entire windscreen. In the last fraction of a second before impact, Maddy flicked the steering wheel sharply to the left and then equally fast to the right. The sudden shifts in direction were enough to destabilize even the Volvo's four-wheel drive. For an instant, all traction lost, the Volvo turned broadside on to the tree. Maddy seemed to be hurling herself sideways into its trunk. Then she slammed her foot down on the accelerator, the wheels spun frantically, grabbed a fraction of purchase against the forest floor and the car slid past the tree, still moving sideways till she turned hard left again and swung the nose of the car round and they could carry on again, careering through the trees until they hit another track.

'OK, almost there,' said Larsson, his voice shaking. He looked across at Maddy and saw the whites of her knuckles against the steering wheel. Her face was more taut and mask-like than ever. She was only just keeping her emotions in check. It occurred to Larsson that the nerve-shredding tension of driving so fast in such difficult conditions was, for her, a distraction from the far greater fear of what might have happened to Carver.

How had it come to this? Larsson thought about the steady escalation of threats and demands to which he had been subjected. At first it was just a matter of getting Carver to arrive in Oslo on a particular day. Then came the order for the bombs and their triggers: not just the hotel device but other ones, too, incendiaries. There had never been any explicit connection between the various commissions. Larsson had feared, of course, that Carver might be the target for the bomb, but not knowing it for sure had enabled him to pretend that it might not be so.

Finally he had been taken up to the barn and had been forced to install the booby-trap system the man demanded. Larsson had seen that the barn was intended as a torture chamber, but there was still no certainty that it would be Carver hanging from that cord and sitting on that simple wooden chair. The only certainty was that Karin and their unborn child would be made to suffer if he, Larsson, did not do as he was told. That had overridden everything else. But then there was the other thing, the design job he'd been given just recently. That didn't fit with any of the others. It was intended for something else, he was sure: something just as bad as the atrocity at the King Haakon Hotel. If only he knew what, that might give him a chance to atone for what he had done.

Then the track came out of the trees and joined another path that was running through an open field with a helicopter parked at its centre. He knew where he was now, recognized the house that stood beyond the line of parked police cars.

'Down there!' he shouted, pointing ahead and to the right. 'He's in the barn!'

Maddy gave a fractional nod of the head and flung the car down past the house, oblivious to the unarmed police officers, shouting and waving at them, and the black uniformed figures lifting their automatic weapons to their shoulders.

When one of them fired a pair of three-round warning bursts that just missed the car, Maddy finally hit the brakes.

Larsson hardly noticed the men or their weapons. He was too busy grabbing the alligator loppers, kicking the door open and running towards the barn. He was watching the black-clad figures crouching by the double doors at the front of the building. His eyes were wide in horror at what he was seeing. His mouth was forming the word 'No' and he was screaming it.

But the sound of Larsson's voice was drowned by the blast of the shotgun and then, as the door was rammed open, the sound of an explosion and a sudden whoosh and a crackle of timber as the whole barn was engulfed in a blazing yellow and orange sheet of flame.