Assassin's Game

TWENTY-SIX

At the very moment Commissioner Forsten was backpedaling across a Stockholm sidewalk, the man she was looking for was standing on a more quiet slab of concrete some three hundred miles south in the port of Sassnitz, Germany. From his arrival point, Slaton had hiked the width of Jasmund National Park, a four-mile excursion through the brooding heaths and moors of northern Rügen Island. Where the park gave way to a narrow road, Slaton turned left toward a glow of lights in the distance. Twenty minutes later he arrived in Sassnitz.

Now, standing in front of the rail terminal, he looked out and marveled at his good fortune. Slaton could not imagine that a better selection of transportation alternatives existed in any square mile of Europe. He saw a ferry port that dealt the full spectrum — passengers, cars, and long-haul trucks. A rail terminal lay directly behind him, and on the horizon was a shipping yard. In the harbor a small cruise ship had docked next to the fishing fleet, and an assortment of leisure craft lay moored in private slips. There were small bulk carriers and cargo ships, and around these, loading cranes and forklifts sat ready to connect everything to trucks that would spread their payloads across Germany and beyond. Yet if the possibilities seemed overwhelming, they narrowed considerably when he measured his means against his objective. He had thirty-nine U.S. dollars in his pocket. On that he had to reach Switzerland.

Patiently, Slaton reckoned how best to attack the problem. He walked toward the ferry terminal with a cool wind at his back, the air scented with evergreen and the acrid residual of wood-burning fireplaces getting an early-season workout. As the long northern dusk lost its grip, the walkways fell increasingly sectioned, deep shadows broken by shards of electric light. Slaton lingered in the darker recesses to study his options. His attention settled on a large ferry where vehicles were unloading, and after twenty minutes the answer to his problem lumbered down the big metal off-ramp.

He kept to the shadows and watched, and soon two more vehicles of the same type rolled off in direct succession. He followed the little convoy’s progress and saw them park, one by one, in a well-lit holding yard. He watched the drivers dismount and deliver the keys to a kind of dispatch shack. Slaton could not see inside the shack, but he imagined rows of keys hanging on hooks, or perhaps tagged and put in drawers. Either would serve the German penchant for organization. He kept watching, and in thirty minutes saw nine more of the type, nearly identical to the first, driven off the ferry, parked, and the keys delivered to the shack.

Satisfied he understood the process before him, Slaton began a well-practiced reverse flow. He searched for faults in the system, and saw a number of possibilities. He then studied the parking lot itself. The apron was massive, nearly a half mile in both length and width, and surrounded by a wire fence. The lot was roughly half full, a hodgepodge of trucks and cars and trailers and containers. Some would be gone in minutes, while others might expect spring flowers to blossom beneath their undercarriages. Of particular interest, Slaton noted that there was only one entrance, governed by the shack, where a heavy-set woman gave cursory inspections to everything that came and went.

He looked once more at his targeted vehicles and knew it had to be. It was a perfect match for his needs, albeit the sort of theft that would require patience and planning, even creativity. His decision made, Slaton stepped out of the shadows and set to work.

The knock on Sanderson’s door came at half past eight that evening. He opened it to find his ex-wife.

“Ingrid … what on earth?” Seeing the concern on her face, he quickly surmised, “Blix called you, didn’t he?”

“How are you, Arne?”

“I wish everyone would stop asking me that.”

A gust of wind swept across the threshold. “Are you going to ask me in?”

“Yes, sorry.”

Sanderson turned and swept his eyes over the room. As best he could remember, Ingrid had not been here since moving out five years earlier, and he wondered how the place had changed in that time. He saw unkempt furnishings, a carpet that needed cleaning, an embarrassing stack of dirty dishes by the sink. There was no getting around it. “I’ve given the maid a year’s holiday.”

“It’s not so bad,” she lied.

“Can I offer you some tea?”

“Decaf would be nice.”

Sanderson put water on the stove, watching with an odd discomfort as she meandered the place they had shared for so long.

“How is my garden holding up?” she asked, peering into the darkness out the back window.

“Honestly? It looks like the Ardennes after a good German pounding.”

She smiled. “It doesn’t seem like five years, does it?”

“No,” he agreed.

“How is Alfred?” Sanderson asked, happy he hadn’t said “the toilet king.”

“Not well, actually. It’s his heart.”

Fishing through a cupboard for clean cups, Sanderson stopped what he was doing. He saw her sadness, and said, “I’m sorry, Ingrid. Really I am.”

She came closer and looked at him in the kitchen’s strong light. “You don’t look well, Arne.”

“What did Blix tell you?”

“He said you passed out at headquarters today. And he said you’ve been forgetful — that it’s become an issue at work.”

“It won’t be an issue any longer.” Sanderson turned back to the cupboard. “I quit today. It was a rash decision, I admit, but Sjoberg had just pulled me from a big case for no reason.”

“I did hear about that. You were working on these shootings?”

“Yes. He was quite unreasonable about the whole thing. But I suppose it was as good a time as any to pack it in. I’ve given them thirty-five years.”

“That must have been very difficult.”

“Not the way I did it. But we all knew it was coming. I only wish I could have finished the investigation I was working on.”

The tea brewed and then cooled to the point of being useful. As they talked, he thought Ingrid seemed dampened, even spiritless, but given the mood of her visit, not to mention her husband’s ill health, he should not have expected more. He did wish it, though. When they moved to better ground — their daughter and her fireman boyfriend, and the attendant speculation about grandchildren — the air seemed to improve. Ingrid even made him laugh once or twice, which was once or twice more than any other night this week. They’d talked for an hour when she finally looked at her watch.

“I should be going. Alfred doesn’t always remember his pills before bed.”

“Yes, of course.”

After an awkward moment, she said, “I promised Blix I’d tell you to see a doctor. If he asks, say I did.”

Sanderson smiled. He helped her put on her coat, and she looked at him with something old and familiar.

“This investigation — it’s bothering you, isn’t it, Arne?”

“They all do.”

“No. Not like this.”

“Unfortunately, there’s nothing more I can do about it.”

“Oh, I don’t know.” She went to the door and took the handle. “You could always get off your ass and finish what you started.”

To sink a sailboat was not as easy as Christine imagined. She spent an hour in near darkness hammering and pounding, and in the end used a battery-powered drill to breach what she guessed was an adequate hole below the starboard waterline. When seawater finally began flowing, she disabled the automatic bilge pump and cranked the motor.

She had argued at length with David over the need for sinking the boat, he being of the school that no evidence should ever be left behind, and she assuming a more practical sailor’s point of view. A compromise was reached when he agreed that once their situation normalized they would search out Bricklayer’s owner and make things right.

With the boat hove close to shore in a cove off Runmarö Island, Christine maneuvered to point the bow toward open water. She shone a flashlight into the cabin and watched the water level, trying to estimate the rate of rise in relation to the engine compartment. When she gauged submersion to be minutes away, she lashed a line beam-to-beam to hold the tiller steady and levered the motor into gear. For the third time in as many days, Christine slipped down the stern ladder in her underwear and eased into the Baltic. It seemed colder than ever.

Clothing under her arm, she waded into ankle-deep water before turning to watch. The boat ran seaward, and veered slightly to starboard as slack settled into the steering arm. She had already used the boat’s depth finder to confirm that the water just offshore was deep, even if the very concept seemed ignoble, rather like making a condemned man stand in his grave to verify the correct depth. She heard the rumbling motor sputter, hesitate, and then go silent. So far so good. Already showing a distinct list to starboard, the momentum the boat had gained was absorbed in an awkward pirouette. Fifty yards out, the drunken silhouette of Bricklayer fell still on an indifferent sea.

Christine slogged ashore, used the last dry towel, and put on her pants. She wondered how long it would take, knowing that big ships sometimes took hours to go down, even days. There were any number of variables: buoyant compartments, shifting loads, center of gravity. For a long time nothing seemed to happen. The little boat just sat there, its skewed mast clear in the cloud-drawn moonlight. Then it began to founder, moving lower and swaying further to starboard until the gunnel went under. Across the still bay she heard rushing water and spewing air, and minutes later the blue-belted Pearson was flat on her side. As the hull disappeared, she watched the mast go vertical as if grasping for the wind one last time. Then it slipped straight down like Excalibur into the lake.

Christine turned away before it was gone.

Erbek Gurhan handed over his delivery paperwork, and in return was given a set of keys by the frau in the shack outside the Sassnitz transfer lot.

“You are Turkish, no?” she asked.

He nodded. “Where is this one?”

“Spot two hundred and six.”

Gurhan grunted.

“My name is Helga.”

“Erbek.”

“You’re getting a late start,” she said.

“Tell me something I don’t know. I just got the call — the ferry was running late.”

“Is it time and a half?”

“You’re damned right.”

“So then you are rich. Maybe you can buy me a pint tomorrow. My shift ends at twelve every night.”

Gurhan stared at her. He had been in Germany for five years, but still was not accustomed to the forwardness of Western women. “I won’t be back tomorrow,” he said. “This one is going all the way to Munich.”

“Then maybe the next day.”

Gurhan grunted a second time and turned away. As he padded across the gravel siding, however, he kept thinking about the woman in the gatehouse. She was lively enough and not bad to look at, although too many after-work pints had dulled her shape. And she had to be at least fifteen years older than he was — it would be like going out with his mother. Gurhan sighed. A spirited woman with a slack body. Why can I never find the inverse?

He found spot 206 at the back of the lot, and there his night was ruined. A mechanic with a work light was beneath the small motor home, his legs jacked out from under the front bumper.

“What is wrong?” Gurhan asked, bending down toward the ground.

The mechanic, dressed in greasy coveralls and with a wrench in his hand, slipped out from under the camper. “The engine starter is bad. I have to replace it.”

The man had light hair, but Gurhan thought his accent was not German. Probably a Pole or a Latvian, he supposed, another expatriate brought in to do the dirty work. Not that it mattered to a Turkish delivery driver. “When will it be ready?” he asked.

“I cannot get a new part at this hour. Tomorrow, I think. Probably close to noon.”

Gurhan cursed under his breath. “They just sent me here from Stralsund. What will I do until then?”

The mechanic shrugged and pushed back under the bumper.

Gurhan stood straight and looked at his watch: 11:45. He looked at the gatehouse and saw the frau whose shift was nearing an end. From a distance she seemed more attractive, and from any range utterly bored. What the hell, he thought. He started walking back to the shack.

“Hey!”

He turned and saw the mechanic’s head again.

“I’ll need the keys if I am going to make this work.”

Gurhan didn’t hesitate. He tossed them across the divide, a poor throw actually that was headed for the grill. Then the blond man swept out his hand and snatched them cleanly from the air.