Part 25 (1/2)
Neither of them spoke. They sat there in the blandly impersonal surroundings of the hospital lounge with its synthetic flowers, quietly contemplating their separate fates.
REYKJAViK,AUGUST
The days pa.s.sed, turning into weeks and months, and the media furore caused by the US army opening fire on an Icelandic rescue team gradually died down. Kristin spent much of her time at the hospital with Elias who soon regained consciousness and was able to tell her about his encounter with Ratoff. His recovery was slow but steady. Their father returned from abroad and learnt about Elias's condition, but he did not seem particularly interested in hearing the details.
'All this b.l.o.o.d.y messing about on snowmobiles,' he said. 'It's time you grew up.' Four days later he was off on another trip.
Kristin broke the news to Elias about his friend Johann. To her surprise, Johann's parents were satisfied with the explanation that the two men had fallen into a creva.s.se. Kristin and Elias debated whether to tell them the truth and finally decided they would. Once Elias was stronger, they asked Johann's parents to the hospital and told them about the circ.u.mstances of their son's death and the eventual fate of his murderer. They chose not to mention anything relating to the German plane. Although Elias had witnessed the incident, Kristin pointed out, it was obvious that the army would not admit to any kind of violence, let alone murder, and no witnesses would come forward from among its ranks to support their statement.
Johann's parents, however, a wealthy, middle-aged couple, were determined to find out the truth. They called on Elias, Kristin and Julius as witnesses but as Kristin had suspected, the charges they submitted to the public prosecutor's office and the subsequent investigation failed to yield any results and their case was not considered strong enough to mount a prosecution. The army spokesmen declared themselves astonished by the accusation that they were harbouring a killer in their ranks; they disclaimed all knowledge of the presence of Delta Force operators or a C-17 plane in the country. The legal proceedings dragged on, the media whipped themselves into a new feeding frenzy, but this too ultimately fizzled out.
Runolfur's murder remained unsolved. Kristin was summoned again and again by the police for cross-examination but stubbornly insisted on her innocence. After an exhaustive investigation, the police concluded that there were no grounds for prosecution. The decision was taken on the recommendation of the two detectives handling the case, one of whom was the sympathetic man that Kristin had talked to on the phone while at Jon's farm. The case ended up deadlocked between the Icelandic police and the Defense Force in Keflavik.
It was announced that Steve had been found not far from the Andrews movie theatre on the base, shot in the head by an unidentified gunman, and his body was repatriated to the States for burial.
During all the legal proceedings in which she was involved over the following years Kristin never once spoke of the plane's secret, but in her spare time she read up on the history of n.a.z.i Germany and the fall of the Third Reich. To her surprise, she discovered that many different theories had surfaced over the years as to Adolf Hitler's fate. She knew he had left orders for his remains to be burnt in the Berlin bunker when the Russians took the city. After the war, however, many doubted that this had truly been his fate. She learnt that the doctor's report on his remains, published by the Russians some time after his death on 30 April 1945, concluded that the body was probably that of Hitler; they also claimed immediately after the war ended that they had compared the skull to his dental records and had confirmed that it was. .h.i.tler's. Yet before long rumours began to circulate that he was being held prisoner in the British-occupied sector of Berlin, while at the summit meeting in Potsdam in July of 1945, Stalin announced that the Russians were ignorant of his fate; they had not found his body, and Stalin even hinted that he might be hiding in Spain or South America. This gave birth to a host of wild conjectures that he was staying in a Spanish monastery or on a South American ranch. Kristin came across yet another theory that the British had put him on board a submarine and taken him to a remote island. Indeed, towards the end of the war Stalin had suspected the British of engaging in secret talks with the Germans.
She also read that Hitler had been quoted as saying that in the end he would have only two friends Eva Braun and his dog, Blondi.
One summer's evening, about six months after the traumatic events, she was sitting in the kitchen after a simple supper, her thoughts wandering, as so often before, back to the glacier and what had happened there, when she remembered the piece of paper she had found in the pocket of her overalls. She had emptied them before throwing away the bloodstained clothing and put the bits and pieces she found in a kitchen drawer where they had been sitting untouched ever since. Rising, she went over, opened the drawer and rummaged in the acc.u.mulated junk until she found the folded sc.r.a.p of paper. Opening it, she read again the words OPERATION NAPOLEON OPERATION NAPOLEON. It was a fragment of the doc.u.ment that Jon had found on the body of the German officer. She placed it under a bright light and set about trying to decipher the rest of the typewritten text.
She could only read the odd word here and there but she wrote these down, along with any letters she could make out from the illegible words. Having copied down everything she could, she took her notes to a friend at the foreign ministry who had been a diplomat in Germany, and asked him to translate the text into Icelandic and, if possible, fill in the blanks to the best of his ability. She declined to tell him what it was about, where she had acquired the text or what it was part of. As she watched over his shoulder, he did his best to translate it and make some sort of sense of the whole, though he could make no suggestion as to what it added up to: ... put ash.o.r.e on a remote island off the southernmost tip of Argentina. There is a small uninhabited archipelago which might provide a suitable location. Although inhabited in earlier centuries, the islands were long ago abandoned on account of their harsh climate and barren terrain. The island we have in mind is known as Borne in the local language. It is the final option. The other two locations proposed for OPERATION NAPOLEON OPERATION NAPOLEON...
That was as far as it went. Kristin took the notes home with her, along with the translation. She told no one of her discovery, not even Elias or Julius, just tried to put the knowledge out of her mind. But it was no good: she had been beginning to find her feet when she came across the doc.u.ment but now she was once again possessed by memories of the glacier, of Steve, of Miller's story. After studying it, however, she found that she was still none the wiser about what to do, so she put the piece of paper in a drawer and locked it.
On the day of her departure she woke up in the early hours, as she had every morning since her escape from the glacier, feeling cold and empty, as if something inside her had died.
She had neither heard nor seen anything of Carr or his henchmen since her conversation with him on board the plane in the last year of the old millennium, but there were times when she was a.s.sailed by an overwhelming conviction that she was being followed or that someone had been in the flat or rifled through her files at the office. That she was not alone. She had no idea who Carr and Miller were, or what organisation they belonged to, and made no attempt to find out. Indeed she was careful to do nothing that could risk connecting her to the plane on the glacier.
An intense paranoia filled her. She was convinced now that there had been a link between her turning on the light in her flat the morning she woke up on the sofa and the phone call she had received with the warning not to cross Carr. Someone, or more than one person, had been watching her windows and knew when she woke up and switched on the light. Sometimes when she entered her flat she sensed a presence that made her profoundly uneasy. Yet she never received another phone call.
She adopted a new way of life. She never left the city and abandoned foreign travel. Any relations.h.i.+ps were short-lived, never intended to last. She did not have children. Not even among her tiny circle of friends did she confide in anyone about what had really happened on the glacier. Shortly after the millennium her father died, going to his grave with nothing but the vaguest idea of what his children had gone through. As she had planned, she left the ministry to open her own practice, and led a quiet, solitary sort of existence, though she and Elias remained close and Julius was a frequent visitor. They spent hours discussing what had happened on the glacier, but never more than that.
Hardly a day pa.s.sed when she did not recall the camp, the plane, the swastika, the bodies in the tent, Ratoff, or the secret knowledge she possessed. The years pa.s.sed, but however hard she tried she could not quite forget the island called Borne off the southern tip of Argentina. She tried to block the memory, to convince herself that the matter was over and had nothing to do with her, but it had its claws in her and in fact it developed into a mild obsession as time went by. As if the affair were somehow unfinished.
What convinced her was the thought that Steve had died because of this knowledge. He was in her mind every day and she relived his death over and over again, during her waking hours or in her dreams. He had left a void in her life that would never heal, nor would she have it any other way. But if the matter ended like this, he would have lost his life for nothing, and that she found unbearable.
It was a s.h.i.+p's captain who first made her consider the possibility seriously. He engaged her to handle his divorce and a sort of friends.h.i.+p had developed between them. He was captain of a merchant vessel and once confided in Kristin that he had helped a young Icelandic woman flee her husband with her two children by smuggling her from Portugal to Iceland. Kristin could have chosen an easier way and flown to Argentina via Spain or Italy, but she did not dare. Did not dare risk the surveillance cameras, the pa.s.senger lists, pa.s.sport control.
Even after taking the decision she did nothing precipitate. She tried as far as possible always to use cash, never credit or debit cards for transactions, to avoid places with CCTV, including some streets in the city centre where the police had installed cameras, and never used the internet at home. She fled from every aspect of the surveillance society.
She went about it as if she were organising a long holiday. The island existed, after all; she had located it with the help of the British Royal Geographical Society, whose website she visited at the National Library. Their information about the island was mainly of geographical interest, although it included a brief description of its history and the coordinates for its exact location. She considered flying to South America via Europe, or travelling there via a variety of other routes but none of these had the same attraction of invisibility.
When her friend the captain told her one day that he would shortly be sailing to Mexico to deliver an Icelandic trawler to its new owner, she decided to enlist his help. Initially he refused because she would not explain why she wanted to stow away on board his s.h.i.+p and slip ash.o.r.e unseen in Mexico. The captain was not unaccustomed to taking pa.s.sengers there were always people who were afraid of flying and preferred to sail on merchant s.h.i.+ps but he wanted nothing to do with anything illegal.
She never knew why he changed his mind but one day he came and agreed he would help her, if that was what she wanted. She had asked it as a favour of a friend, he said, and who was he to deny her?