Free Operation Napoleon by Arnaldur Indridason Page A

inner darkness they brought with them. She walked along the pavement, wondering what to do, before eventually deciding to head back in the direction of Tómasarhagi, looking round warily all the while. She had come up with a plan of sorts, though she doubted that she was in any fit state to think rationally or to work out the simplest solution.
    She would handle this alone, at least to begin with. She did not dare to go to her friends or family for fear that her pursuers or their henchmen would be waiting. Only a few minutes had elapsed between her conversation with her brother and their appearance on her doorstep. Perhaps they were tapping her phone. But why? Did it have something to do with Runólfur? They had killed him, afterall, and he had been raging about a conspiracy; about the Russian mafia.
    She knew only one man who could tell her about soldiers.
    Taking care to keep out of sight, she peered over at her own house. There was no sign of the police or anyone else; everything looked quiet, domestic, unremarkable. When she reached the main road she hailed a taxi, one which fortunately accepted cards.
    ‘Where to?’ he asked.
    ‘Keflavík Airport,’ she replied, casting a nervous glance out of the rear window.

VATNAJÖKULL GLACIER,
FRIDAY 29 JANUARY, 2100 GMT
    Ratoff did not see them land but heard the thuds as they collided with the ice on their headlong descent into the crevasse. It was pitch dark on the glacier, the moon hidden behind thick clouds, the only light emanating from the headlamps on Ratoff’s tracked vehicle and the snowmobiles. By the time they had reached the crevasse, one of the young men was unconscious, the other dead. Ratoff ordered his soldiers to push their snowmobiles into the chasm on top of them, after which his men set to work obliterating their tracks. Once this was done, Ratoff dropped Elías’s phone into the crevasse after him.
    In the end he had forced Elías to give up the salient facts about Kristín, information which he duly passed on to Ripley and Bateman. Elías had held out for a long time but Ratoff was good at his job. The boy had surrendered everything about his sister’s friends and colleagues, where their father lived and how he often made longtrips abroad, and about Kristín’s ex-boyfriends, the lawyer and his circle; even about their mother’s death a few years earlier in a car crash. He revealed how his sister had taken a postgraduate degree in California and how, despite sometimes visiting friends abroad, she hated travelling in Iceland and that trips into the interior were her idea of hell. Elías had told Ratoff everything he wanted to know, before finally begging for mercy. But by then his friend Jóhann was dead. The last thing Elías heard before he lost consciousness was Ratoff whispering the news in his ear that his sister was dead too.
    Ratoff’s men laboured away at clearing the ice from the German aircraft, working in four-hour shifts, sixty men to a shift. They were well on schedule; more and more of the fuselage had been uncovered until they could now see into the passenger cabin through the first of the side windows. When Ratoff returned to camp, he walked over to the German plane and spent a long time peering through the window. He could dimly make out shapes on the floor that might have been bodies. He was summoned to the communications tent and straightened up. Ripley was on the line.
    ‘She used her debit card to pay for a taxi to Keflavík, sir,’ Ripley informed him. ‘Did her brother say anything about Keflavík?’
    ‘Why the hell is she going to Keflavík?’ Ratoff asked. ‘What happened at her place? How much does she know? Surely the logical move would be to go to the Reykjavík police?’
    There was a short pause on the line.
    ‘She knows there’s a strong possibility that her brother’s dead,’ Ripley admitted hesitantly. ‘She may also be under the impression that someone’s trying to murder her because of a conspiracy