Free Chasing the Storm by Martin Molsted

the control room. By the light of the console, he saw Captain Tamm sleeping on a cot. “This is very strange. Why he sleep on Alpensturm ? Why he not sleep in nice bed at home? Never before I see him sleep on Alpensturm .”
    Yuri fetched the master keys from a secret hiding place that only he and the captain knew about, the whereabouts of which, for some reason, he refused to divulge to Rygg (and you will never guess!). He made his way to the hold, opened the metal doors with the keys, and felt his way inside. He was expecting drugs, in bags or concealed in tins. What he found were twelve long boxes. He measured them roughly with his feet. Each was around four meters long, one meter wide, and one meter high. Yuri fumbled around on the wall until he found a monkey wrench and jimmied one of the boxes open from the bottom – “Only five centimeter.” Reaching in, he could feel something hard: a firm, rounded surface. Demonstrating with his hands, Yuri showed how he slipped the camera in and took two pictures. Then he replaced the wrench and the keys and left, slipping out the porthole.
    As he was swimming back to Ocho’s ship, he saw the square goon at the sentry box, and knew he was being fingered. So he swam for half a kilometer through the freezing Baltic, clutching the camera, until he got beyond the wall of the port. “When I come out, I have no clothes, I am naked, with Vaseline. Very funny.” He had an almost girlish way of putting his hand in front of his mouth when he laughed. “There is window open. I take curtain from window and put on my body. I get into taxi, I tell driver story about how I am thiefed.” Yuri laughed again, hand cupping his mustache.
    “So what did the pictures show?” Rygg asked.
    Yuri nodded. “I cannot look at them very good, I have not computer. You see, I have to leave Kaliningrad very quickly. But I think they show something interesting, okay? Something very interesting to Marko Marin.”
    “Do you have them?”
    Yuri shook his head. “Not here.”
    “Why didn’t you bring them with you?” Rygg asked, exasperated.
    “I don’t know who is coming to shoot this time. I am frighten. Maybe they find me. So I leave the pictures somewhere. A secret place.”
    “Can we go get them?”
    “You meet me tomorrow.”
    “Here?”
    “No!” Yuri looked shocked. “No, no, no, no. We meet in café. You know the Speicherstadt?”
    “Down by the water?”
    “Ya, along the canal.”
    “Sure.”
    “You come tomorrow. Is café, Café Mendelssohn. Very nice. You feel like rich man. Eleven o’clock. Sit beside me on the bar. Don’t speak, don’t look to me. You will find there my cigarettes. Marlboro, ya? When I go, I leave my cigarettes. You take.”
    “I got you.
    “Marlboro.”
    “Got it.”
    “What time?”
    “Eleven.”
    “Okay. Now I take the money.”
    Rygg paused.
    “You have information. I take the money please.”
    “I will wait until I get the pictures. Marko said after I get all the information.”
    “You don’t give me money, I don’t give you pictures. All my money, I have used. I have no work, like I tell you. Tonight I want to drink vodka, I want find nice Turkish girl. You want pictures?”
    Rygg made the decision. “I’ll give you half,” he said. “Half now, half on delivery of the pictures. Hand me the briefcase.” He unpeeled the leather from the bottom and took out the envelope. It seemed very slim. He opened it and counted out ten five-hundred euro bills and slid them across the table. Yuri counted the bills again, carefully, slipping his forefinger under his mustache to wet it.
    “Okay,” he said. “I like you. Okay. Tomorrow. Eleven. You will take the cigarettes and leave the envelope. I am Yuri. I will be there.”

    Emerging from the Pleasure Hole, Rygg marched fast away from the entrance, stopping once he got outside of the Reeperbahn, checking for shoes, checking for anything familiar. Once, looking up from buying a bag of apples, he