The Valkyrie Project Read online

  From the doctor he had liked the most, he begged an accurate assessment of his chances. “There is a statistical possibility that you will live a normal lifespan,” the doctor said. “You can’t ignore that.” He was a pleasant man of about fifty, with rather long gray hair, a heavy smoker. “That is, however, a small possibility.”

  He paused and looked as though he wanted a cigarette. “There is also a possibility that you will die tonight,” he continued. “This too is small. The probability lies somewhere in between.”

  Spencer remarked with some profanity that this was unhelpful.

  “Mr. Spencer,” the doctor said. “I could tell you the chances are a hundred to one against anything happening to you. But what good would that do you if your case turned out to be that one? If I told you that you had only one chance in a hundred of surviving, what if you proved to be that one?”

  Spencer remarked that this, too, was unhelpful.

  “We can’t predict these things, Mr. Spencer. I’m sorry. We’ve prescribed medication, a diet, a schedule of checkups. Beyond that, you’ll just have to live your life like the rest of us.”

  “If I were to die within a year,” said Spencer, “would you be surprised?”

  The doctor slid open his desk drawer and removed a package of cigarettes. He lit one, inhaled deeply, exhaled an enormous cloud of smoke, then stared through it at Spencer.

  “No,” he said. “Mr. Spencer, I would not be surprised at six months.”

  Spencer took a week off work after that and was drunk day and night for all of it. He finally compelled himself to recognize the pointlessness of that and made the effort to fashion some sort of life for himself. But it was not life lived “like the rest of us.” It was a life utterly bereft of future, a life that ended every day. And the nights were not possible without alcohol.

  He had risked his life many times throughout his career-often deliberately. But Khmer Rouge landmines and IRA snipers and storms off the coast of Iceland were dangers that passed. Now he must live with a terrifying danger that could end only with his death.

  Still drinking, Spencer fidgeted a moment, then abruptly rose and began moving restlessly through the room. He picked up his wife’s picture from the mantelpiece, stared at it, and drank. He took his loaded pistol from the desk and walked with it to the window, letting it hang loosely in his hand as he stood naked watching the swirling leaves.

  He had always been peculiarly curious about the experience of killing another human being. He knew an extraordinary number of people who had done it. In Vietnam, some correspondents had gone out with helicopter gunships to shoot VC as a lark. Spencer had gone along once but had no interest in shooting anyone. Merely this overwhelming curiosity about what it would be like.

  What would it be like to kill oneself?

  Returning his pistol to the drawer with great care, he had a final drink, then went back to stand at the foot of the bed. Frances was quietly snoring. Spencer turned her over onto her back, and heaved himself onto her.

  Warm sunlight found him still alive. He had come to rejoice in that morning moment.

  Frances still slept. Without dressing, he went to make coffee in the kitchen and, when done, took a cup to his leather chair by the front window. It was against his new rules to drink in the morning, but he poured some whiskey into the strong coffee anyway. It would help him think, and he needed to.

  Frances joined him a short while later, having put on an old robe Chesley had left behind. She made a face when he offered her coffee, lighting a cigarette instead. He wished she had not put on the robe, though not for any reason to do with Chesley. Naked, Frances had looked young and vulnerable, appealing. With the robe—her hair disheveled, her bare feet awkward and unattractive—she seemed haggard, almost sleazy.

  She exhaled a long plume of smoke into the shaft of sunlight from the window. Then she coughed.

  “You’re a mean fuck,” she said.

  “Is that a compliment?” he asked.

  “No.”

  She paused, looking at her hand.

  “Yes and no,” she said. “You hurt me. You scared the hell out of me. You were wandering around out here with a gun. Are you some kind of weirdo?”

  “No. I just drink too much.”

  He sipped his coffee. There was ample room in the cup for more whiskey, but he decided against it.

  “What would you do if you knew when you were going to die?” he asked.

  “What?”

  “What would you do if you had only a very short time to live?”

  She studied him a long moment. Her eyes were roughly darkened from smudged mascara.

  “Would you do whatever you wanted to do?” he said.

  “I guess I’d do what I wanted to do most,” she said.

  “Thank you for last night.”

  “I have to get home,” she said, putting out her cigarette. “You can drive me, if you’re sober enough. I’ve got that much coming.”

  She lived rather near, in one of the old but expensive canopied buildings on Connecticut Avenue near the zoo. She had a roommate, she said—a man, who didn’t mind her having other “friends.” As he always did with the women he liked, Spencer wondered whether he might ever see her again. It would require continuing to work second-rate Embassy Row parties. Which meant that he would not. Turning his BMW sedan into the downtown-bound morning traffic, he put her out of his mind. He was putting an extraordinary number of things out of his mind.

  The list of committee hearings and press conferences on the Senate press gallery bulletin board was a catalog of trivia. As it was yesterday. As it would be tomorrow.

  As he left the gallery, a dark-eyed young girl who worked for one of the wire services looked up from her desk and smiled, earnestly and sadly. There were a great many rumors circulating about what might be medically wrong with Spencer—doubtless none of them right. But he had become a Tragic Figure. He smiled back at her, tragically.

  The Capitol’s pay phones were much too public. Spencer instead walked over to the Rayburn House office building, following a long corridor to a little-used second-floor press room. As he expected, it was empty. There was a long row of free telephones in booths against the wall, soundproof for the benefit of broadcast reporters. He chose one with a good view of the entire room and slid the door closed behind him. The telephone number was on a dirty, wrinkled card he still carried in his wallet. He dialed it and was informed by an operator that it had been changed. The new number she gave him was answered after only one ring by a girl who merely repeated the number back, saying no more. That much had not changed.

  “My name is John Spencer,” he said, identifying himself as a correspondent for the newspaper chain in the Midwest.

  “Press inquiries are handled by Colonel Fitzwilliam,” she said. “One moment, I’ll connect you.”

  Colonel Fitzwilliam, Spencer knew very well, did not exist. It was the name used by all the people in the Central Intelligence Agency who dealt with press inquiries. Spencer wondered why they hadn’t given the colonel a new name.

  “No, no, no,” he said. “This isn’t a press inquiry. I’ve worked for you before. I’d like to work for you again. Is there someone I might speak to about that?”

  “One moment please.”

  She connected him with a real colonel. He was quite friendly, if circumspect, and invited Spencer to come out to Langley that afternoon. He sounded rather encouraging.

  It was an old maxim at the CIA: The best spies are those who want to be spies. And being a spy was what Spencer now wanted to do most.

  3

  Geir Krog was the only witness to the murder that was supposed to have been his own. He had left his cabin only a short while before, thinking that nothing was amiss and that his American friends were alarmists. With his Mercedes firmly stuck in the mud, he walked to the grocery, leaving Inga to begin the dinner and feeling perfectly secure. At the store he encountered nothing out of the ordinary, except two foreign sailors
who made their purchases without paying him any mind. Despite the miserable weather, he trudged back to the cabin feeling peculiarly happy, only to be abruptly halted outside the cabin window by the sight of Inga struggling with a tall man in a fisherman’s slicker. Krog heard her body drop to the floor. An hour earlier they had been making love.

  Krog was a huge man, a bluff, cheery giant with bright blue eyes and yellow-red hair and beard, who might well have stepped off one of the long ships that had brought the Vikings to Iceland in the late ninth century. A mountain climber who spent much of his free time trekking across Iceland’s glacier-strewn interior, Krog had inordinate strength—enough to break the murderer’s neck with one hand if he were furious enough, which he was.

  Instead, he hurried back into the darkness and dropped to the sodden ground. There was nothing he could do for that poor girl. It was too late—probably too late for him as well. He was in the most serious trouble of his life. And he had been treating this entire business as an intellectual game—just another game of chess.

  Krog was frightened, and he was seldom frightened. It was incredible that they could have found him so soon, that they could behave so brutally. The Russians he had dealt with had been clumsy, primitive sorts, but they had been friendly enough. And trusting. Brother socialists.

  Yet here was Rozkowski, the gentlemanly Polish engineer who had come to Iceland for the innocent purpose of studying Iceland’s hydroelectric techniques. Krog had dined with him, drunk with him, and played chess with him. And here he was in Krog’s cabin, savaging an innocent girl like a demented fiend. It was all run together now. So many of Krog’s questions answered, so many others raised.

  Unless, in this rain and dark, he had made a mistake. It might not be Rozkowski but someone who resembled him, some drunken sex-crazy sailor, or an Icelander gone berserk because of the approaching dark season.

  No. It was indeed Rozkowski. He hesitated in the light of the doorway as though listening, then hurried past the unseen Krog, stumbling up the slope to the road.

  Krog lay where he was in the rain for another ten minutes, waiting to make sure Rozkowski was alone, wishing he had torn him to pieces. He walked slowly to the cabin. What he saw in the kitchen made him sink into a chair and weep. Krog could not recall the last time he had wept.

  He had met Inga only that morning—at the telephone office in the village, where he offered her his place in line. She was a schoolteacher from Reykjavik, visiting relatives here in the east counties. They lunched together, went for a walk in the hills above the fjord, and then stopped for aquavit in his cabin. She had been the one who wanted to make love.

  Casual about women, Krog had liked this Inga very much. As became a small person, she was fey and witty, charmingly impish, at once friendly and taunting. She liked his books, and his phonograph records, and his beard. She said she thought he must be one of the giants of Icelandic mythology and asked whether he knew any elves or trolls. He said: “Only you.”

  Now she lay half-naked, dumped face-down like so much refuse in an enormous pool of her own blood, having committed no crime but meeting the wrong man on very much the wrong day.

  Still uncomprehending, he filled a glass with aquavit and sat pondering his circumstance, as he might have one of his engineering problems.

  Though he had not taken the Americans’ warning very seriously, he had followed their every instruction in precise detail: telephoning the prearranged number, mailing the overseas letter as required, leaving Akureyri at once for this summer cabin, and telephoning again with a prearranged message to confirm his arrival. They had said that they would have him out within the week, and that all seemed well.

  Krog had never in his life felt so helpless. His instincts were to do what was required of him by Icelandic law, but he could not do that. The nearest county police were in Egilsstadir, a two-hour drive even in good weather. The village telephone office was closed, and there was no point in seeking help from the villagers. Inga was of a local family and he was a stranger whose presence was already viewed as suspicious. Were one of the local fishermen to see what had been done to Inga, he’d be flayed to pieces with boat hooks, no matter what his explanation.

  A woman, liquor, a kitchen knife, the darkening time of the year—it all pointed to the only kind of murder Krog had ever heard about in Iceland. It was as logical as the truth was not.

  It would accomplish little to hide Inga’s body, even if he could bring himself to do it. Krog could not bear to look at her again. As it was, they’d doubtless have him in a cell in Kopavogur as soon as they clapped hands on him. Ultimately, his best hope lay with the Americans, but not now. He would figure this out—he would figure out many things—but for now he would avoid the Americans.

  He wondered whether the Russians might in some way prove to be a help. They were out to kill him, but he could trust them—trust them to act entirely in their own interest. The Icelandic election was a month away. He might yet be able to draw them out with some sort of negotiation. They obviously weren’t aware of all the documents—engineering papers in a folder still on top of the one small bookcase in the cabin, the notebooks he had left with a friend in Reykjavik.

  Why had Rozkowski left without looking for these things? Inga. Poor Inga had performed a great if inadvertent service for her country. And for him. If he had not met her that morning, he would surely now be dead.

  He swore a silent promise of repayment over his glass of aquavit and drank it—all of it. A tiny noise attracted his attention, the ticking of the small portable clock in the bedroom. He looked at his watch with some urgency. Rozkowski might be coming back—with friends. Even if not, providing he could elude the police and find sanctuary, he’d dare not waste another moment.

  There was no logical escape by conventional means. There were very few roads in Iceland, especially here in the eastern counties. Even if he could extricate his car from the mud, which he doubted, he would still be only a few hours along the coastal road by the time Inga’s body was discovered. The airport at Egilsstadir was closer, but the first flight to Reykjavik didn’t leave until late morning. Krog was himself a pilot, but an attempt to steal an aircraft would be a great risk—if there happened to be any parked at that small airport.

  Stealing a boat would be quite easy, but pointless. The weather was impossible and the nearest foreign lands were inhospitable Greenland or the Faroe Islands, more than four hundred miles away. The Icelandic Coast Guard had a patrol plane, a helicopter, and six fast patrol vessels. Wherever Krog turned in his mind, he saw himself in the grasp of the Rannsoknarlogregla Rikisins, Iceland’s state criminal police.

  Krog was a poor spy, but a good historian. It had become clear to him what he must do, terrifyingly clear.

  In the olden times, Icelandic justice had been as cruel and swift as any other medieval European land’s, with beheadings, mutilation, and torture prescribed for a wide variety of offenses. But the ancient Icelandic legal code contained another punishment that people of those times considered as bad as all the others, if not worse: banishment.

  Upon conviction of a crime, the banished person was given the distance of the flight of an arrow, or two or three times that, to flee. Once beyond that distance, he was for the term of his banishment an outlaw. He was denied every protection of the law and could be robbed, beaten, or killed with impunity. He was banned from all human habitation. Any person who gave shelter or succor to the banished was automatically sentenced to the same punishment.

  In that harsh and cruel environment, a year’s banishment could mean death. There was no escaping Iceland. The visits of ships were rare and celebrated events, and ships stopped chiefly at settled places where a banished person would be killed on sight The only refuge for the outlaw was the countryside, then as now among the most forbidding the world possessed.

  The longest anyone had survived in the Icelandic wild under banishment was seventeen years: Grettim Asmundsson had brought his wife into banishment with him an
d formed an outlaw band. Asmundsson’s sentence had been eighteen years. He died a year before it was up.

  The greatest Icelandic outlaw, though, had been the legendary Eyvind of the Hills, a philosophical fellow, Iceland’s Robin Hood. One of Krog’s heroes.

  Now Geir Krog was little different from Eyvind of the Hills. Krog, who thought himself a patriot, who had broken no law and served only what he saw as his country’s best interest, was now a banished person. He would be hunted throughout the island, not only by the police but by the men who had come to kill him. He would have to take to the wild and think his way out of this problem from there.

  Hurriedly, he changed to warmer clothes and stout hiking boots, filling his backpack with extra clothing, food, and essentials. The last included two books: Njal’s Saga, the most famous of Iceland’s medieval sagas, and the Edda of Snorri Sturlsson, the thirteenth-century poet and politician who’d been hunted down and put to death by the king of Norway. Krog added the papers from the bookcase, wrapping them carefully in plastic, and his last bottle of aquavit. He did not neglect to bring his sheath knife, his only weapon.

  Before leaving, he took a piece of notepaper and wrote upon it a single sentence: “I did not kill this woman. G. Krog.” He set it carefully upon the kitchen table; then, shouldering his heavy pack, he walked out of the cabin without looking behind, heading away from the village, toward the mountains. In the darkness, he saw nothing but Inga’s face. And her bloody body. To keep his mind from that, he turned to his puzzle, his game of chess. It was clear now that the Russian endgame was concerned with electricity, massive amounts of electricity, considerably more electricity than might be required for the aluminum plant that was at the heart of Erikisson’s naive bargain. To what civilized purpose would the Russians put so much electricity? And why in Iceland? And why the word “Valkyrie”? The Valkyries were spirits of death.