A light lunch of salad, soup and bread full of so many seeds that they stuck between his teeth gave Jóel Ingi the energy to wake up, and half an hour later he was stripped down to shorts and a grey T-shirt as he pedaled his habitual ten kilometers at the gym, surrounded by like-minded professionals with the same aim in mind. There was a sharp aura of dedication in the air as Jóel Ingi passed the eight kilometer mark in the time he usually took to do ten. He wondered if that might be enough, but forced himself to continue.
“Hi, how goes it?”
The question took him by surprise as he was emerging from the shower. He looked around and saw only the back of someone he didn’t recognize until the face appeared from beneath the towel that was rubbing a mop of dark hair dry.
“Hi, not so bad. And you? How’s things on your side? Not that you’re allowed to tell me anything about what you guys do,” he joked.
“I can tell you exactly what we do,” Már Einarsson replied, opening the packaging around a new shirt and taking it out of its cellophane wrapper. He grinned. “But I’d have to send someone to kill you afterward.”
“And then you’d have to kill him after that, I suppose?”
“Yeah, probably,” he said it dismissively. The humor had gone from his voice. “We have a minor problem. Can we have a quiet word later today?”
“Sure,” Jóel Ingi agreed. He knotted his tie and looked at himself in the mirror. “Urgent?”
“Hmmm. Could be. Let’s say it is, shall we?” Már continued. “Wait for me at the door, would you? We can talk there and it’ll only take a minute.”
The shower had been too hot and had left his pores wide open. In the warmth of the gym’s lobby, Jóel Ingi found himself sweating uncomfortably. He considered taking off his coat, but that would only mean putting it back on as soon as Már appeared, so he decided to be too hot for a few minutes before plunging into the welcome chill of the cold afternoon.
By the time Már appeared silently at his side, Jóel Ingi was almost asleep, his eyelids drooping.
“Ready?”
He shook himself awake. “Sorry. I’ve not been sleeping well recently,” he explained.
“You need more exercise. Or are you pushing yourself too hard?”
“Ach. I don’t know. A bit of both, probably.”
Már made for the door. “Walk with me. There are too many ears around here,” he murmured.
The sun shone outside for the first time in days, a pallid sunlight with no warmth, but welcome all the same in the dead of winter.
“Problem,” Már announced once they were clear of the gym and anyone who might overhear. “A whisper from the Brits, of all people. Three men and a woman who disappeared from Germany two years ago turned up in Libya. Dead, and not from old age.”
“And what does this have to do with us?”
“Nothing at all, I hope. You tell me.”
“This was the four who …?”
“So it would seem.”
“Shit. What do you know? What do they know?”
Már slowed his pace; he obviously had no intention of reaching their destination too soon. “I’m not sure. But they decided to tell us this, which is what makes me wonder. You realize the implications, don’t you? There could be heads on blocks all over, starting with yours and mine, and all the way up from there.”
“But we did what-”
“What we were told? Come on. We can’t use that excuse.”
Chastened, Jóel Ingi nodded. “Does our guy know about this?”
“I doubt it. He’d have blown his stack by now if he did. Or he’d have blogged about it,” Már said with a snigger. “But Ægir wants to be briefed.”
“Give me an hour,” he said as the back door of the ministry building loomed. Jóel Ingi turned to face Már. “I’ll do a few discreet checks,” he said, keeping his nerves under control, his hand on the door and his mind already focused uncomfortably on what had happened to his computer.
The expression on the minister’s political adviser’s face showed that the meeting was not going to be a happy one.
“Is there any link to these men?” Ægir Lárusson demanded in a tone caustic enough to strip paint from the wall.
“Not as such,” Már Einarsson replied.
“And what does that mean, or is it just bullshit?”
Már winced. People with political rather than ministry backgrounds could be tiresomely rude. “It means that as far as we know, there are no links.”
“As far as you know? So you mean there could be? What am I going to tell my boy in there when he’s up on his hind legs and one of those hairy-legged lesbians asks him straight out if those four terrorists came to Iceland?”
“There was no evidence that they were terrorists,” Már protested. The man was simply too crude.
“Or if the press get hold of even a whisper of this?” Ægir’s voice was rough, with a scratched quality that reminded Már of fingernails scraping down a wall. His face was redder than Már had ever seen in a man who was seldom far from an angry outburst.
“Listen. There’s one of those lesbians with hairy armpits in the office next to mine. She’s the human rights and gender equality officer, and if she gets a sniff of this, even a hint, she’ll raise the roof, and I personally will ensure that your pickled testicles are lovingly put in a jar for your wife to keep by her bed as a shriveled memento of what could have been. Understand? Now, will you tell me just what ‘as far as we know’ means in plain language?”
Már took a deep breath. “There’s nothing on paper. Not a scrap. I’ve checked records and been through the archives. There were phone conversations at the time. There are no notes and no memos here. I can’t speak for the minister,” he said in an attempt to hold his own.
“I’ll speak for my boy. But?”
“But what?”
“I can see it in your face. You were about to say ‘but …’ weren’t you? So, but what?”
Már took a deeper breath. “There were emails. I’ve already done some housekeeping on that score. There’s nothing here. But …”
“You’re doing it again,” Ægir snapped.
“There’s a laptop. It went missing.”
“When?”
“Not long ago. A few days before Christmas.”
The expected outburst didn’t materialize. Instead, there was an even more disturbing silence while Ægir sat down and placed his hands together on the deck, intertwining his fingers. “Then I would suggest, Már, that you and your people set about finding that laptop with all due speed. That is, providing your wife doesn’t want to abandon every ambition she has of arranging the seating plans at ambassadorial dinners in Paris or Washington one day in the distant future. Because the alternative is that she might end up as a fishery officer’s wife in Bolungarvík, possibly in the not-too-distant future.”
“I have already …”
“Don’t tell me what you’ve done,” Ægir cut in. “Just let me know when it’s fixed.”
The girl looked uncomfortable in the shabby magnolia-painted canteen that contrasted with the understated opulence of the hotel’s lobby and sumptuous rooms. Gunna smiled and wished that Yngvi would stop fidgeting.
“Hæ, my name’s Gunnhildur Gísladóttir, and I’m a detective sergeant in the city police. What’s your name?”
“Valeria Hákonarson,” the girl replied uncertainly through dark eyes that flickered toward Yngvi in his suit, which was beginning to look a lot less smart than it had a few hours earlier.
“Where are you from, Valeria?” Gunna asked. “You speak Icelandic well enough, don’t you?”
“I’m from Romania, but I’ve been here for a few years,” she replied in passable Icelandic, but with a distinct accent. “My husband’s Icelandic.”
“Been working here long?”
“Two years,” she said, her eyes flickering toward Yngvi again.