“If it’s all the same to you, I’ll just stay here.”
“Suit yourself,” Gabriel said. “If you want to sit here alone, that’s fine with me.”
Ibrahim made a show of thought, then climbed out. Gabriel opened the trunk and removed the flashlight and the tire iron.
“Why are you bringing that?” asked Ibrahim.
“In case we come across any Vikings.” He slipped the tool down the front of his jeans and quietly closed the trunk. “They made me leave my gun back in that service station, too. A crowbar is better than nothing.”
Gabriel switched on the flashlight and set out across the car park with Ibrahim at his side. The snow was six inches deep and within a few steps Gabriel’s brogans were sodden and his feet freezing. Thirty seconds after leaving the car, he stopped suddenly. There were two sets of faint tracks in the snow, one set obviously larger than the other, leading from the car park into the burial ground. Gabriel left Ibrahim alone and followed the footprints back to their point of origin. Judging from the condition of the snow’s surface, it appeared as though a small truck or transit van had entered the lot from a second access road several hours earlier. The larger of the two occupants had stepped into the snow from the driver’s side of the vehicle, the smaller from the passenger side. Gabriel crouched in the snow and scrutinized the smaller prints as though he were examining brushstrokes on a canvas. The prints were feminine, he decided, and whoever had left them had been wearing athletic shoes. There was no evidence of any struggle.
Gabriel rejoined Ibrahim and led him down a footpath into the site. The cemetery fell away before them, down the slope of the hill toward a vast inland bay in the distance. Despite the snowfall it was possible to discern, in the glow of Gabriel’s flashlight, the outlines of individual graves. Some were mounds of stones, some were circles, and still others were shaped like Viking ships. It was not difficult to find the far corner of the longhouse; all Gabriel had to do was follow the twin sets of tracks. He crouched down and probed with his bare hands beneath the surface of the snow. A few seconds later he found what had been left there for him, a small plastic ziplock bag containing a portion of a detailed map. He examined it by the glow of his flashlight. Then he stood and led Ibrahim back to the car.
“Skagen,” said Gabriel as he drove slowly down the hill. “They want us to go to Skagen. Well, almost to Skagen. The spot they circled on the map is a little to the south.”
“You know this place?”
“I’ve never been there, but I know it. There was an artist colony that formed there in the late eighteen hundreds. They were known as the Skagen School of painters. They came there for the light. They say it’s unique-not that we’ll be seeing any of it.”
“Perhaps this is another good omen,” said Ibrahim.
“Perhaps,” said Gabriel.
“Will the ambassador’s daughter be there?”
“It doesn’t say. It just tells us to go to a spot along the North Sea.”
“Was she in the burial ground tonight?”
“They wanted me to think she was,” Gabriel said. “But I don’t believe she was there.”
“How can you tell?”
“Because the woman got out of the vehicle and walked into the cemetery on her own,” Gabriel said. “I saw Elizabeth at the moment of her abduction. She wouldn’t have walked in there on her own. She would have fought them.”
“Unless they told her she was about to be released,” said Ibrahim.
Gabriel gave him an admiring sideways glance. “You’re not bad,” he said.
“I was a professor once,” he said. “And I love detective novels.”
41
She did not know the duration of her journey, for she had tried to think of anything but the clock. It was but a few minutes, she told herself. It was the blink of an eye. She had told herself other lies as well. She was in a comfortable bed, not a wooden box that smelled faintly of fish. She was wearing faded blue jeans and her favorite sweater, not the same dirty tracksuit she had been wearing since the morning of her capture. She could see her favorite mountain range through her favorite window. She was listening to beautiful music. The rest were just scenes from a bad dream. She would wake soon and it would all be over.
She had been prepared for the appalling discomfort-Cain’s note had made it abundantly clear what lay in store for her-but the earplugs had taken her by surprise. They had robbed her of one of her most potent weapons, the ability to hear what was taking place around her, and had reduced her world to a monotonous droning. She had been left with only one sense, the ability to feel motion. She knew that they had driven at high speeds and at moderate speeds, on good roads and bad. Once she’d had the sensation of being in a large city surrounded by people who did not realize she was only inches away. Now she felt certain they were on an unpaved track, in a place near the end of the earth.
They stopped suddenly-so suddenly that her head was pressed painfully against the end of her coffinlike container-and a moment later the droning of the engine went silent. Several minutes elapsed before they finally removed her from the vehicle, and several more passed before she finally heard the screech of the nails being removed by the claw of a hammer. Cold salty air streamed over her face as the lid came off. Hot tears spilled involuntarily into the fabric of her blindfold as she was lifted to her feet. No one spoke to her as she was led inside the new hideout. No one asked about the condition of her arrhythmic heart as she was placed on the cot in her new cell. When the door closed on her again, she removed the blindfold and the earplugs and gazed at a new set of white walls. There was a plate of food-bread, cheese, and chocolate because she had been good during the drive-and there was a yellow bucket for her toilet. She had no idea where they had moved her but was certain of one thing. She could smell the sea.
42
The road from the Baltic port of Frederikshavn to Skagen was abandoned and barely passable. Gabriel sat hunched over the steering wheel for mile after mile as a string of silent snowbound towns flashed past. Their names were full of strange consonant combinations that even Gabriel, whose first language was German, found impenetrable. Danish is not a language, he thought resentfully as he plunged through the gloom. Danish is merely an affliction of the throat.
After leaving the town of Ålbæk, a seemingly endless moonscape of dunes opened before them. The cutoff toward the summer resort town of Kandestederne lay near the northern end of the wasteland; Gabriel, after making the turn, saw a single set of freshly made tire tracks in the snow. He suspected they had been left by the same vehicle that had been at the cemetery in Lindholm Høje.
They sledded past a few small farms, then entered another expanse of dunes-vast dunes this time, dunes the size of foothills. Here and there Gabriel glimpsed the outlines of cottages and small homes. There were no lights burning, no other cars, and no other signs of life. Time, it seemed, had stopped.
The tire tracks bent to the right, into a narrow road, and vanished behind a curtain of snowfall. Gabriel continued straight and stopped a moment later at a small car park overlooking the beach, next to a boarded-up café. He started to switch off the engine, then thought better of it. “Wait here,” he said. “Lock the doors after I get out. Don’t open them for anyone but me.”
He took the tire tool and flashlight and walked over to the café. There were fresh footprints all around-two sets at least, perhaps more. Whoever had left them had come to this spot from the dunes. One set of tracks led down to the beach. They were identical to the ones he had seen at Lindholm. The woman’s.