Sohlberg and the White Death (48 page)

A siren wailed. Lights flashed. The helmeted gendarme was right behind them in less than five seconds.

Laprade cursed and said:

“What’s wrong with this idiot? . . . I was way under the speed limit.”

They crossed a narrow bridge. A long stretch of guardrail prevented Laprade from pulling over. He instead turned left into a gravel parking lot at the front yard of a country home. The motorcycle cop parked in the back and to the side of Laprade.

A black Peugeot sedan roared down the street. The vehicle screeched to a stop behind the Citroen.

“This doesn’t look good,” said Laprade. “Did you bring your gun?”

“Yes,” said Sohlberg. He wondered if this was a clever set-up in which the motorcyclist or someone else would kill him. He wondered if this was Laprade’s doing or a roadside assassination by the 'Ndrangheta. Either way he didn’t see how he was going to come out unscathed.

Laprade put his hands up high on the steering wheel. “Don’t reach for your gun until I say so.”

The motorcycle cop got off the police edition Yamaha FJR1300. The gravel crunched under the gendarme’s boots. Sohlberg wondered how long it would be before the bullets started flying and whether he would be able to get off a shot.

Laprade’s cell phone rang.

The motorcyclist walked towards Laprade without taking off his helmet. The gendarme lifted the visor and said:

“Monsieur . . . I would answer the phone if I were you.”

Laprade reached for his cell phone and said, “Hello?” The detective frowned. “Procedures? . . . Since when do we follow procedures? . . . This wasn’t necessary. You should’ve just asked. I would have given it to you.”

The burly driver of the black Peugeot got out of the vehicle. The gorilla in a suit approached Laprade and said:

“Hand it over.”

“Enjoy it,” said Laprade while he reached into his coat for the thumb drive that Bonhoeffer had given him.

The car and the motorcycle left towards Lyon.

Sohlberg felt little drops of cold sweat roll down his face and scalp. “What was that all about?”

“Pierre wanted the documents handed over to his people at the D.G.S.E. He said he was just following procedures.”

“Since when do spies follow procedures?”

“That’s what I told him.”

“So we’re done with this North Korean stuff?”

“Not exactly. I told Bonhoeffer to give me two copies of whatever documents he found inside the safe. I have the other thumb drive in my coat.”

~ ~ ~

An enormous harvest moon floated above the horizon. The red orb seemed eager to foretell a tale of death, disaster, and destruction. Laprade sped down the A40 Highway to Lyon. They passed gloomy and narrow valleys in the western edge of the French Alps.

Sohlberg peered into the darkness. “Did Pierre say anything after you sent him Bonhoeffer’s goodies?”

“No. . . . And that’s what worries me. I get nervous whenever someone in the intelligence community gets tight-lipped. . . . I need you to find someone at Interpol . . . someone we can trust . . . to translate the documents for us.”

“How many pages?”

“Twenty-four.”

“I’ll call Rageh Ziedan. He will pick the right person.”

Sohlberg took out his cell phone and called Ziedan. “Hello my friend. I need someone we can trust to translate a couple of pages written in Russian. This is top secret. Nobody can ever talk about what’s mentioned in the documents.”

“I understand.”

“This person must be absolutely reliable.”

After a few seconds the head of Interpol’s translation department said:

“Eva Perebinossoff. . . . She’s the best person we have at Interpol for translating Russian documents. Eva grew up speaking Russian at home . . . she studied Russian and Russian literature at the Sorbonne. Her parents are Gerard and Beatrice Perebinossoff. Her great-grandfather was a Russian aristocrat who came to France to escape the Communist revolution.”

“Excellent,” said Sohlberg. “Let’s meet early tomorrow.”

“I will reserve a secure room for you.”

Sohlberg ended the call and turned to Laprade. “Ironic . . . isn’t it?”

“How so?”

“Our translator is a descendant of a Russian exile and she’s about to expose the ugliest secret about the communists who took over so many countries so long ago.”

“Payback is good.”

Sohlberg glanced out the window and stared at the red harvest moon. “You should know.”

~ ~ ~

The following morning Eva Perebinossoff met Laprade and Sohlberg at the Locust-only room inside Interpol’s tenth floor basement. She read the documents that Sohlberg had printed out. She did a second and a third reading and then said:

“Do you want me to write down a translation . . . or do you want a verbal interpretation?”

“Verbal,” said Sohlberg. “Time is of the essence.” He also hated leaving behind a big fat paper trail that had to be carefully shredded and incinerated.

An hour later Sohlberg profusely thanked Madame Perebinossoff. “Of course . . . you will never mention this to anyone at all.”

“I understand.”

~ ~ ~

Sohlberg and Laprade walked towards Laprade’s new Peugeot SUV in the far recesses of Interpol’s underground parking lots. The azure of the flourescent light varnished everything and everyone in the lifeless blue hue of death.

A queasy disorder churned their stomachs while the two men tried to mentally digest the unappetizing information that they had just discovered.

“Interesting,” said Laprade. “Interesting.”

Sohlberg curled his lips. “Think of it . . . the insanity . . . North Korea wants to finish and
win
the Korean War against the Americans . . . sixty years after they signed a truce.”

“No doubt about that.” Laprade started the car’s engine. “Pyongyang wants a couple of nuclear explosions in major American cities . . . just like Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda.”

“And,” said Sohlberg, “if those nukes go off then—”

“
If?
. . . No my friend. You heard how North Korea’s nuclear program has advanced so quickly. . . . They already manufactured a working prototype of a nuclear trigger. It’s a matter of
when
. . .
when
will some nutcase from North Korea or Pakistan or elsewhere set off an atomic bomb in a big city in America or Western Europe. That’s
when
Hell will start looking good . . . looking like a real nice place to move into.”

Chapter 29/Tjueni

LYON, FRANCE: SEPTEMBER 27 AND 28,

OR FIVE MONTHS AND 15 AND 16 DAYS

AFTER THE DAY

Emma Sohlberg raised a strategic eyebrow at her husband and said:

“I can’t believe that you
still
haven’t opened any mail since I left or arrived.”

“I did. I paid the bills.”

“Yeah. But only because Madame Bonnaire sorted the mail every day and then hounded you until you actually paid the bills.”

“My Love. . . . Do you see how much I need you? . . . It was horrible when you were gone.”

She pointed at two boxes of mail on the dining room table. “Take them to the library. Open and read each letter. No dinner until you go through every piece of mail. Get going. Now!”

~ ~ ~

Two items of mail from Russia puzzled and disturbed Sohlberg. The first item was a large manila envelope with a July 12 postmark from Moscow. The second and third items were two postcards with a July 13 postmark from St. Petersburg. The sender of all three pieces of mail was Ivan Navalny. He had written the two postcards in French. But the words were all mixed up—as if written down at random.

Ivan Navalny? . . . Why would he write to me?

A year ago Sohlberg had briefly met the policeman from Moscow during a conference on organized crime in Vienna. After shaking hands Navalny had smiled and said in perfect English:

“It’s an honor to meet a man like you.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sohlberg. . . . I know all about you . . . how you stood up to the powers that be . . . how you arrested corrupt justices of your Supreme Court and paid the price for your integrity.”

The man had obviously done his research or heard from informed sources.

But why send me this mail? . . . What’s the real message behind the code? . . . How am I going to break the code?

Sohlberg stared at the contents of the July 12 manila envelope—a letter-sized poster of a Russian icon and a cryptic handwritten message on a sticky “Post It” note stuck to the poster.

A label on the back of the poster identified the man in the icon painting as the martyred Saint Adrian of Nicomedia standing next to his martyred wife St. Natalia. Sohlberg went on the Internet and looked up a list of saints in the Eastern Orthodox Church. He discovered that St. Adrian (or Hadrian) is the patron saint of arms dealers.

Okay . . . Navalny is sending me a message about arms dealers. . . . But what is the message? . . . Where is the message?

For the umpteenth time Sohlberg read the handwritten note on the sticky “Post It” note. Navalny had simply written in English:

CLEAR DAY.

What does this mean?

Sohlberg next grabbed the two July 13 postcards sent from St. Petersburg. Navalny had changed his handwriting style for the postcards in French. It looked more like a young woman’s loopy cursive style. That was clever. Russia’s intelligence agencies were unlikely to pay much attention to postcards from a young French tourist.

Sohlberg wrote down all of the words in each postcard. He started moving the words around in each sentence. Some of the words—prepositions, adverbs, and adjectives—were missing. But they could be figured out. The first sentence soon made sense. In less than twenty minutes Sohlberg had deciphered the first postcard. The second postcard took a little longer. The two postcards electrified Sohlberg.

~ ~ ~

Mon ami: I’m sightseeing with pals! Love it! I had to go with them. I had no choice. They took my wife and sons. Won’t see them alive if I don’t help my pals. They are probably going to kill me after I escort them to London with their human contraband. They will leave me (or my corpse) in England or en route and blame me for some crime like the good sacrificial lamb.

~ ~ ~

Mon ami: My pals somehow found out that I had been investigating their corrupt activities in Moscow, specially an FSB Col. Pyotr Zubkov aka Lt. Col Nicolai Dvorkovich. My pals are selling many things, even NK scientists developing nuke triggers. Beware! My pals already sold three Russian nuclear suitcases to the Arab group which successfully inserted them inside the USA. O’s group plans on repeating history in the USA just like H-city in Japan. Beware and farewell!

~ ~ ~

The postcards explained so much about the massacre of nine in Tromsø. Sohlberg was glad that he did not have to see the bodies. And yet he was in dreaded awe of so many souls losing their earthly existence. He made a mental list of the dead.

The corrupt Russian FSB Col. Zubkov and his two tattooed goons.

The chemist Edvard Csáky.

The North Korean husband and wife.

The two Ingebrigtsen brothers.

Lt. Col. Navalny—the man known as
Cool Hand
.

Ivan Navalny deserved a better death than the one that Cruel Fate had dealt him in Norway. And yet Sohlberg felt no satisfaction about identifying Navalny as Cool Hand.

I’ll have to call Kristina Skrautvol and let her know about Navalny.

Sohlberg was soon lost in more disturbing thoughts—vexing images of the three nuclear bombs that terrorists had brought into the U.S.A.

A dizzy nausea began its vise-like grip. Sohlberg’s heart skipped beats.

Osama bin Laden’s
American Hiroshima
was clearly beyond the planning stage now that three nuclear suitcases were inside the USA. It was just a matter of time before a couple of nuclear triggers from North Korea or elsewhere made their way into the hands of al-Qaeda or some other anti-Western group.

American Hiroshima will be the beginning of the end . . . it will be financial and political Armageddon for the U.S.A. and eventually for Europe itself.

The horrific loss of life in six or more cities in the USA would be limited to the small blast zone of a nuclear backpack. Ditto for the radioactive fallout and poisoning. An
American Hiroshima
would nevertheless be followed by the slow-motion meltdown of the American economy and the fast or slow implosion of its political system. The world’s balance of powers would shift and drastically change. Russia and China would predominate and eventually rule supreme. Norway and the rest of Europe would sooner or later be enslaved by the Russians.