The Cup (4 page)

CHAPTER 8

Forsberg drove the Volvo. He had a list of the places where no one had been at home. At the first one, the door was opened by a middle-aged farmer eating a sandwich. He spoke with a thick accent that Selena couldn't understand. Forsberg spoke with him for a few minutes. The door closed.

"He didn't see anything."

"Where is he from?" Selena asked. "I didn't understand what he said except for a few words."

"Up north, near Kruna. It's near the Norwegian border. The dialect is hard to understand for most Swedes, much less a foreigner."

The next farm was a few miles farther down the road. The main house was two stories high, a long single building with whitewashed walls and a pitched roof. Behind it was a smaller, stone building that might've once been a guesthouse. There was a barn. The farm had a forlorn, abandoned feeling to it. Everyone had walked away one day and left it behind.

The day was cold and clear. Fresh snow had fallen the night before. The drive leading in showed no tracks. No vehicles were visible. As they drove up to the house, Selena thought a curtain moved on the second floor.

Forsberg knocked on the door. There was no response. He knocked again, louder. The sound rolled across flat, empty fields marked by stubble sticking out through the snow. The silence was overwhelming.

"Nobody home," Forsberg said.

"I thought I saw a curtain move upstairs," Selena said.

"There are no tracks, no vehicles. Nobody's going to walk all the way out here."

"I could've been mistaken."

She looked again at the window. There was nobody there.

They drove on to the third farm on the list. They found the farmer in his barn, mending harness. He was a man who might've been eighty years old or more, with a face grizzled by hard work and hard weather. His arms were knotted with muscles. A faded naval tattoo graced one of them.

He hadn't seen anything either. No, no blue car. Yes, he was usually here. He'd probably been out in the fields when they'd been here before. If a blue car had gone by, he would've noticed it. He knew all the cars that came this way. There wasn't any reason to go this way except to visit neighbors a mile up the road. The weather was going to act up and they might get a lot of snow.

The man went on for five minutes before Forsberg finally cut him off. He thanked him and they went back to their car.

"I thought he'd never stop talking," Forsberg said. "Some of these old farmers get lonely."

"It seems desolate," Selena said. "I can see how living out here could get you down."

"It looks that way now," Forsberg said, "but in the spring and summer it's beautiful. All this is green. There are flowers everywhere, birds, it's a beautiful place. But winter is bleak."

"What now?" Ronnie asked.

"That was the last stop on the list. We might as well head back to town."

"I want to look at that second place again," Selena said.

"Why?"

"Just a feeling. The more I think about it, the more I'm sure someone was inside the house. Why didn't they answer the door?"

Forsberg looked at her. "A feeling?"

"Better listen to her," Ronnie said. "She's got good intuition."

"Why not? It's on the way."

Nothing had changed when they returned. The only tracks going in and out from the main house were the ones they'd left earlier. The curtain in the upstairs window hung still and lifeless. Forsberg pounded on the door again. There was still no answer.

They walked around the house, peering in windows. There was nothing to see except empty rooms. A back door was locked.

"Let's take a look at the barn," Nick said.

"Technically speaking, I'm supposed to have a warrant," Forsberg said.

"I won't say anything if you don't." Nick started toward the barn.

The building was old, weathered by years of harsh Swedish winters. The boards had long ago given up any paint they might once have had. Two hinged doors were closed with a thick metal hasp and locked with a new, heavy-duty padlock. A square metal plate was bolted onto the wood behind the lock and hasp.

Nick pointed at the lock. "What's a new lock like that doing on a beat up building like this? Everything else around here is falling apart."

Forsberg bent to examine the lock. "Someone wants this to stay closed."

"Makes me wonder what's inside," Ronnie said.

"Why don't we find out?" Lamont said.

The side of the barn was littered with scrap, the kind of junk found on every old farm. Rolls of wire. An ancient tractor. A broken pump. Odd pieces of rusted machinery. Pieces of pipe.

Lamont picked up a length of half inch pipe about two feet long. He went back to the door, thrust the pipe through the loop of the padlock and braced it against the metal plate. He levered down, grunting with the force. The lock, plate and bolts pulled away from the old wood with a screeching sound. It sounded like someone dragging their nails across a blackboard.

Selena covered her ears. "I hate that sound."

Lamont made a claw of his hand and pretended to run it across an invisible surface.

"Eeeeeee."

"Very funny," Selena said.

"Looks like somebody broke in here," Lamont said. "We'd better investigate, just to make sure everything's okay."

Forsberg shook his head, but he was smiling. Ronnie and Nick swung the doors open.

The interior of the barn was cold and uninviting. Dust moats floated in shafts of sunlight coming through holes in the roof. The floor was packed dirt. Three wooden stalls lined one side of the building. Old tools hung on the other wall.

Andersson's blue Saab was parked at the far end.

"Bingo," Ronnie said.

The Volvo started up outside.

"Fuck!" Forsberg yelled.

He pulled his gun and ran to the open doors of the barn. The car fishtailed down the drive as it accelerated. Forsberg took up a two-handed stance and fired. The rear window shattered. He kept firing until the magazine was empty and the slide of his Glock locked open.

The Volvo slowed and veered to the side. It kept going until it went over the edge of an irrigation ditch paralleling the drive, ending up nose down in the ditch, rear wheels spinning. The horn sounded a steady, raucous note.

They walked toward the ditch. Forsberg kept his pistol ready.

"I smell gas," Selena said.

A wisp of pale flame flickered along the side of the car.

"Oh, oh," Ronnie said.

The gas tank exploded. A bright, orange flower burst into bloom against the white snow. They force of the blast knocked them down. One of the car doors spiraled into the air and came crashing down fifty feet away.

A column of dirty black smoke rose into the sky.

Forsberg picked himself up and brushed snow off his clothes. He looked at the burning hulk.

"Damn it, that was my personal car."

"Looks like you were right about somebody being home," Nick said to Selena.

CHAPTER 9

Forsberg called his headquarters, spoke for a few moments and put the phone back in his pocket.

"Forensics is coming. They'll bring a vehicle for us. Until then, we're stuck here."

"I want to take another look around," Nick said. "Why was someone here? He must've been guarding something and it wasn't Andersson's car."

"Whoever it was, he didn't want to get caught." Selena brushed dirt off her jacket sleeve.

"Let's start with the barn," Forsberg said.

The barn revealed nothing except a patch of oil under Andersson's car.

The door of the house was open. Wide spaced footprints in the snow showed where the driver of the Volvo had run from the house to the car. They went inside and began going from room to room, opening cupboards, looking in closets. There was furniture in every room but it was obvious that the house had not been lived in for years. On the second floor they found a sagging bed, a chair, and a dresser with a cracked mirror. The bed had been slept in. There was a Koran on the dresser.

Forsberg held up the book. "Why does this not surprise me?"

The first and second floors gave up nothing else of interest.

"Is there a root cellar?" Selena asked. "Wouldn't there be something like that on one of these old farms?"

"There should be. The entrance is usually off the kitchen," Forsberg said.

"I didn't see one," Ronnie said.

They went back to the kitchen. Ronnie was right. There was no obvious door or entrance to a cellar.

An enormous china cupboard was pushed up against one wall.

"If I were a door, where would I be?" Nick said. "What's behind that big cupboard?"

"Let's find out," Ronnie said.

Selena pointed at the stone floor. "There are old scratches. Someone's moved it before."

Ronnie and Nick moved the cupboard away from the wall. Behind it was a wooden door painted green. Nick pulled it open, took out a pocket flashlight and shone light through the opening. A short flight of wooden steps led into darkness. He climbed down, followed by Lamont.

"Creepy down here," Lamont said.

The floor was dirt, littered with old rat droppings. They had to stoop under a low, beamed ceiling covered with spider webs. Open wooden bins took up much of the confined space. The bins were empty. There was nothing at all to indicate that anyone had been in the cellar for a long time.

Back upstairs, Nick brushed fragments of cobwebs from his jacket.

"There's still that stone building," Ronnie said.

The building wasn't locked. The windows were broken. It was one large room and it was empty.

They went back outside.

"There has to be something here," Nick said.

"Maybe he was squatting," Selena said.

"Sure, but why steal the car? How much trouble could someone get in for sleeping in an abandoned house? It's overkill. I keep thinking about that fancy padlock on the barn. We should take another look."

"We've been in there twice already," Forsberg said.

"Not like we've got something better to do," Lamont said. "We're not going anywhere until someone comes to take us back to town."

The barn looked the same as it had an hour before. Selena wandered over to the stalls. The dirt floors still had old straw on them. She started into the middle stall to look at an old piece of leather tack hung on the weathered boards and stumbled against something. She kicked the straw away, exposing an iron ring in the floor.

"Over here."

The ring was set in a wooden trapdoor. Nick bent down and pulled on it. The door came up easily on oiled hinges.

A wooden ladder dropped straight down into whatever lay below.

He handed Selena his flashlight. "Hold the light for me."

The bottom of the hidden room was ten feet below the stable floor. The room was about twenty feet square but it wasn't old, like the rest of the farm. The boards forming the walls were clean and fresh, the nails holding them together still bright.

"Better come down here," Nick called.

Forsberg came down the ladder, followed by Selena. She played the light around the room. Four long crates stamped with Swedish markings were stacked against a wall. There were boxes at the end of the room.

Nick pointed the light at the nearest crate. "What does that say in Swedish?"

"Shit," Forsberg said.

"It says shit?"

"Those are military markings."

He walked over to the crate. The lid was loose. He lifted it up.

"Assault rifles. AK5Cs. They're issued to the home guard."

"That explains the lock," Nick said, "and why they left someone behind."

"Bring the light over here," Selena said.

She stood at the back of the room, looking down at the contents of an open crate. It was filled with artifacts packed in straw. It was easy to see that the objects were old. Selena picked up a statue of a goddess, about eight inches tall.

"This is Babylonian. It's a statue of Astarte. Probably looted from Iraq."

"ISIS,"Nick said.

"Has to be."

Nick turned to Forsberg. "After finding this, I don't think you have to worry much about what happened at the refugee center."

Selena lifted the top off another crate.

"Wow," she said.

The gold gleamed in the light of her torch. The crate was filled with objects stolen from Christian churches. There was a gold chalice and two gold candlesticks. With the chalice and candlesticks was a silver Orthodox crucifix set with precious stones.

There was a silver box, about a foot long and eight inches across. Words in Latin were scribed on the surface of the lid.

Liber Simon

Selena opened it. Inside were two ancient scrolls of vellum.

If she hadn't opened that box, everything would have been different.