Peter and Davila crouched in the dark, listening for any sound from above. They had heard the clatter of Tomas Markussen's sword against the workshop floor, then nothing.
Peter reached up, groping for the drawer Markussen had slammed shut above their heads, but Davila held him back, her whisper warm on the back of his neck. "If Gryphus is up there, then Markussen is already dead."
She was right. But they still had a duty to warn Markussen's uncle, who might know more about the Mustard Seeds. Markussen had said there was a tunnel leading to a boat, which they could take to the island in the bay, where his uncle lived in a cottage.
The light on Davila's phone blazed. They stood in a cramped brick-lined space behind a sheetrock wall. Insulated wires crisscrossed through the studs. A low archway led to a dubious tunnel, narrow and crooked. Little mounds of silt-covered rubble marked the spots where chunks of ceiling had broken loose. But a little farther on, and the tunnel grew straight and sturdy, the walls, ceiling and floor lined with smooth, dark stones. Rusty water trickled forward through shallow trenches to either side. The hint of methane hung in the dank air.
After a hundred yards, the tunnel delivered them to the bottom of an abandoned well, or maybe a waste pit of some kind. They stepped down into the fetid, knee-deep water and craned their necks at the faint outline of a trapdoor fifteen feet above. Iron ladder rungs had been set into the stone, the lowest several feet above Peter's head.
"Lift me up," said Davila, squaring up with Peter and placing her hands on his shoulders. She stepped into the sling he formed with his hands, but she was heavier than he expected, and he had to widen his stance to hoist her up. The strain sent a jolt of pain through his skull.
She swiftly pulled herself up and perched on the bottom rung, her pants and shoes dripping muck. Climbing up, she paused to listen at the trap door. Then she threw it open to a flood of gray light and the hard patter of rain.
Peter jumped as high as he could and managed to get his fingers around the bottom rung. He hung there, waiting for the pain in his head to subside. Then scrambling for purchase with his slimy shoes, he lunged for the second rung and got it, barely. Several more attempts earned him the third rung, then the fourth, until at last he had his feet beneath him.
Climbing out, he joined Davila inside a little boathouse set back from the river's channel, hidden between two high wharves. A wooden dinghy equipped with a wimpy outboard motor bobbed expectantly in the water beneath them. Peter jumped down, primed the fuel line and pulled the starter cord. To his surprise, the motor started, burbling cheerfully. Davila dropped in on all fours like a cat.
They pushed out into the rain-pocked river, thankful for their waterproof parkas. Motoring along a dockless stretch of river hemmed in by wooden buildings, they passed under several low bridges before entering a wide shipping canal that led to the bay. To their left, the Gudrun's white wheelhouse towered above the roofs of drab industrial buildings.
They rounded the breakwater and immediately ran into heavy chop. Salt spray stung Peter's face. Davila curled up between the dinghy's benches, too terrified even to peep over the gunwales. Had she dared, she would have seen their destination less than a mile out, the little fortress island of Munkholmen standing like an outpost in the rain-swept sea. Atop its low, whitewashed seawalls, outbuildings and leafless trees clustered around a squat cylindrical tower capped by a gray conical roof. Two piers serviced the island, south and east. The southern pier was unoccupied, but at the eastern pier someone had moored a sleek motorboat.
A sandy spit curled out from the island's northern fringe like the tail of a comma. Peter angled toward it and ran the dinghy ashore. They leaped out and jogged to a wooden staircase scaling the fortress's northern wall. Stepping over a heavy chain, they penetrated the island's raised, park-like interior.
The tower and surrounding buildings appeared to be vacant and unattended, but over by the northwest wall, a low cottage glowed with warm window-light. Sweet-smelling wood smoke curled from the chimney, fluttering away in the wind and rain.
They crossed a soggy lawn to the cottage door. Wet footprints marked the dry flagstones beneath the entry eave. The door stood ajar. Davila drew her pistol and chambered a round. She pushed inside, Peter close behind as she crept down the darkened hallway toward large, window-lit room. She crouched at the threshold, pistol raised.
It was a great room of sorts, with a scuffed wood floor, white plaster walls and a vaulted ceiling ribbed with dark wooden beams. A long, rectangular table with rustic chairs occupied the center of the room. To the left, a fire burned in the fireplace, the plaster above dark with soot. On the broad stone hearth lay a stack of split firewood, an iron poker and a smooth granite stone the size of a cantaloupe, its white surface smeared with blood.
Davila nodded at something beyond the table, at the back-left corner of the room. There, beneath a paned window, someone lay sprawled across a thick rug. They approached slowly, pausing at the end of the table. It was the body of a man, a very old man it seemed, emaciated and skeletalâJonas Markussen, Tomas's uncle. The front of his bald head was caved in, a grisly imprint of the granite stone on the hearth. Fresh burns marked his face. He wore a traditional sweater, his arm reaching toward the dusty corner, his lifeless hand clutching at something that was not there.
"Don't move!" said a voice from behind.
Peter whipped around before the words had taken hold. Davila stood mid-stride, pistol low at her right side, face frozen in horror.
A yard behind her was a man in all black, his lithe frame held in a feline crouch. His jet hair was pulled back into a taught ponytail. His narrow face of dark-olive skin declared neither youth nor age. But his eyes were strange and bright, like amber. Like honey. Gryphus. God, it had to be.
The black-clad man stood straight and aimed a pistol with a silencer at the back of Davila's head. Then he spoke in a low, cool voice, his accent continental, his diction measured. "Pass the weapon behind your back to your left hand, then place it on the table."
She remained motionless, but the pistol in her hand trembled almost imperceptibly, knuckles white. Her eyes met Peter's, and it seemed they were asking a question. Should I?
Peter shivered his head. No. God, no!
"Put your weapon on the table!" Gryphus commanded.
Slowly, she passed the pistol behind her back, setting it in on the table with her left hand, fingers trailing over the cold steel.
"Move away, slowly. One more step. That's it. Now, both of you put your hands up where I can see them."
They obeyed.
Stepping forward, Gryphus snatched the pistol from the table, uncocked it and stuffed it into his waistband. It was then Peter noticed the black rucksack. Gryhpus slipped it off his shoulders and set it on the table with a heavy clunk.
Then he turned his attention to Davila, frisking her head to toe. Fishing her phone from an inner breast pocket, he tossed it into the nearby fire. Then he pulled a small double-edged knife from her ankle holster. That too went into the flames.
Peter swallowed down the bile in his throat. Davila was two steps away, Gryphus three, four at most.
As if reading Peter's mind, Gryphus ducked to one side. "You'd be dead before you took a step." Then he ordered Peter to walk slowly around the end of the table, past the fireplace to the chair nearest the entryway.
When Peter had sat in it, Gryphus took Davila by the back of her collar and hauled her around the table, forcing her to pick up a chair, place it on the hearth and sit facing the fire. Keeping one eye on Peter, Gryphus took out a bundle of nylon zip ties and bound Davila's wrists behind her and to the stout wooden slats of the chair's back. Then he bound her ankles individually to the chair's rear legs, above the stretchers so that she could not slip free. Satisfied with his work, he frisked Peter and bound him the same way.
Now, standing behind Davila, he took a fistful of her rain-damp hair and wrenched back her head so that he could see her face.
She clenched shut her eyes and swallowed hard.
"So beautiful. So treacherous. I never thought I'd see your face again." He threw her head forward, and her chin bounced off her chest. A few strands of damp hair matted her face. "Tell me, who are you whoring yourself out to these days?"
When she failed to respond, Gryphus smacked her with the barrel of his gun, splitting her lower lip. "Tell me!"
Blood dribbled down her chin and dripped into her lap.
Peter stared, unable to look away. Instead of feeling faint, a ball of anguish twisted his gut.
Gryphus crouched and took one of her fingers in his gloved hand.
"Tell me!"
She clenched her jaw.
With a sickening crunch, he broke her finger.
She screamed and spat a salvo of blood over her shoulder.
Peter bucked against his restraints. "Leave her alone!"
Gryphus stood, wiping a bit of blood from his face. "Are you colleagues? Friends? Lovers? I wouldn't be so quick to defend this woman if I were you. Did she tell you who she works for? Did she even tell you her real name?"
Davila lifted her chin from her heaving chest.
"Once a Mossad whore, always a Mossad whore." Gryphus pointed his gun into the flames, at the bubbling puddle of plastic that had been Davila's phone. "She was recording everything you said and did, uploading it along with your position to an IP address in Tel Aviv."
Davila shook her head, no.
Gryphus scowled. "Don't you dare deny it. I found your phone in that poor girl's flat, beneath the sofa cushions. I put it back so you could find it again, but not before programming it to send all its data to me as well. How else do you think I tracked you to London?"
Peter balled his fists at the image of Anna lying there on the carpet while Gryphus tinkered with Davila's phone. "You killed her, you fucking monster!"
"Was she your friend too? I'm sorry. I didn't mean to kill her. And I had nothing personal against her, just like I have nothing personal against you, or your father, despite your repulsive genetic heritage. What is it with you Jews and your mutations? Inbreeding, I suppose."
Peter had no idea what he was talking about.
"I understand it's a rare one that runs in your family, something like one in a billion. And yet he insists I eradicate it from the human gene pool. Not that I pretend to understand his mind. Nobody does."
He spun Davila around so that her back was to the fire. "But you I want to kill." He aimed his pistol playfully at various parts of her anatomy, lingering over her left breast. "But first, you need to know what your father never told you."
A strand of half-clotted blood stretched between her swollen lips.
"He never told you about Munich, did he?"
Munich, 1972, a city and a year forever bound by violence and vengeance. Peter had seen a movie about it once. It all began at the Summer Olympics. Armed Palestinian terrorists infiltrated the athletes' village and took hostage eleven Israeli team members, eventually murdering them all. In response, the Israeli government sent out its Mossad agents to exact revenge, sometimes killing innocent bystanders in the process. It went on for years.
"Wrath of God. That's what your people called it, as if you were angels of judgment. What were the lives of a few innocents compared to the will of the Almighty?" He looked past Davila into fire, still burning hot. "We were innocent. We had nothing to do with it. We didn't support the Palestinians. We weren't even Muslims. And yet the Mossad firebombed our tenement. I watched my entire family burnâmy father, my mother, my sister."
He looked down at Davila, his face red with firelight. "It took me years to find the man who did it."
Davila's bloody lips voiced a silent no.
"But I finally tracked him down, caught him in the open like a desert rat. Oh, I never had any interest in that worthless box of bones you call the Ramallah Ossuary. I only wanted to kill the man who murdered my family. And I thought I had killed you as well, in payment for my sister, but here you are, still alive."
A log shifted in the fireplace.
"Maybe it's better this way. Now I can watch you suffer like my sister did." Holstering his pistol, he reached into a pocket, withdrew a tiny metal earring and dangled it in her face. She looked away, but he grabbed her by the ear and forced the earring's hook through her cartilage.
Then he returned to the table, opened his rucksack and unloaded a half dozen olive-green canisters strapped together with duct tape. They were thermite bombs, the same devices they had seen beneath William Fitzimmin's bed back in London. Taped to the outside of the canisters was a gray box roughly the dimensions of a deck of playing cards, a remote-control device, a timer perhaps. Red wires connected it to each of the six canisters. Setting the canisters under Peter's chair, Gryphus secured them to the legs with more duct tape then returned to his rucksack on the table.
Davila lifted her head, rasping, "Why him?"
"It's the only way to destroy his DNA. He'll die instantly." He cinched the rucksack's drawstring. "But you won't."
Peter jerked his chair, the sharp nylon slicing into his wrists. "What the hell do you want from us?"
"Aside from your deaths? Nothing, really." He began to shoulder the rucksack.
"We can tell you where the Mustard Seeds are."
He stopped with just one strap over his shoulder. "Tell me then."
"Somewhere in North America."
"You'll have to do better than that." Gryphus nodded toward the body of Jonas Markussen lying on the rug in the corner. "He told me exactly where to find the Mustard Seeds, and look where that got him. No, you have nothing to add. You two have served your purpose."
"What purpose?"
"To help us find the Mustard Seeds, of course. You see, he knows what the Mustard Seeds are. He always has. What he didn't know was where they were hidden. You two helped us find them by leading us here. Ever since London, we've been following you, watching and listening. It's the only reason we let you live this long." He shouldered the other strap. "And now you're done."
He loomed over Davila, whispering, "For Myriam." Then he turned and disappeared down the hallway.
No sooner had he passed out of sight than the odor of gasoline wafted into the room. Yellow firelight flickered from the hallway.
Davila nodded frantically at the thermite bombs strapped beneath Peter's chair. "The detonator box is flashing. It's active!"
Flames leaped from the hallway into the room, licking the walls, racing up the ceiling's wooden beams. Peter tried to rock forward and balance on his toes, but he went too far, falling over and crashing to the hearth, his face barely missing the bloody granite stone.
Davila peered over her shoulder and scooched around in her chair until her back was to the stone. "Get out of the way!"
Peter wriggled aside just as the back of Davila's chair came crashing down on the stone. The slats shattered with a loud crack. Groaning, she rolled off the stone and lay with her back to the fire, grimacing in pain.
The room grew darker as black smoked filled the vaulted ceiling, concealing the flames above. Yet Peter could feel their heat against the back of his neck. Semina sinapis, his father's final breath. Was this how he died? Holy Mary.
Davila freed her wrists from the broken slats, but now she hesitated. She could not pass her bound wrists beneath her feet, because Gryphus had lashed her ankles to the chair's legs above the stretchers.
Her next move came as little surprise. Peter had seen her do it once before, when they had struggled on the floor in his hotel room back in London.
With a grunt, she threw herself up on splayed knees, cheek and shoulders pressed to the hearth, wrists still bound behind her. Then she folded her left elbow over so that it nestled in the crook of her right arm. There she paused, her now-dry hair in her face, fluttering with each ragged breath.
Flaming globs dropped through the smoke and splattered like napalm on the table and floor.
She brought her left elbow high, arms snapping into a letter Z across her back. Blood oozed from her wrists. With a piercing scream, she slipped her left elbow over her head and gathered her hands beneath her chin. For a moment, she seemed to rest, cheek to hearth, eyes closed. Then she fell sideways, unconscious, her chair smacking against the wood floor.
"No! Wake up!" Peter inched close. With his forehead, he nudged the top of her head. Then he knocked it hard, pain ringing from ear to ear.
She stirred, her moaning barely audible above the roaring flames.
"Wake up!"
She snapped to attention, eyes darting. Grabbing the iron poker from the hearth, she scooched close to the fire and raked the coals. Out came her double-edged knife, clattering on the stones. She laid her bound wrists across the searing steel, and the nylon straps popped loose. Then with the sleeves of her jacket, she took the hot knife and sliced through the straps at her ankles.
Peter thrashed against his chair. "Cut me loose!"
Once she had freed him, they belly-crawled together to the window, rolling the bloody granite stone with them. Behind them, a ceiling beam smashed the table, showering them with sparks and biting embers.
Holy Mary, Mother of God.
They scuttled to the window and paused beneath the sill, filling their lungs from the layer of breathable air along the floor. Then Peter took the stone and hurled it through the paned glass, falling back amidst the flurry of shards, hands scorched, hair and eyebrows singed. "It's too hot!" he screamed.
A curtain of flames and smoke closed around them.
Holy Mary, pray for us sinners.
Davila slithered along the wall toward the back corner. Peter followed, groping through the smoke. His hand brushed against a shoe, a sweater, a bald head sticky with blood. Jonas Markussen. The old man lay on the heavy wool rug, his dead hand still reaching for something that was not there. Davila rolled the frail corpse aside, lifted the rug, and draped it over their heads and bodies.
Shielded, they crawled back to the window and pulled themselves up to the sill. The rug's outer fibers hissed and popped in the radiant heat. Cool, fresh air billowed in through the shattered window. Just a few feet away, a damp lawn beckoned.
And there stood Gryphus, pistol at his side. But he was not alone. Next to him stood a tall man in a black overcoat, his eyes hard-set, gray as flint. Jason Dayan.
Peter and Davila lowered themselves to the floor.
Pray for us sinners, now and in the hour of our death.
Another beam crashed to the floor, producing a shower of brilliant embers. And in that sudden light Peter saw it: a perfect square cut into the floor where the rug had lain, a trapdoorâthe escape Jonas Markussen had been reaching for.
Protected beneath the rug, they crawled together to the corner. Set in the trapdoor was an iron ring. Peter took it in his jacket sleeves and pulled with all his strength. Black salvation welled up from below. And in that moment, the entire cottage seemed to draw a great breath. It howled through the window and whistling up through the floorboards.
A burst of lightning took the air.
The thermite bombs.
Peter's life flashed before his eyes, the joys and the sorrows, the pleasure and the pain, hope and regretâall welded into one singular thought, one brilliant white light.
Then he pushed Davila in and fell after her.
___________________________
Author's note:
Thank you for reading Chapter 33!
Now we know the connection between Gryphus and Davila. And we finally learn what's in Gryphus's rucksack.
Did you already know that Gryphus was working for Jason Dayan?
I'd love to get your thoughts.
Thanks!
-Frode
Image: Munkholmen (https://media-cdn.tripadvisor.com/media/photo-s/0c/3e/f1/de/caption.jpg)