people who speak Icelandic and the Icelanders have a comical air of pleased surprise when they encounter a foreigner who has taken the trouble to learn it.
‘Will you be fishing again, Mr Stewart?’ asked the Customs officer.
I nodded. ‘Yes, I hope to kill a few of your salmon. I’ve had my gear sterilized – here’s the certificate.’ The Icelanders are trying to keep out the salmon disease which has attacked the fish in British rivers.
He took the certificate and waved me through the barrier. ‘The best of luck,’ he said.
I smiled at him and passed through into the concourse and went into the coffee shop in accordance with the instructions Slade had given me. I ordered coffee and presently someone sat next to me and laid down a copy of the New York Times. ‘Gee!’ he said. ‘It’s colder here than in the States.’
‘It’s even colder in Birmingham,’ I said solemnly, and then, the silly business of the passwords over, we got down to business.
‘It’s wrapped in the newspaper,’ he said.
He was a short, balding man with the worried look of the ulcered executive. I tapped the newspaper. ‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. You know where to take it?’
‘Akureyri,’ I said. ‘But why me? Why can’t you take it?’
‘Not me,’ he said definitely. ‘I take the next flight out to the States.’ He seemed relieved at that simple fact.
‘Let’s be normal,’ I said. ‘I’ll buy you a coffee.’ I caught the eye of a waitress.
‘Thanks,’ he said, and laid down a key-ring. ‘There’s a car in the parking lot outside – the registration number is written alongside the masthead of The Times there.’
‘Most obliging of you,’ I said. ‘I was going to take a taxi.’
‘I don’t do things to be obliging,’ he said shortly. ‘I do things because I’m told to do them, just like you – and right now I’m doing the telling and you’re doing the doing. You don’t drive along the main road to Reykjavik; you go by way of Krysuvik and Kleifavatn.’
I was sipping coffee when he said that and I spluttered. When I came to the surface and got my breath back I said, ‘Why the hell should I do that? It’s double the distance and along lousy roads.’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’m just the guy who passes the word. But it was a last-minute instruction so maybe someone’s got wind that maybe someone else is laying for you somewhere on the main road. I wouldn’t know.’
‘You don’t know much, do you?’ I said acidly, and tapped the newspaper. ‘You don’t know what’s in here; you don’t know why I should waste the afternoon in driving around the Reykjanes Peninsula. If I asked you the time of day I doubt if you’d tell me.’
He gave me a sly, sideways grin. ‘I bet one thing,’ he said. ‘I bet I know more than you do.’
‘That wouldn’t be too difficult,’ I said grumpily. It was all of a piece with everything Slade did; he worked on the ‘need to know’ principle and what you didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.
He finished his coffee. ‘That’s it, buster – except for one thing. When you get to Reykjavik leave the car parked outside the Hotel Saga and just walk away from it. It’ll be taken care of.’
He got up without another word and walked away, seemingly in a hurry to get away from me. All during our brief conversation he had seemed jittery, which worried me because it didn’t square with Slade’s description of the job. ‘It’ll be simple,’ Slade had said. ‘You’re just a messenger boy.’ The twist of his lips had added the implied sneer that it was all I was good for.
I stood and jammed the newspaper under my arm. The concealed package was moderately heavy but not obtrusive. I picked up my gear and went outside to look for the car; it proved to be a Ford Cortina, and minutes later I was on my way out of Keflavik and going south – away from Reykjavik. I wished I knew the idiot who said, ‘The longest way round is the shortest way there.’
When I found a quiet piece of road I pulled on to the shoulder and picked up the newspaper from the seat where I had tossed it. The package was as Slade had described it – small and heavier than one would have expected. It was covered in brown hessian, neatly stitched up, and looked completely anonymous. Careful tapping seemed to indicate that under the hessian was a metal box, and there were no rattles when it was shaken.
I regarded it thoughtfully but that didn’t give me any clue, so I wrapped it in the newspaper again, dropped it on the back seat, and drove on. It had stopped raining and driving conditions weren’t too bad – for Iceland. The average Icelandic road makes an English farm track look like a super-highway. Where there are roads, that is. In the interior, which Icelanders know as the Óbyggdir, there are no roads and in winter the Óbyggdir is pretty near as inaccessible as the moon unless you’re the hearty explorer type. It looks very much like the moon, too; Neil Armstrong practised his moon-walk there.
I drove on and, at Krysuvik, I turned inland, past the distant vapour-covered slopes where super-heated steam boils from the guts of the earth. Not far short of the lake of Kleifavatn I saw a car ahead, pulled off the road, and a man waving the universally recognized distress signal of the stranded motorist.
We were both damned fools; I because I stopped and he because he was alone. He spoke to me in bad Danish and then in good Swedish, both of which I understand. It turned out, quite naturally, that there was something wrong with his car and he couldn’t get it to move.
I got out of the Cortina. ‘Lindholm,’ he said in the formal Swedish manner, and stuck out his hand which I pumped up and down once in the way which protocol dictates.
‘I’m Stewart,’ I said, and walked over to his Volkswagen and peered at the exposed rear engine.
I don’t think he wanted to kill me at first or he would have used the gun straight away. As it was he took a swipe at me with a very professionally designed lead-loaded cosh. I think it was when he got behind me that I realized I was being a flaming idiot – that’s a result of being out of practice. I turned my head and saw his upraised arm and dodged sideways. If the cosh had connected with my skull it would have jarred my brains loose; instead it hit my shoulder and my whole arm went numb.
I gave him the boot in the shin, raking down from knee to ankle, and he yelped and hopped back, which gave me time to put the car between us, and groped for the sgian dubh as I went. Fortunately it’s a left-handed weapon which was just as well because my right arm wasn’t going to be of use.
He came for me again but when he saw the knife he hesitated, his lips curling away from his teeth. He dropped the cosh and dipped his hand beneath his jacket and it was my turn to hesitate. But his cosh was too well designed; it had a leather wrist loop and the dangling weapon impeded his draw and I jumped him just as the pistol came out.
I didn’t stab him. He swung around and ran straight into the blade. There was a gush of blood over my hand and he sagged against me with a ludicrous look of surprise on his face. Then he went down at my feet and the knife came free and blood pulsed from his chest into the lava dust.
So there I was on a lonely road in Southern Iceland with a newly created corpse at my feet and a bloody knife in my hand, the taste of raw bile in my throat and a frozen brain. From the time I had got out of the Cortina to the moment of death had been less than two minutes.
I don’t think I consciously thought of what I did next; I think that rigorous training took over. I jumped for the Cortina and ran it forward a little so that it covered the body. Lonely though the road might be that didn’t mean a car couldn’t pass at any time and a body in plain sight would take a hell of a lot of explaining away.
Then I took the New York Times