The Norse Directive (27 page)

Helsingor, Denmark

“You know we could have just walked over here,” Sean said in a dry tone, exiting the SUV and stepping down onto a cobblestone pavement.

Dufort got out of the front and closed his door. He walked around the hood and smiled cynically, framed perfectly by his thick down coat and fur-lined hood. “I’m sure you’d have loved that, Sean. A wide-open area, no people around, plenty of room for you to escape and run.”

“I’m just saying it was, like, a ten-minute walk, at most.”

Thunder boomed in the distance as the sky continued to boil over with pillowy black clouds.

“Of course,” he went on, “we probably would have got wet. So good call on the driving.”

Dufort motioned sideways with his head, and Caron jabbed Sean in the kidneys with a gun barrel.

“Time is running out, Sean,” Dufort said. “I’d hate to have to cut off those pretty fingers.”

Sean hesitated for a moment. He wasn’t sure where to begin. The bigger problem was he had no idea where to end. They could spend the better part of the day walking the grounds of the palace and still never find what they were looking for.

“I guess I’ll lead the way?” he asked and walked along the cobblestones and through the stone archway of the entrance leading into the palace interior. A placard indicated that the Kronborg Slot had been the setting for Shakespeare’s famous work
Hamlet
and briefly described a few interesting factoids about the fortress that Shakespeare called Elsinore.

Once on the other side of the entryway, they were surrounded by high stone walls that enclosed the courtyard on all four sides. The area was impressive, reaching hundreds of feet in each direction. In the center of the square courtyard was a round fountain with a square top. Small streams of water spewed through an iron grate and back down into the center. The cold weather must have been keeping out most of the tourists, as only a few milled about, strolling leisurely around the courtyard’s perimeter.

Sean had a rough idea of the castle’s layout, mostly from reading about it. He’d learned that the basement and lower floors still featured some of the original fortifications and foundations from the original construction in the 1420s when Erik of Pomerania built it. Later, in 1574, Frederick II began building the incredible Renaissance version that Sean was seeing now. The interior was badly damaged during a fire in 1629, but was restored to near its full glory by later Danish kings.

Kronborg Castle was a seat of power for the sound between Sweden and Denmark, acting as the gateway to the Baltic Sea. In the almost three hundred years of its operation, nearly two million ships had passed through, most of which were charged a toll. Danish kings would also allow some ships to pass by at no charge, if the countries they represented were willing to make an alliance.

Sean motioned with his hand that the others follow as he led the way across the cobblestone square to the ticket office, embedded in another arched entryway.

“Where are you going?” Dufort asked calmly, a few steps behind Sean.

“We have to buy a ticket,” Sean said over his shoulder in a tone that suggested the answer was obvious. “And don’t expect me to pay for yours.”

Dufort stepped in front of the group when they reached the doorway to the ticket office. He went in first, cutting Sean out of the way and produced a pocketful of Danish currency. He purchased the tickets without thanking the kind-looking, round-faced woman at the desk, and returned in less than two minutes with a fistful of tour passes.

The castle’s entrance was behind where Adriana was standing at the rear of the group. The two men guarding her kept a close eye on her every move. If they’d been privy to her reputation, their watch would have been even closer. Her narrow eyes were always searching for a moment, the briefest of openings that could allow her to make a move. So far, there’d been none.

Dufort walked by the group and stopped at the entrance. He handed the woman in the doorway all of the tickets and explained they were for everyone. She smiled and returned the stubs to him, then he motioned for the others to follow.

Sean wished he could pass along a message to the woman that they were being held at gunpoint, but it was too risky. Dufort was the kind of man that, if put into a corner, would kill everyone. Sean had dealt with men like that before. Evil people, when made desperate, would take as many with them as possible.

Once the group was inside the foyer, Dufort turned to Sean and asked, “Where should we go first, Monsieur Wyatt? The clock is ticking.” He tapped the Bulgari watch on his wrist.

Sean had known the man would leave it up to him, so he’d already prepared his answer. “Let’s start at the basement. The lower sections of the castle were closest in their construction to the time when Holger and his captain would have lived. Maybe there’s something down there.”

“Lead the way.” Dufort put out his hand toward the staircase behind him that led down into the bowels of the castle.

Sean didn’t wait for him to ask twice. He stepped confidently into the stairwell and began his descent.

SSSSS

Tommy crossed a barricade that was nothing more than a loose chain hanging from a series of iron pylons. It was put there as a means to keep vehicles from driving on the grassy field, rather than to prevent people from walking around on it.

The first big droplets of rain began pattering on his coat. At first, only a few fell, but as he waded through the tall grass, the pace of the raindrops increased, and soon he was in a full-on downpour. Fortunately, his coat was waterproof, and the droplets rolled off the fabric and onto the ground. His pants, however, were not. In just a few minutes, the bottom half was completely soaked, as were his socks and shoes.

Tommy pressed on, heading for the first hill he’d seen on the map. The closer he got to it, though, the more he realized it was likely a dead end. The smooth sides of the huge hump presented no points of entry. The hill was probably sixty feet from one end to the other, and maybe fifteen feet high at its crest. If something were hidden inside, the entrance had been covered long ago. It reminded him of one of the burial mounds he’d seen before, and of the mysterious Native American mounds in Georgia and Illinois. This, though, seemed to be a natural occurrence.

He spent fifteen minutes plodding around in the rain-soaked grass, examining every foot of the hill’s surface, but found nothing of note. Off to the right of his current position, he looked at the other rise, surrounded by a patchwork of trees and rocks.

The wind whipped across the field, and lightning struck the water in the sound, followed immediately by a crackle and a boom. Tommy shook his head and started for the second hill. He needed to get out of the hazardous weather conditions. Visions of being struck by lightning danced through his head, but he pushed them away and took off at a jog as the wind continued to drive the rain at him.

Paris

Through a pair of binoculars, Emily stared out from the passenger-side window at the concrete block warehouse below. They’d parked their van next to the sidewalk near the gated entrance to the facilities.

Two armed guards stood on either side of a corrugated aluminum sliding door, both carrying submachine guns slung over their shoulders. The men stared blankly ahead, occasionally turning when they heard something out of the ordinary, but for the most part just standing at a slack form of attention.

Another guard paced around the front of the massive facility. He was more aware of the weapon he carried, keeping it hidden away in the left flap of his overcoat.

“That’s the most heavily guarded cleaning facility I’ve ever seen,” the blond guy said from the driver’s side.

“Yeah,” Emily agreed.

“This is the kind of operation that would probably be a lot easier at night,” the redhead said from the back. “You sure we can’t wait for the cover of darkness and go in then?”

“Would you want us to wait if you were one of the girls inside?” Emily asked, keeping her eyes straight ahead. “We go in now.”

The girl said nothing, signaling that Emily’s point was well taken.

“What’s the plan?” the driver asked.

Emily drew in a slow, deep breath and glanced over at the gate. She pointed at it with one finger. “They have cameras here in the front. It would be reasonable to assume they have them in several places, which means we go in with masks. But it also means we can’t go in through the front. If we do, it will likely raise an alarm.”

“So we go in the back? Circle around?” the dark-haired man in the back asked.

Emily shook her head. “No. I’d wager there are more guards and cameras in the back too. They’d be ready for that.”

She spied some large shipping containers just beyond the fence that wrapped around the warehouse facilities. An idea began to form in her head.

“Have you ever been in a car accident?” she asked the driver with a raised eyebrow.

He wasn’t sure how to respond or where the question was going to lead. “Sure, a few times.”

“Maybe today would be a good time to have another one.”

His eyes grew wide at the comment, but he didn’t say a word.

Emily laid out the plan to the four agents and explained how it would work. Her team listened intently until she had finished.

“Make sense?” she asked.

Every head nodded except the driver’s.

Emily peered into his eyes. “You don’t have to hurt yourself. Don’t go in there at fifty miles an hour. Just a nice, slow crash will be fine. All we need is for you to get their attention.”

“What do you want me to do when they send their guards up here?”

“What you’re trained to do. Take them out.” The words carried no remorse and no ambivalence.

“The rest of you will come with me. We’ll have to hurry. Our opening won’t last long. We go in between those containers, take out the perimeter guards, and enter the building. Once we’re in there, we’ll have to search quickly. I’m sure Dufort has more people guarding other areas on the property. Once the alarm sounds, it’s only a matter of a minute or two before they rally to the main building.”

The driver nodded. “Okay, let’s do it. I’ll come in behind you once I take out whoever they send to the gate.”

Three minutes later, Emily, the two female agents and the dark-haired male agent she called Number 6, crouched next to the chain-link fence surrounding the warehouse. They were careful to use some of the metal shipping containers to remain hidden from the guards’ view as they waited for the driver to do his thing.

The dark haired female agent, known as Number 8, took a small rotary blade out of her utility pouch and began cutting a hole in the fence. The task took less than twenty seconds as the saw made easy work of the soft metal. It was a tool Emily had requested from government weapon developers, something that would work much faster than bolt or fence cutters. The device was also quiet enough to not draw attention from any passersby.

Fortunately, in this part of the city, pedestrian traffic was scarce, if not completely nonexistent.

Emily looked back as the van’s driver stepped on the gas and zipped by them. She instinctively ducked down as the van crashed through the front gate and crunched to a halt into a telephone pole. 

An alarm began blaring from somewhere near the corner of the warehouse. Emily watched through the cracks between the shipping containers as one of the guards instructed two others to run over to the gate and see what had happened. The men obeyed immediately, tucking their weapons under their armpits and jogging to the scene of the crash.

Number 8 crawled through the hole in the fence, and Emily followed closely behind her. They sprinted the twenty feet to the first red shipping container and stopped, pressing their bodies up against it next to faded white Chinese characters written on the side.

The other two agents joined them, taking cover behind the big object with weapons drawn. Before leaving the van, each one of them had attached silencers to their weapons. While the alarm would draw some attention, though doubtfully the police, Emily hoped the sounds of gunfire in the open was something that could be avoided.

She slipped around the container’s corner and down the long side between two of the big metal objects, toward the closest corner of the warehouse, careful to stay in as much shadow as possible. The guard that had been pacing around the front was staring at the van, trying to see what happened. He was also speaking on a radio to someone. Was it Dufort? Or was it reinforcements? She knew they would find out soon enough.

She risked a peek around the container next to her and saw the guards slowly approaching the crashed van. They surrounded the van’s passenger door and looked inside. A sudden spray of red shot out from the back of one of the guard’s heads, immediately followed by the same from the second. Both men collapsed to the asphalt, dead before they hit it.

Emily watched the third guard’s reaction. His eyes grew wide as he saw the other two men killed. He pushed a button on his radio, but the words he wanted to say, probably alerting reinforcements, never came. She stepped from between the two containers and fired four shots from her weapon, squeezing the rounds steadily as she crept toward the target. Three of the bullets found the man’s torso, sending him reeling backward. He stumbled and fell to the ground on his back, the radio still in his hand.

Emily hurried over to the body, motioning for the others to follow. They obeyed and met her by the dead man, each taking a wrist or ankle and dragging the body over to where they’d just been hiding between the containers.

The driver of the van exited the vehicle and rejoined the team.

“Front door?” he asked, just above the sound of the alarm.

“Yeah,” Emily nodded. “Front door.”