Shadow Read online

  All the hope and joy and goodness in Susan’s life dropped out of her in a single bleak instant, swallowed into the earth like floodwater rushing down a sluice.

  How many times had she dreamed of this, or something like it? How many times had she bolted awake in the darkness, her heart thudding against her rib cage? How many times had Simon held her as she cried, as she lied to him about the reasons for her nightmares?

  The white woman raised a gloved finger to her lips.

  “What happens next,” she said quietly, the words issuing out in a French accent made of brittle glass, “that’s up to you.”

  * * *

  Jakobs had his pistol drawn and held down at his side, his finger resting on the Smith & Wesson’s trigger guard, as Briss stepped forward. The Slovakian had not pulled his own gun, opting instead for a collapsible baton which snapped out to its full length with a flick of his wrist.

  The two men exchanged glances and an unspoken question: Could Verbeke have someone on the train?

  Every possible precaution had been taken to avoid the details of the prisoner transfer from getting out. Interpol’s circle of information was tiny, just a few of the Slovakians and some of the men in Jakobs’ unit. He had personally vetted them, making sure to pick people with an axe to grind against the prisoner. His biggest fear had been that one of them might exercise their grudge and kill the man before they made it to Belgium, but never that there would be a leak.

  “Knock knock,” said Verbeke, as if he was reciting a nursery rhyme. “Who is at the door?”

  Jakobs had a hand-held radio in an inside pocket, and raised it to his lips, squeezing the push-to-talk button.

  “Stodola. Answer me.” When he got no reply he tried again, this time trying to raise the man he had brought with him from Brussels. “Gatan. You there?”

  “Not them,” continued Verbeke.

  “Open it,” said Jakobs, nodding to Briss and taking aim at the door with the pistol.

  He was thinking about the man with the smoker’s breath who had blundered up the train. That seemed less and less like a coincidence with each passing second. He stiffened and put his finger on the trigger.

  “Yes!”

  Verbeke shouted out the word as Briss put his hand on the lock, and the mechanism exploded inward, blasted from the other side by a shotgun shell. The Slovakian cop was showered with splinters of wood and hot metal fragments that tore up his arm.

  Briss reeled back, clutching his ruined hand, as the door slammed open on its runners and a figure lurched into the compartment. It was Stodola, his eyes blank and sightless, a second red mouth opened across his throat. Someone shorter than him was behind the dead police officer, shoving his body forward as a meat-shield, with the Slovakian’s weapon pointing out from beneath his armpit. The barrel of the dead man’s .38 revolver twitched in Jakobs’ direction and spat fire.

  The Belgian threw himself aside, the motion exaggerated by the rocking of the train as it rounded a turn in the hills, and he bounced off a support pillar. Jakobs returned fire, but the shot was wide, more to break the intruder’s concentration than to hit him.

  Stodola’s body pitched forward and fell to the metal decking with a loud crash, revealing the train conductor behind him, the young cop’s pistol in his hand. The man that Jakobs questioned before they set off had seemed mousy and ineffectual, thoroughly invested in remaining ignorant of whatever the policemen on his train were doing. That had clearly been a ruse. The conductor’s florid face was devoid of emotion, his eyes cold.

  Jakobs had seen that expression in the mirror. It was a soldier-face, an assassin-face. The aspect of someone who had been trained to kill.

  He put another shot in the conductor’s direction, no longer giving him the benefit of the doubt, but a second shotgun blast filled the air with lead pellets and he flinched away.

  “Fuck me!” Jakobs heard Verbeke shout out the curse. “Watch where you are fucking shooting!”

  The shotgunner was the civilian, the smoker. He ratcheted the slide on a pistol-grip pump-action weapon, swarming into the compartment on the heels of his comrade. Dropping into a crouch, Jakobs put two 9mm rounds from the Smith & Wesson into the man’s chest and blew him off his feet.

  The sound merged with the thunder of the .38 as the conductor used it to kill Briss with a head shot. The other Slovakian slid down the wall of the cargo wagon, his hand flapping at the pistol he had been too slow to pull.

  Jakobs pivoted, bringing his gun to bear on the conductor, but then a blast of pain flared in the side of his head as Verbeke booted him in the skull. In the chaos of the gunfire, the Belgian had fallen back, close enough that his prisoner could strike out and hit him.

  It was enough to rob the older man of vital seconds. Verbeke was up off the metal chair, spitting and straining at his chains like an angry dog at the end of its leash. He managed to hook one of the policeman’s ankles and pull it. Jakobs went down, and immediately tried to bounce back up, but a blow from the butt of the revolver hit him in the same place Verbeke had kicked him, and he crumpled.

  Someone pulled his pistol out of his hands and planted a boot in his belly. He blinked through the pain and saw the smoker rolling over, gingerly getting up. The bearded man swore violently in English, and pulled open his jacket to paw at a bulletproof vest beneath.

  “Time?” shouted the conductor.

  “Three minutes.”

  The smoker consulted his wristwatch before hanging his weapon on a strap over his shoulder. He produced a tiny skeleton key and jammed it into the cuffs to free the prisoner.

  Jakobs lurched over on to his side, wheezing through the pain.

  I never should have come, he told himself, his gaze finding Stodola’s and Briss’s bodies, knowing that Gatan was as dead as they were. Should have sent someone younger and faster.

  He had leaned on the man who had prepared his last fitness report, “encouraging” the doctor to give him a clean bill of health so he could remain field-rated. If only to see this transfer to the end, if nothing else. Now he was going to pay the price for that hubris.

  For my obsession.

  Verbeke shrugged off the cuffs and the chain, and then, with deliberation, he walked over to Jakobs and kicked him three more times. They were sharp, vicious blows that landed in his belly and his crotch, burning the air out of his lungs in jolts of ragged pain.

  “We have some fresh clothes,” said the conductor, signaling to the smoker to bring in a sports bag.

  Verbeke stepped away and emptied the bag’s contents on to the chair, stripping off his prison attire. He grinned as he listened to every wheezing, agonized breath that Jakobs took.

  “So who are you two?” he asked, glaring at his rescuers. “I do not know you.”

  “We were paid to get you out,” said the conductor.

  “All right.”

  Verbeke accepted that and flexed his arms as he bared his chest. Jakobs saw the full tapestry of the man’s tattoos in the harsh illumination from the overhead fluorescent light. It was a chaotic mess of violent imagery. Runic symbols co-opted from Nordic myth, graphic depictions of screaming skulls and tortured demons, and fascist iconography of all kinds. Noah Verbeke’s skin was his heraldry, his manifesto. It was the outward expression of the hate that drove him on.

  Pride of place was given to the portrait of a male lion captured in full-throated snarl, bigger than any other design upon him. Rendered across Verbeke’s back and shoulders, the gold and black tattoo sat above a scroll bearing a single word in Gothic script: Leeuwenbrul.

  The Lion’s Roar—every police force in Europe knew the name of that particular far-right group. They knew about their campaigns of firebombings, their assassinations. The riots they started and the toxic climate of hatred they stirred up against anyone who didn’t match the group’s idealized model of racial supremacy.

  Verbeke shrugged on a T-shirt and a military-style jacket over the top of it.

  “That’s better,” he
said to the air, before his gaze dropped back to Jakobs. And out came the grin again.

  “One minute,” said the smoker.

  He moved to the loading door in the side of the cargo wagon and used the shotgun to blast off the lock holding it closed.

  “We don’t have time for you to play around,” added the conductor, offering Stodola’s revolver to Verbeke. “Hurry up.”

  Jakobs drew himself shakily to his knees, as a dreadful sense of the inevitable settled upon him.

  Verbeke sniffed and his grin became a frown.

  “I’ll make the most of it,” he said, and unloaded the last two rounds from the .38 into the Belgian police officer.

  * * *

  The white woman ushered Susan Lam, her husband and his son into the lounge at the point of a gun. She made Susan sit on one of the sofas and Michael and Simon on the other, so that they were facing each other.

  Three men, who also appeared to be Europeans, came in and secured the front door behind them. Without speaking to one another, the two more muscular of them broke off and conducted a search of the house. The third, who revealed a mop of curly hair and an acne-scarred face beneath his muslin mask, stood behind Susan’s husband. He held his pistol at the ready a few inches from the back of her stepson’s head. Michael still had the juice in his hand, and he chewed on the rim of the plastic glass.

  “What do you people want?” said Simon, straightening in his chair, attempting to maintain some degree of authority in the situation. “Money? Valuables? Is that it?”

  He seemed to assume that this was a robbery, and Susan wanted so much to believe that too.

  “We’ll take those,” said the woman, and for a moment Susan dared to hope that maybe this was just about that. But the pale woman’s next utterance killed that possibility dead. “It will give the police the wrong idea.”

  The woman moved and perched herself on the side of the sofa where Susan was sitting.

  “Don’t hurt them,” Susan whispered. “Please.”

  “How long have you been married?” The woman’s tone was casual.

  “Please—” repeated Susan, but she was waved to silence.

  “I already know the answer,” came the reply. “Five years. You met a few months after you came to work at MaxaBio. The genius biochemist who did not talk about her past, and the great lawyer-turned-professor with the sad story of his dead first wife.”

  Simon stiffened at the glib description of his personal tragedy, and he pulled closer to his son.

  One of the men came back into the room and gave the woman a nod, no doubt to tell her that there was no one else on the lower floors. A moment later, the other returned from upstairs.

  “Found a safe,” he grunted.

  “Empty it,” said the woman. Then she looked at the acne-scarred man. “Get your kit.”

  “Okay.”

  He nodded and stepped away, gathering up a hard-shell plastic case that he had brought with him.

  The woman’s attention returned to Simon.

  “Do you know how many lies your wife has told you in those five years? It has to be at least one a day. At least. Two thousand lies or more, I would estimate.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” Simon’s face hardened, and he took on the tone he used with students who disrupted his lectures. “Take what you want and go!”

  “What is the biggest one?” The woman went on, asking herself the question. “Oh, I know. Her name. It isn’t Susan. It never has been.”

  “Is that true?” Michael asked, eyes widening.

  “Yes, yes, little man,” said the woman, before Susan could answer. “You look like you are clever. You must wonder why it is your stepmother does not speak about where she grew up, or the family she had before you and your papa. Yes?”

  Michael shot her a look that cut like a razor, full of unanswered questions and formless fears.

  “Her real name is Ji-Yoo Park. She isn’t from Busan in South Korea. But that isn’t the worst thing she hid from you, no.”

  “I don’t care what you are saying,” Simon said firmly. “I won’t hear it. I won’t listen to you try to torment the woman I love.” He stared at his wife imploringly. “Susan, look at me.”

  But she couldn’t bring herself to do it, not when she knew what was going to come next.

  “Ji-Yoo Park is a liar and a fake, and she is responsible for the deaths of dozens of innocent people.” The pale woman relished the secret’s revelation.

  “That’s not true!” shouted Michael, throwing his cup to the ground. “No! She is a good person!”

  “Are you going to lie to them again?” Tears streamed down Susan’s cheeks as the pale woman studied her. “Go on. Lie. One more atop the others won’t make any difference.”

  “Susan?” said Simon, and that single word was enough to break her. Contained within it was the doubt from every single instance when she had deflected his questions about her past.

  She tried to form a denial, but nothing came. Her chest ached with the wrenching churn of her emotions, trapped between the cold cruelty of the pale woman’s words and the inescapable reality these intruders had brought into her home.

  The acne-scarred man was indifferent to it, carefully removing a number of devices from his case—a video camera with a wide-angle lens, a laser scanner, and other equipment she didn’t recognize. He set up the camera on a tripod and nodded to the woman.

  “Ready to roll.”

  “Get up.”

  The pale woman pointed with her gun, and when Susan—no, remember her birth name—when Ji-Yoo didn’t move fast enough, she grabbed her arm and dragged her up.

  Simon bolted to his feet, coming to her defense, but one of the gunmen grabbed his shoulder and forcibly slammed him back into the sofa.

  “You’re coming with us,” said the woman. “This must be familiar to you.” She gestured with the gun again. “You’re going to do what we tell you. If you disobey, these two will die. Just like old times.”

  A whimper of fear escaped her throat.

  “I’ll do it,” she said. “You don’t have to hurt them. They don’t need to be involved.”

  “Ah, but they do,” countered the woman. “You are such an experienced liar, Mademoiselle Park. We need to make sure you are telling us the truth.”

  As the pale woman guided her out of the room, she took a last look at her husband and her stepson. The man with scars was pressing a sheet of paper into their hands.

  “Don’t look at her, look at me,” he snapped, aiming the camera at them. “You first, Daddy. Read the words out loud, if you don’t want your little runt crippled in front of you.”

  Simon clutched at Michael’s hand and reluctantly began to speak.

  “The beige hue on the waters of the loch impressed all, including the French queen…” He glared at the man. “What is this? It’s nonsense!”

  “Say it. Don’t mess it up. Then the kid goes next,” said the scarred man.

  “Move it,” snapped the woman, prodding Ji-Yoo in the shoulder with the barrel of her gun.

  * * *

  “Twenty seconds.”

  The call was the signal for the man who had freed Verbeke to haul open the sliding hatch on the side of the train carriage, and he gave it a forceful shove. The hatch slipped back, as the endless wall of fir trees beyond retreated away to become a shallow bank of hillside, falling down toward a river a few hundred meters below. In the dark of the night, the river was a ribbon of black glass, snaking up alongside the railway.

  The carriages rocked and began to decelerate as the train entered a shallow curve.

  “Driver has to slow the train to make the turn,” the man in the conductor’s uniform explained to Verbeke. “This is where we get off.”

  He jerked his thumb at the open hatch, pausing to button up his jacket.

  “Tuck and roll when you land,” began the bearded man. “Then you—”

  “I know what to do. Stop talking to me unless you have
something useful to say.”

  Verbeke gave them both a sneering look, and stooped to help himself to the pistol that Briss had not fired.

  “Whatever,” said the man with the beard. “Time!”

  Verbeke’s military training had included numerous parachute jumps, both daylight and night-time drops, so he drew on the skills he had been taught to orient his body and make the fall from the moving train without breaking any bones.

  He would have liked to do something more with the body of that shit-rag cop Jakobs. Maybe mutilate him so that he couldn’t have an open casket funeral, just to leave his mark behind, but there wasn’t the time for it. Verbeke leaped into the dark and the night air embraced him, whirling around.

  Then there was the juddering impact against the damp grass and he rolled, pulling tight to protect himself, bleeding off the energy of the jump until he slowed to a halt. He was on his feet in a heartbeat, the stolen pistol drawn and ready.

  The chatter of the train over the rails rattled on and faded as it disappeared around the turn and into the treeline. Verbeke panned the gun around, finding the two men who had freed him as they stood up from where they had landed in the thick, wet grass. He took a deep breath and nodded to himself, enjoying the moment of liberation. Of course he was free. His enemies could not hold him.

  Verbeke thought about killing his rescuers while they were still disoriented from the jump. In the darkness, they would never see it coming, and he could be away in moments. Find a car, a telephone, reach out to his people …

  He hesitated. There were too many questions that only these men had the answers for. And then he was awash in bright light and it didn’t matter anymore.

  Pivoting instinctively toward the illumination, he saw the headlights of a 4 × 4 pickup as it bounced along the bank of the river. The vehicle turned around, orienting itself to speed them away, and Verbeke watched as a densely built man climbed out. The man’s searching gaze found the three figures up in the grass and he beckoned to them.

  “Move quickly,” he called. “We need to be away from here.”