Read Online Operation Napoleon by Arnaldur Indridason - Free Book Online

only going to try out the snowmobiles. They’re new. We never meant to wander far from the team.’
    ‘How long have you been away?’
    ‘About half that time. Maybe three hours.’
    ‘When will they start looking for you?’ The questions came one after another, he was disorientated by them and by his bleeding, sobbing friend; he had no sense of what he should or should not be saying, and this was precisely what Ratoff intended.
    ‘Very soon if we don’t turn up on time. They’ve probably started looking already. How do you know about Kristín?’ It was beginning to come home to Elías that his life was in danger but he was more worried by the fact that this man knew his sister’s name.
    ‘What did you tell your sister on the phone?’
    ‘Only that I was trying out a new snowmobile. That’s all, I swear,’ he said.
    ‘No more than twelve minutes had elapsed from when you talked to her to when I got hold of your phone. Which means that you would have been quite close to here when you called her. What does she know, Elías? Do remember that your friend’s sight is at stake. Perhaps you described what you saw? It is out of the ordinary. Why wouldn’t you?’
    ‘Nothing. I didn’t tell her anything. I ended the call when I saw the soldiers coming towards us and we tried to escape.’
    Ratoff sighed once again.
    His attention turned to Jóhann who had been helped to his feet by two of the guards. Ratoff stepped up close to him and stared into his good eye. The awl flashed and screams rang out from the tent again, carrying a long way through the still air on the ice cap. The men by the plane paused briefly in their digging and looked up, before resuming their work without comment.
    Ratoff emerged from the tent with a thin spattering of blood on his face. He walked rapidly to the communications tent where he found two messages waiting for him. He would talk to Ripley first. Finding a cloth, he dried his face deliberately and thoughtfully, as if he had just washed.
    ‘A regrettable suicide?’ he asked when Ripley came on the line.
    ‘I’m afraid not, sir,’ Ripley replied. ‘The target escaped and we were forced to leave a body behind in her apartment.’
    There was nothing but static from Ratoff’s end of the line.
    ‘She had a visitor, sir, whilst we were with her. An unforeseen eventuality. Our orders were to move in directly and we had no time to prepare.’
    ‘So what now?’ Ratoff asked eventually.
    ‘We find her, sir.’
    ‘Do you need more men?’
    ‘I don’t think so, sir.’
    ‘And how do you propose to find her?’
    ‘Is her brother still alive?’
    ‘More or less.’
    ‘We need any available information, sir. Does she have a boyfriend, any friends – old or new – or family? Anything we could use. Did he manage to pass on anything?’
    ‘Only to his sister. She knows the glacier is swarming with armed soldiers, she knows there’s an airplane in the ice, she knows her brother’s disappeared and I’m reasonably sure she knows where Elvis is hiding. If you imbeciles hadn’t let her give you the run-around, we’d be in the clear.’ Throughout this speech, one of Ratoff’s longest in days, neither the tone nor the volume of his voice changed in the slightest.
    ‘We’ll find her, sir. We’ll track down her family. We have her credit and debit card numbers and can monitor any use of them. She’ll turn up and when she does, we’ll be waiting.’

BUILDING 312, WASHINGTON DC,
FRIDAY 29 JANUARY, AFTERNOON
    General Vytautas Carr was sitting in his office when a call came through on his private line. His thoughts had been wandering while he waited for Ratoff to make contact. Carr had parted from the defense secretary having given an assurance that no news about the plane in the ice would ever reach the public domain. The young Democrat had pronounced with great solemnity that the operation was to remain clandestine and that he did not want to know the details; in fact, he did not