Page 30 of The Collector
Upstairs inher room, Ingrid stripped off her cycling gear and hastily pulled on jeans and a fleece and a pair of suede boots. The Faraday pouch containing Peter’s phone was in her office. She shoved it into a nylon backpack along with a laptop. She would ditch the phone somewhere on the way to Vissenbjerg. Somewhere deep and wet where it would never be found. Fortunately, there was no shortage of such places in the island nation of Denmark.
Outside, she slid behind the wheel of her Volvo. A few kilometers south of Aarhus, she turned off the E45 and headed for Mossø, the largest freshwater lake in Jutland. On the eastern shore was a deserted car park. She carried Peter’s phone to the water’s edge and tried to calculate how far she could hurl the thing, this 174-gram rectangle of silicon, aluminum, potassium, lithium, carbon, and reinforced glass that might well contain the information necessary to identify Peter’skiller. Penetrating its defenses was beyond Ingrid’s capabilities. Better to be rid of it, to never think of it again.
But not here, she thought. No, this wouldn’t do.
She walked back to her car and returned the phone to the Faraday pouch. Her navigation system forecast an arrival time of 5:45 p.m. She only hoped she wasn’t too late.
She nearly tossed the phone out her window as she was crossing the Vejle Fjord Bridge—and again, twenty minutes later, as she was spanning the Little Belt. Both times she returned the device to the Faraday pouch. It was tucked into her backpack when she entered Jørgens Smørrebrød Café. A different woman stood behind the counter. She was approximately the same age as Ingrid, mid-thirties, with magenta hair and too much makeup around her coal-black eyes. The name tag affixed to her Roxy Music shirt readkatje. Something about her face was familiar. Ingrid was convinced she had seen it somewhere before.
She ordered a shrimp-and-egg smørrebrød and a coffee, and sat down at the same table near the window. This time the seating area was deserted. She removed the laptop from her backpack and scanned the list of available wireless networks. She ignored the café’s free Wi-Fi service and selected a private network called Q8VSBJ instead. A password was required for admission. Ingrid cracked it with a brute-force attack, and she was in.
The rush hit her instantly. She remembered to eat some of the smørrebrød and, realizing she was famished, devoured half of it. Then she located the security system and got to work.
There were ten surveillance cameras—two over the petrol pumps, two inside the convenience mart, four in the car park, one over the door of the café, and another behind the counter. All ten of thecameras were connected wirelessly to a display monitor and recorder in the convenience mart.
The weak link in the system was its remote access. Ingrid checked the output of one of the cameras and saw a woman, mid-thirties, jeans, a fleece pullover, sitting alone in the smørrebrød café before an open laptop computer. It was no matter, she thought. The woman would soon be forgotten.
The recorder was capable of storing continuous video for twenty-five days, a typical interval for security systems designed for homes and small businesses. Ingrid reset the time code for the camera to 6:05 p.m. the previous evening and saw the same woman sitting at the same table with an antiquarian book dealer from Copenhagen. On the chair next to him was an attaché case.
She reset the time code again, this time for 5:40 p.m., and Peter vanished. Two other tables were now occupied, one by an unhappy-looking Danish couple of late middle age, the other by a man of perhaps forty who was wearing a dark business suit beneath a car-length overcoat.
Ingrid advanced the time code to 5:55 and watched the man’s departure from the café. The camera behind the counter captured his left profile; the camera over the door, the back of his head. Both cameras, however, had a perfect view of his arrival, which had taken place at 5:18 p.m.
Ingrid downloaded the video onto her hard drive, along with footage from a camera in the car park that showed the man climbing into a dark-colored Toyota hatchback. Then, with a single click, she erased twenty-five days’ worth of video from the recorder.
Outside, two men in uniform were climbing from a Volkswagen Passat bearing the markings of the Police of Denmark. Ingrid calmly finished the last of her shrimp-and-egg smørrebrød. Then she slipped the laptop into her backpack and walked out.
It was nearly 10:00 p.m. when she arrived home. In the kitchen she brewed a pot of coffee and carried it upstairs to her office. “Well, well,” she whispered as she opened her laptop. “Who do we have here?”
The image on her screen was of an overcoated man stretching a hand, his left, toward the door of a café. The camera angle was downward, the lighting shadowed and subdued. Even so, certain critical aspects of the subject’s features were visible. The slope of the forehead and the distance between the eyes. The shape of the cheekbones and nose. The contours of the lips and chin. Ingrid enlarged the image and filtered out some of the graininess. She did the same to the shot captured by the camera behind the counter. Here the lighting was better, and the subject’s face was animated by speech.
Ingrid decided to use the second shot for a facial recognition search. She expected it to produce numerous additional photographs of the man—from social media, for example—that she might use to discover his name. At which point, the floodgates would open, and his life would be laid bare. His home address. His email address. His mobile phone number. His nationality. His marital status. The name of the football club he supported. His politics. His sexual preferences. His darkest desires.
Unless the subject of the investigation was not a normal person. Which was the conclusion Ingrid reached after eight different search engines failed to exhume even a single photograph. Indeed, had she not laid eyes on the man herself, she would have questioned whether he existed at all.
By the time Ingrid closed her laptop, it was approaching 4:00 a.m. She shed her clothes and crawled into bed and lay there, wired and wide-eyed, until seven, when she switched onGo’ morgenDanmark. The broadcast opened with the murder of a rare book dealer in the fashionable Nørrebro district of Copenhagen.
The story led the eight o’clock hour as well, but at nine it was displaced by the latest Russian crime against humanity in Ukraine. Ingrid, however, was distracted by an unsettling development closer to home. It was the arrival of a new tenant at the rental cottage up the lane. A well-dressed man of late middle age. Medium height and build. Very gray at the temples.
Definitely not Danish.
18
Kandestederne
The cottage had two bedrooms, a single bathroom, a cramped sitting room, a galley kitchen, and a small terrace sheltered by the eaves of the steeply pitched roof. Because no one of sound mind came to Kandestederne in autumn, Chiara was able to snag it for two weeks at a discounted rate. She settled the bill using a credit card linked to the Tiepolo Restoration Company and instructed the property manager to leave the cottage unlocked and the key inside. No, she said, laundry and maid service would not be necessary; the man who would be staying at the cottage would be working on an important project and wished not to be disturbed. Needless to say, she did not inform the property manager that the man in question was none other than the world’s most famous retired spy—or that his project involved the recovery, by any means possible, ofThe Concert, oil on canvas, 72.5 by 64.7 centimeters, by Johannes Vermeer.
Gabriel had seen to his car and his provisions. The car, a Nissan sedan, he had rented in Hamburg. The provisions he acquired during a predawn raid on a SuperBrugsen in a town called Hinnerup.He placed the tins in the pantry, the perishables in the fridge, and three bottles of decent red wine on the countertop. Then he hung his wholly inappropriate city clothing in the closet of the larger of the two bedrooms. In violation of every rule of professional tradecraft, written and unwritten, he concealed four million euros’ worth of borrowed diamond jewelry and one hundred thousand euros in cash between the mattress and box spring.
Returning to the kitchen, he brewed a pot of strong coffee and drank a first cup outside on the terrace. The view was westward across the dunes toward the sea, though it was saved from perfection by the large modern dwelling at the end of the lane. A Volvo XC90 was parked outside, and a light burned faintly behind drawn shades in a window on the second floor. The surrounding cottages were darkened and shuttered and gripped by an air of sudden abandonment. Indeed, from Gabriel’s vantage point, it looked as though he and his neighbor had the entire settlement to themselves.
A blast of frigid wind drove him inside. He lit a fire in the wood-burning stove and drank the rest of the coffee while watching a breakfast television program on Denmark’s TV2. His Danish was only slightly better than his Armenian. Still, with the help of the video images, he was able to deduce that there had been a shooting death in Copenhagen, an unusual occurrence.
A weather forecast was next, followed by a political discussion. Gabriel couldn’t make heads or tails of what the panelists were saying and didn’t much care; he was watching a cyclist coming down the lane from the direction of the beach. She shot past the cottage a moment later, all but invisible beneath her winter-weight kit, her pedal stroke smooth and effortless, and vanished from view. A hearty soul to be heading out in conditions like these, thought Gabriel. But then he supposed she was used to it. She was Danish, after all. A bit of a chameleon, as was he. But definitely Danish.
The cottage had four windows, one in each bedroom, a third in the sitting room, and a porthole above the kitchen sink. The woodwork was weakened by age, the latches brown with rust. The lock on the only door was aspirational; Gabriel could have picked it himself in less than a minute. He engaged it nevertheless and, after wedging a tiny paper telltale between the door and the jamb, set off toward the cottage at the end of the lane.
It was the largest in the entire settlement. The newest as well, or so it appeared. Unlike its neighbors, which were sparingly furnished and occupied only during the summer months, it would doubtless have a proper security system. Sensors on the doors and windows. Motion detectors and cameras. But would the Danish police receive an automatic alert in the event of a break-in? Gabriel supposed that would depend on the quality of the owner’s public-facing facade. According to Khoren Nazarian, she worked as a cybersecurity consultant in addition to her primary occupation, which was theft.
