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I had to suppress a sob. “Oh god… thank you,” I said and grabbed his hand in gratitude.
He smiled gently and asked, “What else do you know about him? Anything that might help me trace his whereabouts would be helpful.”
“I know he originally came from Gothenburg, Sweden. He has a friend named Gunnar in Amsterdam – he was in Special Forces with Lars. I met him at Bagram.”
I winced as I said it… because I was admitting that I’d met Lars at Bagram, too.
But if Alistair had seen the file from Background, he already knew that.
“Do you have a last name on this Gunnar fellow?” he asked.
“No… he never told me.”
Alistair took my hand, which was already on his, and squeezed gently. “I’ll see what I can find.”
“Thank you.” I nearly broke down crying.
This was my one ray of hope since the dead end at the hotel – and it was a powerful ray of hope. If anyone could find Lars, it would be the Director of Operations of Europe’s most powerful intelligence agency.
Alistair smiled gently. “Anything I can do to help.”
152
The ray of hope didn’t last long.
Alistair came by my office later. He looked distressed.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, my stomach immediately sinking.
“Was Lars out of town around…” He checked a Post-It note on the manila folder he was carrying. “…March 3rd?”
My stomach, already sinking, suddenly felt downright queasy. “I don’t know the exact dates, but he was away at the beginning of March… why?”
Alistair got a pained look. He pulled several photographs out of his folder and laid them on the desk in front of me.
They were crime scene photos taken in a snowy landscape. One was of an older man who I assumed had been shot in the back; the exit wound on his chest was the size of a softball. His eyes stared up sightlessly, the corneas frozen white.
Another photograph was of a younger man in an orange jacket. He had been shot through the forehead.
The photos didn’t shock me. I’d seen plenty of dead men in my time.
In fact, I’d killed most of them.
But I was curious why the hell Alistair was showing them to me.
“Hans Solner was an MI6 assent,” he explained. “The Chinese thought they were blackmailing him, but he was actually feeding them false information he got from us. The other man is his bodyguard. They were both killed March 3rd at Solner’s vacation home near Kirkenes, Norway.”
“…so?”
Alistair laid down several more photographs. They were grainy night shots taken from some sort of surveillance cameras.
In them, a man with a blond beard walked along snowy streets in a black knit cap and a heavy jacket.
My heart froze in my chest.
It was Lars.
“This is from security cameras in Kirkenes the night before the killings. A ‘Lars Kinberg’ was registered in a local hotel from March 2nd through the 5th. He called in unexpectedly on the 3rd and canceled the rest of his reservation without going back to the hotel. Did Lars come back into town earlier than expected?”
