BZRK: Reloaded (BZRK 2)

That night the man hanged himself in his cell. With a belt that was not his.

The second and third sets of tracks were never identified. One matched the suicide victim, another appeared to belong to a grown woman, and a third could have been those of a teenage boy or girl.

The only reason that Pia Valquist knew anything about the matter was that she’d been visiting a Brazilian friend who happened to be the regional police lieutenant. He also happened to be absurdly handsome and wonderfully romantic and quite infatuated with Pia.

The fling had gone nowhere in the end—how could it? But it had left Pia with the kinds of memories that still brought a smile to her face years later.

And a mystery.

For two days she had assisted her friend’s investigation into the boat and the suicide and the unexplained footprints. The mystery had gotten its hook into her.

When she had returned to Sweden, she’d taken another look at maritime incidents in that time frame. She’d come across reports of a body washed up in Madeira. And an unconfirmed report by a freighter captain who claimed to have seen a ship foundering in the storm. The ship matched the description of the U.S.S. Tiburon.

The best official guess was that the ship was involved in drug running or human smuggling. But Pia had observed the questioning of the “madman.” She thought that explanation was nonsense.

The incident was officially forgotten. But not by Pia Valquist, because she wasn’t someone who gave up a good mystery. She was, in the words of her boss, unique, by which he meant difficult, by which he further meant that she was a pushy obsessive who just would not let something go.

Valquist knew better than to go chasing every highly fragrant bit of nonsense that crossed her desk, but she had sensed something very wrong going on. For one thing: people who smuggled immigrants or drugs did not own amphibious assault ships. They moved people and drugs around in tramp steamers and rickety fishing boats.

Valquist had searched every record she could find. From the ship’s decommissioning in Norfolk, Virginia, to its purchase by a cutout corporation, to a brief appearance off the coast of Tisno, Croatia, and Tunis, and the Ivory Coast, to an equally brief appearance off the coast of Capetown, South Africa.

Capetown, South Africa, where two people had been reported missing in the time frame, and where a yacht had been found floating empty, thirty miles out, with no sign of crew or passengers.

One of those missing people looked exactly like the Natal suicide. Had in fact been that unfortunate man.

Of the seven disappeared, the average age was seventeen. And in precisely zero cases was there an explanation.

Here is what Valquist knew about smugglers: they didn’t go around kidnapping Croatians or Tunisians or Ivorians or South Africans.

And then she had begun to look at mysterious disappearances in port cities even further back in time. Two in Ireland. Three near Southampton, U.K.

It went on.

And no, there was no way to prove that the mystery ship had been in each of those locations. But, critically, it could have been. Given normal sailing times it could have been in each place where the disappearances occurred.

Now, Valquist was convinced that she had at last tracked one set of those footprints in the sand all the way from far-off Brazil to relatively nearby Finland.

The house was rather grand, very un-Finnish. It had the look of a fort. It was large, made of a pale stone, one corner a tower, a sort of stunted mockery of a medieval castle. The windows were narrow, as if the person who had built it was anticipating a siege, with crossbows and lances.

The front door was well-maintained oak, thick enough to discourage a battering arm.

To the left was a detached garage. To the right was what might have been a small guest cottage but spoke rather of guardhouse . This suspicion was confirmed when a man emerged carrying a rifle. He had been interrupted in his lunch: there was soup in his beard, already beginning to solidify as it froze.

“Stop,” he ordered.

She stopped. Automatically she turned gloved palms out: no weapon, nothing to hide, no threat.

“What do you want?”

“To show you my identification,” she said. She held her fingers up, pincers, ready to reach into an inner pocket and pull out her ID.

“Go ahead,” he said. His accent was not Finnish or Norwegian or Swedish. Israeli, she thought. Well, poor man, he was a long way and many degrees Celsius from Tel Aviv.

She pulled out her official MUST identity card and handed it to him.

His eyes widened.

“I’m here to see your boss,” she said.