Beck ran in his head through the last few years. Lumos? The energy giant; a corrupt organisation with a finger in every environmental pie around the world. It had been his biggest enemy, his greatest problem — but that should all have been over when Edwin Blake, its founder and chief, had been arrested. Beck and Edwin’s grandson, James, had helped bring the giant down. Edwin had died in jail — he wouldn’t be sending assassins out now.
African poachers, Indonesian illegal tree loggers, South American drug smugglers… Beck had had run-ins with all of them. But he wouldn’t expect any of them to track him down to this remote corner of Sweden, of all places.
Jonas coughed and moaned, and mumbled something in Swedish. Beck was immediately at his side, shaking him gently.
“Hey, Jonas?”
Before too long Jonas was also sitting up, also with a splitting headache. They each wrapped one of the rugs around their shoulders for warmth, and compared notes. Jonas didn’t have much more to add.
“They knocked you out with that stuff, then they did the same to me.” He shuddered and his voice broke a little. “I was so scared. I didn’t know if I would ever wake up again…”
Beck put a hand on his shoulder to comfort him.
“Yep we got done, well and truly,” he said softly. “But we must stay calm. They didn’t kill us and they could have done — there and then. There will be a way out of this. What can you remember? One of them said something…”
“Ställ inte till det inne,” Jonas said glumly. “It means, don’t make a mess in the room.”
“Ah. Right.” Which meant the van was taking them to somewhere they could be disposed of tidily. This didn’t bode well at all, Beck thought wryly. Not well at all.
“We have to get out of here.” Beck crawled over to the rear doors. “Let’s see if we can get these open…”
“The van’s moving,” Jonas reminded him, “and it’s freezing out there.”
Beck had already thought of the second point. He and Jonas were still dressed for indoors. He wore jeans and a light jumper over a t-shirt — it was all you needed in the lodge. Jonas was similar. Neither of them was prepared for the sub-zero temperatures outside.
“We’ve got blankets,” Beck pointed out, “and the van slows down when it takes a corner. We can jump then.”
Anything was better than the alternative of waiting for the van to stop.
They fumbled together at the door’s locking mechanism. There was a handle and they pulled down hard on it, but no matter how much they put their weight into it, it wouldn’t shift.
“It’s locked,” Jonas moaned.
A metal handle set into the floor of the van dug into Beck’s knee. It was the handle of the van’s spare wheel compartment, and he pulled it up to reveal the spare tyre, snug in its slot.
“See if there’s a crowbar in there, or anything we can use…”
At that moment the van gave one last lurch, and slowed, and stopped. The boys’ eyes met in the gloom, and then Jonas redoubled his efforts to find something in the compartment.
“There is something down there, but it’s under the wheel and the wheel is screwed down… Beck, I’m so sorry I got you into this.”
“Eh?” Beck asked in surprise. “You got me—?”
But then a door opened and closed outside, and footsteps walked down the side of the van. A key scraped in the lock of the rear door. Jonas fumbled at the locking nut of the spare wheel and Beck poised himself to pounce on whoever opened the door.
But whoever it was had thought of that. He pulled the door open and they heard him step back to a safe distance. Freezing air gushed in so that they both immediately shivered and instinctively pulled the rugs tighter around themselves.
And suddenly they were both blinking and shielding their eyes from the light of a torch which killed their night vision in a split second. They could see that it glinted off the barrel of a handgun, held in the man’s other hand and aimed right at them.
“Out,” said a man’s voice. “Now.”