Chapter Six: Stranger in a Strange Land

Pure as the driven snow. It had been many years since Søren Nørgård had heard that old-fashioned expression, but remembering it now, he realized he’d always misunderstood its meaning. Having lived his whole life in snow-laced Copenhagen, he’d thought that being compared to the pristine beauty of newly fallen snow was a compliment to ones moral character. Since he’d taken up this graveyard-shift vigil he’d had a lot of time to think about morality, character, and purity of snow. He’d seen plenty of it fall and fade to grey as he stood waiting in the shadows night after nightmare in rain, sleet, hail and, yes, of course, snow and then more snow.

He’d stood so still for so long, the eye of his own silent ice storm, that the cop on the beat, the bartender down the street and the nurse who always took the same five a.m. bus had started calling him the Snowman. Søren didn’t mind. He thought the name fit: he was frozen to this spot, waiting for an answer, a sign, a ray of hope that would allow him to melt away, move on.

Meanwhile, Søren had plenty of time to reconsider many of his previous assumptions about the facts of life and one of the conclusions that he’d come to was that driven snow was not pure. That was just an optical illusion, snow blindness. It was a whitewash that hid a multitude of sins; out of sight, out of mind. Unless, that is, you had eyes made out of coal, then you could see right through the pretty white lie down to the blast shattered windows and blackened ledges beneath the frothy icing. The snowman would never forget what happened in there, and he had the right eyes, black-ringed, unblinking, to seek the truth of what happened the night of October 6, 2006, on the ninth floor of Ørsund Klengvjel 544, Copenhagen, Denmark, home of The Hanso Foundation.

* * * *

Nørgård had been working NATO S.W.A.T. for almost eight years and in that time he had only fired his weapon once three months ago. Soon after the incident, it was established that the bullet that had killed the terrorist had not been fired from his assault rifle. So he’d been spared the Internal Affairs battery of inquiries and psychological testing issues. His teammate had not been as lucky. He was still mired in paperwork, tests and inquiries after three months until his death put paid to all his outstanding debts.

While that earlier assignment had been very tough, the current mission was beginning to look even more challenging. Their orders were so vague and the mission prepared so quickly he worried that major details had been missed. He was very proud to be serving in his hometown for the first time having spent the bulk of his career any and everywhere else around on earth, but there was a surreal quality to this operation that troubled him and made him wish it wasn’t taking place so close to home. There just wasn’t as much intelligence available as in previous assignments. It felt much too rushed for his liking. All that aside, when his superiors ordered him to jump he was expected to read their minds and jump a meter higher than they anticipated.

For this operation Nørgård was assigned sniper position on a building across the street from the prime target. His responsibility was to provide covering fire if needed and to monitor the insertion team on his communication gear. He looked at the building through his night-vision scope and followed the progress of the rest of his team as they reported to the command leader.

Søren heard the team lead, designated “Alpha,” ask for a situation report from the rest of the squad through the ever-present light static of his communication gear. He focused in on and then calculated the distance to the building across the street with his scope and night-vision goggles.

“All units report!” Alpha leader commanded.

Søren spoke into the microphone of his communication headset, “Charlie team, eyes on!”

“Zulu team, in position.”

“Bravo team, lobby secure.”

“You have visual on target?” the team leader asked.

“Yes sir, heat trails on tenth floor!” responded Søren.

“Is that confirmed?” Alpha demanded.

“Yes sir, it’s a mint-green lab coat and a black ponytail,” replied Bravo.

“Lunatics and their hair!” the leader replied with disgust.

Nørgård chuckled. The S.W.A.T. team members all wore their hair regulation military short. So everyone with hair longer than two centimeters was labeled a lunatic.

“Ninth floor now,” said the Bravo team leader. The slight change in Bravo leader’s breathing over the communication gear told Søren that Bravo and his team had just jogged up eight flights of stairs.

“Target is confirmed on tenth floor.”

“Bravo here, look’s like we’ve got a staircase between lab levels nine and ten.”

“Personnel count on nine?” Alpha leader inquired.

“Alpha, we count three. No, four.”

“Armed?”

“Affirmative! Target moving towards the elevators!”

Søren knew that for the insertion team this was the most tense and stressful moment of the assignment. Just before the first strike there came a split-second of moral philosophizing that no S.W.A.T. member ever wanted to admit to but everyone knew was present. Do I have the right to kill? But his training took over and the fleeting thought disappeared. They all knew what they had signed up for and what had to be done. Besides, when bullets were flying there was no time to debate what was right.

“Bravo, this is Alpha, we’re on the move!”

“Alpha, this is Bravo, we’ve been made!”

“Zulu, cut power now,” demanded the Alpha leader.

“Cutting!” she said.

“Bravo, take nine. We’ve got ten. Zulu stand ready to support covering fire.”

“All teams, go! Go! Go!”

Nørgård could hear voices calling and yelling in the background and he knew that they did not belong to his team.

“Zulu, did you cut power?” Bravo questioned.

“Affirmative”

“Then why are we seeing lights?”

“They’ve got auxiliary!”

“Freeze!!” bellowed Bravo leader.

Søren heard the “pop – pop” of a handgun and then the unmistakable sound of the
gas-operated SIG 551 Sturmgewehr assault rifle his team employed. The sound of at least two three- or four-second bursts of automatic fire filtered through his headpiece. A mixture of raised voices and shuffling feet could also be heard. The words, “Freeze, get down, freeze!” were heard often but in the confusion he could not tell who yelled what.

“Alpha leader, behind you, behind you!”

“I see him, south corridor.”

“Nine clear. I’ve got him cornered in an office. He’s barricaded,” reported Bravo leader.

“We need a ram up here.”

Nørgård heard the distinct sound of a twenty-six pound Zak door ram slamming against a door and the door crashing in.

“Hands behind your back, knees to the floor,” roared Alpha leader.

“We’ve got him!” exclaimed Zulu leader.

The Bravo team leader responded, “No that’s not Mittelwerk. He’s a look alike. Repeat, our target’s still loose.”

“Where is he?”

There is nothing more sobering, thought Søren Nørgård, then the sound of a calm voice amidst the turmoil of a S.W.A.T. raid. But the baritone with the accent that came over the communicator was no voice he recognized.

“Gentlemen, I’m sorry to have to do this…”

“We’ve got a radio over here,” reported Bravo leader.

The voice over the radio continued, “I can’t have my work compromised. You should run now!”

“Shit, this whole place is wired,” cried Alpha leader, “Go! Go! Abort! Abort! Evac now!”

Søren heard his team member’s boots pounding down the stairwell racing to beat the bomb, but never took his eye from the scope, methodically scanning the ninth floor windows searching for the man with his finger on the come-to-Jesus trigger. He didn’t need a clear shot; he’d go with the shadow of a doubt, a ghost of a chance, the twinkle of an eye.

“Namaste!” Nørgård heard the pitiless voice of the Hanso Foundation sign off just as
his scope found the flicker of light in a ninth floor window. He steadied his aim at the match-head target and pulled the trigger, but it was too little, too late. He felt, rather than heard, the “fwoomp” of the concussion seconds before a conflagration of heat and flame erupted through the windows of the ninth and tenth floors of the building showering the street below with shredded glass and burning debris.

When the sound of the explosion diminished the only remaining thing Søren could hear was the eerie static drone coming from his dead radio…but it was telling him more than words ever could. He knew that Alpha team was gone, and in a way the blast had taken his life, too. He knew that if it took the rest of his days, cost him his happiness, his hope, his life, he now had a new mission: to find out why Alpha team had to die and make sure their killer would not find cold comfort by taking cover beneath a blanket of all-forgiving snow.

****

Søren had been staked out at the scene of the crime for nearly three months. During that time he’d come to know exactly how the street ticked, who came, who went, what they drove, where they parked. That’s why he moved a little deeper into the shadows when he saw an unfamiliar unmarked police car pull into the alley beside number 544, kill the ignition and lights.

“Looks like my Christmas present has arrived a few days early this year,” Søren thought. “All right, then let’s see what kind of surprise Santa has brought me.”

****

Michael Valentine Smith had nothing on Iben Powned today. The culture and language in Copenhagen could have been Martian as far as Iben was concerned. He understood none of it. Standing in the Tivoli plaza he attempted to formulate a plan of action. Unfortunately, that plan consisted of staring blankly out at the passing scene and in at a mind empty of rational thought. Fear of being stranded in a strange land would not seem like the usual neurosis of a been-there done-that New Yorker, but Iben didn’t really care to do new things or meet new people and he had no idea what he was going to do next.

Iben had always thought he understood the meaning of loneliness. It seemed a permanent condition of his reality and his life. Oh, he had friends and plenty of acquaintances but there were times, especially during the holidays that he felt very much alone. However, being abandoned in a foreign city with no currency and no guide and no idea how to get back to the safety of his hotel left him feeling extremely vulnerable and not a little frightened. “Now what?” he thought.

Iben glanced around the plaza and realized that there were a number of young people milling about. He tried to recall his conversation with Dr. Apollo and any information concerning the three-bedroom suite at the luxury hotel she never named. The only other thought that kept circling back to him was that The Hanso Foundation world headquarters building was located somewhere in the city. So, Iben did what tourists from time immemorial have done. He asked a local resident for directions.

He drew near a young man in a long brown coat and asked, “Excuse me sir, can you point me to The Hanso Foundation?”

“Sorry, never heard of it!” the man replied in perfect English.

Iben next approached a young woman dressed in jeans and a heavy coat. Her fashionable black glasses with embedded diamonds.

“The Hanso Foundation?” he asked.

“Hanso? Yah, Ørsund Klengvjel 544,” she replied pointing into the distance.

Iben headed away from the Tivoli plaza towards the canal in the general direction of Nørrebor. Along the way he asked a number of people directions for Ørsund Klengvjel. After an hour of begging directions from perfect strangers Iben came out on a quiet, unpopulated street.

The Hanso Foundation building was of a typical minimalist modern design. It had been constructed of glass and concrete with the occasional piece of aluminum trim. The thing that stood out to Iben however, was not the design but the blackened and burned shell of the ninth and tenth floors of the building. Glass windows had obviously been blasted out and all the openings were scorched as if from the inside. The front doors were covered over with pressboard and the building looked deserted.

It was obvious to Iben that an intense explosion had occurred here, and not too long ago since by the look of things of the clean-up operation was far from finished. The sign in front of the building, complete with logo and name, was dark and exhibited signs of scorching but it still told Iben everything he needed to know. Hanso was no more at this address. It occurred to Iben that for the second time that day he had no idea where to turn next.

A thin, middle-aged man dressed in a crumpled dark suit emerged from a doorway, flashed a badge at Iben and said, “Please sir, to come with me…” The man took him by the elbow and gently directed him towards a police car parked in a nearby alley.

“Great, more cops!” Iben thought. “Certainly!” he told the policeman. “Where else do I have to go?” he said mostly to his sad self.

The policeman got into the back seat of the squad car with Iben. “Headquarters,” he instructed the driver. When they were settled in he introduced himself.

“My name is Aarøn Alvarsen St. Germaine and I am the arson detective assigned to The Hanso Foundation case. You’ve seen the destruction, yes?”

When Iben attempted to answer, the officer stopped him.

“Rhetorical question,” he said. “We know who you are Mr. Powned. We just don’t know what you are doing here. Would you care to enlighten us as to what an American journalist is doing in Copenhagen and why you are interested in The Hanso Foundation?”

“I’m here doing research for a T.V. program,” Iben replied defensively, “I’m not a journalist. I write scripts.”

“Yes, well, scripts or newspapers… they are both, after all, just fiction, no? In your ‘research’ travels have you ever heard the term Dharma Initiative?”

“I can’t say I have,” he lied.

“At the risk of calling you a liar, I find that difficult to believe given the nature of your assignment. But you are a stranger here and we Danish are nothing if not polite to visitors to our island nation. Therefore, I’ll take you at your word and once we arrive at headquarters will find a way to enlighten you,” he said cryptically.

When they reached the police station, St. Germaine exited the car, scanned the immediate area before quickly pulling Iben from the vehicle. He did not see Søren Nørgård watching them from the building across the street. “This way,” he said and led Iben inside the station, down a short hallway, and into a dark interrogation room.

“Make yourself comfortable,” St. Germaine said to Iben, and then nodded to his own reflection in the one-way glass at the back of the room as an 8mm film began to roll.
Black-and-white still images began to crawl across the blank white wall of the room.

The words “Orientation Testing Issue 1980” flashed across the screen in bright red letters and for the next six minutes Iben watched as a number of images quickly flashed across the wall. There were too many to remember them all but he did manage to commit several to memory.

Each image appeared to be a one-of-a-kind photograph, but no two images were related. They didn’t appear to be in any sequence. He remembered a nuclear mushroom cloud and immediately thought “Bikini Atoll”, he saw a small weather balloon, a Rorschach test page which resembled a human pelvis, the “light” side of the moon, a Mapinguari or Megatherum, a swimming nurse shark, an antenna array, two perfectly white swans on a body of water, an adult polar bear tagged with a tracking device with two cubs (a scientist appeared to be taking notes), a Doctor and what looked like a burn victim in a Nazi soldier’s uniform, an image of burned or melted film stock, an aerial or satellite view of Area 51, a light dispersion pattern, a wild boar, a pulsar, a close-up of in-vitro fertilization, the Aurora Borealis, another mushroom cloud that may have been the detonation over Hiroshima, an enlarged image of an atom and the Dharma wheel. There were many other images but Iben’s memory of them was quickly fading. The ominous questions, “Where did they go? Why didn't they return? Whatever happened to the Dharma Initiative?” appeared on the wall. The words flickered obliquely on the wall and then faded.

“What is all this about?” Iben asked.

“Isn’t this why you came to Copenhagen, Mr. Powned, for research purposes?” replied St. Germaine. “The film you have just watched is research of the most important kind! We believe that this film is somehow tied to the arson that occurred in October at The Hanso Foundation. We have witnesses that swear they saw armed men in military uniforms near the building just before the explosion. It’s almost as if someone with a great deal of knowledge concerning criminal investigations wiped the place clean before we got there.

“What was left of it,” Iben mentioned.

“To be sure, we gathered what evidence we could find but there was precious little.”

“But what does this film have to do with the arson or with me?” Iben asked.

“That’s what you’re going to tell us, Mr. Powned,” he replied.

****

After St. Germaine’s driver dropped him off at his hotel, Iben walked into the lobby and sat down. He needed to catch his breath, get his bearings, and sort out the past 24 hours.

“What just happened?” he asked himself. He recalled the film and he remembered St. Germaine talking about research but it occurred to Iben that a lot of unaccounted time had elapsed since he was picked up. Splintered images refracted through his mind but they made no sense and he realized he was suffering the second worst headache of his life. His cell phone rang disturbing him from his state of bewilderment.

Iben Powned,” he answered distractedly.

“Mr. Powned, I think we need to talk…”

It took him a moment to place the voice. It sounded very much like the messenger who had left her backpack in his apartment back in New York.

“Are you alone?” she asked.

Iben looked around the cavernous lobby of the five-star hotel bulging with bejeweled Christmas revelers, hand-holding honeymooners, elegant matrons perched on high-priced luggage sipping Aquavit with their equally high-priced escorts as a choir of tiny tin-foil-haloed angels spilled through the revolving door singing their little hearts out.

“Never been more alone in my life,” Iben confessed.