Grendel's Curse

“If you could give your details to the officer.” He nodded toward an intimidatingly blonde Amazon of a woman with a pistol strapped on her hip and a peaked cap. She was busy taking details from a line of shell-shocked people. Surreally a radio played in the background, a pop song she didn’t know taunting the world to come on and do its worst. She couldn’t help but think it had.

Annja joined the line to give her contact info, and then wandered the empty streets toward her hotel, a lost girl in a strange town. She felt her cell phone vibrate in her jeans pocket. When she took it out she saw she had seventeen missed calls, all of them from the same New York number: Doug Morrell, her producer on Chasing History’s Monsters. Seventeen calls meant he’d obviously seen the news about the explosion at Thorssen’s rally and put two and two together. She answered with a not-quite-breezy, “Doug!”

“Annja! I thought you were dead. Answer your damned phone next time, would you? I’ve been calling and calling. We saw footage of the explosion. Tell me you weren’t there.”

Doug was a decent guy, if young, blunt and not all that interested in life outside of ratings. She liked him as much as it was possible to like a self-obsessed Ivy League charmer like Doug, which in truth was often just enough to get her to agree to things against her better judgment. He knew it and she knew it. And he liked her just enough in return to at least make the lies and manipulations sound plausible. It wasn’t quite a meeting of minds, but in TV terms it was positively synergism.

“Right in the middle of it,” she replied, just how lucky she’d been registering as she said it.

“Are you okay? I mean...stupid question...but you know? Two arms, two legs, no bonus bits or bits missing? Every bad word I’ve ever said, every time I’ve conned you into doing something you didn’t want to do—”

“Don’t go saying anything you’ll regret, Doug. You know, the kind of stuff that can be used in a court of law.” Annja laughed. It was a slightly frazzled laugh. “Because, believe me, I’ll certainly hold it against you.”

“Okay, good point. You sure you’re in one piece?”

“All fingers and all toes in place.”

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay, I believe you. So, now we’ve got the mild hysteria out of the way—see what happens when you don’t answer your phone?—time for the million-dollar question. Micke had someone in there filming the rally, right?” He paused for a beat, judging her reaction, then added, “Don’t get me wrong. It’s a tragedy.”

“It is.”

“But you have to admit it’d make great television. An episode on the greatest Norse hero of all, a myth that has continued to fascinate us over the centuries, tied in with the assassination attempt on one of the most charismatic politicians of recent times?” She could hear him marveling at the serendipity that had dropped this in his favorite reporter’s lap. “It’s pure television gold. I can see it already, can’t you?”

Ratings.

It was always about ratings with Doug when it came right down to it.

That wasn’t fair, and she knew it. The man who had been terrified when she didn’t answer, that had been the real Doug Morrell; the man who wanted the gory details caught on film, that was the TV producer and they were different beasts. It was only now that Doug was sure she was safe that he let that beast out. It was only natural that he did. “Gold,” she agreed, halfheartedly.

“Anyway, kiddo, you sound bushed. What is it, one, two in the morning?”

She looked at her watch. It was closer to 5:00 a.m. and she could smell the hit of cinnamon in the air from a nearby bakery. The Swedes loved their cinnamon buns; it was as close as they came to a societal addiction.

“Five.”

“You should be in bed. You’re breaking ground tomorrow, right? Don’t want you looking like you’ve gone ten rounds with...well, I was going to try and be clever and name some female boxer, but you get the idea. Beauty sleep. That’s an order.”

“You ever notice you only tell me what to do when there’s an ocean between us, Doug?” Annja laughed. “But just this once I’ll be good. I’m too tired to argue.”

His voice changed. “I’m glad you’re okay, Annja. When you weren’t picking up...”

“I know,” she finished for him. She couldn’t deal with mawkishness at 5:00 a.m., not that she was a big fan of it at any other time of day. She walked the rest of the way to the hotel, noting that it was still bright out, and had been for hours. This whole land of the midnight sun thing was a bit unnerving. In the height of the summer it was dark for no more than three hours a night, and if you went far enough north, to the Kebnekaise massif, you could watch the sun approach the horizon, then just rise again without ever disappearing from sight. As it was, the distinct lack of darkness as far south as Gothenburg was enough to turn a light sleeper into an insomniac and have them climbing up the hotel wall.

An early-morning tram drove by on its way to one of the suburbs. The only passenger had her head resting on the window, still half-asleep. Annja waited for it to rumble off down the street before she crossed the road to the hotel.

The night porter smiled at her as she crossed the marbled foyer and made for the bank of elevators, and her waiting bed. She saw herself in the mirrored elevator doors. It was a wonder he wasn’t reaching for the phone to call for the cops.

* * *

TWO HOURS OF restless sleep later, breakfast skipped, Annja was on-site waiting for Karl Thorssen to grace them with his presence.

There was always something special about that first day on a dig—a sense of anticipation and hope that was almost palpable. Right up until they broke ground, anything was possible.

This was no different.

Beowulf’s barrow.

Was the Geatish king interred here?

What, if anything, would they find down there?

Annja grinned despite herself. She wouldn’t have traded this part of her life for anything.

Usually the locals were fairly dour and uninterested, but this time it was different. This wasn’t just some plot of land where a Roman villa had supposedly stood. This was part of legend. Their legend. Beowulf was more than Gustavus Adolphus, the father of modern warfare; he was their King Arthur. Slayer of dragons.

She couldn’t help but think that whatever they found in the barrow had the power to make or break a part of the nation’s psyche. What if the bones were deformed or stunted? What if they extracted DNA that proved that he wasn’t Swedish at all? She thought of Thorssen driven to apoplexy by the imagined discovery his racially pure hero was nothing of the sort, and smiled. There would be a beautiful irony in that.

Annja shielded her eyes against the sun.

The site was already a hive of activity.

Given the attempt on Karl Thorssen’s life last night, it was hardly surprising the press had turned out in force to cover the ritual breaking of the ground. There were local dignitaries, too, businesspeople who provided financial muscle to Thorssen’s campaign and, giving their teachers the runaround, a group of schoolchildren who seemed to be everywhere at once, grinning and giggling and pretending to be ancient heroes with invisible swords fighting equally invisible dragons. There were half a dozen television presenters speaking to cameras, each offering a version of the same report. How Thorssen had survived the attempt on his life, how the crowd had gathered for this historic event, how Thorssen was writing his own legend and how the upcoming election promised to be a closely contested thing with a groundswell of support for the right-wing politician in the wake of last night’s tragedy.

“Quite a turnout,” Johan Cheander said, his camera on his shoulder and scanning the crowd of faces. She couldn’t see Micke. Johan was good. He didn’t need telling what might make useful footage. Just like the night before, his camera was documenting it all down to the last detail. They’d work out what they needed later.

“You’re not wrong,” Annja agreed, pointing to the black Mercedes coming across the grass toward them. It wasn’t designed for off-road. She’d half expected Karl Thorssen to arrive by helicopter. That seemed like the kind of over-the-top entrance he’d have enjoyed. No doubt he’d discharged himself from the hospital, telling the nurses he couldn’t miss this moment for the world. It was the kind of thing that would make good press whether it was true or not.

The sight of the man getting out of the car with one arm in a sling, his rock-star face battered and bruised with any number of minor cuts and abrasions, left him looking like the wounded warrior he wanted to be. The cuts stood out against his pale gray skin. He saw someone he recognized in the crowd and raised a hand in greeting. It took him a second to muster his strength and don the mask of charming affability he’d need to get through the morning, but Annja noticed the occasional wince as he moved, and that he bit on his bottom lip every time the pain threatened to get too much.

Maybe I’m being too hard on him, she thought, watching him press the flesh.

Last night had clearly taken it out of him, but Karl Thorssen wasn’t about to be denied the spotlight by something as trivial as an assassination attempt.

That spoke volumes about the man.

Reporters jostled for position as he moved toward the podium that had been set up for the speech, their microphones pushed toward the front. Some were already calling out questions before he reached the lectern. He gave them time to settle down while he gathered himself. He really was good at this kind of thing, playing to the crowd. He wasn’t there to address the locals or the schoolchildren. He was talking to everyone on the planet—or as much of it as the news channels would reach. In a viral world that was everywhere there was a screen, a cell phone, a tablet or a laptop. News spread now like it never had before. The reach of microblogging sites was insidious, immense and instantaneous, turning everyone into an on-the-spot reporter. Nothing went unseen. Especially not something like this. Karl Thorssen was a political animal. This was his stage.

He looked up at her and seemed to smile—a smile that was for her and her alone. But of course it wasn’t; it was for the cameras.

“Ten bucks says the first words out of his mouth are about politics and have absolutely nothing to do with archaeology.”

“I’m not taking that bet,” the cameraman said. “Might as well just give you the money.”

“Ah, you take all the fun out of life.”