Rebekka Franck - 03 - Five, Six ... Grab Your Crucifix Page 17

  “Yes. That’s him.” Sune inhaled his cigarette.

  “Another of the leaders from back then,” I grumbled. “Now they’re all dead except Isabella Dubois and Bjarne Larsen.”

  “Bjarne Larsen? Wasn’t he the guy you visited a couple of days ago and talked to his son?”

  “I think so, but I don’t know. It’s a pretty common name. It could be someone else, but then again, I don’t believe in coincidences. Besides it would explain how he knew so much about religious sects. He called them ‘Ranters‘ which isn’t something everybody knows what is. I know I didn’t until I looked it up.”

  “Could Edwina still be alive?” asked Sune.

  “I have thought about it,” I answered. “It’s definitely possible. Maybe she came loose from her chains somehow and took the baby and disappeared.”

  “So maybe she’s getting her revenge?” Sune said.

  “It is one of my theories. It is after all quite suspicious that it is all of the leaders from back then who are being killed. One of them, Hans Christian, wasn’t even in the leader group anymore. He left after the birth of the baby, or was thrown out because he tried to stand up to the Priest. Today the leader group has lots of new members. I remember from my research about them that they are nine leaders now, but only people who were part of the group back then, have died. That’s a little too coincidental if you ask me.”

  “I agree,” Sune said. He drank from his wine and stared at the church across from the street. “But Edwina must be what? Twenty-six, twenty-seven?”

  “Yes, that’s about it. But I don’t understand why Mette kept saying she saw the girl in her room the other night. She told me she jumped out the window and ran from her. That’s why she ran out in front of my car,” I said. “When she died I even heard her scream that she saw her again.”

  “That is strange,” Sune said. “Maybe she was dreaming?”

  I sipped my wine. “Maybe,” I said.

  “So what do we do now?” Sune asked.

  I leaned over and kissed him. “Tomorrow I’ll call the SIS and tell them about the water post. Then I think I’ll pay Bjarne Larsen another visit, I fear that he might be the next victim. Either him or Isabella Dubois, but she is harder to get in contact with.”

  Chapter 46

  Isabella Dubois was kneeling on the floor. She was clinging on to her silver crucifix asking God to help her and lead her, guide her in the right direction. She wanted to help this church walk in the right direction.

  “Forgive us father for we have disappointed you, we have strayed from the path you have given us to walk in. We have been weak and let evil in among us.”

  Then she stripped off her shirt and took the whip and began whipping her own back leaving big bloody stripes. She moaned in pain but continued undaunted. Pain came before gain. If anyone knew that it was Isabella.

  “Please God forgive us, have mercy on our souls for not obeying your commands,” Isabella pleaded while crying.

  Then she swung the whip once again and moaned in pain and agony. She bent over crying, groaning.

  Then she put down the whip and smiled while she kissed her crucifix again and again. She fell to the tiles on her knees in praise of the good Lord, and then kissed the crucifix again and again showing her love and humbling herself to the Lord of Heaven’s Armies whose battle she had devoted her life to fight. The battle against all evil here on earth. The battle to outcast the devil.

  “I am not worthy, dear God. I am nothing but a humble servant. Please anoint me and grant me the grace to teach my people and direct them,” she said while crying and kissing her crucifix. “They are lost in this world, they are like lost sheep who need to be found and directed.”

  Isabella had heard from God for the first time on the night the Priest had taken her virginity. When he was panting and puffing on top of her she had heard a small still voice inside of her mind. It spoke to her and told her to not be afraid. “One day, one day soon I will exalt you,” it said. “I will make you a great leader of this church.”

  All God wanted Isabella to do was to endure the trials put upon her and wait patiently, and then he promised to guide her to victory, to glorification. She was going to lead all these people, she thought every day looking at all of them filling herself with pride, because God had a special plan for her. She might have to endure pain and humble herself right now, but soon, soon she would taste the sweet taste of triumph.

  God hadn’t let her down. He had been there through all of her trials, every night when the Priest came to her room, He was there with her, holding her hand, whispering comforting words in her ears, telling her that soon, soon she would be lifted up, soon they were all going to obey her commands and worship her instead.

  Her loyalty and obedient behavior had soon paid off. The Priest had grown quite fond of her and soon she was elevated to sit at his table when they ate and she was allowed to have meat and wine with her food. Soon she became a part of the leader group and helped make the important decisions. God showed his faithfulness because she did what he told her to, she obeyed every word and she endured hardship with a happy mind and attitude, because she knew the reward was coming one day. When that thing happened, when that girl, that Chernobyl-kid, arrived at the camp Isabella had sought God’s wisdom. She had prayed and heard from Him that now it was her time to flourish. She needed to take over and guide the Priest and the rest of the group in what to do.

  “There will be resistance,” God had told her. “Some won’t like it. But that’s the Christian life. You will always be persecuted and ill-treated. But know that I am with you. Know that I am your God.”

  So she had told the others what she believed God had told her they should do about the girl, to save her from the evil inside of her. Just like God had prepared her for, some of the leaders didn’t like the ideas she presented. Some even protested, but not for long. The Priest had understood Isabella’s vision and he was behind it right away. He too believed it came from the mighty God himself. So he had listened and Isabella had managed to remove her worst competition from the position as the Priest’s right hand. She had managed to remove two of those closest to him, the very two who were supposed to take over once the Priest wasn’t there anymore. One left the church completely and the other was disowned by the Priest. Now Isabella was the sole heir to the throne.

  Yes, God had been good and faithful in Isabella’s life and now he was being faithful again. He was slowly helping her by removing the last competition and resistance in the church that was left. She had no use for them anymore. She was ready to take the throne and claim her right.

  Soon she was going to have her victory. What a sweet victory it was going to be. All thanks to the good Lord who would never abandon her and never forget his promises to her.

  Isabella was interrupted in her praises when someone knocked at the door. She snorted in irritation and got up to open it. Outside stood one of her loyal leaders, one of those she had trained herself when he arrived at the camp as a teenager. He looked at her and bowed his head in respect as she had taught him to.

  Behind him stood two police officers.

  Chapter 47

  Bjarne Larsen still thought of himself as a man of God. Even if he had left the church many years ago he still believed in God and in doing good to others. But he had long ago lost his belief in man.

  People were in his opinion permeated and poisoned by evil. Especially religious people. They were by far the worst. That lesson had Bjarne Larsen learned many years ago. Religion was the worst thing mankind had ever come up with. It was the cause of most wars and most of the misery found in this forsaken world. Therefore Bjarne Larsen stayed far away from anyone who called himself or herself a religious person. But he hadn’t turned his back on God. Not entirely. He still believed in Him.

  He just didn’t believe He cared about people.

  “God decided to leave us all alone many years ago,” he told himself as he put water in the kettle and placed it on
the stove. “Guess He just had enough of all of our nonsense and cruelty towards each other.”

  There was a time when Bjarne Larsen believed that God cared about him and the rest of the people on this earth. Back when he was young and searching for meaning in life he had been part of the Danish Tvind empire - a left wing experiment founded by the mysterious Mogens Amdi Petersen. They were hippies and founded schools in Denmark and traveled to India and created The Necessary Teacher College. They drove in a bus following “The Hippie Trail” through Afghanistan in the late seventies where Bjarne Larsen had met many interesting people among them some who had introduced him to LSD. Bjarne decided then to jump off the bus and stay there a couple of years, but when the Russians invaded the capital Kabul in Seventy-nine he had to go back home to Denmark. By then he was an addict and he continued like that for a few years and thought he was going to be addicted for the rest of his life until he met Anders Granlund. They met at a concert in Copenhagen. Bjarne Larsen was high on drugs yet Anders Granlund had talked to him and started discussing the facts of life and death and suddenly brought the concept of God into the picture. Up until then Bjarne Larsen had never thought about God or even decided if he believed He existed or not. At this point in his life Bjarne Larsen didn’t believe in any kind of divinity except for the divine fix of a drug. Suddenly this guy was telling him about how he believed that the devil used things like drugs to keep people from living out their true God-ordained destinies.

  Bjarne Larsen had liked that. He liked the idea that there was a plan for his life and suddenly he realized that he was in fact wasting his life away. Even if it was his favorite band playing at the concert, he had at that instant decided to go with Anders Granlund.

  Back then “The Way” was an idea and Anders Granlund was nothing but a man with a vision, a dream. There was no camp and no church members. It was just him and a small apartment in Copenhagen that Bjarne followed him into. Anders locked him into a room for a week in that apartment and only provided food and water and a silver crucifix. Every day for hours and hours Anders sat outside the door and read from the bible while Bjarne knocked and banged on the door screaming for a fix, yelling that he needed drugs, but Anders never gave in to his demands and soon Bjarne was clean, the evil was driven out of him. Anders opened the door and brought Bjarne into the kitchen where he made a meal for him and congratulated him on his accomplishment. They prayed for Bjarne’s healing and Bjarne asked God to forgive his sins.

  Later Anders told Bjarne that he needed people like him. If Bjarne wanted to he could help him start a new movement, what he believed would be a new wave in Christianity in this country, maybe even the world. Anders had visions of saving people all over the world and reaching out to the lost ones.

  Bjarne really liked that too.

  So Bjarne told him about his childhood town of Arnakke where his parents owned a big property. He told them most of the land had been used as a campground for schools but it had been closed off for years now. Bjarne told him his parents owned that land and that they could move in there and begin rebuilding it for a small monthly payment.

  So the next day they had gone to see Bjarne’s dad who was so thrilled to see his son again and see that he was free from the bondage of drugs and now had found Jesus and wanted to become a Christian and help others.

  “You can stay in the camp as long as you want,” his dad had told them. “I’ll help you rebuild it. I’m just so happy that my boy is finally back,” he had cried.

  That’s how “The Way” ended up in Arnakke and now since Bjarne had inherited the property he was now also the rightful owner of the camp. That was how he managed to leave the church again after almost fifteen years. That’s why the Priest had to let him go without stopping him like he normally did.

  When and where it all went wrong at the camp, Bjarne Larsen couldn’t tell, but somehow along the way they all got lost. Bjarne Larsen tried on several occasions to point out that he disapproved of the way they treated the young people, how they were used as forced labor, of the way they weren’t allowed to leave and especially how they treated that young girl who couldn’t help it.

  “She is mentally ill. She needs medication,” he kept telling them. But no one listened. He tried everything to help her and got the idea that maybe she suffered from some sort of brain damage caused by the exposure to radiation while she was still in her mother’s womb. But he couldn’t get them to listen to his arguments, and then they came up with that horrendous idea to impregnate her.

  Bjarne Larsen sighed when he heard the water boil. He got up from his chair and searched for the coffee in the cabinet. He never liked thinking about what had happened back then, but it wasn’t healthy to keep things like that bottled up inside. That they all had sex with the girl wasn’t the worst part for him, the worst part was that he had participated. Bjarne hadn’t said no and he had regretted that all of his life. You could call it peer pressure, you could call it fear, but Bjarne knew the real reason why he hadn’t said no.

  Because he wanted to. He wanted to have sex with that girl. Oh, the realization of your own weakness, it hurt so bad, so deeply. The pain and the anguish of regretting your past had almost eaten him up afterwards.

  Once the night was over he had cried and punished himself with the whip again and again, punishing himself for this secret pleasure, this desire that could be born from nothing but evil.

  That was when he realized that they were in fact the ones that had evil living inside of them. All these religious hypocrites were in fact pure evil. He was evil. That realization made him leave the church and the camp during the night.

  He had only been back once since. To reclaim was what rightfully his.

  Chapter 48

  I called Gunnar Moll at the SIS first thing in the morning and told him about the water post and how I suspected it was the source that had contaminated my dad. Gunnar Moll was very happy to hear from me and told me they would send a team out there immediately to seal it and examine the area.

  “If it’s in the water at the post then it might be the source of what has contaminated the people in the camp.”

  “That’s what I thought,” I replied. “But what I wonder is how it got into the water in the first place?”

  Bjarne Moll cleared his throat. “Well that is a good question, since polonium-210 is not something you come across every day. It’s very difficult to get a hold of. Polonium in large quantities can only be used by the government of a country that has military or civilian nuclear facilities. Only a few countries produce polonium. One of them is Russia because the country produces polonium for industry.”

  “So that’s why they think the Russian government was behind the death of Alexander Litvinenko?”

  “Precisely,” he answered.

  “So what you’re telling me is basically that this can’t be an accident? It can’t accidentally have spilled into the water?” I asked.

  “No it can’t. Someone must have put it there for some reason. Someone poisoned that water.”

  “But if the water is contaminated then why didn’t anyone else in the area get sick? Why is it only the people living in the camp? And why only some of them?” I said.

  “That’s a also a good question. We’ll have to look into all that. I alerted the police after the doctor discovered that they had a patient who was killed by polonium and the forensic lab is now testing the bodies to learn if the three others also were killed by it. They decided to evacuate the camp and I have a team at the hospital in Holbaek right now cleansing all of the church members. That’ll give us time and room to investigate the water up there as well.”

  We drove the kids to the hospital to be with my dad who was thrilled to have some “intelligent company for once,” as he put it. After talking a little with Dad we drove to the local police station and told them all we knew. They were very interested and Officer Frederik Knudsen who was in charge of the investigation listened carefully and wrote everything down on a not
epad. We told him that we thought the church members were being killed and that we feared that Bjarne Larsen would be the next victim. Isabella was already in a safe place at the hospital so I wasn’t worried about her.

  “Those are the last two who were part of the leader group back then,” I said.

  Officer Knudsen nodded slowly and pensively. I got the sense that he didn’t quite believe us even if he wanted to.

  “Listen,” I said. “We know it’s a strange story, but polonium 210 is not something that appears by a coincidence. Someone has put it in the water up there to kill those people. Four are dead already.”

  Officer Frederik Knudsen leaned backwards with a deep sigh. “I am very interested about the story about the girl Edwina and we will certainly look into that. If what you’re telling me is true, then it is very serious. About the other stuff, I hear all you’re saying, but the problem I’m facing is I just received a phone call a minute before you stepped into the police station from the SIS telling us the water is clean. There is no contamination of the water in the camp. Not of polonium 210 or anything else. The water is clean.”

  I looked at Sune. He shrugged. “I don’t understand,” I said. “I was so certain.”

  “Well, all I can do is look at the facts and they’re telling me that if these people were killed by polonium 210, they didn’t get it through the water. The SIS did find some by that water-post you told them about. But only very little and it was on the post, on the handle, not in the water.”

  “It had to have come into the camp from somewhere else,” I mumbled. “I still feel we should talk to Bjarne Larsen.”

  Officer Knudsen nodded. “I have a few questions for him of my own. I’ll go with you.”

  Chapter 49