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The Dead Drop

A black notebook, $20,000 in Danish krona and a deadly dilemma: Who killed Rebecka's grandaddy, and why?

By Hamish AlexanderPublished 3 years ago 9 min read
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Image by Free-Photos from Pixabay

She had that unsettling feeling the moment the snow lifted and she could see the cabin through the midwinter trees, somber and oddly still in the gloom. There was no sign of life inside, not even the telltale smoke from the chimney, just the eerie quiet of the white, snowbound forest all around. She paused, and that moment of dread rippled over her once again, that moment she hoped would never come but, deep down, knew it would.

The days were short, the nights long this time of year in Sweden’s far north, and the silences ran deep. The snow had a way of absorbing sound, so that even the sharp, crisp sound of a branch snapping under the weight of heavy snow was muffled, the sound dissipating and disappearing in the frigid air so one couldn’t even tell which direction it came from. Silence was a familiar feature of the winter landscape, but this silence was different.

Mikael, her maternal grandfather who had raised her alone in the wilderness from the age of five, 10 years ago now, had warned her this day would come. She didn’t want to believe him, of course, but he had never given her a reason to doubt him. All those long and lonely nights of listening and learning together, reading and rehearsing what needed to be done — this would somehow keep her alive, he promised. Or give her a chance, anyway.

He had told her what to do if the day ever came, in immaculate detail. Keep your head down, pause, focus, calm your nerves, pause again, and focus harder. Go to our secret place. Find what you need to find. Don’t be seen, and if you are seen, don’t tell anyone. No one. Lower your heart-rate. Think. Then act. Act as if your life depends on it. Because it just might.

From a young age she understood it had something to do with her mother, who she could no longer remember because it was so long ago that she had last seen her alive. She couldn’t remember seeing her father, at all, ever. She learned it was not something to be talked about — that something had happened, in the faraway city where she had been born, a city of 70 rivers and canals where they spoke a strange, ancient language.

Mikael told her, slowly and gently and over time, that she would never see her parents again, that she had been dealt a terrible injustice as a child, that what had happened to her was wrong and unfair, but it had happened and there was no way of changing the past now. It was the way of the world, and the world could be cruel to those who didn’t deserve cruelty.

She didn’t even know if Mikael was really her grandfather, if his stories were made up, but it seemed a good story to tell. No one would question it, and the region was isolated enough that they were unlikely to come across many other people anyway. Life in the wilderness was always about self-reliance, and being resilient. They saw few if any other people during normal times as it was, and these were not normal times.

Image by Analogicus from Pixabay

She learned her name was Rebecka — an origin word meaning servant of God — which they both found wryly funny, as neither she nor Mikael were particularly religious. Mikael was a man of science, and he spent long hours writing mathematical equations of some kind in a small journal, no more than a notebook really. A small, black notebook.

That notebook seemed important to him, Rebecka realized from a young age. When he wasn’t scrawling calculations in it, he would fastidiously hide it away, somewhere deep in the woods — their secret hiding place.

He had a small library of books in different languages in his cabin, and that was how she first learned to read, and speak different languages. She learned that Danish and Norwegian are similar, identical even, in vocabulary, but sound quite differentwhen spoken. Norwegian and her native Swedish are closer in terms of pronunciation, she learned, but the words are different.Oddly, Russian came easiest to her, almost as if it was something ingrained deep inside her, from early childhood, and yet it was supposed to be the hardest to learn.

Mikael was officially registered as a resident with the state authorities in Älvaden. Rebecka did not know if she was registered, too; she just took it on faith. The pair kept to themselves, and rarely went to town except for supplies. The state authorities always seemed to be distracted by some crisis or other, and couldn’t be bothered to pry closely into their lives. There were stories of a series of unexplained incidents, involving agents from another country, but what county, and why, no one knew. If anyone knew anything, they certainly weren’t talking, certainly not the state authorities,.

In his quiet, gentle way, Mikael taught Rebecka everything he knew about the natural world around them, from the types of trees to the way different birds nested in the trees at different times of the year, and how the soil, birds and trees were all connected in a delicate but complex cycle of life. The climate was changing, Mikael said, slowly at first but at a faster pace more recently. This was not normal, he told her. It was worrying.

She learned about about upheavals in the jet stream and ocean currents, how shifting weather patterns in one part of the world were reshaping entire planet, climate systems in other parts of the world, and the fossil fuel industry was largely to blame.

In his younger years Mikael had been a scientist of some kind, Rebecka guessed. He did not talk much about his work, only that it required long hours of concentration, and there was no money in it. The past is a foreign country, he had said once, and not to be discussed.

He opened her eyes to the ways of survival in the wild, how to stay warm in the dead of winter without shelter or easy access to food. Knowledge was the key to everything, he said, even the secret of life on Earth. He told her about a unique stand of pines near the nature reserve, not far from the border with Norway, and how, if anything should happen to him, she should go to their secret place and dig out a hollowed-out rock buried at the base of a tall pine whose location she had memorized as a child.

And so, here she was, standing in the snow, her slight body braced against a suddenly stiff wind as snow began to spin and twist and curl on itself, like a beautiful but deadly whirlwind of ice crystals.

She peered through the darkening light at the silent, still cabin, the only real home she had ever known, and she knew then she would never see her grandfather alive again.

She swallowed. Her throat felt dry. She turned and slipped back into the gathering night, following her own tracks and then, in one sudden, fluid motion, she jumped aside onto a patch of ice, where her tracks would be harder to read. She followed the ice, carefulnot to fall. She knew where she needed to be, and she knew she did not have much time to get there.

She wanted to cry, but this was not the time. There would be time enough for that later.


If you’re reading this, it is the day we both hoped would never come, the note began. It was placed carefully alongside the inside cover of the black notebook inside the hollowed rock, which was exactly where he’d promised it would be, together with $20,000 in Danish krona.

The bulk of the money was in Danish krona, not Norwegian or Swedish krona, he explained in the note, because Norway was the first place they’d assume she’d run to, as the border was so close and she couldn’t chance staying in Sweden. There were too many ears. And while most people usually meant well, she would be easy to find if she stayed close to the place she had called home these many years.

The $20,000 in Danish krona wasn’t much, he admitted, but it was all he had been able to squirrel away over the years. Science didn’t pay, not his kind of science anyway. And while the security agencies would pay handsomely for the notebook and not think twice about how much, he could not take blood money, as he called it, and I think I’ve learned enough to know you won’t either. The bills were in low denominations and used, which made them hard to trace; he had saved them over time during his occasional trips to Denmark, far to the south, across the Øresund Millennium Bridge.

The most important thing, he said, was the notebook. It was full of equations, which were encrypted. He had worked on them his entire life, he explained, and there were those who would kill to get their hands on them. Who had killed.

He had made a point of keeping everything low tech, he explained, away from laptops, portable devices and memory sticks, because technology was easy to trace, even encrypted tehcnology, especially if the big security agencies wanted the information badly enough. And there were security agencies, mostly rogue, who wanted these calculations in the worst possible way.

An old-fashioned notebook — simple pen and paper — is the safest, most personal, most private way to store sensitive information, he told her, provided nothing happens to the notebook itself, and provided no one is alllowed to copy it or store it in a retrieval system. His handwritten calculations were encrypted, but the security agencies would be able to break the encryption in a heartbeat. It’s what they did. The encryption was more in case someone stumbled on the notebook by accident. To the uneducated eye it looked like gibberish, just scrawl in an elderly’s man’s shaky handwriting, not something to be taken seriously.

It was midwinter, but soon it would be spring, he reminded her in his note. She needed to be in Copenhagen on Earth Day, in time for the climate protests. An older woman he knew well and could trust would be waiting for her. She would know the younger girl by sight. Rebecka should hand this woman the notebook, but with care; there would be police at the climate protests, even in Denmark, and rogue agencies had infiltrated the police in Denmark, too. The older woman would ask her where she wanted to go after that, and what she wanted to to do with her life, and she would see to it that Rebecka was safe and sound and would live to see her 16th birthday, and beyond.

It all seemed very mysterious, but it was no mystery, he wrote. The world ran on fossil fuel; the oil-and-gas industry controlled all, and what the world really needed was a green, inexpensive, easy-to-use, easy-to-produce form of energy that any nation could afford to make on its own, and in so doing save the climate, and save the world. He had worked at this his entire life and now, finally, as he was about to pass from this earth, he believed he had broken it. Those boring equations could save life as we know it, and now it was on Rebecka’s slender shoulders to get the equations to the outside world.

It was dangerous and it was wrong and it wasn’t right or fair that she had lost those she loved, and who loved her, but that was the way of the world. The world can be a cruel place, he told her, but there are beautiful people in it. Remember this always.

She wanted to cry, but this was not the time. There would be time enough for that later.

Mystery
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About the Creator

Hamish Alexander

Earth community. Visual storyteller. Digital nomad. Natural history + current events. Raconteur. Cultural anthropology.

I hope that somewhere in here I will talk about a creator who will intrigue + inspire you.

Twitter: @HamishAlexande6

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