Meltwater (Fire and Ice)

transparency of information was of paramount importance. That Sabine Dumont had deserved the scandal that she had found herself in when everyone in Belgium discovered what she
had done. That if she chose to take her own life, that was up to her. It was a consequence of her actions ten years before, not Freeflow’s.
    That was unfair and untrue.
    Erika Zinn had as good as killed Sébastien’s mother.
    And Sébastien owed his mother a lot. She had always believed in him – when he had been expelled from high school for breaking the leg of that jerk Marcel with a hammer, when he had
been arrested for getting his own back on the kid who accused him of cheating at university. It was down to her that he had eventually graduated as an engineer, and that he now had a good job with
the electricity company.
    No one else had cared.
    He had given her a hard time when she was alive, a very hard time, secure in the knowledge that she loved him unreservedly. He regretted that now. He would make up for it.
    The anger and the hatred that he had nurtured for nearly two years flared up again. Erika was going to die. She deserved to die. Of that, Sébastien was sure.
    The idea that he should do something tangible to avenge his mother’s death had come to him after his mother’s funeral, during a long night of drinking with his brother. At first
François hadn’t thought he was serious, but the more Sébastien thought about it, the more it seemed the right thing to do, the only thing to do. And he could persuade
François. His younger brother was if anything more devastated than he was by what had happened, and, as always, he followed Sébastien’s lead. Sébastien knew he would have
to do the actual killing himself, but he could rely on his brother to help. And it had been François who had thought of infiltrating himself into Freeflow.
    If only Sébastien had been slightly quicker on the volcano, Erika would be dead and he would be back in Belgium. But it hadn’t worked out that way.
    François had suggested bagging the whole plan, lying low until the ash cloud lifted and trying again somewhere else. But that didn’t make sense, and Sébastien had told him
so. They didn’t have much time. They simply had to do what they had set out to do: kill Erika Zinn. Sure, there was an ever-increasing chance that they would get caught, but Sébastien
really didn’t want to risk getting arrested before they had achieved their objective. Killing Erika was all that mattered.
    François had understood. They had gone into this together; they would finish it together.
    Hafnarfjördur was on the way to the airport from Keflavík. François had said that Erika wanted to spend an hour at the Blue Lagoon before the airport. Plan A was for
François to drive her by himself towards the lagoon, and meet up with Sébastien on a quiet track Sébastien had checked out earlier. Plan A was good. Plan B, if someone else
drove her, wasn’t quite so good, but still might work.
    Plan C, if she changed her mind and was driven directly to airport, didn’t really exist. There was no Plan C. They would just follow her and take any opportunity they could.
    They might be lucky, but frankly, under any of the three plans, there was a chance they would get caught. However, they were committed now. They had to finish what they had come to do, and take
the consequences.
    Sébastien’s phone buzzed and a text message came through.
    Plan B
    Sébastien took a deep breath. He left some krónur on the table, and hurried outside to his car.

CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
    I T WAS WONDERFUL to be out of Reykjavík and on the open road. Once Dúddi had driven past the town of
Hafnarfjördur, they were into a bleak, brown landscape of rock and dirt. No trees, just a light dusting of green moss. On the right was the sea, and on the left, in the distance, a low ridge
of jagged mountains. They passed a perfectly conical miniature mountain, like the volcano in a child’s drawing, and then turned off the main airport road following signs to the Blue
Lagoon.
    It was a cold clear morning; the temperature could not have been much above freezing. Erika could see steam rising up in great billows from the foot of the range of mountains. ‘Is that
it?’ she asked Dúddi.
    ‘Yep.’
    ‘But what are all those buildings next to it? It looks like a power station?’
    Indeed there were lines of pylons running across the lava field towards the steam.
    ‘It is. The lagoon is totally