City of Exiles (9781101607596)

by Nevala-lee, Alec

  As he limped onward, however, he began to have second thoughts. The snow made it difficult to move quickly, and the pain in his leg was growing worse. What was only half a mile on the map began to feel much longer. And it was only a matter of time, he knew, before he was discovered.

  An instant later, through the snow, he saw something so strange that it seemed like a hallucination: a door set into the bedrock at the base of the cathedral. It looked like the entrance to a modern office, except surrounded by blocks of irregular stone. Staring into its glowing rectangle, Karvonen realized that he knew exactly what it was. And it gave him an idea.

  He went up to the door and looked inside. Through the glass, he could see a brightly lit space with chairs and a reception desk. After only the shortest of pauses, he opened the door and entered.

  Behind the desk, a secretary was on the phone. When he tried to get her attention, she looked him over doubtfully, then raised a finger and turned away, signaling that he would need to wait.

  Karvonen was in no mood to be patient. Lowering his carrying case, he opened it and took out the shotgun. He raised it and, aiming at random, fired into one of the frosted partitions behind the desk.

  The partition shattered, the fragments raining to the ground in a long tinkle of glass. With a gasp, the receptionist spun in her chair, eyes wide, and let the phone drop from her hands.

  “I apologize for the disturbance,” Karvonen said, shotgun still raised. “But I’m afraid I’m in a bit of a hurry—”

  51

  When the news came over the radio, Wolfe sensed the change in mood at once. She was in the backseat of the police van, riding next to Laila, whose legs and wrists were shackled. For the past few minutes, as they made their way through the storm to the nearest station, Laila had been brooding and silent, but now, hearing the latest dispatch, she sat up suddenly in her seat. Wolfe looked at the two officers in the front of the van. “What’s going on?”

  “It’s Karvonen,” Lindegren said, listening to the alert as he drove. “He’s killed a policeman—”

  At the news, Wolfe felt her dismay click forward another notch. “What happened?”

  Lindegren unhooked his radio from the dashboard, asked a question of the dispatcher, then listened to the response. “It was near Uspenski Cathedral,” Lindegren said, replacing the mike. “The constable pulled over a car matching the description of Karvonen’s rental vehicle. That was the last anyone heard from him. It looks like Karvonen shot him three times with a handgun.”

  “So he’s killing Finns now.” Wolfe looked over at Laila, whose face had gone white. “What about his car?”

  “Sounds like it’s still at the scene,” Lindegren said. “Witnesses are saying he escaped on foot. Police have sealed off the park near the cathedral. The Presidential Palace is just across the canal, so security there is already moving in. Though if there’s any justice, our men will find him first.”

  In his voice, Wolfe heard a helpless anger, which she also saw in the junior officer’s face. “How far is it?”

  “Ten minutes, if we hurry.” Lindegren glanced out the windshield. “It won’t be easy in this weather. Still—”

  Wolfe said nothing, sensing that Lindegren didn’t need much in the way of persuasion. Finally, without a word, Lindegren reversed the van at the next intersection, turning back the way they had come, and used his radio to report that they were heading for the cathedral.

  As they pressed onward, their progress slowed by the snow, Wolfe remembered that she owed Harju a call. Fishing out her phone, she dialed the number that the investigator at the airport had provided, although she assumed, based on his silence, that there would not be any news.

  She was wrong. “I have an update on survivors,” Harju said, speaking over the din of the incident command center. “Chigorin is alive. The fuselage broke in half on impact. The crew at the front of the plane was killed, but Chigorin and at least a few others at the back survived. He’s badly injured, possibly paralyzed, but I’m told that they think he’ll make it.”

  Wolfe stared out at the storm, unable to believe the news. “What about Powell?”

  “I don’t know.” The lead investigator’s tone was apologetic. “Please understand that the situation is in great confusion, and we’re still waiting for a list of names. The Ministry of Emergency Situations is supposed to give us an update soon. I’ll call you back when I know more.”

  He hung up. Wolfe pocketed her phone, then turned to the others. “Chigorin made it. He’s going to survive.”

  As she related what the investigator had said, she began to feel something like hope. She noticed, however, that the others did not seem as elated by the news, while Laila had withdrawn again into sullen silence.

  Ten minutes later, they arrived at the scene of the shooting. In the shadow of the cathedral, barriers had been set into place, and officers milled around the area like strange snowmen in their fur hats. As Wolfe got out, she saw a cluster of cadets from the Presidential Palace, armed with rifles, awkward in their overcoats and white spats. The snow was falling more thickly than ever.

  Wolfe and Lindegren headed for the heart of the scene, their badges out, leaving Laila in the van with the junior officer. Up ahead, beyond the barricades, she could make out the body of the constable, already dusted with snow. In the faces of the policemen around her, she saw the same impotent rage as before, and knew that none of them would hesitate to take Karvonen down.

  Lindegren waved at a cadet stationed nearby, evidently a friend. As the cadet approached, crystals of ice adhering to his coat and hat, Lindegren greeted him in Finnish, then indicated the woman at his side. “This is Rachel Wolfe from London. She’s been tracking your killer.”

  The cadet gave her a short nod, then gestured at the van. “Who do you have here?”

  “A material witness,” Wolfe said. “We were taking her to the station when we heard the news.”

  As she spoke, she shot a glance at Lindegren, who appeared to understand. Given the mood of the crowd, it would be wise to conceal the fact that Laila had been Karvonen’s accomplice. Lindegren turned back to the cadet. “What can you tell us about the search so far?”

  The cadet jerked his head toward the cathedral. “Witnesses saw him going into the park. We’re trying to track him, but snow and wind are erasing his footprints, and there are too many people on the scene. The cathedral has been evacuated. We’re searching it, but there are a lot of places where someone like this could hide. The dogs should be here within the hour.”

  “We can’t wait that long,” Wolfe said. “I need to see it now. Can you take me there?”

  The cadet glanced at Lindegren, who nodded. After returning to the van, where they told the junior officer to drive Laila to the station for booking, they headed into the park, the cadet marching ahead of them. Looking over her shoulder, Wolfe caught a glimpse of Laila’s face through the van’s rear window, her features pale and grim. Then the van was gone.

  Wolfe turned to the cathedral, which was barely visible through the veil of snow. She tried to see it as it might have looked to Karvonen, fleeing from the scene of this latest murder, and saw that it was both the most obvious destination and too prominent a hiding place. In this storm, she thought, he would head for the nearest visible landmark, but she wasn’t sure whether he would stay there.

  A second later, lowering her eyes, she saw what appeared to be an office door set into the bedrock at the cathedral’s base. “What’s that?”

  The cadet looked where she was pointing. “Data center. It’s built in an old bomb shelter under the cathedral. We’ve checked it. The door was already closed and locked when we got here—”

  Wolfe went up to it anyway. Trying the door, she confirmed that it was locked, then shaded her eyes and looked inside. Beyond the glass, the interior was dark. As her vision adjusted, she b
egan to make out the outlines of a reception desk, unoccupied, and a few empty cubicles.

  She was about to turn away when she noticed the glint of something on the floor. Taking out her penlight, she directed its beam through the doorway, illuminating a scatter of broken glass. Looking more closely at the other side, she saw that one of the frosted partitions near the reception desk was missing.

  Behind her, the cadet was growing impatient. “We should be going. They’ll be missing us back at the—” Before he could finish his sentence, he broke off, startled, as Wolfe drew her gun. “What are you doing?”

  “Cover your ears,” Wolfe said, and fired once, shooting out the door’s glass panel. Knocking away the remaining shards with her elbow, she reached inside and unlocked the door. “Come on.”

  She opened it and went into the data center, which at first glance seemed deserted. As she and the others entered the facility, guns drawn, she saw the receptionist’s vacant chair, as well as an adjoining bicycle room. Beyond the reception desk was the main floor, also empty, lit only by the glow of computers. Fifteen flat-screen monitors were arranged in a semicircular console at the center of the floor, in front of a large projection screen.

  “Someone should be here,” Wolfe said, checking the room. “A center like this should always have someone on duty. Unless—”

  She paused. From the hallway to her right, there came a muffled shout. Heading for the noise, she swung around the corner, gun first, and found herself at the closed double doors of a conference room. It had been chained shut with a bike lock. On the carpet, there was a pile of cell phones. She went up to the door, keeping her back to the wall. “Who’s there?”

  A chorus of Finnish voices resolved themselves into the words of a man speaking in accented English. “We’re all here,” the man said. “He took our phones and locked us inside.”

  As he spoke, he pushed the door open a fraction of an inch, which was as far as the chain would allow it to go. Wolfe looked in. Through the gap, she saw the flushed face of a man in short sleeves, with several others standing behind him, making five in all. As the officers went to find something to break down the door, Wolfe spoke into the opening. “Where is he?”

  “Gone,” the man said. “But he took Antero with him. Our project manager with Helsinki Power. The doors have electronic access, so he needed someone to let him into the tunnels—”

  “Tunnels?” Wolfe asked. An alarm bell began to go off in her head. “What tunnels?”

  Before the man could respond, Lindegren and the cadet reappeared, each carrying a fire extinguisher in his hands. Wolfe stood back as they began hammering at the doors, alternating their blows, until one of the handles finally broke. Tossing the extinguishers aside, they undid the loosened lock and unwound the chain, allowing the doors to be opened.

  As the workers filed out, Wolfe went up to the man who had spoken through the door, who turned out to be the chief engineer on duty. “I need you to show me where this man would have gone.”

  “Of course.” While the others retrieved their cell phones and began giving statements to the cadet, Wolfe and Lindegren followed the engineer into the hall. Leaving the main floor, they entered a room lined with row after row of computer servers, each locked inside a separate orange cabinet. The room was clean, climate controlled, and filled with the low hum of data processors.

  “This building was carved out of the bedrock during the war,” the engineer explained, leading them into the bowels of the facility. “It was originally built as a refuge for city officials during Russian bomb raids. A few years ago, we leased the space. Down here, our servers are safe. Since we’re underground, we can use seawater to cool the machines. And the excess heat goes here—”

  Rounding a corner, they entered an area where the walls gave way to bare rock, the marks of the tunneling tools still visible. Across the rough gray stone were bolted sets of horizontal pipes, from which Wolfe could hear the murmur of running water. Up ahead was a metal doorway. The engineer unlocked it, then beckoned them inside. “Watch your step.”

  Wolfe went in, with Lindegren close behind, and followed the engineer down a set of stairs. Looking around, she saw that they were on a catwalk lit by a grid of fluorescent tubes, with a network of pipes and ducts snaking across the walls. Directly in front of them, a spiral staircase descended down a rectangular shaft, leading into the caverns below.

  “This is where the water ends up,” the manager said. “The district heating network, seventy meters underground. Forty kilometers of tunnels, delivering heat to the rest of the city. This is where he wanted to go.”

  Examining the floor at the edge of the shaft, Wolfe noticed a set of drying boot prints. The marks, she saw, had been made by someone who had recently been in the snow. And they had been left not long before.

  Wolfe stared down the spiral staircase, which wound into unfathomable depths. She didn’t want to go down there, but saw that there was no other way. “The man who was taken hostage. Who is he?”

  “A recent hire,” the engineer said. “He works for the energy company. I don’t know him well. But he has a wife and child—”

  Looking into the darkness, Wolfe knew that Karvonen, who had already shot one man today, wouldn’t hesitate to kill his hostage as well. As she reflected on this, she heard the sound of footsteps, and saw that the cadet had joined them on the catwalk. He seemed about to say something, but when he looked down at the darkened rectangle, he fell silent instead.

  A map of the tunnels had been posted to the wall. Wolfe tore it down and handed it to Lindegren. “Are you coming?”

  After a pause, Lindegren nodded grimly. He turned to the cadet. “Call it in. I want police stationed at all access points to the surface. And I’ll need a Karhu team brought in to sweep the tunnels. Tell them to bring dogs.” He turned back to Wolfe. “You’re sure you want to do this?”

  “No,” Wolfe said. She turned toward the stairs. “But I don’t think we have a choice.”

  She began to descend, the metal steps ringing beneath her feet. As she headed down the shaft, she wanted to pray, but found that she no longer knew how. Instead, she raised her gun and kept it pointed into the darkness, seeking comfort of another kind, as she and Lindegren passed into the tunnels under the city.

  52

  Karvonen moved down the tunnel. A few steps ahead of him, marching at gunpoint, was the project manager he had enlisted to guide him through this underground world. The tunnel along which they were passing was wide enough to drive through, with sleek heat and water pipes running along the rock walls. Lights were set in the ceiling every twenty feet, making the tunnels easier to navigate, but they also left him feeling dangerously exposed.

  The project manager was a stout man with a bald head, and he puffed heavily as he led Karvonen to the access shaft. From time to time, he would comment nervously on their surroundings, as if giving a guided tour: “What we see here is only part of the system. The data center opened just a year ago, and is already generating enough heat for five hundred homes—”

  Walking behind him with the shotgun, Karvonen barely listened. This was the kind of man he despised, servile but humorless, navigating his little world like a rat in a maze. Karvonen was more interested in the maze itself, with its odor of stone and faint rumble of pumps and turbines. He had already noted that the heat pipelines ran along one side of the tunnel, with cooling pipes on the other, which would allow him to maintain his bearings.

  Otherwise, it would be easy to get lost. Helsinki, he knew, was riddled with kilometers of these passages. With historic buildings on one side and the sea on the other, the city was unable to expand in the usual fashion, so instead, it went straight down, excavating caverns and tunnels in the bedrock that lay so close to the surface. The result had been a secret city, an underground reflection of its sister above, and while the expansion was justified for pra
ctical reasons, Karvonen sensed that there were also darker impulses at work.

  A city, he thought now, plunging deeper into the tunnels, was something like a man. Every great city was driven to explore the underworld, building its shadow house in order to grow. And, as with men, it was only through a journey into the darkness that it could reach its full potential.

  Karvonen belatedly noticed that the project manager had slowed. “What’s wrong?”

  “We’re here,” the manager said. He pointed to a utility corridor up ahead. “See?”

  Karvonen followed the gesture with his eyes. Past a pair of fire doors, he saw a set of metal steps, which seemed to lead to the surface. “Stay here. I’m going to check it out. Don’t you dare move.”

  He crept forward, keeping the shotgun raised. Reaching the doors, he went inside in a low crouch, leading with the barrel, and found that the room was empty. The stairs lay directly in front of him. Leaning back, he saw that they spiraled upward until they reached a second level, perhaps twenty meters above, where his view was obscured by the landing overhead.

  With his shotgun pointed toward the ceiling, Karvonen waited, listening. Around him, he heard the whisper of unseen machines, the movement of water in heating pipes, and then—

  From somewhere above came the ring of footsteps. It was hard to tell how many men there were, or whether they were workers from the energy company or something else. A moment later, however, he heard the crackle of a radio, the words impossible to distinguish, and then, more ominously, the barking of dogs.

  Karvonen backed away from the stairs, his shotgun still trained on the opening above. “We can’t go up,” Karvonen said without turning. “They’re sealing off the shaft. I need you to—”

  Too late, he heard footfalls on the stone floor. He turned, bringing the shotgun down and around, just in time to see the project manager fleeing up the corridor, panting as he ran. A second later, he was gone.