City of Exiles (9781101607596)

by Nevala-lee, Alec

  Karvonen’s finger tensed briefly on the trigger, then relaxed. A shot would only give away his position. In any case, keeping a hostage now would only slow him down, when he had to act even more decisively than before.

  Leaving the utility corridor, he returned to the main tunnel. The project manager was nowhere to be seen. With his free hand, Karvonen reached for the fire doors and swung them shut one at a time, closing off the entrance to the stairs. Then, looking around the tunnel, he tried to figure out his next move. There were access points to the surface every two or three hundred meters, but the shafts from the main passage were probably blocked off by now.

  Directly ahead of him, three pairs of doors opened onto a set of side tunnels leading away from the main passage. After a moment’s indecision, he chose one at random, and with the shotgun raised, he went in.

  As he pressed onward, he tried to keep heading east, which would eventually take him to the passenger harbor. Here the tunnels grew narrower and darker, some lit only by a row of fluorescent tubes along the ceiling, while others were not lit at all. He passed through one door, then another, checking each corridor as he went, moving as noiselessly as he could.

  After a minute had gone by, and he had yet to see an access shaft, he slowed his pace. Looking more closely at the tunnel, he saw that the pipes on the walls had switched places. Now the hot water pipes were on his left, with the cooling pipes on the right, which implied that he had doubled back somehow.

  Karvonen lowered his shotgun, trying to decide what to do. His pulse was higher than before, but he forced himself to remain calm. The safest course of action, he concluded, was to stick to the side tunnels and work his way to an access shaft that had not yet been sealed, moving as quickly as possible.

  With this in mind, he continued up the tunnel, where he found himself facing another set of doors. In the end, he chose the darkest passage, trusting that it would protect him, and headed onward, moving away from the light.

  It was at that moment, unknown to him, that Wolfe and Lindegren emerged from the stairwell, some distance away, that led from the data center down to the first underground chamber.

  Wolfe swung into the room, pistol first. It was empty. Taking in her surroundings, her legs aching from the descent, she saw that they were in a cavern with floors of stone, its walls lined with scaffolding and construction equipment. Up ahead, a set of fire doors opened into another chamber, with doors on either side leading into machine halls and tunnels.

  Looking around, Wolfe realized that she had entered an underground labyrinth, and that Karvonen could be anywhere. A glance at her phone was enough to confirm that she no longer had a signal.

  At her side, Lindegren brought out the map of the tunnels, which he had rolled up and tucked into his pocket. Across the laminated schematic, there ran a network of energy and service corridors. Lindegren pointed to a thick gray line moving north from the cathedral. “This is the main tunnel, I think. It goes three kilometers north to Katri Vala Park, where the primary heating and cooling plant is located. From there, it leads to the rest of the network.”

  Wolfe followed the line with her eyes. “Karvonen will stay out of the primary tunnel. It’s the first place anyone would look.” She tried to put herself in Karvonen’s position, studying the map as he might have, then pointed to a tunnel leading eastward. “Here. He was on his way east when he was pulled over. I think he was heading for the harbor. If he has any choice, he’ll keep going that way.”

  She could tell that Lindegren had his doubts about this, but even the slenderest possibility was better than nothing. He rolled up the map again and slid it into his pocket. “All right. Follow me.”

  Drawing his sidearm, he headed for the passage to their right, with Wolfe following close behind. Under her feet, the floor was damp with moisture, which ran in dark gray fingers across the stone. She hoped that the tactical units were in place. Their only real chance of finding Karvonen lay in closing off the shafts to the surface and doing a systematic search of the tunnels, and without a larger team, it would take a miracle to find him and his hostage alive.

  Reaching the end of the corridor, they swung around the corner, timing it silently so that they moved in together. Nothing. They continued onward, Lindegren leading the way, keeping close to the pipes. As they diverged from the main tunnel, the passage grew darker and lower, though the ceiling was still too high for her to reach. Out of the corner of her eye, Wolfe saw cautionary signs posted on the wall, admonishing her sternly in Finnish.

  At the end of the passageway, there was another door. Lindegren checked it, then motioned her forward. “Come on.”

  Going inside, Wolfe found that the tunnel had opened into a larger machine room. In the darkness, she could see two rows of concrete pedestals about the height of her waist, each supporting a horizontal gray drum connected to the ceiling by a pair of white pipes. She didn’t recognize the machines, but thought they were transmission pumps of some kind, and was about to ask Lindegren about this when his chest exploded under a shotgun blast.

  Wolfe fell back as her face was sprayed with blood and bone. As Lindegren crumpled to the floor, dead, she caught a glimpse of a figure at the other end of the room, just the outline of a man in the shadows, but before she could raise her own gun, she heard Karvonen rack the shotgun again.

  As the spent shell fell to the floor, she dropped, ducking behind a pedestal just before Karvonen fired a second time. The blast, deafening in the confined space, struck the pedestal a few inches from her face, sending chips of concrete flying. She felt shards cut her on the cheek, stinging like insects, then heard the pump action of the shotgun cycle once more.

  A second spent shell clattered to the ground. A pause. Then nothing but silence.

  Wolfe was behind the pedestal, her back to the concrete, her gun in a high grip with two hands. Karvonen was somewhere behind and to her right. In front of her lay Lindegren’s body, the pistol still clutched in his fingers.

  The silence deepened. Karvonen, she knew, was waiting. Wolfe strained to hear the tactical unit, but there was no sound. By now, she hoped, they would have posted men at the access shafts, preparing to clear the tunnels. She suspected that Karvonen knew this too.

  Behind her came a quiet footstep. Another. Wolfe wanted to risk a glance around the pedestal, but she forced herself not to move. Instead, she tried to put herself in Karvonen’s place. If he was all the way back here, she realized, he was lost. He would be desperate to keep moving. And he would not hesitate to kill her.

  Pinned behind the pedestal with blood, not all of it hers, trickling down her face, Wolfe found herself remembering what Ilya had said. Sometimes it was best to surrender, like Isaac bound to the altar. And as she considered the body lying next to her now, she knew what she had to do.

  Wolfe felt a rush of despair. She wasn’t ready for this, not by a long shot, although she’d had her whole life to prepare for it. Then something shifted inside her, like a mechanism finally clicking into place, and she found herself praying. Not formally, in words, as she had been taught to do, but mutely, in thought and action, as if prayer were as inevitable as breathing, whether God existed or not.

  Ten yards away, at the other end of the room, Karvonen held his shotgun at eye level, watching for signs of movement. He had used two shells, leaving four in the magazine. It was darker than he would have liked, but the strip of white tape he had laid along the barrel made it easier to sight.

  He knew that the woman was still here. From the glimpse he had managed before she ducked down, he also knew that she was armed. A pistol against a shotgun wasn’t much of a contest, but all the same, he had to be careful. And as he looked around the machine hall, he recognized at last where he was, and realized that she was standing between him and his best way out.

  In the shadows, about thirty feet away, lay the legs of the man he had killed, w
ith the rest of the body concealed by the pedestal. Part of him was glad that he could not see the man’s face, but another part no longer cared. Two of his countrymen were dead at his hands, and a day ago, he would have mourned this. But now, with the suddenness of all great revelations, he saw that such trifles had ceased to matter, and that he was no longer really a Finn at all.

  A nation, he understood, was nothing. A man was an island unto himself, an exile in his own country, and by now, he had shaped and revised himself into something even more. It was a transformation that had been under way ever since he had sat at his grandfather’s knee as a boy, determined to carve out a destiny of his own. And it seemed only fitting that it would reach its full realization here, in this underground world, which reminded him so much of the darkroom.

  He was still coming around to this newfound truth when a voice rose out of the darkness. “Karvonen?”

  Karvonen, suspecting a trick, pointed his shotgun toward the source of the sound. One good blast, he knew, would take off most of the woman’s head, and his pressure on the trigger increased only slightly as she spoke again: “Karvonen, I’m coming out. Listen to me. My name is Rachel Wolfe. I’m a special agent with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Before you do anything else, you need to listen to what I have to say. I’m getting up now.”

  A shadow emerged slowly from behind the pedestal. Sighting across the strip of tape, Karvonen saw that the woman had removed her jacket and was holding it away from her body. In her other hand, she held her pistol, grip outward, in a position of surrender. Her eyes were fixed on his.

  “If you kill me, you’re throwing away your best chance out of here,” Wolfe said as she came into full view. “A tactical team is sweeping the tunnels right now. You know this. To get out of here alive, you need a bargaining chip. Something to trade. And that’s me.”

  Karvonen, still wary, kept the shotgun up. He spoke quietly. “Put the gun on the floor. Then slide it this way.”

  Wolfe obeyed. Keeping her eyes on him, she knelt and set the gun down, arm fully extended, and slid it in his direction. The pistol skated across the floor and came to a stop at his feet. Once it was there, Wolfe put down her jacket, then straightened up. “You’ve got the gun. Now we can talk.”

  Karvonen took a step forward, leaving the pistol on the floor. Eye to eye with Wolfe, he took another step, considering his situation. Like it or not, she had a point. If the police were searching the tunnels, he could only escape with a hostage. It would be easy enough to use her to get to the surface. Then, once he was safely away from the city, he could kill her at his convenience.

  He drew closer, the blood sticky under his feet, until the body of the officer came into view. When they were a few steps apart, he lowered the shotgun. “All right. You take me to where we started. And then—”

  Karvonen paused. Looking down at the officer’s body, he saw that the holster at the dead man’s side was empty, as were his hands. The gun that the man had been carrying was gone.

  He understood, too late, that he had been tricked. With a snarl, he turned to Wolfe, shotgun rising, but before he could pull the trigger, he saw the muzzle flash of the second gun, the one she had just drawn from the back of her belt. Two heavy blows struck him in the chest, one after the other, and then he was on his back, staring up at the darkened ceiling.

  Wolfe came forward, covering him with the pistol she had taken from Lindegren’s hands. Karvonen was on the floor, bleeding from two gunshot wounds. At least one had entered his heart.

  Going up to him, she kicked the shotgun away. It slid across the concrete, where it struck the base of a pedestal and skidded to a stop. Wolfe knew from the earlier shooting that Karvonen had a handgun as well, but she couldn’t see it. She thought it might be in a holster under his jacket.

  “Keep your hands away from your body,” Wolfe said, her voice strange and thin in her ears. “I’m placing you under arrest—”

  In the distance, faintly, she heard footsteps. For a moment, she thought that they were just her imagination, but then she heard the crackle of a radio, and she knew that the tactical unit was on its way.

  She looked down at the man before her. Karvonen’s lips were pulled back in a grimace of pain, but from this angle, it looked like a smile. His eyes were on hers. He was grinning a bloody grin.

  Before she was aware that she was going to say anything, Wolfe heard her own voice, although its tone did not seem to be hers: “You failed. Chigorin is alive. All you’ve done has been for nothing.”

  Karvonen laughed, then began to cough. Blood and sputum ran down his chin, the red startling against the whiteness of his face, and Wolfe knew that he was dying. At the very end, though, before falling silent, he managed to speak, words that would haunt her long after she had emerged from these passages to return to the world above: “You don’t know how wrong you are—”

  53

  At St. Pancras Hospital, near King’s Cross, a rehabilitation center had been established in the southern wing. Much of it was devoted to a therapeutic gym, a large colorless room stocked with weights, roller machines, and treadmills. In the corner, a television played a reality show with the sound turned down.

  A patient was working on the parallel bars, which folded away from the wall. As he paced back and forth, his therapist, a small round woman in a red polo shirt, gave him encouragement and suggested modest corrections to his gait. The patient was careful not to push himself too hard, knowing that good habits were more important than strength, but today, he put extra effort into his routine, knowing that he was being observed from nearby.

  Finally, when his workout was finished, the therapist complimented him warmly, saying that he was taking good steps. As the patient lowered himself into his wheelchair, he was approached by the woman who had been watching from the doorway. It was Wolfe. “How are you doing?”

  “As well as can be expected,” Powell said. He turned to his therapist. “Do you mind if we talk in private?”

  His therapist smiled blandly and left. When he turned back, Powell saw that Wolfe was looking at him with unusual tenderness. He had been hoping to put a better face on his condition. For the past six weeks, out of misguided concern, he had been kept in the dark, and he was extremely tired of it.

  All the same, when he looked down at his ravaged body, he couldn’t blame the others entirely. There was a cast on his right hand and a splint on his left leg, with a snug body brace holding the rest of him together. For the first two weeks after the crash, he had been under sedation, and he was still on more drugs than he cared to remember. They helped with the pain, at least to a point, although his throat was constantly sore after having been intubated for so long.

  He had spent more than a month at the burn unit in St. Petersburg. As soon as his mind was clear enough, having a great deal of time on his hands, he had carefully studied his charts. He had been brought in with second-degree burns across his back and legs, as well as various internal injuries and fractures. For a week, he had breathed through a ventilator, a pump inserted into his stomach to reduce the swelling, and had endured repeated surgeries on his ankle, along with a series of skin grafts. Even now, whenever he tried to rest, he felt the constant itch of healing tissue.

  If he was grateful for anything, it was for the ventilator hood he had worn as the plane went down, which had protected his face and lungs from the fire and smoke. This, above all else, had saved his life.

  Of the twelve people on the plane, only four had survived. Both pilots had perished, as had Chigorin’s chief of security. A flight attendant had escaped with severe burns and internal injuries. Chigorin’s assistant was still in intensive care. And while the grandmaster himself was expected to live, it had been widely reported that he would never walk again.

  After his return to London, Powell had found that the greatest change was not physical but mental. He still had f
lashbacks from the poison, but on the whole, they were bearable. Throughout it all, a core of himself had remained constant and sane, and as a result, he no longer feared his father’s dementia, even after confronting it in terms that he would not soon forget.

  One consequence of the poison had taken him by surprise. It had subtly changed his perception of life. No longer did existence seem as orderly and logical as before. Instead, even with his sanity restored, it seemed full of signs, mysterious affinities that struck him wherever he turned. Seeing the world through a madman’s eyes had taught him the limitations of his old, more rational self, and this realization had been a crucial factor in his most recent decision.

  Now, shifting in his wheelchair, he turned to Wolfe, who had been waiting patiently. “In case you’re wondering, there’s nothing wrong with my mind,” Powell said. “I’m tired of asking for straight answers. Cornwall keeps putting me off. I hope you aren’t planning on doing the same thing.”

  “That isn’t why I came,” Wolfe said. She had lost weight since their last meeting, and she still bore the marks of her recent exertions, although at least her hair was growing back. “I was hoping that if I told you more, I could convince you to change your mind. What have you heard?”

  “Only what I see on the news.” Powell gestured at the television, on which the reality show was still playing. “Occasionally, when I can get someone to change the channel, I see Stavisky. He’s milking this, isn’t he?”

  “To a point. He’s pushing for further disclosure. With Chigorin in the hospital, he’s the default opposition leader. There are rumors that he’ll be running for president in the next election.”

  “I always knew he was too ambitious to stay put for long.” Powell looked down at his body brace, made of hard black plastic, which was cinched tightly to his chest and sides. “I imagine that the attack has given him plenty of ammunition against the current regime.”

  “Yes, you would think so,” Wolfe said. “But as a matter of fact, we were wrong.”