by Ronan Frost
“Which I didn’t finish.”
“—lasting over one hundred days out there alone, that’s something. You’ve been a regular competitor in the X Games—”
“I broke my leg and needed metal pins. I tore my rotator cuff. I ruptured my ACL and countless other minor injuries. It’s three years since I last took part.”
“—but remain an active base jumper, an accomplished ice climber, builderer—”
“Arrested three times for night-climbing the façades of several famous buildings isn’t exactly a claim to fame.”
“Scaling the Petronas Tower, CN Tower, Sears Tower, and the Millennium Tower, however, is. Five years ago, you were featured in an article in Time magazine, even though you weren’t featured by name, where they called you the real Spider-Man. That article also discussed your obsession with the urban exploration scene, especially roof-topping, though I believe you prefer to call it roof-and-tunnel hacking?”
“That was another life.” He fiddled idly with the watch hanging from his wrist. It had been a wedding gift from Hannah. Right now, it felt like all he had left of her. “I got old. I settled down.”
“Maybe so, but it doesn’t change the fact that you are the real Spider-Man, and that person will always be in you. And that is who we’ve identified as the missing link in terms of our team here.”
ELEVEN
The first thing he noticed about Stockholm was the air.
It tasted different in his lungs. It was hard to explain the difference, only that it felt more vital. He stood on the asphalt looking up at the stars. It was the same sky he’d grown up with, but everything was in the wrong place, as though god had scooped up all the stars and decided to play dice with the universe, letting them fall where they may. He smiled at that. Beside him, Vic stuffed his hands in his pockets. “Strange to think the sun will be coming up again in a couple of hours.” Which of course was true. This time of year, the city had maybe four hours of darkness at best. It was every bit as disconcerting as the stars being in the wrong place.
The airport walls were adorned with photographs of famous Swedes welcoming them. He had no idea who half of them were, which was as much down to his shortcomings as theirs.
Rather than wait in the snaking queue of travelers for a cab that could easily be an hour in arriving, they turned and went back into the terminal, riding the elevator down to the subterranean station, and took the express into the central station.
The second thing he noticed, stepping off the train, was the women.
It was a hoary old cliché to say that Scandinavian women were gorgeous, tall, endlessly blond, with equally endless legs, but confronted by the city in summer it was hard to deny the cliché had its foundation in reality. Though these days it was a considerably more multicultural place, the Viking heritage ran strong in the nightlife. Most bizarrely, stepping onto the platform expecting the reek of grease and engine smoke, he was surrounded by the heady fragrances of designer perfumes. Even the station smelled good. He couldn’t help but smile as he followed Vic through to the main hall, looking for signs to the taxi ranks.
The demographics settled into a more interracial balance around them. A dozen languages rose and fell, some snatches of conversation sounding like mynah birds singing; others much more guttural, like hammers chipping off rocks. People hugged hello and good-bye. There were tears and smiles. All of life was here on some miniature scale.
He checked the boards. They promised half a dozen more arrivals before they closed for the night. There were half as many departures lined up, with the station already closing up. Half of the concessions were already closed, steel shutters rolled down across their doors. There was a café with no food left in the glass display cabinets and a florist in the process of retrieving the brightly colored waterfall of blossoms that had spilled out onto the concourse.
She smiled at him and Vic as they walked past.
Up ahead he saw a man holding a sign with his name on it.
“Looks like our ride’s here,” Vic said.
“Give me a second, I’m just going to grab a coffee,” he said, which proved more of a challenge than he’d expected as he put a handful of dollars on the counter, then realized he couldn’t pay with them. He felt about two inches tall. The barista just smiled. “We take cards.” But he didn’t have any plastic on him. Vic had wanted minimal ties that linked back to their real lives in case things went sideways. The barista ended up offering him a cup on the house, black and strong enough to descale his arteries. “Welcome to Sweden,” she said. Rye walked toward the huge granite portico where Vic waited for him.
Their driver was a young refugee who had come over from Syria twelve months earlier and already spoke better English than a lot of the Americans Rye’d encountered. He showed them to a waiting car that looked like something he had brought with him from the war zone. Rye couldn’t help but smile at the beaded cushion on the driver’s seat. The driver held the door open for them, eager to please.
“So, what are you? Like the Swedish version of Uber?” Rye asked, as they settled in for the short ride to the waterfront.
“Ammar,” the driver said.
It took him a moment to realize it was the kid’s name.
“Pleased to meet you, Ammar. You know where we need to go?”
“Oh yes, the most expensive street in the whole country, everyone knows it,” he said, not worrying about the blinkers as he pulled out into traffic. It was still bright daylight despite the fact it was less than an hour short of midnight. Ammar drove quickly, weaving in and out of back streets and off-ramps to cut across the city with the confidence only a taxi driver could possess. They didn’t get to see much of it through the windows, until he brought them around a particularly seedy corner and up a street so tight Rye and Vic could have reached out of either side window and dragged their fingers down the walls closing in on them. It was a shortcut around the back of the Grand Hotel and Berzelii Park. They emerged on the waterfront beside the golden statues of the national theater on Strandvägen. “Not far now,” Ammar assured them. Up ahead, on the right, row upon row of luxury yachts were moored, bobbing in the surf. To the left, imposing buildings older than the country they called home housed embassies and the rich, if not the famous, of the old town.
“Did you know Hitler loved this city?” Rye said, not sure why he did.
Vic raised an eyebrow. “All the blond hair and blue eyes?”
“It’s true. Not only was Sweden neutral during the war, high-ranking members of the Third Reich loved the place so much they bought residences here. Himmler and Goering had apartments in the city. So, on the one hand, you had places like the Swedish Match Factory running intel for the Polish resistance, and on the other, you had them playing the Germans for profit.”
“That’s different.”
“That it is,” Rye agreed.
“Here we are,” Ammar said, slowing the car to a crawl alongside an avenue of ancient trees. They were coming into bloom, the season here a few weeks behind back home. The branches were weighed down with buds and sap. Ammar killed the engine as they pulled up across the street from an antiquarian bookstore. A light burned in a window upstairs, despite the relatively bright night.
Vic opened the passenger door, still holding the handle as he told the driver, “Just wait here. We won’t be long.”
“I live to serve,” Ammar said.
Rye couldn’t be entirely sure the man was joking. He opened his own door while Vic got out the other side, into the road.
The four lanes were empty of traffic. The nearest car was still several hundred yards away. They crossed the white line divider. Before they reached the sidewalk, a huge explosion tore out the façade of the store, the shards of glass chased out into the street by fire. The shriek of masonry ripped from its foundations and metal twisted beyond salvage was deafening. The savagery of the explosion punched Rye off his feet. Beside him, Vic went down sprawling across the blacktop, face and hands torn up from the lethal spray
of glass fragments. Rye lay on his back for a moment. He couldn’t hear anything from the world outside of his head. The only noise that existed was the pounding of blood through his skull. He looked across the street to see the flames licking at the timber frames of the windows. Everything beyond where the glass should have been was fire.
The sheer heat coming off the blaze was intense.
He rose unsteadily, mind racing.
The books burned.
Had they arrived at that shop ten seconds earlier, they’d have been knocking on that glass door as the explosion shredded the storefront. Thirty seconds earlier and they’d have been inside. And it wouldn’t have been a few cuts and bruises he’d be nursing.
He looked at Vic.
The big man was getting to his feet. Ammar was out of the car, shaking his head, and on his own cell phone, jabbering away in a singsong language that could have been any of a dozen variants of Arabic.
Rye couldn’t look at the fire; the ferocious heat stung tears from his eyes.
He took a step toward the building, and then stopped dead in his tracks as a burning man launched himself through the upstairs window, screaming as he tried to fly.
TWELVE
The man hung in the air, wings of fire unfurling behind him.
And then, like Lucifer, he fell.
Rye stood rooted to the spot.
He couldn’t move.
It was as though he’d been given a front row seat with a view straight down into Hell. He froze, as the man hit the ground, the flames still burning, his arms and legs bent at unnatural angles. He wasn’t screaming anymore. He didn’t writhe against the flames. He lay there as the fire consumed his clothes and got at his flesh.
Vic moved fast. He threw his coat over the unmoving man, beating the flames out with his bare hands while Rye and Ammar just stood there, locked in the horror of it all.
It was useless. There was no saving him.
But that didn’t stop Vic from smothering the flames.
Rye saw the man’s burns and knew enough to know it was a mercy he hadn’t made it.
He looked from the dead man back to the burning building.
He wasn’t a big fan of coincidence.
In his experience, coincidence just meant you couldn’t see who was pulling the strings.
In the distance he heard the first sirens. That was one thing about these socialist countries, the response time of the emergency services was fast. They had maybe two to three minutes before the first responders were on the scene, and already Swedes had begun to gather, drawn out onto the yacht decks by the explosion. Of course, it wasn’t that long ago the city had been the victim of its first real terror attack—a disaffected man denied asylum had stolen a delivery truck and driven it headlong down the main shopping street and into the plate glass windows of the city’s premier department store, claiming the lives of too many people in the process.
Rye started toward the building, but Vic stopped him. “It’s pointless,” the big man called. “We are here for a painting. There’s no way anything made of canvas could survive in there. The heat, the flames. It’s gone.”
But Rye didn’t listen. He pulled off his borrowed sweater and started to wrap it around his face to fashion a makeshift mask. Before Vic could stop him, he plunged into the burning building.
The heat came at him in waves.
It was unlike anything he’d ever experienced. It made the heat of a Wyoming summer feel like Siberia. He couldn’t hear much beyond the sheer ferocity of the flames consuming row upon row of precious manuscripts, but every few seconds one of the glass cabinets succumbed to the conflagration. The glass shattered, each time ringing out clear and crisp like a gunshot. The heat stung his eyes, drawing out tears. He blinked against them, trying to see through the thickening black smoke. It was impossible. He pushed his way deeper into the store. The tables with rare leather-bound volumes danced with flames, the books on them barely recognizable as the fire consumed them. The flames chased up the walls, rippling out across the ceiling above him.
The heat was unbearable.
The timber frames in the old building sagged as the fire scored into them, biting deeper and deeper into the ancient heart as the wealth of inflammable material fed the flames. All around him the timber frame snapped with its own tiny detonations as the fire dried every last ounce of moisture out of the wood.
Rye shielded his eyes, biting back on the need to cough.
He called out, his voice muffled by the sleeve tied over his mouth.
There was no answer.
But that didn’t mean there was no one else in here.
He forced himself to walk deeper into the rising inferno, feeling the bite of the fire against his skin. He wouldn’t be able to withstand the heat much longer. He could feel his clothes beginning to sear to his skin. And still the heat rose as everything in the old store fed it.
He couldn’t see anything obviously in the process of restoration, but why would the dealer have it down here on display? He had to have a workshop somewhere. The man had come crashing through the window of the floor above, which made upstairs a good place to start looking, if he could find a way up without getting himself killed.
Breathing hard, he forced himself to go deeper into the store.
He picked his way through the detritus of the explosion. It quickly became obvious that it wasn’t rooted in some tragic gas leak or other accident. He saw fragments of the incendiary device, military issue, amid the rubble where the back half of the store had been utterly destroyed. There was a gaping hole in the ceiling that was filled with smoke and flame.
All around, the old building answered his progress with a chorus of failures as the integrity of the structure was undermined by the blaze. He found a staircase leading up but knew the likelihood of ever being able to come back down this way again was virtually zero. He didn’t let that deter him. All he could think was that whatever that hidden map led to someone thought it was worth killing for, which right now made it worth risking his life to salvage. That was what having nothing left to lose meant.
Rye climbed the stairs two and three at a time, rising above the smoke.
He emerged on a landing. There was less air here than down below.
Three doors faced him on the landing.
The stairway rose to a third level, disappearing into thick choking black smoke halfway.
He didn’t go up. He hadn’t been in the building a full minute and already he was struggling. He looked left and right, trying to orient himself in the smoke. The stuff got through his makeshift mask into his throat. It was getting harder and harder to breathe and was only going to get worse. Every instinct in his body screamed at him to turn around and get out of the building on Strandvägen, but he went against them all and followed the worst of the fire toward the front of the house, each step harder than the last as the heat scoured his skin.
Somewhere out beyond the smoke he heard the frantic rising cries of sirens.
He pushed on, feeling the heat rising up through the floorboards as the flames consuming the story below worked their way through them. With each step they groaned desperately.
Rye ventured deeper, moving into the first doorway. He felt the rush of fresh air through the shattered window in direct contrast to the oxygen thief stealing every last ounce of air from the building.
He stepped into the room.
The open fireplace was the only thing not alight. The bookshelves lining one of the three other walls shimmered like a gateway to Hell, especially with half of the floorboards ending in a jagged hole where the explosion had torn up through them. Flames rushed in a funnel up from the first floor. Smoke billowed out through the shattered bay windows while the drapes around them burned.
In the middle of the room a draftsman’s table was angled up. He saw a canvas weighted down on it. Part of the paint had begun to blister and wouldn’t survive the fire much longer. There was a second table being used as a desk, that was rigg
ed up with a curious arm and camera attachment that was hooked up to a huge iMac. There was a palm-sized portable drive on the table beside it. There was no way he could get the computer out of there. He snatched up the portable hard drive and stuffed it into his back pocket, leaving the cables still dangling from the back of the machine.
Behind him, a sudden backdraft of heat was chased by a groan so deep in the fabric of the building it sounded as though the whole place was coming apart.
Several of the lower stairs caved in on themselves, cutting him off.
He was into his second minute, with no way out.
Rye crossed the room to the draftsman’s table and rescued the painting, rolling it up without looking at it, and crossed the room to the window.
The gaping hole in the floorboards was a problem.
He couldn’t exactly drag the table across the room to bridge the gap, which meant he was going to have to do something stupid if he wanted to get out of there alive.
THIRTEEN
That was what he did.
With the floor crumbling beneath his feet, Rye stuffed the rolled-up canvas inside his shirt. He ran across the short distance, getting up as much speed as he could as he launched himself over the gaping hole where the floorboards had collapsed, kicking up through the blinding smoke and the rising flames, knowing that he only had one shot at this. Get it wrong and he was following the dead man all the way down and, short of learning how to fly in a couple of seconds, joining him in the morgue.
And part of him thought that wasn’t such a bad place to be, just for a moment, a fleeting thought.
The bay windows dominated the outer wall, the center of the frame a crucifix of thicker timber supporting smaller windows set into the arch above. The cross brace was two inches deep, meaning there was two inches of handhold for him to catch and hold before he fell to the street below. This catch-and-release was basic stuff for a skilled climber, but that was a different life. It was a long time since he’d tried anything quite as reckless as this.