Bubble: A Thriller

by Anders de la Motte

Her mouth felt dry, and her heart was beating faster than she had expected. Her right hand was shaking so much that she had to stuff it into her trouser pocket.

  She had been involved in considerably more risky jobs than this, so she really shouldn’t be nervous.

  Her cell phone vibrated in her inside pocket again. This was the third time, so whoever it was seemed keen to get hold of her. But they’d just have to wait. Work came first.

  The lift stopped at the ground floor and the door slowly slid open. She took a deep breath.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The chanting of the crowd was getting louder.

  Someone bumped into one of the brass posts, making the rope swing.

  The suited man beside the rope suddenly began to shout.

  “Back, get back!”

  The two uniformed police officers took a few hesitant steps closer.

  HP closed his fingers around the handle of the revolver.

  There was no going back now.

  The main doors opened and the chanting rose to a roar. But it suddenly felt like his ears were blocked.

  The carpet of sound around him turned into a faint murmur, and all he could hear was his own heavy breathing.

  In . . .

  Out . . .

  His field of vision shrank, turning into a grainy tunnel, and for a moment he thought he was about to pass out. He squeezed the handle of the revolver even tighter, digging the mesh pattern into his palm. Hundreds of tiny, stinging needle pricks that woke him up and reminded him what he was doing there.

  He had a task to carry out.

  His last one . . .

  And suddenly he saw him.

  The snake himself.

  Mark Black . . .

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The roaring started the moment they opened the doors. The crowd pushed forward, she had time to notice the masks, the white overalls, the worried look on Kjellgren’s face. Then the quick movements of the uniformed police officers as they extended their telescopic batons.

  Leaving through this exit had been a big mistake.

  “Back, we’re going back,” she shouted at Thomas’s thick neck.

  But he didn’t seem to hear her and carried on toward the car, closely followed by Black.

  One of the posts holding the rope toppled over, dragging the others down with it.

  And a moment later the demonstrators had broken through.

  Thomas immediately floored the first person with an elbow in the face. It sounded like a whip cracking as the mask broke, sending a shower of blood and saliva over the white overalls of the nearest protestors. Thomas didn’t seem remotely concerned and merely shoved the limp body backward to clear some space. He dealt another blow, then another.

  Then she saw him bring his hand back and reach under his jacket in a way that she recognized all too well.

  She grabbed the top of Black’s arm with her left hand and pulled him toward her. She felt on her belt for her baton . . . Her hand was shaking so much she had trouble finding it. And then she heard Thomas yell.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  He looked almost exactly like he had on television.

  High forehead, pointed nose, and backswept, graying hair. At close quarters the reptilian feeling was even more obvious. He imagined he could see a little forked tongue dart out between the narrow lips. Getting the scent of his surroundings, preparing to attack.

  The crowd was roaring now, forcing its way through the cordon. HP went with the flow. Sweat was pouring down his back.

  There was a crash, and one of the white-clad figures in front of him fell backward, leaving a gap.

  The mask fell off, revealing a shocked and very pale woman’s face. Blood was streaming from her nose, soaking the front of her white overalls.

  A moment later he caught sight of Becca. Right behind Black with her hand on his arm.

  Far too close . . .

  Slowly he began to pull his hand out of his pocket . . .

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  “GUUUUN!!” Thomas roared, and she saw him draw his gun. Among the white-overalled figures she caught sight of a dark figure. Baseball cap, sunglasses, a scruffy beard . . .

  Hands were tugging at her clothes, trying to grab hold of Black . . .

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The shout came from his left.

  A guttural roar that he hardly heard. He didn’t turn his head. Instead he went on raising his hand, his eyes fixed on Black.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  All of a sudden everything seemed to be happening in slow motion. She could make out every little detail in the scene playing out around her. The white-clad demonstrators whom Thomas had just pushed over, the blood on their overalls.

  Then Thomas’s silver revolver slowly emerging from its holster.

  The demonstrators in front of him raised their hands, trying to defend themselves.

  She could see the suspect clearly in the crowd. The cap, the mirrored glasses, the dark camouflage jacket. The hand that was halfway out of his pocket . . .

  Then her view of him was blocked briefly. Her hand reached for her own pistol and closed around the handle.

  The shaking hadn’t stopped. Alarm bells were going off in her head, drowning out her thoughts. Something about this whole situation felt wrong . . . The hands were still grabbing at her, trying to pull Black from her grasp.

  Thomas’s gun was out now, the barrel aimed directly at the man in the camouflage jacket. But the demonstrators seemed to be blocking his line of fire. He moved sideways, trying to find a gap.

  The alarm bells went on ringing like mad.

  Wrongwrongwrong!

  Suddenly a gap opened up through the protestors. The man in the military jacket was standing motionless just five meters away. He was staring straight at Black, straight at her. His hand emerged from his pocket. She caught a glimpse of a dark object.

  Instinct took over. Quick, practiced movements.

  Draw,

  bolt action,

  fire!

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  The sound came from in front of him.

  Close enough for him to feel the pressure wave on his face.

  A hard blow to the stomach. The next moment his knees gave way. Screaming, falsetto voices on all sides.

  Someone grabbed him around the neck, dragging him backward. Everything went black.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  People were screaming in panic, throwing themselves to the ground.

  She saw Thomas’s head turn, and he stared at her as the figures in white scattered all around him.

  In a flash she holstered her gun, grabbed Black’s arm, and shoved him ahead of her as fast as she could toward the edge of the sidewalk and the waiting cars.

  Kjellgren caught up with her and helped get Black in place. Then quickly into the car.

  “Drive,” she snapped at Kjellgren.

  “What about him?”

  Thomas was still standing on the sidewalk with his revolver in his hands, sweeping the barrel over the crowd as if he was looking for someone.

  One of the uniformed police officers shouted something that she couldn’t quite hear, then aimed his own weapon at Thomas.

  “He’ll have to look after himself, drive, drive!”

  Kjellgren put his foot down and they shot away from the sidewalk with a screech of tires.

  “What the fuck was that all about?” he snarled when they reached Strömbron.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  Swaying, lurching movement, so familiar.

  He was lying in the back of a vehicle, a van of some sort, driving fast. Very fast.

  A sharp corner pushed him up against one side, making him whimper in pain.

  “He’s awake,” he heard a female voice say somewhere behind his head.

  He tried to turn his head, but the effort made everything go black once more.

  “No, he’s gone again . . .” was the last thing he heard.

  13

  TEAM FORTRESS

  SHE DIDN’T LIKE tr
aveling by helicopter. The jerky movement of the machine felt unnatural. Nothing like an airplane gently riding the currents. If the engines of a plane suddenly stopped, nothing much would happen. The pilot would lower the nose and glide for a while as they tried to deal with the problem.

  But if a helicopter’s engine stopped, you wouldn’t be able to defy gravity for too many seconds.

  She shook off her discomfort and looked at her watch.

  “Ten minutes to go . . .”

  Black looked up from his BlackBerry.

  “Okay, thanks . . .”

  “Have you heard anything from Thomas?”

  “Yes, he says everything’s been sorted out with the police and that he’ll be joining us by car later in the day.”

  “Good . . .”

  She took a deep breath.

  “So how are you feeling,” she asked.

  “Fine,” he said, a little too quickly. “Absolutely fine,” he added. “I’m sorry, Rebecca, I should have thanked you for what you did back there. What exactly was going on?”

  He was trying to sound calm, but she had no trouble at all discerning the faint tremble in his voice. And he also seemed to have switched to calling her Rebecca instead of Miss Normén.

  “I’m not entirely sure. The demonstration obviously got out of hand, but after that everything’s rather unclear. I had hoped that Thomas might call me to clarify . . .”

  “He’s been busy with the police . . .”

  “Yes, I can appreciate that. Gun laws in Sweden are very strict, I’d have been happy to explain them to him if he’d asked. But he never told me he was actually armed . . .”

  “No, that probably wasn’t a wise move. Thomas is very loyal. He only wants what’s best for me and the company.”

  She merely nodded in response.

  Black straightened up and crossed his legs.

  “But he didn’t shoot, did he, which must count in his favor, mustn’t it?”

  “That’s right,” she said. “I was the one who opened fire.”

  “Is that going to cause trouble for you? For us?”

  “I don’t know yet. We’re licensed to bear arms, and I called the duty superintendent in Stockholm to explain what happened and how the police can contact me. We’ll just have to see . . .”

  That last bit was a lie.

  She’d have a hell of a job explaining what she had done, she knew that already. Whether or not you had a license, you couldn’t just go around firing a gun, and certainly not in the middle of the city. The regulations governing warning shots were the same as for firing at a target: there had to be an immediate and serious threat to life and limb.

  But obviously there had been.

  The man in the jacket had a gun, just as Thomas had shouted, and it was quite clear that he was focused on Black.

  Yet she still had only fired a warning shot . . .

  She had been acting entirely on instinct, and in hindsight she couldn’t really explain why she had done what she had.

  In order to make the best of a potentially disastrous situation, she tried to convince herself.

  It had all felt so wrong. Thomas’s view had been blocked, with no opportunity to act. The gun, the attacker, the whole thing was almost a textbook example of an extreme emergency.

  All the criteria were in place for firing directly at the target. But in the crowd it was impossible to shoot at the attacker without risking hitting innocent bystanders as well.

  That was it, obviously.

  She looked down at her hands, grabbing her knees in an attempt to keep them still.

  Suddenly she realized that Black was still looking at her. He was studying her face intently in a way she didn’t like, then he dropped his eyes to look at her trembling hands.

  “Adrenaline,” she said. “It’ll soon pass . . .”

  For a moment she felt he could see straight through her.

  “Two minutes to landing,” a voice said over the speakers.

  “Right . . .” she said, giving Black a quick smile.

  But he didn’t smile back.

  ♦ ♦ ♦

  He was slipping in and out of consciousness.

  He heard voices several times, conversations going on above him.

  “He’s in very bad shape . . .”

  “How much has he had?”

  “A triple dose. I daren’t give him any more . . .”

  “Have you spoken to the Source?”

  “Mmm . . .”

  “And?”

  “He says we have to bring him back to life. That there are no other alternatives . . .”

  “Okay . . . so what do we do now?”

  “We wait . . .”

  “Do we know anything else about the place?”

  The sound of paper rustling somewhere to his left.

  He must have been awake for five minutes now, but he was keeping his eyes closed. There was a rhythmic bleeping close to his left ear, which he guessed was a machine keeping a check on his pulse. Best to lie low and take slow, deep breaths.

  There were two other people in the room, a man and a woman. He seemed to be lying on some sort of bunk or table a few meters away from them.

  He felt a vague pressure in the crook of his right arm, which he guessed was from the needle of a drip, but other than that his body felt surprisingly okay.

  There was an odd smell, ether and something musky that he couldn’t identify.

  “To start with, it’s much, much bigger than we thought. Take a look at this!”

  The woman’s voice again, then more rustling, which HP guessed must have been from some sort of plan.

  “Right, so these red marks, are they . . . ?” The man’s voice sounded familiar, but he couldn’t quite place it.

  “Red is for guards, blue for security cameras, and yellow is different types of alarms . . .”

  “Okay . . . and all this comes from the Source?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you trust him?”

  “He’s never given me any reason to doubt him. Everything he’s given us so far has been one hundred percent accurate, just look at that poor guy . . .”

  It took HP a few seconds to realize that the woman meant him.

  “I’m still not sure. About him, or the whole thing.”

  The male voice again, a bit whiny, in a way that still sounded extremely familiar. He fought the urge to open his eyes and turn his head.

  Suddenly he noticed the bleeps speeding up.

  Shit, he had to relax.

  Deep breaths, nice and easy.

  He wanted to hear more, try to work out what the fuck was going on.

  “Six floors, then,” the woman went on.

  “Thirty meters into the rock, each floor consisting of a hub with five tunnels leading off it like spokes, each of them fifty meters long. Five times fifty is two hundred and fifty, multiplied by six floors . . .”

  “One and a half kilometers. That’s a hell of a lot of space . . .”

  “And each one of the spokes is ten meters wide, which means they might have several rows of server racks in them. Say, two passageways for maintenance in each tunnel. Each rack is, what, one meter deep? That makes . . .”

  “Five kilometers, maybe more. Five kilometers of servers . . . That’s a fuck of a lot of capacity!”

  The man’s voice sounded agitated.

  “That’s enough to supply . . .”

  “. . . pretty much the whole of Europe’s requirements for secure data storage.”

  The site manager paused long enough for the statement to sink in. The hundred or so visitors seemed impressed. As for her, she was only really half listening to the press conference.

  Details of the site’s capacity flickered past on the large screen, interspersed occasionally with pictures of its construction. She stretched discreetly and took the chance to check her phone for messages. But the inbox was empty and the calls she had missed in the lift at the Grand didn’t seem to have been registered by the p
hone. Weird.

  In contrast to the summer heat outside, the air in there was cool, and even though they were aboveground, she thought she could detect a faint smell of the rock, a bit like in the subway in Stockholm. Which wasn’t really that strange . . .

  During the Cold War this had been the site of an underground command base—she’d read that in the papers. And just as Kjellgren had said, there was a long tunnel that acted as both an emergency exit and a conduit for all the communication cables to the artillery bunkers on the coast a couple of kilometers away.

  Now that same tunnel brought cool water from the Baltic to service the air-conditioning down in the underground chambers. That and the cool Swedish climate, the unlimited and secure supply of electricity, and the extensive broadband network were evidently the main reasons why the whole installation had been located in Sweden, blah, blah, blah . . .

  Obviously she ought to have been more interested, because this was her employer they were talking about here, after all. But she was having trouble concentrating on the details of the presentation. She couldn’t shake the gnawing feeling that something was seriously wrong. Really she ought to be trying to call Thomas again.

  Black was bound to be safe in there. All the visitors had been registered and checked out in advance, and had been made to undergo a security check more rigorous than at any airport. All electronic gadgets except the photographers’ cameras had been locked away out in the security lodge. Naturally she had been spared these security procedures and still had both her radio and cell phone on her.

  But she already suspected there was no point to the call she was thinking of making. Just as before, Thomas wouldn’t answer. Besides, he would be there in an hour or so.

  Kjellgren was driving, and according to the text she had received a few minutes ago, they had already passed Uppsala. She wasn’t looking forward to the meeting.

  But she wasn’t the one who had made a fool of herself, she wasn’t the one who had drawn an illegal handgun . . .

  “Our site basically works the same way as an old-fashioned bank vault . . .” the site manager went on as the video projector faded neatly into an image she recognized.

  The bank vault on the screen was practically identical to the one she had been in a few days before. Thick concrete walls, polished marble floor, and long rows of little brass doors . . . Could it be the same vault?