Below Zero

by Eva Hudson

  “OK?”

  “You want SIM card?”

  She shook her head.

  “They need SIM card.”

  “That’s OK. I don’t need a SIM.”

  He looked puzzled.

  “They are for a play. The theater.” She didn’t know the Swedish word for ‘prop’. It was possible he didn’t either.

  “Ah.”

  He took the money and she threw the phones in her backpack. “Tack,” she said and smiled as she walked back out into the cold. She pulled off her beanie and turned it inside out so its bright orange lining was on the outside. It had taken longer than she’d hoped to buy the phones and she didn’t have time to waste finding the SIM cards she had been instructed to get from a separate retailer. She knew there would be one in Hötorget station, but she also knew that entering the public transport system massively increased her chances of being caught on CCTV. She hoped a distinctive hat would confuse anyone who might be tailing her, or anyone who wanted to recreate her movements in the event of her… her what? Her failure? Her disappearance? Death?

  She bought two pre-paid SIM cards in the station, and stocked up on painkillers and a packet of Libresse sanitary napkins after feeling the first twinges of period cramps. When she returned to street level, she quickly found a branch of Wayne’s Coffee and chose a seat next to an electricity outlet. She set down her Americano and pulled the Samsung flip phone out of her backpack, realizing too late that she had already taken her gloves off. She examined it closely: it was absolutely covered in dirt. She reasoned there would be so much DNA on it, some of which—given how she’d acquired it—would almost certainly match at least one record already on the Stockholm police database, that it would be a challenge to get her profile from it. And given that it would soon be at the bottom of the harbor, she hoped removing her gloves wasn’t the first in a long line of mistakes.

  3

  Ingrid punched out one of the SIM cards from its plastic casing and inserted it into the phone. She replaced the battery, attached the charger, plugged it in and prayed. The phone immediately vibrated. Then a blue light behind the keys flickered and finally the screen brightened. She relaxed a little, sat back in her seat and took a sip of her coffee. She had forgotten that there is no such thing as a bad cup of coffee in Sweden—even in a chain like Wayne’s—and smiled. If only she was back in the land of her ancestors for a different purpose.

  The Samsung trilled with the sound of a new message from the provider, presumably welcoming her to the network and advising her of the call tariffs. That meant it was working. She took a deep breath, then pushed up the sleeve of her jacket to reveal the phone number she had written on her arm.

  She had rewritten it three times since Nick’s wedding on Saturday, each time on a different part of her body. With each transfer from limb to belly and from belly to limb, she had checked and triple checked that she had written it down correctly. But now that Ingrid had to use it, she feared she might have made a transcription error.

  She inputted the number and started to write the text message, just as she had been instructed.

  I am waiting for you.

  That was it. Just that. She dropped the phone back on the table and took another sip of coffee. Then another. She kept looking at the Samsung as if the power of her stare would be enough to make it ding with the sound of a reply.

  By the time she had finished her Americano, there was still no text. Had she used the wrong number? She checked the scrawl on her forearm against the single number in the phone’s memory. They matched, so she licked a paper napkin and scrubbed the ink from her skin. All she could do now was wait. She ordered another coffee and her first Swedish bulle in over a decade. It was sticky and sweet and probably just what her exhausted body needed to keep it ticking over. She had always thought that Sweden’s greatest gift to the world hadn’t been ABBA, but the tradition of fika: strong coffee and sweet cakes, ideally twice a day.

  She reflexively checked the phone. The display flashed 00:00. Ingrid had left her watch in London and there wasn’t a clock on the wall, but she guessed it was now eleven fifteen or eleven thirty. Which meant it was ten thirty in London where she was about to miss a meeting with an art collector who was interested in acquiring a Kandinsky. For the past several months, Ingrid had been working undercover for the FBI as an art broker, matching ultra-rich Russians in London with twentieth-century masterworks. Her brief was to gather intelligence on the Russian oligarchs in Britain and to piece together where they kept their money and how they moved it around. After spending most of her career in child protection, it was work Ingrid enjoyed.

  Her undercover role meant she was less tied to her desk in the criminal division at the US embassy in London. She was now often absent from the office for days at a time and she hadn’t needed to call in sick, or arrange a vacation day, before she’d boarded the flight to St Petersburg. For a day, no one would miss her.

  Ingrid took a sip of coffee. She didn’t want to think how long she could actually disappear for before anyone would notice. With no family in London and the kind of friends she tended to see spontaneously rather than casually, not to mention the sort of neighbors who avoided eye contact in the elevator, the only person who would think to report Ingrid missing was her assistant Jennifer. But right now, Jennifer was on vacation, visiting her folks in California.

  “Damn you,” Ingrid said softly under her breath as the realization dawned. “You goddamned bastard.”

  Nick Angelis knew that Jennifer was away. Nick had worked it all out, and as she licked the sugar off her fingers Ingrid had to accept she’d been played. She should have been suspicious the moment she’d received the last-minute invitation to Nick’s wedding, given their status as acquaintances-with-benefits. At first, she had assumed Nick simply wanted to make it clear that their arrangement had come to an end, or maybe he had wanted to prove to as many people as possible that an inveterate lothario was truly capable of settling down, or at least saying ‘I do’. On Saturday afternoon, Ingrid had considered whether perhaps the wedding was a way of telling half the women crammed into the pews of the St Andrew’s Greek Orthodox church that they simply weren’t good enough. It was only when the laconic James—silver-haired, bespectacled, Savile Row suit, and with a handshake that could split bedrock—had handed her a glass of champagne at the reception and said, “Do the words ‘Arding Manor’ mean anything to you?” that she realized her invitation had been a straightforward business transaction.

  Ingrid shuddered. Was it the cold air that burst into the coffee shop every time the door was opened, or was it recalling what had happened at Arding Manor? It had been the biggest screw-up of her career, and Fortnum’s—one of the world’s elite private security companies—had, quite literally, disposed of the bodies. She had always known that one day her debt would be called in, and here she was, waiting in a coffee shop in Stockholm for a phone to ring.

  Nick’s parting comment to her before he’d taken his bride—twenty-six years old, a doctor with MSF, as beautiful as she was intelligent, and who would have no reason to marry so young to a man with a past as checkered as Nick’s—on honeymoon to Venezuela was that Fortnum’s would never ask her to do something she was not capable of executing perfectly. While the remains of her coffee grew colder, it dawned on Ingrid that the real reason she had been selected for this mission wasn’t that she spoke Russian, or could pass for Swedish, or even that she was available—it was because it was so risky Fortnum’s could not allocate one of its own. Nick must have calculated that she was expendable, that if anything went wrong no one would notice Ingrid’s disappearance until Fortnum’s had been able to cover their tracks. A small dagger of resentment thrust its way up from her waistband and under her ribs. They might not be sleeping with each other any more, but Nick Angelis had found another way to screw her.

  Ingrid couldn’t stay in Wayne’s any longer. The girl serving at the counter had smiled at her too many times and there was a risk s
he’d be able to identify Ingrid, to confirm to investigators that, yes, she had indeed been there and that all she had done was quietly drink coffee and stare at a phone that looked like a prop from a ten-year-old movie. She pulled the beanie over her blonde hair, bent down to unplug the phone and grabbed the Samsung from the table. The moment she dropped it into her bag, a muted trill announced the arrival of a message. She scooped it out, figured out the unlocking sequence, then read the message:

  Grand Hotel. Spa. Midday.

  She flipped the phone shut, suddenly feeling like Fox Mulder or some other vintage TV cop from a time when flip phones had felt like the future. The spa? It was obvious now she thought about it. What better way to make sure she was unarmed than to force her to be naked.

  She picked up the napkin and wiped the rim and handle of her coffee cup, then checked herself: she was taking things too far. The cup would be washed before the lunchtime rush, long before any forensics specialist might come searching for evidence. Ingrid took the battery out of the phone and removed the SIM, which she wrapped in the napkin and dumped in the trash can.

  Back on the street, Ingrid hailed a cab, but before she climbed in she knelt down and carefully placed the Samsung’s battery under the car’s rear tire.

  “Nationalmuseum, tack,” she said. The National Museum was just a block from the Grand Hotel but it disguised her true destination.

  The driver pulled out into the traffic and Ingrid heard something crunch beneath the wheels. Ten minutes later, after waiting for the cab to disappear around a corner, she crossed the street and threw the Samsung into the harbor and watched it sink beneath the frigid water. Then she turned back, looked up at the Grand Hotel and took the deepest breath of her life.

  4

  Ingrid took the towel from the receptionist and followed her directions to the changing rooms. Still, at the age of thirty-three, nothing could make her feel like an awkward teen as reliably as a changing room. Lurking somewhere inside Ingrid’s five-ten, size-four frame was the second fattest kid in the class. The same old feelings of revulsion tightened the muscles beneath her tongue as she pushed open the locker-room door.

  One of the things Ingrid had come to appreciate after two years of living in London was British prudery. It was rare that a store or a fitness club had communal changing rooms, but this was Sweden, the country where entire villages took a sauna together. Just as she had done as a teenager, Ingrid moved to a far corner, hoping to be invisible.

  There were two other women in the changing room, both older. Ingrid had no idea who she was meeting and it was possible her contact was the overweight woman with sagging, rippling flesh who was struggling to keep her towel tucked under her armpits. The woman was red-faced, her wet hair flattened against her thick, wobbling neck. Ingrid tried to make eye contact without appearing to stare, but the woman was more embarrassed than Ingrid and did not look up.

  The other woman—wiry, gray ponytail, black Lycra gym gear—seemed a more likely contact, but her smile was an awkward expression of locker-room solidarity rather than one of greeting. Ingrid slipped off her sneakers. A burning memory of Kennedy Junior High flashed into her brain. Her and Megan, the fat girls, holding up towels for each other so that the other kids wouldn’t point. It didn’t stop them. Two little piggies. Ingrid blanched.

  Fuck them.

  She stripped quickly, defiantly, even waiting until she had folded her clothes before grabbing the towel and securing it over her breasts. She had worked hard—in the gym, pounding sidewalks, rock climbing—for her physique and a tiny bit of her wished the girls from the catty clique at school could see her now. Although, no doubt, they’d still point and laugh at the bruises Ingrid was collecting below the knee. She couldn’t tell which ones came from whacking her shins on the foot pegs of her beloved Triumph Thunderbird, and those she’d acquired in parkour training. She’d like to see one of those cheerleaders attempt a twenty-foot leap from a high-rise parking lot onto the story below.

  Ingrid picked up her neat pile of clothes, carefully hiding her runner’s ankle pouch containing around two thousand euros between her tee and her jeans, and walked over to the bank of lockers. She felt two sets of eyes boring into her. She turned to face the women, who both had open mouths. The gray-haired woman blinked and turned away. The obese woman bowed her head. They weren’t looking at her bruises: they had seen her scar. A dark, pinched purple welt under her right shoulder blade that was so obviously a bullet entry wound that no one ever had to ask how she got it, only when. Ingrid’s teenage awkwardness, her yearning to be invisible, was instantly reignited.

  She slammed the locker door hard and turned the key before pinning it to her towel. There was a pyramid of rolled towels by the door. She grabbed one, flung it over her right shoulder and strode out into the spa.

  The place was beautiful, with muted lighting, soft classical music and a series of columns that hinted the spa may have been based on an original Roman design. There were, unusually for a spa, several people in the pool, three naked men, one naked woman and another woman in a black swimming costume. Ingrid was willing to bet the woman in the swimming costume would be British. She found a wooden lounger facing the deep end of the pool and sat down. Presumably, whoever she was meeting would approach her?

  She carefully checked the entrances and exits, an occupational necessity. She could see three doors: one to the locker rooms, another to the treatment area and a third marked ‘Staff Only’. She watched one of the women climb the steps out of the pool and grab a towel, and wondered if she was the person she was meant to be meeting. Nick and the mysterious James had only given her need-to-know information, and that definitely hadn’t included a description of her contact. What the two men had impressed upon her, however, was the strategic importance of her impromptu city break in the Venice of the North.

  “Do you know about the Vienna negotiations?” James had asked. They then ushered Ingrid out of the room where the wedding reception was taking place and led her down the corridor into the Reform Club’s library. They spoke quietly but firmly so that she would understand and no one else would hear, despite the fact that they had the room to themselves. Ingrid realized now that their isolation would have been arranged in advance.

  “The Iranian thing?” she had said. Never had the attempt to find a settlement to nuclear proliferation sounded so casual.

  Nick had nodded. He had run his hand through his hair, and she remembered thinking the new gold band on his finger looked preposterous. Nick Angelis had committed himself to one woman. Until death did they part. “Right now there is a side negotiation happening.”

  Ingrid put her champagne flute on a bookshelf. The dark wood was worn, polished, ancient. “Should I know about it?”

  The two men looked at each other.

  “It’s probably a very good sign that you do not,” James said. He was well-spoken, and Ingrid thought that, unlike Nick, his crisp upper-class consonants were the result of breeding and education, not affectation. “While various foreign ministers were in the same room, a few decisions were taken about Syria.”

  “There is a plan emerging,” Nick said. He had loosened his tie and unbuttoned his collar. Ingrid remembered hating that she had noticed. “There is an opportunity to apply some pressure, but—”

  “But,” James interrupted him, “no one, no nation, can be seen to be applying that pressure.”

  “And it is in these sorts of situations that organizations like ours are asked to do what governments cannot be seen to be doing.”

  “Or ever be known to have done.”

  Ingrid had wished her glass wasn’t empty. “And what has this got to do with me?”

  James turned to Nick. “Don’t you have a bride to attend to?”

  He nodded. “I certainly do. I will leave you in my colleague’s estimable hands.” He gave Ingrid a tiny wink and retreated back out into the hallway.

  “Shall we?” James said, an arm extended toward a table and two chairs
near a leadlight window overlooking Pall Mall.

  Nervously, Ingrid followed him and he pulled back a chair for her.

  “Relax, Ingrid. Nick has assessed that you are more than capable of carrying out this task. And when it is done,” James sat down, brushing invisible specks from his pressed black trousers as he did so, “you will never hear the words ‘Arding Manor’ again.”

  Ingrid bit the inside of her lip and fought the instinct to stare at her lap: she was damn well going to look him in the eye if he was going to send her into the lion’s den. “I don’t know very much about Syria. There is probably someone better placed than me for whatever it is you need.”

  “Nick assures me you are perfect for this.” He reached inside his tuxedo jacket and pulled out a white envelope which he slid across the table. “That is five thousand dollars in cash, a mix of US, euros and kronor.”

  “Kronor?” Ingrid stretched out a hand and quickly shoved the envelope into her clutch. A small but significant act of compliance.

  “Don’t look so worried,” James said, his jet-black eyebrows inclining toward the middle of his forehead. Did he dye them, she wondered? “Your task is straightforward. We only require you to collect something, and then deliver it.”

  Ingrid’s lips were dry. She wanted a drink. “What has this got to do with Vienna? With Syria?”

  James spread his fingers and pressed them into the table. His cuffs were starched, his cufflinks gold. His watch, just visible, was a Breitling. “Your government,” he began. “Your State Department, to be precise, is attempting to build a coalition within Syria. I presume you know the basics?”