Below Zero

by Eva Hudson

  The café was long and narrow. The style was industrial with subway tiles and exposed pipework. A marble counter laden with pastries ran down one side of the main room with several tables beneath the windows opposite.

  “Hej.” The girl behind the counter smiled broadly at her.

  “Hej.” Ingrid ordered the poached egg and English muffin with an Americano.

  “Vill du senap?”

  Ingrid’s brain scavenged her memory to recall that ‘senap’ was Swedish for mustard. “No, thank you,” she said in Swedish.

  “You sure?”

  Ingrid nodded.

  “OK.” The girl seemed surprised. “Take a seat.”

  The place wasn’t full, so Ingrid took one of the tables rather than a seat at the counter. At the table behind her, four co-workers were switching off their laptops and exchanging goodbyes. In front of her, two women who had to be mother and daughter were enduring a silent lunch with one another. It reminded her of lunches with her own mother, half of which were exercises in contained fury, while the other half were showdowns worthy of a daytime soap opera.

  Ingrid opened her backpack and felt around for the Nokia and its charger. Her fingers brushed up against the components wrapped inside her socks, then the charging cable that was sticky with age, and finally pulled out the phone. It reminded her of the new Walkie-Talkie building in London. A hideous piece of architecture that had apparently been modeled on the ugly lump of plastic in her hand.

  She inserted the cable into the port and ducked beneath the table in search of an electrical outlet. There wasn’t one. She looked behind her at the group of co-workers who were packing up their laptops. She would switch tables when they left.

  The counter girl brought over Ingrid’s Americano. “There you go.”

  “Can I please get a glass of water?”

  The girl looked at Ingrid with such puzzlement that Ingrid assumed she had completely mangled the language, but the girl pointed to a cabinet near the door that was groaning with cutlery trays, the napkin dispenser and a jug of cold water wearing a glittering cloak of condensation.

  Ingrid smiled at her: “Tack.”

  The backpack was on one of the chairs: even though the counter with the jug of water was no more than fifteen feet away, she was reluctant to leave her bag unattended. Not because anyone would steal it—there was no way they’d be able to escape Republik without Ingrid tackling them onto the hard stone floor—it was in case the people at the table behind nudged it when they got up to leave. She had no idea how fragile the circuit boards were.

  They’re weapons components, aren’t they? They’re probably tested to withstand Mach 2.

  Nevertheless, she carefully put the bag on the floor and got herself a glass of water while the co-workers at the next table packed their briefcases and left. Ingrid placed her glass on their table, moved her coffee, grabbed the backpack and sat down on the cushioned window seat. Ingrid removed the Nokia’s battery, inserted the second SIM and plugged the phone into the outlet beneath the table.

  Nothing happened. It didn’t bleep. Or flash. Or buzz. Nothing.

  She glugged several mouthfuls of water but her throat still felt dry. She checked the cable was inserted properly. It was. Ingrid looked around the room. Perhaps she could use someone else’s phone? Put the new SIM into their handset? No, that wouldn’t work. She needed to receive a message too.

  She gulped down more of the water.

  She was going to have to steal someone’s phone. There wasn’t time for anything else. She looked around the café, clocking the phones on tables and poking out of back pockets.

  Ingrid shook her head, took a centering breath and bent under the table to push on the plug. It gave a little and above her head she heard a tiny electronic ping.

  “Duh!” She hit her head on the table in her haste to check the phone. A tiny amber light flickered. She squeezed out a vortex of air through pursed lips.

  A cook in a white apron appeared from the kitchen and brought over Ingrid’s lunch.

  “Tack.” It looked just as good as the photo on Anna’s Facebook timeline.

  Despite the beckoning aroma of melted butter, she put her lunch to one side and grabbed the phone. It had a signal. She picked up her gloves and turned them inside out, exposing the care labels where she had written down the number she needed to dial. She keyed it in then typed out the message just as instructed, getting frustrated by the lack of predictive texting.

  Are you here yet?

  There was no way of knowing if the message had sent properly. No reassuring ‘delivered’ icon. No comforting bleep. So she picked up the cutlery and tucked into her lunch. Egg and pickles. It shouldn’t work but it did.

  Ingrid wiped her mouth with a napkin and smelt traces of chlorine on her hand. Somehow, with the police activity and the need to send the second message, she had managed not to think about what had happened in the spa. In particular, what had happened in the steam room. She felt the bracelet dig into her wrist as she cut up her food and recalled the threatening tone the Australian woman had deployed. Then we come and find you. Ingrid shivered: she would make the drop.

  She had no idea who the Hungarian man and the Australian woman were. If she was right about their nationalities, it was extremely unlikely they worked for the same government. Most likely another private agency like Fortnum’s, probably delivering the component on behalf of… she didn’t have a clue. The Saudis? A former Soviet state? It was possible they worked for different organizations. It was all so far removed from her day-to-day life that she could almost understand why she had been chosen: even under torture she wouldn’t be able to reveal anything because she simply didn’t know anything.

  She glanced at the phone. The tiny amber charging light pulsed slowly but there was no sign of a message. Come on!

  She took a sip of coffee—another fine Swedish blend—and started to slowly shake her head. Ever since she had called Nick Angelis and asked for his help to clean up the mess she had created at Arding Manor, she had known there would be a quid pro quo. Payback. And for fourteen months she had wanted to be free of the debt and to have that obligation removed. She had never properly thought about what form that payment would take, but had assumed it would be something like accessing an FBI database, or maybe placing a bug in a meeting room at the embassy. She never expected anything like this. Ingrid closed her eyes and exhaled slowly. She had needed Fortnum’s then, and now they needed her. An eye for an eye, a crime for a crime. She could hear her mother, in her undiluted Russian accent: “Never a borrower or a lender be, Ingrid. Don’t never owe nobody nothing.” Svetlana Skyberg wasn’t right about much, but Ingrid never wanted to owe anyone anything ever again.

  She opened her eyes as a shaft of steely air blasted in, followed by a man in a woolen coat. He smiled at her, and she smiled back. Athletic, evidently employed judging by his smartly tailored clothes, slim and with no visible deformities: why didn’t she meet men like that at home? She watched him as he chatted to the girl behind the counter, who was clearly flirting with him.

  The phone bleeped.

  Ingrid swallowed hard and swiped it from the table. The display told her there was a message, but the Nokia wasn’t a touch screen. She scrutinized its faded buttons for an envelope symbol and punched it. She read the message and gasped.

  Stortorget Christmas market. 9am tomorrow.

  Tomorrow? She didn’t have until tomorrow.

  10

  Ingrid’s head slumped into her hands. Really? Tomorrow? In Stockholm? She had always assumed she’d be delivering the components somewhere else. She felt her cheeks redden at the realization she’d been naive to assume she’d be returning to Riga on the ferry she’d come in on.

  She looked down at her brunch and couldn’t imagine taking another mouthful. She did the math: if she wasn’t leaving for Riga until Tuesday evening, the earliest flight she could get back to London from St Petersburg would be on Thursday night. She had meetings. Sh
e had a goddam job. She couldn’t just not turn up at work until Friday. She worked for the FBI not some voluntary organization that was grateful if she showed her face. There would be a disciplinary. Reassignment was a possibility. Something hard and heavy sank from her sternum to her stomach: she could lose her job.

  Ingrid’s gaze settled on the middle distance, her eyes seeing almost nothing as her brain flicked through a sequence of worst-case scenarios. She bit the inside of her cheek, trying to determine how long it would take before she would be missed, assessing when someone at the embassy or the Bureau would start looking for her. The last thing that she—or Nick, or Fortnum’s or even the warring factions in Syria—needed was to have the FBI track her down and blow her cover. Tracking people down was one of the things the Bureau was really good at.

  Her stare returned to the old Nokia lying uselessly on the marble tabletop. What if their text was a mistake? Surely they meant nine in the evening? The market would be busy then. She pictured a postcard scene of Stortorget strung up with Christmas lights, and snow-dusted tourists buying mittens and reindeer skins. Isn’t that how illicit deals take place: in plain sight, with hundreds of witnesses who can never recall a thing? So much less suspicious than meeting in the early morning when their liaison would stand out against a tide of commuters and bleary-eyed stallholders.

  A single typo—the difference between am and pm—could ruin the entire plan. Then there was the issue of where she could stay for the night without needing a passport or a credit card. Nor had the message said who she was meeting. Was it the mysterious Magnus Jonsson? Had he been given a description of her? She needed more information.

  “Is this seat taken?”

  Ingrid wrenched her stare from the phone and felt her features soften when she realized the voice belonged to the good-looking man, who was removing his scarf, the cute smile still on his lips. Involuntarily, she smiled back. There were plenty of empty seats elsewhere in the café.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “But I am waiting for someone.”

  He looked disappointed. And disbelieving.

  Ingrid conjured up a slightly wicked thought: if she stayed with him for the night she wouldn’t appear on any hotel register.

  “My boyfriend.”

  He knew she was lying, but gave her another smile before taking his coffee into the room in the back. Another day, she wanted to tell him, and she would have gladly shared her table.

  Staying with Anna and her husband Björn would be another way of keeping off the accommodation radar screens, but Ingrid didn’t have Anna’s number. Finding a computer and logging into Facebook while she was in Stockholm was absolutely out of the question. She’d have to come up with another solution.

  Ingrid ran her fingers through her hair, in an attempt to redress the damage done by her beanie and possibly to rub some sense into her skull. She picked up the Nokia: she had to make sure they hadn’t made a mistake.

  Are you sure? 9am for the Christmas market not 9pm? Please confirm.

  She reread the message several times. Typing with one finger without predictive text was too damn frustrating to finesse it any further. She probably couldn’t make it any clearer anyway; she just had to decide if sending it was the right thing to do.

  Ingrid felt the blast before she heard it, her head instinctively turning toward the door that rattled with the force. A fraction of a second later, everyone else in Republik fell silent, and then in unison they all faced the direction of the explosion. The girl behind the counter was the first to reach the door, peering across the harbor toward the National Museum.

  “Was that a bomb?” someone asked as they ran toward the glass door.

  Ingrid had heard enough explosions in her career to know that’s exactly what it was. A small one. Maybe just a couple of hundred pounds. Possibly a controlled explosion. A group of people crowded round the door. The kitchen staff crammed behind the counter, staring out of the only window to have a direct view of the harbor.

  The mother and daughter practically screamed at the throng around the door, demanding information.

  “Herregud,” Ingrid heard one of the cooks say. Dear God. “There’s smoke coming from the National Museum.”

  Outside, drifting over the water, came a surge of sirens. Ingrid braced herself, expecting a second blast. Her body was stiff, her muscles taut, her breath still, her eyes fixed on the plume she could see above the heads of the people in front of the door. But there was no second explosion, and her body softened slightly with the knowledge it was unlikely anyone would have been killed because the area had been evacuated.

  People reached into their pockets for their phones. Some filmed the smoke through the window, most sent messages or updated social media, and the café was filled with a tuneless chorus of dings and bleeps. Ingrid looked down at the Nokia and wondered again if she should send the message.

  A young woman ran through from the back of the café, shouting over her shoulder at someone and then insisting she be let through to leave. The small crowd parted and she pushed the door open, sucking in cold air from the harbor. The door then stayed open as three men pushed their way in. The patrons by the door regarded them with disdain, presumably for letting the place get cold.

  They were carrying several bags each and they seemed awkward and clumsy. They were African. Somali, Ingrid reckoned, judging by their high foreheads and narrow features. Two in their twenties, one closer to forty. Ingrid looked at the older man again as he reached inside his canvas duffel bag. He wasn’t Somali. A case report would describe him as ‘of Mid-Eastern appearance’. North African maybe.

  Instinctively, Ingrid knew what he was about to pull out of the bag. Her reflexes hit the send button on the Nokia and she leaned on the table, pushing herself to standing as he shook the duffel bag to the floor, unsleeving an automatic rifle. Some variation of a Kalashnikov. One of the younger men rammed a plank of wood under the door handle, wedging it shut, then pulled a pistol from his belt.

  11

  The small crowd near the door backed away with their hands up. The mother and daughter started screaming and the muted sounds from the back of the café faded into silence. The man with the Kalashnikov stared at Ingrid as he shouldered his weapon. It was chipped and dented, like something scavenged from a battlefield. Ingrid sat back down, her sneaker instinctively pushing against her backpack, making sure it was still there, protecting it. The girl behind the counter dropped a coffee cup and it shattered into pieces that scattered across the floor. Ingrid swallowed hard.

  “Give us your money. Give us your cell phones. Give us your watches. Your jewelry.” The man’s voice was quavering but he smiled as he spoke: the classic, dangerous, mix of fear and adrenaline. “Now!”

  One of the Somali men approached the first table and stood over the mother and daughter, waving a Glock 19 in their faces. The women opened their handbags and offered up their purses, which were thrown into a small, tattered holdall.

  Maybe, Ingrid thought, the hold-up was just a way of confusing the cops, to throw them off the scent. She kept one eye on the older gunman as he rushed past her, still shouldering the Kalashnikov, into the room at the back. Now she was confused: hadn’t they come for the components? Weren’t they there for her? Surely they must have followed her from the hotel? Or intercepted the texts? Why wasn’t he thrusting the muzzle in her face and demanding she hand them over?

  A flurry of electronic dings meant several people in the café had just sent a text. It didn’t matter if they had contacted the police or a loved one: either way it wouldn’t be long before the cops arrived. The Somali man continued to collect wallets, watches and phones from the other customers. He checked wrists, hands and necks, pulling off necklaces and demanding rings.

  Ingrid knew she could not let him take the Nokia. She needed a reply to her message. Using her elbow, she surreptitiously pushed it onto the cushions on the window seat then bent underneath the table. Her heartbeat ricocheted inside her chest as sh
e reached up, grabbed the phone and shoved it under a cushion. She could see the skinny Somali’s legs—filthy sneakers, stained jeans—walk toward her. She grabbed her backpack and felt inside for the tubes: she damn well wasn’t going to hand over weapons components to armed thugs. Not without a fight. She slid one of them up inside her sleeve, held in place by an elasticated cuff. She could see the feet of the skinny boy collecting the valuables step toward her. She slid a second tube up into the other sleeve, above the bracelet, just as he slammed his fist onto the tabletop above her head.

  “Wallet.”

  Ingrid reappeared from beneath the table, holding the open Russell Athletic backpack.

  “I look for it.” Her Swedish was faltering. She couldn’t parse tenses. She couldn’t think of any words beyond the basic. Quickly, she rummaged around inside the bag and felt for her wallet. She fished it out, dropped the backpack back down onto the seat and handed the wallet to the man. He looked at it suspiciously and indicated she should throw it into his battered North Face holdall, utterly unaware it contained over a thousand US dollars.

  “Phone.”

  There was an argument escalating in the room at the back. Someone was obviously refusing to hand over their valuables. Shouts of ‘please’ and ‘do as he says’ were going unheeded.

  “No phone,” she managed.

  “Phone.” His eyes were wide. She could see the pulse in his carotid artery thumping hard and fast.

  “No phone,” she repeated.

  “Then iPad.”

  “I no have one.”

  His expression was one of incomprehension. He dropped the holdall onto the table and grabbed her bag off the chair. He unzipped it further and looked for a phone. Ingrid tried not to think about his fingers touching her underwear, or her toothbrush. Somehow, even at that moment, that was what her brain latched onto, not the fact that he was about to find one of the circuit boards.