Below Zero

by Eva Hudson

  And if he found one of them, presumably he’d want the other two? Sweat prickled between her shoulder blades.

  His left arm pushed and tugged inside her bag, searching frantically for something, while his right hand gripped the carry handle of her backpack and the Glock 19. Ingrid knew she could kick it out of his hand while he was searching. It would be easy. But with the other Somali at the door holding a Beretta firmly in both hands, it wasn’t worth the risk: there’d be a bullet in the back of her head before she’d picked up the Glock.

  The man holding her bag looked up at her, confusion condensing his features into the center of his face. “Phone,” he repeated.

  “I no have.” It was the best sentence construction she could manage.

  He dropped her bag onto the table, pushed the zipper apart and laid the Glock down on the marble. Ingrid’s right hand began to twitch in the certain knowledge that she could pick it up and take him out. If it was the only gun in the place, that was exactly what she would do, but she wasn’t about to start a firefight and put so many lives at risk.

  Her attention was drawn away from the Glock as he removed his hands from inside her bag. She could barely look, but told herself that the third component was a back-up. If she could still deliver the other two, the peace negotiations in Vienna could be concluded as planned.

  She gasped: he was holding the envelope stuffed full of kronor. Over a thousand dollars’ worth.

  Take it, she said to herself. Take it.

  He opened the envelope and inspected the contents, then raised his eyes and looked her in the eye. He smiled and maintained eye contact as he dropped the envelope into his holdall. Then he picked up the Glock and pointed it straight at her. “Pockets.”

  Ingrid couldn’t work out why he hadn’t grabbed the Perspex tube.

  “Pockets,” he repeated. “Give me your phone.”

  Ingrid stood up and pulled the gloves out of her jacket pockets and dropped them on the table.

  “No phone,” she said again.

  He shoved his left hand through the zipped openings of her pockets and felt for a phone. When he realized she wasn’t lying, he raised the Glock up toward her face and made a clicking noise with his mouth.

  Asshole.

  She exhaled as he moved on to the next table, quickly swiping her bag and checking the circuit board was still inside. In case it got damaged, she tore a hole in the packet of Libresse and stuffed the Perspex tube inside. The shouting from the room at the back got louder. Ingrid hoped the older guy wouldn’t be stupid enough to fire a round. He had to know the people in the café weren’t worth a murder rap. Everyone except her, that was.

  The gunman at the door kept looking over his shoulder, out onto the sidewalk and across the harbor to the plume of smoke. He would be the one to call time when it was over, to tell them when the getaway car was outside. A little chubby, he was sweating heavily and sporting the kind of facial fuzz only found on teenage boys. He was never going to be able to grow a jihadi beard.

  It was while she was staring at him, and listening to the screaming mother and the arguing voices from the room behind her, that Ingrid noted that the three of them weren’t wearing masks. And it was at that moment that she understood just how bad things were going to get. The bomb wasn’t a coincidence. This was all part of a coordinated attack. The gunmen intended to become martyrs. Probably ISIS.

  “No!”

  Ingrid turned her head quickly. A man, thirties, balding, a little out of shape, was refusing to hand over his valuables.

  “Give it to me.”

  “No.”

  The older gunman was jabbing the muzzle of the rifle into the man’s paunch.

  “Put it in the bag.”

  “No.”

  He flipped his weapon and jammed the butt of the rifle up hard into the man’s jaw, snapping his head backward. He fell hard against the edge of the marble table and slumped onto the floor.

  Ingrid ran over. She could help. She could administer first aid. But as she approached the unconscious man, the gunman rammed the rifle butt into her chest, winding her and knocking her from her feet. She fell to the floor, her head cracking as she landed heavily on the cold stone slabs.

  12

  “Get up!”

  Ingrid couldn’t quite move. She tried to shift an arm, but it was as if she didn’t know how. How long had she been out for?

  “Get. Up. Now.”

  She tried again. Her limbs were so heavy. Her head felt stuck to the stone floor. She closed her eyes, willed her arms to work and rolled over onto her front. She felt the tubes inside her sleeves move with her. Then she pushed herself up onto all fours—tabletop pose—and was grateful for the elasticated cuffs. She tried to arch her back, her head dropping forward as she did so. Cat pose. Her spine from her bra strap to her skull was sore.

  “Now!” the man shouted.

  She looked up at his red face. He took one hand off the rifle and wiped his palm on his trouser leg. Dirty, faded denim. Not been washed in weeks. But his palms were sweating. That meant he was nervous. Good.

  “Up. Get up.”

  “I am trying.”

  He bent down, grabbed her collar and hauled her to her feet. “Move!” He shoved her toward the Somali gunman on the door, making her step over the injured man on the floor who was prone and bleeding from his temple.

  “Where are they?” the older man said, agitated.

  The Somali looked over his shoulder at the road outside and shrugged. “Don’t know.”

  It took Ingrid a beat to realize they were talking to each other in English.

  “They should be here.” The older guy, Moroccan, maybe Algerian, was jittery. “Hold her.”

  The Somali man—tall, muscular, trembling—grabbed Ingrid, put one arm around her shoulders and held the Beretta to her head. She now had her back to the door and could see that everyone else in the café had been made to sit on the floor, their hands on their heads, everyone apart from the mother and daughter. Frailty and obesity had apparently offered them an exemption. It reminded her of something she’d seen in the ferry departure lounge in Riga: the TV news had been showing images of a siege in a café in Sydney. Her blood ran cold: maybe this wasn’t a hold-up, maybe they were being held hostage.

  The man grabbing her kept twisting around to look out the glass door. Was he looking for their ride out of there or watching for cops? Ingrid didn’t know who she wanted to arrive first. Her instincts and her training meant she wanted the gunmen to be arrested, but when she thought about being asked her name, or having to provide ID, she hoped their getaway car arrived first.

  The Somali tightened his grip: why wasn’t she being made to sit on the floor with the others? She immediately understood: she was a bargaining chip. They were going to take her with them out to their vehicle. Insurance. A human shield to make the cops think twice before firing a shot. She tried to swallow, but her throat was too sore.

  The Skinny Boy appeared from the back room of the café.

  “You got them all?” the Moroccan asked.

  “Yeah.” His bag was alive with cell phone ringtones. “Where’s the car?”

  The Moroccan shrugged. “Coming.” He didn’t sound convincing.

  Ingrid stared at the man who had hit his head, motionless on the floor, blood still seeping from his temple. She couldn’t tell from twenty feet away if he was breathing, but it didn’t look like it. Now she really hoped the getaway car got there before the cops did: the worst thing you can have in a hostage situation is a dead body. They tend to breed.

  The cell phones continued to ring, the bank of refrigerators hummed and the rumble of the ovens drifted in from the kitchen. Outside, the trundle of traffic merged with the wind and the distant sirens, but inside no one said anything. A tableau of compliance and fear. Ingrid’s gaze shifted to the cushioned window seat where she had hidden the Nokia. What if it rang now? The skin on her scalp tightened. Then something else caught her eye: her backpack, t
he orange packet of Libresse visible through the open zipper.

  The roar of a diesel engine vibrated through the door, sending shivers up her spine.

  “It’s them,” Skinny Boy said.

  “Let’s go.”

  The Moroccan yanked the door open and the man holding Ingrid pressed the muzzle of the Beretta into her temple. “You come with us.”

  “I…” Her throat was so tight it was hard to speak.

  He pulled her to one side, almost making her stumble.

  “I… My bag,” she said in English. She couldn’t leave one of the circuit boards for crime scene investigators to find. “I have my period.” His grip loosened. “I need sanitary napkins.” The gunmen looked at each other. Ingrid had heard of abductees escape by quoting the Bible or claiming they were diseased, but never because they were menstruating. Sensing her moment, Ingrid tried to pull away but the Somali tightened his grip around her waist.

  “Get it,” the Moroccan said to Skinny Boy.

  “What?” Ingrid didn’t understand. She watched in confusion as Skinny Boy swiped up her Russell Athletic backpack from the table, zipped it up and darted through the open door, shoving his Glock into his waistband as he did so. The thrum of the engine pulsated outside.

  The Somali shoved her toward the Moroccan, who held her even more tightly. “You will walk out this door. You will get in that car. If you do not, these people will die. Understand?”

  Ingrid tried to pull away from him but he raised his left hand: he was still holding the Kalashnikov.

  She nodded.

  He pushed her out through the doorway and down the steps to the sidewalk. A black Subaru SUV was in front of her, its rear door open. Her backpack was already on the back seat. Ingrid glanced left and right. No cops. Where the hell were they? She looked back over her shoulder at the Moroccan. He stood in the doorway, training the rifle on her torso. Skinny Boy stood on the sidewalk. He lifted his jacket to reveal his Glock.

  Why weren’t they getting in the car? Why weren’t they making their getaway? It made no sense.

  “Get in,” the Moroccan said.

  The only risk Ingrid could take was that the guns weren’t loaded. She could run. If she could reach the side street there was no way Skinny Boy would catch her. Even if the guns were loaded, they might miss. They probably would. But then there was the bag on the back seat. The component.

  The frigid air encapsulated her. She stood stock still. Run or comply? Run or comply?

  They had already let one man die and done nothing to save him. There were twenty or so people in the café who would go home tonight if she just got in the car.

  She looked into the open door. Black tinted windows. Black leather upholstery. Glistening with melting snowflakes. She didn’t want to do it, but she had to. She had no choice.

  She walked toward it and climbed in. A man—white, twenties, unshaven—was sitting on the back seat. He was holding a Beretta M9.

  “Close the door.”

  Ingrid pulled it shut, and the driver put the car into gear. The wheels spun as a hood was pulled over her head.

  “Lie down.”

  13

  When Ingrid was fourteen, she had been walking home from a carnival with her best friend Megan. It was late. Nearly ten. They should have been home hours before, but there had been teddy bears to win and cotton candy to eat. Ingrid hated cotton candy now.

  They had taken a short cut, past the softball diamond, beyond the boating lake toward a path through the trees. Even now, Ingrid could plot out every step in her mind. She relived each step most weeks, if not most days.

  They were still in earshot of the organ from the carousel and the cheers from the pirate ship ride when the man jumped out into the path in front of them.

  “Hey girls,” he said. “Want to have a little fun?”

  Ingrid had only looked at him for a second before she’d dropped her cotton candy, turned and run. Megan followed. She’d heard her footsteps. They’d called out to each other. Encouraged each other to run faster. But they were slow. They were overweight. The biggest girls in their class by twenty or thirty pounds. They couldn’t run far, or fast, and Megan was heavier, slower.

  In the intervening years, Ingrid began to wonder what percentage of her memories from that night were true, and which parts were just wishing. Maybe some details never happened but were implanted by the unskilled questioning of Deputy Morris. Inventions that became memories, memories that became facts.

  What Ingrid never admitted to anyone was that she can’t actually remember looking back. In her head she can see the path, and she can picture Megan’s reddened face, but she cannot be sure it happened. It was possible Megan never even ran. Maybe she had been too scared. Maybe she simply knew she wouldn’t get very far. Whatever actually happened in those hideous seconds, wherever the truth lay between hopes and nightmares, for nearly twenty years Ingrid had been tortured by the thought she could have done more to save her friend.

  Megan’s disappearance changed Ingrid. That night she lost her innocence, her accomplice, and her belief that somehow things would be all right. But she also found something too: purpose. She started dieting and exercising so that by graduation she was one of the slimmest girls in senior year. And those inept, brutish questions of Deputy Morris made her want to become an investigator herself. She never wanted another kid to be interrogated in the way she had been, but mostly she never wanted another child to suffer the way Megan had.

  By the time she turned fifteen, Ingrid Skyberg had already worked out her career path to the FBI’s Violent Crimes Against Children unit. She studied languages at college—adding fluency in Italian and French to her semi-native Russian—then joined the Jackson County Sheriff’s Department the same month Deputy Morris retired.

  Ingrid served the obligatory two years before applying to Quantico, during which time she reinvestigated every line of enquiry into Megan’s disappearance. She re-examined all the evidence, liaised with law enforcement across the country about other abductions near traveling carnivals in the mid-nineties, but by the time she was accepted into the Bureau, she had never found a single trace of Megan.

  Ingrid never gave up hope. Elizabeth Smart, Jaycee Lee Dugard, Natascha Kampusch, Michelle Knight. Every time a story about an abductee being found after years in cellars and attics hit the headlines, Ingrid went back over the original investigation notes, desperate to find something she had previously overlooked. She never stopped hoping that she would be the agent to knock down the door, to finally save her friend, to make amends.

  Although she was never offered the chance to take the FBI’s hostage negotiation training, Megan’s disappearance meant it was a subject Ingrid knew plenty about. She’d read the Bureau’s manual, made a point of playing softball with the lead negotiator when she’d worked in the Cleveland field office, and read extensively about how some hostage situations are resolved without the loss of life, and why so many end in a bloodbath. Right now, this was knowledge Ingrid almost wished she didn’t have as she inhaled the scent of the polished leather upholstery.

  There was no point in trying to work out where they were taking her. She didn’t know Stockholm well enough to follow every turn. But there was a lot of traffic noise, a lot of gear changing; she was sure they weren’t leaving the city. Her knees were in the footwell, her head resting on the back seat with the constant pressure of the Beretta against her collar bone. The man on the back seat did not speak again for several miles.

  For some reason, she remembered her meeting in London. Caviar at Berlinsky’s to talk about the Kandinsky. She pictured Ekaterina Volitova, wife of the owner of a Kazakh mining company, leaving endless messages, tapping the screen of her gold-plated iPhone with her pink talons, enraged that her art consultant had not turned up for their meeting. No one stood up the Volitovas. Somewhere out there, Ingrid thought, is my life, my career. Somehow she was going to have to find a way back to it.

  The heating system in the car d
id not extend to the footwell, and Ingrid’s legs were getting cold. Goose bumps were forming and she started to shiver.

  Below zero.

  Would Nick Angelis really betray her? She didn’t think so, but as the SUV surged and swerved through the Stockholm streets, Ingrid couldn’t be sure. She pictured him, leaning against the bookshelves of the library in the Reform Club, his bow tie loose around his opened collar, a tumbler of Scotch in one hand. He would pretty much do anything if it could be filed under national security. Nick Angelis, patriot and traitor.

  You bastard.

  Forget him. Forget the past, she told herself, focus on now. Concentrate on the present. What do you know? What can you learn?

  She thought about the men who had taken her. The gunmen in the café were Somali and North African. Almost certainly Muslim. Possibly connected to Islamic State, Al-Shabaab or some affiliate. The man who held the Beretta was white. Pale. Likely local. Maybe a convert.

  She knew that the Moroccan’s rifle was old. A relic from the mujahideen, or any number of conflicts in Africa. Battered, chipped enamel. Probably killed dozens, if not hundreds. The Glock and the Beretta suggested scavenged weapons, acquired over the years, not an organized militia.

  The car turned suddenly. “Shit, man. Look out,” the white guy said.

  “Cops.” A deep, resonant voice with a thick accent. Had to be coming from inside a big chest. A big guy who wasn’t Swedish. Another Somali?

  “You drive like that and they are going to follow us.”

  “Road is closed.”

  “But you can get us there?”

  “Sure.”

  “Put the radio on. Maybe we’ll hear something.” They were also talking in English.

  The driver pushed a button and Uptown Funk pulsed out of the speakers.

  “Put the news on, asshole.”

  Not friends then. The driver had probably only been hired for this job. Would know nothing, would only have met one contact until the operation started. He punched through a few stations, settling on one broadcasting live from the National Museum. A reporter was interviewing an eyewitness who was describing a heavy police presence and a calm response from the public. At least that’s what Ingrid could make out. Her Swedish just wasn’t good enough to catch every word.