Below Zero

by Eva Hudson

  AGENT 54: We train to use them in all settings.

  BILUNGS: When had you last used the MP5 in anything other than a training exercise?

  AGENT 54: We routinely use them in anti-terrorism operations.

  BILUNGS: So this was a weapon you were very familiar with?

  AGENT 54: Yes.

  BILUNGS: Tell me, agent, how common would it be for such a high-velocity weapon to be deployed in an urban environment?

  AGENT 54: If the Piketen are deployed, we would usually carry MP5s or something similar.

  BILUNGS: So there was nothing unusual about using such weaponry in this sort of environment?

  AGENT 54: I think we already covered that. [Pause] No.

  BILUNGS: What had you been told about the operation in Stortorget that morning?

  AGENT 54: We had a multidisciplinary meeting at oh five hundred hours. Positions assigned, signals agreed, tactics discussed. The usual.

  BILUNGS: [Sighs] And what was the plan for the operation?

  AGENT 54: To shoot and kill as many innocent civilians as poss—

  CHAIR: Agent. Enough. It is obvious you are giving testimony under duress but this committee will not tolerate, and nor will the Swedish people tolerate, such flippancy in the light of the death and injury caused that day. [Pause] I am sure that, on reflection, you might want to apologize to your victims for your last remark.

  AGENT 54: You know what, I don’t want to. I am sick and tired of being the scapegoat for the biggest fuck-up in the Swedish Police Authority’s history. I did my job. I followed orders. It’s not my fault that the entire operation was planned on the basis of one single, solitary text message found on that phone in Republik. We had no other intelligence. None. We had no idea why we were there or who might turn up. You want to blame someone, blame—

  BILUNGS: It is not the purpose of this committee to apportion blame, it is—

  CHAIRMAN: I think we should leave it there, don’t you?

  40

  Ingrid successfully avoided ticket inspections with judicious visits to the toilet, and by the time she’d made it through the ticket barrier at Central Station by accidentally-on-purpose tripping and falling into the person in front of her, she had just eleven minutes to get to Stortorget by the nine o’clock deadline. She estimated the square was a little over a mile away, a distance she could normally cover in six minutes.

  Running in an oversized woolen trench coat slowed her down more than she’d anticipated. Or she was weak from the lack of sleep and food. Either way, by the time she reached Vasabron, the bridge that led over to the island of Gamla Stan, the clock on one of the huddled buildings on the other side of the water read eight fifty-seven. Ingrid stopped, but not to catch her breath. Uniformed officers were patrolling both ends of the bridge. She couldn’t risk bringing attention to herself by running. She was just going to have to be a couple of minutes late.

  In the sky, audible but not visible above thick gray clouds, was a helicopter. The city thrummed with pressure. The temperature had risen above freezing and the snow had stopped, but commuters still hurried to their offices without making eye contact. Ingrid did not know if the police presence was a hangover from the events of the day before, but suspected it was because they knew what was going to happen at the Christmas market. Taking a deep breath, and pushing her hands deep into the trench coat’s pockets, Ingrid crossed the road and started to make her way over Vasabron.

  There were pairs of uniformed officers at each end of the bridge, covering both sidewalks. Eight cops in total. Ingrid’s chest felt hollow as she walked past the first pair, trying to look natural, trying not to appear as if she was deliberately avoiding noticing them. She fiddled with the earring that was now decorating her nostril and added a swagger to her walk to accessorize the shaved head.

  She made it safely past the first four cops without arousing suspicion. They were paying more attention to vehicles than pedestrians. Midway over the water, Ingrid looked up to judge how much attention she was attracting. It would only take one of them to do their job: after all, she was the right gender, the right height, the right build, the right skin color. And in the right place at the right time. Ingrid slowed: maybe this was a risk too far.

  Then she thought about the girl at Hässleholm station, and the desperation in her mother’s eyes. She carried on walking, checking over her shoulder just in case there was an escape route she’d missed: if the cops on the other side identified her she’d be trapped on the bridge. Unless, she smiled, I jump over the wall and drop down onto the water just as a speed boat passes underneath.

  But this wasn’t a Bourne movie and Ingrid’s breathing became shallow. Her throat tightened and her stride shortened as she neared the other side of the bridge. One of the cops was looking at her. No, he was staring at her. Ingrid swallowed hard and carried on walking toward him. Another twenty paces and they would be face to face.

  Pressing her heels firmly into the ground, Ingrid walked tough. She had a nose piercing; she had a cut above her eye, make-up that was visible from space: she could carry this off.

  Ten paces.

  Ingrid glanced left and right. Maybe that appeared too casual, too affected? She dared not look at the cop but sensed his posture hadn’t altered: he was scoping her out.

  Five paces.

  Ingrid raised her vision and stared straight at him, almost daring him to challenge her. Such was her ferocity that he took a half-step back. Ingrid picked up her pace and left the bridge, soon hurrying through the narrow cobbled streets toward Stortorget.

  The square was pretty much as Ingrid remembered it: dominated on the north side by the hulk of the Nobel Museum, and hemmed in on every other flank by the narrow, brightly painted eighteenth-century townhouses so typical of Scandinavian architecture. In almost every window above the street-level cafés were paper Christmas stars, illuminated through their delicate perforations by a warm honeyed light. No flashing LEDs. No nodding reindeers or waving Santas. Sweden celebrated Christmas with a pleasingly understated aesthetic.

  The Stortorget cobbles had been turned into a camping ground of Christmas stalls that were being prepared for another day of selling slippers, jewelry, blankets and sausages to tourists. Several of the stalls were still locked up but a few sellers were opening early, hoping to tempt the tourists lingering over their coffees and pastries in the sidewalk cafés.

  Nervously, Ingrid scanned the square, looking for anyone who might be Magnus Jonsson. Was he tall, fat, old, white? With no physical description, she was on the alert for other tells: walking too quickly, shifting from one foot to another, a constant fiddling with clothing or a phone.

  The cafés on the west and south edges of the square were bustling, as serving staff delivered breakfasts to tourists who were wearing winter coats and huddling under heaters. Ingrid looked for a man taking coffee alone. There were several, but none gave any hint that he was looking out for a woman in her thirties carrying an illegal arms shipment. Maybe nine o’clock had been a very precise deadline and Magnus Jonsson had already left. She wondered if she should do the same.

  Just hanging around made her look suspicious, so Ingrid joined the line at the waffle stand for a coffee. The line was several people deep, in part because there was a new employee being trained. She stood and listened as he took instructions from the frustrated stallholder. The new recruit was incompetent: she doubted he could boil a kettle let alone work the espresso machine. And then she realized why: he was an undercover cop. Why else would you give a middle-aged man a go at losing you customers? He had to be the only barista in Stockholm who was both over twenty-five and a native Swedish speaker.

  Ingrid bit the inside of her cheek: she didn’t have any kronor anyway. She left the line, hoping not to draw attention to herself, and started wandering through the stalls that were sporting little white skirts from the overnight snow. Her heart beat so hard she could hear it: the fake barista wouldn’t be the only cop. Those single guys sipping coffees
in the sidewalk cafés were probably also police.

  She felt trapped. Coming to the city had been a mistake. She should have taken the train to Malmö. She could be in Denmark by now. Her jaw started to tremble with the realization that she was in a square in the middle of an island in the center of a capital city: every possible escape route would be monitored and patrolled. There were only two possible ways she was going to get off Gamla Stan. In the back of a police van, or in a body bag.

  41

  Instinctively, Ingrid’s gloved fingers wrapped around the two Perspex tubes inside her pockets. If she wasn’t going to get out of Stortorget, she should ditch the illegal weapons components before she was apprehended. Without them, what was she actually guilty of? Stealing a couple of cars? Fare dodging? Maybe she could tough it out and stay silent. Serve a sentence as a Jane Doe. Out in a few years. Months, maybe, if she could pin it all on the fact she’d been kidnapped. Then she remembered firing the gun at the McDonald’s employee. She wouldn’t get away with less than ten years.

  None of the uniformed cops in the square seemed interested in her, and it made her nervous. Why hadn’t a police officer stopped her and asked her why she was there? If it were an FBI operation, she hoped her colleagues would have made an approach on the basis of her height, race and age.

  She scanned the square and counted the uniformed presence: sixteen officers. And none of them had approached her? She began to wonder if it was possible that the police weren’t even looking for her. She’d assumed the cops would have worked out who the Nokia had belonged to, but it was less than twenty-four hours since she’d thrown it under the cushions in Republik. The forensics might not be back yet. Ingrid inhaled so sharply she had to stop, finding herself in front of a stall selling brightly colored, oversized lollipops as her head spun with the possibility that they hadn’t actually linked the phone to her yet. The cops would know the where and the when from the message, but they didn’t have a clue about the who and the what. After the bomb at the museum, the cops were probably only looking out for men of Arab or Somali appearance. Her eyes widened with the realization. She reached out a hand to steady herself on the stall in front of her. She needed to rest. And she definitely needed to eat.

  “God Jül,” the woman behind the counter said.

  “God Jül,” Ingrid managed, totally distracted by the thoughts rotating round her head. She smiled at the woman, her face barely visible inside a woolen hat with pompoms dangling from the ear flaps. Ingrid desperately wished she had some of the local currency. Lingering, talking to a stallholder, walking away with a bag of candy: these actions would make her look like a tourist and would buy her a little time to find Magnus Jonsson. Or let him find her.

  “For you, or for someone else?” the woman asked.

  Ingrid looked into the woman’s face and saw that she was apprehensive, making her aware of her appearance. Shaven head, black make-up, a cut above the eye, clearly not been to bed. The woman probably thought she was about to steal something.

  “I am just looking,” Ingrid said. She smiled broadly, attempting to look as unthreatening as possible.

  “Where are you from?” The woman’s accent was hard to place. Baltic was as close as Ingrid could get. Another Latvian, or Estonian or Lithuanian.

  Ingrid didn’t know how to answer and so looked up as the helicopter she had been hearing since she’d entered Stortorget swooped low over the square.

  “Crazy,” the woman said. “Since yesterday. Absolutely crazy.”

  You don’t know the half of it.

  “They don’t let people in with their trucks, their vans. Nobody can open their stall today if they can’t bring, you know, if they cannot bring in…” The woman searched for the right word in English before giving up.

  Ingrid scanned the other people in the square. Only a handful weren’t looking at the helicopter as it hovered above them, making the Christmas decorations on the stalls flap noisily in the down draft. They had to be plain-clothes officers. Ingrid puffed out her cheeks and exhaled slowly, her warm breath spiraling out of her mouth like a fire-breathing super-villain from a Marvel comic. It would only take one of them to recognize her. Just one of them to put a hand on her shoulder and ask her to answer a few questions. She needed to get the hell out of Stortorget, get off Gamla Stan and onto a ferry back to Riga. Finding Magnus Jonsson was a problem she could solve in a few hours’ time: right now escape was her only priority.

  Ingrid remembered to smile at the stallholder before walking away, swallowing hard and shoving her hands deeper into her pockets. Just keep walking. Get out while you can. Find a locker, leave the components, bust the bracelet, get a message to Angelis and then disappear.

  Something caught Ingrid’s eye and made her look up: someone was on the roof of one of the hotels. A sniper. Then she noticed how many of the windows above ground level were open, curtains fluttering in the breeze. Windows weren’t generally left open in Stockholm in December. More marksmen. She started to comprehend the size of the police operation. She knew how much planning they normally took and this one would have been prepared in haste. Her jaw tightened. She picked up her pace and headed for the southern side of the square before stopping dead at the sight of a dog walker ten feet in front of her. It wasn’t the first one she’d seen that morning. Breathing quickly, Ingrid did a three-sixty. There were three others. In the city center. In the same goddamn square. All walking spaniels.

  Sniffer dogs.

  Ingrid gulped hard, her throat sore and dry. The cops might not have DNA back from the phone, but the dogs would have the scent. Her scent. If not from the phone, then from the cabin, the Russell Athletic bag… Even if the cops didn’t know who they were looking for, the dogs would. A bead of sweat trickled down between her shoulder blades. Sweat. It was barely above freezing.

  Ingrid tried to look over her shoulder slowly, casually, but feared her movements were jerky and nervy. There was another dog behind her. Whichever way she went, she was going to have to walk past one of them.

  Stay where you are.

  She didn’t even have a phone she could get out and pretend to play with. Or a watch she could consult. Hell, she didn’t even have any hair she could twiddle round her fingers. She just had to stand there, trying to look as though it was what she wanted to be doing. Then she remembered the cigarettes in her pocket. But she didn’t have time to light up: one of the dog handlers was moving toward her. She could see his earpiece now. A curtain in an upper-floor window fluttered in the corner of her vision. The whirr of the rotors burrowed deeper into her ears.

  Ingrid undid the top button of her coat and fished around inside for her scarf. He was a big guy. Six foot. Two hundred pounds. She pulled the scarf free of the collar as she turned to look at the other officer. She was short but stocky. Ingrid could outrun both of them, even in the coat. She wrapped the scarf around her neck, pulling the fleecy material up over her chin to hide her trembling jaw. She looked like a punk about to do over a grocery store.

  The spaniel over her left shoulder was now only five feet away, sniffing at the base of the adjacent stall. To her right, the dog was seven or eight feet away.

  Do you just stand there waiting for the world to end, or do you do something?

  Ingrid took a step forward, her right foot almost unbearably heavy. Her left foot was just as difficult to lift, but she managed to move slowly toward the south-west corner of the square. Her heart boomed like a tennis player’s on match point.

  Just one foot in front of the other. That’s all you’ve got to do.

  Ingrid picked up a little speed, but didn’t want to draw attention to herself by rushing. Her throat was tight. Her mouth was dry. The female dog handler was three feet to her right. Ingrid nodded to herself: she was going to make it through; the spaniel was diligently inspecting an unopened stall. It wasn’t going to notice her.

  Just a few more steps then you can break into a run.

  Ingrid passed the dog and its handler, e
xhaling hard as she did so. Then she began pushing through the Christmas shoppers, who were still looking up at the helicopter.

  A dog started yapping behind her.

  Keep walking. Don’t run yet.

  The yapping got louder. There was shouting. The crackle of police radios.

  Run!

  Ingrid powered her way through the stalls and the tourists who were looking to see what the commotion was. Skipping and darting between obstacles, she kept moving as the noise behind her got louder. She could feel the ground shake with footsteps that weren’t her own.

  Should she grab a hostage? Steal a car? How the hell—how the fuck—was she going to get out of this?

  A crack of gunfire ricocheted round the square. A single shot. A handgun. Screaming. Everyone was screaming. Ingrid instinctively ducked as she balled her fists and pumped her arms, determined to reach the corner of the square and a road—any road—out of Stortorget.

  More shouting. Endless screaming.

  Her heartbeat drowned out everything else as she ran, her sneakers slipping on the cobbles, and she swung right, avoiding a gaping-mouthed tourist too stunned to move out of her way. She felt her leg give way under her, felt herself falling, so she pushed down hard on her left foot, turning her tumble to a stumble, and carried on running.

  A uniformed officer came round the side of one of the stalls and ran toward her.

  Fuck.

  Her arms pumping, her legs driving, Ingrid aimed for a gap between tourists, ducking, darting, forgetting to breathe.

  Behind her, the shouting and the screaming expanded, mushrooming. The same syllables were being blasted at her over and over again. Sluta. Stop.

  She kept going, her vision narrowing as she ran toward the street heading south out of the square. She accelerated, sensing she was pulling clear of the cop who was chasing her. She was running headlong at the uniformed officer ahead of her. Her only option was to push him out of the way. Velocity versus weight. She just needed a few more yards to get up to speed.