by Karen Guyler
As their night vision kicked in, the winter scene resolved into varying shades of white, grey, blue, black. With every degree the temperature in the car dropped, she wondered if she should just tell him to go back to the hotel.
“You got cereal bars or something in your survival kit?” He asked after a while.
“Better.”
Eva fished around behind his seat and pulled out a small bag, handed him a can. “Open it, wait a couple minutes.”
He did as instructed and she knew exactly when he felt it getting warm. “What magic is this?”
“Self-heating coffee. It’s not bad either.”
“Whoever dreamt that up deserves a knighthood.”
The first sip of her own was very welcome. She handed him a cereal bar. “Your wish is my command.”
Only ten minutes after they finished their second bars, the side of the road ahead of them lit up, long headlight beams parting the darkness from Rubin’s driveway. “And there he goes.” Luke pointed out the obvious.
The Tesla turned right, away from them in a smooth motion, the driver apparently untroubled by the realisation they were there.
Luke turned the engine on. As the heater blasted away the long fingers of arctic night that had wormed their way into the car, Eva’s shoulders relaxed into the warmth. She unclenched her gloved hands in her pockets, breathed out all the way.
“How do you want to do this?” he asked.
“So many security lights, what’s the betting the untrusting Mr Rubin has cameras outside his house?” Eva thought aloud. “But, given how remote he is there, maybe not out the back.”
Luke gazed at the pristine snowy fields leading back to the Rubin property. “That’s quite a trek, don’t suppose you have snowshoes in that survival gear?”
“Better.”
“Can you puff any quieter?” Eva waited for Luke at the top of the small incline where she waited. “They can probably hear you in Bergen.”
“These are some kind of hideous torture instrument.” His words rushed out with his breathing. He leant forwards, leaning on his ski poles, sounding like he was on the summit of Everest without oxygen. “I class myself as fit, but. . .seriously, why did you think to bring these?”
“Being stuck once without them. Cross-country ski-ing gets everyone when they first try it but trust me, it’s way harder walking through deep snow.” She wasn’t going to tell him her thighs were burning, her lungs sore with the exertion of breathing the cold air, that the residual champagne in her system was making her head ache. Very out of practice. “But you’re warmer now, though, right?”
“Wish you’d brought snowshoes.”
Eva pointed to their diagonal left. “That way, those trees are definitely on their property. The house must be thirty metres to the north of them.”
“Up that hill?”
“I’m so tempted to say yes. But that bump will make us visible, round it would be safer. Also, we don’t have skins on our skis.”
“Skins?”
“Strips that go on the underside that allow you to slide forward on the snow but not go backwards. You need them for inclines, these,” she gestured at the landscape, “don’t count but no sense making it harder for ourselves.”
“Glad I brought you along, handy knowing all this stuff.” He seemed to have forgiven her for her faux pas with Agnetha and the champagne.
“It’s kind of my element, the snow. Don’t know how much use I’d be if we were in the desert. Ready?”
The time it took to reach the double bank of trees at the bottom of Rubin’s property gave Eva plenty of opportunity to argue with herself. How would this look to the panel? Breaking and entering was going to be hard to justify, particularly if her instinct was wrong.
“That little voice inside your gut,” her father had told her when he came home after the assignment where he’d been kidnapped, “listen to it, do what it tells you. If I had, I wouldn’t have gone out without an escort and, if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have dropped my gear that led them to find me.”
What had that voice been telling him when he’d saved that little girl’s life that cost him his own? Had it been screaming Eva’s name?
“Eva,” Luke saying it then made her start. “We doing this, or what?
“Just checking.”
The vastness of the vista behind them was stunning. A landscape of pristine snow that would sparkle in strong moonlight, broken by sparse runs of trees at the edge of her vision. The Northern Lights from there would be phenomenal. Rubin’s house was higher than where she and Luke stood but he’d let the firs grow to a natural height, probably double Eva’s five foot three. Why then would Rubin, who was all about the beauty of nature, make a landscaping choice to curtail his view? Was it a case of what kept him in would keep others out?
Looked at like that, the trees were a good deterrent, planted as they were in a dual overlapping band especially tight at the corners where they turned in soldier-like precision to skirt the sides of the property. Eva unclipped her skis and slid them underneath the trees.
“Thank God.” she couldn’t help smiling at Luke’s relief as he did the same.
Near the middle of the barrier, she got down onto her belly, slithering past the low branches that would snag and hold on to her.
Elbow over elbow, she dug her boot tips into the ground behind her and pushed.
“You forgetting something?” Luke dropped the question on her.
Was she? They’d hidden their skis for their route back to the car, if Agnetha was waiting for Ralph to finish his shift they’d be out before she even got there. The snow would be the only giveaway of their presence.
The slide of a gun behind her sounded like a shot. She hadn’t checked hers. Again. Eva’s head dipped to the ground, a what an idiot gesture. Then she heard something else.
She froze. “Pull me out.”
Luke grabbed her ankles and yanked her backwards over the powdery snow.
She rolled up to standing. “Thanks, something’s electrified in there.”
“In a tree-line? I’m no engineer but wouldn’t that be impossible?”
“What else would hum out here?”
He squatted in front of the natural barrier, in the disturbed snow where Eva had begun her creep forwards. Breaking a low twig off the fir tree in front of him, he threw it further in than she’d crawled. It fell to the ground noiselessly.
He repeated it, throwing the next one higher. “Not seeing anything to suggest it.”
Wood wasn’t a great conductor of electricity but these trees were damp, they should have triggered some kind of interference. But they were touching the wires all the way along the boundary.
Eva walked along to the next weakening in the treeline, to where she could push herself through. On her belly she listened. It was there, just above her head. Up on her knees, she listened again, another humming about shoulder height.
“I can probably get in between the two. You want to wait here?”
Luke gauged it. “I’ll follow, ladies first.”
She pushed at the fir tree to dislodge the snow on the upper sides of its branches. Upplega, the Swedish word for that type of snow. She remembered her godfather, Per, making a rhyme up out of the fifty odd words for snow they’d sung together to get her resisting seven-year-old self to ski back to their cabin when she was so tired all she wanted to do was lie in the kornsnö, her favourite one of those words.
Eva lifted her leg to step over the lower wire and a snapping crack hit her. She recoiled so fast,she fell back faster than Agnetha had in the fish market. Grasping her leg, she swallowed the swearing she wanted to scream.
“You okay?”
She flexed her foot, stretched, rubbed at where it hurt like hell. “Definitely electrified. How did it do that?”
“If you still want to go in, we’re not getting in that way. Would you rather go back to Bergen, regroup, figure out another way to get this done?”
Was that Luke’s
way of telling her she was making a terrible choice? Finding whatever Rubin didn’t want them to see was the only way Eva could imagine having leverage to get him to comply with her first objective.
If Luke hadn’t been there to cast doubt on what she was doing, she’d be doing it. She looked at him. “There’s a run of buildings up each side of the property after the trees. I can climb in that way.”
“Not happy about putting those contraptions on my feet again.” Luke sighed.
The ground sloped upwards towards the house, it’d be a harder ski. “The snow’s probably shallow near the buildings, we’ll be okay to walk in boots.” She hoisted her skis up onto her shoulder. Going from slipping between trees to climbing over a building was a whole other layer of explanation for the panel. This had better get her something to offset everyone’s disapproval. Channelling her father’s ghost might cost her dearly.
The moon blinked away behind a run of dark clouds as they reached the first building.
“You’re sure about this?” Luke murmured. “It’ll have to go in my report.”
“Yes.” She looked at the roof edge. It seemed a long way above her.
“I can boost you.”
Eva stepped into his cupped hands. He hoisted her as though she weighed nothing high enough that she could lever herself up onto the flat roof. Not so flat lying on it though, a surprising incline towards the front of the building. As she scrabbled up it, her boots shuffled the snow, clanged on the freezing metal.
From up there she could make out the lighter outline of the house beyond the rise of the land, every window a screen of blackness in the dark. A bowing dip creaked beneath her as the metal flexed. She froze in a starfish shape. It wasn’t far, the front edge. Roof, please hold.
Wriggling more slowly, Eva reached the compound edge and peered down. A couple of trees cast the ground between them and her into a blackness she didn’t want to drop into. It probably wasn’t as high as it looked, nothing to be afraid of. She wouldn’t fail this mission because of something that wasn’t even a phobia.
She pushed herself to the left; the roof protested.
Another shove with her heels and pull with her hands and she was above where the drop was more dark grey than pitch black, light enough to be sure there was nothing to hurt her other than the distance to the ground itself. Sweating beneath her technical layers, she worked herself round until she could get up on her elbows and lowered herself over the edge, as though she were just getting into a cold swimming pool.
It seemed a long way down. As she was about to lose her balance, she dropped on to the gritted snow.
Too late she wondered at her knee, or rather her ACL ligament, sprained in a collision with a cyclist last year. A jar on the soles of her feet as she hit the ground, heart pounding. She straightened up, flexed her legs. No other damage. She checked her holster, its contents where it was supposed to be.
“I’m down.” She hissed at Luke. “Stay there, I’ll be quick.”
A gentle breeze teased at her with icy fingers, pointing out the wet patches on her jacket, down her wrist where the snow had settled in a poorly tightened glove.
Eva tucked it under her arm, wringing her hand dry, and prised out her phone. Wooden fingers, clumsy with the cold, texted him.
She tested the outbuilding door. Solid in its frame, locked in part by a securely fastened padlock and what looked like an iPad attached to the wall. Eva jumped at the shattering crash of metal onto concrete on the other side of the door.
Then a low growl reached for her from behind.
14
Eva held her arms out to her sides, turned to face it.
The lynx was beautiful, face impassive, tiny tufts of dark fur on each ear stuck up, the contrast with its well-camouflaged body that rippled in and out of Eva’s night vision as it prowled through the ribboned shadows of the trees towards her. Its partner joined it, approaching from the bottom end of the property, giving the same warning.
Eva tensed, forcing herself to not run, pushing herself as tall as she could make herself. But how long before they realised she was no threat and pounced? They stopped a distance from her, watching, gauging what she was. Or were they?
She took a careful step towards the cats, all while her brain screamed at her to run in the other direction. They didn’t move, she took another. As though communicating telepathically, they stayed still. Another step forward and Eva caught it, a snatch of a hum.
More closely spaced than in the back tree-line, lines of almost perfectly camouflaged wires ran from beside the tree spans. As she held her hand out to the one at her shoulder height, a hum grew louder, as she withdrew it, the sound melted to virtual silence. To her left the wires were secured to the metal edge of glass panels that extended high enough to dissuade the lynxes from climbing up the trees and jumping out.
Rubin’s reaction to the seals in the fjords didn’t equate to a man who kept wild animals caged. Nothing about that man added up. Maybe it was Agnetha, she seemed to like her fur.
A faint banging reached Eva.
The crash—Luke.
She rushed back to the building, knocking, shouting at the door. “Are you okay?”
Nothing from inside. Grabbing out her phone, her call went straight to the automated voicemail.
He was conscious, at least, if he was knocking.
Pulling on the head torch from her inside jacket pocket, she studied the door and held her hand up to the iPad-sized panel. Handprint entry. What the hell was Rubin keeping in there?
And the door, not dissimilar to how solid the one at St George’s Grove was, top security. She pulled on the padlock. A flash of a locked door in Marrakech behind which she’d found Lily when she thought she’d lost her, and her husband’s unknown about brother’s decomposing body, disoriented Eva. Luke had dealt with that locked door, she could take care of this one.
Her ski gloves wouldn’t let her pull out her Glock. She took them off and stuffed them in her pockets, and, holding the gun by its barrel, lined up the handle with the padlock. She smashed it down, but the padlock held. They made it look easy in the movies. She tried again, but it didn’t budge. So she did what Luke had done in Morocco.
The shot reverberated from building, to tree, to house, to field beyond the tree-line, cracking through the silent Norwegian landscape. The lynx would have taken refuge as far away as the electric fence would let them.
Eva pulled the hasp. It held. What was this made of? Side on to the padlock this time, she shot it apart.
Scrabbling at the hasp, she pulled it open, but there was still the matter of the access panel.
The door opened.
Eva’s heart leaped. She pointed her gun up.
“Bang. You need to be faster. Take cover first before exposing yourself.” Luke was standing at the side of the doorway, putting away his weapon.
The lighter blackness of the sky filled the space above her head where the roof had been. A tumbled slide of metal sheeting filled the middle of the floor space. “I told you not to follow. You’re okay?”
He moved his shoulder round until he winced. “Yeah, won’t do that. Strained something.”
A pile of tarpaulins poked out from under the metal, extended in neat rows to the opposite side. The stacks of flattened cardboard along the far back wall had been half buried and crushed by the imploded roof.
“That’s a lot of security for some cardboard.”
“It’s camouflage.” Luke pushed the tarps to one side at the opposite corner to the cave-in and her head torch beam picked up a large rectangular outline cut into the wooden floor. He lifted the trapdoor up. “Your hunch was right. Don’t put your head below the opening, haven’t checked for booby traps.”
Eva peered into the darkness from a careful distance. Her light glinted off shiny guns, long-barrelled rifles, an open wooden crate filled with some form of grenade nestling in foam packaging and cylindrical black metallic objects with a trigger that could have belonged in a b
eauty product display. Everywhere she looked, something different met her gaze, boxes taking up the entire hidden floor space beneath them.
“Carl Rubin’s quite the paradox,” she said, “wanting to save the planet with his green energy and blow it to bits. That’s Agnetha’s why, he’d never divorce her, she knows too much.”
The darkness in the hut blazed away, the overhead lights almost blinded her.
“I suggest you step away from the trapdoor. You do not want to fall down there.” A man’s voice boomed into the space behind them. “Hands in the air.”
15
Eva pulled her Glock out as she whipped round. Sean Finch stood in the open doorway holding a gun on them that looked as if he’d picked it up from a space station.
He laughed. “You think you’re taking me on with that kid’s toy? This is a Scorpion, with a serious sting. Watching this fire’s like watching a blowtorch through ice cream. You want me to demonstrate? Say goodbye to your partner.”
“No, wait.” She raised her hands in surrender. He wasn’t that far away, she could definitely hit him. But no guarantee she could incapacitate him before he pulled the trigger and he was pointing the gun unwaveringly at Luke.
“Put it down.”
Eva could have screamed at the ‘why don’t you try this’ scenarios her brain was feeding her. She wasn’t good enough to risk Luke’s life. She placed her weapon on the floor.
“And you,” Finch pointed it at Luke, who did the same. “Mr Rubin’s not going to be happy.” He looked at the space where the roof had been, then back at them. “Strip.”
“What?”
“You heard me.”
“You’re a big man.” Eva said.
“You’re not my type. Strip, I’ll let you keep something on.”
That wasn’t what worried her. Being naked in front of him was neither here nor there in the circumstances. It was the lack of layers of warm down and technical fabric that did. Her face and fingers were already feeling it. Norway in winter wasn’t the time to be taking off outer layers unless you were beside a roaring fire.
