by Eva Hudson
Her best bet was to trip him up, hope the gun fell from his grasp, grab it, use it if she had to, and then run. She just had to pick the right moment, to sense when he was already falling forward, leaning into her, and then stick out her leg. Her breathing got heavier just imagining it, the vapor condensing into white puffs as she labored through the snow.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Walk.”
She changed her stride pattern to see how quickly he would bump into her, to gauge how close he kept. She started to move her arms, judging if she could get enough power to ram her joined fists up under his jaw. She didn’t know how long she’d be on the path for. She had to take the first opportunity she got.
Either side of her were dark fir trees, rigid with snow, hemming them in. Keeping her head bowed, she looked left and right, but all she could see were trunks and snow-laden branches. It would be easy to get lost plus, she reasoned, it had to be twenty below. She was in sneakers and jeans: if she did manage to overpower Mohammed, she might not survive long. If she fell, hypothermia would kick in within minutes. She already sensed she was seizing up, shutting down. She was dressed for the city, not the wilderness.
Above their heads, Ingrid heard the buzz of a power cable, and drifting up from below was the deep moan of a freeway. Civilization wasn’t far away. She could reach help, she knew she could. Then she remembered that she couldn’t. She couldn’t exactly knock on someone’s door and say: “Hi, you don’t know me, but I’m carrying some highly lethal weapons components and I need to deliver them to help stop the war in Syria. Will you let me use your phone?” She might as well rip up the Conduct After Capture booklet. Apart from hostages with Stockholm syndrome, she said to herself, she was one of the few people to be abducted who didn’t want to get saved.
Stockholm syndrome. In Stockholm. What were the chances? She allowed herself a smile.
For her, there could be no rescue. No tearful reunion with loved ones. This never happened. She was never really here. Whether she survived this or not, no one could ever, ever know about it. She wiped the snow from her face and kept walking, listening to Mohammed’s breathing.
“Stop,” he said. “You stop here.”
Ingrid could hear him fiddling with something so she risked looking up. The wide triangle of sky visible above the path was dark gray, like a steel door waiting to be slammed shut, and in the gloom, through the black trees fringed with white, stood a small dilapidated cabin.
“You put hood back on now.”
Transcript from Riksdag Committee Hearing 23
December 15 2015
BILUNGS: For the record, please state your full name and rank.
FONSMARK: Birgitte Fonsmark. I don’t have a rank. Technically, I am a civilian. I lead MAT, the Mobile Analysis Team within Police Sweden.
BILUNGS: And what is the role of the MAT?
FONSMARK: We track and monitor mobile and internet communications of persons under investigation.
BILUNGS: Only suspects?
FONSMARK: Yes. We have nothing to do with the intelligence services. We do not carry out general surveillance, only those individuals the police wish to pursue.
BILUNGS: And I presume you have been briefed on the purpose of these hearings?
FONSMARK: Yes.
BILUNGS: You understand that we are not here to apportion blame. This hearing is about discovering the true facts of the events of December 15 and 16th last year. Nothing you say here will have any bearing on your future career prospects and no one will be subject to sanction on the basis of anything they reveal to this committee.
FONSMARK: Yes, I understand that.
BILUNGS: So, we have already heard from Sergeant Holm that a cell phone was found at Republik. Perhaps if you could talk us through the significance of this phone.
FONSMARK: Significance?
BILUNGS: How it pertains to the events of December 15th last year.
FONSMARK: I think that is a question for an investigating officer. As I say, I am a civilian. A technician.
BILUNGS: Very well. Yesterday, Sergeant Holm testified to this committee that, around four o’clock, she was informed by the CSI team inside Republik that they had found a phone—an old Nokia 3210—close to the table where the suspect had been having lunch. Sergeant Holm told us that it is very unusual these days to find a phone like this, and when they are used, it tends to be for criminal activity. Would you agree with everything I have said so far?
FONSMARK: Yes.
BILUNGS: When did you first become aware of the existence of this Nokia 3210?
FONSMARK: Me? I couldn’t tell you. Sometime later that week, probably.
BILUNGS: Ah. [Refers to notes] It was my understanding—this committee’s understanding—that you were sent the phone for analysis on the afternoon of the 15th. Is that not the case?
FONSMARK: I am the head of MAT. I do not log the deliveries.
BILUNGS: Of course. Do you know when your organization first became aware of the existence of this phone?
FONSMARK: [Refers to notes] A call was received from Sergeant Holm at four seventeen requesting immediate analysis. Once the CSI teams had taken swabs for DNA, it was sent to our laboratory. [Refers to notes] It was logged at five ten on the 15th.
BILUNGS: I am going to try and speed things up a little bit. Please interrupt me if I get anything wrong. [Pause] It was immediately discovered that the SIM card was brand-new, a good indicator that the phone had been used for criminal purposes.
FONSMARK: Yes.
BILUNGS: There was no record of any calls made by that SIM card, only three text messages. Two sent, one received.
FONSMARK: Yes.
BILUNGS: The first message, sent in English at twelve ten, read: ‘ARE YOU HERE YET?’ At twelve eighteen, the Nokia received a message, also in English, that said: ‘STORTORGET CHRISTMAS MARKET. 9AM TOMORROW.’ And at twelve twenty-nine, the Nokia sent a second text message that read: ‘ARE YOU SURE? 9AM FOR THE CHRISTMAS MARKET NOT 9PM? PLEASE CONFIRM.’ Is that correct, Miss Fonsmark?
FONSMARK: Yes.
BILUNGS: Do you have a copy of the lab’s report? Document AM/76TA?
FONSMARK: Yes.
BILUNGS: Could you please talk this committee through the findings on page eight?
FONSMARK: Yes. Sure. The records confirm that the two messages sent from the Nokia were sent from a location within a two hundred meter radius of the Republik café.
BILUNGS: You cannot be any more precise?
FONSMARK: The position is triangulated from three masts. With an iPhone, for example, there is usually other data—Wi-Fi connection, or Bluetooth positioning—that can narrow down the location, but with such an old phone, that is all the data can say with certainty. Smartphones send out GPS signals. They can be extremely accurate.
BILUNGS: We know the gunmen entered Republik at twelve twenty-eight. It is reasonable to think that the phone had to have been inside the café before then, therefore the message sent at twelve twenty-nine must have been sent from Republik.
FONSMARK: The data does not show that. It is supposition.
BILUNGS: But it is the only possible location for that text to have been sent from.
FONSMARK: I think your line of questioning would be better directed toward a police officer. I can only tell you what the data says.
BILUNGS: What does the data say about the phone that received the two messages sent from the Nokia?
FONSMARK: Well, OK, that I can tell you. Firstly, only one message was received. The second message, the one seeking confirmation, was never received. The only data we have for that SIM shows it received a message at twelve ten, and sent a message at twelve eighteen. We also know that SIM card was never used for any other communication, before or since.
BILUNGS: And do we know the location of that phone [refers to notes], the phone with the number ending in 6575?
FONSMARK: We can be less certain about its location when it received the first message—the sy
stem isn’t entirely accurate for receiving data—but we know that the message it sent at twelve eighteen was sent from a location in Västerås. MAT passed on that information to Sergeant Holm at six fifteen.
BILUNGS: Could I ask you to talk the committee through the conclusion on page eleven, if you please?
FONSMARK: [Pause while she reads the relevant page] The conclusion is a straightforward one. When two SIM cards that have never previously been activated are used for the first time to communicate with each other, it is highly suspicious and frequently associated with criminal activity.
BILUNGS: Thank you.
18
“Bucket,” Mohammed said, placing the metal pail inside the door. “No bathroom.”
“I need water. To wash my hands.”
He was wearing a hunter’s hat, a scarf that covered his mouth and nose and an enormous coat that was far too big, even for him. The room was dimly lit by two oil lamps, so apart from his impressive height it was hard to make out anything about his appearance. Sub-Saharan African was all Ingrid could be sure of. He looked at her, a dusting of snowflakes clinging doggedly to his woolen coat. “OK.”
Through the open door, Ingrid could see that it was now properly dark. What did that make it? Four thirty? Five? She had probably been there an hour. Mohammed left and locked the door behind him. Three sliding bolts and two padlocks. She heard his footsteps trudge away through the snow.
Ingrid hadn’t gotten a good look at the cabin before Mohammed had put the hood back over her head, but from her brief glimpse it had looked abandoned. An old hunter’s place. Maybe a holiday home, some place the children didn’t want after their parents died. No electricity or running water. Too small to take a family. Impossible to get a car to. No good for a cosmopolitan twenty-first-century Swede. Probably hadn’t been used for decades.
The cabin had an asymmetrical pitched roof and had been built, or had since been divided, into two unequal parts. She was in the smaller part, which would have once been the sauna. A wry smile curled her lips: her second sauna of the day. This one had thick walls—made of whole tree trunks—and no windows. About six feet by ten, lined down the long wall with a wooden bench. There was a burner, but it didn’t look as if it had been lit in Ingrid’s lifetime, and a broken thermometer on the wall. Had it been working, it would have registered a temperature that started with a minus. If she kept walking, pacing, circling her shoulders, she could stay warm enough. Unless she fell asleep, she wasn’t going to die of hypothermia. At that moment, sleep seemed as preposterous as a hot cup of coffee and a pastry.
Don’t think about food.
On the other side of the wall she could hear voices. Mohammed and one other. A man. She didn’t think they were speaking either Swedish or English. They didn’t speak often, and their conversations were short, usually ending in sounds of agreement. Either reassuring each other, or egging each other on, she couldn’t tell. Ingrid paced the inside of the sauna, looking for anything that might help her escape, and made a mental list of everything else that was in her favor. Staying positive was one way hostages kept themselves alive.
Apart from the small bruise that was blooming on her right knee, she hadn’t been injured… She had a weapon. The screwdriver might be small but, combined with the element of surprise, it had the potential to do harm… She was still in possession of all three components… They had taken the hood off… She hadn’t been tied up and, if she needed to, she reckoned she could free herself from her duct tape bonds by removing her jacket. She wasn’t going to attempt to do that unless she absolutely had to. So long as her kidnappers thought the tape was effective, they would be less tempted to restrict her further… She was less than an hour from Stockholm. If she could escape, she could still make the Christmas market in the morning… She was being held by Muslims. If they were devout, they would pray five times a day. That might just create five opportunities to escape.
She inspected the inside of the wood burner, hoping to find the kind of iron poker only used as a murder weapon in Agatha Christie spoofs, but the burner was empty aside from the fossilized remnants of a bird’s nest that had fallen through the flue at some point in the twentieth century. The place was empty: no blankets, no rugs, just the bucket, the bench and the lanterns. She continued with her mental list.
The fact that she had told them she was menstruating—something that would be true within hours judging by the cramping in her abdomen—unsettled her captors. She was unclean. She didn’t think sexual assault was an immediate threat… There was no electricity. Even if her captors had battery packs to recharge their devices, it wouldn’t be long before their phones dried up. No communication, no Tetris, no Netflix or Al Jazeera: she wouldn’t be the only one getting bored… Although the walls were thick and impenetrable without a chainsaw, Ingrid reckoned the roof was weak. She could feel a breeze every now and then. If there was a way out that wasn’t through the barricaded door, it would be via the roof.
She stood on the bench, retrieved the screwdriver from her sock, reached up as best she could with her bound hands and poked a patch of ceiling where the wood was particularly soft. The screwdriver sank in, like pushing a spoon into baked custard. She stared up at the black rotten wood and sighed: making a hole big enough to pull herself through would take days. And she didn’t have days.
Footsteps. Mohammed was coming back.
She stepped down, pushed the screwdriver back inside her sock and felt the pouch against her leg. It was sodden, as were her jeans, but at least she still had some money. A couple of thousand euros. Something else in her favor.
The bolts rasped in their sheaths and the door rattled as Mohammed struggled with the padlocks. “Water,” he said, placing a bucket of snow on the floor. A swirl of snowflakes spiraled in from the darkness outside. “Will be water soon.”
“Thank you,” Ingrid said. “How long will we be here?” Ingrid deliberately used ‘we’. From chapter one, page one of Conduct After Capture.
Mohammed shrugged.
“Are we staying here tonight?”
Mohammed’s eyes narrowed. “Depends.”
“On what?”
He shrugged again.
“It is too cold to sleep here. I’ll die if I stop moving.”
He nodded. “Keep moving.”
“For how long? How long are you keeping me here?”
He took a step back toward the door. “Until your husband says yes.”
19
Husband? Ingrid didn’t even have a boyfriend.
English wasn’t his first language. Maybe he meant ‘partner’, as in business partner. Was he talking about Nick Angelis? It seemed unlikely. But words like ‘unlikely’ were acquiring new meaning.
She couldn’t work out why they hadn’t asked for the components. She hadn’t even been frisked. The Skinny Boy in Republik had probably even felt one of them inside her backpack and not claimed it. So if they weren’t holding her to nix the arms deal, why the hell had they taken her?
Ingrid didn’t know enough about the factions in the Syrian war and their links to organizations like Al-Shabaab, but she could construct a scenario where they weren’t trying to intercept the components, only to disrupt the handover. If they could make her miss the Christmas market in Stortorget, then maybe they could alter the balance of power at the Vienna negotiations? Was that why she was in a shed in the middle of a forest at twenty below?
Nothing made sense. A picture of her desk in the criminal division at the embassy forced itself into her head: case files, Post-it notes, the motorcycle helmet under her desk… that’s where she was meant to be. The thought she might not make it back to her own life, to her real life, made her gasp.
She concentrated on her breath, pulling air in through her nose, expanding her chest and then letting the air out slowly through pursed lips, a vortex of steam evaporating in front of her. Repeat. The voice from her yoga app drifted through her thoughts… become aware of your body, aware of the contact betw
een your body and the floor…
Ingrid realized she could no longer feel her feet. The bands of cold she had felt when she had disembarked from the ferry had spread from her ankles, sending tendrils of ice to her toes and upwards, encasing her calves. She picked up one of the two oil lamps and placed it beneath the bench, then sat down with her feet either side of it. She held her hands over the lamp and looked down at her gloves.
The gloves.
She had written the second phone number on the labels inside them. If she could find a phone, she could make contact with Magnus Jonsson, or whoever it was she was meeting in the morning. Her heart beat a little harder, warming her slightly: there was someone she could call, someone who didn’t want the cops to find her either. Someone with the same goal. A possible ally. An option. It felt good to know her brain was still functioning, still alert to opportunities.
The warmth wasn’t getting to her feet at all because they weren’t just cold, they were wet. Wet feet, she knew, were potentially dangerous. Trench foot or gangrene or frostbite. She didn’t know which. Couldn’t remember. Couldn’t concentrate. She bent forward and fumbled with her laces, eventually able to slip off her right sneaker. She peeled away the wet sock to reveal a puckered, white foot she barely recognized.
She limped over to her backpack, carried it back to the bench then felt around inside for her spare pair of socks. There were voices coming from the other side of the wall. It sounded like they were having a card game. Friendly. Relaxed. Warm. They had to have a source of heat in the other part of the cabin. She pulled on the socks and rubbed her feet as best she could with her taped-up arms, hoping to get some feeling back into her toes.
Ingrid examined the oil lamp. It was like something from a period drama on TV but with an IKEA label on its base. It smelt slightly of lemons. More like a fake lemon-scented air freshener. She tipped it to one side to assess how much oil was in it, but as she had no idea how quickly it burned and no accurate means of keeping time, she had no way of knowing how long it would be before she was consigned to blackness.
