Below Zero

by Eva Hudson

  Mohammed put his socks on Jens’s feet. “What else?” he asked.

  Ingrid made deliberate eye contact with him. “More layers.”

  He looked confused.

  “More clothing. As much as possible. But you really need to get him to hospital.”

  He shook his head. “Thank you but I do not think so.”

  “Then keep talking to him, you never know what he can hear, what signals his brain will tune in to. And when he wakes up, he’ll need fluids. Water. You understand?”

  She needed to get back into the sauna, lift the floorboards and escape. Short of dialing nine-one-one, or somehow grabbing a gun and overpowering three captors, escaping was the best thing she could do for Jens. She looked over to the boy, who was staring at her as if she were a chocolate bar he wasn’t allowed to eat until after he’d finished his supper.

  Food? What the hell were they going to eat?

  She smiled again at the boy, who stuck out his tongue at her. He did not seem in any way distressed. Nor did he seem drugged. Ingrid wondered if he suffered from some form of autism.

  The short man tipped a Marlboro out onto the table and placed it between his lips. He struck a match and held it to the tip of his cigarette. Ingrid watched as the tobacco glowed and smoke drifted out of his mouth. Two more weapons, she thought. A box of matches and a lit cigarette. She couldn’t remember the last time she had seen someone smoke indoors.

  She looked down at Jens. On a battlefield he would be mistaken for a corpse. His lips were still blue, but the lack of blood at least meant his cut had stopped bleeding. She pressed her index and middle fingers into his neck, searching for a pulse. His skin felt like damp clay.

  “Come on,” she said under her breath. “Come on, Jens.” The only pulse she could feel was her own. His jaw was loose, his body limp.

  “He will live, yes?” Mohammed said.

  Ingrid pushed her fingers harder against his throat, feeling the gristle of his windpipe under her touch. Nothing. She pushed her hand inside the coat, placing her palm directly above Jens’s lean muscular chest. She kept it there for many moments, hoping that through the layers of clothing she would detect a heartbeat.

  “Yes?” Mohammed repeated.

  No heartbeat, just the gentle expansion of his ribs as his body drew in a breath. He was alive. Ingrid caught the eye of the boy, who was still staring at her.

  “I think so,” she said to Mohammed, “but he really needs to be in a hospital.” She looked up at the short man, who held the cigarette between his fingers in the same way Rita Hayworth might. “One phone call would save his life.”

  “You,” the short man said, smoke curling out of his lips as he spoke. “You will save his life.”

  “There is nothing else I can do for him. I’m not a doctor. He needs to be in hospital.”

  He expelled a thick toxic plume of smoke in her direction. “No.”

  Jens’s breathing was shallow but regular. She took off her beanie and carefully stretched it over his head. Even if they saved his life, these minutes without blood in his brain could cause irreparable damage. Someone needed to call the emergency services and if the short guy wasn’t going to do it, she had to get back into the sauna. She had to lift those floorboards and find a way out.

  27

  “No, you stay with him.”

  “There’s nothing else I can do.” Ingrid stood up defiantly, the Perspex tubes shifting inside her padded sleeves as she did so. “We just have to wait.” Or, you know, call an ambulance and get him to hospital. She went over to the boy, who was perched on a large wooden chest.

  “Hej,” she said. “Mitt namn är…” She was about to say ‘Ingrid’ but stopped herself. “Anna.”

  “My name,” he said in Swedish, “is Magnus. I am ten years old. I live in Stockholm.”

  “Nice to meet you,” she said and extended her hand. He took it and shook it theatrically. Maybe it wasn’t autism, but the kid’s confident demeanor suggested some kind of personality disorder. It was only when she sat down next to him that she registered what he had just said. The pronunciation in Swedish is so different. Like Mao-ness. Magnus. She felt a tremor in her jaw. Was this who she had been sent to meet? Was she supposed to give the components to a child?

  “How old are you?” the boy asked. His intonation was slow, mannered, like he was reciting his multiplication tables.

  “Um. I am thirty-three,” Ingrid said, remembering her basic Swedish. The boy was almost impossibly blond, with curls like a golden retriever’s framing an angular face. His alert blue eyes barely blinked. Ingrid took a deep breath and spoke quietly: “What is your full name, Magnus?”

  The boy was staring at Jens. “Will he die?”

  “Ah—” She didn’t know what to say. Her Swedish wasn’t good enough to convey the complexities of Jens’s condition. “Um, I hope not. He just needs to get warm.” She just wanted him to tell her what his surname was.

  The boy nodded. “Do you like Candy Crush?”

  “I, er, I don’t play it.”

  “I play it very well.” He turned away from her and picked up a new-looking Samsung.

  “Are you hungry, Magnus?”

  He remained completely still as he considered her question then shook his head enthusiastically. He was like a toddler.

  “We feed him,” the short man said.

  With what, she wanted to ask. All she could see was the packet of cookies. There were no cooking facilities, and nowhere comfortable for the boy to sleep. “What time is it?” she asked.

  The short man tapped the screen of his phone. “Twenty-two eighteen.”

  Later than she’d thought.

  “Shouldn’t the boy, shouldn’t Magnus, be in bed by now?”

  He scrunched the remains of his cigarette into an ashtray on the table. There were as many as twenty butts in it. Ingrid suddenly saw it as a way to measure time: if your kidnapper smokes at a rate of one cigarette every forty minutes, how long have you been held captive?

  Without looking up from the Samsung, the boy asked: “Does your face hurt?”

  Ingrid glowered at the short man who, sensing the weight of her stare, looked up from his phone and met her eye. “Yes, a bit.”

  The short man sucked in his cheeks. His expression told her he’d do it again if he had to. Mohammed’s face, by contrast, displayed a mix of apology and fear. The kid, head down, thumbs skating over the screen, had a face that was utterly unreadable. Ingrid had worked with enough children to know that, just because a kid can’t express his emotions, it doesn’t mean he’s not feeling them. She put an arm out to comfort him, but he pulled sharply away. Could he really be the person she was supposed to hand the components to?

  “Magnus?”

  The boy didn’t answer.

  “Magnus. What is your full name? Your family name?” The muscle in her jaw twitched.

  The boy continued playing with his game, furiously obliterating boiled sweets from the screen. The battery on the Samsung, she noted, was at twenty-three per cent. It wouldn’t be too many hours before the boy’s entertainment died. She looked around the cabin. There was no obvious means of recharging any of their phones, and the only sustenance she could see was the cookies. What was going to happen when their batteries died, or when the Marlboro or the kerosene ran out? Nothing indicated they planned to hold them for very long.

  Ingrid stood up and all three men stiffened in response. They watched her as she walked slowly over to the table and poured some water into a plastic cup. They didn’t attempt to stop her. She lifted a cookie out of the open packet and ate it: she was asserting her autonomy and they weren’t cracking down. It was a good sign.

  She started to pace around the cabin, a space that was maybe twelve by twenty feet. She walked slowly, watching the men as intently as they watched her. She could tell now that the tall man was Mohammed’s brother. It wasn’t simply that the two were so similar in build; their body language suggested a bond that predated thei
r current confines. When the brother coughed, Mohammed’s expression was of concern rather than irritation.

  Her captors, she realized, had no more freedom than she did. No more access to food or water or escape. She checked on Jens as she passed him, waiting to see his chest rise before walking on. Her foot pressed down on a squeaking floorboard: somehow she had to get back to the other side of the wall. The floor under her sneakers was strewn with sawdust that must have come from the installation of the foil panels. Other than the ceiling, the cabin appeared to have been untouched for a century: hard wooden furniture, small shuttered windows and a stove with a broken flue. There was nothing in the place that suggested they had planned for a lengthy stay.

  Something must have gone wrong with their plans. Her abduction from the café, timed to coincide with the bomb, her transfer from one vehicle to another, it had all been so professional. But now Jens was close to death, and she had been taken instead of her cousin, and their plan—whatever that was—appeared to be falling apart.

  She didn’t have time for their plan to crumble slowly; she needed to blow it apart. As quickly as possible.

  “Who is Abdullah Saladdin?” she asked.

  The three men looked at each other, each wondering if one of the others would answer. Mohammed smiled and leaned forward. His lips parted as he worked out how to respond, but just as he was about to speak, he looked up at the ceiling. A flash of panic jolted across the short man’s features. A helicopter. Cops. All three of them stood up and grabbed their guns.

  Shivers ran over Ingrid’s scalp. Cops might mean medical assistance for Jens, but it signaled hours in detention for her. Hours she needed to spend getting to Stortorget.

  The men checked their weapons and pocketed boxes of ammunition as the sound of the rotors deepened and pulsed. The foil panels on the ceiling had clearly failed to fool the thermal imaging cameras: the helicopter was circling.

  Magnus suddenly started clapping like a toddler being presented with a birthday cake and they all turned to look at his beaming, smiling face. “Daddy,” he said. “My daddy is coming to get me.”

  28

  “Your daddy is in the helicopter?” Ingrid asked

  He nodded vigorously.

  Ingrid tried to remember the Swedish word for pilot, but failed. “He flies helicopters?” she asked. Jens had said that the boy’s father was a judge.

  Magnus moved his head from side to side, shaking his curls like a shampoo model. The boy’s English was probably better than her Swedish. “Why is your daddy in a helicopter, Magnus?” she asked in English, but his fixation had already switched to the short man, who was shouting in Arabic at his cell phone, furious because a flurry of messages arrived while he was trying to dial out. The brothers talked frantically to each other in their mother tongue, panic raising their voices an octave. Ingrid switched back to Magnus, who appeared more intrigued than scared.

  “Why is your daddy in the helicopter?” she asked again in English.

  This time he turned his head toward her and pursed his mouth in concentration. “It’s a secret,” he said, then giggled.

  Ingrid’s eyes widened in surprise: the kid knew how to say ‘secret’ in English. She took a step toward him. “What secret? What’s the secret, Magnus?”

  The boy stared hard at Mohammed, who had started to mumble. A prayer perhaps? Was he preparing for martyrdom? A muscle in Ingrid’s jaw began to twitch. She crouched down in front of the kid. “What secret? Magnus, tell me your secret.”

  The boy glanced at her quickly, then stared over her shoulder to the short man, who was ranting into his phone.

  “Magnus,” she said softly, “why is it a secret?”

  He looked down at her, his expression almost one of surprise that she was still there. He pulled an exasperated face, as if he was annoyed that she hadn’t answered her own question.

  “I can’t tell you!” He laughed and clapped again, like a seal at a circus.

  She pushed herself to standing and, as she did so, the cuff of her jacket rubbed against the tagging bracelet. It took a moment for the dots to join in her head, but when they did her mouth fell open: what if it wasn’t the cops? What if the helicopter had been dispatched by whoever was monitoring the bracelet?

  She felt dizzy at the thought and staggered slightly, reaching out to the wall for support. She tried to remember what the Australian woman in the sauna had said. That they would come for her if she didn’t make the drop. Her head started to shake from side to side. No, it couldn’t have anything to do with the bracelet. The drop wasn’t until nine in the morning. They wouldn’t be coming for her yet, would they?

  Ingrid faced the wall and furtively pushed her cuff up to expose the bracelet. It was smaller than the ankle tags she’d seen on felons released from prison, but she wondered if it nevertheless had additional functionality built in. She examined it surreptitiously, looking for a microphone or a camera. If there wasn’t just a GPS transmitter, but a means of real-time surveillance, was it possible that the arms dealers would know what had happened to her as well as where she was?

  Nervously, she fingered the edges of the bracelet, but couldn’t feel any perforations or indents that suggested it was also a listening device. Apart from the hinge and the edge where the two halves locked, it felt perfectly smooth. Nothing. She pulled her cuff back over the bracelet and turned round.

  The kidnappers were huddled together, arguing urgently. Mohammed looked scared and his brother kept hitting him on the back as if to bolster and encourage him, but his expression remained that of a man on the verge of vomiting. Magnus was transfixed by the three of them, observing them with curiosity, as he might animals in a zoo. The gunmen had probably made the same calculation that she had: if a helicopter had spotted them, it wouldn’t take more than ten minutes for a ground team to be deployed.

  She was screwed. She was completely trapped and her only means of escape was back on the other side of the wall she was leaning against. A vision of what would happen if she didn’t escape ran through her head. An interrogation suite, an interpreter on her left, a lawyer on her right, and a couple of cops opposite asking the same questions over and over again: who are you really and why were you found in possession of a large quantity of cash and illegal weapons components? How long would it be before they found out who she really was? Maybe her cousin would inadvertently identify her. Her heart tightened painfully at the thought. The Bureau and the State Department would have to be involved. And then there were the peace negotiations.

  Ingrid didn’t know how many laws she had broken in which territories, or what sentence she would serve in which country. And that assumed she survived the coming hour. She ran her fingers through her hair, not quite believing what a train wreck her life had become.

  A wreck that was about to get worse. Panicked kidnappers who want to be martyrs. Gung-ho police who don’t have to worry about neighbors becoming collateral damage. A shootout was inevitable, wasn’t it? What was that line from Bonnie Tyler’s big hit in the eighties? We’re living in a powder keg and we’re giving off sparks? Ingrid suddenly felt like human kindling. She placed her hand on Magnus’s shoulder but he stiffened under her touch.

  “Sorry.” She withdrew her hand.

  The rotors of the helicopter pulsed overhead, making the entire cabin vibrate. Mohammed’s brother opened a case and pulled out several more rounds of ammunition, stuffing his pockets before shoving a vintage handgun into his waistband and handing another to Mohammed.

  The kidnappers were shouting at each other, and over each other, incessantly and their phones didn’t stop ringing. Their callers were immediately berated and their demeanor spiraled from panic to fear. Pressure formed at the base of Ingrid’s neck as her body absorbed the enormity of what was happening. It took a few moments for her to register that something had changed. The men were fighting so much that at first they didn’t notice either: the sound of the rotors was dimming.

  Ingrid had to make her m
ove if she was going to get out before there was a knock at the door. Could she join forces with her kidnappers and help them fight their way out? She knew a better plan was encouraging them to run, but it would be useless if they were seeking martyrdom over freedom. The men finally noticed the drop in decibels and their shouting downgraded into an intense debate about why the helicopter had flown off. It was time for Ingrid to act.

  “Hey,” she said.

  The short man turned and glowered. He sniffed sharply, his nostrils briefly flaring like a cobra’s hood. He did not speak.

  “I need to go next door,” she said, pointing toward the dividing wall. “I need something from my bag.”

  The three of them looked at each other, deciding between them whether they should accede to her request.

  The short man shook his head. “No.”

  Ingrid pictured the cops finding her backpack and discovering the component: her kidnappers had no idea she could add arms smuggling to their rap sheet. “I have my period,” she said. They looked at her blankly. A suspicion snuck up on Ingrid that she was about to enjoy the next few sentences that came out of her mouth. “I need sanitary protection.”

  Their expressions did not change.

  “Kotex? Tampax?” Making men uncomfortable about menstruation was just too easy. “I am bleeding.” She held her hands in front of her crotch.

  Slowly, incrementally, their faces drooped with disgust.

  “Now,” she said. “I need to go now. I need the Kotex that are in my bag.”

  The three men did not move. Her demand appeared to scare them more than the threat posed by the helicopter. She pictured the two pried floorboards slightly proud of their neighbors.

  “Now,” she reiterated. “I need to go now.”

  It was Mohammed who moved first. An almost imperceptible bow of the head, followed by a formal nod. “I will get your bag.”