The Silent War

by Andreas Norman

  ‘Hurry up,’ Jonathan chivvies her.

  Her fingers are trembling; for a moment she actually forgets the code, and knows that if that happens, then he will probably kill someone – he will do that if she doesn’t do everything he asks of her right now. Then she manages to gather her thoughts and enter the six digits.

  She spots the letter opener. It is made from carved wood and is in a pen pot with a handful of pens; she can see the wooden handle sticking out, and the slender, shiny piece of metal ending in a sharp point.

  ‘Move,’ he says, and she turns towards him so that she is standing by the small cabinet. Her hand fumbles, her fingers brushing the slender outlines of the pens.

  He makes an annoyed gesture with his head. The pistol – she constantly has it in her sights – is facing her.

  She feels the square shape of the handle and closes her hand around the knife before quickly moving to one side.

  ‘Sit there,’ he says, and she sinks into the sofa, feeling the cool, soothing metal of the paperknife slide under her cardigan sleeve.

  He crouches in front of her by the safe. There is her service weapon, and a spare magazine. Passports, an envelope filled with cash, papers in different files. And the flash drive.

  He holds it up by its tip.

  ‘This one?’

  Yes, she nods. That one.

  ‘Is this the only copy?’

  ‘Yes, that’s the only copy.’

  He leads her before him down the stairs to the living room. She can feel the handle close to her wrist. With each step she tries to find a way out, just a tiny opportunity, a second of inattention would be enough. But he is sharp, professional, just like her. He keeps his distance and doesn’t relax his guard.

  Rasmus is on his knees in the living room with his hands on his head. He is absolutely silent and looking down at the floor. Gustav is sitting on a chair in the middle of the room with his hands tied behind his back and duct tape over his face, and next to them are the two toughs. It looks like a surrealist painting. She can’t quite believe this is happening to her, and at the same time it is so intensely real that every detail sparkles in her mind’s eye.

  ‘Okay,’ says Jonathan briskly, holding up the black flash drive. ‘I’ll ask again. Is this the only copy?’

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I promise.’

  He looks at her in dissatisfaction.

  And then she realises all hope is lost, because he doesn’t believe her, even though it is true. One of the men in checked shirts steps forward and strikes Rasmus’s face without any warning. Her boy falls headlong to the floor and curls up into the foetal position.

  ‘No,’ she cries out. ‘Leave him alone.’

  She turns to Jonathan.

  ‘Jonathan, listen,’ she says while Rasmus’s hoarse sobs fill the room. ‘There are no other copies. You can hit him as much as you want, but there aren’t any others. I promise you . . .’

  The man looks self-conscious when he bends down over her son and pulls him up by the jumper, raising his hand and striking Rasmus again with the broad palm of his hand across his mouth. The cracking sound almost makes her vomit.

  ‘Stop it, stop it,’ she begs.

  Rasmus is screaming, horror-struck, as blood bubbles out of his mouth.

  Gustav jerks in his chair and tries to shout through the tape; one of the men strikes him across the face.

  ‘No,’ she shouts when the men straddle the boy’s ribcage and press him down into the rug. She tries to get to him to stop them, but one of them holds her while the man leans over her boy and wraps his hands around his neck. Rasmus falls silent and begins to struggle noiselessly.

  ‘All the copies,’ says Jonathan.

  He’s dying, she thinks.

  And with resounding clarity she realises what she has to do.

  ‘There is another copy.’

  ‘Where?’ Jonathan roars.

  ‘In the basement.’

  The man loosens his grip. A horrible rasping sound emerges from Rasmus as he gasps for breath.

  Jonathan nods, as if he had known all along she would admit this.

  Initially, her boy lies there, immobile, when the man who has been sitting on him gets up. Then he quietly rolls onto his side and vomits onto the rug, and stays lying like that, still, curled up, as he had once lain inside her, completely safe. She just wants to hold him, protect him from all this pain, destroy it, erase the memory of it. If only she could.

  Jonathan pushes her from behind down the narrow basement stairs. ‘Where is it?’ he says. It is more than impatience; he is upset. Perhaps he is going to kill me, she thinks to herself while looking around; where should she lead him? Then she makes up her mind: there is only one spot where she will be close enough to him.

  ‘Here,’ she says.

  She opens the door to the sauna. He is too agitated to think; he is also afraid, she realises. This is an obsession for him, too, and he doesn’t know how to get out of it. She glimpses his sceptical expression when she holds the door open for him. But the gesture, so deceptive in its ordinariness, makes him react the way she had hoped he would: instinctively. He steps carefully over the threshold.

  ‘Wait.’

  She bends over the unit and pretends to search behind it. She has imperceptibly begun to control the situation: he is waiting for her, and doesn’t notice how she discreetly positions herself to be in the best spot. Nor does he notice, when she bends forward, how she shifts the weight in one leg, leaning with her upper body and carefully raising her free knee.

  Then she kicks. A hard and fast blow, straight out, with her foot against the hand holding the weapon. The move is unfamiliar, but she still knows what to do. His hand flies up towards himself and for a brief moment the muzzle goes up and away towards his head and he reels in surprise. The knife slides out of her sleeve and is in her hand. With a small cry she flings herself at him.

  She stabs him in the stomach, in and up, and feels the wet warmth running over her fingers as she pulls out and stabs again. He sighs, gasping as if he had run up the stairs. The explosion when he fires his weapon is painfully loud in the confined space; she anticipates a sharp pain, and for her body to give way, but instead the bullet hits wood. She presses his arm up towards him and he struggles against her.

  Jonathan lashes out one arm to defend himself, a wild gesture, but weakened. The pistol falls, rattling, onto the clinker floor. He bays like a slaughtered animal. Blood is running out of him, a dark and bubbling sludge. It seems odd that such a cold person can have so much blood in them.

  She turns around. He has collapsed by the lower bench in the sauna, as if in prayer.

  The man lying there has had a power over her like no other. Behind him is an expansive organisation that he has been able to shape into a weapon against her. But lying there, it seems incomprehensible. How has he been able to penetrate so deeply into her family’s life?

  Jonathan pants. His hands clasp at the bench, smudging blood onto the pine.

  She bends down and picks up the pistol, and then rummages through his pockets until she finds the flash drive. He offers no resistance.

  With a rapid step she is out of the sauna and leaning against the door. Then she sees the mop in the corner, the one she usually uses to swab down the sauna. It will have to do. She jams it under the door handle and peers through the small window. Jonathan is still on his knees, he is too badly injured to break down the door.

  She can hear them upstairs in the house, their rapid steps on the creaking hall floor.

  She turns off the lights. She is enveloped by protective darkness. She peers up the stairs, the door forming a rectangle of light. Once again, she hears a familiar creaking sound: steps on the parquet in the hall. Closer now.

  She crouches and raises the pistol.

  ‘Sir?’

  A rou
nd silhouette slowly appears at the edge of the door.

  He doesn’t have time to see what is happening before the bullet hits his head. The bang is painfully loud as it echoes off the stone walls. The whole world whines and screams as she runs up the stairs, quickly, but not so fast that she doesn’t have time to take aim at the living room and the other man staring at her. Her second shot misses. The powerful explosions tear through the air of her home.

  She hurries at a crouch through the kitchen and waits, leaning by the fridge. It is quiet . . . but not entirely: she can hear Rasmus making a strange, juddering noise, as if a sob were stuck inside him. And she can hear the other man panting. This is her home and it is familiar terrain for her. She knows every mark on the herringbone parquet in the living room, she knows where the hall creaks and which of the steps make a noise.

  She can hear the enemy moving in the living room, quick steps with the final one muffled. He is at the edge of the Persian rug, probably two metres inside the room, close to the coffee table and the TV.

  A creaking sound. The threshold.

  She waits. Then she hears another creak. She moves with the utmost caution to the kitchen door. Three metres away: she can’t see him, but she knows he is standing there in the hall, next to the stairs. She wheels out, but lowers her weapon and throws herself back when she sees her son, a pale, shocked expression on his face, standing next to the man.

  The shot reverberates downstairs, and her face stings from the splinters thrown into the air from the tiled wall. Rasmus. She can hear his terrified panting as the man drags him upstairs.

  She glances into the hall. The man she shot is lying there like a bloody sack, still alive, trembling, twitching, in shock. She has no intention of saving him. She quickly bends down and twists the weapon from his loose grip before aiming up the stairs.

  ‘Release my son,’ she bellows.

  She takes a few steps backwards. Gustav is lying in the living room next to the coffee table. He has crept under it, his hands still tied behind his back and his mouth covered in tape. He glares at her as if he doesn’t recognise her, panic etched deeply into his face. She had been intending to free him and give him a weapon, but she can now see he won’t be of any assistance at all.

  Her mobile is still lying there, on the coffee table, in pieces. Her hands are shaking terribly as she attempts to assemble it. The SIM card seems absurdly small; she covers it in blood, but then, finally, her mobile is switched on.

  The seconds trickle away until it connects. She quickly writes a text message and sends it to the emergency number. It is as if part of her were a numb machine, the fighting part of her. Man with pistol upstairs. One hostage. One wounded.

  She creeps, crouching, up the stairs.

  ‘Rasmus,’ she calls out in a low voice. ‘Can you hear me?’

  From upstairs she hears a drawn-out, sobbing reply. ‘Mu-u-m.’ The impulse is so strong – he is just a few seconds away – that she wants nothing more than to rush up there. But she can hear where the sound is coming from, and knows that the man is at the end of the landing. It would be like stepping onto a firing range.

  ‘M-u-u-m,’ Rasmus calls out again, mournfully. She can hear him crying with his mouth open, like a prolonged, horrible laugh. ‘Mumm-m-m-m-m.’

  ‘I’m here, darling,’ she calls back but can’t say more; her voice breaks. ‘I’m here,’ she whispers.

  She is now standing just below the final step to the landing. She quickly raises her head, just enough to see the TV corner with the sofa, the hallway, and Rasmus’s room. A shot breaks the silence, one of the slats exploding into splinters beside her. She presses herself down, huddling up.

  ‘Let him go!’ she shouts in English.

  She can hear them moving.

  She rushes up the stairs, because her son could die at any moment; she can’t just sit there waiting.

  She ducks into a small window bay as two shots fly past. She catches sight of the man in the bedroom, together with Rasmus sitting on the bed.

  Then there is another sound that catches her attention. Through the window she can hear a scrape against the outer wall. At first, she can’t understand what it is, then she hears a footstep against the wall. Help has arrived.

  A detonation shudders up through the floor from downstairs. There is a violent crash as the glass in the landing window splinters, and then, before even glimpsing it, she sees the grenade come sailing through the air.

  Time slows down. Every second is transformed into flickering, shining details. She sees the grenade and thinks Cover my head as it traces an arc through the air. Then she too is in the air, throwing herself at a shelf of board games.

  The blast is so loud that her ears suddenly feel blocked. It seems to suck up all the oxygen, all the life in the room. She can smell the acrid, bitter smell of gunpowder. Three masked men clad in black rush past her – she sees them take up positions around the doorway to Rasmus’s room – she sees the machine guns and the heavy vests. A Belgian Federal Police Special Unit.

  They are shouting but she still can’t hear anything; her ears are ringing. Then she is on her feet. One of the team turns around and aims his short-barrelled machine gun at her, eyes white and wide open beneath the black hood, surprised, frightened. ‘I’m the mother,’ she cries out, not altogether sure why she chose to say that. She crouches beside the tactical unit. They shout down the hall:

  ‘Show us the boy. Show us the boy.’

  She can’t understand how he gets free, but suddenly Rasmus comes rushing out of the bedroom. She throws herself at him because it is her child, and you will do anything for your child, even die, especially die, if it would save their life, and they meet in the middle of the hall in a tight embrace. She wraps her arms around him, then bundles him through the bathroom doorway, where they fall, tightly entwined, onto the hard tiled floor. ‘Darling,’ she whispers over and over. ‘Darling. Darling.’

  Volleys of fire boom on the landing. A series of rattling explosions is followed by several dull blasts. She waits, lying absolutely still on top of Rasmus’s body to make sure that he doesn’t rush out onto the lethal landing in a panic. Bullets crash into the walls, plunge through doors and windows. Curled up, they wait for the war to reach its conclusion.

  Then, suddenly, the shooting stops. Shouts are audible. Then silence.

  After a while she gets up slowly, listening. Then she peers out of the doorway.

  The walls have been hammered to pieces. The wallpaper is strewn with large holes exposing the skeleton of the house, brickwork. The air is grey and has the sour smell of gun smoke.

  A member of the tactical unit crouches beside them. He speaks calmly to them in French and asks if they are hurt. She looks into the masked face. It’s over, she thinks to herself, reaching for Rasmus who is lying beside her. She sees more of them appear and stop next to Rasmus while they talk calmly to her. It is peaceful. She has no idea what will happen now, what the future will look like, nothing. But it is unimportant. All that matters is that they are alive, she can put her arm around her son and feel that he is alive.

  Rasmus stares at her in terror. And when they get up she sees in the mirror above the sink why: her face is smeared with blood. It has spattered and run all over her hair and hands and throat.

  She is shaking, numb, as if outside of her own body. Yet she tries to think in a level-headed manner, looking forward. She goes to the study. The dead body in the checked shirt is visible through the bedroom door, lying spreadeagled across the bed. She turns her gaze away, but catches sight of the rigid face and the blood that has flowed onto the quilt, and can’t stop the thought that it is sinking into the sheets on her side of the bed.

  The safe is ajar. She quickly grabs the false passports inside and hurries back to Rasmus. Three paramedics have surrounded him, attaching a thick brace around his neck, placing him onto a stretcher and pic
king him up.

  Cool evening air wafts through the ground floor. Two Belgian police officers put a rustling foil blanket over her shoulders and lead her downstairs; she hurries after the stretcher to keep up with Rasmus. She would prefer not to let go of his hand, but she has to.

  She passes the living room and glimpses the gaping hole where the veranda door should be, the curtains being sucked into the darkness by the breeze. Where is Gustav? she wonders.

  The other man is lying in the hall, dead, curled up in a pool of his own dark blood. A blue light flashes through the windows, making the interior of the house seem unreal.

  The house and street have been transformed into a dark scene of light and shadow, fitfully illuminated in blue. Heavily armed police are moving around the garden.

  Someone leads her towards the police cars and ambulances. She can see a large gathering of neighbours who have come out onto the street and are now watching her and Rasmus with a mixture of curiosity and anxiety.

  As if strobe-lit, she sees Fredrik and Petra, their neighbour, together with her daughter Julia, their eyes wide open, and their mouths saying something to her. ‘Mum,’ she hears a familiar voice shouting, and she squints into the lights and manages to catch Daniel as he throws his arms around her.

  Hands quickly lead her towards the illuminated interior of an ambulance. The paramedics work quietly to lift in the stretcher carrying Rasmus, then close the door and shut out all noise.

  Gustav is sitting on a stool inside the ambulance. He is huddled under his foil blanket, a thin and pale old man. When she gets into the small space, he lifts his head and looks at her vacantly. She sits down next to Rasmus and holds his hand, all the while stroking his forehead. His eyes rest calmly on her, the drugs already taking effect.

  And it is perhaps only now that she truly grasps that they are alive; that death, which penetrated the other bodies in the house, hasn’t touched them. But they were so incredibly close to the power that will one day destroy their flesh. She grimaces at this, the chilly stiffness in her muscles suddenly representing the horrors of that sapping eventuality. She knows that Rasmus will live with the feeling of having come excruciatingly close to his own death, that he will carry death in him, like frost damage, for a long time to come. They are alive, but it will be a long time before he has any faith in life again.