1.04
The field cell phone showed the highest possible alert level, LILAC. Large-scale nuclear attack with critical consequences for global security.
Without thinking, I tried to turn on the bedside light, but nothing happened: the power must have been cut. Yet the light of dawn shining through the windows was strong enough—it hardly made any difference when we turned on our headlamps, leaving our hands free. Our movements were lightning quick and yet dreamlike, despite the deafening shrieks of the alarm, making it impossible for me to communicate with either Zafirah or the Nurse.
We went at top speed down the stairs from the bedroom level to join the rest of the Team. Touching base with the President’s own security detail, checking our combat packs and the briefcase, taking up our positions, out through the doors of the surveillance suite. In my case, at most five feet from the President. Apart from the alarm, everything was calmer than usual. Quietly counting our steps, as if choreographed, while we made our way toward the emergency stairs at the far end of the corridor.
I kept a firm grip on the briefcase in my left hand. With the alert level at RED or above, the security strap could no longer be attached to my wrist, so as not to delay any possible use of the Doomsday weapon. We could hear the chaos of the mêlée of people behind the safety doors in the stairwell, the panic of the hotel guests, desperate cries, a baby’s piercing yells. Fear ran like a bass tone underpinning the alarm.
Some of the President’s own security detail were in the lead, just as in the animations, with the First Couple immediately behind. I fell in between them on the way down the stairs. Zafirah pushed her way in just ahead of me, with Kurt or John behind. The Nurse was right beside me and all of a sudden stuck her small but surprisingly strong left hand in my right one. So I would have to shake it off to be able to draw my weapon.
Once I had squeezed through the little hatch in the wall by the last set of stairs and was standing close to the hotel goods entrance on Stallgatan 4, one foot on the first step of a long and rusty spiral staircase, I glanced back at the Nurse. Even with her bulky medical backpack she followed me nimbly through the small opening. She too must have been hand-picked and specially trained.
After forty-three rotations in the narrow spiral stairway—never losing control, always keeping a close eye on the situation, the First Couple and our lines of retreat—we reached ground, as in the animations, the even floor of the mystifying tunnel system.
But not one lamp could be seen along the rough rock walls, no cabling, not a trace of anything which would make it easier for those needing to move around inside the immense tunnel system at normal times. For those who had built it. For whatever reason anyone might even have thought of devoting so much effort to something like this, here—in this neutral country, at peace for more than two hundred years.
The Nurse squeezed my hand so tightly that it was impossible to tell if she was wanting to protect me or to be protected. In fact I had not much more information than she did. From level RED and up, all technical details were classified at least one layer above me. All I knew was that I, or rather the briefcase, was regarded even in those situations as both the ultimate counter-strike weapon and the most important thing to be protected—after the President.
And that Alpha had to be somewhere in the vicinity. Had to be the one pulling the strings, letting the whole plan unfold, step by step. Our escape together from the Team.
In contrast to the appalling din up in the hotel—the alarm, the rippling panic of the guests—the sudden silence here within the bed-rock was unreal. We were breathing in short bursts through our noses, to reduce the noise coming from the group. Although our speed was equivalent to high-intensity short interval training, I had a dream-like feeling that we were standing still while the enormous tunnel system was rushing back past us, like a tsunami of stone. It seemed as if there were constant new passages on either side of our path, appearing in the circular gleam cast by our headlamps: a myriad of alternate tracks leading out into the darkness.
The President now passed me to the left to be next to the First Lady, so that only Zafirah was between the First Couple and me. The President had never devoted much attention to any of us in the Team. To the country’s Commander-in-chief, we were for the most part faceless figures, functions rather than human beings, pretty much seamlessly mixed up with his own security people. Even I was probably no more than “The Man with the Briefcase”. The unknown person who would always be close.
Our formation hurried forward. The Nurse was right behind me, holding my hand in a grip which tightened for every turn in the labyrinth, with an astonishing strength for somebody so small. My pulse increased, I could now feel it clearly in my chest, not because of the exertion—I had never been fitter—but with the insight that I would have to take the next step all on my own. Alpha had given the signal, fired the starting pistol. The rest was up to me.
Yet I had no idea how it was going to happen. I knew nothing beyond the short encrypted messages sent to the cell phone at the playground, and beyond the fact that I would only have a few seconds to act. Not enough for me both to get out of the Nurse’s grip and to draw my weapon, however fast I did it.
I saw Edelweiss’s animations before me. The verdigrised copper gate would soon come into view on our right-hand side. I heard something beating. There was an intensive ticking, like a timepiece, a clock-work mechanism. My eyes passed over the rock walls, looking for some form of detonation device—before I realized that it was my own racing pulse.
So I improvised.
Just before the last bend I gripped the Nurse’s left hand even harder. I could have bent it right back and broken it, snapped her wrist like a biscuit. She cannot have weighed more than 110 pounds, but that ought to be enough.
When I caught sight of the small symmetrical installation in the rock wall—it was a control box, no question about it—the Nurse suddenly gave my hand a squeeze back. It must have been a signal. But I still followed my instincts and improvised: I braced myself against my left leg and swung her around my left shoulder with my right hand.
Kurt-or-John fell headlong, not only because of the force behind the human sledgehammer but also from sheer surprise. Blood and glass splinters from the headlamp spattered across the rock.
The Nurse let out a shrill sound as I swung her around again—this time aiming in front of me. Zafirah hardly had a second in which to turn before the Nurse’s head, sticky with blood and covered in razor-sharp shards, hit her straight in the face.
Still there was an unreal silence, as if everything was muffled. Only a weak whimpering from the Nurse, not a sound from Zafirah or Kurt-or-John. With blood running over their faces, they were all fumbling for their weapons, which the impact of the Nurse had knocked away from them, trying hard to understand what had happened. What had got into me. The First Couple had already been bundled away among their own security detail and continued at full speed, while a few others separated themselves from them.
That was how they were going to try to solve the impossible puzzle: to be able to protect the President and at the same time neutralize the Mole. And also take care of my briefcase.
But my thoughts were already several steps ahead. Before any of the President’s men had got back to Kurt-or-John, still less passed by his enormous figure blocking the narrow tunnel, I had flipped open the lid to the control box and uncovered the buttons on the panel under it.
I did not need to think, my fingers moved automatically as I keyed in the only thinkable code. The first message which Alpha had sent to me, artfully encrypted, the start of our whole elaborate communication over the course of twelve long years. The long sequence was 102 115 101 922 G52 0N6 161 512 211 019 R2D. It became, once deciphered: WE TWO AGAINST THE WORLD.