There was an audible click from the lock. The mighty copper gate swung open with a piercing screech.
I tightened my grip on the Nurse’s wrist—she was now almost unconscious—and stepped through, dragging her in just before the gate closed again. The salvo of gunshots from the Team and the President’s men smattered like muffled keystrokes on a computer console as they hit the surface of the thick metal. We were alone, in the sealed-off underground station.
I wish I could say this was a sign that I was still capable of empathy. To show how it had survived all these years, my entire transformation; that something of the real me remained deep inside. But even the decision to take the Nurse with me was purely a tactical one.
I would be forced to go significantly more slowly, since I would be carrying a full combat pack and also the Nurse like a broken doll by one hand, the briefcase by the other. Besides which she would leave a trail of blood along the floor, which our pursuers could not possibly miss. Before I tested the elevator which led down to the platforms I therefore considered leaving the Nurse there. Like wounded prey, for the others to pick up or not, perhaps delaying them for critical moments.
But I did not do it. The Nurse’s hand had given a squeeze in the tunnel just before we reached the control box, clearly some sort of signal. And since I still knew nothing at all about Alpha’s wider plans, I did not dare to rule out the possibilities: that maybe the Nurse would turn out to be useful. Or the Nurse might even be Alpha. So I laid her across my shoulder and started to run down the first escalator.
The elevators from the station’s next level had been shut down. There were also man-high barriers at the ticket gates, like a wall of toughened glass, but I managed to get over them with all of my load by shifting the briefcase, the Nurse, my combat pack and myself one at a time. Then I ran on as fast as the weight would allow, down the dizzyingly steep second escalator leading to the platforms. It was heavy, but no worse than on one of our desert training maneuvers with two simulated wounded men to carry in at least forty degrees of heat.
In my intense research before our departure—when I still had no idea what use this was all going to be, if any—I had read that the escalator was one of the longest in all of Stockholm. The sound of rubber soles against metal, my rhythmic and controlled breathing even at top speed, were the only sounds penetrating the silence of the bed-rock. I counted my footsteps… 148, 149, 150, 151.
Then I was down there: in the cabinet of horrors on the way to the platforms, the artistic and historical installation in the station which I had studied during my days and nights of research. But I was still not prepared for it. The lighting was spare and theatrical, as in a museum, the emergency illumination seemed not to be working all the way down here. The sealed-off station was only lit up in places by the old-fashioned street lamps, with their flickering ice-blue neon spirals and the weak sheen from the gargoyles built into the rock walls. With the help of my headlamp I was still able to hurry on through this weird underworld. It seemed to me as if I were already dead.
I also saw that there were black and white radiation symbols in the naïve paintings on the ceiling. I had not noticed them during my research, maybe none of the photographs had been taken at the right angle. For a moment I felt myself sway. The briefcase seemed to be sending out its spell, but I kept going, crossing the checkered floor in hard, short bursts on my way to the platforms.
I looked at my watch. Almost five minutes since we passed through the copper gate, and no sound of our pursuers.
The load over my left shoulder must have weighed at least 165 pounds, including the Nurse’s bulky medical backpack. With my own combat pack, the total must have come to more than two hundred pounds. Sweat ran from every pore, mixing with the Nurse’s blood to form sticky trickles down my back. Just as I was making my way to the platforms, I was at last forced to stand and catch my breath, gasp for oxygen. My mind needed it, as much as anything. And I had an idea, a hypothesis. Not much more.
The gold-colored cross on the rock wall looked exactly as it had in the photographs. To the left of it stood the God of War with the dead wolf over his arm, everything was as it should be. As I put down the briefcase and carefully laid the Nurse next to it on the checkered terrazzo floor, I could clearly hear the dull thump all the way down here. Our pursuers—parts of the Team, maybe some of the President’s own men, those who were not needed to lead the First Couple through the tunnel system away to the helipad—must have forced the copper gate with a powerful and probably excessive explosive charge. They would not have had time to make an exact calculation.
The alarm immediately went off. The underground platform was bathed in a yellow, rhythmically flashing light. My pulse fell rather than increased. What had felt impossible during the early part of my training, to achieve anything at all with such a powerful adrenaline rush, quickly became addictive.
My watch showed 06.03. Eight minutes since the alarm sounded at the hotel, my escape seeming both lightning quick and endlessly drawn out. It should take at least two minutes before they managed to make their way through the remains of the gate, which would probably be obstructed by rockfall from the explosion, and to get down the two escalators. Then it would be about fifteen seconds before they had us within range of their guns—and a few moments more for them to assess the situation. To weigh the alternatives.
I began to run my fingers around the base of the statue of the God of War, methodically searching. The decrypted message to the cell phone at the playground had read “around mars”. At first it had meant nothing to me—until I studied the photographs from the underground platforms. Then my eye lit upon the statue. The God of War, Mars.
Liquid was slowly seeping out along a vaulted niche behind the statue, like a tiny artificial waterfall. Close up like this, one could even see the thin yellow runnels in a narrow gap between the rock wall and the floor. Maybe it was part of the statue’s design, maybe not. Just to the left of the statue there was something on the ground that could have been taken for the cover of a well, about three feet in diameter, and it too went in under the base of the statue. So there must be something under it.
Only when I could feel the small control box on the back of the God of War, did I glance at the watch: already 06.05. The pursuers must now be on the lower of the escalators, on the way down to the cabinet of horrors.
It was not easy to key in the twenty-nine numbers and four letters from that position, lying half-curled around the statue. Even to be able to fit one’s arm between its base and the uneven rock wall by the platform was hard, not least to move one’s fingers nimbly enough to press the correct buttons in the right order. But on the other hand: it was not meant to be easy.
When I had managed to register the same sequence as at the copper gate, the cover of the well shifted reluctantly. It was weightier than I had thought, reinforced with lead or steel. The mechanism juddered and rattled. Soon a small staircase could be seen, swinging down to the right, in under the statue itself, into the darkness.
I drew the Nurse close to me and thought that I could see her mouth move a little through the grimace on her face, but I could not hear anything against the piercing noise of the alarm. I lifted off my combat pack and took out the rescue harness—and after wrestling for a few seconds with the semi-lifeless form, I managed to secure the Nurse to me with her face buried in my chest. During the struggle she seemed to come to life a little and began to wave her arms weakly. When she realized that I was going to carry her off, maybe even deeper underground, her helpless flailing increased.