Authors: Charlie Huston
Shrill scream from below the trap. The Säpo have found Lili in the bathroom. Shrieking. A voice yelling commands in Swedish. Gunfire. Four or five pops, rapid but erratically spaced, a hole appears, punched through the ceiling from below, an arrow of light, and more smoke, and a half-dozen professionally distributed shots fired, much louder than the pops. NATO 5.56mm rounds, and no more screaming.
Skinner picks Jae up and swings her through the door, hands in her armpits, and drops her, then slides through headfirst, a slither of odd coordination, muscles she’s not sure she has, hands catching his weight, elbows flexed, tuck and roll, with the pack still on. The Russian is up, jumps, slaps the bottom of the door, forcing it into place, and lands heavy, loud, even in his New Balance walking shoes. They squat, light from the Mag in Skinner’s hand. Sound from the protesters’ apartment limited to an occasional barked order, a small dog in the house next door. Three bleats, louder, the test button on a megaphone. Some kind of general readjustment, footfalls, en masse, and then quiet.
The Russian is peeling cobweb from his face, rubbing it from his hand onto the thick ribs of blue corduroy covering his thigh.
“Lili had a gun. Little crazy girl.”
Jae looks up at the tiny door.
“The one crying in the bathroom?”
The Russian taps his chest.
“Great heart. Passion for the cause.”
He taps the side of his head.
“Weak mind. A suicide bomb waiting for a detonator.”
He makes a slight popping noise with his lips, shakes his head.
“Now what the fuck.”
Skinner is shining the light, storage, detritus of years, file boxes, an old IBM copy machine, three broken rocking chairs, a pile of rugs, moth-eaten, material that will tear and crumble like wads of damp dead leaves.
Bleat of the megaphone.
Outside now?
Amplified Swedish. Orderly commands, firm and calm. Skinner looks at the Russian.
The Russian tilts his head, listens.
“I think something about coming out. Everyone they want out. I think.”
Skinner shines the light around again.
“Door.”
The Russian nods, starts shoving boxes aside, letting the upper tiers tumble where they will. Jae opens the Toughbook, a last check before they descend, and sees the image from the spider she left on the lamp in the alley. No longer an eye-level fixed view of Säpo officers cordoning off either end of the narrow lane, it’s now a shot of an empty alley, a small tractor at the far end; an extendable arm folded in three sections on top, camera and another box at the end of the arm, silver, and painted in black along that folded arm,
iRobot.
“Shitshit.”
Skinner and the Russian look at the screen, look at her.
“Someone saw the spider. They think it’s a bomb.”
She taps the screen, the white tractor bot at the end of the alley.
“510 PackBot. They’ll get a closer look with the camera. And a sniffer for explosive particulates. Operator must be around the corner.”
She looks up at them.
“Evacuation.”
The Russian wheezes his laugh.
“Everybody out.”
Skinner is moving, shoving a way through the mess. The Russian joins him. They find a counterweighted trap with a swing-down ladder. The Russian looks at Skinner, and Skinner shrugs, uses his stick to push down on the trap, and watches it drop with a creaking of springs, ladder unfolding, ushering them downward. Russian first.
She follows, and finds an old woman standing at the end of the hallway, some kind of squat shotgun braced firmly at her hip in a practiced stance that implies it might not actually blow her off her tiny feet if she should be inspired to pull the trigger and release whatever is loaded inside the flared and gaping maw at the end of its single barrel.
Jae looks at the dragons engraved on the barrel of the weapon.
“Blunderbuss?”
“Dragon.”
She doesn’t look at the Russian, no idea what might set the old woman off, but clarifies nonetheless.
“The gun, not the decoration. Blunderbuss?”
Skinner behind her, feet on the bottom rungs of the ladder.
“It’s called a dragon. Pistol version of a blunderbuss.”
Jae feels something flutter inside herself, something giddy and eminently unstable. To find death in the personage of this woman, a gnarled piece of jerky with over eighty winters behind her, house slippers, sweatpants, and a red cardigan worn over a thick Irish cable sweater, one eye milky, the other blue and clear as the sky outside, brandishing a weapon once favored by pirate boarding parties in the time of tall ships.
The giddy thing breaks loose for a moment and a titter escapes her mouth. She covers it as if she burped in church.
“Will it fire?”
Skinner’s speed, she thinks, as she watches him move suddenly past her, is a product of his decisiveness as much as his musculature. There is no hesitancy or waver in his steps or line of approach, propelled by his intention, the desire to be down the hallway and in front of the old woman makes it so, his will manifest as physical. She waits for a boom.
Blunderbuss.
Out of the Dutch. Factoids loose in her mind. Some other name before. Not currently at hand. But the translation.
Thunder pipe.
She doesn’t want to hear that particular thunder.
And she doesn’t.
Skinner is there, one hand for the barrel of the museum piece, one, flat, at the end of a straight arm, propelling the old woman back, out of her braced stance, the gun staying with him as she stumbles several steps, emptyhanded.
Skinner with the gun.
“Yes. It will fire. If primed and cocked.”
It’s not. The hammer down on the striking plate. No flint.
The woman is talking Swedish, angry Swedish, rolling and guttural, jabbing her finger at the ceiling, at them, at the window. The Russian scratches his head through a too-small green wool watch cap that somehow finds a way to stay perched up there. Jae is starting to suspect Velcro.
“She wants to know. I think. Why we are in her attic. She is mad about that.”
The woman takes a step toward Skinner.
“Mad! Yes mad!”
She points at the window, more jabbing and more Swedish.
The Russian uses his hammer to point in the same direction.
“The police want everyone in the street. But she will not go in the street. I think. I think she says,
Fuck the police
.”
She raises both hands, waves them up and down at the Russian. He shakes his head.
“No. No. She does not say,
Fuck the police.
She does not talk like that.”
Skinner has his walking stick in one hand, blunderbuss in the other, looking positively ready to join an H. G. Wells expedition to forgotten lands at this very moment if the National Geographic Society should render an invitation.
“We want to evacuate her. We are here to see that everyone gets out of the building safely.”
The Russian tucks a finger under his cap, pulls it forward a bit.
“She is not stupid.”
Skinner doesn’t say anything, and the Russian shrugs, takes his finger out from under his cap, stepping around Skinner toward the woman, picking his way through the Swedish language like a man in evening dress picking his way through a field of cow patties. Not the worst thing if he should misstep, but these are his best shoes, after all, and how did he get here in the first place?
The woman’s arms cross over her slight chest, bird-boned in appearance but not likely to snap anytime soon. She listens to the Russian and then laughs in his face. A genuine laugh. Merry. He tries a few more words and she laughs harder.
He looks at Skinner and Jae.
“I told her. I think. That we are the police that she wants to fuck. In not so many words.”
She stops laughing, shaking her head, a firm shake that will brook no disagreement. Then spills more Swedish, not as angry, but plenty of finger pointing, down the stairs.
The Russian nods, nods some more, smiles, wheezes his laugh, nods, scratches his head.
“She says something about the protests. She is watching on TV. She says young people should always say what they think. She says she hates Nazis, and Bilderberg was created by Nazis. She says we should leave her house and go be crazy somewhere else.”
He shrugs.
“I think.”
She nods, turns, and starts to march downstairs, stops, looks back at them, waving her arm,
now, now, not tomorrow, now.
The Russian lifts the tail of his North Face parka, zipped since they first saw him, and slips the handle of his hammer through his belt, pulling the tail down over it, following the woman. Jae follows, pauses at the head of the stairs, catching Skinner studying the blunderbuss in his hands. With something like regret, he bends and sets it on the floor.
The house is clean, cluttered, cold, a TV in a first-floor bedroom is on, volume quite loud, SVT coverage of the protests. On the ground floor, a nice surprise. The old woman’s house faces onto the next street over from Lilla Hoparegränd. Before she opens the door, Jae opens her Toughbook. The alley spider’s camera window is filled with the camera lens mounted at the end of the PackBot’s arm. Sniffing for explosives that are not there. She closes the computer and puts it in her pack, taking it from Skinner, onto her own back again. They swipe at their clothing, batting away dust and cobwebs, straightening. The old woman makes exasperated noises, watching the dust fall onto the wood floor of her vestibule, but waits until they are composed.
The door open, they walk out into the empty alley, Jae, confused for a moment, certain they have come back to Lilla Hoparegränd, but no, it is a sister street. A voice yells. Police officer at the end of the block, waving an arm at them,
this way, quickly now,
urging them to move, move move, which they do, smiling sheepishly, ushered to the other side of a sawhorse that is keeping the curious at bay while the bomb-sniffing robot does its work out of sight, intimately prodding Jae’s own creation. And around a bend at the end of the alley to a highway along the waterfront: traffic. The bridges jammed with police on the other side of the island, everything backed up. People trying to turn around to take the other bridges to Södermalm, island-hop their way home. And just there, across the highway, a parking lot, for the ferry.
Twenty meters beyond the police line no one seems very much aware that there is a bomb squad at work across the highway; that a cell of protesters, possibly terrorists, has been the target of a coordinated police assault; that people have been shot. The scale of the protests has eluded most people. There is complaining, tedium, frustration. So they walk south, weaving in and out of foot traffic, a few hundred meters to the ferry, quite a bit less than that to the end of the line of passengers waiting to board. Not one line, several. There are at least half a dozen different ferries with landings here. They pick the one that seems to move fastest.
The Russian tugs his hat, adjusting its perch.
“A walk for me, I think.”
Skinner picks a strand of cobwebs from his sleeve.
“Questions.”
The Russian shakes his head, shrugs,
I am helpless at this sort of thing, but I will do my best.
Skinner nods toward the mess behind them.
“You found them. Anarchist chatrooms. An old pro. Sympathetic to their cause. Yes?”
The Russian wobbles one of his hands.
“Forty years ago. Forty-five. I was trained. To do this. Be an anarchist. I was trained. These skills do not go away. The technology. Yes. Changes. But so many principles. And to bring down a government, it is much easier now.”
Skinner taps the tip of his stick on the pavement.
“Trained anarchist. I see counterespionage school. Teenagers in red neckerchiefs.”
The wheeze of the Russian’s laugh.
“So much propaganda. No. See clubs, instead. After school. See sports. Electronics. Guns. Explosives. Girls. It was cool. To be recruited then, it was cool. No so much marching.”
The post-Soviet Frankenstein monster is in Jae’s head again. Part spy, part oligarch mobster. A mad scientist somewhere in the shadows. It would be funny if it wasn’t her brain’s way of trying to put something important together.
Skinner is tapping very rapidly now.
“And then.”
The Russian clucks his tongue.
“And then the seventies. I was very popular. East bloc. I was recruited many times. So dissatisfied I was. Sullen. Military training. Valuable. Anti-Soviets loved me.”
“Until they started being arrested.”
The Russian holds up a finger.
“No. Very few arrests. You would be surprised. Mostly reports. Files. Mostly, one officer uses me to fuck with a rival. Then I go west.”
Skinner stops tapping.
“On your own?”
The Russian wobbles his hand again.
“I am happy to go, but they are happy for me to go. Western European anarchists, communists. Blow this up. Rob this bank. Give us money. Hijack this plane. Mostly fuck and smoke marijuana and complain. Shoot bureaucrats in between fucking.”
Skinner taps once, scratches the pavement with the brass cap at the tip of his stick.
“Long time ago.”
The Russian nods.
“Who would think? Alive still. The devil loves me.”
The Russian adjusts his cap, the tail of his parka, the collar. Preparations for leaving. Skinner raises a finger,
just one more thing.
“The protesters, anarchists,
they
didn’t find you.”
The Russian is playing with the tab of his zipper, down one inch, back up.
“No. No. They found each other. Shiva found me. It was a referral from an old co-worker.”
“Professional.”
The Russian shrugs.
“A referral. A job. Logistics. Organization. No bombs. No guns.”
“Shiva found you how?”
The Russian unzips his jacket, steps close to Skinner, holding it open, just a bit, on the left side.
“Hey. Something. Inside my jacket. For you.”
Skinner doesn’t move.
The Russian moves his hand just a little, widens the opening, dark inside his parka.