And for the first time, Eva heard herself mumble:
“
Ti sento,
I hear you.
Ti sento, madre.
”
The wave that came flowing from the ankh, through the hull of the icebreaker and the freezing water, was so warm that she immediately lost her breath.
M
aybe it was the howling wind or the perpetual scraping of the ice floe, but something was making it hard for guide David Bailey to get any rest. He wondered how long he’d been lying there, tossing and turning in his bed, and he started to fumble with one hand across the cabin’s nightstand.
Even before he pulled off his eye mask, he had managed to get hold of his small black PDA. He woke it up to see what time it was, but as he realized that it was nearly three o’clock, there was something else on the glowing green screen that caught his eye.
There must be something wrong with the location of the satellite, Bailey thought, and he shook his hand, but the digital GPS numbers refused to change. For a little while the guide just lay there, staring suspiciously, but finally he conceded to himself that the icebreaker really had changed course.
It had made a half turn on its own axis, and instead of heading for the North Pole,
Yamal
was breaking through the ice and going straight south.
W
hen Bailey had managed to get up the staircase and reach the navigation bridge, he discovered that its tinted glass doors were locked. He hesitated for a second, but then he knocked.
The Russian sailor who opened them didn’t look particularly impressed by the guide’s little GPS. Instead he pointed grimly at the captain and the chief engineer, who were standing in the cold blue glow of the control console.
It was nearly impossible to make out the foredeck of the icebreaker through the window in front of them, even though all the spotlights were shining into the whirling clouds of the snowstorm.
The captain didn’t even look up when Bailey stood right next to him. The line of the radar circled around below his bearded face.
“Captain Sergei Nicolayevich,” David Bailey said, “why have we turned? Is there something the passengers ought to know?”
The captain turned to him, inscrutable, his lips sealed. Bailey could see his own face reflected in the black sunglasses, and then he heard the chief engineer’s thin voice.
“The journey to the North Pole is going to be somewhat delayed because of a snowstorm and a few other factors. We’re going to stay in one place for a few days in a position about fifty nautical miles to the southwest.”
“Stay in one place?” David Bailey panted. “South? But the contract …”
“Our highest priority, as I’m sure you understand, is the safety of everyone on board.”
When the chief engineer had stopped speaking and the captain didn’t give any further explanation, Bailey began to look around the room with all its blinking instruments.
Among the Russian uniform coats he glimpsed a gaunt face. He immediately recognized the stubborn old man who had wanted to carry his luggage aboard himself.
Several of Lytton’s long-haired men were standing alongside him with glaring eyes. David Bailey tried to produce something that
looked like his usual, self-confident smile, and he extended a hand in greeting.
But Lytton kept standing there with his arms crossed, and he was the one who spoke first.
“Señor Bailey, I was just planning to come and wake you. You must immediately take a message to all your passengers. There are a few new rules on this ship, and it’s important to be aware of them.”
“Oh,” said David Bailey, confused, “but it’s nearly four o’clock. I assume everyone is sleeping, and …”
“Señor Bailey, I’m not asking you. You don’t even need to think, just contribute your reassuring voice.”
Bailey had time to see on their name tags that it was Moyano and Rivera who were lifting him by the arms. The South Americans carried him a bit above the floor over to the console, where there was a microphone with a flexible shaft.
Lytton pulled it down in front of the guide’s mouth and placed his index finger on the speaker button.
“This is what you will say, and I think it will be best for you to keep to the text.”
A handwritten paper that contained only a few short phrases was placed on the table in front of Bailey.
“They have to hand in all electronic equipment?” the guide stammered. “Telephones and cameras? But surely that isn’t necessary.”
He looked beseechingly over at Nicolayevich, but the captain’s face was still expressionless.
Then Agusto Lytton pressed the button and from the PA system came static that turned to a tinny whistling. David Bailey coughed, cleared his throat, and looked down at the first syllables on the paper. Then he began to read in an unsteady voice.
*
E
va had begun to wonder whether Don Titelman had fallen asleep, because she couldn’t see his eyes where he was half lying on the sofa.
The captain’s suite had been uncannily silent for an hour or so, in the rhythm of the icebreaker’s motion.
Don hadn’t asked her any questions after Lytton’s long story. He had just turned away in silence. She could hardly imagine what he thought about what he’d heard, but that he was skeptical—that, she assumed.
Yet it was true, everything he’d been told. Even if the years seemed to blend together now, she and her father had lived far too long. The injections during her teen years had left scars and pain, but just as with Lytton, they had fulfilled their intended purpose.
They had slowed the genetic countdown that is built into each person. The biological clock, which is set at birth to run out at a given time. Ninety years after the first trials, her cells were still successfully copying themselves without the slightest defect or mutation.
Her skin may have become slightly thinner, and she had some joint and skeletal problems. Otherwise, Eva’s body was completely preserved, just like her brother’s in the mine. It was almost ironic that this underworld opening had, in such different ways, placed both siblings outside the course of time.
Sterility was the price she’d had to pay, but no one could have guessed at the time that it would be a consequence. Her father had always told her that this gift had been so incomprehensible that she could never repay it, and in that way he had kept her under his control.
Sometimes Eva wondered whether she’d even existed, because if you exist you must surely have the ability to make your own decisions, right? Certainly she’d had her own life in Stockholm for a few decades around the war, along with a husband, before she had returned to her father and her life in his shadow.
The only thing they actually shared was the loss of Olaf—Lytton had never really been able to get over that grief. Yet she still didn’t know what her father had mourned the most: the loss of his son or of Strindberg’s white star and ankh.
Once, at the beginning of the century, he had taken her along down
into the opening. Eva had been about ten years old, and she remembered it as a journey to hell. The sound down there had never left her, but she couldn’t remember any mystical visions.
She had never returned, nor had she become involved with the military research. She ended up as a silent assistant, taking care of the practical details of her father’s life. Of those who had gone down into the underworld with him, she was the only one who was still alive, the only one who knew where all of Lytton’s knowledge came from.
As far as she knew, her father’s research had gone into a more experimental phase during the past few years. It seemed as though he now hoped to be able to make contact with the other side, which he’d been keeping at bay for so long via the injections.
Lytton considered the men he had brought along on the icebreaker to have enough mental strength to be able to open the portal down in the underworld. The goal was total knowledge, to get past all hints and intimations. To reach the clarity for which he had been searching for so long. She had followed her father’s instructions and traveled to Falun, where she met this Don Titelman. He had reminded her so much of the brother she’d lost that she had thought it couldn’t be a coincidence.
During their journey together, Eva had become increasingly uncertain of what she actually wished to achieve by recovering both of Strindberg’s objects. She didn’t know anymore whether it was about helping her father or whether she actually wanted to obliterate his underworld.
She still couldn’t say for certain, sitting there next to Don on the sofa. The only thing she knew was that she very much wanted to protect him from the unavoidable end of the journey. She straightened his velvet jacket, and then she just sat there listening to the sound of his slow breathing.
W
hen Don felt her touching him, he thought that he should try to catch her hand. Demand answers to all the questions that he hadn’t had time to ask yet.
For being over one hundred years old, Eva had a remarkably agile mind, and she must have had astounding luck playing the attorney. But as they said:
A mentsh on mazel iz vi a toyter mentsh
. A person who isn’t lucky might as well be dead.
Then Don couldn’t help but smile as he thought of all the meanderings that had come between the interrogation room in Falun and the captain’s suite. In his memory, they would always wander through Ypres and Saint Charles de Potyze, and he could already feel a sense of loss, even though Eva was sitting only a few feet away.
He looked up and tried to find a way to ask the first question, but at that very moment it became inconceivably quiet. Then the glasses over in the drink cabinet shook, and with a sucking tug the icebreaker
Yamal
began to slow down.
O
ut in the snowstorm and the wind, the blades of the helicopter had just begun to turn. Don tried to cover his ears to protect himself from the roaring noise of the machine. But it was difficult because Moyano kept yanking him by the arm as he dragged him along toward the helipad on the ship’s quarterdeck.
Alongside them, Eva pressed her way forward through the wind. She had shoved her hands into the pockets of her jacket, and in the spotlight her eyes appeared to be red-rimmed. She hadn’t bothered to cover her head, and the gray strands of hair were hardly visible under the growing layer of snow.
Agusto Lytton hadn’t bothered to come fetch them from the captain’s suite himself. The old man was already standing by the open door of the helicopter’s cabin, where his shouts were drowned out by the choppy roar of the rotor blades.
Then Lytton waved at his men to load the last steel chest. Don recognized his cabin neighbor Rivera, who was currently grabbing
the front handle and heaving the heavy box into the helicopter’s freight area.
A small metal staircase had been folded out from the cabin. Its lowest step had disappeared in four inches of snow. The old man gave Don one last shove up toward the greenish yellow light of the cabin door.
E
va sat close beside Don and huddled up to shield herself from the cold. The interior of the helicopter was stripped down, and large roses of ice were growing across the glass. She blew into her hands and stamped her feet on the floor. One by one, the South Americans took their places, their breath like clouds of frozen smoke.
Finally only Agusto Lytton was standing out in the storm. But suddenly he too came up the metal stairs, which then were reeled in. The old man knocked on the window of the cockpit and gave the pilot a bony thumbs-up.
W
ith its rotors whipping at maximum speed, the helicopter gave a lurch and then began to lift unsteadily from the deck. The wind caught them about thirty feet above the helipad and threw the machine sideways. They could hear the metal crates sliding and scraping down in the freight area. Eva tumbled toward Don, and he could feel himself bite his tongue so hard his mouth filled with the taste of blood.
At the last second, the South American pilot managed to correct the angle, and they soared up until they were level with the ship’s radar masts. Then came a sudden slip backward, out over the path of sea that the keel had broken free from the Arctic ice.
Down there in the spotlight, Don caught sight of something that made him catch his breath. A spool-shaped, shining fuselage that was breaking its way up through the black surge of the waves. But the farther they got from the icebreaker, the more certain Don was that it must have been a reflection of light, an optical illusion that just
showed how tired he was. For a few minutes, they could still see
Yamal
from the helicopter, like a distant star, far off in the darkness. Soon even that glow went out, and they continued in blackness and heavily falling snow.
L
ytton’s men sat in their red expedition jackets in the glow of the emergency lighting. The noise in the cabin was so loud that they couldn’t speak to one another.
Don let his eyes slide across the row of Native American faces and gleaming eyes. Moyano, who was sitting directly across from him, had a firm grip on the magazine of an automatic weapon. Next to Moyano sat Rivera, fingering something that looked like a rubber mask, a full-coverage hood with openings for the nose and mouth.
Eva’s eyes were shut tight, and the thin skin above the bridge of her nose was creased. The only person who seemed to be completely unconcerned about the situation was Agusto Lytton, who sat looking at the ankh and the star.
Don let his eyes stop there, because by now the lurching had caused him to feel quite motion sick. Strindberg’s objects seemed to be the only fixed point in the helicopter.
But as the minutes passed, it was as though the ankh began to change. Its metal became increasingly transparent, and soon it glowed with a shimmering light.
When the glow passed into the star, the two objects began to fuse together again. The reaction that Don had seen so many times when the gas flame burned hot enough.
In the next instant, it was as though an air pocket had opened under the helicopter. Don could feel a sinking in his stomach as they fell down toward the expanse of ice.