This door also had a padlock that Assad broke open with the iron bar — a skill that would soon have to be added to his job description.
They noticed a sweet smell in the hall’s entrance. Like a mixture of the cologne from Lasse Jensen’s bedroom and the smell of meat that had been left out too long. Or maybe more like the scent of the animal cages at the zoo on a warm, blossoming spring day.
Lying on the floor were scores of receptacles made from in shiny stainless steel in different lengths. Most of them did not yet have gauges affixed to them, but a few of them did. Endless shelves along one wall indicated that production had been planned on a large scale. But that had never happened.
Carl gestured for Assad to follow him over to the next door, holding his index finger to his lips. Assad nodded and gripped the iron bar so hard that his knuckles turned white. He crouched down a bit, as if to make himself a smaller target. He seemed to do so reflexively.
Carl opened the next door.
There was light in the room. Lamps in reinforced glass fixtures lit up a hallway. On one side, doors opened on to a series of windowless offices; on the other side a door led to yet another corridor. Carl gestured for Assad to search the offices while he started down the long, narrow hallway.
It was unspeakably filthy, as if over time shit or some kind of muck had been smeared on the walls and floor. Very unlike the spirit in which the factory’s founder, Henrik Jensen, had wanted to create these surroundings. Carl had a very hard time picturing white-clad engineers in this setting.
At the end of the corridor was a door, which Carl cautiously opened as he clutched the switchblade in his jacket pocket.
He turned on the light and saw what had to be a storage room containing a couple of carts and stacks of plasterboard as well as numerous cylinders of hydrogen and oxygen. He instinctively sniffed at the air. It smelled of cordite. As if a gun had been fired in the room quite recently.
“Nothing in any of the offices,” he heard Assad say quietly behind him.
Carl nodded. There didn’t seem to be anything here either. Except for the same impression of filth as he’d had in the corridor.
Assad came inside and looked around.
“He is not here then, Carl.”
“It’s not him we’re looking for right now.”
Assad frowned. “Then who is it?”
“Shhh,” said Carl. “Do you hear that?”
“What?”
“Listen. It’s a very faint whistling sound.”
“Whistling?”
Carl raised his hand to make Assad stop talking and then closed his eyes. It could be a ventilator in the distance. It could be water running through the pipes.
“It is some air saying like that, Carl. Like something that is punctured.”
“Yes, but where is it coming from?” Carl slowly turned around. It was impossible to pinpoint. The room was no more than ten feet wide and fifteen to twenty feet long, but still the sound seemed to be coming from everywhere and nowhere at the same time.
He took a mental snapshot of the room. To his left were four pieces of plasterboard, standing up next to each other in layers that were perhaps five boards deep. Against the far wall was a single piece of plasterboard that leaned crookedly. The wall to his right was bare.
He looked up at the ceiling and saw four panels with tiny holes and in between them bundles of wires and copper pipes leading from the corridor and over behind the piles of plasterboard.
Assad saw it too. “There must be something behind the boards then, Carl.”
He nodded. Maybe an outside wall, maybe something else.
With every piece of plasterboard they grabbed and carried over to the opposite wall, the sound seemed to come closer.
Finally they were standing before a wall with a big black box up near the ceiling upon which was mounted a number of switches, gauges, and buttons. To the side of this control panel an arched door had been set into the wall in two sections that were covered with metal plates. To the other side were two big portholes with armored, completely milk-white panes. Wires were taped to the glass between a couple of pins that Carl guessed might be detonators. A surveillance camera on a tripod had been set up under each porthole. It wasn’t hard to imagine what the cameras had been used for and what the detonators were meant to do.
On the floor under the cameras were several little black pellets. He picked some up and saw that they were buckshot. He felt the glass panes and took a step back. There was no question that shots had been fired at them. So maybe there was something going on here that the people on the farm were unable to control.
He pressed his ear against the wall. The whining sound was coming from somewhere inside. Not from the door, not from the windows. Just from inside. It had to be an extremely high-pitched sound for it to penetrate such a solid enclosure.
“It reads more than four bars, Carl.”
He looked at the pressure gauge that Assad was tapping on. He was right. And four bars was the same as five atmospheres. So the pressure inside the room had already dropped by one atmosphere.
“Assad, I think Merete Lynggaard is inside there.”
His partner stood very still, studying the arched metal door. “You think so?”
He nodded.
“The pressure is going in a downward direction, Carl.”
He was right. The needle’s movement was actually visible.
Carl looked up at all the cables overhead. The thin wires between the detonators dangled to the floor with stripped ends. The plan must have been to fasten a battery or some other explosive device to the wires. Was that what they were going to do on May 15, when the pressure was supposed to drop to one atmosphere, as had been written on the back of the photo of Merete Lynggaard?
He looked around to try to make sense of it all. The copper pipes led directly into the room. There were maybe ten in all, so how could anyone tell which ones released the pressure and which ones increased it? If they cut through one of the pipes, there was a huge risk they would make matters worse for the person inside the pressure chamber. The same was true if they did anything to the electrical wires.
He stepped over to the airlock door and examined the relay boxes next to it. Here there was no question — everything was printed in black and white on the six buttons: Top door open. Top door closed. Outer airlock door open. Outer airlock door closed. Inner airlock door open. Inner airlock door closed.
And both airlock doors were in the closed position. That was how they would stay.
“What do you think that thing’s for?” asked Assad. He was perilously close to turning a little potentiometer from OFF to ON.
Carl wished that Hardy was here to see this. If there was one thing that Hardy could deal with better than anyone else, it was anything to do with buttons or dials.
“That switch was then put in after all the others,” said Assad. “Otherwise why are the others made of that brown stuff?” He pointed at a square box made of Bakelite. “And why should that one then be the only one made of plastic, out of all of them?”
It was true. The different types of switches had obviously been fabricated decades apart.
Assad nodded. “I think that dial might either stop the process, or else it does not mean anything.” What an imprecise but beautiful way of putting it.
Carl took a deep breath. It was almost ten minutes since he’d spoken to the people out at Holmen, and it would still take them a while to arrive. If Merete Lynggaard was inside there, they were going to have to do something drastic.
“Turn it,” he told Assad with a sense of foreboding.
As soon as he did, they could hear the whistling sound slicing through the room at full force. Carl’s heart leaped to his throat. For a moment he was convinced that they’d released even more pressure.
Then he looked up and identified the four framed rectangles on the ceiling as loudspeakers. That was how they were able to hear the whistling sounds from inside the room, which had become piercingly enervating.
“What is happening now?” shouted Assad, holding his hands over his ears, making it hard for Carl to answer him.
“I think you’ve turned on the intercom,” he shouted back, turning to look up at the rectangles on the ceiling. “Are you inside there, Merete?” he yelled three or four times and then listened intently.
Now he could clearly hear that the sound was air passing through a narrow passage. Like the noise a person makes with his teeth, just as he begins to whistle. And the sound was constant.
He cast a worried glance at the pressure gauge. Now it was almost down to four point five atmospheres. It was dropping fast.
He shouted again, this time at the top of his lungs, and Assad took his hands away from his ears and shouted too. Their combined yelling could wake the dead, thought Carl, sincerely hoping that things hadn’t gone that far.
Then he heard a loud thud from the black box up near the ceiling, and for a moment the room was totally silent.
That box up there controls the pressure equalization, he thought, considering whether to run into the other room and get something to stand on so he could open the box.
It was at that instant they heard groans coming from the loudspeakers. Like the sounds uttered by a cornered animal or a human being in deep crisis or grief. A long, monotonic moan of lament.
“Merete, is that you?” Carl shouted.
They stood still and waited. Then they heard a sound they interpreted as a yes.
Carl felt a burning in his throat. Merete Lynggaard was inside there. Imprisoned for over five years in this bleak and disgusting setting. And now she was possibly about to die, and Carl had no idea what to do.
“What can we do, Merete?” he yelled. At the same instant he heard an enormous bang from the plasterboard on the far wall. He knew at once that someone had fired a shotgun through the plasterboard from behind, scattering buckshot all over the room. He felt a throbbing several places in his body as warm blood began trickling out. He stood paralyzed for a tenth of a second that felt like an eternity. Then he threw himself backward against Assad, who was standing there with one arm bleeding and an expression that matched the situation.
As they lay on the floor, the plasterboard tipped forward to reveal the person who had fired the shot. It wasn’t hard to recognize him. Aside from the lines on his face, which his hard life and tormented soul had produced over the years, Lasse Jensen looked exactly like the boy in the photos they’d seen.
He stepped out of his hiding place, holding the smoking shotgun, inspecting the wounds his shot had made with the same cool indifference as if it had been a flooded basement.
“How did you find me?” he asked, as he cracked the barrel and inserted more shells. He came over to them. There was no question that he would pull the trigger if he felt like it.
“You can still stop this, Lasse,” Carl said, propping himself up so that Assad could get out from under his body. “If you stop now, you might get off with a few years in prison. Otherwise it’s going to be a life sentence for murder.”
The man smiled. It wasn’t hard to see why women fell for him. He was a devil in disguise. “Then there’s a lot you don’t know,” he said, aiming the gun straight at Assad’s temple.
Yeah, that’s what you think, thought Carl as he felt Assad’s hand feel its way inside his jacket pocket. “I’ve called for backup. My colleagues will be here any minute. Give me that shotgun, Lasse, and everything will be OK.”
Lasse shook his head. He didn’t believe it. “I’ll kill your partner if you don’t give me an answer. How the hell did you find me?”
Considering how much pressure he must be under, Lasse sounded far too controlled. He was obviously raving mad.
“It was Uffe,” Carl told him.
“Uffe?” Now the man’s expression changed. That piece of information just didn’t fit into the world he was determined to control. “Bullshit! Uffe Lynggaard doesn’t know a thing,” Lasse said. “He can’t even talk. I’ve been following the news the past couple of days. He didn’t say a word. You’re lying.”
Carl could feel that Assad had grabbed the switchblade.
To hell with regulations and laws about concealed weapons. He just hoped Assad would have time to use it.
A sound came from the loudspeakers overhead as if the woman in the room wanted to say something.
“Uffe Lynggaard recognized you in a photograph,” Carl said. “A photo of you and Dennis Knudsen standing next to each other as boys. Do you remember that picture, Atomos?”
The name stung him like a slap in the face. It was obvious that years of suffering were now surfacing inside Lasse Jensen.
He grimaced and nodded. “So you know about that too! I assume you know everything. Then you also realize that you’re going to have to accompany Merete.”
“You won’t have time. Help is on the way,” Carl said, leaning forward a bit so that Assad could pull out the knife and lunge at the man in one movement. The question was whether the psychopath would be able to press the trigger in time. If Lasse fired both barrels simultaneously at such close range, he and Assad were done for.
Lasse smiled again. He had already regained his composure. It was the trademark of a psychopath: nothing could touch him.
“Oh, I’ll have time. You can be sure of that.”
The jerk in Carl’s jacket pocket and the subsequent click of the switchblade coincided with the sound that flesh makes when you stick a knife into it. Sinews being severed, healthy muscles clipped. Carl saw the blood on Lasse’s leg just as Assad knocked the shotgun upward with his bloodied left arm. The boom from the shotgun next to Carl’s ears when Lasse fired out of sheer reflex blocked out all other sounds. He saw Lasse silently topple over backward, and then Assad threw himself at the man, his knife raised to strike.
“No!” yelled Carl, though he could barely hear the sound of his own voice. He tried to get up but now felt the full extent of the shot he’d taken. He looked down underneath himself and saw blood pouring out onto the floor. Then he grabbed his thigh and pressed hard as he stood up.