It took only a moment to explain the situation to the naval officer on duty.
“You’ve got to hurry. This is incredibly urgent,” said Carl. “Bring people with pneumatic drills and other equipment, because I don’t know what kind of obstacles you’re going to encounter. And notify police headquarters. I need reinforcements.”
“I think I understand the situation,” said the voice on the phone.
39. The same day
They approached the last of the buildings with the greatest of caution. They studied the ground carefully to see if any digging had been done recently. They stared at the slippery plastic drums lined up along the wall, as if they might contain a bomb.
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
