“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,
