Daniel Åberg - Virus - Stockholm - S2

Dano, who is shorter than the others and so can’t peer over the top of the rock, is crouching down and taking a peek from the side.

“Are we sure this is really it?” he asks.

Iris' heart is thumping. She wants to say that of course they have come to the right place, that there is no other place in the vicinity large enough to house the kind of operation they are dealing with. That it must be here.

But equally, it does look desolate. No movement, no signs of life, no parked cars. In the dawn light, it’s simply an empty monument to an era of Swedish nobility, one that she guesses has drawn its last breath now.

“There’s no reason for anyone to be awake now, apart from some guard who’s probably keeping hidden”, says Amanda in a low voice. “We can’t see the yard or what’s going on further away. And that’s where most of the buildings are.”

Iris looks out over the bay again. It’s now about half past three in the morning and the sun is just starting to move across the horizon to the east, making the surface of the water glitter peacefully. She doesn’t want it to end like this. She has to get her daughter back. She has to.

“Look”, whispers Dano. “Do you see? On the short side, by the window – there.”

He discretely points to the smaller barn closest to them, on the other side of the road that comes out of the forest. The distance between the house and their position is a maximum of one hundred metres.

“What d’you mean?” whispers Iris.

“I…I thought I saw movement inside. And look closely – doesn’t it look like one of the window sections has gone – like something’s missing?”

Iris can’t see anything moving but Dano’s observation about the window panes is right. On the left is the traditional white window you see on most older Swedish houses, which opens outwards and hooks onto a catch when you want to air the room, but to the right there is a gaping hole, as if the window has been opened and lifted off its hinges.

All to give a sniper full visibility if anyone came along the road from the forest, thinks Iris, noticing that this thought scares and exhilarates her at the same time.

“Okay, let’s assume we’re right about the window. How do we get past?” whispers Amanda, after both she and Iris have crouched down behind the rock.

“Do you see the ditch right across the field there, that goes on to follow the road up to the avenue?” Iris asks, pointing. In her mind, an idea has started to take shape – or rather two ideas.

“With a little luck we might not have to go up to the house at all”, she says, fishing out her mobile phone from her pocket.

“That barn could be where they’ve locked up Sigrid. It’s isolated from the farm”, she whispers, clicking the phone on. “Even if we got the GPS thing all wrong last night, Sigrid’s phone might still be useful if she’s got it on her and if there’s some charge left.”

She starts the app connected to Sigrid’s phone and once again receives a notification that the phone is at Nytorget in Stockholm. Bringing up Sigrid’s contact details, she goes to settings, takes a deep breath and clicks on the option “Remove Sigrid”, then confirming that yes – she really does want to do that.

“But what are you doing?” asks Amanda, agitatedly. “Any links to her have now disappeared.”

“That’s the point. If we’re close to her mobile we can find her again because it starts transmitting a Bluetooth signal as soon as it’s switched on. I thought it was weird too – when you pair Bluetooth devices it normally requires you to do something to both the sending and receiving device but this one doesn’t work like that. Look.”

She selects the option “Add new unit”, showing them the message on the display. “Power on your hand unit and select when it appears below”, it says.

“It doesn’t matter if the phone has just been switched on or whether it’s been on for a whole day – as long as there’s enough battery charge, this long combination of letters and numbers pops up. I had to remove and add Sigrid’s phone a number of times in the first few weeks as the app had quite a few bugs to begin with.”

She glances back at the barn again.

“The Bluetooth signal shouldn’t have trouble transmitting through that wooden building. If one of us creeps along the ditch up to the road and manages to get over the other side and close to the barn without getting discovered, the app should let us know she’s in there. If you follow the ditch up to the farm before running across it, you should be able to do it without the guard seeing anything, as you won’t be visible from the window – it faces further up into the forest.”

“I’ll do it”, whispers Dano. “I’m the smallest – I’ve got the biggest chance of succeeding without being seen.”

Iris looks at him.

“Hmm, maybe”, says Iris hesitantly. “But I haven’t finished yet.”

She takes a deep breath. This is the hard part.

“Still, there’s only a slim chance she’s there, and even if she is, we’ll have to get rid of the guard in a way that doesn’t draw attention from the people up at the farm. When Amanda infected Linda – you know, one of the soldiers in Sickla – it hardly took anything. Linda got into a panic just by being in the same room as Amanda, and sure enough, she got ill once we’d gone out onto the lawn afterwards – it took less than an hour. If whoever of us reaches the barn creeps up and lies on the ground right under the window, just a metre or so from the guard, and breathes straight up for a while, that should give the same result. Exhalation is warm and warm air rises, doesn’t it?”

Iris looks at Dano. He doesn’t look quite as enthusiastic anymore.

“With a little luck, the guard will get ill before the replacement comes along, so we’ll try to exploit that – an improvised attack of some kind.”

Dano is quiet for a while, and then he nods.”

“Okay, I’ll do it.”

“Wait Dano”, says Amanda. “What do we do if it doesn’t work?”

Iris flashes Amanda an angry look, but realises how unfair her annoyance is – Amanda is quite right, here comes the hardest part:

“If Sigrid isn’t there, we still have to do what we first planned. So you’ll have to wait behind the barn until we can see from here that the replacement guard is on their way. When the new guard gets close enough not to be able to see the window anymore – the entrance must be on the other side because we can’t see it from here – then we’ll give you the signal and you creep up and breathe as quietly but as heavily as hell under the window and we’ll pray to God and Allah that the guard inside gets infected before the exchange happens. If we get one guard exposed to the virus up to the farm and he starts to get ill up there, then we’ve won.”

The determination that Dano’s face had earlier shown has all but vanished. All that’s left is a boy’s frightened look.

“So…”, says Amanda. “It…yes, that could work if everything falls into place but I mean…”

“You mean what?”

It’s Dano who says what Iris has been afraid of.

“I don’t think that… One guard’s life in exchange for Sigrid’s, I can perhaps live with that but…we can’t…I mean…when mama and Bilal got sick so…when they died it seems to be so…” He sighs and looks away. “It’s so painful. It feels too awful.”

Iris feels her pulse increase and her breathing get shallow – the air can’t reach all the way down into her lungs.

“They want to kill us all”, she says, with as much control in her tone as she can. “You saw with your own eyes how they shot that homeless person, and he was just walking by. And you weren’t there to see what happened when they took Sigrid – do you know what they were thinking of doing at first? Before Amanda managed to convince them that Sigrid could be useful as a guinea pig, they had the option to shoot me or her first. Although as the adult, I was the greater threat to them, they were going to shoot her first. They wanted me to see how they killed my daughter – d’you get it? We’re just weeds to them – weeds that need to be weeded out.”