After the applause for the cadets and the flags glinting in the red light, the evening glided with astonishing ruthlessness into its next item on the programme, as though political alliances could be organised with a single whistle.
The ice rink was divided.
Five goals now stood on the field at the corners of a fictitious pentagram. Each alliance team played simultaneously against all the others, a spectacle of controlled chaos, a tactical storm played out in the moment.
The audience loved it immediately. People were happy to applaud things that looked complicated, as long as they smacked of spectacle from the outside and could be justified by rules from the inside.
Ilya Rozanov also loved that something was finally happening that wasn’t limited to glasses, smiles and multilingual greetings.
After just the first thirty seconds, it was clear what most in the hall wouldn’t understand and what the players grasped immediately: The Socialist Assistance Pact would win this spectacle because Ilya treated the ice as if it belonged only to him and the mistakes of others. He led with visible aggression. He read the players’ movements before they had even decided on them, forced the play into tight angles, intercepted passes, and sent teammates into spaces from which there were no elegant excuses with short, cold commands.
The teams from the Commonwealth Defence Pact, the Continental Defence Community, the Pan-Asian Pact and the Sword of Islam Pact realised one after the other that they were not playing against four teams.
They were playing against Ilya’s will.
Shane Hollander realised it after two substitutions.
He would almost have smiled had he not simultaneously felt that something in the inside pocket of his trousers was heavier than a normal puck ought to be. Lind’s object tugged at his attention like a bad thought. Twice Shane unconsciously reached for the fabric over the pocket, as if he had to check whether the puck was still there.
Anya saw this from the edge of the visitors’ circle: the repeated, brief, reassuring gesture of a man carrying something he didn’t understand. She sat next to an arrangement of white-lacquered driftwood and red light, her arms loosely folded, outwardly just an elegant woman in a dark green dress and emeralds, politely showing interest in a charitable winter sports event. Inside, she was already rearranging routes, spaces and time slots.
Claudia Tiedemann saw something else: she saw Lind.
He was no longer standing where he had been after the puck moment, but below the main concourse in the area of the glass walkway that later led to the arena hotel. Two security guards in ice-white suits flanked him with that false politeness used to signal to a man that, formally, he was still a guest, but in reality was already being escorted out.
Ravn had chosen good people. They didn’t look like thugs. They looked like responsible men. That was more unsettling.
Claudia tried to make her way out of the spectator area as elegantly as possible, but some of those seated were already mocking her as she squeezed through. Lind was speaking to the two security guards. His hands moved only once, briefly, as if he wanted to explain something that nobody wanted explained.
Up in the royal box, de la Motte sat next to Princess Indulan and offered polite applause for a move that didn’t really interest her. Her gaze fell too rarely on the ice and too often on the architecture.
Stromberg noticed this.
“She doesn’t like listening when it comes to sport,” he said quietly.
Ravn stood beside him, his face impassive.
“That’s why Lind isn’t speaking to her anymore this evening.”
“He’d be better off not speaking at all.”
“He’s being taken to his room.”
Stromberg looked down at Lind, who was walking towards the hotel wing between his two escorts.
“Let’s hope his conscience doesn’t suffer a secondary collapse.”
On the ice, Ilya scored the third goal for the Socialist Assistance Pact. A hard, clean wrist shot into one of the side goals, whilst two other teams were still arguing over who should mark whom. The audience reacted with a mixture of amazement and polite irritation. Sport was welcome. Superiority made diplomatic guests nervous.
The children at the edge of the ice rink were already waiting for their next turn.
They wore seaweed costumes in iridescent green, light blue starfish, silver fish caps and fabric fins, which looked at times touching, at times slightly menacing in the stage lights. Behind them stood modern sculptures made of plastic waste: water bottles pressed into columns, transparent waves of cut-up canisters, an archway built from old fishing nets, within which colourful bottle caps glittered like cheap gemstones. The installation was elaborate, morally charged and, in that way, very expensive – the sort of thing rich people love, because it allows them to believe, for a moment, that beauty and social reform share the same sponsor.
Then the music began, an orchestra on the upper gallery, which the announcer had previously introduced in a solemn voice as Stravinsky’s Sacre du Printemps, causing at least three people in the arena to cringe inwardly whilst the rest of the audience remained completely indifferent. The children began to dance. Seaweed arms swayed, starfish spun, small bodies ran between the plastic sculptures, forming a ballet of the endangered oceans in politely rehearsed eco-poetry.
The audience applauded after the very first bars.
That evening, Copenhagen was ready to applaud almost anything, as long as it glowed coldly enough.
Lind had almost reached the remote-controlled glass door in the corridor leading to the hotel. Just four more steps. One of the security guards was already pulling out his key card, although they both knew that the door didn’t respond to a card but had to be opened from above. Lind lifted his head as if he’d sensed something. A very slight tremor in the air, perhaps, a drop in pressure, a disturbance in the temperature that only someone who had spent too long dealing with false cold would notice.
Claudia saw it first on the pane.
For a fraction of a second, the glass wall of the passageway took on a silvery sheen, as if frost were running through the material from the inside out. The strip of light above the door flickered. The air contracted. No wind. More like a sudden absence of warmth.
Then came the wave.
It was invisible, provided one did not confuse invisible with harmless. A single, silent jolt through the temperature. A bulge in reality. Lind’s eyes flew open. One of the security guards instinctively took a step back, the other half a step forward, as if one could hold onto a man with a reflex who was no longer standing in the same spot at that very moment.
Lind vanished.
He had simply been there one moment and was gone the next. Where he had just been standing, only a harsh gust of ice-cold air remained, so cold that the breath of the two security guards immediately turned white in the air.
Lind’s ID badge had fallen from his lapel to the floor.
One of the men swore under his breath. The other spun round as if a door must have opened somewhere, through which a fifty-five-year-old physicist had just slipped away unnoticed. For a moment, neither of them looked like security professionals, but rather like desperate men.
Claudia took a step out of her hiding place before she regretted it. The cold hit her face painfully.
“Where is he?” hissed one of the security guards.
“Where have you taken him?” asked Claudia.
Both men turned towards her. They didn’t know her well, but they knew enough: technical guest list, Hessian scientist, official accreditation. Too legitimate to push her away immediately. Too out of place to be pleased she was there.
“This area is restricted,” said the older of the two.
Claudia looked at Lind’s ID card on the floor, then at the frozen trail that had formed at the edge of the doorframe.
“Your husband didn’t just disappear through a regular door.”
“You didn’t see anything.”
“I saw it, but I didn’t understand it,” said Claudia dryly.
The younger one was already pressing his earpiece.
Claudia thought quickly. If Lind was gone, if the security guards were about to report to Ravn what had happened, then every semi-technical area of the arena would be guarded within the next few minutes. Every normal route would be closed off. The puck was still with Shane. Or not for much longer, if Shane went to the hotel, had a shower, changed his clothes and was surrounded by a hundred people who believed in sport but not in time physics.
She changed her plan.
“Listen,” she said, pointing to the frozen doorframe. “If you report this, you’d better cordon off the entire corridor immediately. If it happens again, you don’t want any guests nearby.”
It was the sort of sentence people obeyed when they had no better idea and someone said it in a calm tone.
Both men looked at each other. That was enough for Claudia. She didn’t walk away. She merely shifted out of their field of vision. Half a step back, then behind the wall ledge, then sideways into the service area, where towel trolleys, cleaning boxes and rolls of paper goods awaited their next invisible task. No escape. A mathematical calculation.
On the ice, the Socialist Assistance Pact cheered another goal.
Ilya gave no visible sign of triumph. He simply skated on, sharply, in control, as if every goal were merely proof that the world actually functioned as he had assumed. Shane had by now realised that the exhibition match was lost, but at least he maintained his composure in such situations. He made two good assists, intercepted a pass from the French line and took a half-check, which he would normally have answered more forcefully. But his thoughts weren’t quick enough on the ice. Too often his attention drifted to the heavy pocket of his trousers.
Anya saw how he tried to hide it from himself.
She smiled. The final minutes passed to the sound of the children’s ballet, whose little seaweed arms now wound themselves around the plastic waste sculptures, as if seeking to reclaim the oceans from humanity. The audience applauded both the sport and the children, feeling very pleased with themselves.
When the game ended, the Socialist Assistance Pact was in the lead.
Ilya left the ice without turning back.
Shane left with that controlled concentration which, in very good players, meant they were already mentally on to the next problem.
The teams were led to their respective changing areas. Towels, showers and lockers.
Claudia reached the Commonwealth wing and tried not to run into the staff. In front of the shower door stood a trolley laden with white towels. Behind it, a narrow row of cubicles; above them, the neutral pictograms of that architecture.
Voices. Laughter. Water. All the players were showering.
Claudia pushed a cleaning trolley half a metre further, simply because movement was less suspicious than standing still, and then slipped into the changing cubicle. Commonwealth trainers, British team bags, men’s voices, their mixture of English, American pronunciation and Ghanaian dialect blending with the sound of running water. It sounded like that heated ease that, after sport, makes everything seem harmless for a moment.
Claudia didn’t wait. But physics and theft had something in common: timing was more important than dignity.
Some people threw clothes into cubicles as if in an explosion; others remained so entrenched in their rituals, even in moments of utmost tension, that they would fold their discarded sportswear. Shane was that sort of person; Claudia had realised that at the latest when he appeared on the ice. The fabric lay folded enough to appear orderly. Trousers on the bench. Shirt on top. Jacket on the hook; even his socks and underpants were folded.
Claudia held her breath.
Water splashed. Two players were discussing Ilyas’s lead. Someone was swearing at a seaweed-covered child who’d nearly got caught under his skates. Somewhere, someone was laughing about ‘Stravinsky’s most barbaric ballet’.
She stood in front of Shane’s bench. The jacket hung open, the pockets: empty. Claudia briefly overcame her revulsion. The trousers lay folded on the bench. She checked the pockets. The left back pocket was empty. The right one wasn’t. She reached inside. The puck was colder than it should be. The shower was still running. Someone began singing a song in English that apparently only came to mind when he lost.
Claudia pulled the puck out of the pocket and slipped it into the large inside pocket of her own blazer. The shoulder pads helped. It was probably the first time in history that being behind the times in fashion had a practical use.
Behind her, the Commonwealth players continued showering, whilst outside children in seaweed and starfish costumes danced the finale of their ballet and the audience applauded enthusiastically, as if art made from plastic waste and ice-cold air could dance together in the same building out of nowhere.
Claudia opened the door to the nearest ladies’ toilet and disappeared inside. White marble slabs, cold light behind mirrors, steel and brass fittings, and a scent expensive enough to qualify as perfume. Claudia walked past the washbasins without so much as a glance in the mirror. She checked briefly to see if anyone else was in the room.
A woman in an evening gown stood at the washbasin, silently touching up her all-too-perfect make-up. A second cubicle was locked. From behind it came the discreet rustle of an evening gown and the impatient click of a small handbag being closed.
Claudia didn’t wait a moment longer than necessary. She went into the last cubicle, locked the door and immediately turned her back to it.
Then she took out the black disc. In the dim light of the cubicle, it looked less like a souvenir than it had before. Claudia turned it in her hand.
On the surface, she felt the fine engraving of the Atlantis logo of the Stromberg Foundation. Beneath the engraving, however, she felt a barely visible ring that was not quite flush with the surface. She removed a hairpin from her hair. A brief press on the inconspicuous indentation beneath the lettering had no effect. She turned the disc over. There was a second tiny notch on the edge. She pressed again. This time there was a barely audible click.
The puck split cleanly in two, revealing a circular metal plate with microscopically fine engravings, barely wider than a coin, and beneath it a tiny dark insert that looked like a key fob but was too specialised for ordinary electronics.
Claudia carefully pulled out the inner disc. Etched onto its reverse side was an architectural plan that laid out the area beneath the hotel and arena like a labyrinth: service corridors, a goods lift, a marked zone labelled: CRYOLOGY / TECHNICAL LEVEL -2, with a sequence of numbers beneath it. Claudia read it once. Then again. It had to be an access code.
Beneath the metal plate, the black insert sat in a magnetic holder. Claudia pried it out with her fingernail. The chip was smooth on one side. On the other, it bore a barely visible spiral pattern. She looked back at the engraved section plan. The service corridor, the glazed connecting passageway, the vertical shaft to the hotel, and below that a laboratory that would not appear on any public building plan for this structure. Another floor beneath the hotel’s basement. Whatever efficiency technology she might have been able to buy upstairs would be nothing compared to what might lie behind that locked door beneath the hotel basement.
From outside came the muffled sound of a toilet door opening. Footsteps. Water running. A woman coughed quietly into the mirror.
Claudia remained completely calm. She placed the two halves of the puck side by side on the closed toilet lid, took out her mobile phone and took a photo. She looked at the plan again, committed it to memory, counting routes, junctions, the width of the service corridor, the access from the hotel side through the goods lift shaft. Only then did she put everything back together: metal disc back in place, key fob into the slot, halves on top of each other, a quick press, click.
Claudia put the puck in her pocket. Now Lind’s nervousness made sense. The puck was never just a message. It was directions and access all in one. Outside, the woman at the washbasin left the toilet. The second cubicle opened. A celebrity muttered something about vodka that was too cold and not enough lemon. Claudia didn’t unlock the door straight away. She thought. Lind didn’t want to sell; he could have done that discreetly at the technicians’ meeting. He wanted someone to find the place beneath the hotel before Ravn and her people could shoot him. And he had chosen Shane of all people as the conduit, because visibility was often the best camouflage. So that anyone could then simply pick up this information, produced in the EU, for free. How could she find out from Hollander who the gift was intended for? Claudia flushed the toilet, partly to wash away her revulsion at this betrayal of Europe.
Claudia opened the cubicle door and stepped into the wash area. She washed her hands, even though she hadn’t made them dirty, and looked in the mirror not at herself, but at the room behind her.
She dried her hands with a white damask towel, tossed it precisely into the basket and walked to the door. She opened the door and stepped back into the corridor. Outside, the evening still reeked of culture, money and frosty politeness. Claudia walked back to the passageway leading to the hotel, where the throng of guests was now surging to feast at the buffet. Claudia wasn’t looking for salmon sandwiches or glasses of grog, but for the laboratory beneath the hotel cellar.