PART 12 — The ultimate riddle
The gunshot echoed down the iron hallway, ricocheting with a loud bang off the metal wall behind us. The bullet missed me by a hair's breadth. In the ensuing chaos, Van der Meer and De Jong went crashing to the floor, wrestling wildly for the gun. The guards behind De Jong began shouting and charging toward us, raising their weapons to fire. "RUN!" Van der Meer screamed, holding De Jong in a headlock with the last of his strength.
"Take Thomas and run to the pump house!" I didn't hesitate for a single second. I hoisted Thomas over my shoulder—his weight was almost too much for me, but sheer survival instinct gave me superhuman strength. I turned around and sprinted back down the hallway, away from the gunfire and shouting. Behind us, I heard a second shot, followed by a dull thud and a chilling silence, but I didn't dare look back.
I ran into the darkness of the sewer pipes, out into the cold mist, holding Thomas tightly against me. After what felt like an eternity, we reached the iron door of the pump house. I kicked it open, and together we tumbled forward into the fresh, rainy morning air of the street. The city was just beginning to wake up. The first trams rattled over the tracks in the distance.
I laid Thomas gently on the back seat of the parked car Van der Meer had left behind. He was breathing heavily, but he was alive. He looked at me with tears in his eyes. "You really came…" he whispered. "Always," I said, sliding behind the wheel and turning the key in the ignition. We drove away from the hospital, away from the nightmare that had ruled my life for eighteen years.
But as we drove out of the city, I saw something in the rearview mirror that froze my blood. Sitting on the passenger seat, nestled among the binders I had dragged from the archive, was a small, worn envelope that had definitely not been there moments ago. With trembling fingers, I picked it up and opened it. There was no letter inside. Only a photograph of myself, taken this morning at five o'clock, as I ran through the deserted hallway of the hospital.
And at the bottom of the photo was a single handwritten sentence that wiped away all my hope in an instant: "Do you really think you're free now, Frank? The real guard wasn't De Jong... it was you."
