Acts of Vanishing Read online

  He clicked once more, and although William was well aware of what must be coming next, it was still gripping. The screen showed a similar flare-up in data traffic, but this time the centre was right in the middle of Poland: the same expanding spider’s web, or perhaps it was more like a sea anemone, with tentacles growing outwards and filling up with a glowing white for a second, then two, and then back down through all the colours of the rainbow before disappearing.

  William caught himself holding his breath.

  Warsaw? It was a possibility he hadn’t even considered.

  ‘I don’t know who sent me that email,’ he said, and instantly regretted it.

  Dammit. Not the logical response at this point, but it was too late, it couldn’t be unsaid, so he spoke up to continue instead before anyone else noticed the same thing.

  ‘And what’s the connection with the attacks? For a start, it’s nowhere near a coastline. And also…’ He rubbed his eyes as he strove to put his thoughts into words. ‘Also–do you mean that somebody sent me an email in the middle of an attack in progress?’

  ‘If we had all the answers we wouldn’t be asking you so many questions, would we?’

  That was Forester. Her expression made it clear that she was still expecting him to explain it all to them, and not the other way around.

  ‘I know what it looks like,’ he said eventually. ‘It looks like I’m somehow involved, I can see that. But I don’t know how, don’t know why, and most importantly, if I am, it’s without my consent.’

  Palmgren waved his hand dismissively. That was another conversation, and they had other things to talk about first.

  ‘In the middle of this surge,’ he said, pointing at the screen. ‘Right here, in the absolute epicentre, is the University of Warsaw’s main library. I’m guessing you won’t be all that surprised when I tell you that their log shows that someone logged into a Hotmail account minutes earlier. From one of their public terminals. As ROSETTA1998.’

  William got the picture. That’s how they’d found his email, and how they’d known about the meeting at Central Station. But what did they want him to do with that information?

  ‘I still don’t understand,’ he said, and that was partly true.

  Two thoughts were scrabbling around his head, competing for his attention. One was the nagging sensation that their suspicions were not completely unfounded after all, but for reasons they could not possibly know. The other was the irritating hunch that there were still things they weren’t telling him. On the one hand they were still treating him as a suspect, while on the other they were asking for help.

  It cut two ways. Were they showing him all this to ask for his opinion, or were they trying to force him into admitting something he hadn’t done?

  He was just about to ask them out loud, when a thought dawned on him.

  ‘Wait,’ he said. ‘The centre of today’s—’ The anxiety was raw in his voice. He hesitated, before going on. ‘—was it my house?’

  Palmgren did not keep him waiting.

  ‘No,’ he replied. ‘It’s worse.’

  There was something in his tone that sent William bolt upright. It was the same one he had used when he’d collected him from the bathroom–full of commiseration and empathy, as though some ordeal waited to beset him. Something tragic and troubling, and that everyone but William had already seen.

  Palmgren had zoomed in on the map, closer and closer to Sweden, the east coast, Stockholm, before approaching it and getting a final approval from Forester.

  ‘The activity that we saw today,’ Palmgren said, standing next to the screen, ‘had its epicentre… right here.’

  It took a minute for William to work out where he was pointing.

  Downtown Stockholm. Hötorget Square.

  ‘And?’

  Once again, the answer was just slightly too slow in coming.

  ‘I am so sorry, William.’

  That was Palmgren. Eyes so sincere that William felt the cramp invade his stomach without knowing why.

  What the fuck is this about?

  ‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘So sorry to be putting you through this.’

  The room that Velander had asked Christina to wait in was an unwelcoming reception room on the lower ground floor. It was just metres away from the entrance, separated from the rest of the operation to keep people without clearance from getting too deep inside the Swedish Armed Forces’ quadratic secret heart. It had dirty grey windows overlooking the dirty grey courtyard, and the only plants visible there were the winter-bare rosehip bushes. Along with the expanse of concrete slabs, they combined to make the view all the more depressing. You are now on Government property, they seemed to say. No unnecessary happiness.

  When the door opened and William was shown in, he didn’t even look her in the eye. Instead he was led in behind her before taking up position a comfortable distance away, leaning against the wall to avoid his face ending up level with hers. His stare was fixed on Palmgren to avoid any contact.

  ‘If this is a blind date, we can stop it here,’ he said. ‘Neither of us is quite that blind.’

  Palmgren feigned not to have heard.

  ‘This is difficult for me too,’ Christina finally added, and William sniggered. Compassion and accusation hand in hand, thank you for that.

  ‘How about we just do what we normally do,’ he replied flatly. ‘We’ll each of us comfort ourselves.’ And with that, the conversation was over before it had even begun. Snide barbs had won the day, and if anything was going to be said, it was going to be Palmgren that said it.

  ‘I realise that you have questions you’d like answered.’ He stood between them, looking for the right way to get started. ‘First of all, I didn’t know. I didn’t realise…’

  He looked sorrowfully at Christina, hoping to avoid having to utter the words. Words about separation, drugs, their searching for Sara.

  ‘We didn’t either,’ Christina said quietly. ‘There are a lot of things we realised far too late.’

  Silence again, the room full of eyes avoiding contact with each other: furthest in was Velander, sitting by the wall. Forester stood nearest the door, and in the middle of the room, in between two people who no longer loved one another, there was Palmgren, getting ready to say things he didn’t want to say.

  ‘And I am terribly sorry for asking you to come,’ he said in the end. ‘But we do need your help to understand all this.’

  He nodded in Velander’s direction. On the shelf next to him was a set of electronic devices: a DVD-player, an amplifier, and a grey desktop computer. They were stacked haphazardly, cobbled together as though no one had bothered to do it properly because the components would be obsolete even before the last cable was pinned up and hidden from view.

  An average-sized, unbranded flatscreen TV hung on the wall. With a couple of clicks Velander summoned a flat, blurry film loop onto it, but it took both William and Christina a couple of seconds to decipher what they were seeing.

  Everything seemed to suggest that the image was one of a large office. It was filmed from above, striped and in low resolution, the colours over-saturated and smeared by a camera that had been in the same position for years.

  No, not an office. A hall. Everything was poorly and strangely lit, the only light coming from the illuminated rectangles that seemed to be arranged in rows throughout the room. Workstations, that’s what they were, overexposed computer screens in small cubicles. At each keyboard a pair of hunched shoulders, and beyond the reception desk a glass door where pale blue faceless people hurried across equally pale blue flooring.

  An internet café?

  At first neither of them could work out what they were supposed to be looking at. Then in an instant they both realised why Palmgren had apologised so profusely.

  William’s reaction was the more visible. He was overcome with icy emptiness, felt himself losing his balance, as though his emotions had crept up behind him and were now pushing a boot into the back of bot
h his knees at once. He steadied himself on the table, stock-still without knowing what to say, and beside him Christina stood motionless. The selfsame emotions, but invisible, internal.

  A young man had entered the scene in front of them. He was dirty, wearing a padded jacket with the hood pulled tight around his face. A thin, empty rucksack hung on his shoulders, and he had just stopped to say something to the guy behind the desk–and then he turned his head so that his face was in view of the camera.

  The young man in the coat wasn’t a man at all.

  ‘One minute later,’ said Palmgren, ‘the power supply to half the country is cut off.’

  William was the first of them to speak, clearing his throat several times to rid his voice of the shock. His eyes were fixed on the screen.

  ‘What the hell is she doing there?’

  16

  By the time Sara Sandberg finally turned off onto the gentle incline of Skeppargatan, four hours had passed since it all happened. Four hours since she’d been caught on CCTV walking into the internet café in Hötorget’s metro station, wearing her padded jacket and rucksack.

  ‘Café’ was a bit of a stretch. When Sara Sandberg was growing up, cafés had been warm, welcoming places where you gossiped about classmates over drinking glasses with six-inch teaspoons and frothed milk. The place behind the dingy shopfront next to the escalators was the polar opposite. It was more like an amusement arcade or perhaps a youth club, dark and asocial and stinking of stale breath and damp clothes. The coffee was served from pump flasks and if there was any gossiping about classmates going on it was via keyboards and headphones and with people sitting in other parts of the world.

  For thirty crowns though, you could have a computer for an hour. And thirty crowns was what she’d placed on the desk by the door.

  ‘What were you planning on doing?’ the young man behind the desk had asked. He had a patchy, downy moustache, and a side-parting draped over half his face like a black curtain. He was younger than her. Probably no more than seventeen.

  Sara forced herself not to look away first.

  ‘Do you normally ask people that?’ she said. ‘Or just me?’

  She could hear her own, quavering voice, how it dragged itself along with softened consonants like a baggage carousel set too slow. She could hear how she sounded stoned, despite the fact that she wasn’t.

  ‘Right now, I’m asking you,’ he said.

  ‘Emails,’ she said. ‘News. Things like that. What sort of things do you use the internet for?’

  He didn’t answer, and for a split second she was tempted to make a few unflattering guesses, but that wasn’t likely to help her cause.

  Instead, she waited while he hesitated. She let him observe her through all those strands of hair, as if he wasn’t sure if she might be contagious. As though he too might risk a bout of addiction if he spent too long talking to her.

  ‘Coffee’s not included,’ he said finally.

  Condescending eyes behind the theatre curtain, bum-fluff ’tache wobbling as the consonants emerged. He was pathetic, tragic even, the eternal ruler of a fusty little kingdom that reeked of faulty ventilation, and in a way that made her hate him. She did realise, though, that she would once have felt exactly the same way had the roles been reversed.

  She thanked him with a nod, despite having nothing to thank him for, and, leaving her damp hood up around her face, she wandered into the darkness until she found a spot where she felt sure she would be left in peace.

  A coffee would’ve been good. Anything to warm her up a bit, maybe even suppress the shakes. She didn’t have much cash left though, and coffee was hardly a priority.

  The briefcase had been a welcome boost to her coffers, no question, but not for as long as she’d hoped. Pangs of guilt struck her at the mere thought of it. She had meant so well. Standing there on the threshold of her own home, literally a single step away from going inside and asking to be allowed back. The temptation that presented itself at that point was too great. Or was it fear? Either way it was there, on the rug in the hall, just inside the door, almost asking to be stolen. Why else would anyone leave a briefcase like that, unless deep down what they actually wanted was someone to nip in and help themselves?

  Inside, she found three hundred krona in cash, but that only lasted a few days. The only things of value that she’d been able to sell were a couple of designer pens and a phone charger. It had hardly been worth the bother.

  But the thing that had grabbed at her insides had been in the side pocket.

  Unopened post from the doormat. Letters that had been stuffed in the bag, to be looked at later. Now she had them.

  That’s where she’d found the padded envelope. Flat, stiff, addressed to her father, and–of all places–postmarked Warsaw.

  William and Christina got to their feet, seemingly without moving a muscle, and watched their daughter walking into an internet café. Over and over again she walked in, a loop that began and ended at the same point and which repeated with ruthless precision again and again.

  It was just a collection of pixels, blurred and flat and out of focus, yet neither of them could tear their eyes from the screen. The office. The till. The man coming in, turning to the camera, not a man after all but Sara Sandberg. Talking, negotiating, and paying cash before walking on and disappearing from view. Then for a split second, the screen goes black, before the loop begins again.

  There she was. After months of searching.

  Why? Why there?

  ‘Am I right in thinking,’ William eventually managed–grief, hope, the feeling of being deeply, unfairly offended–‘that you seriously believe that our daughter has something to do with the power cut?’

  ‘When the Security Police arrived at the scene ten minutes later, Sara was gone.’ Palmgren’s voice. ‘Not just her. The computer she’d been sitting at was gone too.’

  William looked away. ‘That’s the sort of thing she does,’ he said, ashamed of himself and his daughter at the same time. ‘What’s a computer like that worth, do you think? That’s her only income. It’s how she gets by.’

  Palmgren said nothing.

  ‘Even if the power cut started there, and even if she took the computer with her when she left, there’s no way you can know that it was her. The whole place was full of kids.’

  ‘William?’

  That was Christina.

  It was her first word since the tape had started rolling, and now she got up, walked over to the TV and beckoned for William to do the same.

  They stopped just inches short of the screen, close enough to feel the electronic warmth radiating towards them, and at this distance the picture was even more blurred than before. Even sadder. The large light grey pixels continued to walk in and out of shot, and what had been Sara became less and less real, portrayed in lifeless, fluttering squares, as though she was slowly disappearing, slowly becoming ones and zeros in a grey-blue line on a TV screen.

  ‘What’s that she’s holding?’ she asked.

  William saw Sara look at the camera, saw her heading off to her spot for the umpteenth time, saw the time hop backwards and Sara coming in the front door again.

  The negotiation. The money. And there–‘Can we stop it?’ said William.

  Velander’s fingers clicked a key, and the blue-grey world in front of them froze to a flickering, pixelated mosaic.

  Sara, the till, the shiny thing in her hand.

  ‘It’s a CD.’

  Palmgren nodded.

  ‘We believe that’s what she wanted to take away with her, but it got stuck in the computer when the power went.’

  The silence returned. William fixed his eyes on Sara’s face, the worn-out clothes, the empty rucksack that perhaps was her only possession. He felt the urge to shout out loud at the screen, to call out to her wait, I’m on my way, but forced himself not to.

  He felt the world around him shrinking. As though the twine was suddenly being wound another loop, around Sara, around all o
f them, but above all, around him. Even if he was, hopefully, the only one who’d noticed. For now.

  ‘I don’t understand,’ he said, his voice so deep that it seemed to be thundering straight out of his chest. ‘How could our daughter be involved in this?’

  Forester’s reply was a chilling understatement.

  ‘We don’t know. But we would love to hear your thoughts.’

  It had happened almost immediately.

  She’d just put the CD in the tray at the front of the computer, watched it disappear into the thin slot, and for a second the computer had buzzed and hummed as though it was tasting the CD and trying to decide whether or not the contents were worth showing.

  Then, her computer died. Followed by those around her.

  Same thing with the lights, first the one above her, then the neighbouring ones, then all the others in the whole building and onwards, outwards, like a single dark ring in a pool of light, a ring that had unquestionably started with her and that grew and swallowed everything within a second.

  Everything was gone. The flickering light of the screens, the hum from hard drives, the muffled clunking of the escalators in throbbing competition with the music seeping in from a nearby gym.

  It took a few seconds before the swearing started.

  Voices barking about the games they’d just lost, weapons and points and important alliances that were gone, and the voice of Bum-fluff assuring everyone that he was trying to call a technician and that everything would surely be back up and running soon.

  Sitting quietly in her chair in the darkness was the girl who was about to die. She had made it happen. Not her, personally, but somehow the CD had taken control of her computer, spread from her, knocked out the whole café and apparently even the hall outside. It was impossible. Yet she knew it was true.

  She felt her way to the computer’s tower next to the screen, grimy fingers scanning across the buttons on the front to eject it. But the power was gone. And there was only one way she was taking the CD with her.