Acts of Vanishing Page 13

  No, she didn’t love Sweden. And it seemed to be mutual. Ever since she’d arrived, Sweden had offered her nothing but trouble.

  On paper, it had all sounded so simple. Someone was going to be at Stockholm Central Station at a certain time on the third of December, and that person would therefore be guilty. With his help–she’d assumed it would be a he–they would work their way backwards and establish who was behind the attacks and why.

  Now though, she wasn’t at all sure. The man they had arrested was clearly genuinely bereft, and he had explanations that, while convoluted, were perfectly plausible. And isn’t that the way life is? It is convoluted. It is full of coincidences and far-fetched events, and if anything is suspicious it’s when the opposite is true.

  Cathryn Forester was starting to have her doubts, and she hated it.

  She’d got on that plane to Sweden determined to show her true self. She had told herself that her unshakable suspicions, those nagging feelings that Trottier didn’t believe she was capable of her mission, either came from her imagination, or at least from incorrect assumptions on his end. She was competent, she was experienced and she knew it, so why wasn’t she allowed to prove it?

  ‘Don’t take it as a vote of no-confidence.’

  That’s what Trottier had said to her just thirty seconds earlier. Now she stood here in the cold, holding a small black satellite phone, the size of an ordinary mobile and strictly prohibited on the premises.

  ‘See it as me offering my support,’ he’d said, and his voice had been crystal-clear in its insincerity.

  It was not, of course, about support. Major John Patrick Trottier was on his way, and that meant one thing only. It meant that she’d been right all along–he didn’t trust her, she wasn’t up to it, and now they were sending a babysitter to take over.

  ‘I’ve got it all under control.’ She’d said it several times in the course of their last phone conversation, each time a little more in that pleading voice she hated so much.

  ‘In that case,’ he’d replied, ‘where’s the girl from the internet café?’

  Forester had explained that they were doing everything possible to find her. Her description had been circulated to the police, to all the turnstile attendants on the metro system, and to anyone else they could think of. Right now it was night time and she had a head start, but she couldn’t keep out of sight for ever.

  Then she’d made the mistake of saying what she was thinking.

  ‘Besides, I think we’re looking in the wrong place.’

  Trottier had not even bothered to sigh.

  ‘Sandberg is the one who turns up at Central Station. The person who triggers the power cut is his daughter. How can that be the wrong place?’

  Out of nowhere, Forester had felt a powerful urge to swear at him. She wanted to call him an idiot, then hang up on him, as though she was a teenager again and Trottier one of her brothers. It was like he meant to press all the right buttons to drive her up the wall. Or was she just letting him get to her?

  ‘I’m not saying we should let anyone go,’ she’d said, as calmly as she could manage, her hands sweating in spite of the cold. ‘I just want us to consider the possibility that we’ve got it wrong.’

  ‘I consider everything, all the time,’ Trottier had said. ‘Because it’s my job. Yours, on the other hand is to prepare to hand the mission over to me.’

  With that, John Patrick Trottier had hung up, leaving her on the roof with the information that his plane was already waiting. That, and a growing sense of failure.

  When she felt the vibration in her pocket a minute later, her first thought was that it must be Trottier again. But the phone she fished out was her Swedish one.

  ‘Where the hell are you?’

  It was Palmgren.

  ‘I’m getting some air,’ she heard herself say, just as she’d planned.

  ‘Well, stop it,’ he said. ‘Stop it, and come down.’

  ‘What’s the matter?’ she said.

  ‘It’s Sara,’ he said.

  ‘Where is she?’ said Forester. ‘Have we got her? Is she here?’

  Palmgren didn’t answer, and she asked again: ‘Whereabouts is she? Have we found her?’

  When he did speak again, his voice was thin and brittle, like he was exhaling.

  ‘No. We haven’t.’

  22

  William stood up as soon as Palmgren entered the room. He was standing by the computer, stress in his eyes, perhaps even guilt, as they stared at Palmgren, like a child in a larder with both hands behind his back. And maybe Palmgren should have seen it. But he didn’t.

  ‘William,’ was all he said.

  ‘What’s going on?’ asked William. ‘Is it an attack?’

  ‘William,’ he said again.

  ‘Is it in Sweden? Somewhere else? What is it?’

  Palmgren opened his mouth and wished that the answer had been yes.

  Sara had done what she always did: she’d stood on the platform the train was arriving at, patiently and idly at first, as though waiting for someone to arrive. Then she’d wandered slowly through the crowd as the passengers got off, just as though she was one of them and had just got off too.

  As the crowd started to disperse she slipped into the first carriage she could see was empty. Once on board, she locked herself in the toilet, a pristine toilet in a first-class compartment. It was warm and quiet, and if they weren’t going to clean it before departure then she’d be left in peace for some time.

  She had promised herself, but the rules had changed. She’d wanted to stop so that she could go home, but that was no longer an option. They’d given up, so why shouldn’t she do the same?

  She did it the way she’d learnt. She unfolded the foil and warmed it and sucked in, she took her top off and stopped the blood flow, and then, on the inside of her elbow, where the skin was still struggling to heal the old holes, she made another, same as always. Almost.

  She sat there in her internal cockpit as she felt herself starting to shrink. She felt the space between her and her body expand, the distance growing and growing to everything that was Sara and that had once been herself.

  Soon she could only see herself from afar, like a thin, thin shell round a universe of nothingness, a warm, quiet universe where she was floating in peace and could see herself disappear. There was no cockpit any more, no body to resist and try to control. She was alone now, alone and nowhere, surrounded by darkness, and for the first time in a long while she felt completely at ease. And as soon as she realised that, she knew.

  Now, when she’d decided to forgive them. Now, when she so desperately wanted to see them again and hold them tight. This time, she knew, it was irrevocable.

  She relaxed, felt herself shrinking, getting smaller and smaller. And far away, somewhere on the other side of the darkness, Sara Sandberg had stopped living.

  The black Volvo XC90 moved in silence through a city without features. William’s upper body jerked left and then right between the two solid agents from the Security Police, but he didn’t feel the jolts or hear the sirens; just watched as the fronts of the buildings outside seemed to float past the window.

  The city ahead was flashing blue, rushing towards them at a dizzying speed. Traffic lights and road signs glowed in their reflective coatings and became threatening geometric shapes in the darkness.

  Nothing was right here, in the present, and everything was far too late.

  When they finally let him out, his feet ran of their own accord down the grooved steps of the escalator, out on to the patched-up tarmac that formed the platform, through the smell of damp and electrics and rubber from brakes and couplings.

  All he wanted was to hold her, say how sorry he was, ask her forgiveness. He wanted to make up for that solitary lie, the one he’d thought was for her sake, but it wasn’t going to happen.

  His feet kept running, sped over puddles and trodden-in chewing gum, ran alongside the train although there was really no need to hurr
y.

  He felt the paramedics’ hands coming towards him, consoling hands, maybe, but above all restraining–calm down, take it slowly, take a deep breath–hands trying to prepare him for what he was about to see.

  As though anything in the world could do that.

  It smelled of plastic and moquette and complimentary coffee. The carpet was grey-blue with damp patches left by slush-covered shoes. And the door to the toilet was open.

  There she was. Lying on the floor.

  And along with Sara Sandberg, part of her father died too.

  23

  The small jet that stood waiting for John Patrick Trottier looked more than anything like an airliner that had shrunk in the wash. It bore a red and blue livery, the insignia of the 32nd Air Force Squadron on its fuselage, and behind the cockpit window two pilots were flipping through their heavy binders preparing for takeoff.

  Trottier saw it, said nothing, let the young female Air Traffic Controller walk him up to the stairs. He had never liked flying, and it hardly helped seeing the pilots browse their manual as if the aeroplane was a newly bought microwave. But right now he had more important thoughts to keep him busy.

  When the car had come to pick him up for the airport, he had already been certain: there was something about Michal Piotrowski that was decidedly wrong. He couldn’t be found anywhere, not on social media, not in any newspaper articles; the internet was full of Michal Piotrowskis but none of them was the right one. That, in itself, was more informative than anything. No one is that impossible to find unless they’re hiding.

  In little over an hour, Trottier was going to be in Stockholm. There, he would confront Sandberg with all the information that Forester didn’t have. Ask him about Floodgate, about Piotrowski, about everything.

  When he sank down into his leather seat in the back of the jet, he picked up his private mobile phone to continue his search. He couldn’t possibly have known it, but that would be the biggest mistake he’d ever get to make.

  It was Agneta Malm who had first noticed Sara on the internet café’s CCTV, and no one was surprised she was now the one who spotted the beginnings of a white patch on her screen. Three whole seconds after she’d stood up and announced her discovery the computer saw the same thing.

  When Cathryn Forester walked in a minute later, the JOC was almost full. There were staff everywhere, squeezed between their workstations and the rows of chairs lined up behind them, all standing staring at the giant projector screen that covered the wall in front of them.

  Forester elbowed her way through the room, the feeling of losing her grip increasing with every step she took. William Sandberg was a dead end. His daughter was dead. And to top it off, Trottier was on his way to teach her a lesson.

  And realising that she was the last one in the room when it happened again didn’t help in the slightest.

  She saw Velander standing up front with a few others from their working group, and pushed carefully through the crowd towards him. She grabbed his arm to get his attention, yet didn’t take her eye off the big screen for a second.

  ‘When was this?’ she said.

  ‘One minute ago,’ Velander said, his eyes fixed on the same display. ‘Almost two.’

  Projected across the wall was the same black and white map that they had shown William in the briefing room. Europe and Africa in nocturnal dark blue, Asia in a quietly awakening green, the Americas in frenzied yellow.

  With one major anomaly. At a single location, the darkness lit up in blooming colour, slowly displayed in a repetitive loop. Right in the middle of the darkest blue, almost in the centre of the map, lines erupted through the whole rainbow spectrum into an intense, brilliant white, before shrinking again and disappearing as though it had never been there at all.

  Forester swallowed. Her pulse was so intense that she could almost taste it.

  ‘Can we zoom in there?’ she said, perhaps to Velander, maybe to those around him. No one seemed to hear, and she kept on jostling through the room, past desks and colleagues, raising her voice as she got closer to the image at the front.

  ‘Can we zoom? Can we get more detail?’ And eventually someone did as she asked. Shit.

  ‘I need to establish the exact geographic centre,’ she said in a voice that was struggling not to crack. Behind her the map was centred over her homeland, a cloud of white disturbingly close to London, and she turned around, looking for faces that belonged to her group. ‘I want to know everything that’s going on in the area. Power cuts, major hacks, burglar alarms–if so much as a fuse blows south of Edinburgh I want to know about it.’

  Around her colleagues nodded in reply, then turned to leave the room or take a spot at an empty desk, and at that point another thought occurred to her.

  ‘Velander!’ she called. She could feel the cold sweat running down her back, a nagging suspicion that perhaps she might even end up being blamed for this too.

  ‘Give me the log from Sandberg’s PC,’ she instructed. ‘I need to know exactly what he was doing up there, every email, every log-on, everything.’

  She saw Velander sit at an unused terminal and then she turned to face the front again: the multi-coloured cloud slowly appearing and disappearing on the giant screen.

  Trottier’s on his way, she thought. And if it were somehow to emerge that this attack was a result of her having let William up to his office… She closed her eyes, trying to gather her thoughts, and not to panic until she knew for certain—

  When she opened her eyes again, Velander was looking at her.

  ‘What have you got?’

  ‘Nothing,’ he told her. ‘He read a few articles. That was it. After that, nothing.’

  It took her just seconds to grasp what he was saying. It just wasn’t possible. William must have been in his office for an hour, and he had to have used the computer during all that time. Read emails, tried to contact someone, something.

  ‘In that case, what was he doing up there all that time?’

  ‘That’s what I’m worried about,’ said Velander. ‘After nine o’clock, there are no logs at all. His computer is disconnected from the network.’

  When the plane taxied into position at one end of the runway, John Patrick Trottier did the same thing as always. He put his hands together on his lap, underneath his coat, carefully concealed to his fellow passengers even though today he was flying alone.

  He heard the engines gearing up outside the window, felt the acceleration pushing him into his seat, and then the body of the aircraft lifting clear of the ground. As he did, he clasped his hands even tighter together, mumbled his own approximations of the prayers he’d heard as a child. Just this once. Get us there in one piece. And I promise I’ll never fly again.

  This time, his prayers went unanswered. If John Patrick Trottier hadn’t already had his eyes closed, he would have seen the lights disappear outside the windows.

  24

  William Sandberg wanted to cry, but didn’t know how. He sat on the wipe-clean seat floating through the city on flashing blue lights, his daughter lying on the stretcher next to him covered with a blanket, even though she couldn’t feel the cold. Together. At last. In an amberlangs.

  Yet somehow it wasn’t her. Her face was drained of everything that had once been Sara Sandberg, she had eyelids that someone else had closed, and she jolted in time with the bumps in the road, side to side with no resistance.

  He could feel his thoughts jostling in panic, mixing and colliding, grief and emptiness on one side, everything else on the other.

  What now? They were going to drive him back to HQ. And then?

  The world was being subjected to electronic attacks. Somehow, everything pointed to a single person, the last person on Earth he’d want to meet–and to himself. Eventually, they were going to find those damning emails about the conference. Even if his hard drive was by now–hopefully–formatted, that just meant that it would take them longer, not that it would keep them out for ever. And once they knew he wa
sn’t telling them everything, how many chances were they likely to give him then?

  There was only one person who could prove William’s innocence. Unfortunately, it was himself.

  As soon as she opened the door to Sandberg’s room, Forester knew that Velander’s fears had been justified.

  His computer was there, on the desk right in front of her. It was surrounded by blinking diodes on hard drives and storage devices, all whirring at full speed. She knew she was too late, yet she still rushed over to the computer, because you’ve got to try. She grabbed the devices on the desk, pulling out cable after cable without even thinking about what was connected to where.

  The screens around her went black, fans fell silent, the green lamps on the units in the rack slowed down. Before long, all of them had stopped pulsing, instead flashing red to warn that the connections had been lost and the processes cancelled.

  Everything was wiped, his hard drives, backups, everything, and whatever there’d been to begin with was now gone. All overwritten with random digits several times over to make it impossible to recover.

  And this she knew for sure: you do not wipe all your own files unless you’ve got something to hide. Major Cathryn Forester took out her phone and punched the number to the Emergency Services’ control room.

  The woman behind the wheel was Jenny Bodin. She was a paramedic with ten years’ experience behind her, but as she replaced the radio handset her only thought was that she’d never experienced anything like this.

  It had started as a routine call-out–sad, yes, tragic and unfair, but routine all the same. The girl had died before they got there, and along with her colleague Bodin had attempted all possible resuscitation techniques to no avail. The girl was declared dead at the scene, and the man who was clearly her father had demanded to travel with her in the back. They’d driven through the darkness, blue lights but no sirens, and everything was normal. Until the call came.