Acts of Vanishing Read online

  All of a sudden they were no longer transporting a deceased girl and her father. Instead, the control room explained that they’d been contacted by Military Command and informed that the man in the back was under suspicion of terrorism, a highly potential escape risk, and must under no circumstances be allowed to leave the ambulance until they arrived.

  She felt a surge of adrenaline, but forced it back. The man in the back had no way of knowing that he’d been uncovered. They were separated by a robust wall with a reinforced glass pane, and the ambulance was being escorted by two unmarked police cars. Nothing could happen, she told herself. That call changed nothing.

  When Jenny Bodin seconds later heard the sound of breaking glass, her first thought was that she must have hit something. She ducked and slammed on the brakes, shielded herself from the shards flying all around her, mind racing to figure out what she hadn’t seen in time.

  Then she felt the arm around her neck.

  Palmgren hung up. He sat in the second of the two tailing cars, both of them dark-coloured Volvos, behind the ambulance. An officer from the Security Police sat in the driver’s seat next to him.

  ‘Was that about Sandberg?’

  Palmgren held back the answer. He had been saying stuff like What are you saying and That can’t be true and Are you absolutely sure?, and oh yes, Forester had been completely fucking sure, and as little as he wanted to he was now in a car with a bunch of colleagues who would very much like to know what it was all about.

  ‘Contact the other car,’ he said to the agent behind the wheel. ‘We’ll pull in close to the ambulance, them first, us at the rear. That ambulance is not to stop until we arrive at the hospital, no matter what.’

  They all knew what it meant. Something had happened and now they were worried that Sandberg was about to flee, and the driver lifted the receiver and was just about to speak. Instead of that, chaos broke out.

  It was the turn of the woman’s head that got William to make up his mind. The slight change in the driver’s expression, the suddenly self-conscious undertones that came with pretending nothing was happening. The conversation didn’t last for more than seconds, but it was enough to tell him that the call was about him, and for a couple of short moments he observed the two paramedics through the glass panel, one hand hugging his daughter’s.

  Through the window, their own blue lights mixed with those coming from the Security Police vehicles. They were cruising tight behind like cygnets behind a hurrying parent, and in one of them was Palmgren, and maybe he was on William’s side, maybe not.

  It took him four seconds to find the emergency hammer.

  In front sat the two paramedics–their seat belts fastened, he noted, telling himself that that was a good thing. Hopefully no one was going to get hurt, including himself, and he looked at Sara one last time, squeezed her hand.

  Now the emptiness thundered through him, rolling in like a wave down a drained canal, and once it was happening it was so powerful that it couldn’t be stopped. Finally, finally he cried.

  Then he raised the hammer and smashed the panel between him and the cab.

  Palmgren screamed, but no one could hear him over their own voice.

  Right in front of them, the ambulance was dancing. There was no better word for it: it started with a swerve, as though the driver had tried to avoid something in the road, but before it had straightened up again it slammed on the brakes with no warning, and the wheels locked and skidded uncontrolled through the treacherous slush.

  Right behind the ambulance, the first Volvo had just begun its overtaking manoeuvre. Now they panicked too, brakes slamming on to no effect, and spinning over the central markings into the oncoming traffic. On the road ahead, cars were streaming off the steep Västerbron bridge. Behind them, a necklace of cars bound for Kungsholmen and the Essinge Islands. If you had to lose control at high speed, this was not the place to do it.

  Without words, Palmgren watched as the Volvo lost traction, saw the approaching cars brake on the slippery tarmac, gliding and jerking out of the way and straight into parked cars.

  But most of all he saw the ambulance trying to manage the skid, steering into the slide, and all at once driving on two wheels. From behind, it looked like figure skating, a feat of poise and balance on one set of wheels, and for an instant it hung like that, frighteningly close to tipping over and sliding on its side.

  The driver next to Palmgren reacted at once. He slammed on the brakes and spun the wheel in a desperate attempt to turn their car through ninety degrees and stop before they smashed into the cars in front. Through the side windows, they could see the ambulance still dancing. It had regained its balance and managed to thud back onto all four wheels again, but the speed it was travelling at meant the performance was not over. Instead, it reared up again, but this time in the opposite direction, and slid across the tarmac on the other two wheels, a missile in flight.

  Palmgren felt himself holding his breath. On one side was the oncoming traffic, on the other the steep embankment. And no vehicle could balance like that for long.

  William realised a thousandth of a second too late that the ambulance was going to fall. He clutched for a hold but didn’t find one, and when it finally tipped onto its side he was thrown helplessly through the cab, the kinetic energy slamming him against the roof like a rag doll, with tubes and trays and equipment flying as tarmac pounded on steel. The ambulance had flipped over, and was now careering across the damp ground.

  The first thing he saw as he opened his eyes was the side window. He’d landed on what had been one of the walls but which was now grinding along the tarmac, and he could see the ground rushing underneath him like a sander belt, with only the shuddering window between it and him.

  He reacted without recourse to his brain: grabbing at anything solid, pulling himself clear of the window with all his strength–and at that moment the window gave out. It exploded into a cloud of glass particles, and William shielded his face with his arm, pushed his body against what had been the roof but was now a vertical wall, feeling how new shards were released from the rubber seal with each new impact.

  Ahead of him was the partition between him and the cab. Beyond that, he could see the windscreen, and beyond that reality had flipped and was rushing sideways towards them, and in the midst of that reality was a bridge railing…

  When the Armco barrier crushed the windscreen, straight through the middle as though they’d driven into an upright pole, the momentum caused the whole vehicle to lift, teeter on its front end and then cartwheel over the barrier and down the verge beyond.

  The world around William, meanwhile, was rotating. Tubes and bags and binders were torn from their compartments and holders and thrown around like a shirt in an enormous washing machine, with the sound of shrubs and ground as they reeled forwards. The necks of the paramedics swung and rocked helplessly like rag dolls. The forces at work ripped the rear doors from their hinges, crushing them against the rough ground, sending glass and particles flying in all directions as the world outside span.

  And in the midst of it all was Sara. Lifeless, strapped in, rotating along with everything else. Him and her and an amberlangs.

  25

  At first, everything was silent. A yellow-gold glow played softly in the damp, cast by hazard lights and street lamps and hundreds of low-beam headlights on hundreds of stationary cars.

  Then it all started. First movements. White, narrow lines from torches. Then people. Black silhouettes emerged, running from the cloud of light, like paper dolls making their entry in an ambitious shadow puppet performance, heading full pelt down the bank with their narrow, ice-cold torches pointing straight at the ground.

  Weapons drawn.

  Ambulance secured. He’s gone.

  William saw all of this from afar. He was lying at the bottom of the bank, hugging the ground and the bushes around him, as far as he’d dared to go before he heard them coming. His only chance was to lie perfectly still. He held his
face to the ground, breathed silently and closed his eyes, waiting for time to elapse.

  It had been two minutes when the light struck him. It shone warm and yellowy-red through his eyelids, and he lay there, his eyes still closed, hoping that it would pass. But it didn’t. Instead, he heard a voice right in front of him.

  ‘Shh,’ it said.

  William looked up, and one of the silhouettes was standing there, legs astride, levelling the torch. The world stood still. There was the trickling sound of wet snow melting as the temperature climbed above zero. Blue-grey breath hung in the air.

  ‘Make your mind up,’ said William, quietly. ‘Make your mind up before they wonder what the hell you’re doing just standing here and not searching.’

  ‘You do know, don’t you?’ said the figure.

  ‘Know what?’ asked William.

  ‘You know who emailed you.’

  William hesitated. If he answered, what then? All he had was a suspicion–that, and a thousand questions, and very bad odds.

  ‘What if I do? If I did happen to know that?’

  ‘If you know,’ said the man they all called Lassie, ‘then I think you should find that bastard and stop him.’

  William said nothing, just nodded back through the silence. And then, from a distance, came shouts from the silhouettes by the ambulance. Colleagues who called over to see if everything was okay.

  ‘I’m taking a leak,’ Palmgren shouted.

  He stayed there for another few seconds, feet apart and quite still, before he nodded down at the wet ground. Good luck. Then he walked away.

  William stayed prone for a long time. He saw Palmgren rejoin the group on the slope, people he used to work with but who were now looking for him. He looked down at the ambulance at the bottom of the embankment, the paramedics being helped to their feet, his dead daughter loaded back on the stretcher to be taken away. He could see the snowfall intensifying and twink­ling in blue.

  By the time the dog handlers arrived, released their dogs and let them comb the area, William Sandberg was miles away.

  Day 2. Tuesday 4 December

  ROSETTA

  Perhaps that’s why death scares me so much.

  Because I don’t know who I am, where I’m from, how I became me.

  Once upon a time I didn’t exist, and one day I will be no more.

  In between though? Is it really so much to ask–to know who you are?

  Perhaps that’s why I’m so scared of dying.

  Because if I never get to find out who I am, have I even really lived at all?

  26

  As the clock ticked seamlessly over into Tuesday the fourth of December, Stockholm lay quiet and deserted. Here and there, police cars sped silently through the frosty streets, occasionally flashing their blue lights and casting vivid, sweeping shadows onto the walls of surrounding buildings.

  William Sandberg saw them across the water, chillingly silent as they appeared and disappeared behind the city hall, past the Central Station, or down onto the northern shore of the stream. Sometimes, crawling, sometimes speeding, constantly looking for him.

  He’d stopped for breath at the top of the hills in Skinnarviks park. And even though his entire body wanted him to stop, give up, just lay down on the ground and cry until the morning, he knew that was something he couldn’t allow himself.

  He just couldn’t face carrying on. But he could already hear the dogs in the distance.

  On the other side of the water, his estranged wife sat in the passenger seat of a light blue Volvo. Dry snowflakes floated past the windows, mocking her with their carefree swirl, dancing like children on a playground in a world of their own and oblivious to what had happened. Reality dared to go on, the laws of physics were so bold as to let the empty paper cups roll from side to side in the foot well under her legs, while Beatrice drove them in silence towards St Göran’s Hospital.

  In her mind, she ran into the hospital, time and time again, only to find herself still in the car. It was as if her thoughts kept arriving before her, over and over, and when they finally did pull up outside the emergency entrance, and she told Beatrice not to follow her inside, she still wasn’t sure if it was happening for real.

  She ran inside without knowing how, took the lift or the stairs or stayed on the same floor, it didn’t even matter. She would soon be doing it all again, anyway.

  It was only when Palmgren came up to her in corridor, put his arms around her without saying a word, that she finally knew she was there.

  27

  Cathryn Forester had never even come close to drowning, but as she hurried towards the flat roof of Swedish Armed Forces HQ for the second time that evening, she did so with a frightening conviction that this was exactly what it felt like.

  Everything had collapsed around her. First Sara’s death, then William’s escape, and then, worst of all–the short message from Anthony Higgs. He had reached her on the unofficial satellite phone, and even as he introduced himself she’d felt the knot in her stomach.

  She knew who he was, of course she did, she’d seen him on TV like everyone else, and frankly that had been enough for her to decide that she instinctively disliked him. But she had never spoken to him before, and there was no reason for him to be making contact, not now, not direct with her.

  When she was new at the Vauxhall Cross HQ, Major John Patrick Trottier had time and time again returned from Whitehall meetings red in the face and furious about things that were top-secret but which he inevitably conveyed between the lines. The project that he and Higgs had both been involved in had been way above her grade, a European security collaboration with a codename she had long since forgotten. For years it had been poised in the starting blocks, but–as Trottier put it–constantly stymied by political cowardice.

  What they developed wasn’t a weapon–it was far better, he used to say, it was a non-weapon–but that hadn’t prevented the scheme from finally ending up mothballed for good. On that day, Trottier had come back to the office in a snarling rage that smelled a lot like Guinness, swearing at all and sundry and calling the Defence Secretary a bloody spineless turncoat and just as untrustworthy as all the other bastards up there.

  Now that turncoat had contacted her via the satellite phone, and the more she listened to his voice, the more the water had closed in around her, drowning on the same roof where she’d just been talking to Trottier.

  Trottier’s plane had been a Hawker 800. Piloted by two very experienced officers and with a single passenger on board. At ten minutes past ten, Defence Minister Higgs had told her with formal precision, the plane had received clearance from the control tower, sped down the runway and into the air.

  According to witnesses, the darkness had come the moment the plane left ground. It dropped as though someone had put a blanket over a birdcage, rippled like a wave throughout the airfield and beyond, and now Major John Patrick Trottier was gone.

  She tilted her face towards the snow, hoping that the cold sensation would calm her down, but it didn’t help in the slightest. The man who just moments ago was on his way over to her, who she’d have done anything to avoid seeing, that man was dead and from now on all contact would be directly with the turncoat himself.

  Was this her fault? Were they right, was she simply not up to the job? Could she have done things differently, prised the truth out of William Sandberg, could that have stopped Trottier’s death?

  Fuck. She deserved the rollicking Trottier had intended to give her.

  None of it added up. How could Sandberg be involved with this? What could he have done anyway–started what process, sent what order, prompted what sequence that made the computers at Northolt ready for attack as soon as Trottier took off? And given all that, how could Sandberg even have known that he was coming?

  She swore into the falling snow, felt the flakes burning her face.

  The question was not how did it happen, it was how was she going to get hold of Sandberg again. Once she’d done that, she wa
s going to pin him against the wall, and she wasn’t going to let anyone get in the way, not Palmgren and not Velander and not even the Whitehall turncoat. She would push Sandberg until he told her what had happened, why it had happened, and what he had planned next.

  All she needed to know was that he was guilty.

  And now she was certain of that: only a guilty man formats his hard drives.

  Velander did as he’d been asked and waited until they’d gone past the Royal College of Music. He wove between the dirty brown trails of snow that had been ploughed up onto the pavements, and saw his vision blur as the snow melted on his bloody glasses. Every now and then he would attempt to wipe them with his forearm, a nylon coat sleeve that was just as wet as everything else and that only made things worse.

  The whole time, he had his phone pressed to his ear. He let it ring and ring, and was about to hang up for the third time when a crackle came at the other end.

  ‘Where are you?’ the voice said, with no introduction.

  ‘Where are you?’ said Velander. ‘I’ve been ringing for ages.’

  ‘I know. I couldn’t talk in there.’

  Velander regretted it almost at once. In there. He knew that Palmgren had accompanied Sara’s lifeless body to the hospital. He knew he had waited for William’s wife and then obviously–Velander grimaced–obviously he’d have stayed with her for support.