Acts of Vanishing Page 18

  Everything is connected, she thought to herself, and at that point Tetrapak’s face popped into her head. His pleading, ravaged eyes. What was it he’d been trying to say? Her thoughts took over, and then performed that unavoidable circular manoeuvre she knew they would: Tetrapak got her thinking about the power cut, that made her think of Sara, and the thought of Sara caused a stabbing sensation in her gut, one of grief and emptiness.

  For the first time in her life, she realised that she felt lonely. Or rather, it was bothering her for the first time. Friends, she and William used to say, are like children. They’re fun to have sitting in your lap for a while, but then afterwards it’s nice to hand them back and go home and listen to the quiet. And it had been a joke, of course, but it wasn’t without a grain of truth at its core. Christina liked to be alone. Just not like this. Not this unjust, corrosive loneliness.

  When the waitress returned, she did so with a truly impressive plate, groaning with cold cuts and several kinds of bread, fruit, a little bowl of herring, a big pot of coffee and ‘If there’s anything else you need just shout.’

  And none of it seemed to taste of anything.

  She forced her emotions to one side, put the papers down and got her phone out. Too early, but what the hell. She looked up the latest headlines on the screen. None of them mentioned her husband. Nothing hinting at any arrests, no suspects being questioned, no veiled statements about the police having conducted certain operations about which they weren’t yet able to divulge details.

  That was a good sign. Hopefully, it meant that he was still on the run.

  The ambulance crash figured here and there, but no one made any connections with the power cut, it was just short and factual, the same dismissive assessment of newsworthiness that she herself had made. The events in Kaknäs Tower got predictably spectacular headlines–Do you feel safe using lifts after this?–but again, no connection between that and the power cut, or any suggestion that the same event might have caused both.

  When it came to her own newspaper, it almost hurt. It was as though deep down she’d expected it to be empty, a result of the whole team being paralysed by her absence, and even as she realised how absurd that was, it ended up serving as an uncomfortable reminder: the world goes on without you. When you disappear, there’s someone waiting to take your place.

  The front page was dominated by the power cut. She’d had a hand in most of the headlines, but in the course of the small hours they’d gathered a few statements from public figures, politicians and press officers from the power companies, and none of it offered any new perspectives. They were all just repeating the same things. A substation, a fire, an accident.

  She knew that Military High Command suspected some kind of sabotage. She also knew that there were foreign military personnel in Sweden, that whatever had happened was probably just a part of something bigger. What she didn’t know was how it all fitted together. Sara, the CD, whatever she’d done at the internet café.

  Or, what anything had to do with Per Einar Eriksen. He was the addressee on the envelope in the brown Nissan, and he was also the car’s registered owner. Back at the paper, she’d found him on the Karolinska Institute’s homepage–he was a professor of Neurology–but the only listed telephone number went straight to answerphone, which she couldn’t help feeling confirmed her suspicions. If you fall thirty storeys down a lift shaft you don’t do a lot of talking afterwards.

  But most of all, what plagued her was the sticker on his rear windscreen. From the same conference that she and Sara and William had been tricked into attending. And say what you like about Tetrapak, but things bloody well did come together.

  She finally turned her phone off, folded up the newspapers, pushed her plate to one side. She could see only one way forward. She had Eriksen’s CD in her handbag, and somehow, she thought, it must hold the answer to what the hell was going on. The question was how she was going to find out.

  As she stood up, nodded across the room to the waitress and made her way towards the lifts, her mind was already made up.

  34

  It was the smell of smoke that caught his attention. By then they’d been in the taxi for over an hour, and William had been able to follow their progress eastward along the dual carriageway on the satnav. The road seemed to go on for ever.

  The petrol station had been on the outskirts of Łódź. He had stood on the slip road, waving to taxi drivers as they pulled in to fill up, and one by one they’d explained that they weren’t interested in a hundred kilometre ride. Especially not to the destination on William’s handwritten business card.

  In the end though, he’d found one. The young, short-haired man smelt of pipe tobacco and was wearing cornflower blue plastic-rimmed glasses, and after some hesitation he’d accepted for a fixed price that was probably way too much. But what choice was there?

  They had barely got on to the motorway before the questions started coming. What was William doing in Poland? Where did he come from? William’s answers had been blunt and evasive, and he’d thought to himself that at this price, a driver who keeps quiet and gets on with the driving ought to be included.

  Eventually the conversation petered out, and they’d continued in silence past the frozen fields, dense forest, and mile after mile of motorway rumbling beneath them. Several times, William caught himself doing sums in his head. He’d managed to take out twenty-five thousand, but by the time the Norwegian had helped him change money on the boat he’d already got through seven. Hopefully his biggest expenses were behind him, but the problem was that when the bundle of notes in his chest pocket was gone, he had no hope of getting hold of any more.

  By the time the countryside finally began to give way to suburbs, the light was fading. They drove past homes and industrial buildings, some austere high-rise apartment blocks every bit as grey as the sky overhead, some vanity projects topped with the names of multinationals, oozing self-confidence and dripping with cash.

  Once they’d crossed the river, the city lost its self-esteem. The buildings were lower, older, more decrepit. The brown, dying hulks stood in wilting rows, lining the streets as though they were long vegetable beds left to decay on their own. Instead, the graffiti seemed to prosper. Bigger, more violent, like another kind of life–a Technicolor weed that had been allowed to take over and spread to new sites when no one was there to keep it in check.

  ‘Praga,’ said the young man via the rear-view mirror. As though that explained everything.

  William was sitting with his face to the side window, watching the neighbourhood pass by, trying to decide whether or not it scared him. Along the main drag were trams, shops and display windows, admittedly ones that were quite hard to see into, but yet the whole scene seemed to communicate a sense of everyday life, of ordinary people, of safety. Then again, these seemed to alternate with derelict lots, gaping holes with crumbling buildings, fences made of chicken wire and entrances that had been both boarded up and then broken into.

  ‘You were the one who wanted to come here.’ The shrug said the rest: You do as you please. But you wouldn’t catch me wandering about round here.

  William could see what he meant. He was just about to reply, when he smelled the smoke. It was like a camp fire in the rain, or someone trying to smoke a ham in a garden shed, and it spread inside the car, thick and very real and almost choking.

  William instinctively reacted by sitting up straight. It was as though an entire orchestra of internal alarms were going off at the same time, and he looked around in suspicion. Was he overreacting? Maybe. But then–given everything that he’d been through in the past twenty-four hours–how could he possibly determine what was paranoia and what wasn’t?

  ‘That’s coming from my street,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it?’ The driver looked at him, confused. ‘The smoke. It’s coming from the address I gave you, right?’

  The young man leaned over the wheel and turned his face upwards, surveying the sky over them. But there was nothing to s
ee, it was just the smell, and he shrugged.

  ‘We’re almost there,’ he said, with an intonation that told William that he’d find out soon enough. ‘Ulica Brzeska, it’s the next right.’

  ‘Drive past it.’

  The driver aimed his cornflower-blue specs at him via the mirror. In the back of his car was a stranger who had insisted on being driven to Warsaw, to an address east of the river, and even if people were saying that Praga was changing for the better, this was still a part of town that made him feel distinctly uneasy. And now, having got there, the passenger started giving him other instructions, and that did not feel good at all.

  ‘Please,’ William said from the back seat. It was all too much of a coincidence to ignore it: everything that had happened, his suspicions about Piotrowski, and then a fire, right here–at his address? ‘Keep straight on,’ he said. ‘Please.’

  Perhaps it was the fear in William’s voice that settled it. They’d just started slowing down to turn off, the driver’s finger on the indicators, but all right then. At the last minute he carried straight on, shifted down to accelerate again, struggled with the gearstick for a second and then managed to get it into gear.

  And while that struggle took place, the taxi rolled past Ulica Brzeska. For just a few seconds, William caught a glimpse of the street, the derelict houses on each side, the incident tape stretched right across the road, and the frontage over there that just seemed to be missing altogether. The air carried an acrid smell, like damp charcoal. A couple of fire engines were parked in the middle of the street, hoses winding up the black hump, mindlessly spraying their water like sprinklers on a charred golf course.

  They carried straight on, and William let the taxi travel a few blocks without saying a word. Looked through the rear window time and time again, as though he was half expecting someone to emerge from an alleyway and follow him, someone that might have spotted him in the taxi and immediately understood who he was.

  That was an overreaction, he said to himself. He was careful, not paranoid, and this was the wrong side of that line.

  ‘This is okay,’ he said, finally. ‘I can jump out here.’

  ‘Here?’

  William nodded. Waited for the taxi to pull into the pavement and stop with its tyres in the deep puddles that lined the kerb.

  ‘Do you know where we are?’ the driver said once the car had come to a stop, looking at William over the seat back. ‘Do you know where you’re going?’

  William shook his head. ‘It’ll be fine.’

  ‘This is no place for tourists. Not at this hour.’

  ‘I’m not here on holiday,’ said William.

  ‘They don’t know that.’

  They, he said, without emphasis, just a nod towards the rotting facades that surrounded them. William looked at him. Maybe he was right, maybe he was exaggerating, but either way William had no choice. He nodded his final thanks, opened the door, and climbed out into the street.

  It was colder than he’d expected. It smelled like frost, and smoke from the fire, and then something else he couldn’t put his finger on. Oil, maybe? Or exhausts? He looked around, trying to work out his next move, alone on the outskirts of a city he didn’t know.

  ‘Do you know if there’s a hotel around here?’ he said.

  ‘Shall I not just drive you into town instead?’

  ‘Just give me some suggestions,’ William said. ‘Preferably ones that take cash. And that don’t mind too much who stays there.’

  ‘If you stay around here they’re all like that.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said William.

  He turned around, started walking back the way they’d come.

  ‘Hey?’

  The taxi driver’s voice. When William looked back he was sitting there with the window down, a look of hesitation while he finished his final negotiations with himself.

  ‘I might be wrong,’ he said. ‘But I think you need these more than I do.’ He rocked to his right, to give himself room to put his other arm out the window. William’s notes in his hand.

  He hesitated. The pride of paying your way on one hand, the knowledge that he needed everything he could get on the other. And the driver stayed there, not taking no for an answer, two round blue circles in an ever darker evening.

  ‘If you’re going to let me sit here waving a thousand-zloty note around in this part of town, then neither of us is going to have them for very long.’

  William smiled. A surprising sensation, because he hadn’t smiled in a very long time. Then he nodded a thank you, took the note, stuffed it in his pocket.

  ‘Be careful,’ said the specs, closed the window, and put the car in gear.

  As soon as the sound of the taxi had died away, William walked back down the road, cautious steps in the dusky light. He passed countless broken brick frontages with boarded-up windows, pavements with no cars parked alongside, streets that stretched down towards dark alleys devoid of street lamps, people or signs of life.

  Maybe the driver had been right. Maybe he shouldn’t have stayed. But how would he find out then?

  He stopped when he got to the street named Ulica Brzeska. Down there was the black hump, thin lines of smoke where the water from the firemen’s hoses happened to fall onto something that was still smouldering. A few curious passers-by had gathered along the tape, young boys propped up against their handlebars, men leaning in doorways all down the street. William kept his distance. He’d seen all he needed to see. The rubble down there, between the brick-built firewalls, were all that remained of Michal Piotrowski’s address.

  And if the answers to William Sandberg’s questions had ever been there, they had now ceased to exist.

  35

  The crisis meeting had been going on for over six hours, when Winslow was finally able to get down to the canteen in the basement of the MoD. He stocked up with a handful of Snickers and a sandwich packed in burglar-proof plastic, and wandered back down the echoing corridors, his hands gripping the snacks with a cramp-like intensity. the leather heels of his formal shoes clicked and echoed between the stone walls as he tried to collect his thoughts. An effort he knew was in vain.

  They were alone now. It was, after all, Trottier who’d been the driving force, and now Winslow himself was going to have to give a summary of the situation. And to be perfectly frank–what did he know?

  He’d just finished thinking that thought when he realised that Higgs was waiting for him by the lift. He’d sat pretty much opposite him in the meeting, yet they’d made eye contact only once or twice in all that time, invisible acknowledgements that they’d heard the same thing. Now he was standing there at the other end of the landing, black suit and a faultless grey-flecked hairstyle.

  They stepped into the lift, waited for the doors to close, then waited again for the lift car to start moving.

  ‘So nice that you could spare the time to come after all,’ Defence Secretary Anthony Higgs said with the same well-enunciated vowels as ever. The caustic nature of his remarks was more in the delivery than in the words themselves, so aristocratic that every syllable felt like a slap across Winslow’s face.

  ‘I got your text message in the taxi,’ said Winslow. Not that that really explained anything at all. But he had to say something.

  ‘How is this even possible, Winslow?’

  He didn’t answer.

  ‘Isn’t this precisely the reason for Floodgate’s existence, to avoid standing here with our trousers around our ankles, asking ourselves what on earth just happened?’

  ‘We cannot talk about this, not here…’

  ‘Are you worried that we might be being bugged? Because that would be frightfully ironic, would it not?’

  Winslow said nothing. And the man who was his boss gave a great sigh, and shook his head, before continuing.

  ‘Big brother isn’t watching you, Winslow. Big brother is far too sensitive to public opinion. And now here we are without the faintest bloody idea what to do next.’ The sarcasm was g
one, replaced by a tired anxiety. You are my adviser, his eyes seemed to say. So give me some advice. ‘They’re going for us now. Straight for us.’

  ‘We still haven’t got the full analysis,’ said Winslow. ‘It was an attack, but it might not have been aimed at Trottier in particular. There’s no reason to suspect that they know about the project, and even less reason to think that they might know who we are.’

  Higgs sniggered audibly.

  ‘How old are you, Winslow? Someone is trying to knock us out. And we don’t know who.’ He paused for a long time before he continued: ‘This is worse than we ever imagined. We are not fighting any old terrorists. We are fighting terrorists who are fighting against us.’

  When they emerged, the conversation was over, and without a word Winslow carried on down the corridor, a step behind Higgs as they headed for the meeting room.

  His boss was right. This had gone too far. They had assumed that the attacks were not targeting them, nor their projects, but that the targets had been chosen because of their locations in coastal cities with important internet hubs. If the terrorists’ aim was to cripple the internet, they had thought, then it was only natural that they identified the same places as they had themselves. But if Trottier’s death was a deliberate attack on him, personally, on them, then it was conclusive evidence. It meant, in that case, that the terrorists knew about Floodgate–and now that it was ready to be deployed, those bastards had decided to stop it at all costs.

  They paused just outside the room, sounds of scraping chairs and people gathering audible through the door. In a few hours’ time, their external consultants would be back from Northolt. They would have examined the networks and gone through the logs, and on their return they’d be able to give a detailed account of how the attacks had proceeded.

  Higgs leaned over towards Winslow. Lowered his voice to the point where it was almost inaudible.