Chain of Events Read online

  He reached for the white cord hanging from the wall. Pulled it in, pressed the tube-shaped button to call for help. He hoped that it wouldn’t be the same nurse coming back; it would be an irritating defeat to go from acerbic and articulate to having to ask her for sleeping pills. But then again, if she could help put him to sleep for a while, that was a price he’d be willing to pay.

  So he pressed the button again.

  To his surprise there wasn’t any sound.

  He pressed it again, longer this time.

  Still nothing.

  Not that strange, he told himself. After all, he wasn’t calling for himself. As long as the buzzer went off somewhere else, wherever the doctors sat and did whatever doctors do, someone would notice and send a nurse to find out what he needed.

  Then he saw the lamp. A red plastic casing on the wall just above where the alarm cord came out. Shouldn’t it light up? Even if he couldn’t hear it ring, surely the light should come on to show he’d pressed it?

  He pressed the button again. And again. But nothing happened.

  He was so occupied by the malfunctioning alarm that the sound of the opening door made him jump. He glanced towards it, tried to decide whether to choose defence or attack: complain about the broken lamp or apologise for pushing the button so hysterically?

  But his thoughts didn’t get any further before his eyes adjusted to the backlight from the window. And then, none of the options seemed valid.

  The man standing at the end of his bed was neither a doctor nor a nurse.

  He was wearing a suit, a shirt without a tie, and a pair of boots, disproportionately heavy compared to the rest of his attire. He was probably around thirty, but it was hard to tell with his head being shaved and his posture screaming of years of extensive physical training. Perhaps he was older than he looked. Or the other way around.

  ‘Are those for me?’ William said, for lack of anything better.

  The man glanced at the flowers in his hand, almost as if he didn’t know he was holding them. He didn’t answer, dropped them in the washbasin. They had just been an excuse to help him blend in and navigate the corridors without standing out.

  ‘William Sandberg?’ he asked.

  ‘Barely,’ William replied. ‘But yes.’

  The man stood there; a long silence as they both looked at each other. Measured the other one with their gaze, even though William hardly would’ve been able to put up any resistance from his position. The entire situation was odd, and William could feel his senses brace themselves inside.

  ‘We’ve been looking for you,’ the man said at last.

  Really? William tried to understand what he was talking about. He wasn’t aware of anyone trying to contact him lately, but to be fair he probably wouldn’t have noticed if someone had.

  ‘I’ve been having a few problems of my own.’

  ‘So we’ve gathered.’

  We? What the hell was this?

  William sat a little straighter, straining to give him a casual smile.

  ‘I would love to offer you something, but they’re not as generous with the morphine as you’d hope.’

  ‘We’re going to need your help.’

  It came out of nowhere, almost too fast, and there was something in the voice that made William lower his guard for a moment. The young man looked at him, his gaze steady, but something hiding behind it. Urgency. Maybe even fear.

  ‘Then I think you’ve got the wrong person,’ William said, thrusting out his arms. Or rather, he tried to. IV lines and ECG cables limited his movements, but it all served to strengthen the point he was trying to make: William Sandberg was hardly in a state to help anyone with anything.

  But the young, well-built man shook his head. ‘We know who you are.’

  ‘And who is “we”?’

  ‘That’s not important. The important thing is you. Your skills.’

  The feeling that pierced William’s body was familiar and unexpected at the same time. This was a conversation he would have anticipated twenty years ago. Perhaps even ten. Back then it wouldn’t have surprised him. But now?

  The man at the foot of the bed spoke impeccable Swedish, but somewhere below the surface there was an accent. Too polished to place. But definitely an accent.

  ‘Where are you from?’

  The man looked at him with feigned disappointment. As if William should realise that he wouldn’t be getting an answer, and as if even bothering to ask was undignified.

  ‘SÄPO? Ministry of Defence? Foreign power?’

  ‘I’m sorry. I can’t say.’

  ‘Okay,’ said William. ‘Then give them my best and thank them for the flowers.’

  He said it with an air of finality: the conversation was over, and to stress his point he lifted the cord with the patient alarm again. Pressed the button with his thumb, gaze fixed on the young man as if to underline just how definitely over the conversation was. Again, nothing happened.

  ‘If that’d been working the light would come on,’ said the man.

  Unexpected. William looked at him.

  Another moment of sizing one another up, and then William let go of the cord, let it fall on to his stomach, draped across the yellow hospital blanket.

  ‘I am fifty-five years old,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been working for years. I am the Great Wall of China: I was important a long time ago but today I’m just crumbling away.’

  ‘My superiors take a different view.’

  ‘And who are your superiors?’

  There was an edge in his voice. He was getting tired of the conversation; he just wanted to have his pills and float away, not to play Cold War games with an over-exercised puppy who’d arrived a decade too late.

  But it was the young man who closed the conversation first.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. He sighed apologetically before turning on his heels.

  He’s leaving, William thought. A strange end to a strange conversation.

  But when the man opened the door to the corridor there were two other men waiting to be let in.

  The clock showed ten past one in the afternoon as the medical team wandered through the cavernous corridors of the Karolinska University Hospital’s intensive care unit to check on the progress of their charges.

  They had completed half of their round without any great surprises, and their next patient was a man in his fifties who had attempted suicide: chemical overdose and lacerations to the arms. Hardly a case that would warrant a longer stay in intensive care. He’d been given a blood transfusion, both to compensate for what he’d lost from his wounds and to dilute his high dosage of prescription medicine, but his condition hadn’t been life threatening when he arrived; either he’d made a mistake and taken too low a dosage or, quite possibly, he was just another case of someone trying to get the attention of people around him.

  In any case, there was little doubt that he would soon cease to be their responsibility. Dr Erik Törnell stopped outside the patient’s room, closed the medical record in his hand, and nodded at his colleagues: this would be a quick one.

  The first thing they saw when they entered was the empty bed.

  A bouquet of flowers lay head-down in the basin, a vase on the bedside table was turned over and smashed, the sheets were crumpled up on the floor and the IV line swung freely from the drip.

  The bathroom was empty. The cupboard emptied of all the belongings the patient had arrived with. And the drawer in the small cabinet pulled out and overturned.

  William Sandberg was gone.

  After an hour’s search it was concluded that he was nowhere in the vicinity of the hospital, and nobody had any idea why.

  3

  The ambulance that wasn’t an ambulance stood parked in the middle of a large field of random, self-sown vegetation – wild plants stubbornly growing in the face of numerous unconscious attempts to wipe them out, time and time again growing back up from craters, nooks and blast holes. There was a slight irony in all the vital
ity, but it was an irony lost on anyone who knew that the place existed.

  The men wearing reflective vests and paramedics’ clothes were long gone, cleansed, rinsed and well on their way through the list of predefined security protocols.

  Only the homeless man remained in the ambulance.

  They had taken his life away from him, there was no doubt about it. But didn’t they also give him a new one? A better one? Who knows if he didn’t even get to live longer this way – perhaps the street would already have taken him if they’d let him stay where he was? They gave him food, clothes, somewhere to live. He had a purpose. He exercised. They even gave him an education of sorts.

  But nobody had told him about the fear.

  About the symptoms.

  Who could have known it would go this far?

  ‘It is what it is,’ said the young, crew-cut helicopter pilot, as if every single one of Connors’ thoughts had been printed out on a telex tape for him to read. He sat in his seat up front, headphones fighting to let them hear their own voices instead of the perpetual drone of the rotors above them.

  Connors nodded back.

  ‘Shall we?’ the pilot asked him. Drummed his fingers against the throttle.

  This time Connors paused before nodding, but they both knew that sooner or later he would. Without his binoculars the ambulance was just a shining dot far away in the early dawn, and yet he wouldn’t take his eyes off of it.

  As if he could avoid the inevitable.

  As if he sat with the answers in one hand and an exam in the other, trying to come up with a different response, time after time, even though he knew what the correct one was.

  Responsibility. An overrated thing to have.

  But things were what they were.

  He signalled his agreement with a move so slight that it could have been an involuntary shake from the turbulence, but the crew-cut young man registered it and did what he was supposed to. He already held the tiny box in his hand, and all he had to do was to press the button.

  When the ambulance exploded in a fiery cloud the job was done.

  And a new generation of grass and wild flowers were given a new crater to conquer.

  4

  When William Sandberg woke up for the second time on the day he originally planned not to wake up at all, he found himself several thousand feet up in the air.

  The realisation immediately kicked him wide awake.

  He was seated in a leather armchair, soft, warm and deep enough to fit right in in front of a home cinema in any suburban home. Outside the acrylic windows a low sun shone straight towards him, cutting through an inviting cotton landscape of tightly packed clouds.

  He was on a plane. And he’d been dreaming.

  As always, the dream lingered, without form but with a feeling of discomfort. For a second he considered doing what he had learned to do, to let the brain go on a journey back along the feeling in search of whatever it was that had caused it to begin with. More often than not it turned out to be the same thing. And more often than not it tortured him even more to go back and revive the images. But it was the only way he knew to get rid of them.

  However, he let it be. He made himself focus on where he was, motionless in his chair as if the slightest movement would tell them he was awake and that it was time to come in and neutralise him.

  Them? Who?

  He didn’t know.

  The only thing he knew was that the last thing he remembered was three men in suits walking into his hospital room, that he had a persistent thirst in his mouth, and that he was currently in the custody of someone with a great deal of money.

  It wasn’t his first time aboard a private jet. But it was the most ostentatious one he had ever seen from the inside. His room – because it actually was a complete room; across from him there was another armchair, and between the seats a wall-mounted table hovered as a generous, common workspace – was divided from the rest of the plane by a sturdy panel wall. A door of imitation wood led to what was most likely a small corridor along the plane’s port side. It was probably locked. Surely not very hard to force if you tried. But definitely locked.

  Then again, he asked himself, why was that so certain?

  There was nothing that suggested that he was a prisoner. The belt that someone had carefully tightened around his midriff was a normal seat belt, and when he pulled at the clasp it released as it should, and the only thing stopping him from standing up was his own decision to stay seated.

  A stream of fresh air from a fan in the ceiling. Soft warmth from the sun outside. The day before, he had stuffed himself full of pills, and today he was sitting here. Wearing the hospital’s shirt and shapeless trousers, slumped in an armchair that probably cost an average annual wage. If this was death, then death had a strange sense of humour.

  It surprised him to be here. And it bothered him that it did. For a long period of his life he was perfectly prepared for things like this, or even for things that were considerably worse.

  At the end of the 1980s, when William was in his thirties and the world was split between two superpowers in blue and red, he had been followed by vehicles through Stockholm on several occasions. He had parked his car and walked in complicated patterns through shopping centres and department stores, just as he had been taught to do, and every time he’d managed to lose his tail. He’d taken a taxi home and had a colleague collect his car a few days later, everything according to protocol. He had security cameras and alarm systems installed in his suburban house, almost invisible and outstandingly high-tech for the time, but that didn’t stop the strange clicks in his home phone or the door-to-door salesmen who kept visiting his neighbours, then lingering in their cars trying to get a view of William’s house. He was, quite simply, a highly interesting target, and it was all entirely because of his work.

  But that was then. Back when he was active, young and promising – that blew over, as he used to say – and when his abilities were exceptional and in demand. Now he was discharged and surplus to requirements. Most of his work could probably be replaced by a few lines of code and a laptop from the high street.

  He shook his head at himself. It was hardly the technological developments that made them transfer him. There were no external forces to blame; he’d made himself impossible to keep, to the point that they offered him retirement at barely fifty. He’d dug a hole for himself and he knew it, he’d jumped right into it and kept digging; and all the time he couldn’t help enjoying it, taking an inexplicable pleasure in seeing everything he’d built up fall apart around him.

  And now, here he was. With stiff muscles and a sandpaper tongue and two deep cuts in his wrists. On a very modern business jet. Spirited away by what couldn’t possibly be anything but a foreign military power.

  There was no logic to it whatsoever.

  William Sandberg had been kidnapped.

  But it had happened at least ten years too late.

  The young intern paid just as little attention to the piece of news as everybody else at the editorial desk had done that morning.

  He was sitting at his large monitor, much too sleepy to concentrate on the article he was supposed to sketch out, and instead he’d turned to the long agency newsfeed, pretending to be responsible and up to date when all he really wanted was to avoid work for a minute without being too obvious.

  He focused his gaze as best he could. Saw the constant stream of reports from news agencies around the world, short summaries in English of things that weren’t important enough to merit their own newsflash.

  It was unremittingly boring. But it was less boring than trying to summarise the debate about the rebuilding of central Stockholm for the thousandth day in a row. And even if ten out of ten messages would be dismissed by a click of the delete key, either because the news was too small or because it was geographically irrelevant for the paper, he was still able to claim that he was actually working. If anyone asked what he was up to he could say that he was checking the feeds. I
t sounded a lot better than saying he was too hungover to write.

  And here he was with yet another uninteresting piece of news on the screen in front of him, his right ring finger hovering above Delete. A homeless man had been found dead in an alleyway in Berlin, and though the report didn’t explicitly say so, it wasn’t too hard to discern that he had taken an overdose or drunk too much and passed out before freezing to death. It was a local story, and scarcely that. One more of the hundreds of stories he would glance at without taking any action.

  He fought against an oncoming yawn, but lost.

  ‘Late one last night?’

  It was a female voice. And it was close. And he still had his mouth wide open.

  Damn.

  He had consciously not removed his baseball hat when he came in, but just as effectively as it shielded his face from the eyes of others, it also made it impossible for him to see what was happening beyond the monitor without turning his whole head upward.

  Which he hadn’t. And now she was standing there, and for how long? Obviously at least long enough to see him air his throat to the rest of the newsroom.

  ‘No. It was, what’s it called, no,’ he answered, removing his hat, trying to look as if that was what he’d planned all along.

  The woman didn’t say a word, just as he knew she wouldn’t. And that made him even more insecure, just as he knew it would. Christina Sandberg was at least twenty years older than him, but she was attractive in an almost inexplicable way, beautiful, natural and irritatingly pleasant. Not irritating because her pleasantness was false or over the top, but because he really wouldn’t mind her having some unforgivable shortcoming, something to stop his eyes from constantly wandering in her direction and losing the ability to construct full sentences as soon as he tried to talk to her.

  ‘You’ve got, I sent, in your,’ he said, hoping that a weak nod would complete what he failed to communicate himself.