Acts of Vanishing Read online

  Behind him, the corridor ended abruptly in a narrow, metre-high window, streaky from the weather and dirt and screwed shut to make sure no one opened it. On the other hand, it wasn’t a very tempting escape route. Four storeys below was a hard alleyway of tarmac and old junk, and the only way out from there would take him straight into the arms of the police he’d seen reflected in the window.

  In the corridor on the other side of the stairs were a few more rooms, all of which were presumably closed and locked and equally dangerously far from the ground as the rest of the floor. At the far end, a brick wall marked the boundary with the neighbouring building, dark and damp and hidden behind a trolley full of dirty linen and cleaning equipment.

  The only proper fire escape seemed to be the tight wooden staircase in front of him. From there though, he would be forced to enter the lobby, where presumably a number of black-clad men were already waiting to make their way up to his floor. That left him with only one option–the lift–which would be like wrapping yourself in a little brass and wooden packet and handing yourself over like a gift.

  He leaned out into the stairwell, trying to see down through the shaft between the landings. Still no one on their way up, no shadows between the gaps in the banisters, no elbows swinging out as they rounded the turns. Chances were they were still planning their operation, confident that time was on their side. That gave him a head start. But what good was that if he had nowhere to go?

  Reluctantly, he looked upwards. His room was on the top floor, and the staircase led only downwards, but there was a trapdoor above the staircase. It was madness. Fleeing upwards was like running into a cul-de-sac–in the end you can’t go any further, and all you can do is wait to be found and arrested. Only an idiot would try and escape via the attic.

  But there was no time to think of a better plan. He went out into the corridor again, pulling the laundry trolley behind him and out into the stairwell, feeling it wobbling as he clambered up. He found himself standing there, legs apart, above all the used sheets, with the trolley’s flimsy mesh sides swinging under his feet. The hatch was heavier than he’d expected, and he had to push with all his strength, trying not to think about the deep stairwell in the middle.

  When it finally succumbed, it did so in a cloud of dust and dirt that caused him to turn his face away, and that was enough to change his centre of gravity. Beneath his feet, he felt the trolley rolling off, inching out over the handrail like a clinking, unstable suicide, balancing on two wheels with William hovering above it.

  A stairwell in Warsaw, he thought to himself. That will be how I die. In his mind’s eye, he could see a dozen adrenalin-fuelled policemen rushing quietly up the stairs, weapons and vests and crouched steps, only to suddenly meet him going in the other direction, plunging down the shaft between them, a final farewell before it was all over.

  Only he wasn’t falling. He’d managed to grab hold of the edge of the hatch, a painful grip with his fingers in the corner, touching the floor of the attic, and he was hanging there, his legs dangling and his hands screaming in pain, but apparently still alive for a little while yet.

  His feet fished after the trolley and pulled it back into place. He listened. Was it their voices he could hear? Above him the hatch was resting just over its opening, and beyond that, only darkness. A draft that smelled of damp and mould wafted through–an attic, as he’d hoped.

  He hesitated again, another glance down the stairs, trying to work out how much time he had. They were going to come storming in at any moment, and only an idiot tries to escape via the attic. But then again, he thought, how were the men in the lobby to know that he wasn’t?

  For the sloth of a man on reception, it had all happened at once. He’d just managed to get back to his dinner when he heard the door opening again, and this time he just dropped his cutlery onto the table, a clatter of stainless steel that he hoped would be audible out at the desk, so that whoever it was might realise that you can’t simply go waltzing into a hotel and expect assistance just because you feel like it.

  But the moment he walked out, those thoughts disappeared. There were at least ten of them, maybe more, moving through the lobby wearing body armour and black jumpsuits.

  Only one of them stood out. He was wearing a black bulletproof vest over civilian clothes, and identified himself as Sergeant Wojda before explaining in an authoritative tone that they were looking for one of his guests. When he then passed him a photo that undoubtedly showed the man who had just checked in to room 407, the receptionist could feel his hands shaking. It must have taken twenty seconds for him to log in to the computer, another twenty to make a copy of the keycard, and then finally it was all done and the SWAT team were making their way up the stairs.

  Room 407 was located down the corridor, almost at the far end. They fell into line, weapons drawn, ready for anything. According to the receptionist, the phone in the room was engaged, which hopefully meant that he was so deeply absorbed in conversation that he still had no idea they were there, but they weren’t about to take that for granted. He might just as easily be waiting behind the door, perhaps even armed, and in that case they would have a single instruction. To neutralise the threat before he had time to neutralise them.

  The commanding officer’s name was Yazek Borowski. He was just over thirty, ninety kilos of pure muscle, and he now raised one hand, signalling to them to wait while he pushed the keycard towards the lock.

  One last glimpse around the team. Then he barged the door open with his shoulder, and with that the silence was gone: Like a single black mass, they rushed into the room, weapons drawn, shouting testosterone-fuelled orders in English, things like POLICE and HANDS ON YOUR HEAD and NOBODY MOVE.

  Nobody, however, had already left the room.

  Forester was at her post in the JOC as Lars-Eric Palmgren approached her. She stood staring at the large projector screen in front of her and gave him only the briefest of glances before her attention returned to the moving images on the wall.

  ‘Is this live?’ he asked.

  The entire screen was filled with shaky images from a room in which everyone was dressed in black. They moved with hulking resignation, just as lost and directionless as the camera itself.

  ‘The Operational Commander is wearing a bodycam,’ Forester said by way of an answer. ‘And no, there’s nothing wrong with the camera, I’ve already checked. The room is that yellow.’

  The raid had proved to be a failure. The screen showed the black-clad SWAT team wandering around opening wardrobes, pulling back curtains, disappearing from view and being replaced by someone else, who in turn opened the same wardrobe and tugged the same curtains. Tall, low-resolution shadows.

  ‘So they missed him again?’ said Palmgren, with what almost sounded like relief. Forester gave him a quizzical look.

  ‘I have a confession to make,’ she said after a while. ‘I may have had suspicions that he was at your place. I may have suspected that you were helping him. I apologise for that.’

  He said nothing.

  ‘At least for the first part. I mean, he’s obviously not hanging out at your place, is he?’

  When he looked at her she gave him a wry smile.

  ‘It’s funny though, how things transpire. I can’t help thinking that maybe William Sandberg would’ve been sitting on that bed watching television, if only Velander hadn’t gone down and told you about the call from Poland.’

  ‘You think I warned him?’ Palmgren barked in a whisper.

  She responded with a raised eyebrow.

  ‘I had no idea he was in Warsaw,’ he said. ‘It was only when Velander told me. I’m as surprised as you are.’

  ‘That’s strange. You see, I’m not the least bit surprised.’ Her expression hardened. ‘To me, it’s just proof that I was right all along.’

  He grunted.

  ‘Palmgren?’ Forester said. ‘Would you play a game with me?’

  Not really. No.

  ‘It’s like this,’
she said. ‘You are an innocent man. Absolutely, completely innocent. Then one day, you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, and that’s where you end up being suspected of a sabotage that you have nothing to do with. Are you with me so far?’

  Palmgren kept quiet.

  ‘Later that evening you format all your hard drives. Crash an ambulance so that you can escape. Then turn up in–of all places–Warsaw. Tell my why you’d do that?’

  Palmgren shook his head and flung out his hands in frustration.

  ‘What do you want me to say, Forester?’

  ‘Just give me a scenario. Anything at all.’

  ‘I don’t know! I don’t understand it either.’ He rubbed his forehead, wanting to defend him, but not knowing how. ‘Someone is trying to set him up,’ he said eventually. ‘There’s no other explanation. Why else would he be on Interpol’s list? With the wrong name, wrong details, wrong everything?’

  She didn’t answer.

  ‘There might be a thousand reasons for him being in Poland,’ he said. ‘Just because we don’t know what they are doesn’t mean that he’s guilty.’

  ‘I’ll give you another scenario.’ She looked at him with her dark, dark eyes. ‘Maybe you’re the one who’s got this wrong. Maybe you’re the one being duped, and the guy who you’ve played tennis and drunk beer with for thirty years was actually cultivating you as his alibi. The guy who has known all along that one day, at some point in the future, he’ll show the world what he’s capable of.’

  That was too bizarre to even answer. So Palmgren made a noise that expressed complete disdain.

  ‘You’re telling me you know the guy,’ she said. ‘All I’m saying is, how can you be sure?’

  He couldn’t take any more, turning to face the screen instead, watching the moving pictures of policemen squeezing past each other.

  ‘William Sandberg is not a terrorist. That’s all I’m going to say.’

  ‘I very much hope that you’re wrong about that,’ she said. ‘Because that’s what they will treat him as when they get hold of him.’

  Sebastian Wojda ran up the stairs, his teeth gritted so hard that he could hear them squeaking.

  ‘For fuck’s sake,’ he spat into the radio as he ran. ‘For fuck’s sake secure the other rooms, he can’t have got far.’

  According to the painfully slow receptionist down there, the man in the photo positively hadn’t left before they arrived, absolutely not, and even if Wojda wasn’t sure that alertness was one of the receptionist’s strengths, both the stairs and lifts were accessed from directly outside his office. Even for someone with a pulse one notch up from being dead, it shouldn’t be too difficult to tell whether or not he had passed this way.

  Yet the fact remained that the man they were after was not in his room. And, as Sebastian Wojda ran up the stairs, he was accompanied by a nagging anxiety that someone had warned him.

  ‘How come everyone is so anxious to talk to him?’

  That was the first thing the receptionist had said after the SWAT team had disappeared into the stairwell, and it had taken a couple of seconds for Wojda to realise what he’d just heard. He’d turned around, studied the old man’s eyes, and had apparently done so forcefully enough to make the receptionist feel he had to elaborate.

  The man they were looking for had arrived less than an hour before. He’d checked in under the name of Karl Axel Söder-something, gone up to his room, and not long afterwards a bald woman came in and asked who he was, politely thanked the receptionist, and left. That was everything he had to tell them, and there were a thousand questions waiting to be asked, but no time to do it.

  Questions like why he let his guests check in without a passport. Or why he gave out the names of his guests to inquisitive women. But there’s a time and a place for everything, Wojda realised, and even if Hotel New York merited another couple of visits from the police, that wasn’t the important thing right now.

  The important thing was who the hell that shaven-headed woman might be.

  Wojda had just reached the corridor on the fourth floor when he suddenly spun on his heels. Slowly, steadily, he made his way back towards the top step, and then felt a calm spread through his body.

  His eyes closed as he brought his radio to his mouth.

  ‘We’ve got him,’ he said. ‘Fourth floor, the stairs, now.’

  In front of him was a laundry trolley, neatly positioned in the corner as though casually abandoned. But being a police officer isn’t about accepting everything you see: it’s about questioning why you’re seeing it. Why was there a laundry trolley at the top of the stairs when the lift was right next door?

  Being a policeman is about being open-minded, about looking up.

  And when he did, he saw the skewed hatch in the ceiling.

  41

  It took just seconds for the SWAT team to haul themselves up through the black hole and into the attic. It was freezing cold and completely dark, and it wasn’t until one of them turned on the searchlight on the barrel of their weapon that they saw the space grow to its full length. The powerful white rays danced through the darkness like a light show.

  The roof above them sloped down on both sides, bowed by the weight of the roof tiles and dotted with large patches of black mould. Thick beams criss-crossed the space and every now and then the flutter of pigeon wings brought an instant reaction from the assembled torch beams–catching the poor bird in their sights before the police realised what it was they’d heard.

  They continued between the piles of timber and boxes of junk put in storage, in a space that seemed to extend over the length of the entire building, constantly aware that their target could be hiding anywhere in the darkness. The thick planks creaked under their weight as they made their way forward. They crossed them like small bridges, linking damp piles of sawdust insulation, scattered in layers over thin ceiling boards that would collapse if anyone were to put their foot on them.

  It was only the brick-built firewall at one end that stopped their progress. Above them was another hatch, out onto the roof, and their silent signals communicated the fact that the loft was empty and that the roof was the only remaining escape route.

  They lifted themselves out onto the sloping roof, one by one. A dozen or so black silhouettes hunched over as they made their way across wet roof tiles, balancing their way past brick chimney stacks and forests of TV-antennas.

  The very last man onto the roof was Sebastian Wojda. He stood next to the hatch and watched the operation from a distance, and as the police got further and further away, the realisation got closer and closer.

  He wasn’t a policeman who had luck on his side. He had been duped.

  When he finally talked into his radio again, the listlessness in his voice made it disappear in the damp evening air, and when he realised that they hadn’t heard him he repeated the order louder. ‘Search the rooms!’

  He saw the men on the roof around him stop moving. Hesitate. Then turn towards him.

  ‘He’s not here,’ he said, and then, with a new vigour, as frustration converted into energy: ‘We need reinforcements. We need people down on the street, in the courtyard–everywhere he might have been able to get to without getting himself killed. And we need them now.’

  He heard the cars below receiving the order, and the blonde operator with the unruly hair promising to do what she could, and for a couple of long moments he just stood there, alone on a poorly constructed rooftop gangway in Praga. He could feel the collar of his nylon jacket flicking against his face in the icy wind, but it felt like he deserved it.

  Only an idiot would try to escape via the roof. And Karl Axel Söder-something was nothing of the kind.

  As Inspector Sebastian Wojda finally turned around, leaving the roof behind, he had no idea that he was being watched. The internal courtyard was dark and deep, and had no lighting whatsoever. The bottom was a rectangular space which had over the years been used as a junkyard for the businesses on the ground fl
oor, a forgotten back yard where the only sound came from whirring fans and the occasional flutter as pigeons swapped places.

  And William Sandberg’s heartbeat.

  He stood in a window recess leading to one of the rooms three floors down, completely still, waiting until he was absolutely certain that no one was left on the roof and that no one was about to return to it either.

  He’d only managed to get down two flights when he heard the SWAT team leaving the lobby and heading up the stairs, and he’d pressed himself against the wall of the second-floor corridor as the policemen’s footsteps rushed past out in the staircase. When the silence returned, he’d forced himself down another flight, and with his heart racing in his mouth he’d ducked into the corridor one floor up from street level.

  The peephole in the door of room 106 had been the only one that wasn’t completely dark. A little dot of warm light in the centre of the lens revealed that the lights were on inside, and he stopped, hoping that the person on the other side would be easily persuaded, and knocked on the door.

  ‘Room service,’ he’d said, overlooking the chance that this hotel might well not offer such a facility.

  It had taken far too long for the dot of light to disappear–someone peering at him–and he’d smiled politely, hoping that the bus driver’s jacket sticking out from underneath his windbreaker made him look vaguely official.

  ‘It’s about the telephone,’ he said, in English, hearing his own words before he’d had the chance to think about them. Hadn’t he just said he was room service? Why the hell had he changed his mind then and said that this was about something else?

  After another couple of seconds, the door opened. The man inside was probably older than the building itself, and William smiled at him, already somewhat ashamed of what he was going to have to do. But what choice did he have? After a quick glimpse of the view from the window–facing into the courtyard, he could see that much, and even if it was a long way up, at least it wasn’t a potentially lethal drop–he turned to the man and explained that he had to repair a telephone line and was going to need access to the gentleman’s bathroom.