Acts of Vanishing Page 24

  ‘They match?’

  ‘Not only that. After each one, the trials have been ratcheted up a notch, increased in frequency. As though each new event is making it even more important to put it into action.’

  ‘It?’ she said. ‘I don’t understand. What are you telling me we’re looking at?’

  ‘I believe that it is a new analogue communication system. Something not dependent on the internet, something that will continue to function even if everything else is knocked out.’

  ‘Why would everything else be knocked out?’ she asked. ‘By whom?’

  ‘That,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘That is the question I would like to ask them.’ He nodded at the electronics on the desk, modern hard discs with blinking diodes next to cumbersome radio receivers with heavy buttons. ‘And no,’ he said. ‘I don’t know who they are. The authorities. Swedish Armed Forces. Military organis­ations from around the globe. All or none of the above.’

  The conversation halted for a moment, neither of them knowing how to continue.

  ‘Can I ask you something,’ Tetrapak said in the end. ‘Why are you here?’

  ‘Because I’m starting to worry that you might be right.’

  William stood in silence. Rosetta. Just like the email address, the sender of the three short emails that had got him to turn up at Central Station, the one that, one way or another, was behind everything that had happened. A stream of connections flooded through his head, dizzying and far-fetched.

  What if they don’t even need that.

  ‘As in the stone?’ he said.

  ‘As in the stone.’

  William turned away his head. He knew what it implied and he didn’t like it. At the end of the eighteenth century, Napoleon’s troops had discovered a stone in Egypt, a stone with three sets of inscriptions, each of them in one ancient language. With that as a key, science managed for the first time in modern history to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. The Rosetta Stone was nothing but a lexicon. A lexicon for translating an unknown language into something that could be understood.

  ‘Thoughts are nothing more than electrical impulses,’ she said before he’d had time to protest. ‘It’s really no stranger than that. It’s not magic, not witchcraft, just science, pure and simple. Electricity can be measured, the rest is just about creating a meter that’s up to the job. All you need is a lexicon.’

  She turned towards the desk again, another rattle of fingertips on the non-existent keys before she leaned back in her chair. At a stroke, everything came alive. All of the tables, diagrams and empty data fields crackled into action, with values nervously flickering around zero. In the blue-grey booth of the video feed, the CCTV showed two people sitting down.

  It was a recording. Images and data that were stored on hard discs, and that were now being played back in synch.

  A woman, probably about sixty, sat in the dentist’s chair. The backrest had been lowered to almost horizontal, and pretty much her whole head was covered in the discs that William had noticed over on the desk. She had her eyes closed, and countless electrodes attached all over her scalp and forehead and right the way down her neck, all connected by the colourful cables to the light-grey tube.

  The chair opposite her was occupied by a noticeably younger woman wearing a white lab coat draped loosely over a simple jumper, long dark hair that fell into playful curls across her shoulders.

  It wasn’t until he saw her face that he realised it was Rebecca.

  ‘What am I watching?’ he said.

  ‘Wait,’ was her reply.

  He watched the recorded Rebecca Kowalczyk pull a file towards her across the tabletop, get out a piece of paper, presumably covered in text, then glance briefly at the ceiling and smile. Straight into the camera, straight into William’s eyes.

  The moment burned itself onto William’s retina. Of course it wasn’t him she was smiling at. The person sitting at the control desk when the recording was made was Piotrowski, and what he’d just seen was an intimate look between lovers.

  On the screen in front of them, Rebecca turned her attention to the woman in the chair. She tucked her hair behind her ear, put the sheet of paper on the desk, read silently from it. Short, simple texts, as if she was asking a series of questions.

  In that same instant, the schematic diagrams of the woman’s brain were transformed. They flipped through a spectrum of colours, shining like rainbows in stark contrast to the colourless room. Rolling surfaces and lines appeared across the cerebral hemispheres, shifting from blue to green to yellow to red, colours representing neural activity, changing rapidly as the video Rebecca continued to ask her questions at a calm, unhurried pace.

  In a single second William could feel his thoughts rushing back to the day before, to the briefing with Palmgren and Forester, the huge maps with the similar colour schemes showing the attacks that had caused power outages.

  Somehow, this scared him more.

  ‘The woman you’re watching is from an agency,’ said Rebecca. ‘We’ve never met her before, we don’t know her name, nothing. Her only instruction is not to say anything out loud, and what you’re seeing on the screens is her brain activity as I ask some prewritten questions. This is from the twenty-sixth of November, only three weeks ago. It’s the very first time.’

  ‘First time what?’

  Rebecca didn’t answer. She nodded towards the wall instead.

  ‘I’m activating Rosetta now.’

  Her fingers tapped a few strokes on the keys in front of her. And then:

  ‘This isn’t possible.’ William’s voice.

  But it was.

  Word by word, he watched the screen in front of them filling up with text, sentences evolving and stacking on top of one another to form a long, long feed as Rebecca read the short questions from her page.

  He didn’t need to ask, but he did anyway.

  ‘Where’s the text coming from?’

  ‘It’s her answers,’ she replied. ‘Her answers to my questions.’

  He sat there not saying a word. He could hear Rebecca still talking to him, but it was distant, and he still could not tear his eyes from the screen. He could hear her telling him about all the work that had led them to the moment they were watching, about their struggles to decouple the brain’s conscious thinking from the chaos of impulses and reflexes, about the incredible amounts of processing power they had deployed to find the needles of syntactic thought in the haystack of all the incidental noise. All the times they’d said that this is our last attempt. If this doesn’t work, we’re giving up. Just one last try.

  ‘And then, finally,’ she said. ‘Finally, we succeeded. The words on the screen are the computer’s own transcription of the electrical impulses in her head.’

  The words on the screen kept coming, one word after another in a language he did not understand, but still: Rebecca and Piotrowski had achieved the impossible. They had found a key to decode all the chaotic nuances pulsing back and forth in the woman’s brain that were actual thoughts, and then managed to translate them into words.

  Psychotronics.

  It isn’t possible to read someone’s thoughts.

  ‘What you’re showing me now,’ he said, finally. Got to his feet, climbed down from the platform, and sat in the empty booth behind them. ‘Even if you have managed it, even if you can transcribe other people’s thoughts into words…’ He pointed at the knot of wires and electrodes resting on the table. ‘Even if that is the case, it still doesn’t explain how they found me in Warsaw.’

  Rebecca didn’t answer, and William sharpened his tone.

  ‘I know I’m tired, I know I haven’t been myself for a very long time, but I think I would’ve noticed if someone had taped electrodes to my head.’

  ‘If we have managed this?’ answered Rebecca with an apologetic shrug. ‘How do we know that no one else has, somewhere else? How do we know they don’t do it better?’

  ‘If that were true,’ he said, ‘why me? Why would anyon
e be so keen to read my thoughts that they would follow me all the way here? My thoughts are really not that interesting. Ask my ex-wife.’

  ‘I don’t know how much you know about Michal Piotrowski’s past,’ Rebecca said, pretending that she hadn’t heard.

  If you only knew. He didn’t say.

  ‘I used to say that he was afraid of ghosts,’ she said. ‘That he needed to let go of the old, needed to move on… But, ghosts or not, maybe he was proved right in the end.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  She lowered her voice.

  ‘We struggle for years to get Rosetta to work. Then, finally, we pull it off–and from that day, almost from that moment, it’s as though everything about his behaviour went into a slide.’ She gestured towards the screens. ‘It was historic. This was an incredible breakthrough, we should’ve been celebrating, should’ve done something. Instead, he became a recluse. Wouldn’t say why, but I could see it in his face.’

  She paused.

  ‘Michal was scared. No. Michal was terrified, in fear of his life.’

  ‘What is it you’re trying to tell me?’

  ‘What if he read a thought that he wasn’t supposed to know about?’

  William hesitated. It was as if the conversation was slipping from his grasp, and he could feel the frustration building inside him. The next stage, he knew, would be rage. And he didn’t want that.

  ‘Why are you telling me this?’ he said, with all the composure he could muster. ‘Why bring me here, why let me see this, what’s the point of it all?’

  ‘Because you are the only one who can help me. Somehow, you’ve got something to do with all of—’

  ‘I’ve got fuck all to do with this,’ he shouted. ‘I’ve got my own life, hundreds of miles from here, I’ve got nothing to do with what happened to Michal Piotrowski and nor do I want anything to do with it!’ He felt a dam breaking, and behind it months of self-loathing and longing, and thousands of other emotions that he couldn’t control. ‘I’m not here to help anyone but myself. I’m here because, regardless of how Michal Piotrowski may have been, however innocent and kind-hearted you would have me believe, he has brought this on me. Not the other way around. And even if everything is as you say it is, even if he did read someone’s thoughts, what right does that give him to drag me into this? Why can’t I live my life in peace?’

  He could feel the pressure easing, the dam emptying faster than he’d expected, and how his ranting grew empty, lost meaning.

  ‘I can’t help you,’ he said quietly. ‘All I know is that I’ve been accused of something I haven’t done. And I can’t take it any more.’

  They stayed sitting there for a long time. Her by the control desk, him in the booth, looking at the wall of glass blocks, next to all the wires that could read people’s thoughts.

  ‘Why did he have pictures of you in his apartment?’ she asked again at last. He didn’t respond. ‘You hate him for something, don’t you?’

  ‘I don’t hate him,’ he said. ‘I just promised myself never to go anywhere near him ever again.’

  Her eyes narrowed. Again?

  ‘Why not?’ she asked.

  He looked out of the window for a long time before he answered.

  ‘Because I was afraid he was going to take my life away.’

  45

  ‘I really don’t know where to start,’ said Christina.

  ‘I know the feeling.’ Tetrapak looked at her from across the room. ‘Don’t think about it. Don’t worry about what’s important and what’s trivial, don’t look for connections. Just say what you know, in whatever order you like. We can build context around it afterwards.’

  She took a long pause, arranged the events of the past twenty-four hours into some kind of order, and tried to transform them from fragments to a story that could be told. Then she did.

  She told him about William’s arrest, about the sighting of Sara at the café, and when she’d finished, she looked down at the table. It was Strandell’s turn to say something, and she was longing for him to do so, as though the silence belonged to her, and the longer it was allowed to go on, the less credible she would seem.

  ‘I want you to tell me why you decided to come to me,’ he said.

  ‘Because I couldn’t think of anyone else.’ And then, opening her handbag. ‘I want to know if you can tell me what this is.’

  When Alexander Strandell saw what she was offering him, his hand recoiled as though he’d burned his fingers.

  ‘Where did you get that?’ he asked, eyes flaring with fear, as though the CD that she held out had managed to frighten him through its mere existence.

  She replied by telling him what she knew. About the man who had met his end in Kaknäs Tower, about the car and the window sticker that she’d recognised. And about the CD in the car stereo, the broken window, the envelope lying on the seat with the Warsaw postmark.

  ‘It’s as though everything leads back to that fucking conference,’ she said. ‘We should never have gone there. But how were we to know?’

  ‘What do you mean, know?’ he said.

  ‘That’s a whole different story,’ she said.

  ‘Something tells me it might not be.’

  She looked up. What was he saying now?

  ‘Do you know whose car it was?’ he said.

  She went back to the handbag, pulled out an envelope, the yellow, padded one that had been lying on the passenger seat along with the CD case. She turned the scratchy letters towards him, the addressee’s name underneath the Polish postmark. Per Einar Eriksen.

  ‘The car was registered to that name too,’ she said. ‘All I know is that he’s a professor.’

  ‘Human consciousness,’ he said with a whisper.

  ‘Do you know who he is?’ she said.

  ‘Not to talk to, no. Not personally.’

  ‘But?’

  ‘But he was a very good speaker.’

  Tetrapak stood up and walked over to one of the bookcases. When he turned around he was holding something out towards her, and what sent a shiver through her was not the yellow envelope in his hand, the scratchy letters forming Alexander Strandell’s address, the same writing as the envelope she’d found in the car, with the same Polish postmark in the corner. Nor was it the flat, rectangular shape she felt inside it, the rattling plastic that she hurried to pull out from the envelope and that she knew was going to be an identical CD. Instead, what shook her was what he said.

  ‘Here’s what I think,’ he said. ‘I think we’ve all been to the same conference.’

  On day three, the storm had broken. The sky above Warsaw had remained bright blue, with quivering, unforgiving heat. Everyone was waiting for the thunder. In the great hall, long tables were decked with complimentary champagne and canapés, and everywhere you looked, conversations were taking place in ball gowns and evening dress. Behind closed doors, catering staff had clattered through their final preparations ahead of the closing gala dinner, and William had felt well rested and content and even a little bit tanned.

  He’d just got himself another glass of bubbly from one of the tables when Piotrowski came over to him.

  ‘You have a wonderful family,’ he’d said, with a broad smile, pretty much out of nowhere. An odd thing to say, but William had smiled in response, mumbled something about Warsaw being a beautiful place, as though that compliment would repay the first.

  And then, there had been a pause that went on for just a little bit too long.

  ‘You must be wondering why I was so keen for you to attend,’ Piotrowski had said. ‘I’ve been thinking about how to make contact with you for a long time. It ended up being like this. I hope you’ll forgive me for that.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ said William.

  ‘I’ve had my eye on you,’ Piotrowski said.

  He said so cordially, but the words made William straighten up, and he felt a shiver run through his stomach. What was this about? Politics? East and West?

&nb
sp; ‘Oh, not for military reasons,’ said Piotrowski, as though he’d read William’s mind. ‘The Cold War is over, and if it isn’t, we’re in the West now, however ironic that might be.’ He gestured towards the walls–they were in a building built by Stalin, in a city that had once lent its name to everything east of the Iron Curtain. ‘I have lived in the same city all of my life, and yet one day I moved from East to West without so much as lifting a finger.’ He shrugged. ‘Not that I’m complaining. It just takes some getting used to.’

  ‘Explain had my eye on you,’ William said.

  ‘I know that you are fifty-two years old. That you grew up in Saltsjöbaden, that you’re a self-taught electronics nut and mathematician, a qualified engineer employed as a cryptologist by the Swedish Armed Forces Headquarters. I know that your wife’s name is Christina Sandberg, forty-six, journalist.’

  ‘That’s not having an eye on someone, that’s having a spare ten minutes to do an internet search. What are you trying to get at?’

  Piotrowski hardened his tone, barely noticeably, but enough.

  ‘Two years ago you sold the big house in Täby and bought an apartment on Skeppargatan in Stockholm. Your daughter moved from Näsbypark school to Norra Latin and she finished the ninth grade last spring. She likes fencing and riding. She smokes ten a day, but you don’t know that.’

  The last sentence caused the cold cramp in his stomach to harden. What the hell was this about?

  ‘I don’t know what you think you’re doing’–William felt his grip tighten around the champagne glass in his hand–‘but if you’re trying to get at my daughter…’

  He bit off the rest of the sentence, panned across the hall with his eyes and felt a new chill when she was nowhere to be seen. Christina was standing a couple of metres away, and when he saw her unprotected skin in the scooped back of her gown he felt how what had been exciting and elegant as they left the hotel was suddenly transformed into something naked and vulnerable. She was chatting with a group of other visitors, but Sara wasn’t one of them.