Acts of Vanishing Page 26

  ‘I can’t be completely sure,’ he said, ‘but perhaps your daughter was the only one who played it in a computer that was online.’

  ‘Wouldn’t that mean that there had to be something on there after all? A virus? Some kind of code that triggered everything?’

  ‘As I said, that’s my theory, but it doesn’t hold up.’

  He gave a brief account of how he’d gone through the disc one block at a time, looking for hidden partitions, files that might be hidden alongside the audio. And nowhere, he said, was there anything on the disc that was out of place.

  ‘What you heard is what there is. No virus. Nothing.’

  ‘So how could Sara cause a power cut with it?’

  ‘That’s it you see,’ said Strandell. ‘I have absolutely no idea.’

  The conversation had drained them both, and for want of something better to say, Strandell asked if he could get her anything. Christina said tea, as it happened, and he left her in the living room while he went out to boil the water for a drink that neither of them actually wanted.

  ‘If we summarise what we know,’ he said as he returned with a tray and two ceramic cups that didn’t match. ‘All we know for sure is that someone tried to arrange a meeting with your husband, with me, and with the professor who died in the tower. And it might have been Michal Piotrowski, it could have been someone else. Either way, he’s sent us a CD each, which apparently contains only music, and one of those discs, if it did contain the same thing, caused a power cut across half of Sweden.’

  Once the tray was empty he sat down on the edge of the sofa, leant forward, and formulated his next sentence with his hands dangling between his knees.

  ‘And there’s one more thing we know. That this is an iceberg we haven’t even seen the tip of yet. The stuff I played you–the number stations, the packets of information on the shortwave band–make me even more convinced that something’s going on out there. A war. But one that we’re not allowed to see.’

  ‘Cyber terrorism?’

  His head movement was neither a yes or a no.

  ‘Why? And how did we end up in it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘But I’m terrified of where it’s all heading.’

  47

  The crisis meeting had been going on for over twelve hours by the time they were joined by the consultant, straight from Northolt. His name was Simon Sedgwick, and while Winslow studied him from his seat he asked himself the same question he always did: whether Sedgwick actually enjoyed the fact that he didn’t fit in, standing at the front of the room, all those people in sombre suits and dresses, and him dressed in leather boots, jeans, and a checked blazer that could barely be called tweed. He smelt of cigarettes, smiled with teeth that looked like chaos in a car park, and the whole look was crowned with a hairstyle that might have belonged if he’d been standing propped against a palm tree and not a lectern with a huge whiteboard behind him.

  Not only that, he was external. That didn’t do much for his popularity. Outside consultants were an unnecessary evil, partly because they represented a security threat, partly because they diverted swathes of the defence budget into the pockets of private business–something that no one was keen on.

  ‘I’ll cut to the chase,’ said Sedgwick. He’d already connected his laptop to the projector in the ceiling, typing commands as he spoke. ‘I’ve seen the information you gave to the press. Faulty materials, computer failure, human error. Creative, I would call it. Contradictory, but creative.’

  He smiled at his audience, an unamused smile.

  ‘What you choose to release doesn’t concern me, but after a thorough examination of the logs from Northolt I would at least like you to know what actually happened.’

  As he typed in his last instruction, the white text disappeared, to be replaced by an outline map of England. It was covered in green and yellow lines linking cities and coasts, and everyone around the table had seen it all before. The internet in evening mode, data streaming into homes showing television and fuelling social media.

  ‘You’ve already heard the staff’s accounts, haven’t you? How the whole base went down at once–control tower, runways, everything.’ He looked around the audience. ‘Some of you have already asked: shouldn’t the plane have been able to take off anyway? Even if ground control disappeared, shouldn’t the plane have been able to climb with its own instruments?’

  He paused again before answering his own question.

  ‘I don’t know anything about aeroplanes, but those I’ve spoken to have said, yes, of course it should have. Once the plane has been given clearance to take off, it’s the pilots who are in charge. If they lose contact with the tower, that doesn’t change anything in terms of the flight.’

  When he continued, there was an extra weight to his voice.

  ‘What makes it more interesting are the witness statements from the personnel in the tower. About nothing but a ribbon of fire disappearing into the forest. Only the afterburner against the black sky. Why did they say that? Why didn’t they mention the positioning lights? Aren’t the spotlights supposed to be on for take-off and landing? Shouldn’t there be some light from the cabin windows?’ He shrugged. ‘It might just be an oversight. But it could be something else.’

  He drew a box on the map to zoom in to north of London, and then repeated the procedure. The contours of RAF Northolt were well-defined in the map’s black-and-white, stylised cartography.

  ‘I believe it is of vital importance.’

  A quick flick of the return key ordered the computer to play a recorded sequence, and at the top of the picture a little clock ticked forward as new pictures were displayed, one one-hundredth of a second at a time.

  ‘It happens at ten, ten, twenty-two,’ he said.

  And it did. At exactly that time the map burst into colourful blooms, yellow turned to red, then glowing pink, and then white. It seemed to start all around the area in the middle, as though the airbase itself was an unaffected rectangle at the centre of the flower, but after another couple of hundredths the warm colours spread into the buildings within it, boxes that now also flared up in white.

  ‘What we’re looking at here is when the attack reaches the base’s internal network.’ He paused to enhance the importance of what he was telling them. ‘The whole base is protected by incredible levels of security, yet the firewalls only seems to resist for a moment.’

  The room held its breath.

  ‘But let’s go back to the original question. Why was the plane not able to take off anyway? And why didn’t they see any lights?’

  He rewound to that point again, summoned a new zoom area, scrolled the map westwards. There were no colours at all there, everything was black, as though the internet didn’t exist, and a second or so later Winslow registered why. What they were looking at was the runway, an entire area with no wires, except the odd thin cable to signs or lights.

  ‘As you might expect, a modern aeroplane is as connected as everything else. Data from the flight systems, information about conditions and routings and GPS backup. Wait.’

  He pressed return again. The clock up in the corner started ticking. After a couple of moments of black, a light green cloud came racing across the black area, jolting forward with each new frame.

  ‘Here it is. The plane. About to take off for Stockholm, with Major John Patrick Trottier on board.’

  At the top of the screen the time ticked on.

  10:10:20… 10:10:21… 10:10:22…

  First came the bloom outside the base, the one they’d been able to see from the previous level of zoom.

  The next hundredth, and it spread into the area itself.

  And then out of nowhere, the advancing cloud changed colour. It went yellow, then red, searing white, a smouldering puff of smoke that progressed step by step over the map until it crossed the two diagonal lines that represented the motorway. And then, a split second later, the glowing cloud vanished altogether.

  It wasn’t
as though it sank away, or that it changed colour to dark, less visible hues or to a simmering green or blue. It vanished completely from the map. The aircraft had ceased to exist.

  ‘What we’re looking at here,’ Sedgwick said, once the silence had lingered long enough, ‘is an external force bringing down an aeroplane.’

  48

  William was left sitting alone in the large room for another twenty minutes. He was on a chair in one of the booths, the same one that Rebecca had been sitting on in the video, and in front of him alongside all the colourful wires lay her papers, neatly arranged. Lists of questions, crossed off one at a time. Questions she’d asked the woman.

  On one of the screens at the far end of the hall he could see the images of himself from the booth’s CCTV camera. He was surrounded by the schematic brains, black and now devoid of activity. He looked at the wires; the discs on the desk. If he put them on himself, what would he see on the screen?

  Come off it. You can’t read minds.

  William closed his eyes.

  But what if you could?

  If it was possible, then Piotrowski might have been able to decipher something, to see inside someone’s innermost thoughts, he might have stumbled across something he wasn’t supposed to know about, been forced to flee, and then contacted William for help.

  The question remained though–why William? Of all the people Michal Piotrowski should have been able to call on, why choose someone who had more or less threatened to kill him, someone who would not be the least bit inclined to help him get out of trouble?

  William frowned. He was asking the wrong thing. The question wasn’t why William, but help with what? What would make Michal Piotrowski contact him specifically, in spite of everything else?

  He opened his eyes once more, looking through the glass blocks that separated his booth from the next one. Saw the neighbouring desk, distorted through the glass, rolling as though he was looking at the surface of water, and then the next glass block wall beyond the desk, and then another one. He saw how they transformed the world outside into the blocky pixels of a scanned photograph, and as his thoughts began to wander he realised that he still hadn’t slept since the terrifying hours he spent in the lorry.

  He leant backwards, closed his eyes again and allowed himself to stay like that for some time. It wasn’t until he opened his eyes that he saw what he’d been looking at all along.

  When Rebecca returned to the room, William stood up to greet her, a new energy radiating out from his eyes, a restless optimism that caused him to stretch out his arms to pull her towards him.

  ‘Come here,’ he said.

  He led her towards the booth, letting go right by the chair he’d been sitting on until just now. She looked around, utterly confused.

  ‘What’s going on?’

  ‘Sit down.’

  She sank onto her office chair, then let William wheel her towards the desk, felt him bend down alongside her, his eyes at the same level as hers, looking straight ahead. It occurred to her that he might have lost it all together.

  ‘Try squinting,’ he said, and nodded towards the wall of glass blocks. ‘Do you usually put up little notes like that?’

  The glass wall closest to them was decked with light yellow Post-it notes, as it always was, spontaneous notes and aides-memoires, hurriedly scribbled remarks about things that needed doing. Beyond all the windows the night sky hung colourless and black, and everything was as it always had been, with the possible exception of the Post-it notes–there were more of them than usual and that meant she had to crane her neck to get a view out—

  My God.

  The lump in her throat came from nowhere. Her eyes started welling up. Because between her and the external wall were the other two, unoccupied, booths, separated by the glass block walls, one behind the other. And from this angle, with the glass blocks lined up in a perfect square pattern, all those layers of Post-its combined into a single image. As though each wall contained part of a message that wasn’t visible, unless viewed from a certain spot.

  Rebecca’s spot.

  Letters. Five rows of text, floating in front of the night sky visible on the other side of all the windows.

  William Sandberg. Per Einar Eriksen. Alexander Strandell.

  ‘Who are the other two?’

  Rebecca shook her head. ‘I don’t know,’ she said.

  Her eyes met his. ‘Do you believe me now? Do you believe me when I tell you that he didn’t want to cause you any harm?’

  William didn’t reply, just nodded over at the wall again.

  ‘What does the rest of it mean?’

  Her answer was a long time coming.

  ‘It says find them. Then I am in danger. Then last…’ She had to let her voice compose itself before she read out the last line. ‘The last line says forgive me.’

  49

  William had never called a tips line in his life, but now, as he fished his brand new phone out of his suit pocket and went to his wife’s newspaper’s homepage, that’s what he did.

  Back at home, he was still a wanted man. The risk of her phone being tapped was significant, and if it was, then a phone call from Poland was hardly about to go unnoticed. A call to her newsroom, on the other hand, would just be one of many, and when he called the number, had the good fortune to get Beatrice on the line and asked her to transfer him through to Christina, he could feel himself clenching his fists in hope that his number wasn’t being relayed.

  He moved away from Rebecca, over to the gigantic windows, stood staring out although there was nothing to see. When Christina finally answered, he could feel his own voice disappear.

  ‘It’s me,’ he said, his voice cracking. Perhaps it wasn’t fair of him, she’d had no way of knowing that it was him calling, no chance to choose whether she wanted to take it or not.

  ‘Wait,’ said Christina, finally. ‘Two seconds.’

  He heard her making excuses to someone, then the hum of the wind and the night as she went outside, the crunch of snow. He resisted the urge to ask her where she was, who she was talking to. That was no longer any of his business.

  ‘William, where are you? Are you okay? What’s going on?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s one great big bloody mess.’

  ‘You’re a wanted man,’ she said.

  ‘I know.’ And then, his voice paper thin: ‘Christina? Have you spoken to Palmgren?’

  ‘Yes.’ A long pause. ‘I said goodbye to her at the hospital.’

  With that, the silence returned. There were a thousand things to talk about, but none to discuss on the phone.

  ‘So no, I don’t know what’s going on,’ William said eventually. ‘And I don’t know how you or I or Sara fit in. Not beyond the fact that somehow it must have something to do with Michal Piotrowski.’

  ‘So I understand.’

  William was taken aback.

  ‘How did you come to that conclusion?’

  ‘It’s a long story,’ she said. Then she surprised him again. ‘That CD that Sara had. I think there are two more.’

  For a moment, he could feel everything starting to sway.

  ‘What makes you think that?’

  ‘Well, I’m holding one of them right now.’

  ‘What? How?’

  ‘That’s a long story too. The short version is that I found it on the back seat of a car.’

  ‘What car?’

  ‘A brown one, if you must know. A Nissan. Belonged to a professor named Per Einar Eriksen.’

  She hadn’t finished talking before he had already spun around. Slowly, almost cautiously, he wandered back towards the booths, the dividing glass walls, the Post-it notes.

  ‘What do you know about him?’ he said, looking straight at the name again as he did so. ‘Who is he? Have you spoken to him?’

  It took a moment before she answered.

  ‘He’s dead. An accident. A lift.’

  William could feel the walls closing in around h
im. It was as if each new attempt at thought brought him to the same paranoid conclusion, that everything was a conspiracy and directed right at him, and he hated himself for even thinking it. Conspiracy theories are the lazy man’s escape. They are the brain’s way of avoiding thought, a perpetual motion device for logic, where fear becomes its evidence and its fuel both at the same time.

  An accident. It could of course be an accident. So why couldn’t he convince himself to believe that?

  ‘William? Are you still there?’

  ‘Michal Piotrowski is gone too,’ he said. ‘But he left a message behind.’ He looked at the glass blocks, reading each letter. ‘The message includes three names, mine, Per Einar Eriksen, and an Alexander Strandell. I was hoping that you’d be able to help me find them.’

  It took a second.

  ‘I’m here now,’ she said. ‘I’m at Alexander Strandell’s place.’

  ‘You’re where?’

  Christina gave him a quick summary. She told him about the meeting with Tetrapak, about his recordings of radio transmissions, about the CD she’d taken with her in the hope that he might be able to help her decipher it. And finally, about Tetrapak’s own, with piano music on it.

  ‘Piano?’ he said.

  ‘Chopin. We don’t know why.’

  He reached for a chair, couldn’t summon the energy to pull it over, and slumped onto the edge of the desk instead. As if the weight finally become too heavy for him to stand–their daughter, the paranoia, everything.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry for everything.’

  ‘Me too.’

  They stayed on the call without saying anything, Christina in a frosty woodland garden, William in a cigar-shaped glass tower. Stood in the company of each other’s silence.