Acts of Vanishing Read online

  ‘It’s cold,’ she said eventually. ‘I have to go back in.’

  William nodded. Stood up from the desk, turned his head to leave the room. And in that instant, everything fell into place.

  ‘Christina?’ he shouted, to stop her hanging up. ‘Christina, are you there?’

  It was a second before the phone had rustled back to her ear again.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘The discs,’ he said. ‘I think I know what they are for.’

  He stood there, right in front of the glass walls again, seeing the rectangles melt together, forming letters. And he smiled.

  ‘We need all three of them.’

  Fifteen hundred kilometres away, Simon Sedgwick lit his third consecutive cigarette. He stood staring at a shop window display where mechanical Christmas decorations moved listlessly around toys in a miniature snowy landscape.

  He was worried. Everything had escalated just as he had said it would, and now they were one step behind, if not more. Had it not been for him–and his colleagues, he corrected himself, him and all his colleagues–those weak-kneed bastards would probably not even have noticed the attacks until it was too late.

  He blew the smoke out towards the dead landscape on the other side of the glass.

  If they’d only had the wherewithal to be scared of the right things. Of terrorists, of attacks, of whoever it was out there, trying to hurt them. Instead, they spent all their energy worrying about three-line whips and votes and the consequences of having broken international agreements. What use are polling numbers if you don’t even survive until the next election?

  The only person he had been able to rely on was Trottier. Now the decision lay in the hands of a politician, and it was all taking its time, despite the pattern being as clear as it possibly could be: at every location where Floodgate had been installed and tested, it had been met with an instant and untraceable counter-attack. Massive amounts of data, hitting them in the right places at the right time even though neither should have been possible to predict.

  Someone was one step ahead. And there was only one solution.

  He’d been standing by the window for more than ten minutes by the time the diplomatic limousine passed by, a dark reflection hovering past the Christmas display. He ditched the cigarette, watching the clear red glow land in a puddle and float away, and walked the twenty metres over to where the car had stopped.

  ‘You should see a doctor about that,’ he said to the young man sitting opposite once he’d climbed in.

  ‘Thanks for your concern,’ said Winslow. He popped the lid back on the antacids without any further comments, and then tapped on the partition as a signal to the driver to start driving. They sat in silence as the shops and festive decorations shrank away behind them.

  ‘Give me your honest opinion,’ said Winslow.

  ‘You’ve already got it,’ came the reply. ‘You know exactly what I think.’

  Winslow swallowed the last of the chewy tablets, the mint flavour mingling with the stinging sensation in his chest, and waited for it to finally make a difference.

  It wasn’t until the lights of Hyde Park’s Christmas fair danced through the window that he spoke again.

  ‘It looks like you’ll be getting an early Christmas present.’

  William waved at Rebecca to come, placing the phone on the desk between them.

  ‘Christina,’ he said. ‘I’m going to say this in English. You’re on speaker now.’

  Then he led Rebecca by the shoulder and placed her in a spot where she could see right through all the glass blocks.

  ‘Tell me again. The discs. What’s on them?’

  ‘Music,’ Christina answered from the crackly speaker. ‘Piano concertos. Chopin.’

  ‘Nothing else? No more? Nothing hidden?’

  ‘According to Strandell here, no, nothing.’

  ‘I think maybe there is after all. Something that no one, and I mean no one, would be able to find.’

  ‘What?’ Christina said down the line.

  ‘Differences.’

  He paused. Gave Rebecca a long, apologetic look. She had been right all along.

  ‘Music is data. We’re all agreed on that, right? The sound on a CD is made up of ones and zeros, just like everything else, like documents or images or whatever you like. But there’s something in sound that other data doesn’t have,’ he said. ‘Background noise.’

  The fatigue was long gone now. Finally, he was functioning normally, he could think and come to conclusions and do what he was best at. Piotrowski had given them a riddle. And he had solved it.

  ‘Every second of recorded sound,’ said William, walking around again, ‘consists of thousands of small packets of data. Tens of thousands of little samples, each one saying what it should sound like in that very microsecond.’ He gestured as he talked, a slicing motion as he demonstrated how each second was chopped into small, small pieces. ‘Let’s say that you change the value on a particular sample. Perhaps a change right in the upper reaches of the register, in a noise that the human ear can barely discern. And if you keep doing that, change something here, something there, throughout the disc… when you play it back, it still sounds perfect. The music sounds exactly as it’s supposed to, and in background you’d hear a noise, or perhaps it would even be so subtle that you couldn’t even hear it if you tried. The best thing though? Even if you were to hear it, it would still just be noise. Because how can you tell the right noise from the wrong noise?’

  He pointed over at the glass walls again. It was as simple as it was brilliant. On their own, they were merely three glass walls with randomly distributed Post-it notes. Just as each CD merely included an hour’s worth of classical music.

  ‘But,’ he said. ‘If we take the sound from all three discs–if we compare them, bit by bit, sample by sample–then, I promise you, we’re going to discover small, subtle differences that Michal Piotrowski has inserted, and that won’t be apparent until we’ve got all three. And if we collate those differences…’

  If William was right, there was a message waiting for them. Maybe a picture, maybe a document or a sound file–everything is data, and data can be hidden within other data, and whatever it was, Michal Piotrowski had hidden it within a chaos where it would go unnoticed.

  Smuggled under cover of a piano concerto. Just like the old days.

  ‘William,’ Christina said down the line.

  ‘Yes,’ said William.

  ‘We’ve only got two.’

  It took a couple of seconds for the penny to drop.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Sara’s is gone.’

  He felt the world sway again. He grabbed the phone, turned off the speaker, and moved away from Rebecca, over towards the window.

  ‘How? How can it be gone?’

  Somewhere, far away, he could hear Christina’s voice explaining what Palmgren had told her. That the rucksack, the computer and the CD had been missing when they found Sara’s body.

  ‘Where are you, William?’

  He stood in silence for a moment before he answered.

  ‘I’m afraid this is going to sound insane,’ he said. ‘But you cannot contact me. Not online. Not by phone. They know where I am, they know my movements. I don’t know how.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘I don’t know that either.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound insane,’ she said, and then corrected herself. ‘Yes, it sounds insane, but I think you’re probably right.’

  He could hear her breathing in the silence that followed, closer than they’d been for months, knowing that as soon as he hung up it would it would be gone.

  ‘I’ll find Sara’s CD,’ she said, finally. ‘And I’ll let you know when I do.’

  ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘How are you going to do that?’

  It took a couple of seconds for her to reply.

  ‘I think you’ll notice.’

  Alexander Strandell couldn’t help but smile. He had bee
n right all along, and finally, he had made himself understood. The woman standing in his garden and talking to her editorial team was a journalist at Sweden’s biggest-selling tabloid, with a byline pic showing her striding towards the camera with just the type of self assurance and intelligence that would normally turn him into a mumbling rag doll, and that’s exactly how he’d felt as he’d left the newsroom on Kungsholmen just twenty-four hours earlier. An outmanoeuvred, shambling failure.

  Now though, she was here to listen to him. He was on the inside now. And whatever was waiting round the corner, threats or terror or goodness knows what, he would much rather be involved, helping out, than be standing on the sidelines and considered an idiot. That’s what he was thinking as he glanced out at the woman standing in his garden.

  And at that very moment, everything disappeared.

  In a second, it was as though the world around William and Rebecca exploded in light and sound: out of nowhere came sirens, whining with an intensity that made thinking impossible, scraping on eardrums like thousands of nails on a blackboard. Lights everywhere, flashing in short, sharp pulses, deliberately designed to paralyse an intruder while police and security rushed to arrest them.

  ‘They know we’re here!’ shouted William above the noise. Scared, angry, blaming himself. Maybe Rebecca had been right all along. Maybe they knew what he was thinking—

  He didn’t get to finish that thought, as Rebecca grabbed hold of his arm and steered him out of the office. The alarm was paralysing, and he found he was no longer able to think or see or move in a single direction, and he gratefully followed Rebecca’s instructions, hurrying down a route she’d walked hundreds of times before.

  They only got as far as the frosted door leading out onto the gangway. It was locked, immovable, and the electronic keypad sitting next to the frame was no help either. He turned to face her.

  ‘They’ve got us,’ William said. ‘They won.’

  Rebecca called her response through the sirens.

  ‘Only if we let them.’

  50

  As Sedgwick jumped out of the limousine ten minutes after the conversation had begun, accompanied by the evening traffic on the South Bank of the Thames, he was smiling in the dark.

  For five long years he had been developing a system that was not allowed to exist. Day after day he’d arrived at an office that was something other than what it claimed to be, waiting for an order that never came, working on tasks that didn’t exist. On the occasions when somebody asked, he was working on cyber security, which was a simplification but at least not an outright lie, and over the years he’d learned to describe his job in such soporific terms that he could be confident of never being asked any follow-up questions. Even his own wife would sometimes call him over, in the middle of a garden party or a social gathering, to ask him to ask what it is you do exactly? His daughter had been known to tell her classmates that he was a hacker. So far, that was the closest anyone had got to the truth.

  Simon Sedgwick entered an opulent lift and pressed the button for the top floor. Through its transparent sides he could see London from all angles as he was transported skywards. The London Eye, the Thames, and the Houses of Parliament.

  How many of them knew what they were paying him for, that consultant who would turn up in his awful jeans and give them security assessments. That if they followed him, they’d find him taking the lift to an office that had never existed, working on projects that no one had officially commissioned? This was his hiding place, not even a mile away, in plain view.

  It was no accident that the premises were located here. London was the best place to start–strategically, but also technically. Here was the world’s largest node for internet traffic, and ridiculous amounts of data coursed through its thick, physical cables each and every second, volumes that were increasing year after year. Each second, more than twelve terabytes passed through London–every minute of every day. That was the equivalent of two thousand CDs, packed with information. Per second.

  If they were going to start anywhere, it had to be here. And once they were confident that the technology worked, they had distributed it across the world, and now it was everywhere, ready to activate on their command.

  And today was the day.

  Sedgwick was still smiling as he swiped the card through the reader, walked into the large office, stood in the middle of the floor and cleared his throat.

  51

  The door was designed to withstand every conceivable kind of violent attack, a task it performed with aplomb. Only when they located a fire extinguisher at the far end of the room and smashed it against the armoured glass, again and again in the din, only then did the glass succumb at last and allow them to squeeze out between dangling shards.

  Outside in the circular walkway, William only managed a few steps. He stopped, confused, blinded by the strobing light and deafened by the roaring alarm. In the short bursts of light he could see Rebecca make a dash for the lifts, then arrive at the door, then bang the call button with the heel of her hand. Next, seemingly without having moved a muscle, she had turned towards him, her eyes ablaze with panic and accusation.

  ‘You made that call!’ she screamed over the sound. ‘That must be why!’

  ‘I called the newspaper!’ he yelled back. ‘They put me through!’

  They couldn’t have traced him from that call. His call had been relayed by the switchboard, and no one would have been able to track that back to him, not unless—

  William felt his own thoughts slamming to a halt.

  —unless the people pursuing him had the whole fucking newspaper under surveillance, all the time. It was crazy, but the only reasonable explanation he could find: someone had gained access to the newspaper’s electronic switchboard, following everything that happened, internal calls as well as those from outside. And they had seen his call come in, relayed to various people in the building and then onwards to Christina’s mobile. And then immediately traced his location.

  Reasonable? Was it even possible?

  Even if someone had managed to make the connection, and conclude that the Polish number being put through to Christina was William’s, how would that person have been able to locate him, in this particular building, in this particular city in this particular country, and then managed to activate an intruder alarm without even being there?

  From nowhere, the feeling popped up again, the feeling that someone was looking at their thoughts, and he tried to concentrate, tried to isolate his rational thoughts from all the other stimulation he was being bombarded with–the noise, the light, and now to top it all, a painful sensation gripping his arm.

  He looked up. Rebecca was standing right next to him, holding tightly onto his arm, and it was only when he looked around that he realised he had moved. All the stimuli had pushed him off balance, and she’d grabbed him to prevent him from hitting the floor. Now she was dragging him towards the lifts, screaming above the noise: ‘They could be here any minute.’

  It took him a second to understand who she meant. If the alarm was directly linked to the police it would mean that they were already on their way. Their own drive from Warsaw had taken no more than twenty minutes, and the police were bound to be quicker. They didn’t have much time.

  On the wall behind her, a display indicated the lift’s imminent arrival. The glass doors slid open to let them in, and Rebecca let go of William, took one step backwards towards it—

  ‘Rebecca!’

  She almost stopped mid-stride. She hesitated for a split second, before she turned on her heel. Stepped into the lift.

  And fell.

  William lassoed a tight grip around her neck, a reflex deployed at the very last second, when he thought it already too late. Her mass pulled him to the ground, and he braced his free arm against the doorframe, grappling with his legs to stop himself gliding across the glossy stone floor. In front of him, Rebecca was hanging from the threshold of the lift shaft, her feet dangling into the abys
s. Every muscle in his body fighting to keep them from being pulled down into it.

  ‘Can you reach me?’ he called.

  She was still fighting with the shock–it shouldn’t be possible, yet the door had opened before the lift had arrived–and just as William stretched out his other hand to her, they both felt a gust of wind from below. It was a puff of rising air, as though someone had turned on a fan further down in the shaft, and it was a second before they realised what that meant.

  ‘Get me up!’ she screamed. ‘Get me up! Now!’

  Somewhere way below, the lift had begun to shoot upwards, air pushed towards them as it rose. The cables behind Rebecca vibrated in the flashing light, taut under the weight and rushing upwards with increasing velocity, and their eyes communicated what they both already knew. They only had seconds to act.

  In desperation she flung her hand towards William, a movement that made her body sway back and forth in the shaft, and he missed her, then saw her trying to dampen the pendulum motion by thrusting out with her legs, bringing her feet dangerously close to the speeding wires. She felt her body racked with cramp, her coat beginning to slide from William’s grasp, yet she swung towards him, again, and then again.

  Finally, she felt him grab her wrist. It was his turn to rescue her. He hauled her up onto the floor, arms and legs fumbling desperately for something to grab hold of to pull herself in, then collapsed onto the cool stone tiles. As—

  ‘Your foot!’ he gasped, and before she knew why she saw him stretching over her, grabbing her trouser leg to pull it in–just as the rush of wind as the lift surged past made them flinch away.

  The next minute, they heard the lift smash into the machinery above. The whole building shook, steel panels that had come loose freefalling down the shaft in front of them, the wires swaying in the middle of it like thick black spaghetti.

  William pulled her to her feet, telling her to take them to the fire escape, forcing her to gain control once more before the shock of what had just happened caught up with her and slowed her down.