Acts of Vanishing Page 3

  4

  William Sandberg’s eyes stared back at him from the mirror, two white circles, glistening in the light of the battery-driven emergency light on one of the walls.

  He leaned forward into the mirror, let his eyes scan from left to right. A sharp, accusing stare straight into the room that he knew was on the other side.

  ‘If this is a stag-do prank you can come out now,’ he said, his voice hard and impatient, strained through gritted teeth as though every word was forcing its way out from his chest against his will. And then, quieter, and with an aftertaste more bitter than he’d intended:

  ‘Because in that case you’ve got the wrong end of the marriage.’

  No reply. Just the mirror, the silence, the darkness.

  He’d been on the other side of the glass often enough to know that you never feel quite safe. Every time a suspect’s stare meets yours, a shiver runs through you, no matter how well you know that they can’t see through the mirror, and if William transmitted a little share of that, then all the better. This one’s on me.

  How long had he been here now? An hour at least, maybe two. In an interview room at his own workplace–or rather, he corrected himself, his former workplace.

  During that time, his thoughts had swung from rage to fear and back again. He’d repeated the same question time and time again, and now it seemed as though they grew bigger and more uncomfortable with each passing minute. What the fuck was he doing here? Why had they been waiting for him?

  Presumably they were SÄPO–the security police. Either that or military police, but who gives a shit, either way they had dreadful taste in clothes. When they had finally tired of pressing him up against the glass door at the Central Station, they had led him through the darkness towards Vasagatan and a waiting black Volvo. They’d fixed him inside using the seatbelt, carefully and precisely so that he wouldn’t get hurt if they happened to crash, which he had to admit was considerate given that they’d seemed all set to knee his spleen out of his body just moments earlier. After that they had driven him through Stockholm in stony silence.

  Darkness had yawned from everywhere. Every building they passed, every street, tunnel, junction–all of it completely pitch-black. Shop windows stood like empty mirrors, Christmas decorations hung lifeless above the streets, neon signs writhed like dark serpents over the entrances to cinemas and theatres.

  ‘What’s happened?’ he had asked, but none of the men in the front seat had shown any inclination to reply.

  Eventually they had turned off Lidingövägen and rolled past all the security gates, down into the car park under the hideous redbrick rectangular building that was the headquarters of the Combined Armed Forces. That’s when they’d taken his phone, watch and coat and put him in here. Then, time had been permitted to pass.

  The power still wasn’t back on, which bothered him more than he cared to think about. Not because there was an awful lot to see in there–the room he sat in was a box with grey walls and a grey floor. Apart from the mirror, the furniture comprised a table and four cheap chairs.

  It wasn’t the darkness itself that troubled him, it was the coincidence. The emails, the meeting, the arrest, the power cut–they were connected in some way, but how? There was no pattern, no logical link. All he could do was wait for his old comrades to haul themselves out of their chairs in there, behind the mirror, drag their arses the three metres along the corridor outside and come in and tell him the score.

  He heard himself snort at that thought. Comrades. Yeah right. With friends like these, and so forth. ‘I’ve read that manual too,’ he barked at the mirror. ‘Just so you know, I’m also waiting you for you to blink first.’

  They were waiting for him to fall apart, to reveal himself insecure and afraid. He had no intention of allowing them that much fun.

  ‘Here’s how we’re going to do this. I’m going to go and sit down, so you can write down all my tics and little movements, and then, when you’ve seen enough, you’re all welcome to come in. Does that sound okay to you?’

  He sauntered over to the table. Sat down, staring straight at the mirror, choosing his body language with care. One arm on the back of the chair, the other on the table, spread out, relaxed. Open, confident.

  As he did, his thoughts caught up with him. How come they had been waiting for him just there? How could they have known that he was going to show up just there, and then? Had they been bugging him? Reading his emails? Or, worse still, had they been following his mobile phone, tracking all his movements? If so, for how long?

  In an instant, it was as if everything fell into place, as though suddenly he could see himself through their eyes, and he was overcome by a helpless desire to defend himself even though he still hadn’t been accused of anything. He’d been convicted in advance. Of what he didn’t know, but convicted he was, and he started to go through everything that had happened over the last few weeks, months, the whole fucking autumn, inside his head. Everything from that Thursday, three months ago, when he’d trudged out through Reception for the last time, dropped his key card and ID onto the floor instead of handing them in through the hatch, as though taking it out on some innocent lad on the front desk might somehow make things better. From that, to all his trekking around night after night, in the chilly autumn rain and this bloody damp that was supposed to be winter. Things that the people behind the glass couldn’t possibly know about. Or could they?

  He closed his eyes.

  And then there were the emails. Obviously they were going to ask him about them. Obviously they were going to ask him about all of it, but how the hell was he going to answer?

  At the moment he opened his eyes again he realised that he’d just let them win. He’d forgotten himself. Dropped his guard. He was sitting with his legs tight together, feet tucked in under his chair, with his back twisted and hunched–a perfect reflection of how he was feeling. Or, to be honest, how he had been feeling for months.

  He looked over at the mirror.

  ‘Insecure,’ he said. He gestured up and down with his hand to draw their attention to the way he was sitting. ‘Uneasy, perhaps even nervous. Write that down, and let’s get this over with.’

  He felt the fatigue closing over him, and this time he couldn’t hold out. He couldn’t face sitting here, couldn’t deal with the brooding or the wondering. He’d already spent far too much time on that.

  ‘Come on. I think both you and I have better things to do with our time than sit here and stare at this mirror.’

  A pause. Then, more honestly than he’d intended: ‘Especially since neither of us is probably all that fond of what we’re looking at.’

  There were fewer eyes watching from the other side of the glass than William thought.

  Half of them belonged to a Major named Cathryn Forester, and she was closing them with a silent sigh, not of fatigue but a frustrating mix of other emotions. Stress. Restlessness. Anxiety. There was no time for fatigue.

  ‘Please,’ she said.

  She said it in English, and though the word entailed a single syllable, her understated British intonation made it seem as though the man beside her was twelve years old and had just claimed not to have smashed the coffee table despite standing there blushing with cricket bat in hand.

  ‘There is no type,’ she went on when the silence continued. ‘No one is the type, until suddenly it turns out that they are. When their neighbours are standing on the news saying who would have thought, he was such a friendly bloke.’

  The man next to her stood straight and determined, staring into the interview room.

  ‘I know him.’ That was all he said.

  He was tall, at least six feet, with neatly cut grey hair. He was probably twenty years older than her, dressed in the Headquarters’ grey-blue uniform, which made him look like an officer from any country in the world, only washed in really cheap laundry powder.

  The others called him Lassie behind his back. She didn’t know why, just that he hated it, w
hich somehow made him even more pitiful.

  ‘What does “know” mean?’ she asked.

  ‘We worked together for almost thirty years…’

  ‘I know that. I mean philosophically speaking.’

  His eye-rolling wasn’t even half as elegant as her please.

  ‘I don’t know how you run things over at your place, but Swedish intelligence doesn’t do philosophy.’

  ‘Really?’ she said. ‘Well, maybe you should.’

  She noticed the sharpness in her voice, and regretted it at once. She wanted to avoid any conflict. After all, she was the one in charge, not him, and if either of them should be feeling squeezed and powerless it wasn’t going to be her.

  But there was something about the Swede that always put her back up. Part of it was the fact that he had chosen to speak English with her, although she was a qualified interpreter and spoke Swedish almost as well as he did. In some odd way it gave him the upper hand, signalled that she was the temporary visitor and that he was, in effect, the one in charge, and that it was only through his good manners that she was admitted.

  The fact was, it wasn’t like that at all. And the last thing she wanted was to waste time on asserting herself, not here, not now, not still.

  Cathryn Forester had grown up in a family with four brothers, and if anyone ever got what was coming to them, it was men who tried to put her in her place. Men who patronised her, cocked their heads to one side, and showed how charming they thought she was, charming and inoffensive and perhaps on the dim side. They had been there at home, at school and at university, and over the years she’d learnt how to take them, how to pretend that it didn’t bother her at all, even if that was hardly true. When, at the age of thirty, she’d started to work in intelligence, she had developed armour that could deflect whole armies of cocked heads. Literally.

  The problem with the Swede was that he didn’t do any of that. He was arguing on behalf of a friend. He was objective and restrained, and he was certain that he was right, but now it happened that so was she.

  In a way, they were both right. And she had no armour for that.

  ‘I’m not stupid, I know what it looks like,’ he said eventually. ‘But none of us were expecting this.’

  ‘Really?’ That British understatement again. ‘None of us? This?’

  Major Forester flung her arms out in the darkness, pointing to the this that was going on around them. The darkness, the power cut–what she had warned them about, the very things they’d always known would happen again, just not when, not where, and not how big they would be.

  It’s like having your arteries on the outside of your body.

  Those were the words she’d used three weeks before, standing in the so-called briefing room. She’d stood there in front of the entire Swedish staff, the walls behind them covered in maps.

  That’s how vulnerable we are.

  No one had challenged her then, because they’d all known she was right, and if the Swedish officer next to her was now claiming that this had all come as a surprise, then this was a discussion she simply couldn’t be bothered to engage in.

  ‘He is AMBERLANGS,’ she said.

  ‘I know,’ he said.

  And for a moment they just stood there, their faces lit only by the faint emergency lighting on the other side of the mirror: one tall British officer in civilian dress, with high-heeled boots, ice-clear eyes, and boyish, strawberry-blonde hair, and the man the others called Lassie, whose real name was Lars Erik Palmgren and who was probably close to retirement. But who had suddenly found himself working with her, without any say in the matter.

  On the other hand, she had never asked to work with him either.

  ‘So what comes next?’ he asked her at last.

  Forester picked up the file from the table in front of them.

  ‘Five more minutes,’ she said. ‘Then we go in.’

  5

  It smelled like Christmas, but no one was in a Christmassy mood. The sweet scent of blown-out candles hung thick over the conference room. On the table in the middle, a warm yellow light shone from the tea lights and candle stubs that someone had dug out of the drawers in the kitchenette–the sort that were left over from celebrating Saint Lucia or departmental parties, just because they might come in handy some time in the future.

  Outside the twentieth-storey window of the great newspaper building, Stockholm spread out like a pitch-black miniature landscape, an abandoned model railway where only brilliant queues of vehicle headlights etched the darkness with creeping luminescent ribbons.

  ‘How far out does it reach?’ asked Christina. Try as she might, she could see no sign of an end to the darkness.

  ‘We took photos from up on the roof,’ someone at the table behind her chipped in. The silence that followed summed up the situation: nothing visible from higher up either.

  Christina nodded but did not speak. There was no point in struggling against it now: that feeling had returned, the one that had overcome her in the darkness downtown, that she’d managed to almost forget over the years. You’re so easily scared when you’re young, aren’t you?

  Thirty years ago, it had had her waking up in the middle of the night, stricken with fear that this might be the day when someone pushed the button that would set the superpowers annihilating the world. The sense that each new second balanced on a thin film of ice, and beneath the film lay the end of everything.

  She turned back towards the room. All her colleagues were sitting around the table, and now they were waiting for her.

  Pull yourself together.

  ‘Right,’ she said, and heard her voice cut slightly too sharply through the silence. ‘So none of us can make any calls?’

  Shaking heads all round.

  ‘I’ve got a mate who can do smoke signals but he’s not answering.’

  The voice came from the far end of the table, a slicked-back hairstyle that spoke without looking up. His name was Christopher, but he had a surname so impossible to pronounce that his name had long since been shortened to CW, for the sake of efficiency. He was a journalist of the old school, something he was keen to remind them of at regular intervals, even if it didn’t, as far as Christina could tell, mean much more than that he smelt unusually strongly of tobacco.

  ‘How’s it going?’ asked a colleague sitting next to him.

  A big ghetto-blaster lay facedown in front of him in the candlelight. They’d found it in the window by someone’s desk, and it had of course been as dead as everything else. The only batteries available had been far too small, plundered from keyboards and peripherals from across the whole floor, but there he was, working like a nicotine-scented surgeon attempting to insert the batteries into too big a compartment, with sticky tape and paper clips to hold them in place.

  ‘It’s fucking fiddly,’ CW said, concentrating on the table in front of him. ‘But if anyone’s got a better idea let’s have it.’

  Christina observed him from her seat at the table. She looked at the dark office landscape beyond the glass walls behind him, the quiet restlessness that was gripping her staff.

  Everyone had a job to do, but no one knew how to do it. The constant ringing and bleeping of phones was eerily absent, the fax machines, the internet–all of it was down. The only way to find out what was happening was via good, honest, old-fashioned radio, but it seemed Sweden’s most modern tabloid wasn’t quite ready for that technology yet.

  And the whole time, those nameless terrors were waiting at the back of Christina Sandberg’s mind, waiting to roam freely, the way they used to on those sleepless nights back in the seventies. What happens if the power doesn’t come back on? How long can we keep going? How long will the warmth last, how long will there be food in the shops—

  ‘Wait!’

  CW’s voice. Moments later she heard the crackling. He looked up at them all, full of pride.

  There was a weak, quiet hum from the speakers–the empty gap between two stations, but radio nonethel
ess–and an intake of breath went all around the table in anticipation of finding a channel where someone would tell them what was happening.

  The crackling lasted two seconds. That was the time it took for the paper clips to come loose and break the contact with the batteries. All the same, it had shown that the method could work; Christina nodded approvingly and told him to give it another go.

  Onwards, she said to herself, and then, turning to the others: ‘Angles?’

  No one answered, but then it had been a rhetorical question.

  Around the table, ballpoint pens were clicked in readiness; lined A5 notepads were brought into the weak light. Here and there, the odd face was lit by the screen of a laptop or a tablet that still had some battery power, and Christina couldn’t help but turn towards them.

  ‘Great idea. Unless the power cut lasts and you’re left sitting there with the world’s best copy trapped on your hard disc and not a cat in hell’s chance to retrieve it until it’s old news.’

  No protests. Just screen after screen going dark around the table.

  ‘First off,’ she continued, ‘the practical. What has happened, how many are affected, are there any prognoses? Who do we approach?’

  Someone suggested the power company, another the city council, someone else said the government’s press office. Christina nodded, delegated the tasks by pointing, and watched her staff make notes in the gloom. There were cars in the basement, others had bikes, the ones who had neither would just have to walk. The only way they were going to get any answers was by moving around.

  ‘Second,’ she said, ‘society. How vulnerable are we? Who’s in charge? What’s happening with the emergency services number, what’s the score with essential services?’

  More scribbling, new suggestions.

  ‘Third.’ She paused. A tone of gravity. ‘The consequences.’

  She was about to conclude her dramatic pause when she saw hands going up around the table again. Hang on, said the hands, and then came shushing from all directions, and finally the click as CW snapped the battery compartment closed for the second time. He carefully placed the radio upright so that he could get at the controls.