Chain of Events Read online

  But William got out of his bed and passed over the breakfast selection, even though his stomach cried out that eating was long overdue. He continued across the room to the curtains, a bright morning sun trying to sneak in around their edges.

  When he pulled them open he stood motionless for several moments. All he could do was stare, partly from pure surprise: he’d been so certain they were taking him to Russia that it took him a couple of seconds to accept what he saw. But also because it was impossible not to be moved by the view that met him outside his high, multi-paned windows.

  Several storeys down, large grassy meadows sloped dramatically towards barren cliffs, broken here and there by winding stone walls, steeply climbing downhill to a light blue mountain lake. Around it, and on the other side, more meadows and cliffs seemed to climb in and out of each other, forming a gigantic pothole of stillness and silence and the sensation of looking at a thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle on someone’s coffee table.

  They had been flying more south than east. The mountains were the Alps; they had taken him to somewhere between France to the west and Austria or Slovenia to the east, and for the life of him he couldn’t understand why.

  ‘Mr Sandberg.’

  The voice was clear and articulate, sharp in the hard-walled room, and it made him spin around. Several steps into the room stood the man who’d just said his name, more as an observation than a question. William hadn’t even heard him enter.

  ‘Our apologies for putting you to bed in your shirt,’ he said. ‘You get a lot of questions if you try to take a man through Customs dressed in his pyjamas.’

  He was about William’s age, hair grey and neatly cut, and he had a friendly enough look in contrast to his starched, light-blue uniform shirt. He spoke with a perfect English accent, and even though William was far from certain he thought he could hear the traces of a working-class dialect in some of the vowels.

  William nodded politely. Very well.

  ‘And which Customs are we talking about?’

  The man smiled back. Friendly, genuinely, but entirely without answering. Instead:

  ‘The rest of your wardrobe is over there.’

  ‘And you’re sure that’s a good idea? I shouldn’t just keep this on until you decide I’ve slept enough?’

  ‘You’ve reached your final destination,’ he said.

  ‘And at risk of repeating myself,’ William said, raising his eyebrow to point out that the question still wasn’t answered.

  The man smiled again. He’d heard him the first time, but had no intention of telling him anything more.

  ‘I suggest you eat something. You’ve been asleep for eighteen hours, and I understand you didn’t eat much before that either.’

  ‘I’ll have some toast,’ said William. He didn’t move, but let his body language finish the sentence: when you’re gone.

  ‘Splendid,’ the man said. ‘I’ll be back for you in half an hour. You’ll get to know a bit more after that.’

  He turned around, took a few steps towards the door and opened it. Unlocked, William noted. No visible security features, just like on the plane. Someone was going out of their way to make him feel welcome, and he couldn’t stop wondering why. Or who. And what on earth they thought he could do for them.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ William said.

  The man turned back towards him. Now what?

  ‘William Sandberg. I didn’t catch yours.’

  He held his right hand out into the empty air between them, challenging, waiting for a handshake and a presentation. And the man looked back at him. Took William’s hand, more of a firm grip than a shake, looked him directly in his eyes without the slightest hint of wanting to keep his name to himself.

  ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Forgive me.’

  And then:

  ‘Connors. General Connors.’

  General Connors had a first name, but there were many things in his life that made him uncomfortable and his first name was one of them.

  He grew up in a small town in north-west England, a working-class area where unemployment and petty criminality were everyday realities and went largely unquestioned. Right and wrong were flexible concepts and sometimes the difference was hard to see. The priority was getting food on the table and the rent paid on time; nobody could afford to ask how it was achieved.

  For Connors it was the worst childhood possible. Early in life he realised two things: one, that finely honed social skills were one of the greatest assets a person could have, and two, that those skills were something he totally lacked.

  Connors was always one step behind. He hated how things around him could change, how the king of the street one week could be overthrown the next, and how friends and allies could turn against you and change sides before you even grasped that there were sides to take. Even before he started school he began keeping to himself, doing everything to avoid friendship, gangs and peer pressure. For long periods he was bullied and labelled as gay, a significantly more serious crime than the petty theft to which his classmates dedicated their spare time.

  An even greater crime was Connors’ love of school. He was good at maths, even when it got abstract and weird, and though he knew it didn’t prove much, he quickly grew more skilled than any of his teachers. He loved rules and logical patterns and when one thing could be traced back to another. And every time he was beaten up in the playground for no reason it just made him love them more.

  When he was first introduced to the army at the age of sixteen, he realised it was the perfect place to find the order he longed for. Not only did everyone have a clear rank and position, it was explicitly marked on everyone’s uniforms, in as many places as possible to the point of being ridiculous. All changes were predictable, and almost exclusively involved moving upward – there was no risk of getting out of bed one morning only to learn that the major was the new colonel, and that the former colonel was having the shit kicked out of him for something his brother did.

  Connors had found his home.

  For the first time in his life he was able to wake up and feel good.

  The army was the perfect place for Connors to develop what he was best at. He was a master in the art of applying patterns and rules, and soon enough he was making them his own, building on them and devising new ones. At the age of thirty he was no longer a working-class boy without a first name but one of the British military’s foremost strategists. He was an expert at inventing scenarios of disorder and mayhem, and then setting the rules for how order and clarity should be restored. He supervised training, wrote manuals, and was the kind of person everyone wanted in the room when things got going. The government, the military, business and God knows who else – everyone wanted him on their side.

  Connors had made it his craft to bring order from chaos. When things fell apart, he was the man to call.

  And now he was confronted with a scenario nobody could possibly have imagined.

  For the first time in years he was back to being a child.

  In the depths of his heart he was scared as hell.

  Connors pushed the key card against the reader on the wall and waited for the door to hiss open.

  He walked along the wide corridors of steel and concrete, towards the lobby and its low soundproofed roof and rigid chairs in impersonal dark blue. Turned through the double doors on one side of the room. Swiped his plastic key again, the lock releasing with a new whirr.

  The room on the other side was circular. In the middle was a large conference table, mirroring the contours of the room, empty chairs everywhere, bottles of water lined up and ready for meetings that almost never took place any more, and when they did never filled up all the seats.

  On the room’s one straight wall hung an array of gigantic LED displays, glaringly bright to anyone who had just entered from the older part of the building. Connors peered at them as he walked towards them, saw the never-ending stream of numbers racing across them as they always did.

  In front of the s
creens stood a man in a dark uniform. Didn’t look up as Connors came in, didn’t turn around as he strode across the needlefelt carpet, just stood there watching the numbers roll past. Until Connors stopped by his side.

  ‘We know how he ended up in Berlin,’ he said.

  At last, Franquin looked up, met Connors’ gaze, his eyes showing a lack of several days’ sleep.

  ‘He stole a truck from a petrol station. We found it drained just outside Innsbruck, it’s been impounded and neutralised. Eyewitnesses say he hitched in a red Toyota RAV4.’

  ‘And where is that now?’

  The silence said it all. They had no idea.

  ‘It’s beginning,’ Connors said. ‘Isn’t it?’

  Franquin didn’t answer.

  And when he eventually spoke, his insecurity was gone, his anxiety masked behind layers of determination. There was only one way now, and it was forward.

  ‘Is he here?’ he said.

  ‘He’s in his room.’

  ‘How is he?’

  ‘He’ll survive.’

  Franquin gave a grunt. Good. If they still had a chance, Sandberg was the only one who could save them. And they had been minutes away from being too late. Again.

  ‘What do we tell him?’ Connors asked.

  Franquin paused. And then: ‘Exactly the same thing we’ve told her.’

  He turned again, his back towards Connors.

  And with that the meeting was over.

  7

  William got to spend forty minutes alone in his room before General Connors returned. It gave him enough time to eat, go through his morning routine and put on a tweed jacket and some trousers. No tie. It was a conscious decision: he didn’t know what awaited him, and he wanted to look serious enough to appear on an equal footing and in control. What he didn’t want was to look as if he was trying too hard. There was little doubt they had the upper hand, and he had no intention of making it worse by arriving dressed as a schoolboy. Plus, who the hell knew if their first move wouldn’t be to stick a syringe in his neck again anyway.

  The conversation started as soon as they were out of the door.

  ‘I know you have questions,’ Connors said. ‘Ask away, and I’ll do my best to answer.’

  The offer wasn’t entirely unexpected. There was no reason to give William the luxury of memorising his surroundings, to let him focus on which corridors led to which staircases, and a conversation was the perfect deception. Connors would still only answer the questions he wanted to, but he would take his time doing it, and William knew it. And Connors knew that William knew.

  ‘You can begin by telling me where I am,’ William said.

  ‘Let’s call it Liechtenstein,’ Connors said.

  ‘“Let’s call it”?’

  ‘I can’t give you an exact address. But you’re not going to be ordering pizza for the time being, anyway.’

  He smiled wryly. An apologetic smile, designed to encourage him to ask another question. And William played along. Put on a polite face. But behind it, he tried as best he could to observe and remember the twisting routes that Connors led him through the building.

  ‘Can you tell me who’s brought me here?’

  ‘You’ll get to know in due course.’

  ‘Or why?’

  ‘You’ll get to know that too.’

  ‘Okay. So can you tell me if there is any question that you’ll actually be answering now?’

  Connors smiled once again. An honest one, as if the absurdity of the situation was as clear to him as it was to William, as if the pointlessness of the conversation made him more uncomfortable than he would like.

  William saw it, and gave him a nod of understanding. Very well, then. And with that, the question-and-answer session was over, and they kept walking in silence.

  They passed along corridors, descended narrow staircases and ducked into yet more corridors. And all the while, William couldn’t shake the feeling that they were walking through side passages and service rooms, as if the actual castle were somewhere else, inside of where they walked, with Connors leading him around it on purpose.

  Everywhere the floor was made of stone slabs, worn down by countless feet over hundreds and hundreds of years. The walls were dark, sometimes with hangings or tapestries, bleached by the light and darkened by the damp until only a grey tone was left. It was impressive and beautiful and disconcerting and intimidating, all at the same time.

  ‘Actually,’ William said, ‘I have one more question.’

  Connors turned. They were halfway down yet another set of stairs, Connors first and William behind him, both stooping to avoid the ceiling.

  ‘Should I be afraid?’

  The question surprised Connors. He looked into William’s eyes, unsure whether he was sincere or just playing games, and for a second Connors paused right there in the darkness, opened his mouth to speak. But he changed his mind. Turned round. And the conversation was left hanging in the air while they descended the last few steps to the next floor.

  The room below the stairs was a hall. It wasn’t very large, but the height of it was impressive, several small windows far up along the wall allowing in enough light for William to find himself squinting. At the other end of the hall was another, larger staircase, decidedly grander than the one they had taken, and in the inner wall was a gigantic, heavy double door of darkened wood.

  Connors went up to it, stopped by the handle. Looked at William for a moment, as if he couldn’t decide on an answer.

  ‘There’s no need to be afraid of me,’ he said finally. ‘Not of us.’

  ‘But of what?’

  For an instant, there seemed to be compassion in Connors’ face. As if he lamented the situation, as if he didn’t really want to do what he was doing, as if something larger forced him to kidnap people from hospitals and fly them unconscious to another corner of Europe.

  But the expression vanished almost immediately. And Connors let the question slide.

  ‘What we will be telling you today is incredibly sensitive and top secret,’ he said. His voice was formal now, matter-of-fact and to the point. ‘Certain things we won’t be able to disclose at all. Others we will only reveal in part.’

  ‘I’m in let’s-call-it-Liechtenstein. You’ve taken my phone. Who are you afraid I might talk to?’

  ‘There are certain things we know here that may never reach the world outside. Under any circumstances. Ever.’

  ‘Does that mean you’re going to let me go home again?’

  Connors hesitated. And then, the honesty back in his voice: ‘I hope with all my heart that there will come a day when any of us will be able to go home.’

  The young intern standing in front of Christina Sandberg was awkward and shy and had trouble expressing himself, but right now he was the only person she could use. All she could do was to hope he was up to the task.

  One moment he would avoid meeting her eyes, almost as if he were secretly in love with her despite being twenty years younger, and the next he would try to contribute to the conversation by spurting out parts of sentences in random order. She couldn’t decide which of the two worried her most.

  With strained patience she summarised everything one more time, to be sure. He was to contact the hospital, the neighbours in William’s building and lastly the removal company, just to confirm what Christina already knew to be true: that there had been no pickup booked from William’s address, and that his allegedly voluntary move was staged.

  Leo Björk listened and noted it all down a second time, careful not to mention what they both already knew – that the job had nothing to do with the paper, but was entirely a matter of her personal concern for a missing loved one. Perhaps, both of them reasoned to themselves, perhaps William Sandberg’s disappearance was the tip of a mysterious iceberg, a political scandal or an event in the shadows of a new, invisible cold war, and perhaps they would find something to write about that could retroactively justify what they were doing. A former military cr
yptologist, vanishing with all of his belongings and equipment – it did sound like a promising springboard for a series of articles about an international threat that nobody knew existed.

  But as far as Leo was concerned, he didn’t need any rationalisation.

  He didn’t have the slightest interest in questioning anything; the task already felt like a step up and the only thing he wanted now was to get started and show what an efficient and talented reporter he was. It would be an active, investigative job. It would give him the opportunity to think for himself, trace people to interview, find leads and locate sources. And not least, it would allow him to work closely with Christina Sandberg, and that made him disturbingly jittery in more ways than he cared to admit.

  Eventually, Christina finished reiterating the tasks a second time, and Leo Björk closed his notepad and got up.

  She stared after him through the glass partition of her office. She didn’t have time to doubt him. Instead, she picked up her mobile and scanned the address book, searching for a name she hadn’t even thought about for at least a year.

  The heavy doors opened up into a gigantic chamber, and William immediately found himself pinned to the spot in awe.

  The room must have been twelve metres high. Thick stone pillars ran up the walls and met high up in a crown on the vaulted ceiling. Along one of the walls the sun shone in through uneven, stained-glass windows, filtering the light into coloured speckles, making the place seem dark and light at the same time. On the opposite end of the room, the few remaining sunrays that made it across landed in the glow of a large fireplace almost the size of a small room in William’s apartment. In the centre of it all hung a huge iron chandelier, and under it stood a long table made of dark hardwood, full of grooves and furrows where generations of nobility had hosted lavish banquets.