Chain of Events Read online

  The picture would have been complete with a skewered roast boar as a centrepiece, served on a tin tray with red wine in goblets. Instead, there was a solitary extension lead, from which a grey cable led to a laptop at the head of the table, a good nine metres from where William was standing. At the computer sat a man in dark uniform.

  ‘Franquin?’ said Connors.

  The man who got up from the table was slightly older. His face seemed to have borne the brunt of every weather there is, and he moved slowly and laboriously, stopping a few metres away. No handshake. Introduced himself as General Maurice Franquin and bade William welcome. William couldn’t decide whether to thank him or come out with some harsh remark, and decided to do neither.

  ‘I could spend a lot of time apologising for bringing you here this way. But I won’t.’

  William didn’t answer, waited while Franquin gestured to him to sit down.

  ‘I don’t know how much Connors has told you.’

  ‘I think it’s fair to say he’s spent quite a lot of time not telling me anything.’

  Franquin nodded. For a moment, traces of a smile seemed to spread through his wrinkles. Either that, or some of them had just ended up pointing in the wrong direction.

  ‘You’ll be getting the short version,’ he said.

  ‘Any version will suffice for the time being.’

  ‘We brought you here because we need your knowledge.’

  ‘I got that much.’

  ‘We know you possess a great expertise in your field. And right now we’re facing a problem we can’t solve by ourselves.’

  ‘And who is we?’

  ‘Let’s just say it’s an international partnership.’

  ‘Between?’

  ‘It varies. Mainly between twenty countries, occasionally more, from Europe to the United States and South America and Japan, and frankly it doesn’t really matter. We act in the interests of all nations, but without their involvement. We are financed by special, ring-fenced funds; only a few people in the world know what those funds are used for.’

  William looked at him. It could very well be true. It would explain the facility, the organisation, the ability to fly him out from Sweden without interference.

  And at the same time, it didn’t explain a thing.

  ‘So what’s the name of this partnership?’

  ‘We don’t exist, so we don’t need a name.’

  ‘Under the UN?’

  ‘There are people inside the UN who know about us. Certain individuals, by which I mean two or three. But since we don’t exist, we’re not subject to anyone.’ He made a pause, long enough to signal that what he just said was definitely a yes, and then a bit longer to signal that this was William’s own interpretation and nothing else. ‘We like to think of ourselves as an autonomous organisation, working for the safety and security of all nations in the world.’

  William looked back and forth between them, tried to determine the level of truth in what they were saying. He still felt as if he was lagging behind. The things they were saying were, on the one hand, perfectly feasible. But on the other, the whole situation was so bizarre that he couldn’t quite grasp it. The castle. How he’d arrived there. Everything.

  What could be so dangerous and important and yet so secret that an entire organisation had been set up to deal with it, one that nobody could know existed?

  ‘Security against what?’ he asked.

  Franquin raised an eyebrow in Connors’ direction: your turn.

  And Connors took a few steps across the room.

  ‘We have…’ he began, but stopped almost immediately. A brief pause while he chose his words, carefully, looking for an explanation that would reveal enough but not too much at the same time.

  There it was: ‘We have intercepted a sequence of numbers.’

  ‘Intercepted how?’

  ‘How is unimportant. What matters is that inside that sequence, there’s information. Well hidden, encrypted with an unprecedentedly complex key – or, to be exact: keys. Plural. Keys cross-referencing to previous keys, which in their turn are based on others, in ways that makes them almost impossible to break.’

  William listened. Reluctantly felt his curiosity grow. This was his field, it was exactly what he’d once worked with, and precisely the type of challenge he relished. Finding the complex rules that always hid somewhere, regardless of how impossible or chaotic a code might appear at the outset. Testing and changing variables and testing again to see if it gave a result. It was maths and intuition in a combination he loved, few things in life made him more excited than finding a pattern in something that seemed to be nothing but a jumble of letters on a piece of paper, watching it reveal its face like a crossword where one single letter solves everything.

  Part of William Sandberg felt like a child on Christmas morning.

  The rest of him still felt very much like a fifty-five-year-old man who had just been abducted from a hospital against his will.

  ‘What’s the source?’ he asked. He knew that it was just another variation on the question he’d already asked, but at the same time it was an extremely relevant one. Different codes take different forms, and if he was going to help them this was the kind of thing he would need to know sooner or later anyway.

  ‘We can’t tell you that,’ said Connors.

  ‘Is it written documents, is it radio signals, is it data from a file?’

  ‘We can’t tell you that either.’

  ‘What can you tell me then? Can you tell me anything at all?’ He realised he’d raised his voice. He regretted it immediately; he wasn’t the one calling the shots here, and he compensated for his mistake with a dry smirk. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just that sometimes when people need help, it’s much easier if you know what you’re helping them with.’

  Still a bit caustic. Be he didn’t mind using a hint of sarcasm, as long as he had the situation under control and didn’t let them break him down. He’d lost it for a moment but now he was back on top of his game, and he gave the two men a disparaging look. We’re too old to be playing games, it seemed to say.

  Okay then.

  Franquin walked back to his place at the end of the table. Pulled over his laptop and pressed one of the keys with his index finger. ‘This,’ he said.

  Above their heads four beams of light suddenly pierced the room, reaching out from the chandelier at its centre. Dust particles danced in the air like weightless circus artists, magically illuminated by the rays on their way to the walls around them.

  What William hadn’t noticed when he came in were the digital projectors mounted in the ceiling, resting on top of the heavy arrangement of iron and candles. They whirred into life in response to Franquin’s finger, throwing their light at the pale wallpaper the last few metres under the roof where the sunlight didn’t reach, and where everything had been shrouded in darkness.

  A stream of projected information stretched across the entire hall, seamlessly transitioning from wall to wall, data rolling from one edge of the room to the other.

  Numbers.

  Endless rows of numbers.

  They raced forth, row by row, feeding upward and replaced from below, and when a row reached the ceiling it was shifted one column sideways, into the realm of the adjacent projector, continuing upward and shifting sideways again, over and over until it vanished for good. At the same time, there were other things going on. Numbers were changing colours and were grouped together with other numbers, marked and moved to a new field to the side of the main stream.

  William knew what he was looking at. Somewhere in the building there were more computers, significantly larger and more expensive than Franquin’s aluminium-shelled laptop, and what he saw now was the result of the mainframe sifting through the code Franquin had talked about, hunting for patterns of logic and trying to pull out the key to the message that someone had hidden in the forest of numbers.

  Judging by the amount of data it was quite a forest.

  ‘How
much code are we talking about?’ William asked.

  ‘This is a part of it.’

  ‘And where did it come from?’

  ‘You already asked us that.’

  ‘And I’m still very curious.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’

  William sighed. They were back in the same absurd circle again.

  ‘And what if I help you to work out what this means? Am I allowed to read what I write or would you like me to shoot myself when I find something?’

  Judging by Franquin’s expression, he didn’t appreciate the sarcasm.

  William changed his strategy.

  ‘So,’ he said, ‘who is it that’s in danger?’

  ‘We can’t say.’

  ‘Can you say who’s making the threat?’

  ‘That’s information you don’t need to know.’

  ‘So what the hell am I allowed to know?’ There was anger in his voice now. ‘You bring me here against my will. You ask me to play along but you won’t explain what you’re trying to achieve. Give me one reason to help you. Just one. Please.’

  ‘Because you don’t have a choice.’

  William didn’t want to raise his voice. And he had almost succeeded. Now he breathed slowly through his nose, bit his lip to calm himself. And started over, a silent, barely suppressed disdain beneath his words.

  ‘Big difference,’ he said. ‘Work and work.’

  No answer.

  ‘You can force people to work for you. Of course you can. You can whip somebody into pulling a cart or crushing a rock or moving this whole damn building a few metres to the left – as long as you whip hard enough you can get anyone to do anything. Except for one thing. To think. It’s going to be very, very hard to make me find a solution if I don’t want to find it.’ And then, closing the subject: ‘So of course I have a choice. One always does.’

  ‘Tell us about your suicide attempt,’ Franquin said.

  William turned sharply. That was totally unexpected. And more than a little disrespectful.

  ‘You want some ideas?’ he said. ‘Because if it’s advice you’re after, you’d probably do better to ask someone else. I don’t seem to be succeeding too well.’

  ‘Tell us why,’ Franquin said. Nothing more.

  ‘If I want to go to therapy I’ll pay for it, thank you very much.’

  ‘I can send you an invoice if it makes you feel better.’

  Okay. This conversation was going nowhere, and William threw his hands into the air to illustrate that he was done here. It was obviously nothing more than a charade, he wasn’t in charge and he knew it, but at least it was a way to show what he felt. And he turned to Connors, gave him a confrontational look. It’s time to leave.

  ‘You couldn’t live with the knowledge that you failed to save someone,’ Franquin’s voice said behind him.

  It cut straight to his heart.

  ‘You know nothing about me —’

  ‘On the contrary,’ Franquin said. ‘I would say we probably know more about you than you do yourself.’

  He got up. He moved restlessly; he didn’t want to discuss Sandberg’s past, they needed him to start working and every minute spent in this room was a minute spent doing the wrong thing.

  ‘You virtually grew up with a soldering iron for a hand. You were the wunderkind in school, the maths genius slash oddball who threw together homemade electronics before most of your classmates could even spell. You fixed your friends’ radios and had three patents to your name before you left secondary school. You had companies throwing money at you for university scholarships, and you could have taken your talent and become stupidly rich. And you knew it.’

  William shrugged. So?

  ‘But you chose to stay in the military.’

  ‘I was well paid.’

  Franquin shook his head in disagreement. ‘You’d have been paid a lot better as a civilian. But there was a cold war going on. You used your knowledge for a cause you believed in. You saved lives. That’s what you did, that’s why you stayed, and no matter how much you try to convince yourself that your passion is numbers and technology and patterns, there is no single thing more important to you than saving other people’s lives.’

  William looked away. It was the reflex denial of someone presented with the truth.

  Sandberg did love the problem-solving and the structures and the maths, and his military work had given him the chance to do it every day. That was the reason he had chosen to stay. But Franquin was right. The payoff was the knowledge that he was doing something meaningful. William had decoded messages containing threats to Swedish interests and individuals, and more than once he’d found himself sprinting down linoleum-lined corridors with urgent information on plans for attacks and assassinations. It felt almost dreamlike thirty years later, but back then it was routine. And every time someone’s travel plans were changed or someone’s speech was cancelled because William had done his job, that’s when he knew why he loved his work and why he kept doing it.

  But even if Franquin was right, it didn’t make much difference. William had no intention of helping an organisation whose aims he didn’t know.

  ‘I am terribly, terribly sorry,’ he said in a voice that revealed he wasn’t sorry at all, ‘but I can’t quite grasp what my daughter or my family or my career has to do with this.’

  Franquin waited him out. ‘We can’t force you to work for us, Sandberg. If you refuse there’s little we can do about it. But…’ He shrugged. ‘You are not going to say no. Because if you do, you will be risking the lives of…’ He stopped for a moment, searched for the right word but couldn’t find it.

  A second of silence. Two.

  And William couldn’t keep himself from looking up at him. For the first time since the whole encounter started it was as if something broke through. A fear, somewhere deep behind the desert landscape that was Franquin’s face. It could obviously be one more part of the act, a choreographed move in their efforts to persuade him, but William kept watching him and couldn’t shake the feeling that Franquin himself was actually afraid.

  ‘Of who?’ William asked.

  No answer.

  ‘Whose lives would I be risking?’

  Franquin’s eyes exchanged a couple of unspoken words with Connors, before turning back to William. And then, he cleared his throat. ‘The lives of an incomprehensibly large number of people.’

  He sat down again.

  William didn’t know what to think. They were pressing all the right buttons, telling him just enough, catching his interest and curiosity in a way that annoyed him.

  ‘What is going to happen to an incomprehensible large number of people?’ he asked.

  Silence.

  ‘What is it you want me to do?’

  Franquin was motionless for long enough to make William wonder if he had any intention of answering, but eventually he reached for the computer again, nodded back up at the wall. Look.

  William’s eyes followed his, and as he did, the images from the projectors began to change.

  In the space of a few seconds most of the numbers faded away into the background, a handful remaining in focus before being grouped and sorted along the edge of the projection. At the same time the whole thing appeared to zoom out to a far larger scale, accommodating more and more numbers, smaller and smaller in size. And all time, numbers kept fading away as if they were discarded by an invisible hand, while others were picked out, paired and placed on the growing section in the corner until it spread to cover the whole of one side, gradually transformed into a binary series of ones and zeroes.

  William realised he was holding his breath.

  He could already see the patterns among the zeroes and ones, but not until every number was replaced by combinations of squares in black and white, lined up in a pattern of filled or empty pixels, not until then did the full picture become clear to him.

  What William saw would have been at home in a museum. Perhaps at a university or a research institute,
anywhere but here. Not projected on to an ancient wall in a castle in let’s-call-it-Liechtenstein, and definitely not in the presence of two serious men in military uniforms who said that this was an important message they had recently deciphered.

  The projection that William Sandberg was staring at consisted of hundreds of rows of symbols and marks and outlines, neatly sorted and rendered in illegible vertical columns.

  ‘Do you know what this is?’ Franquin asked.

  William nodded.

  Cuneiform script. He’d only ever seen it in books. One of the world’s oldest written languages, the kind you see scratched into clay tablets on archaeology documentaries on TV. Now the walls around him were covered with pixelated black-and-white versions of precisely that type of inscription, symbols racing over the room as if they were spelling out an urgent message that nobody could understand.

  William stood transfixed, scouring the unreadable words. The two men let him take his time.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ he said. ‘You intercepted this – now?’

  ‘It’s a collection of material,’ Connors said. ‘We’ve had it for a while.’

  ‘Do we know what it says?’

  ‘We do. You don’t need to.’

  He threw Franquin a look, but he didn’t have the energy to make anything of it. What William couldn’t understand was far more fundamental.

  ‘I think you’ve made a mistake. I think you’ve been misinformed about what I do. I work with numbers. I’m not an Egyptologist.’

  ‘Sumerologist,’ Connors corrected him. ‘The symbols are Sumerian.’ And then: ‘We know very well what your field is. There are other people who translate the text for us.’

  ‘So why am I here then? If you already deduced this message from those numbers, if you already cracked the code, what do you need me for?’