Acts of Vanishing Read online

  ‘Someone,’ he said. ‘Anyone.’

  When Forester’s gaze made it clear that wasn’t answer enough, he closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and let the words pour out in a long, toneless stream. Quiet and objective, as though this was actually about someone else.

  ‘I haven’t slept a whole night since I don’t know when.’ Wrong. He corrected himself. ‘I don’t know when was in August. The third. A Friday.’

  He looked between his two interrogators, felt their eyes, took care to avoid them.

  ‘That was the last time I spoke to my daughter. That was the day I found her gear, and that she swore never to speak to us again, and ever since then I’ve been stuffing myself with sleeping pills and tablets and hoping it will work–every fucking night for four months. But sleep never comes. In the end I go out looking, not because I think I’ll find her, but because it’s the only way I can keep myself from falling apart.’

  He told them about his nightly rambles, about the people he talked to, people he had always known existed but who he had always avoided, pretended not to see. People who slept in ditches and alleyways, in the damp and the cold, or who didn’t sleep at all, just like him. The ones who sit on the streets, outside shops and in the entrances to the metro, the ones who would look at him, pleading for help.

  Now he was the one pleading with them.

  ‘I tell myself that one day, in the end, there must be someone who knows. Who has met her, seen her, heard something. Someone who has something to tell me.’

  He sat there in stillness.

  ‘And then,’ he said, ‘the email arrived. My mistake was that I allowed myself to hope.’

  11

  Alexander Strandell talked on for over twenty minutes, and those twenty minutes afforded him more respect than ever before. He showed them the lists where he had fastidiously recorded the time, strength and duration of the signals, and Christina took photographs of them with her phone, its charge diminishing with each shot, but it had to be done. And lastly he explained the Doppler effect and meteorology, and the way radio waves bounce off the ionosphere. How that makes it all but impossible to determine exactly where a signal originated.

  ‘But radio amateurs are a helpful breed,’ he said, and went on to describe how he had been assisted by other amateurs’ antennae. How they had done calculations on delays and strength, and how, with the help of colleagues all over the world, he had arrived at estimates that were both detailed and reliable, and that almost certainly showed where the transmissions were likely to be coming from.

  ‘First the UK. They’re the ones calling. Then come the replies. Sometimes from America, sometimes from Brazil. France, Japan, the UK, Sweden.’ He lowered his voice again. ‘The whole world is in on this.’

  Those words stopped Christina in her tracks.

  His information had been relevant and fascinating, that wasn’t the problem. And tinfoil hat or no, the man who spoke had gone from being Tetrapak to the real-life Alexander Strandell, and his enthusiasm had been difficult to resist.

  But there was something about that sentence that reminded her who she was talking to. The whole world. All at once, the spell was broken, as if they were right in the middle of a would-be seduction and he had just happened to say I don’t mind you being a bit chubby. She just had to say something.

  ‘In what exactly?’ she asked. ‘Involved in what?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘What I do know is that they knew.’

  She gave him a wary look, but he didn’t notice. As far as he was concerned, the seduction was still in full swing, and the whole room rang with the dissonance between a man ready to crack open the champagne and put on the Barry White on the one hand, and two women who’d already started glancing at the exit on the other.

  ‘Who are they?’ asked Christina.

  ‘The Authorities. The Military. Everyone.’ He drew himself up. It was time for the finale, the point he’d been striving towards throughout the meeting, perhaps throughout his life, a life full of meetings that didn’t happen and the media refusing to listen. He took a deep breath, his pockmarked face draped in strange shadows from the glow of the computer screen.

  ‘I’m afraid that what we’ve seen is just the beginning.’

  Alexander Strandell raised his arms, an impassioned plea and a dire warning in one theatrical gesture.

  ‘The beginning of the end of society.’

  And right then–at the worst possible time–it happened. First, the fans whirred into motion. Then came the toneless plinking of the fluorescent tubes, an orchestra of flat clanging as the room lit up in shades of white. There he was, the man they called Tetrapak, balloon head and grey woollen overcoat, still dripping with the damp from the cycle path, and behind him, outside the window, a wildfire of sodium yellow and floodlit white, a shimmering wave as electricity rippled its way through the city.

  The bridges gained detail. Across the Riddarfjärden bay, thousands of dots–windows–scrambled up the hills and stayed there, hanging like staves of sheet music. Logos and signs lit up and mixed with the evening damp in a twinkling, multicoloured haze.

  And with that, the moment was left hanging, silent and glaring like a sarcastic smile, and in the middle of that smile stood Alexander Strandell, disrobed and tragic, as if someone had turned on all the lights in a haunted house and left him amongst the props and make-up and labels marked Made in China.

  No one said anything. The silence endured, accompanied by fans and lifts, and the longer it lasted the more comical it became. But not for Strandell.

  ‘Believe me,’ he said eventually. ‘You’ll see.’ He looked at them in turn, and made his plea. ‘It will all come together.’

  But the battle was lost. Christina felt herself tilting her head to one side, and saw the disappointment in Tetrapak’s eyes.

  ‘We’ve got your number, haven’t we?’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘But you never call.’

  ‘We’ll be in touch,’ she said. ‘Promise.’

  He wanted to protest, but what could he do? And when she nodded to him to start packing up, he responded with a brief head movement before returning to his equipment to dismantle it all over again.

  The quiet lasted for a couple of seconds before fear overwhelmed Christina Sandberg once more.

  The clangour seemed to come from nowhere. It burst through the room like a chandelier smashed in the air, and she spun around, instantly aware that light or no light, the fear still lurked. She scanned the room, her heart pounding, her body poised to take cover at the instant she found out what was happening.

  On top of the chilled cabinet was her mobile phone, just where she’d left it only moments earlier. But now, the network coverage was back, and the phone was vibrating against the glass.

  She picked it up and peered at the screen. Number withheld. She struggled for calm.

  ‘Hello? Christina Sandberg?’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘My name is Jonas Velander. I’m calling from Armed Forces HQ.’

  At the headquarters on Lidingövägen, the power had come back on at seven forty-six, and if the level of activity had been high during the outage, it was nothing compared to now. Phones rang and computers beeped in all directions. Updates and data poured in, most of it predictable and expected, but there was one exception. The information that had been uploaded from one of the thousands of CCTV cameras around the city, and which was now on a memory stick carried by Jonas Velander, had come as an utter surprise.

  It wasn’t the computers that discovered it first. All that made-to-order, expensive face-recognition technology, complex machines that crunched through images and spat out matches when the algorithms found a nose length and limb movement that resembled someone they were looking for, all of them had drawn a blank. And sometimes it was a good job that humans existed after all.

  ‘Isn’t that the girl?’ The woman who shouted it out was Agneta Malm, two years shy of retirement. ‘It mus
t be. Isn’t it?’

  She’d been sitting at her workstation in the big control room down in the HQ basement, the one named the Joint Operations Centre but that everyone called ‘the JOC’, and people had gathered behind her chair, staring at the fuzzy video loop running on the screen in front of her, asking each other what the hell this meant.

  William Sandberg could not be guilty. That’s what they’d all said to each other four hours earlier when they learned that he’d been arrested at Central Station and was now being brought in in a Volvo. Forester had warned of an impending terror attack, and sure, she’d been right about that. But whatever had happened to Sandberg, they said, whatever the reason why he had behaved as he did, however much he’d deserved to be sacked earlier that autumn, he simply could not be involved with what was happening now.

  In the end, though, enough of them had confirmed that Agneta Malm had been right. They had peered at the CCTV footage, clicked through one frame at a time, and it bloody well had to be her.

  And for the first time, doubts crept in.

  What was she doing there if he wasn’t the one they were looking for?

  Jonas Velander walked down the corridor with the memory stick in his hand, feeling his lack of fitness, the pain in his lungs after only two flights of stairs. He cursed his sedentary job, cursed the fact that, at just gone thirty-five, he felt every inch the decrepit old man.

  He batted those thoughts away, pressed the phone to his ear and kept walking, Palmgren’s orders echoing in his head. Call his wife.

  When she answered he introduced himself. ‘I’m calling because your husband is here. We would like you to come in and answer some questions.’

  When the power returned to Lidingövägen they’d had one final question to ask before they could close their notepads, take a break, and finally release William Sandberg from the claustrophobic grey of the interrogation room.

  ‘Why AMBERLANGS?’

  It was Forester who asked it. And William hesitated, his eyes glued fast to the table to avoid making contact with hers.

  ‘Because she thought that’s what it was called.’

  He had answered in a voice so weak it was barely audible. Now he was standing in front of the mirror in the narrow, sterile bathroom. He saw himself staring back, but it wasn’t really him.

  They had forced him to put things into words that he didn’t have words for, and now he felt emptied of everything, as though someone had wrung him out and shaken him until all his powers had come loose and been scattered to the wind. He stood with hands pointing towards the basin, and he might want to drink, might need to wash his face, or had done so already, he wasn’t sure.

  Sara Sandberg had been three years old. Possibly four. She had learned to pronounce her ‘r’s and had been applauded for talking so well, and so she’d been proud and rolled the ‘r’s in every word they appeared in. And not just in them. Preferably other words too.

  Amberlangs.

  It was as irresistible as it was touching, the bold maturity of a girl who was still a child but aspired to be one of the adults, and who constantly, unwittingly, exposed herself through words. Through ‘r’s that appeared where they didn’t belong, and that she pronounced with a self-confident clarity that made it quite impossible to keep a straight face.

  In the end, she’d asked what they were laughing at–not hurt, not angry, just warm inquisitiveness, a look that spoke of innocent, invulnerable knowledge that she had two parents who always wanted what was best for her. What are you laughing at, tell me, what is it? Finally, they had to.

  Sara had understood straight away. Wherever it came from, she had inherited a fierce intellect. She realised at once what she’d done wrong, and then started laughing too–it’s called an ambulance, they had explained, and when she heard that she realised how silly it must have sounded, amberlangs and telurvision and balcurny.

  She asked them to say it properly, listening and repeating over and over. And they’d laughed together and she was proud of herself for learning how it was supposed to be said, and that moment was committed to memory for ever as an image of what it meant to be a family.

  Along with the dissonance–they could feel it even then, both William and Christina, the dissonance as the moment sliced through them, as if Life materialised in the middle of the room, arms folded, telling them this ends here. Try and hold on if you want, but you won’t be able to. Because that instant, Sara Sandberg took another step away from her childhood. She never said amberlangs again. Never telurvision, nor balcurny. There and then, they left an era behind, and not only that, they left a person, a version of Sara that they would never get to meet again.

  After that, the incident had lived on as a family yarn. As she got older it was told to friends and boyfriends, and each time she had squirmed obligingly, pretending to be tormented when in fact the story meant as much to her as it did to them.

  Years passed. She had just turned fifteen, school finished that spring after ninth grade, and she was more grown up than ever, dead set on spending the summer away on a language trip. The destination was, of all places, Washington DC. And why not? Nothing was going to happen. She was an adult.

  The childish ones now were William and Christina, she told them with that adolescent maturity, because for God’s sake, what’s going to happen? And William had a thousand answers that he didn’t really want to voice but all of them utterly plausible.

  ‘I’ll email,’ she’d said to him. ‘I’ll email every day,’ and then she’d opened an account for him. AMBERLANGS. She’d handed over the login details as he left her at the airport, and there was a burning behind his eyes as he read them, but there were no tears because he didn’t do that sort of thing. Instead he’d hugged her for a very long time, his eyes flitting across all the departure boards in the terminal until he could be sure that they were dry enough for him to dare to face her again.

  He’d watched her through security, seen yet another part of the child Sara Sandberg disappear, known that the next time he saw her she’d be even more grown up.

  That summer would be their last one together. They would be enjoying the warmth of Stockholm, they would be visiting friends, and after that she would be starting high school. And come autumn, they would once and for all kill whatever was left of the child in Sara Sandberg.

  And now he was standing here, hovering by the basin in the gents’ toilets at Swedish Armed Forces HQ. And there were no tears, because he didn’t do that sort of thing.

  The head that appeared at the door, deep inside the mirror image, belonged to Lars-Erik Palmgren.

  ‘I’m sorry about all this,’ he said eventually.

  They looked at each other’s reflections, both motionless; a long silence. A but left hanging. An excuse, but also a sorrowful objection, a trust that should have been a given but turned out not to be.

  ‘You should have told me,’ said Lars-Erik.

  ‘Would that have made any difference?’

  ‘I would’ve known. I would have been able to help.’

  William sniggered, shook his head, said no more.

  ‘No one wanted to sack you, William. You made that happen all by yourself.’

  They looked at each other. The silence hung there, empty and apprehensive.

  ‘So what happens now?’ asked William.

  ‘I want you to come with me to the briefing room. I want you to help us understand.’

  ‘Want? Like really want to? Or is it just your turn to play good cop?’

  Palmgren shook his head.

  ‘I don’t think you understand,’ he said. ‘Forester isn’t the bad cop. She’s the frightened cop.’ A pause. ‘That’s the way it is. We’re all frightened.’

  Then he turned around, leaving William to his reflection.

  ‘Briefing room,’ he said. ‘You know the way.’

  12

  Sara Sandberg was used to hiding. That is, she’d been forced to get used to it.

  At one time, she’d loved t
o be seen, she had a charm that she was both well aware of and only too happy to deploy, and an intelligence which, when combined with the former, made her a dangerous customer.

  She got grades she didn’t deserve on the basis that everyone knew that deep down she did deserve them, if only she applied herself. She was funny and snide and quick and always at the centre of things. She led a charmed life, the others used to say, and, quite honestly: what’s wrong with that? She enjoyed it. She was good-looking and happy and intelligent and what more could you ask for?

  A lot, as it turned out.

  Suddenly, she stopped knowing who she was. From out of nowhere, her parents had informed her that they were not who they had claimed to be–that’s not how they put it, of course, but it’s what they meant–and ever since that day, things had been going downhill.

  Now here she was, hurrying through Stockholm hunched and invisible–and used to it.

  It had taken four hours before the power was restored, and she had spent all of that time in the shelter of a fire escape behind the Gallerian shopping centre, shivering and with her ears straining for the sound of barking dogs and clinking key rings.

  When the lights finally came back on, some of the fear eased off. The falling snow took on contours and danced in front of the street lights, making her think that maybe her situation wasn’t that bad after all, and she walked down Hamngatan; a route she’d walked a thousand times before but that now acquired a different meaning. On streets where once she’d seen shop windows and cafés, places that seemed good for a coffee or getting some clothes, she now saw alleys and shelter and hatches that might open, spaces that weren’t built for people but that might just provide a night’s sleep.

  Life was ironic like that. Three years at high school hadn’t taught her a thing. A year on the streets had taught her everything.

  The old Sara Sandberg would’ve said I told you so. Experience trumps theory.

  She cut through the park between the theatres, passed the big hotel where she’d got drunk in secret, back when being drunk was fun. She went that way now because it was darker, and because everyone who went past the angular stone monument down by the quayside did so with their eyes fixed on the edifice itself, hunched over against the weather and hurrying home from work or the gym or whatever it was that normal people got up to.