But she knew that was simply the kind of person he was. Order from chaos. Patterns and logic. It was the only way for him to survive, and when everything else around him was in free fall, that was exactly what he would hold on to. You don’t stop being pedantic when things fall apart. Quite the contrary.
Finally, she returned to William’s study. The two policemen had gone to join the non-beard in some other part of the apartment, and now she stood here all by herself, looking at the things that weren’t there.
The computers.
The literature.
The black expensive notebook, the one that he loved and hated and hadn’t ever been able to bring himself to use, first because it represented a beautiful memory, and then because of the same thing but for a different reason.
As if it were the book’s fault there were memories. As if he could have preserved all the good, just by keeping things the way they were. As if what happened after wouldn’t have taken place, if only he didn’t touch the memory.
She forced herself to think of something else.
They were lurking around the corner, and she knew it: the thoughts and the emotions and the paralysis that came with them if she let it. The way he had done, and the way she’d learned not to.
Instead, she focused on the situation.
It didn’t make sense.
It just didn’t make sense that he would leave, not like this, why would he?
She knew him. She knew that he had nowhere to go, no reason to leave the only place he still felt secure. And the computers? Why would he take them? Had he even used them since everything happened?
Something wasn’t right. She’d felt it from the moment she entered the room. Something important was missing.
But she hadn’t been able to put her finger on what, and she stood for a while, trying to work out what had given her the feeling in the first place, whether it was only because she hadn’t been in there for over a year or whether she had actually, unconsciously, discovered some detail she wasn’t aware of. Yet.
She closed her eyes. Tried to imagine the room as it used to look. The brim-full, meticulously arranged bookshelves, the files and the papers, the pens that he loved – he was the only person she knew who could spend hours in front of the pen racks at one stationer after another – everything arranged in straight lines and sorted thoroughly. And now everything was gone.
Everything. Was there more? What else was missing, that should have been there but that she couldn’t remember?
She went to the desk. Looked out of the window. Turned round. Took in the room from the opposite angle.
And then she stopped.
There wasn’t something missing.
There was something left that shouldn’t be.
The toiletries in the tiny cabinet surprised William more than he’d ever thought a set of toiletries could.
Not because they were particularly notable in themselves. But because they were his own.
The wash bag was the same black nylon one he always brought with him when he travelled, or at least used to bring when he still went places, and everything inside it came from his own bathroom, everything from razor to toothbrush to aftershave.
One of his jackets sat on a thin hanger, draped over one of his shirts and a pair of his jeans. On the floor were his brown shoes – not the ones he’d choose himself, but nonetheless his own – and beside them lay a pair of his rolled-up socks and a pile of neatly folded underwear.
They had been in his apartment. Instead of throwing him a standard wash kit and a generic outfit from a department store, they had broken into his home and collected his things.
That told him a lot.
It meant that wherever they were taking him, they were going to keep him there for a while.
But it also meant that they wanted him to feel comfortable. He was important to them. Regardless of why they’d spirited him away, they wanted him to feel at home, perhaps even to think of himself as their guest.
He could live with that, he thought. Not least because he didn’t have much choice.
He looked at the thin, faceless version of his own body on the hanger in front of him. And then he pulled off his hospital tunic, put on his normal clothes and wandered barefoot through the corridor to the back of the plane.
The bathroom was fresh and clean and surprisingly roomy for being on board a plane. On the other hand, that didn’t stop it from being unspeakably tiny, and it took quite some effort to go through the normal morning procedures.
William Sandberg took his time. He shaved, washed his whole upper body, dunked his hair into the unconvincing imitation-marble basin and shampooed it twice, just to feel the sensation of the cool water running in smooth streams over his head.
It felt good. Which came as a surprise. And he allowed himself a few seconds to enjoy the feeling, knowing that whatever awaited him when he was done, he wanted to be wide awake and clear-headed.
As he did, he felt both his ears pop at once.
Were they going down?
He held his nose between his thumb and forefinger, equalising the pressure in his head. The whine of the engines had started to change, too, their hum gradually shifting to a lower key, which could only mean one thing, and after a moment he realised he couldn’t hear them any more and had to squeeze his nose again.
He waited a few moments. It could be just a change of course, a new altitude, and if it were they would soon level out again and everything would go back to the same monotonous silent tone as before.
But the plane kept descending. It turned, checked its direction. Levelled out for a moment and started to descend again, creating a vague sensation of displacement in William’s stomach every time it did, playing with gravity for a second and making his body a fraction lighter against the floor below him. There was no doubt. They were preparing to land.
The question was where.
The sun had told him they were flying eastward when he woke up. Possibly slightly to the south-east, depending on what time it really was. But that was information that didn’t help him much anyway; he couldn’t know if they’d kept to the same course since they took off.
And it wasn’t any easier to tell how far they had travelled, either. The sun had been high in the sky when he woke up in the hospital, perhaps eleven in the morning, maybe twelve. Then they’d sedated him and taken him to an airport – Bromma? Arlanda? There weren’t any others still in use, but how could you load an unconscious man on board a plane without piquing the interest of the ground crew? – and if the plane had been ready and waiting and all the papers were in order, it meant they could probably have been in the air an hour later.
It was an extremely rough guess, but it gave him something to work with. The sun was still up. That meant they couldn’t have been airborne for more than two or three hours. Perhaps less if they’d been flying eastward into the night, and more if they had been heading west, but the entire equation had such wide margins of error that they could be covered with asphalt and opened up to road traffic, and he decided that the difference was insignificant anyway.
Instead, he focused on the options. The way he saw it, there were two. Either they were somewhere above southern Europe or they were flying over Russia. Or, possibly, somewhere in between.
His thoughts stopped at one of the alternatives.
Russia?
It would have been the obvious answer, back then. But now?
Where was the logic in that? On the other hand, there was nothing logical about the situation. Why him? Why now? What value would he be, and to whom?
He let the thought pass. Zipped up his wash bag. He would find out soon enough.
One last look in the mirror.
After all, he looked okay for someone who should be dead.
And then he unlocked the bathroom door.
As he opened it, the suits were already waiting for him.
They stood in the corridor, just by his bathroom door, and outside the windows smoke
-coloured clouds streamed past along the fuselage, leaving small vibrating droplets of mist on the acrylic glass.
‘Guess I should go and strap myself in?’ William said. Smiled politely, without the faintest hope that the little welcome committee would stop at that. And sure enough, the bull neck stepped aside, making way for his two colleagues.
‘I’m sorry about this,’ he said. ‘It would have been easier for everyone if we didn’t have to.’
William understood immediately.
And for the second time, he watched as the man with the shaved head took a step towards him, his signature fountain pen in hand. A moment later William Sandberg felt the synthetic tingling rush through his body, turning things off and shutting him down until the sound of the luxury jet vanished into a tunnel of black.
Christina Sandberg spoke briefly and to the point. She held up her phone in front of them, showing the pictures she’d just taken in his room, forced them to take her business card while she explained what she knew, not a trace of uncertainty in her voice. And before the policemen had found any time to argue, she hurried out of the apartment and left them with a report to file.
William Sandberg had been kidnapped. And given his personal history it was more than likely that his life was in danger.
As the echo of her heels died away in the large stairwell, down into the lobby and out through the heavy door to the street, their click against the floor marked the last time she would ever see the apartment on Kaptensgatan.
5
Janine Charlotta Haynes pressed herself against the stone wall, her heart beating so fast that she was scared someone would hear.
She closed her eyes. Focused on breathing as silently as possible, on not letting her feet make a sound, ensuring there was no rustling from the thick envelope stuffed into her waistband.
She couldn’t hear the two men now. But she knew that they were only a few feet away.
There could be three of them, she wasn’t sure: the moment she’d heard their voices echo up the staircase she stopped dead, looking for a way out, throwing herself into a tiny passage without knowing where it led. It didn’t have any lights, and she pressed herself up against the wall as she heard them make it to her floor, stop just outside, only the stones lining the archway separating them from her.
They stood as still and silent as herself, and she could only hope that they hadn’t heard her. It would be impossible to explain why she was there. Particularly in the middle of the night.
She had been running.
And now she was paying for it.
She had been running as fast as she could, barefoot so that her steps would make as little sound as possible in the hard stone corridors, terrified but fully aware that this might be her only chance. And now she stood there, her body crying out for oxygen, fighting to keep herself from breathing.
She couldn’t let them hear her.
She stood perfectly still.
Listened to her beating heart.
Then, suddenly, one of them spoke.
His voice was so close that it felt as if he was speaking directly to her, and it was all she could do to stop herself gasping for air. She pushed her body even harder against the wall, composed herself, listened to their voices, tried to concentrate on what they were saying.
Single words jumped out. Security?
She wasn’t sure. Her French was terrible. She had taken it for two terms in high school, priding herself on performing as badly as possible, and Janine’s teacher had warned her that she would live to regret it. Now she was standing in a stone corridor, painfully aware that her teacher had been right.
Yes, there it was: securité. Were they talking about her?
She closed her eyes again, tried to assess the situation. The worst-case scenario was that someone had realised that the tiny piece of plastic she kept in her pocket was missing. That piece of plastic was her only opening, her only way out, and she clasped it as firmly as she could, as if holding it tighter would keep her safe.
She couldn’t let them find her.
Nobody knew where she was. If they decided to kill her, there was nothing to stop them, and nobody would ever get to know. There probably wasn’t anyone left out there still searching for her.
She pushed the thought away.
He wouldn’t stop.
Would he?
She had to believe he wouldn’t. The last six months had been chaotic, to say the least; she didn’t know which side she was working for, or why, or if what she was doing was morally right or fundamentally wrong or somewhere in between.
The only thing she knew was that she had to tell someone.
That he was her only chance.
And that whatever happened, she couldn’t let them hear her.
The men had been talking for an eternity lasting exactly four minutes, when one of them hushed the other.
The silence cut through her body, and she felt her own fear vibrate inside her mouth with a taste of metal. Had they heard her? Had she relaxed, allowed herself to breathe? Did they know she was standing there?
She held her breath. Counted.
One. Two. Three.
Her lungs were on fire, but she mustn’t.
Four. Five.
And then: a sound.
Somewhere, a helicopter was approaching.
She heard it as a weak, rumbling sound, but it was enough to give her an opportunity to let out her air, and just as she did one of the men began to speak again. Low voice, straight into the air in front of him. Short, confirmatory phrases. Someone had called him on the radio, and it was the person on the other end who did the talking.
Okay. D’accord. Bien.
And then, hell was over. The men started moving, a steady rhythm as their footsteps echoed down the corridor, fading away into silence.
They were gone. And they hadn’t passed the archway where she stood.
Okay, she said to herself. Now or never.
She braced her feet against the wall behind her, pushed off into the corridor like a turning swimmer and let her bare feet carry her as fast as they could. A pounding ache seared her heels each time they made contact with the unforgiving stone floor, but she was running again, and the only way she would make it was if she was fast enough. She bit her lip, fighting to ignore the pain, kept going in the direction she had been before she heard them.
She passed the stairwell. Followed the corridor to the right. A new stairwell. Another corridor, more stairs. Heavy wooden doors blocked her way, but every time she ran into one she would take out the tiny piece of plastic from her pocket, hold it against the little box in the wall, listen to the faint buzz as the lock released and allowed her to move on. Every time waiting carefully for the silence to return, making certain that she was entirely alone before sprinting onward.
Down, further down, two more storeys. It was damper here, probably below ground. No windows or peepholes, nothing to suggest that there was a world outside. The feeling of being in a prison was even stronger.
It was only the third time that she had been this far down. But she’d forced herself to memorise the route by heart, and she saw every corner, door and staircase in front of her well before they appeared. And she sailed through the corridors, weak thuds of soft skin on hard stone, didn’t slow down until she reached her destination.
The room on the other side of the locked door looked like a caretaker’s office. Or rather: it looked like it used to be one. The walls were lined with wooden pigeonholes for letters, a large desk stood behind a glass partition, and a mountain of boxes lay stacked against one wall.
She could see subtle changes from the last time she was here. Stacks of paper were missing, new ones had arrived. Mugs with dried-up coffee dregs had been replaced by fresh ones. The room was in use. She hadn’t dared to believe it, but it seemed to be true.
She went in. Pulled the thick envelope from her waistband. Pushed it into the middle of a pile of similar envelopes on the table. And then, as quietly as
she arrived, she turned round and hurried back out, exactly the same way she had come.
Everything was a gamble. The envelope was addressed to a person who didn’t exist. The contents, if someone opened it, would look like a love letter.
Except to one person.
The only thing she could do was to hope that he would get it.
It had taken her over six months to find a way to get a message out, and as she ran through the corridors in absolute silence, she squeezed her fingers and hoped she’d finally done it.
And that she wasn’t already too late.
6
The moment he pulled the heavy curtains open, William Sandberg saw that his guesses were way off.
The room where he woke up was classical, with heavy furnishings, and extremely old. The floor was constructed from large, soft stones, worn down by feet passing back and forth across them over hundreds of years. Some of the slabs had been split by temperature changes or the ground settling, as had the walls with their hand-painted wall hangings, yellowed by time and damp air, but still impressive in their rich detail. Wooden panels separated them from the floor, and in the roof were huge beams, painted the same dark grey as the rest of the wood in the room.
If he hadn’t been so painfully aware of what he’d experienced the last twenty-four hours, William could have led himself to believe he’d been brought to some upmarket castle weekend getaway.
All the elements were there. The heavy wooden bed where he’d slept, the wall hangings at its head, the fine fabrics draped over the intricately carved canopy. And the breakfast tray on its foldable holder, entirely out of place with criss-cross chrome legs but with an unbelievable spread of food: cheeses, jam, bread, all surrounded by exotic fruits whose names he didn’t know but that obviously seemed to exist anyway. And of all the training he’d undergone in his working life – training to help him survive if imprisoned by a foreign power – not a single minute had prepared him for the risk of being served luxury breakfasts in castles.
Chain of Events Page 4