‘You were there?’
‘You wanted me to speak to them, right?’
Of course she did. And it was perfectly reasonable to go there; she would probably have done the same thing herself – the phone was a great tool but nothing beat looking someone straight in the eye when you talked to them. But to be honest, she had expected him to take the easy way out and make a call. She was delighted to be wrong.
‘I just didn’t know you went there,’ she said.
‘Well. Since I was out anyway,’ he said. ‘I was down on Strandvägen and then the removals office is in Vasastan and then, I don’t know, the hospital is almost on my way home.’
She couldn’t stop herself from breaking into a smile. ‘Which begs the question, why are you here?’
Leo looked up at her. There was a note of friendliness in her voice, a tone he hadn’t heard before, and the realisation forced him to find something else to think about, quickly, before he started to blush.
‘I – thought – that,’ he answered, trying to look like he had just said an entire sentence. Obviously well aware that it made him sound like an idiot, but he still preferred that to looking like one, too.
A new silence.
‘When was the last time you looked at your watch?’ she said.
He shrugged. He knew it was late. But there had been a reason that he went back to the office, and for a moment he glanced over towards his desk and had a rapid negotiation with himself.
He could tell her. But he didn’t want to say anything. Not yet. He might be wrong. Instead, he shrugged again, even though he knew exactly what time it was.
‘Go home,’ she said.
‘I’d really rather stay a little longer,’ he answered.
It was quite possible that this was the first sentence she’d ever heard him utter without getting tangled up in his own words and having to start over, and what’s more he’d delivered it with a clarity and poise she didn’t recognise. She was already smiling. Now it turned into a grin.
‘What?’ he asked.
‘Nothing. I’m tired. And so are you.’
She was right, but he hadn’t allowed himself to notice it.
‘Take a cab,’ she said. ‘You can give me the receipt tomorrow.’
She leaned over and took the coffee from his hand. He was an awkward young man, but there was no doubt he was capable of more than she’d thought. And she didn’t want him to burn out.
‘You start at eight thirty tomorrow morning,’ she said. ‘And I don’t want you yawning at your desk.’
With that, she grabbed her pasta from the microwave.
And turned back towards her glass-walled sanctum.
Leo had put on his jacket and hat when he approached Christina’s room with cautious steps one final time before leaving. Stopped outside the door. Leaned forward on to the glass, his down jacket flattened against it like an exploded airbag on a windscreen.
She looked up, waiting for him to make enough connections in his head to be able to string a sentence together.
‘How come you’re so sure?’ he said. ‘I mean, about him not leaving, you know, voluntarily?’
It was a legitimate question. And even though she didn’t know if it was a good idea to let him in on a past she’d rather forget herself, she couldn’t come up with a good reason to keep him out of it.
‘Everything was packed,’ she said after a pause. ‘He’d taken his computers. His clothes. Even his toothbrush. Everything.’
He looked at her. So?
And she picked up her phone, flicked through her photos until she found the right one. It was a picture of William’s study, one of those she’d taken that morning, and she pinched her fingers to zoom in on one of the room’s walls.
An arrangement of picture frames covered the entire side of the room, from the edge of the low cabinet up to the point where the wallpaper met the stucco on the ceiling. The frames were full of photos, all showing the same face. A young woman, in different situations: smiling at the camera, posing for a portrait, captured in action. In some of them she was younger, maybe fifteen, and in others she looked a few years older.
But nowhere was she more than twenty.
‘Who is she?’ he asked.
‘Sara,’ she answered. ‘She was our daughter.’
He heard her tone. Was. Said nothing.
‘If he’d done the packing himself, they wouldn’t still be hanging there.’
She turned off her phone. Placed it on the table. A sad smile as she looked away from him.
‘Leo? Seriously. Go home and get some sleep.’
He stood for a moment. Then he freed her window from the weight of his jacket, and made his way to the lift on the far side of the open-plan office.
Christina sat where she was. Stared at the white-hot cardboard carton with the colourless pasta. And then she flung it into the waste bin without even opening it, turned on her computer and tried to focus on the job she was paid to do.
9
William Sandberg had stayed in his office until long after midnight, until eventually the guard outside had knocked on the door and politely but firmly suggested he get some sleep.
He’d asked for permission to bring a few printouts and pens to his room, and once there his bathroom mirror had become a makeshift whiteboard, and William had kept working in front of it until the clock showed well past two in the morning and all the fruit from the breakfast tray was gone.
When he woke up five hours later, his second morning in captivity, it was with an energy he couldn’t remember the last time he’d felt.
Nobody had knocked on his door. There was no alarm clock, nobody telling him that it was time to get up, and yet he was fully awake almost exactly at the stroke of seven, sitting straight at the edge of the bed, his mind ready to begin where it left off the night before.
He let his thoughts wander for a few minutes on their own, and then he went into the bathroom and took a long, warm shower while his mind took care of itself.
When he was done, he surprised himself by lying down on the bathroom floor.
His hands behind his head. Knees bent, ankles crossed. And then he pulled his upper body upwards, doing his first sit-up in as long as he could remember.
It was a lot harder than he recalled.
He felt his skin fold in front of him, the creases significantly deeper than they used to be, and his stomach burned like fire for every second he tried to hold himself up. But as he fell down on to his back after what could almost count as twenty passable repetitions it wasn’t without a sense of success. He was completely exhausted, and he wouldn’t manage another one if his life depended on it, but it meant the muscles were still there and they knew what to do. That was a good thing. It was just a matter of doing it again.
Like so much else. Just doing it.
While William was still in the shower, someone had been in his room and left a new breakfast tray by the bed. It was as huge and exotic as the previous morning, but he settled for a cup of coffee and a single fruit, turning his attention to the newspapers that had accompanied the breakfast. Yesterday’s date. Still, he couldn’t help being impressed.
Both of them were Swedish.
He glanced swiftly over both front pages but nothing caught his interest. Instead, he picked one of them up, and flicked straight to the Stockholm section. Read each of the headlines. Carefully. Twice to make sure. Put it down again, changed to the other, did the same thing. Nothing there either. Fair enough.
He folded the newspapers back up. Put them on the tray again, with the front page facing out. There was no point in letting them know what he’d been looking for.
His disappearance wasn’t mentioned in either paper, and even if he would have liked it to be, it didn’t really surprise him. The only person who’d be missing him was Christina. But he was quite certain his captors would have taken precautions to create a scenario that people wouldn’t question. Whatever Christina might think had happened to him, it
wouldn’t be anything that made the news.
All the more reason, he thought. All the more reason to do what he planned.
And when Connors knocked on his door at ten past eight to ask if William was ready to start the day’s work, William had been dressed and prepared to go for quite some time.
He was looking forward to the day in front of him.
He had a plan.
And no intention of telling Connors what it was.
Almost eighteen hours had passed since the first time Connors left him in his new workspace. At that time, William had been considerably less optimistic.
He had remained standing in the middle of the room, alone and motionless for ages, looking at the endless mass of unfathomable information on the walls around him. On one of the walls hung reams of paper with printed number sequences, enough to cover the space from floor to ceiling, and on the wall next to it there were printouts of the symbols, those that apparently were Sumerian cuneiform but didn’t tell him anything, pinned to the walls as if someone had wallpapered the room with a black-and-white graphic pattern.
They were organised into groups, hundreds of pieces of paper side by side, the groups separated here and there by little gaps of wall to indicate a break in the sequence. As if to say that here and there, some of the information had been written off as unimportant, and some of the numbers and groups had been removed.
It was an overwhelming amount of data.
He had no idea where to begin.
And what worried him even more were the things that were only implied.
For one thing, he obviously wasn’t the first person here. Someone had worked with the material before him, performed the initial task of deciphering the endless sequences of numbers hanging around him, cracked the key to how they should be transformed into other numbers that were then in turn transformed to the long pixelated images of Sumerian text.
What did that tell him?
Had someone else started his job, but stopped before they made it all the way? Why? And where was that person now?
The sequences around him had obviously once been decoded, but what they still lacked was a universal key that worked in both directions. They still didn’t know how to re-encrypt new data, and what they needed was a general formula, or who knew, perhaps a collection of formulas, to allow them to encode a new message at any given moment.
The process could be immensely complicated. Perhaps the formulas were based on where in the sequence the encrypted text appeared, perhaps even on what other texts were already in it, or why just there, why not in completely different sequences that he couldn’t even envisage?
He cursed out loud to himself. How the hell could he help them code an answer to a message he wasn’t allowed to read? One that they weren’t even prepared to tell him the origin of ?
He needed to start over. Take it all in, get an overview, see what he could learn from what he saw.
He positioned himself facing the printouts. Then he started from the end.
The wall with the cuneiform.
It told him nothing, but then he didn’t expect it to. It could just as well have been a wall full of children’s drawings, pointless clumps of lines that didn’t mean anything to anyone, except that obviously wasn’t the case. Instead, someone had deemed them so meaningful and important that the nations of the world had assigned an entire organisation to take charge of them. And who was he to argue with that?
From a few steps back, the cuneiform texts appeared to go on and on in long, contiguous blocks, page after page. But on closer inspection he could see that every printed page was framed by a thin border, as if it were a discrete object in itself, a separate piece of the puzzle in the gigantic mosaic of A4 pages hanging from the walls.
Every A4 page was a matrix of tiny squares, each with its own pixelated part of the message, 23 pixels wide, 73 high. In total 1679 pixels, forming a row of Sumerian dashes and symbols, telling him absolutely nothing.
Okay. On to the next wall. The wall with all the number sequences.
On each page there were two sets of numbers. The upper half of the page was printed in black and the lower in red, side by side and without spacing. The letters C and P told him the difference between the two.
Cipher and Plaintext.
The black numbers were C. The encrypted code. The one they had intercepted. And the red was P. The decoded material. The numbers that in turn represented the countless groups of pixels that made up the cuneiform images on the adjacent wall.
So far so good. Nothing too much out of the ordinary. But what did strike him as odd was how the numeric sequences were made up of four numbers.
He hadn’t registered it when they rushed past on the projected video wall in the large conference room, but as he thought more about it he realised he’d seen it back then, too.
Four.
Not two, like digital sequences of binary zeros and ones. Not ten, like the good old familiar numeric system everyone was taught from the day they stopped dribbling and could sit up straight. The sequences in front of him were made up of values from zero to three.
Base four.
Not that this was a revolutionary idea in itself. He’d seen it before, of course he had. But as far as he knew he’d never seen it used in any practical applications, not outside of anecdotal thought experiments, examples to show how arithmetic systems can build on any base you choose. Programmers use sixteen. The Babylonians sixty. But who on earth would decide to use four? And why?
It surprised him, not least because of what he was looking at. If something was going to be turned into pixels that were either black or white, then what was the point of storing them as values from zero to three?
Why put binary numbers in a quaternary code?
He shook his head. Why wasn’t the point.
His job wasn’t to turn the red, decrypted numbers into the Sumerian symbols on the next wall. Somebody else had already done that, and someone had translated that script into something modern and legible, and that wasn’t the point either since nobody had any intention of telling him what it said.
His only task was to work out the connection, how the black numbers had been transformed into the red, and then how some new goddamn red ones should be transformed into new goddamn black, and he felt his frustration grow and the entire job overwhelm him and all he wanted to do was to give it all up and leave.
He glanced over at the desk. The binders. The computers.
He could, but he shouldn’t.
In the binders he’d find his predecessor’s calculations and notes, and he’d be able to use them as a shortcut into the material, and it was extremely tempting but a very bad idea.
If someone before him had figured out a cipher key that only worked in one direction, it meant it was incomplete or even plain wrong, and William didn’t want to walk into the same trap himself. He didn’t want to get stuck inside someone else’s reasoning, accepting the conclusions that had already been made simply because they looked so good on paper.
He needed to start from the beginning. No prior knowledge. No help.
And no computers.
Because if he didn’t know, the computers wouldn’t either.
As long as he was fumbling the computers would fumble too, and before he knew it he would be further away from the answer than he already was. Right now there was only one way of getting into the material. Paper and pen. Sketching and counting by hand. Getting to feel the code inside him, like he used to do, back then.
But back then was a long time ago.
And he stood there, his gaze travelling back and forth across the numbers. Desperately trying to get close to them, but not knowing how. A sense of claustrophobia started to grow inside of him, it pressured him and made it hard to breathe, and gradually he felt it dawn on him, no, he knew it beyond doubt already, a realisation that made his shirt go moist and warm and stick to his back like a wet blanket.
He’d lost it.
He wasn’t
up to the job.
After hours of agony, William had thrown his pen and his papers away, pushed the files on to the floor in sheer desperation, opened the door and marched out into the corridor. He needed air. He needed to look at something else. To think afresh.
The first thing he saw was a guard in a light-grey uniform. It was an unfamiliar face, not someone from the plane, and he was firmly parked a few steps away from his door, the empty gaze of a museum attendant on an out-of-season weekday.
‘Can I help you?’ he said, though his voice made it perfectly clear that he had no interest whatsoever in helping. His sole purpose was to stop William from going anywhere he shouldn’t.
William explained that he needed to stretch his legs.
‘You can walk up and down right here,’ the guard said.
‘I can stop working, too,’ said William. ‘I need to walk to think, and thinking is what I’m here for. Your choice.’
They stared each other out for a couple of seconds. The guard obviously had his orders, probably to keep William in his room and to make sure he was reasonably content, and William could see him negotiate with himself which of the two was the highest priority.
Eventually the guard jerked his head in reply. His gaze remained stony, even if they both knew William had been the victor in their little battle.
‘But don’t you try anything,’ he said.
William gave him a wry smile. For a moment, he considered asking him what there was to try when you’re held captive behind massive stone walls, but he chose not to. Instead, he jerked his head back at him, leaving the guard to interpret whether it meant thank you or fuck off or something in between. And then he started to wander off down the corridor.
It wasn’t much of a stroll.
The air had the same damp edge as in the room, and the walls were built from the same endless blocks of stone.
But if nothing else, it was a break from the numbers and the printouts. He let his eyes wander across the walls and the floor, counting the stones and looking for patterns in the masonry to clear his mind.
Chain of Events Page 8