Nicolai Richter’s Toyota lost none of its speed as it climbed the parapet, began a somersault from the edge of the bridge and sailed like a gigantic leaf towards the carriageway below, landing on its roof in the path of westbound traffic on the A9.
He didn’t feel the itch any longer.
By the time Nicolai Richter was involved in his second car accident of the morning, pushed around across the asphalt and thrown under the wheels of the oncoming traffic, he was already dead from the fall.
The news networks spent the rest of day competing to provide the most comprehensive reports from the catastrophic accident outside Badhoevedorp, Amsterdam.
But not a single journalist reported the most gruesome detail of all.
The fact that Nicolai Richter’s shattered body was rushed with blazing sirens and flashing lights to Slotervaart Hospital, five miles away. And that he was declared dead by a medical team who then went on to attend to other casualties.
13
William lay on top of his bed, staring up at the ceiling, wondering if he was about to die after all.
Wouldn’t that be some turn of events.
Only a few days before, that had been exactly what he wanted. But as he’d found himself examined and subjected to test after test, helplessly bundled up in towels and surrounded by personnel in hazard suits, he’d gradually come to realise that he wasn’t in as much of a hurry as he’d thought.
It was early morning. A weak light was pushing its way through the heavy curtains. And William Sandberg hadn’t slept a wink.
His head was full of questions.
What would happen next?
What had he been exposed to?
And what did the dying woman have to do with his codes, how was his work supposed to help against a contagious disease, how the hell did everything he’d seen and been told fit together?
All he had to go on was what he’d learned from Janine.
That the material they’d given her was deliberately mixed up, intended to confuse her and make it impossible for her to work out what she was dealing with.
There was no way he would be able to solve the puzzle. Not with the pieces he had, not so far. Not until he knew what was true, and which pieces didn’t belong.
There was nothing to be gained from fixating on matters beyond his control. He needed to focus, to do what he did best. To understand. To find patterns and logic and solve problems.
AGCT. Why would she write that?
In his mind he returned to his office, the room where he’d been sitting just hours earlier, and he tried to recall as much as he could. The cuneiform script on the walls. The number sequences, the rows of zeros and ones and twos and threes that had been translated and rearranged to form the countless pixels forming the symbols.
Where had they come from?
Why 23 by 73?
Every time he tried to get to grips with the numbers his thoughts seemed to be deflected, bouncing away as if to tell him that no explanation could be arrived at until he had the whole picture. Until he knew where they came from, where the sequences had appeared, through what medium.
Through what medium.
The feeling spread through his body as a warm tingle of satisfaction. He recognised it instantly. It was the rush of realisation.
The thought had no sooner hit him than he sat bolt upright on the bed, staring into space, his eyes searching the room without focusing on anything. Not looking for something that could be seen, but searching within himself. He felt adrenalin and endorphins dance in his veins as he raced through every detail he’d heard, over and over again, tried to hold on to his realisation, tried to make it stick, to see if it held water.
It did. It was the only possible explanation.
Base four.
Palmgren was already waiting at the table.
His coffee was untouched even though he’d been there for more than fifteen minutes, and he watched in silence as Christina wriggled out of her suede coat, pulled her handbag through one of its sleeves, and hung it on the chair before sitting down.
His eyes were worried.
‘I contacted them,’ he said when she was ready.
Christina nodded in reply. It was both a thank-you and a sign that she was listening despite apparently being occupied in ridding her newly purchased latte of its plastic lid without spilling the contents.
‘William’s job doesn’t exist any more,’ he said. ‘Nobody has taken over his duties, at least not in the way that he performed them. But…’ He unfurled a piece of paper to help his memory, though he knew it wouldn’t make any difference. ‘I got hold of a woman, Livia Eek. I think she’s probably in her thirties now, maybe thirty-five. I met her back when I was still active, she was an assistant then but today she’s responsible for many of the things William did.’
‘Okay.’
‘And when I say many, I mean some. Not everything. You have to remember that the stuff we did back then, the threats we were dealing with, they don’t exist today.’
Christina wasn’t sure what to say. Took a sip of her coffee instead.
‘It was quite an awkward conversation,’ he continued. ‘The things I wanted to ask her are still classified, and she couldn’t give me any details or straight answers. But she did express her regrets about what happened. She knew William too, and she wanted me to tell you how upset she was.’
Christina shrugged. It didn’t help her very much to know that a thirty-five-year-old cryptographer was sitting in a bunker somewhere feeling upset.
‘But essentially, she confirmed what I told you. She said it was inconceivable that an organisation would exist with the need, or the capacity, to do something like this. And as far as she could tell, there has been no web traffic or other communication that would imply matters are about to escalate.’
‘And you’re sure she would tell you? If she actually knew there was?’
Palmgren got her point. Of course he couldn’t know. But he was sure enough to nod and continue:
‘We talked for quite a while. She understood the situation you’re in. And eventually she promised to ask around and get back to me, just in case someone else could come up with an explanation.’
‘And?’ said Christina.
Palmgren paused. It lasted for so long the atmosphere grew strained. His troubled eyes remained solemnly focused on hers.
‘Did William ever tell you about a computer he built?’
‘We never talked about work. Especially not his.’
‘You’re very loyal,’ he said. There was a wry note in his voice, but it was warm and friendly and without hostility.
‘Let me put it this way,’ Christina said, ‘we had people sneaking around in our garden. Our phones were tapped – or were they? Nobody could ever prove it – and at times there were vans parked in the street for days on end until the police came and parked next to them. I didn’t want to talk about his job.’
Okay. Her point was made.
‘William was in charge of a small, top-secret research group,’ he said. ‘Only a handful of people knew of its existence. He developed a machine for cracking extremely complicated ciphers; it was the best thing you could get at the time – at least as far as we knew – and for all I know it may still be one of the most advanced machines in its field. He called it the Scientific Assistant for Reconstructional Arithmetics.’
A second passed, and then she registered. As she broke into a smile, it took her by surprise. Not the smile so much as the lump in her throat.
‘The son of a bitch,’ she said, but with tenderness. ‘He named it Sara.’
Palmgren leaned forward in his chair. ‘As I said, nobody knew this computer existed. Nobody outside the research team, and obviously some people further up the chain of command who provided the finance or made the decisions. You know how it works.’
She did. ‘And?’
‘Livia never called me back. But three hours after we hung up – don’t ask me who, don’t ask me why – but
three hours later, I got a call from a withheld number. It was a man. He wouldn’t say who he was, but he told me he worked for the same unit. And the first thing he said was that he wouldn’t be answering any questions, and that he would hang up as soon as he’d finished talking. Of course I immediately started looking for a tape recorder, but who the hell has a tape recorder lying around these days? All I could find was a pen and some paper. Then I listened to him for two minutes, and when he hung up, I realised I hadn’t written a single word.’
‘What did he say?’ Christina heard herself ask. As if he weren’t about to tell her.
‘Sara’s gone.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘The computer.’
‘Stolen?’
‘Not according to man on the phone.’ He shifted in his seat. ‘Two weeks ago Defence Headquarters got in touch with him, enquiring about an inventory check. They asked questions about equipment and material, as if they were conducting a routine survey of resources for the lack of anything better to do. And one of the things they asked about was Sara.’
Christina listened intently. Forgot about the coffee in front of her. Concentrated to hear his soft-spoken voice over the espresso machine.
Their asking about Sara had made the nameless caller suspicious. Sara wasn’t mentioned in any official logs. Nobody could call and check if the machine was okay, because nobody knew it existed. And if you did, you knew what it was built to do. And that meant that, if you asked for Sara, it was a dead certainty that something was going on.
Three days later the man had decided to carry out a little inventory check of his own.
By then, Sara was no longer in the storage unit.
Somebody had taken Sara out through gates and iron doors and heavy underground lifts and without registering their entrance or exit. There were no records of visits to the facility, and yet, Sara had ceased to exist, in the same way she had never officially existed in the first place.
When Palmgren finished relating his story there was a moment of silence.
‘Who?’ she asked. ‘Who took Sara?’
‘I don’t know. He never found out.’
‘Defence Headquarters?’
‘When things don’t go through formal channels? Ten times out of ten, it’s because they can’t.’
‘Which means they’re wrong,’ she said, ‘aren’t they? You are wrong and they are wrong: something is happening, and even if you have no idea what it is and William’s replacement doesn’t know, then someone in the Defence Headquarters does. Right? Something is going on, and the military wants to keep it secret.’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But somebody does.’
He said nothing. And she started over.
‘If you’re saying that the Swedish Armed Forces in one way or another have allowed someone to buy or borrow or use William’s computer, it’s logical to suppose that that someone would also know who abducted William.’
Palmgren’s silence was a yes.
‘So who would be allowed to do that?’
Palmgren gave her a long look.
‘Who would be allowed to borrow a top-secret military computer?’
Silence. And then came his answer:
‘Nobody.’
Christina stayed sitting at the table long after Palmgren had left, going through what he had said and trying to understand exactly what it meant.
What worried her most was that he was afraid.
Two days earlier he’d been as eager as she was. But something had changed.
She’d ended their meeting by asking him to contact William’s replacement a second time, but this time he’d refused. He’d told her he was unable to help, and politely warned her not to ask again.
This wasn’t simply about a misplaced computer, it was something much bigger, and to Palmgren it was frightening enough to make him refuse to help a friend. That could only mean William’s disappearance was tied up with a major classified operation, perhaps on an international scale.
Which meant this was no longer just a personal issue.
The combination of military secrets and an abduction, possibly with the approval of Sweden’s top brass, from a journalistic standpoint reeked of headlines and copies sold. Christina knew she would have no trouble talking her bosses into letting her follow up on the case.
She reached for her phone. It had been on silent since the moment she entered the café at least an hour earlier, and as she looked at the screen there were four missed calls flashing back at her.
They were all from Leo.
She called him straight away. Listened to the ringtone as he no doubt fumbled around in his pockets for his phone. If his pockets were as well organised as his thoughts, she’d probably end up being switched to his voicemail and would have to call back.
But he answered on the third ring.
She could tell from the background noise that he was outdoors. He was short of breath, and spoke quickly.
‘We need to meet,’ he said. ‘We need to meet now.’
William stood in front of the handbasin, whiteboard pen in his hand. His breathing was ragged with excitement, his mind darting about, restless like a tracker dog that has cornered its prey and doesn’t know what to do next.
As if his brain couldn’t believe what it had just found out.
He looked at the bathroom mirror in front of him. It was covered with the number sequences he’d written up the night before last. On the left side was the coded version, next to a clutter of calculations and arrows, scribbled haphazardly in an attempt to link them to the decoded numbers on the right.
And beyond the pen strokes his own reflection stared straight back at him. His skin ruddy after the disinfection process. His hair left to dry in a haphazard mess. But what surprised him were his eyes. Focused, energetic, burning with an enthusiasm he hadn’t experienced in years.
It was a bizarre situation, and he didn’t like it one bit. He could very well be infected with a deadly virus. But looking at himself in the mirror he couldn’t remember when he’d last felt this good.
He shook it off. He didn’t want to lose track. Refocused, concentrated on the text on the mirror.
He needed to see it. Tangibly, written out in front of him.
And he took the lid off the pen, looked back and forth between the numbers. He erased all the zeros. Replaced them with As. Same thing with the ones, replaced them with Gs. The twos and the threes he replaced with Cs and with Ts, and eventually all the numbers were gone.
And there it was, in front of him.
It was as obvious as it was simple, but he’d had to see it laid out like this, visually and irrefutably, to be certain his mind hadn’t got carried away and skipped across holes in the logic without seeing them.
In front of him on the mirror was a long chaotic row of As, Gs, Cs and Ts.
A DNA sequence.
That had to be it. That’s what she’d been trying to tell him. The code he’d been given, the one they wanted him to crack, had arrived hidden in some form of DNA.
In a virus? So it seemed. A deadly, contagious virus.
Yet it felt far-fetched. Who would write a text in cuneiform script, turn it into pixels and store it in encrypted form inside a virus? And why? Why on earth would anyone do that?
It was far-fetched.
He reached for a towel and carefully wiped the mirror clean, ensuring that nothing stayed on the glass and that nobody would be able to see what he’d discovered. He threw the towel into the bathtub, pressed his forehead against the tiled wall, hoped that the coolness of the glazed ceramics would clear his head.
He needed to speak to Janine again. There were thousands of questions he hadn’t known to ask when they stood out there on the terrace. It occurred to him that he didn’t know where she was at this moment. Perhaps she was being kept in her room, just like him – assuming she had private quarters like his – and perhaps she was waiting, like him, to find out whether she’d been infected
or not.
He had to concede, though, that they’d probably taken her somewhere else. Perhaps they were interrogating her, perhaps worse. Perhaps they were doing everything they could to find out what she’d told him, what she’d come up with that she shouldn’t. Perhaps they were using methods that went against international law, but who would ever know, beyond these stone walls. Maybe the same fate awaited him, too. Maybe he knew too much now, and she knew even more; maybe that was the reason his predecessor had vanished. Maybe Janine would follow, and him too.
And who would know? Who misses someone who’s already missing?
He pulled himself together. Rolled his forehead across the tiles, left, right, temple to temple, trying to cool his head.
The texts. That’s what she’d said.
She’d been given cuneiform texts to translate, and they’d given her other texts that didn’t fit, and she’d been given them in the wrong order to confuse her. But she’d guessed something. The question was what.
He started over from the beginning.
What did he know?
A text. Written in a language that had been extinct for thousands of years.
Okay.
That someone had then digitised into black-and-white matrices.
Very well.
Matrices that had been converted into quaternary code.
And which had then —
Wait.
His thoughts stopped short. It was that feeling again, for the second time the same morning. A realisation breaking over him like a wave; the overwhelming sense of discovering something that had been visible all the while, like that name of that actress who was married to the guy in that movie and whose name comes to you the minute you stop thinking about it. That exact feeling.
The matrices.
He stood absolutely still, his face flat against the tiles, eyes shut so as not to let his thoughts escape.
Suddenly it came to him. The structure of the pixelated images, where he’d seen it before. It was as absurd as it was obvious.
And just as suddenly, he realised that what he had been given to solve was far more improbable than he’d ever imagined.
Chain of Events Page 13