But where would they come from?
What did he have to dream of ?
He who knew the truth?
He heard his own steps echo up the stairwell.
They were shuffling. They never used to do that.
And he asked himself whether he’d made the right choice when Franquin had persuaded him to join them on that rainy October day.
Whether there still was any hope left that they’d succeed.
And whether it wouldn’t have been better to let Sandberg know everything, now that they’d told him this much anyway.
18
The first morning William Sandberg woke up to a new understanding of the world, he stood at his window, gazing at the view for a long time, before he could bring himself to do anything else.
Everything was exactly the same but behind a layer of make-believe.
Everything he’d done before, everything that was standard and routine and nothing special, of all that he now performed and watched and tasted with a constant filter of detachment, as if everything that was true and real the day before had suddenly and in one single blow been transformed into something different.
He hadn’t slept well. Yesterday’s conversation had kept repeating, over and over in his head. He’d tried to analyse single words, the way they were said and how heads had been turned in the room, all in his hunt for some detail he might have heard but not grasped at the time. And in the space between sleep and consciousness he’d tried to form new questions, steer the conversation in new directions, only to realise that his subconscious couldn’t reveal things he didn’t know.
What they’d told him was nothing short of absurd. And no matter how much he grappled with the facts, how much he tried to understand, he always came back to the feeling that it wasn’t true. Because, he thought, it simply couldn’t be.
He stood inside the thin windows, watched the view bend through the uneven glass, as if the entire world around him wanted to join in and illustrate that nothing he took for granted could be relied on any more. Eventually he closed his eyes, let his mind wander freely.
He thought about the conversation. He thought about the woman with the American accent, Janine, who’d wanted to show him something on a piece of paper but who hadn’t had the time.
And most of all he thought of Sara.
She was adopted, but from the moment they first saw her she was theirs. She was such a natural addition to their little family that William and Christina didn’t give it a second thought, things were what they were and there was nothing remarkable about that, and not until the day they told her did it occur to them that for Sara, the whole world had been transformed completely because of one single piece of news.
One moment she was mature and ready to hear it. She was fifteen, sensible and grown-up enough to know the truth, fifteen and dressed-in-jeans and living-in-the-city and coffee and hidden cigarettes. And the next moment she was a child again, the same girl who used to crawl up to them at night when they still lived in the house, the same girl who’d proudly stood in her pyjamas ten years previously, that stupid damned morning when he turned thirty-seven and that would always be etched in his memory as a time when everything was good.
The same girl, that’s who she was. Older, but then again not older at all. Mature, but not mature enough.
They’d told her right there across the dining table, and in an instant they were transformed into two strangers, a pair of liars seated in front of her, smiling and comforting her and claiming that they loved her, and behind them gaped a void of unknown reality, a void that had always existed but that they hadn’t let her see until now.
The colour of Sara’s eyes had changed before them. They used to be green and warm, but that morning they’d turned a black that would never go away, she got up from the table without a word, and that moment drew a thick line across their reality, a line that nobody could ever cross again.
Perhaps that had been when it all began. Perhaps that moment marked the start of everything that would happen, the snowball that was set in motion and that kept growing until William was lying there in the bathtub with a chemical drowsiness and a locked front door.
Perhaps.
He had never been able to understand why she’d reacted the way she did. He and Christina were her parents, and for them nothing changed. Their world was the same as the day before, or as last week or as any other day. But for Sarah everything crumbled.
And here, standing in front of his window, William suddenly understood.
It was as if somebody had just told him his life wasn’t actually his. As if he’d just been told he’d been adopted by reality, as if in fact he’d come from somewhere else and now he didn’t know where, or why, or whether anything around him was indeed what he thought it was.
The human DNA. Full of text.
His own DNA, and Christina’s, and Sara’s, even though she wasn’t their biological child, and the bull-necked man and Connors and Franquin and the children in the park and the old lady at the supermarket and everyone else in human history, the same coded texts, and why?
He closed his eyes, turned away from the view, tried to clear his head. He wanted to stay sharp, sceptical, to keep asking.
How could he be certain it wasn’t a lie, a smokescreen to stop him from understanding some other truth?
He couldn’t be. And he sat down on the bed again. Tried to run through the previous day in his mind.
His biggest concern was the feeling they still weren’t telling him everything. There remained too many unanswered questions.
He got up. Grabbed some fruit from the tray next to his bed, poured a fresh cup of coffee. There were holes in what they were telling him. And they were holes he couldn’t fill himself. He needed to know what those messages said, what they meant and what everyone was so afraid of, and what they thought they’d solve by having William help them code an answer.
There were holes, and only one person could help him fill them.
He was almost certain they’d do all they could to stop him from seeing her.
William had showered and dressed in a white shirt, new pair of jeans and a thin, dark jacket when his appointed guard opened the door with timing too good to be purely a coincidence. He was probably under surveillance in his bedroom too.
‘I’m coming,’ William said, his tone brisk to signal that he was perfectly capable of managing his own schedule, and that he wouldn’t need to be escorted between his room and his office for the rest of his life, or however long they planned to keep him there. ‘I think I can find my own way.’
But the guard stood firm. ‘Connors wants to speak to you.’
William stared at him for a second. Took a last swig of his coffee. Placed the mug on the table to show he was ready. He wanted very much to talk to Connors, too.
And so they exited into the stone corridor and disappeared into the cold maze that was the castle.
Within a second of waking, Janine was hit by a crippling fatigue.
She recognised it all too well, and she fought the urge to turn over and go back to sleep, away from the castle, away from everything and back into her dreams and just stay there. She couldn’t let herself break down again. Not now.
Instead, she made herself sit up on the edge of her bed. No lying down. Up, walk across the room, go into the bathroom. Small steps. Think ahead.
She got into the shower and turned on the water, first ice-cold to wake her up, then as hot as she could take for as long as possible, and then back to a normal, soothing temperature that allowed her body to recover from the shock.
She couldn’t let it happen again.
Helena Watkins had pulled her out of her depression the last time. Without her she wouldn’t have made it.
It was Helena who had let her see the codes, even though it was against protocol, it was she who’d told her about the mailroom in the cellars and who’d pushed the key card under her door that night, trying to warn her, rambling on about a p
lan B that was in fact called something else. Back then Janine hadn’t understood anything of what was happening. Now she did. Only too well.
Helena Watkins had known too much. It couldn’t be any other way. And now she was gone, and wouldn’t be able to help if Janine fell apart.
So she couldn’t. She had to stay alert and continue to fight.
They had kept interrogating her until two in the morning, and she suspected they weren’t done even though they’d eventually called a halt to let her rest. But she also knew they hadn’t beaten her. She had managed to remain composed and awake and sincere, and they wouldn’t know what she’d found out as long as she didn’t tell them.
And she hadn’t told them.
Which gave her an advantage.
That was an advantage she was going to use, and then Albert was going to show up, and after that everything should be fine again.
It was the only option there was. Everything had to be fine again.
When she walked out of her bathroom ten minutes later, her tiredness was gone.
Small steps.
The first thing she had to do was talk to William Sandberg.
It turned out to be quite a long walk.
The guard led William through the stone corridors, the same routes he’d tried to explore himself the previous day, and then on and down the large official staircase that he’d seen at a distance but never made it up to before someone put a T-shirt in his mouth and made him shut up.
After that, new passages appeared, wide and with arched ceilings and with iron chandeliers hanging at regular intervals, and when at last they came to a huge pair of wooden doors, he once again reassessed his impression of the castle’s size.
The chamber inside was a chapel, large enough to accommodate a congregation of a hundred or more. The bricked, vaulted ceiling peaked in sharp angles high in the air above him, hand-painted frescoes covered the walls, from the back of the rows of weathered pews and all the way to the altar, bathed in the light flooding in through the huge stained-glass windows behind it.
The guard waved him forward. Remained by the entrance, waiting until William was halfway up the aisle before he withdrew, closing the heavy door behind him with an echo that never seemed to end.
On the front pew sat Connors. His eyes fixed on the stained glass, with only a brief glance at William as he sat down beside him.
It was a strange place to meet. And yet, William thought he knew why Connors had chosen it.
‘I’m not a believer,’ William said.
‘Neither am I,’ said Connors.
They sat for a moment. Silent, listening as their words echoed like staccato whispers along the ceiling before they faded out and disappeared.
‘How was your night?’
‘It’s a very comfortable bed to not sleep in.’
Connors smiled. Good answer. Looked back into the tinted light. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I’m not a believer. I’m a thinker.’
William remained silent.
‘There’s something soothing about sitting here. The first time I came here I was exactly where you are now. As if someone had taken everything I believed in and shaken it like a large… what are they called? Those souvenirs you shake to make it snow on Big Ben or the Taj Mahal or whichever airport you happened to buy the thing at. All your thoughts fly around just like that, and you can’t keep hold of any of them, or follow them with your eyes, the only thing you can do is to wait until they land, until things calm down and you can start to make out what it is you’re looking at.’
He turned to William for a response. And William nodded. That was exactly where he was.
‘It used to help me, sitting here. The stillness. The silence. The light.The feeling that people have always been looking for answers. We aren’t the first who don’t understand.’
We. William registered the choice of words, but didn’t say anything. We, as if they were a team now, as if they were facing a common problem and had the same starting point and the same knowledge and it was obviously complete bullshit, but he didn’t say so. Instead, he looked at Connors:
‘I’m the first person to see the usefulness of a useful idiot.’
Connors turned his head, surprised.
‘You’re right, of course,’ William continued. ‘I’ve been exactly where you are. I’ve had people working for me without letting them know everything. I’ve seen to it that they’ve understood their part of the job, separate tasks for separate people, and then it was my job to put the pieces together.’
There was a but in the air, and Connors waited for it.
‘I wonder if I wouldn’t be more useful an idiot if you let me know the reason I’m here.’
Connors looked ahead again. Let the seconds pass, either to allow him time to work out what to say, or possibly to ensure that William didn’t forget whose job it was to steer the conversation. Eventually, he decided that he’d been silent for long enough. He reached into his breast pocket, pulled out an envelope, handed it to William.
It was small and white, informal and standard-sized, one that could hold anything from a Christmas card to a wedding invitation. And William took it, quite sure that it wasn’t either.
Its weight surprised him. It wasn’t paper inside. It was an object, flat and significantly smaller than the envelope, and it seemed to slide from end to end as he turned it over, let his finger run under the flap to fold it open.
Let the contents fall into his hand.
A blue piece of plastic.
I’ll be damned. A key card.
He looked up at Connors. This wasn’t what he expected. And he tried to find words to express himself; he couldn’t understand why they would give him this, how it changed his status and what they hoped to achieve by it. And it occurred to him that once again, they’d shaken his snow globe, and perhaps that was the entire point.
‘Here’s how we want it to be,’ Connors said. ‘We want you to feel that you have everything you need to help us. We want you to feel free to ask us questions. And we want to help you with answers as far as we possibly can.’
‘And how far is that exactly?’
‘There’ll be limits. I don’t want to put you under more stress than necessary. But when we say we’re afraid of what’s going to happen, we’re not exaggerating. We need that code key. And we don’t have much time.’
‘Until what?’
‘As I said. There will be limits.’
William watched him. He had thousands of questions. And yet, he couldn’t find a single one to ask. Perhaps it was exhaustion, perhaps his subconscious was struggling to keep up, but whatever the reason he couldn’t express what he was wondering. Which was the worst kind of uncertainty he could imagine.
‘Is there anything you’d like to know right now?’ Connors asked.
‘I want to know when I can see Janine Haynes.’
The treble of William’s voice echoed around the chapel, ebbing out into cool streaks of air between the Christian icons in the rafters, leaving behind that silence that Connors had talked about, the one that made time stand still.
As Connors had said. It was soothing.
‘Soon,’ was the reply.
And they sat for a few moments, until Connors was sure there wasn’t anything else that needed not to be said, and he stood up, moved past William in his pew and set off down the aisle towards the exit.
‘One more thing,’ William said behind him.
Connors turned. Yes?
‘Can I assume this thing here isn’t going to let me go anywhere in the castle I’d like?’
Connors smiled. An amused smile, sincere and friendly in the midst of everything. ‘You’re not an idiot,’ he said. ‘Neither are we.’
And then he carried on towards the wooden door, leaving William alone with a worldview that wasn’t ready to be understood, in the middle of a room that tried to impose its own.
William was still sitting in the pew, a black silhouette in front of what should have been a
multitude of colours but that shone like an overexposed white field on one of the monitors, as Connors entered the surveillance room a good twenty minutes later. He closed the steel door behind him, took his place on the floor next to Franquin.
Both of them hesitated to speak. As if William’s presence on the screen meant he could hear them, as if every thoughtless word or raised voice would allow him to detect the conflict that lingered under the surface, constantly waiting to flare.
When Franquin finally spoke, he did it calmly and quietly. ‘I only hope you know what you’re doing,’ he said.
‘You know as well as I do,’ said Connors.
Franquin waited for him to go on.
‘I’m clutching at straws. That’s what I’m doing.’
‘Let’s hope you’ve chosen the right straw, then.’
Franquin was frustrated. Not just at seeing the situation running away from them, but at the way Connors kept making his own choices and getting the others to accept them, even if they clashed with every protocol. It was wrong, and the timing was the worst possible.
‘How much does she know?’
‘They’re still not sure about that,’ Connors said.
‘And if they are allowed to meet and compare? What happens then?’
Connors shrugged. ‘We allowed her to meet Watkins.’
‘Indeed. And look how well that turned out.’
Connors threw him a tired glance. Didn’t want that fight, not again.
‘Why are you so afraid of letting them know?’ he said.
Franquin’s expression changed. As if Connors needed to ask. He lowered his voice even further, did his best to hold his irritation back. ‘Let’s say Sandberg can do it. Let’s say that his background still counts for something, in spite of all the things we know about him, and what he just tried to do to himself. Let’s say that in spite of all that he can handle the confidentiality.’ He locked eyes with Connors. ‘Even if he’s up to it, there’s still Haynes to consider.’
Chain of Events Page 17