Chain of Events

by Fredrik T. Olsson

  It was obvious what he meant. But instincts are instincts and before his brain made the connection, Leo had turned towards the voice, staring directly into the man’s face.

  ‘Straight ahead,’ he repeated through clenched teeth. ‘I’ll be one step behind you, talk to each other, not to me.’

  Christina nodded at Leo to confirm that she understood.

  Good. At least one of them got it.

  ‘What’s going on?’ she asked.

  ‘That’s what I want to ask you,’ he replied. And then: ‘How are you getting from the airport?’

  ‘We’ve a rental car waiting,’ she said to Leo, and Leo was about to reply that he knew that already when he caught on and gave a curt nod. Hopefully, that was what he would have done if she’d actually addressed the remark to him. The situation made him feel surprisingly unsure of that. Or of anything, come to think of it.

  ‘Good,’ said the man. ‘I’m going to follow you out, and when you’ve reversed out of the parking bay you’re going to stop and let me into the back seat.’

  They proceeded in silence, followed the signs with the car-rental logos, heading towards the exit.

  And then, Christina turned to Leo again. ‘Before you do that? Before you get into our car? Would you mind telling us who you are?’

  They took a few more steps.

  As if he didn’t want to say it out loud.

  People passed them, heels clicking on the polished floor, and the man waited, keeping pace behind them until there was nobody close enough to hear.

  ‘My name is Albert van Dijk. I understand you’ve been looking for me.’

  24

  If Christina and Leo had turned round as they left gate D61 and walked towards Customs and the large arrivals hall at Schiphol airport, they’d have been able to see Captain Adam Riebeeck hurry through security in the other direction.

  His flight bag wobbled on rubber wheels behind him, and a group of people in identical uniforms followed close on his heels.

  There was a Boeing 747-400 waiting for him at Pier E.

  He was going to fly it to Los Angeles with an almost fully booked cabin, and he was irritable and in a bad mood and that was a bad way to start a day.

  He hated rental cars.

  The one saving grace in the hell that was having to sleep in his own home, with its endless conversations about conflicts that seemed to have materialised in his absence, the compulsory quality time with a horde of children who had somehow been brought into the world even though Adam Riebeeck and his wife spent most of their relationship discussing what was wrong with it, the one saving grace in all that was the fact that he got a chance to drive his own car. He loved his dark blue Mercedes, he loved the sensation of sinking into the leather seats, loved listening to the compressor when all the ridiculously unnecessary horsepower reversed him out of the garage. He’d turn off the radio and the air conditioning, he’d listen to the silence in the front seat, search for the hum of the motor as it rumbled under the bonnet, trying to penetrate the sound insulation without succeeding.

  To be honest, it was the only thing he loved about being home.

  And now, Adam Riebeeck’s Mercedes was at the garage.

  It hadn’t been his fault. He’d been driving perfectly calmly, always giving his full attention to the traffic around him, when things had suddenly happened out of nowhere. Now, thanks to some lunatic who should never have been allowed behind the wheel of a car he’d had to spend his day off in a fucking Seat that mysteriously reeked of cigars even though the rental company insisted nobody had ever smoked in it. And now he was going back to work and that was probably just as well.

  The crew walked on board in silence. The captain’s temper hung as a dark cloud over the entire crew, but everyone knew this was how he always behaved when he flew out from Amsterdam, and as soon as they landed somewhere else in the world Adam Riebeeck would be charming and agreeable and a completely different person.

  As they settled into the cockpit and strapped their seat belts across their chests, his co-pilot dared to put the question: ‘Why the rental car?’

  Riebeeck glowered at him. ‘You should try reading a newspaper from time to time.’

  It took a moment before the co-pilot understood what he meant.

  ‘No way,’ he said. ‘The pile-up?’

  ‘Some idiot in a Toyota shot off the bridge and landed on the road right in front of me. He said I was lucky to walk away from it.’

  ‘Who did?’

  ‘The doctor. The guy who checked me out. Did you read the paper or not?’

  The co-pilot shrugged. And with that, the conversation was over.

  When one of the stewardesses stuck her head around the door a few minutes later, putting two cups of coffee down in the holders between their seats, the two pilots were already well into the safety checks.

  ‘Will there be anything more?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Riebeeck. And she looked at him expectantly. ‘I really could do with someone to scratch my back.’

  The smile she gave him was so dry she might as well have shown him her middle finger. But they had a long flight ahead of them and so she thought better of it.

  ‘I believe that’s your co-pilot’s task,’ she said. ‘Union rules, not mine.’ And she turned round, exited the cockpit, leaving the two pilots to their routines.

  Captain Adam Riebeeck looked after her, amused and disappointed at once. He hadn’t been joking. His back itched. In fact, it itched to the point where it was unbearable, and it had been the whole morning.

  But he didn’t say anything. Merely indicated for his co-pilot to carry on, and as switch after switch was read out and checked and confirmed, Riebeeck let his pen travel down into the gap between his collar and his neck, trying to reach the area that was driving him mad.

  His mind was far too busy going through the safety protocols to realise that the soft warmth that spread down his back might be blood.

  25

  The young guy behind the wheel was such a bad driver that Albert van Dijk asked himself whether his chances of survival wouldn’t have been higher if he’d surrendered to the men outside his apartment.

  ‘You need to go right!’ he shouted, the desperation in his voice so obvious that Leo looked up and met the man’s eyes in the mirror.

  ‘Turn?’ he said. ‘Now?’

  ‘No. Right side of the road.’

  Oh. Leo scanned the road ahead of him, saw that he was indeed driving straight towards the oncoming traffic, and swung sharply back to his right. Carried on driving in silence, his hands clutching the wheel and his body awash with adrenalin, wet from sweat even though the heater was struggling to warm the car.

  He was a perfectly good driver. He really was. What he wasn’t so good at was predicting when a one-way street suddenly and without warning was transformed into a two-way street with oncoming traffic. Leo was positive there must be road signs to relay that kind of information, but here he was behind the wheel trying to drive out of a city that had far too few signs and too many trams. And to top it off, he hadn’t a clue where they were going.

  Albert’s eyes slowly let go of him.

  In the passenger seat was the woman who’d called his secretary, and he tried to calm down and concentrate on her instead. Her business card informed him her name was Christina Sandberg and that she was a journalist, but thus far their attempts to start a conversation had been thwarted by the driver’s repeated attempts to kill them all.

  Christina broke the silence. ‘How come you’re wanted?’

  ‘They showed up outside my house. I might have killed one of them.’

  ‘They?’ she asked. ‘Who?’

  ‘I was hoping you would have some thoughts on that.’

  Christina shook her head. And the silence returned, broken only by the sounds of sharp turns and a cursing driver.

  They had left the city centre behind them. Outside, the late afternoon turned to dusk, light from streetlamps and
oncoming cars sweeping over them at regular intervals.

  ‘Why did you come here?’

  Christina looked at Albert. ‘What do you know?’ she said.

  ‘Only what you told my secretary.’

  Okay. Christina began at the beginning. William’s disappearance, Leo’s discovery of the newswire story, the similarities. How both of them worked with codes, albeit from different angles.

  Albert listened. Nodded where appropriate, without interrupting.

  His feelings were mixed. On the one hand he wanted badly to believe the two abductions were related. That would make everything so much easier; they would be able to compare information and experiences and perhaps reach a conclusion that took them further. But on the other hand it wasn’t much to go on. So they were both missing, and they happened to have similar skills, fine. But there had been more than six months between their disappearances and they didn’t even happen in the same country.

  Christina sensed his scepticism.

  ‘I never got to bed last night,’ she said. ‘I went through each and every archive I could access, digging out everything I could find. About the investigation. About Janine.’

  Leo glanced at her. This was news to him.

  ‘There was one thing in one of the reports. Only a passing reference. To the fact that the police wrote it off as a voluntary disappearance, because…’ She tried to find the right word, wanted to get as close as possible to what the article had said. ‘… because, as far as the investigation could ascertain, she had taken all of her personal belongings with her. Something along those lines.’

  It was a small detail, but if she was about to say what Albert suspected she was, it was an important one. ‘Yes?’ he said.

  ‘When my ex-husband vanished?’ She turned around in her seat, one leg tucked under the other, facing Albert as much as she could without undoing her seat belt. ‘He took everything with him. And when I say everything I don’t mean just clothes, toothpaste, you know, the stuff you take when you take everything. But everything. Computers, research literature, data on old experiments and notes and stuff he wouldn’t be taking anywhere for any reason whatsoever.’

  Leo looked at her from the corner of his eye. Waited for the second part, the part about the left-behind photos of their daughter, but it didn’t come. She didn’t say anything more, just sat there, watching as Albert processed the news.

  When someone finally spoke it was from the back seat.

  ‘They kept saying she’d left me,’ he said slowly. ‘They said she must’ve planned it, that it wasn’t unusual for loved ones to be abandoned without warning and that of course they understood it was hard for me to accept it and the only thing I could think was fuck you right back. But I didn’t say it very often.’ A pause. ‘I just knew.’

  ‘She’d taken too much with her,’ said Christina.

  He shook his head to say yes. Shook his head at all the questions he’d asked himself, over and over again, and for the first time he said them out loud to someone who seemed to be thinking along the same lines.

  ‘Why would she do that? Clothes she never wore. Notes from old lectures, courses she didn’t even care about. Stuff that I had kept from my mother, but that I stored in her wardrobe. Everything.’

  ‘And what was your conclusion?’

  ‘That someone did her packing for her.’

  Christina nodded in agreement.

  Albert hesitated. ‘If it is the same people behind both cases,’ he said, an emphasis on the if, as though he refused to believe it, ‘then what does that mean?’

  He looked at her, as if negotiating with himself, as if he wanted to say more but wasn’t sure whether he should. Then, leaning forward:

  ‘Does your ex-husband have any connection to Switzerland?’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Because I received this.’

  Locking his eyes on hers, he pulled the yellow envelope from his pocket. The one that was addressed to Emanuel Sphynx, that was stamped with a franking machine marked Bern, that he’d shown to the police and that was the reason he couldn’t go back home, or to his work, or anywhere else where he was expected to show up.

  She took it. Turned it over. Opened it. Three sheets of paper. Written by hand.

  A thousand questions. And Christina opened her mouth to ask them.

  The moment she did, their car swerved off the road.

  Leo’s reaction was completely irrational, but may well have been what saved them.

  His immediate thought was that they’d been hit, that probably he’d done something wrong, and he veered right, assuming that he must have inexplicably ended up in the wrong lane again without noticing.

  But Leo was already driving as far to the right as he could.

  And as the rental car heaved itself over the verge to their right there was no more road to find, nothing but grass and terrain and a whole lot of bumps that passed under them as Leo pressed the brake pedal down into the rubber mat with all the force he could muster.

  It wasn’t until the car came to a halt that they realised what had happened.

  The noise of their bumping car was gone, but replaced by a growing roar, a vibration that increased in intensity, louder and louder and refusing to end, and above the crest of the ditch the misty afternoon dusk flickered in yellow instead of its usual grey.

  They climbed out into a smell of dirt and petrol. Everything dark from smoke. And as they reached the top of the ditch, they stopped.

  They’d been lucky.

  The airliner had passed directly above their heads, at an altitude just high enough not to take them with it. After hundreds of metres it had finally hit the ground, mowing down everything in its path and with no intention of stopping.

  The tree that had made Leo steer off the road lay on the asphalt ahead them, just above the edge of the ditch. It was surrounded by other trees, broken and split and scattered across the road together with TV antennas and telephone poles that the descending jet had brought down, perhaps smashing them with its engines, perhaps with some other part of the fuselage as it came in like a frisbee, sliding flatly through the air, then on through the landscape and through the houses and through the entire suburban sprawl in the distance.

  Long before anyone reached for their phones to call for help, the flashing blue lights were already appearing in the distance.

  Within minutes the landscape was transformed. From dark and silent to bright and illuminated and teeming with people.

  And the calm, chilly night was gone, never to return.

  26

  Janine led him to the wall, walked to the end of the cuneiform symbols and put her hand flat over one of the pages.

  ‘The paper I gave you,’ she said. ‘Look at it.’

  He did. The last few symbols on his paper were identical to the ones on the paper on the wall. They obviously represented an event that had found its corresponding place on the timeline, and whatever was written there obviously terrified her, but he was still none the wiser.

  ‘I didn’t know where they were supposed to go,’ she said. ‘But it scared me.’ And then, after a pause: ‘This is the reason we’re here.’

  He waited for her to continue.

  ‘Everything that’s happening. Helena Watkins. The fear about you and I being infected. The virus. It has to be.’

  William’s eyes told her that he wasn’t there yet.

  ‘They knew it would happen. They knew, and now it is.’

  ‘What is?’

  She hesitated, wondering how to phrase it. She didn’t want it to sound naïve or stupid or trite, or like something out of a graphic novel. But she couldn’t come up with anything that didn’t sound like a combination of all of that.

  ‘I think we’re going to die. Correction: I know.’

  William massaged his temples between thumbs and forefingers, his hand pressed so firmly against his cheek it hurt, as if this would somehow help him to collect his thoughts. It did
n’t.

  ‘How do you know that?’ he said, his voice a whisper. ‘Not how, I don’t care about how, but how the hell can you know? How can you stand there looking at those verses, and one second you’re telling me it’s an ideographic language and can be interpreted in different ways, and then the next you’re telling me that you know? How?’

  ‘It’s language. I can’t draw you a diagram. I just know.’

  ‘But why are you so sure you haven’t got it wrong? Why can’t you have drawn the wrong conclusion? Why can’t you be right about some of this, about the order, the historical events, about all of that other stuff, but not about what you’re saying now?’

  Janine wished more than anything that he was right.

  The problem was she knew he wasn’t. She knew that the texts about the past corroborated the ones about the future, that the wall corroborated her own thoughts, and that no matter how much he tried to shoot them down she’d be able to defend her logic and tell him exactly how she’d reached her conclusion.

  As an academic, she ought to be satisfied. Instead, she swung between fear and something else that she couldn’t put her finger on.

  Sorrow?

  She heaved a long sigh, turned back to the wall, worked her way backwards through all the printouts, looking for the right place. There. Stopped beside it, her hand firmly on one of the sheets.

  ‘Here. Fourteenth century. Can we agree on that?’

  He cocked his head. And she saw what that meant: Maybe, he meant, maybe, you’re right in your assumptions about the timeline and the order and the events. And she threw up her arms in frustration. For Christ’s sake! She knew that he understood, he just didn’t want to understand, and they didn’t have the time to keep debating the point.

  ‘The rise of the Mongolian empire,’ she said, pointing along the rows of sheets to her left. ‘The destruction of Samarkand and Bukhara. Go ahead and look it up if you want.’

  She kept her hand resting on the fourteenth century. Pointed to the right: ‘In that direction: Constantinople. The Shensi earthquake. Novgorod. Objections?’