He had, but held them back.
And she returned to the paper in front of her. ‘That makes this the fourteenth century. The outbreak of the Black Death. Again’ – she pointed to some of the individual symbols – ‘Rats. Disease. Contagion. Death. An unstoppable plague.’
She spoke the last words with her eyes fixed on his, as if what she’d just said was something huge and terrifying and as if he already ought to have understood.
‘And why,’ he said, ‘why does that mean we’re going to die?’
‘Because of this,’ she said.
She took the paper in front of her, pulled gently until it came away from the wall, two small tears where the pins had held it in place. She folded it like an accordion, made row after row disappear in crease after crease until only the lowest row of symbols remained visible.
Walked towards William. Walked the length of the wall, past the nineteenth century, the Second World War and the tsunami, all the way to the corner where William was standing next to the sheet whose symbols were the same as those in his hand. Almost as far right as the wall went.
She held up her neatly folded paper immediately below it.
The two rows, perfectly aligned with each other. They matched.
The exact same words. An unstoppable plague.
And she looked at him. Saw that he understood.
‘Because of this.’
Annie Wagner sprinted through the corridors, repeatedly diving out of the way of rattling gurneys and trolleys loaded with equipment, blocking her way in places they shouldn’t be.
Confusion reigned, and it was about to get worse.
She’d been working at Dr Joseph Grosse’s side all day, had seen the intensity in his eyes as he hurried from one operation to the next, saving patient after patient like a god moving between bodies and breathing life back as it ran out.
He’d been first on the scene; he had tended to the casualties on the motorway, given them first aid and helped prioritise the injuries, making sure casualties were transported to Slotervaart Hospital in the most efficient order. Then, he’d stood in operating room after operating room until his eyes lost the ability to focus, until his exhaustion had made him slow and careless and someone eventually had to order him to get some sleep.
And now this.
When the alarm sounded, everyone’s first reaction was disbelief.
It was unthinkable, it couldn’t be, not after a day like this, it had to be a hoax, someone’s idea of a joke, a cruel, cruel joke. And all the calls that needed to be made, the measures that needed to be implemented, everything had taken far too much time. Everyone was shouting and running about and ambulances were on their way and Dr Grosse wouldn’t be getting more than a couple of hours’ sleep, at most.
She admired him. No, it was worse than that. She had a crush on him. And if that was a cliché then so be it, if it was corny and immature, then fine, corny and immature was what she was. Perhaps it was the crush that kept her running through the corridors, her posture straight in spite of her exhaustion, her steps springy and rhythmic as she raced along the linoleum floor towards where he slept.
Soon she would lay her hand on his shoulder and wake him with the news that something terrible had happened and hundreds more casualties were on their way in. And he would barely know her name and, if he did, that would be enough to keep her going a few hours more.
Her scream as the fluorescent lights blinked to life was enough to make every staff member on the entire floor stop what they were doing. They came running down the corridors, racing to the door where Annie Wagner stood, gasping for air, her eyes vacant. She’d thrown up on the floor in front of her, and their initial reaction was to make her sit, head between her knees, slow, deep breaths. She’d had a long day. They assumed it must be the fatigue and the drama catching up with her; she needed sleep and water and maybe some sugar, and then she’d be back on her feet again.
Those were everyone’s wordless thoughts.
Until they realised why she’d screamed.
One of the male nurses saw it first. His immediate thought was that Joseph Grosse must have been stabbed. Where else would all that blood have come from? The sheets were soaked in it, and it was running in rivulets to the floor, pooling around the drain in the corner under the sink.
The nurse rushed in, turned him over to take his pulse.
But Joseph Grosse had no neck to take a pulse at.
His skin remained stuck to the bed, left behind on the fabric when the nurse turned him over, sticking to the paper cover on the bunk like a half-baked muffin on a badly greased baking tin. Hours earlier Dr Grosse had been a hero in a white coat, running from ward to ward saving lives; now all that remained of him was a hideous flayed corpse, as if his body had been exposed to the elements for weeks instead of left to sleep for a few hours in a dark, cool room in one of Europe’s most modern hospitals.
As the young nurse turned to look at his colleagues in the doorway, he could find no words to express himself.
Minutes later the news reached the government.
By then the hospital was already quarantined and in lockdown.
27
Amsterdam was a sea of flashing colours.
There was blue from the emergency vehicles. Fire engines, police cars, ambulances, their deep blue beams sweeping through the air, rotating across the landscape and glinting back off reflective surfaces before disappearing into the afternoon darkness. There was white from the floodlights, some on top of cars and rescue vehicles, others hoisted up on to cranes to illuminate the scene and help rescue workers to see.
But most of all, there was yellow and orange. Fires of every size, from fiercely burning blazes to beds of glowing embers, marking the remains of what had once been a house or a tree or a car or whatever else had been burnt to ashes when the airliner slid through.
Amsterdam was in flames.
The wreckage of Flight 601 to Los Angeles loomed in the darkness, hundreds of metres ahead of them, blackened and glowing and broken into pieces, thick pillars of smoke from under a white blanket of foam.
Everywhere, policemen were telling people to step away, leave the area, even though they had better things to do than deal with ghouls and rubberneckers.
One of the police officers moved along the cordon, came up to Leo, and stopped.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked.
‘I was lucky,’ Leo answered.
‘You should have someone take a look at that.’
Leo’s eyebrow had bumped into the side window; it hurt and it throbbed and he could feel blood smeared over his forehead, but there were others much worse off than him. So he mumbled something non-committal and stepped aside to let the policeman pass. Albert, standing a few paces behind him, did the same, praying that the officer would be too caught up in the situation to remember the description of someone who’d recently pushed a man in front of a car.
‘Aren’t you freezing?’ he heard Leo ask.
He had to think about it. It was cold, yes, but he wasn’t freezing, in fact he was too numb to feel anything, even though he was only wearing a blazer and a thin shirt.
‘Go and put it on,’ said Leo. ‘Your coat. Go and get it. It’s freezing, trust me.’
And as Albert walked back to their car, Leo turned to survey the devastation in front of him. Watched it all without seeing, was aware of the smell of fuel and dirt but didn’t take it in, the same way he heard the engines and the sirens and the screaming without actually hearing a thing.
As Christina Sandberg came wading back through the frost-tinged grass, taking hurried steps along the blue-and-white police tape, it occurred to Leo that he didn’t know how long she’d been away.
She had her phone pressed to her ear and was trying to catch Leo’s eye, her finger raised in the air as if telling him to stand by. Stay there, the finger said. I’m going to need you.
It was a pointless instruction.
Even if Leo had been capable of a
conscious decision, he wouldn’t have had the slightest idea where else to go. They were stranded in the dark, in a foreign country on the outskirts of a city they didn’t know, where every civilian in sight was as shocked and stupefied and directionless as he was.
She came up to him. Turned off her call, handed him her phone.
‘I spoke to the news desk,’ she said. ‘How do I look?’
Leo had a number of answers to that question, none of them appropriate at the moment. On the one hand, she was frustratingly desirable by default. On the other, she looked very much like someone who’d been in a car crash, seen an airplane decimate a city, and then struggled to bury her emotions behind a press card in the hunt for whoever was in charge of the rescue operations, hoping to transform a catastrophic event into first-rate news material.
Leo chose to tell her none of this.
‘You look, what’s it called, what are you going to do?’
‘We’ll be streaming live on the website in five minutes,’ she said, as if it was the most natural thing in the world. She smiled without smiling, a face with years of training not to show her actual feelings, her fingers busily plumping up her curls in an unsuccessful effort to give them volume. Then she took her phone back, activated the front camera. Scrutinised the display, her face looking up at her. It wasn’t great, but it would have to do. Too polished would give the impression she wasn’t actually there. Too scruffy and she wouldn’t be taken seriously. She flicked her fingers across the screen again, found what she was looking for, and handed the phone back to him.
‘Give me yours.’
Leo tried to pull himself clear of the viscous morass of shock and detachment, and fumbled his phone out of his pocket and held it out to her. He was nervous, nervous to be working with Christina Sandberg, not just for but together with, and nervous that they were about to broadcast live, everything accessible online the moment they did it. And he knew he was being ridiculous, of course he was, the world had been turned upside down and half of Amsterdam was on fire and no one would give a rat’s ass whether he was holding the camera the right way. But it made no difference.
They were the top news site in Sweden. After an incident this big, the number of visitors would be off the chart, and in all likelihood they were the first news channel with a reporter on the scene, and shit, this was huge.
She calmly punched a number on his phone, put his tangled hands-free earpiece into her ear, watched him while she waited for someone to pick up.
‘No nerves now. You stand there and I’ll stand here, the plane in the background. Okay?’
She didn’t wait for an answer, held up her finger, this time as a sign for him to be quiet.
‘It’s me again. Are we good?’
Sound-wise, she meant. And she started to count into her dangling microphone, giving a voice sample to whoever was sitting at the other end of the line, thick layers of professionalism masking the fact she was feeling the same shock and terror as everyone else.
Leo was already pointing the camera at her.
And the voice in Christina’s ear gave her the thumbs up. They had video and audio and it looked fine and everyone was standing by to go as soon as she was ready.
She steadied her breathing, composed herself.
She was good at this. At staying calm when everything around her was reduced to chaos. It was at times like these that she loved her job most, it became a visor of detachment, shielding her, as if she was a parent to the entire world and could make order of chaos by explaining it to them.
Moments like this she knew how to handle.
The personal crises were harder; then there was no shield of objectivity to protect her from the raw emotions. But here and now she was a professional, she was the right person in the right place and she knew that not only was she about to make one of the first eyewitness broadcasts from Europe’s worst-ever plane crash, she was also relieved of the need to explain what the hell she was doing in Amsterdam.
Christina Sandberg closed her eyes as she completed her final run-through.
Okay. She was ready.
She stood straight, her demeanour appropriately grave, pulled the headset to get the microphone closer to her mouth, close enough but not in the way. And then she nodded at Leo, looked into the tiny lens in front of her.
‘I’m good to go.’
It wasn’t until a minute later, as he watched Christina report her findings into his camera, that Leo grasped the magnitude of what had happened.
The green standby symbol in the corner had changed into a red one labelled live, and the further she got into her story the more he had to fight to hold the phone steady.
The furrow that the plane had ploughed was over a hundred metres wide, she reported. It started as a crater of soot and soil along the northern edge of the Amstelpark where the plane had hit the ground, and then extended as a vast swathe of levelled rubble and wreckage where the airliner had careered across Euroroute 19 and on through the residential neighbourhood of Scheldebuurt.
Apartment buildings and offices and a school had been razed to the ground in the airliner’s wake. The wings had been torn from the fuselage, slid across the ground like giant razors, bounced up and dug themselves back down straight through the flatness of the landscape, until the gigantic pile of steel had eventually come to rest more than a mile from the point of impact.
Schools had still been open. Office hours weren’t over. People had sitting in meetings or in classes or crouching over toys; everyone had been full of dreams and plans, and the next moment everything was gone.
‘The rescue workers,’ Christina said, ‘estimate the number of casualties to be several thousand.’
And behind his camera Leo clenched his jaw, let his front teeth dig deep into his lip to stop himself from crying. Not there, not in front of Christina Sandberg, not now.
He shouldn’t even have been there.
He should have been at home in his bed on Södermalm, he should have let the phone ring, because who in their right mind calls at five in the morning anyway? But here he was, at the edge of a field on the outskirts of Amsterdam, and everywhere he looked a dreadful reality stared back at him, black and present and full of odours that would stay with him for ever. For the first time in his life he couldn’t just take a remote control and change it to something better.
Leo Björk was twenty-four years old.
This was the worst day he’d ever known.
And yet, it paled in comparison to what had already started on the other side of the city.
28
William struggled to pull himself together.
Plague.
He stared at the wall, at the symbols, fought to find the right questions, those that could break her hypothesis. But his thoughts refused to develop beyond half-articulated snatches of ideas, and he couldn’t make anything connect. Historical events in the human DNA. A deadly virus that the Organisation had manufactured. A key that would help them encode an answer, but to what? To the predictions?
How the hell could you answer something that wasn’t even a question?
And then, from out of nowhere, the answer came to him.
It started as a hunch. But it rapidly grew into a full-blown analysis, watertight and robust, and when the picture became clear the epiphany was so strong it hurt.
I know what the virus is for,’ he told her. ‘I know why we’re here.’
Janine had thousands of questions. But before she could voice them, they heard steps in the corridor.
They immediately stopped talking. Waiting for what was about to happen.
When the door opened, it was Connors.
He cleared his throat and told them to follow him.
Connors marched through the stone corridors, deep furrows of worry etching their way across his forehead.
Behind him he heard the steady echo of Janine’s and William’s steps, and to a tiny, tiny degree he couldn’t help feeling satisfied that they’d finally arrived at t
he point where they were.
He had been right, Franquin had been wrong. There wasn’t any sense in keeping them in the dark – they wouldn’t be delivering anything as long as they weren’t allowed to know.
Now, they would at last be able to talk.
The only question was whether it mattered.
Because more than anything else, Connors was afraid it was already too late.
Christina Sandberg’s phone lay on the table in front of them like an object in a badly arranged still-life, a box of glass and plastic between bottles of water and plates of untouched food.
It was night outside, but nobody was asleep.
Window after window flickered with the gleam of TV sets and computers, everywhere people were trying to grasp what had happened, making phone calls to check if someone they knew had arrived home or still couldn’t be reached. And for every time someone sighed with relief in one part of the city, someone’s legs collapsed under them in another.
Christina didn’t know how long she’d been awake, but she knew she was tired. Every time she moved her eyes the room dragged behind as if it were preserved in a thick liquid, and in front of her sat Leo and Albert, their faces registering the same stunned disbelief as her own – no, as everyone else in the half-empty basement pub.
The bar was dark, hidden away down a flight of stairs in a district full of doll’s houses and fairytale castles. Behind the counter at the back of the bar, a flat-screen television was showing footage of the impact site, the same shots over and over, while ticker-tape at the foot of the screen carried the latest updates, the words reflecting and warping through the rows of bottles on the shelves.
And there they sat. Hungry, but unable to eat.
And on the edge of the table lay the yellow envelope.
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