‘We didn’t know where, didn’t know how, didn’t know when. Now we do.’
‘Yes, we do. Because of us,’ said Connors.
But Franquin was right. There was no turning back. The decision had been made.
‘How many people are going to die?’ Connors asked.
‘Fewer,’ said Franquin. ‘What more can we hope for?’
Connors didn’t answer.
And Franquin said it again.
‘Fewer.’
At the back of the room, William and Janine stood watching Connors and Franquin as they spoke in low voices up front, the rows of chairs next to them, and the uniformed men sitting around, waiting in stillness.
It was obvious what was happening.
The whole room was awaiting instructions, and everyone knew what they would be.
When William turned towards Janine, she had given up trying to fight her tears.
The moment Lars-Erik Palmgren turned the key in the front door of his suburban house he knew that he wasn’t alone, and that it was too late to do anything about it.
Perhaps it was the thin snow that dampened the noise.
Perhaps it was his own failure to be more attentive.
Ten years ago it had been ingrained in his mind; he would have been able to recount every single vehicle he’d passed on the way home, he’d have made unnecessary stops, taken spontaneous detours, all the while looking out for cars that lingered too long in his rear-view mirror or that reappeared at regular intervals for no reason.
But that was then. He’d long since lost the habit. And he’d driven straight home, seeing without registering, letting his subconscious take the wheel while his active thoughts remained with Christina in Amsterdam. And eventually, he’d pulled into his driveway and parked the car as if everything was completely normal.
If only he’d allowed himself to think, he’d have realised it wasn’t.
Here he stood with his key in the security lock in front of him. And a strange man’s black glove resting firmly on his wrist.
‘Lars-Erik Palmgren,’ said the voice beside him.
It wasn’t a question but an observation. And Palmgren didn’t answer.
‘And you are?’ he asked instead.
‘Let’s talk inside.’
Without another word, Palmgren opened the door, turned off the burglar alarm, and prepared for the worst.
30
Palmgren turned on the integrated ceiling spotlights, first upstairs in the vestibule, then in the staircase down into the basement, all the time expecting the stranger to object.
Sooner or later he would order Palmgren to stop. If nothing else, he should tell him to turn off the lights, to choose a less exposed room, to stand still and shut up and listen very carefully. But it didn’t happen, and they continued the last few steps down into the insulated basement, walking across the carpet with their shoes damp from snow, stopping on either side of the low couch and with the vast panoramic window separating them from the bay outside, the faint lights of Saltsjöbaden glowing on the far side.
It was a strange situation. But for a moment Palmgren felt remarkably safe.
If he had to stand eye to eye with someone he didn’t know, this was a very good place to do it.
The man was no older than forty, clean-shaven but with a weathered complexion. He was dressed in all black, thin training pants below an equally thin windcheater, its zipper done up all the way to his chin. Black gloves, black sneakers, black knitted cap pulled down to his eyebrows. Dressed so as not to be seen, and to be taken for an evening jogger if he were.
They stood in silence, facing each another across the huge room, the season’s first Christmas decorations reflected in the windows together with their mirror images.
They were fully visible from the outside, and they both knew it.
Not that anyone would be on the water right now, it was night and almost winter and freezing cold, but the crucial thing was that someone might see them, and that if the stranger were there to harm Palmgren in any way, he should know there could be witnesses.
The man could see Palmgren’s thoughts. ‘I’m not here to hurt you,’ he said.
‘Very well,’ said Palmgren. ‘I’ll hold you to that.’
‘And I apologise if you’re unable to make any calls on your landline tonight.’ He raised his eyes towards the ceiling.
Palmgren understood exactly what he was referring to. The man was familiar with his surveillance system. He knew it was linked to a server via the landline, so he had taken the precaution of disconnecting it at the box out on the street. Considering who had installed the system in the first place, there was only one way he could know.
‘Swedish Military?’ Palmgren asked, obvious as it was.
‘This is not an official visit.’
‘But that’s where you’re from.’
‘I have various employers,’ he said. ‘The army doesn’t know about all of them.’
Palmgren studied him. It was a strange answer. ‘So why are you here?’
The man paused as if deciding where to begin. Just by coming here he had broken more rules than he could count, so the less said the better. He probably shouldn’t have come at all; part of him still wasn’t sure it was worth the risk, but when Sandberg’s wife had appeared in that newscast it had made him feel uneasy in more ways than one.
And the truth was he didn’t know any more. What was right and what was wrong.
‘I want you to contact her,’ he said. ‘You need to get her out of there.’
‘Who?’
‘It was a mistake to let her go to Amsterdam.’
The room seemed to come to a standstill. Christina?
Palmgren stood frozen in place, but his mind was working overtime, trying to piece the details together. The man opposite let him take the time he needed.
When Palmgren drew breath again, there was a new certainty in his voice. ‘You were the one who called me.’
The man said nothing.
‘You were the one who called and told me they’d taken Sara.’
Still no answer.
‘You didn’t discover that it was missing, did you? There never was any inventory check. You were the one who took it.’
Again, the man neither confirmed nor denied.
‘There comes a point,’ he said, instead. ‘There comes a point when you’re not certain any more.’
‘Certain about what?’
‘About what you’re doing.’
Palmgren peered at him. ‘Where is William Sandberg?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Then what do you know?’
The man paused. He knew far from everything; he was a cog in a wheel and didn’t expect anything else. But this was the first time he’d sensed so much fear among the people who employed him.
He’d heard them talk about Amsterdam. About the disaster and about the letter that got away. About their worries that Watkins had the answer.
And whatever it meant, it scared him too.
‘Call her,’ said the man. ‘Call her, right now.’
Leo Björk was shaking so much that when Christina’s phone started vibrating in his hand his first thought was that he was experiencing some sort of collapse.
Leo wasn’t afraid. He was terrified.
It was the middle of the night, it was dark and the wind was whipping up. He’d had no idea that he was scared of heights until he opened the door from the stairwell, but the primal fear that had gripped him left no room for doubt. The roof he was standing on was at least ten storeys up, and every time the wind tugged at his clothes his knees seemed to buckle in protest. When he felt the phone buzz, he assumed that was the start of it, and that before he could stop it he’d topple off the ledge and hurtle towards the ground, landing in front of all the police and journalists and crowds who had gathered behind the security cordons below.
He shut his eyes. Told himself to get a grip. He was just as capable of standing upright here
as if he’d been next to Albert down on the street, or next to Christina, wherever the hell she had gone.
He tried to control his breathing again, and looked at the phone in his hand. It was still ringing.
‘Christina Sandberg’s phone,’ he answered.
The voice at the other end didn’t introduce itself. ‘I need to speak to Christina,’ it said.
‘I can’t, I’m standing on a, she’s not here,’ Leo replied. He winced in frustration, partly over his own inability to articulate full sentences and partly over the situation and the stress and how the hell did he end up here?
Because he was a journalist, he told himself. He was a journalist, a real bona fide journalist, and here he was on the scene of a breaking story and the irony was that nobody in the world gave a damn if he was wearing a blazer or not.
‘My name is Lars-Erik Palmgren,’ said the voice, as if this were of crucial importance. ‘Where are you?’
Leo looked around. There was only one answer, and it was as absurd to him as he knew it would sound to the man on the phone.
‘I’m on a roof,’ he said.
‘Where? A roof, where?’
‘Amsterdam. I don’t know where. There’s a hospital in front of me.’
The other end of the line went quiet. Scarily quiet.
‘I want you to get out of there,’ said the voice whose name was Palmgren.
‘It’s sealed off,’ said Leo. ‘The hospital.’
He was fully aware that the information probably didn’t make much sense, but he was confused and bewildered and needed to tell someone about it.
Down on the street, police cars had pulled up with their lights flashing, blocking the approach roads. Vehicles trying to break through the cordon were being turned away; some of them, as far as he could tell from up here, were vans with dishes on their roofs and logos on their sides. News teams.
Christina, being the experienced, resourceful reporter she was, had persuaded someone in the student building across from the hospital to let them up on their roof. And then she’d given Leo her phone and told him to find a good spot.
‘I know it’s sealed off,’ said Palmgren. ‘You have to get out of there.’
‘What’s going on?’ said Leo. ‘I don’t know anything.’
He heard Palmgren hesitate at the other end of the line.
When he spoke again it was even more unsettling than the silence.
‘Desperate measures. That’s what’s going on. Panicky, desperate measures.’
31
Suzanne Ackerman sat behind the wheel of the first ambulance to reach Slotervaart Hospital, utterly convinced that there must be a misunderstanding.
The man in the compartment behind her had survived against all odds. The building he had worked in had been reduced to ruins, split like a breakfast egg by an oncoming aircraft wing; he’d been crushed by debris and had suffered serious burns, but he was alive and she had driven him to the closest hospital. He would be the first patient to arrive, but soon others would follow, god knows how many, a constant stream of casualties that would continue throughout the night.
But in front of her the road to the hospital was sealed off by a man in a military uniform.
She wound down the window. ‘It’s okay,’ she said. ‘I’m coming from the crash site.’
She expected him to leap into action, open the barrier, apologise for the delay. Surely the military’s purpose was to facilitate rescue efforts, sealing off access to the hospital to prevent staff being bothered by complaints of running noses and splinters, ensuring that medical resources were dedicated to the ones who needed help.
But the soldier shook his head. Pointed in the other direction. Turn around. Find another hospital.
Behind him rows of army trucks were positioned across the road, as if the hospital were a small banana republic and her ambulance an attacking guerrilla troop.
Suzanne Ackerman tried again to explain. But the answer remained the same.
The hospital is closed. It’s in quarantine. Turn around.
It wasn’t until she was already driving in the other direction, her lights flashing and her speed even greater than before, that the realisation hit her, logical, clearly expressed, and perfectly terrifying.
Terrorists.
First a jet that crashes in the city, then a hospital that shuts down.
Amsterdam was under some sort of attack.
She pushed her fears aside, resolving to focus on doing her job. It was a night of disaster, and the days that followed would be no better, but it was her sworn duty to save and rescue and maintain life as far as she was able, and she would go on doing just that until her legs gave way and she couldn’t do it any more.
And as the paramedics fought to keep their patient alive in the back of her ambulance, she pushed the engine a little bit harder, ran red light after red light on her way across the city, not knowing that the man behind her would be dead before they reached their destination.
If Suzanne Ackermann had been able to follow the news from where she sat, she would have realised she wasn’t the only one leaping to conclusions.
The monitors at the front of the dark-blue parliament in the depths of the mountain were all showing news coverage of the sealed-off hospital in Amsterdam, all relaying the same grainy, distant footage from different angles, all of them accompanied by voiceovers reporting the same theory.
Speculation disguised as news rolled across screen after screen, text tickers scrolling sideways at the top or bottom or anywhere a space could be found without covering a journalist’s face or the blurry light from the building: Hospital Still in Quarantine, they read, or Suspected Terror Attack Closes Hospital. Objectivity and panic sat side by side at news desks throughout the world; nobody knew what was happening but everyone wanted to be first.
Police Silent on Threat to Hospital.
No Groups Have Come Forward With Demands.
Franquin stood in the middle of the room, watched the muted reporters on the wall, saw their mouths move and knew what they were saying. Amsterdam was under attack.
‘That’s good,’ he said.
And everyone in the room understood.
It wasn’t good as in actually good, but it was good in the sense that, of all the possible explanations they could have settled on, the media had opted to believe that the Netherlands, or possibly the West, or even the civilised world, was under attack from some unidentified terrorist organisation.
In light of what was about to unfold, there could be no more convenient explanation.
When Christina Sandberg opened the door to the stairwell and stepped out on to the roof, she felt as if she’d just opened the door to her own life.
For the second time in one day reality kicked in and reminded her where she truly belonged. The buzz from the helicopters, the news crews’ floodlights, the flashing sirens of emergency vehicles, even the wind that grabbed her and drowned out the noise and made everything sound distant, even that made her come alive, revelling in the surge of adrenalin and energy that rushed through her body and carried her forward.
She didn’t know much more than the reporters down on the ground, the ones who stood in front of cameras and microphones and riffed around the theme that something is happening but we’re unable to say what as yet. But she had enough to fill a stand-up for as long as they wanted her to. She’d been busy questioning the students in the building below, who’d spent the last couple of hours watching as the cordon went up. One of them even knew of someone who was a patient in the hospital; rumour had it the guy had called his family and told them he was scared, that he wasn’t allowed to leave his room and that when he’d pressed the button to call a nurse, no one came. That had been more than three hours ago, and now he’d stopped answering his phone.
She had some good material, and when she crossed the concrete roof to where Leo was gazing across at the façade of the hospital, illuminated by media spotlights, she knew that she’d have a first-clas
s background shot to go with it.
Leo was good. They were a good team. She had to remember to tell him.
She went up to the edge of the roof, turned towards Leo, winked at him. ‘You ready?’
She popped the earpiece back in her ear, just as she’d done earlier that day, ignored his attempts to tell her something and prepared mentally for going live.
She was happy. She was actually genuinely happy.
And she didn’t know it, but happy was how she would die.
The thirty-year-old pilot commonly referred to as Jameson, not because that was his name but because of his low tolerance to alcohol, was well out over the sea in the cockpit of his missile-laden F16 when the orders arrived over his radio.
Everything went quiet. So quiet that his commander called him again, checking that Jameson had understood and that the communication equipment was working properly and the pilot hadn’t missed what he’d just been told.
Jameson answered that he wasn’t sure, and the tower repeated its message, and the same silence returned. The commander didn’t have to ask the reason.
When his voice echoed over the radio again, it had a gravity beyond that of protocol. He informed Jameson that he too had hesitated when the time came to issue the order. Sometimes, he said, morality is a complex affair. If killing a few was the price for rescuing many, wouldn’t it be a greater sin to refuse?
The pilot in the jet saw Amsterdam come closer, outlined as thousands of white-and-yellow dots in the darkness, and he honestly couldn’t answer.
Every fibre of his body told him not to do it.
At the same time, he knew he had to.
And as the landscape grew from dots to houses and buildings and the city he’d grown up in and loved, the arguments for and against raged inside his head.
You can’t bomb a hospital with your own civilians inside.
You simply can’t.
Chain of Events Page 25