Acts of Vanishing

by Fredrik T. Olsson

  ‘For the last time,’ was all he said, ‘why am I here?’

  The question hung, unanswered, in the thick, dry silence until Forester spoke again.

  ‘Because we feel the same as you. We find it hard to believe that this was a coincidence.’

  Every time Christina got into one of the paper’s cars, she wondered what kind of people her colleagues really were. The light blue Volvo was only a year or so old. It had been driven only by adults travelling to interviews and reports, from A to B and back again. Yet somehow it still had the appearance of belonging to a sugar-addicted family on a road trip. There were crumbs and wrappers and remains that couldn’t be identified, and Christina swept it all onto the floor, forming a pile of rubbish along with the stuff that other colleagues had swept down before her.

  ‘Right,’ Beatrice said as she got into the passenger seat beside her. ‘What have you saved for us?’

  ‘I’m shooting from the hip,’ said Christina, ‘but I know someone who ought to have a bit more information about this than we do.’

  ‘And you think he’s going to want to talk to you?’

  ‘I know he doesn’t want to talk to me,’ she replied. ‘But he hasn’t been there in three months.’

  Beatrice’s response was a questioning silence, and instead of answering her, Christina leaned forward and turned the key in the ignition.

  Christina lived a different life now. She had started again. And she had done so in a freezing cold flat in Sollentuna. It was described as ‘furnished’ in the ad, and had it not been Beatrice who’d found it for her, she’d probably have turned on her heel as soon as she set foot inside. Editor or not, every night Christina Sandberg left work she went home to a faded lino floor, a cathode-ray TV perched on a stool, and a single bed whose previous occupants she’d rather not speculate about. She hung her clothes on a hanger outside the wardrobe, since the inside stank of damp and neglect. Her nightly ablutions were performed in front of a wonky bathroom cabinet made of wafer-thin steel and above a washbasin scarred with permanent reddish-brown trails left by the constantly dripping tap.

  It had already been a month. She hadn’t realised until she saw the rent invoice lying on the hall floor, a month of my life in this place, she’d thought to herself, but the truth was she’d been lucky to find anywhere to live at all.

  A month since she cleared out her old wardrobe at Skeppargatan, jotted a concise explanation on a notepad she left on the kitchen table and then pushed her keys through the letterbox as she left. He still hadn’t so much as called her. Maybe he hadn’t even noticed that she’d left.

  So no, he wouldn’t want to talk.

  ‘That’s about the only thing we have in common right now,’ she mumbled in response to her own thoughts, and put the headlights on full beam to light their way out of the car park.

  It was Beatrice’s yell that got her to slam on the brakes. She saw it first, the feeble yellow light that suddenly appeared as they pulled out of the garage and accelerated over the pavement and the bike lane. Her first thought was what the fuck is that? Her second was that it had to be a moped.

  They felt the wheels lock and glide across the ice, the judder from the brakes as the car slid forward, then that instant of uncertainty before the bang came.

  The noise of the moped’s engine cut through all other sound. It cut through the crunch of metal on metal, the squeal of the parka gliding across the windscreen, the clatter as the whole thing finished its scraping course across the bonnet and fell off the other side, where a worrying silence followed.

  Across the road they could see the darkness of the park, bare trees lined up in their headlights, and just in front of the bumper a steady moped headlight shone right up into the mist, signalling ‘Here I am’.

  Christina Sandberg had run someone over. And if they did need help, there was going to be no one to call.

  She flung herself out of the car and undid her seatbelt, roughly in that order, which wasn’t the right one, until she finally managed to extricate herself and cleared her own car door.

  The man who lay in front of her car was staring straight at her. Two eyes sandwiched between a woolly hat and a full white beard. As far as she could see there was no blood, and at least that was something.

  ‘Are you okay?’ she asked. ‘I didn’t see you.’

  His answer wasn’t what she expected.

  ‘Christina Sandberg?’ A voice she didn’t recognise, fevered and full of urgency.

  ‘And you are?’ she said.

  ‘I’ve been calling you. You never call back.’

  She leant over. Did she recognise him? But before she had time to speak he reached out, grabbed hard at her lapel, and then pulled himself up using her body as support until his face hung just inches from hers–harried eyes and damp, flushed cheeks bathed in the light of the car headlamps.

  ‘They’ve known about this all along,’ he puffed. Then with a penetrating stare: ‘They knew that this was going to happen.’

  ‘Thirty years you worked here, isn’t that right?’

  William let his silence concur.

  ‘You’re one of the Military’s best cryptologists. You’re a trusted, well-regarded colleague–that’s what everyone’s told me. Then suddenly, six months ago, out of nowhere–you’re not any more. You start accessing systems you’re not authorised to see. You conduct searches of sensitive directories with no supporting explanations. You refuse to answer questions, you engage in various forms of misconduct, you become unpredictable.’

  He wobbled his head. It was a ‘yes’, a ‘no’ and a ‘who gives a shit’ all rolled into one.

  ‘Am I mistaken?’

  ‘If that’s what it says in your notes then that must be the case.’

  He said it with a glance at the file on the table, trying to provoke her into revealing its contents. She either missed his gesture in the darkness, or simply ignored it.

  ‘Can you tell me why?’ was all she said.

  ‘I’m not a big fan of convention,’ William said loudly, trying to sound authoritative, failing utterly. ‘But wasn’t there a good European one?’

  It all came out a lot less cocky than he’d aimed for, and he was grateful to the darkness for hiding his regret. Hopefully they would at least have grasped what he meant. Somewhere amongst all the articles and paragraphs of the European Con­vention on Human Rights there was a very applicable passage, and if they planned to breach it, he didn’t mean to let it pass unnoticed.

  All prisoner have a right to know what they are accused of.

  ‘Why?’ he asked again. ‘Why am I here?’

  He could feel glances being exchanged in the darkness. Was he imagining it, or was there something they weren’t agreeing about?

  William waited for them. Then, eventually, it seemed that their glances had produced a decision. Palmgren leant forward.

  ‘William?’ he said. His tone was direct and serious. Headmaster to pupil. Traffic warden to someone who’s just parked his Porsche in a disabled bay and then cartwheeled off. ‘We know that you respond to the codename AMBERLANGS.’

  The word caused the ground underneath him to sway. It was the first thing they’d said to him on the platform, yet he’d managed not to make the connection until now: that was the evidence, right there. They had read his emails. What more did they know?

  ‘We know that you showed up for a meeting at Central Station with a person or group of persons who might go under the alias ROSETTA. Not only that, we have reason to believe that they–and by extension you–are involved in one or more terror plots against Swedish and/or international targets.’

  For a second, William looked for a smile in the darkness, but none came.

  Was he being serious? Lars-Erik ‘Lassie’ Palmgren? Dram of Lagavulin with a drop of water Lassie? Tennis twice a week until his Achilles packed in Lassie, the man he’d known for almost thirty years–how could he be sitting there, suddenly transformed into accusing me of terrorism Lassie?
>
  William clenched his jaw.

  ‘There were a whole lot of assumptions in that sentence,’ he said.

  No answer.

  ‘Would you like to tell me just why you’ve arrived at that conclusion?’

  Palmgren gave Forester another quick glance. She had no objection. Palmgren got to his feet.

  ‘Right now, a great swathe of Sweden is in complete darkness. The whole of the east coast, from Sundsvall down. We don’t yet know exactly how many are affected–authorities can’t communicate with one another, no information is getting to the public, masts and transmitters are all down. Telecoms, radio, TV, everything.’

  William swallowed. He’d guessed it was significant, but on that scale? He felt the moisture of sweat creeping down over his back again.

  ‘How?’

  ‘Sixteen zero six today, this afternoon.’ Palmgren was still doing the talking. ‘A short circuit in a substation near Årsta caused a minor fire. The automatic fuses tripped and the security precautions worked as intended: the electricity supply was automatically diverted via other substations to avoid any overload. That caused another blowout somewhere else, and with each incident there were fewer and fewer alternative routings available to deal with an accumulating load. Eventually the system couldn’t take any more and the whole system was knocked out.’

  William said nothing.

  ‘That,’ Palmgren continued, ‘is the official version.’

  Oh shit.

  ‘So there’s an unofficial one?’

  ‘The automatic fuses blew. That much is true. However.’ Palmgren took a deep breath. ‘There was no fire.’

  ‘What do you mean by that?’

  Forester made an invisible signal to Palmgren to take his seat again. That’ll do, she said without saying a word.

  ‘I am sure you’ll understand if we don’t share our information until you have shared yours.’

  She picked up the file, the one that had been left lying on the table like a flat, unuttered threat, pulled the rubber bands away, one snap, two snaps, slowly and carefully like she enjoyed dragging it out. Inside was a single sheet of paper, which she illuminated with her phone as she slid it across towards William.

  A laser printout. Almost completely devoid of content, except a single line of straight letters, striped and of varying clarity due to low ink levels. A toner cartridge somewhere was still being kept at work long after its due date. Still having budget problems, William thought. But said nothing. We’re expected to defend a nation but we can’t afford stationery. Didn’t say that either.

  Instead, he said: ‘Yes,’ then: ‘I recognise that. That’s one of the emails I got.’

  ‘One of?’ Forester’s voice betrayed more surprise than she had probably intended.

  ‘Yes. One of them.’

  ‘Can you explain what it means?’

  ‘It means what it says. What else could it mean?’

  She was still waiting him out. And he could feel himself getting more frustrated.

  ‘I don’t know! What else can I say? If it means anything more than what it says, I don’t know what that is.’

  There was a hint of desperation in his voice now, and he could hear it himself. He didn’t want to fall apart, but then again, why not? Maybe that was the only option left, a collapse and a breakdown that would force them to see that he knew nothing, that he was feeling tired and sad and fuck off, just let me go home and do that alone.

  ‘Seriously,’ he said, slowly, with a tone that contained all that, ‘what is going on?’

  Perhaps she saw him give up. Maybe she saw fatigue take him over. Whichever it was, she leaned back in her chair and turned off the light on her phone.

  ‘You first,’ she said.

  8

  When the blast hit, Rebecca Kowalczyk was sitting in her car. Tears found their way down her face, painting black stripes of mascara, but she left them there. No one could see them anyway. And even if they did, they wouldn’t recognise her.

  Her long dark hair was gone. The process had been more painful than she’d anticipated, first in her mind as the scissors sheared off years of growth and careful attention, then physically as the razor tugged its way across her scalp to finish the job. All because he’d made her promise. Because he’d told her that if one day he disappeared, she too would be in danger.

  Sitting there now, at one end of Ulica Brzeska, with the car facing away just as Michal had taught her, she looked at the door she had shut behind her moments before. Saw the window panes in the storey above shatter, the flames erupting, grabbing at the oxygen, saw how what had once been their apartment now ended its life in a black, billowing inferno that everyone would simply put down to a gas leak.

  Left rear-view mirror. Right. Centre. Switching between the three as though deep down she was hoping that the other mirrors might show something else, a reality where the windows were intact and everything as usual and she was the same Rebecca as ever.

  But the house was on fire. And whoever she was, it was someone she had never seen before.

  She would get used to it. Her hair would grow back eventually, everything that Michal had told her would turn out to be paranoid fantasy and life would go back to normal. That’s what she told herself. But she knew she was lying. Still, as long as it made her feel better, a little white lie was hardly the worst thing she’d done today.

  People came rushing out of the shops and nearby buildings, trying to approach the burning block. But none of them noticed the hire car starting and then pulling off at the far end of the street.

  In her rear-view mirror, Rebecca Kowalczyk could see smoke and fire and people transformed into tiny dots, vibrating as the car shuddered along the uneven road surface. She swung out towards Targowa, continued past Praskiparken, let herself melt into the traffic and followed the flow, without knowing where she was heading. Or why she had done what she’d done.

  The only thing she knew was that the one person she could have asked no longer existed.

  9

  Standing in the empty lunch room on the third floor, Christina was struck by how rarely you experience something that’s never happened to you before. Even big, unexpected events tend to be familiar in some way, as if they’d already been built into your life, and somehow belong when they eventually turn up.

  Hitting a moped rider, though, was a first. Especially in the middle of a massive power cut, and especially a man who knew her name and who demanded to be let into the building because he had something vitally important to show them.

  Now he stood over by the sloping windows, his face floating in the darkness, lit up by the open laptop in front of him. On a chair beside him lay the dark grey plastic crate that he’d had tied to the old moped’s rusty pannier rack. With a steady stream of ‘Oh dear, oh dears’, he proceeded to pull out all the electronic devices that he’d had to rescue out of the sludge down there, checked them one by one, connected them up with twisted cables and attached them to the filthy car battery at the bottom of the crate.

  Normally, the cafeteria would be buzzing with activity at this time of day, but now it was deserted and empty. It had taken only minutes for the rolls and salads to disappear from the chilled cabinets, hungry colleagues stockpiling in case the power cut lasted, and on the now cool hotplates spherical pots offered only the very last, ice-cold dregs of coffee. A handwritten note was all that remained of the kitchen staff, and every now and then she would hear colleagues approach from the stairs, read that the power cut had closed the canteen, then shuffle off again in disappointment.

  But Christina’s focus remained on the man who stood by the windows: the weird homemade device taking shape, the seriousness in his face as he cobbled it all together. An uneasy sensation that this was indeed something she’d never experienced before.

  ‘Maybe you should’ve hit him a bit harder.’ That was Beatrice. She was standing next to Christina, leaning against one of the darkened fridges, her murmur barely audible. ‘I’ve alway
s wondered what he looked like. I have to say I’m disappointed.’

  Christina smiled an invisible smile in the darkness.

  His name was Alexander Strandell. And if they’d known that earlier, he wouldn’t have been standing there at all.

  His beard looked like it had climbed off the front of a packet of throat lozenges. He had zinc-white hair that it would be impossible to pull a comb through, that seamlessly wound its way into his equally white beard, framing a circular face that was pitted and swollen, marks left by an adolescence that had refused to pass unrecorded.

  Tetrapak. That’s what they called him. And even if neither of them had met him he had been a standing joke long before Christina had joined the paper. He was a medically retired amateur radio enthusiast, living in a small house in Alvik, and every time someone recounted a story about him there were more aerials in his garden, thicker layers of tinfoil on his windows, and still less credibility to his tip-offs.

  No one knew who had been present at that meeting when his nickname was coined. It may be that it never even took place. The story went that it was the early nineties–even the Eighties, according to some–and even back then, Strandell had been notorious in the trade. There wasn’t a single tips line at a single Swedish paper that hadn’t at some point received a call from him, claiming to have intercepted some secret radio transmission, each time equally convinced that he had uncovered a global conspiracy that absolutely could not be discussed on the telephone.

  Despite being constantly fobbed off with varying shades of polite professionalism, he continued to make contact–and then one day, towards the end of the last century, someone had finally agreed to meet him for lunch.

  The first thing the man had done was to clear everything from the restaurant table. Saltshaker. Pepper mill. The little wilted pot plant. Everything had been shifted onto neighbouring tables because they’re always listening, and according to the legend he’d then lowered his voice to explain how anything could be a microphone, his eyes darting around as he told them you’re not safe anywhere.