Acts of Vanishing

by Fredrik T. Olsson

  The last thing she wanted was to bump into somebody she knew. She could do without their questions and sympathy and encouragement. Or, worse still, seeing them pretend not to see her, consulting watch or phone and, very importantly, picking up their pace to arrive in time for a non-existent meeting.

  Self-esteem. Wherever that came from. She, who didn’t even know who she was, couldn’t say.

  She turned off down Strandvägen, and walked on the side nearest the water to avoid having to see the streets where her friends lived. Friends who had taken her in when she moved out because she’d had a little disagreement with her family, friends who had offered their sofas and told her she was strong and the best and you are great. Until they found out, and asked her to move on. They all did, sooner or later.

  It had been a long time since she’d done a little dab, and only now and then, and because it was a laugh. Nothing had turned out the way she’d imagined. She had thought that the drugs would mean she’d be able to get rid of herself. That she would slowly transform into someone else, the way all the information films at school had said. Drugs turned people into machines, they had promised, into unfeeling robots in a state either of absent, half-stoned make-believe, or so focused on reaching that state that they didn’t have time to think about anything else.

  It sounded like the perfect package. It turned out to be the opposite.

  She never had stopped being Sara Sandberg. She might not know who she was any more, yet she couldn’t stop being that person, and no matter how high, how vacant, how battered she managed to get, she was still her, always present, but at a remove inside her body. It was as if she was the driver, sitting in the cockpit of an enormous gantry crane, controlling her limbs with levers that were heavy and slow to respond.

  And she couldn’t go on like that. No one can hate for ever, sooner or later you forget why you were so angry and you’re just left with the memories of everything else, the things that were good, the things you miss. And a nagging sensation of, isn’t it about time?

  It was only a hundred metres to Skeppargatan now, and the flat would be there, as it always had been. There’d be tea, maybe a sliced white loaf, and now, when she let herself, she could feel a yearning so strong it hurt. For her family, even though they’d been kind enough as to inform her they weren’t. For Mum, Dad, biological or not, who cares?

  She closed her eyes against the wind, praying they were home.

  It was about time.

  Just as long as it wasn’t too late.

  13

  The café was located on the corner of Wardour Street and a narrow alleyway. It was the kind of place where people came and went without being seen, where the staff weren’t staff but baristas, and where the customers’ names were written in scratchy block capitals on paper cups while they waited for their coffee.

  The man who’d just been served was holding a cup signed ELVIS, but that wasn’t his name at all. He paused under the awning outside the big window, his back to the glass as the rain formed a transparent screen in front of him. He sucked up the sweet chai latte through the hole in the lid, watched the traffic and all the people passing by on the other side of the rain curtain. Here and there, Christmassy gift bags were already starting to give up in the rain, and people pushed their umbrellas ahead of themselves like reluctant sails in the wet wind.

  If he tried hard enough, he could pretend he was one of them. A man who’d just bought a cup of tea, that’s all he was, a well-dressed Londoner in his sixties who was just waiting for the rain to pass, before returning to his Christmas shopping and to jostling in sweaty shops and panic-buying things that no one wanted.

  But the man who wasn’t Elvis had much bigger things to worry about than Christmas presents. He batted away the thoughts, forcing himself to enjoy the warmth from the paper cup and think about nothing. Not about Stockholm. Not about the news from Warsaw. And most definitely not about Floodgate.

  There he was, a perfectly ordinary man under a perfectly ordinary awning, right until reality caught up with him.

  When the black diplomatic limo finally drove past, he waited until it had turned down the next street before raising his umbrella and walking away at a suitable pace. When he followed into the narrow side street and opened the back door, the guy with the tie was already sitting there.

  ‘Major,’ he said.

  The man who wasn’t Elvis nodded back and sat down opposite, and seconds later the car had disappeared into the heavy evening traffic.

  With that, the meeting was under way. A meeting of a working group that didn’t exist.

  14

  It hadn’t been even three months since William Sandberg had last walked down these very corridors. Then, it had felt completely right. Not just right, liberating. He had been marching towards the exit, spitting out percussive consonants, serving to deliver one creative insult after the other. No one would be left in any doubt as to his opinion. As though there was any risk of that.

  Completely right then. And now? To be honest, pretty fucking embarrassing. It was a bit like storming out of a room only to find that you’ve entered a wardrobe, falling from high status to low in an instant, the only difference being that the instant had lasted three months and that the wardrobe in question had been one called grief.

  Now here he was again, a Calvary pilgrimage of shame across worn-out lino floors, a stroll back down the path he’d sworn never to take again, because is that what you get for thirty years of service in this place? Reprimands?

  They had, of course, been right. He had gone beyond his remit: trawled journals and downloaded CCTV and checked police records that he had no business accessing. But he had a daughter to find, and even if he’d had time for trivialities like seeking permission it would never have been granted.

  Wherever he looked, there was feverish activity. Streams of serious-looking staff with intensity and concentration in each step, eyes full of steely focus that went straight through him, no greetings. Carrying papers and with shoulders pressing phones to sweaty ears. And despite the good news–that no one had time to comment on his reappearance–a new layer of unease was rapidly emerging.

  He saw a constant cavalcade of faces he didn’t recognise. The building’s uniformed staff were rubbing shoulders with people who shouldn’t even be there: the Security Police, the National Defence Radio Establishment, and God knows who else–staff who presumably thought they were wearing civilian clothes but who in fact were just wearing a different kind of uniform that consists of polo shirts and chinos with a neat, ironed crease.

  Above all, though, every now and then he spotted uniforms that he couldn’t immediately identify. Some were NATO, he knew that much, others were from the neighbouring Nordic countries, others he would need to see up close to be able to place. Palmgren hadn’t been exaggerating. Everyone was frightened. And when he said everyone, he’d meant everyone.

  The room they called Briefing was a large, no-expenses-spared meeting room, well equipped with soft leather desk chairs and a glass table that stretched from one end of the room to the other. There were no windows, no risk of anyone seeing in, and if you were really paying attention you would notice that the inside of the room was rotated ever so slightly, like a slightly skewed box inside another. This to ensure that the interior walls were not parallel to the exterior ones, so that no sound could leak out to surrounding corridors.

  What happens in Briefing stays in Briefing.

  As Palmgren ushered William into the room, the first thing he saw was that it had changed. It had been reconfigured into a makeshift control room, in which every place at the table was now a workstation, with open laptops and looping extension cables. Everywhere you looked, open notebooks and half-empty coffee cups testified to the fact that this room was full of activity, even if it was now devoid of people, as though the others had been removed just for their sake.

  The most striking change, though, was that the room had now been equipped with an enormous world map.
/>   The map, several metres wide and taking up most of the wall that faced out towards the corridor, was of the good old-fashioned worn-out roller-blind type, cloth-backed and unfurled from a long wooden cylinder. The edges were frayed after at least fifty years of being moved and rehung in various locations, the text bleached by sunlight, or possibly just damp and old age. Within a broad sweep north of the eastern Mediterranean the borders had been drawn and redrawn down the years, some with ink, others with pencil, perhaps a laconic way of saying that some of them weren’t likely to last very long.

  It was all incredibly analogue, and for a minute William felt like he was attending a military briefing in an Elsa Beskow story. As though he wasn’t quite sure whether he was about to be informed of an existential threat to the country’s borders, or just to learn about Swedish wild mushrooms.

  ‘Call me old-fashioned,’ said Forester. William turned around to see her nodding at the map. ‘The advantage of paper is that for someone to succeed in listening in, they’ll have to be close enough that we can see them.’

  Now he noticed for the first time that the roller-blind map was covered in brightly coloured Post-it notes. They were scattered all over the world, each one carefully handwritten. As well as that, the map was surrounded by coloured laser prints on A4 paper, neatly lined up and stuck straight on the wall. From a distance they might be area charts, or small weather maps in bold colours.

  ‘My name is Cathryn Forester.’ She stretched out her hand as though they hadn’t just spent half an evening together. ‘I work for the British Secret Intelligence Service. And I’m sorry if our collaboration got off on the wrong foot.’

  In the light she seemed both younger and taller than he’d imagined down there in the darkness. The hint of freckles, partly concealed by her red hair, made her seem gentler, more human–though the piercing stare of her startling blue eyes was enough to offset any redeeming features.

  He saw her hand from the corner of his eye but pretended not to have noticed.

  ‘Can we get one thing clear before we go any further?’ he said. ‘What, exactly, is my official status right now? Am I on duty, or a former colleague here to visit? Or should I be ready to be pinned against the wall by the Burton’s brothers again?’

  ‘I’d be lying if I said that your colleague and I didn’t have differing opinions of your innocence or otherwise,’ she replied.

  ‘Very well,’ said William. ‘Honesty is good.’ A pause before he straightened his neck with a click. ‘Trust is better, but honesty will have to do.’

  She looked back with a flawlessly bland expression. Either she’d missed the venom altogether, or she’d got it and was now displaying just how unimpressed she was. Whichever it was, it put him out, and it annoyed him.

  ‘Innocence of what?’ Better to move things forward.

  Forester turned to Palmgren and nodded for him to reply.

  ‘William,’ he said, ‘I would like to point out that as yet, your employment has not formally ended. That means that your oath of secrecy still applies.’

  William waved his hand dismissively. Don’t start giving me the rulebook, after thirty years. Palmgren took that as a confirmation, then nodded towards the big screen on the wall opposite.

  ‘Right now, the internet news sites are shouting over each other,’ he said. ‘Heavy black headlines about the fire that plunged half of Sweden into darkness–you know the drill. But again, that fire never happened.’

  He located a remote control on the tabletop and then pointed it at the TV. The image that popped up was another map of the world, except that instead of the faded pastels this one had white details on a black background, sharp thin lines that marked national borders, and light grey vertical lines where time zones met.

  No more than five or six metres separated the two maps–the crumpled one behind them and the one just summoned on screen–but each metre represented at least ten years of technological advance, from complex mechanical screen-printing to a digital high-res representation of the world which could zoom and scroll at the touch of a button.

  When Palmgren clicked the remote again, a wealth of information appeared on the map. From east to west, and all across the world, it covered the continents with bright spots in various colours, the dots joined by a series of lines in a spectrum of hues, all connected to thousands of other dots in country after country.

  It looked like an airline route map. Or perhaps international trade routes for the transport of goods. William guessed that it was neither.

  ‘Internet traffic?’

  Palmgren nodded. ‘This is a graphic representation of the amount of data sent via the internet at a given time. The colour shows the volume. The warmer the colour, the more traffic.’

  He nodded towards the top of the screen.

  ‘Keep an eye on the clock.’

  Immediately above the map were an array of small fields containing numbers and other information, among them the time and date. Palmgren clicked through with the remote, hour by hour, day by day, and as he did so the map changed.

  ‘You see how the colours follow the time of day? This is pretty much what it looks like, day in day out. Where it’s daytime, the colours are red: large files, people working and exchanging information. Where it’s evening, the colours are cooler: film and music and social media. At night it falls to blue–automatic systems and alarms and God knows what else, the odd late-night surfer. But this is today.’

  He held down one of the buttons to single out the details on the timeline, then hopped forward with small short clicks.

  Eventually, the clock showed 16:00–the same time that Sandberg had found himself by the Arlanda Airport Express; six minutes before the lights went out; six and a half minutes before he slammed up hard against the glass door and was dragged out to the waiting Volvo.

  Palmgren kept clicking through, slowly now.

  On the map below the numbers, all the lines across Europe looked like a greenish spider’s web, a continent gradually slowing down to turquoise and closing its offices and going home for the day. In the West, the American continent was slowly awakening in yellow and orange, while in the East, Asia lay in deep blue sleep, thousands of monochrome rainbows reaching in and out from common nodes all over the world.

  16:05, Swedish time. 16:05 and thirty seconds. And then abruptly, without explanation, the lines’ appearance changed. From their cooling, bluish tones, Europe’s lines flared up in yellow again, and then orange, then deep red. It started with its epicentre on the east coast of Sweden before immediately spreading via the spider’s web, out across the seas and on to the countries beyond them, and the colours passed red and turned pink, and after pink came white, and for a couple of hundredths of a second almost the whole of Europe was illuminated by an all-consuming white-hot light, before declining again through yellow to green and then finally to the same low-intensity blue-green as moments earlier.

  It looked like seaside illuminations, like a rainbow explosion bordering on pop art. But it was nothing but a graphic representation of what society feared most.

  ‘An attack,’ said William.

  In the top row, the clock had stopped at 16:06:33:50, and what he had seen was an enormous peak in data traffic–a peak that had lasted a little under two seconds. That disappeared as fast as it arrived, and coincided exactly with the power cut.

  ‘That’s what it looks like, doesn’t it?’ said Palmgren.

  The answer was surprisingly close to being a no. Was it truly?

  ‘Certainly does,’ said William. ‘A Trojan or a virus on thousands of computers, just waiting. Activated at a predetermined time, to attack a substation and cause disruption. What else could it be?’

  ‘You’re right,’ said Forester. ‘And you’re wrong.’

  William turned towards her.

  ‘What we’re looking at is an overload of data traffic, yes. An overload that caused not just one but several substations in the region east of Stockholm to fail. When they cou
ldn’t deal with the volumes of data involved, they simply shut down. And when substation after substation automatically redirected the power grid via substations that had also failed… Well, you know what happened.’

  ‘So how am I wrong then?’ said William.

  Forester spent a moment formulating her reply.

  ‘Right: it’s a peak in internet traffic. But wrong: it is not an attack.’

  ‘But is in fact…?’

  ‘An attack is something aimed at one or several targets. Correct? But this peak… it has no target.’

  William looked at them in turn. Maybe fatigue was getting to him. Right now, he didn’t know what they were talking about.

  ‘The substations?’ he said.

  ‘The substations were knocked out, yes. But they were neither more nor less exposed than everything else.’

  William opened his mouth but was unable to find any questions. Palmgren cut in instead.

  ‘Imagine someone sticking a twig into an ants’ nest. Imagine that, but with information instead of ants. What you see on the map is a veritable stream of data, in all directions simultaneously, a chaotic exchange between all these IP addresses that lasts for one and a half, almost two seconds. And then that’s it.’

  He leaned forward.

  ‘We’re talking about an incredible number of data packets sent off in all directions, not to a specific address, but just back and forth between all of these nodes, between every single little laptop and access point that is online in this region.’

  ‘Nobody attacked anybody,’ Forester explained. ‘Or: everyone attacked everyone.’

  ‘And as a result, the power disappeared,’ said Palmgren.