Acts of Vanishing

by Fredrik T. Olsson

  Quiet again. They waited for William to make the next move.

  ‘I realise that you’re probably trying to get me to answer something right now,’ he said. ‘But I’m tired, possibly even a bit thick. Either way, I don’t have the energy to work out just what it is you want me to say.’

  No one answered. A quick glance from Palmgren to Forester was returned with an equally short glance in the other direction.

  ‘Let me ask you this,’ William said eventually. ‘Why are you showing me this?’

  ‘Because what happened today…’ said Forester, pausing momentarily. ‘It’s not the first time that we’ve seen it.’

  Christina Sandberg had grown up with no siblings, in an extended family with no children. That’s probably why she was such an expert at playing on her own.

  She’d realised early on that her favourite pastime was observing the world from afar, and even as a child her diaries had been full of observations about things that happened to others rather than things that happened to her. She loved to see the big picture, to analyse instead of joining in. For many years she’d also been obsessed by creating small worlds of her own, making dolls’ furniture and miniature towns out of cardboard and packaging. Not for playing with, but just for imagining what might be happening to the people who lived there.

  Fortunately the family had had an almost endless supply of shoeboxes and wrapping, and while other kids her age were presumably out playing on the street, she would embark on voyages of discovery in boxes, transforming them into tiny furnished realities.

  When Christina stepped out of the dark blue military-registered Volvo outside the Swedish Armed Forces HQ at Lidingövägen 24, she was struck by how the building in front of her looked like it was created the same way. It stood like a loveless colossus next to the road, a rectangular box for an enormous pair of sensible shoes, and along the walls, an equally enormous child had carved out window after window in straight, orderly rows and then said Mummy, look what I’ve done.

  And behind all the little toy windows were toy soldiers on toy chairs, and one of them was her husband, and that was beyond understanding. Six months ago he’d been a respected, in-demand cryptologist, a man who gave presentations and was hired out on tasks, and who was important and secret enough that every time someone happened to ask what he did for a living, his whole face melted into a friendly, evasive smile, as he steered the conversation elsewhere and unnoticed.

  Now he was the one being interrogated. Because they had some questions. That had to be a bad thing.

  She walked through the heavily guarded entrance, before handing in her mobile at reception, passing through a metal detector and placing her bag to be X-rayed. Beyond security waited the man who had called her.

  ‘We’re very grateful that you were able to come,’ he said while lifting her handbag out of the dark blue plastic tray. ‘We have a number of questions we’d like answered.’

  ‘I can only say the same thing,’ she replied.

  She flashed a silent smile as she hung the bag on her shoulder, then followed him through the thick plate-glass doors into the big shoebox.

  William had been sitting in silence for so long that eventually they’d have to ask him whether there was something he hadn’t grasped.

  Everything, he’d been tempted to reply, but signalled to them instead to keep going, and Forester walked over to the school map and stood in front of it. Mercator’s Projection, the one that makes Sweden appear to be much bigger than it actually is. Like a metaphor for all of Sweden’s political self-belief, he heard himself thinking before he swept the thought to one side.

  ‘Each and every one of these’–in a sweeping gesture, she moved her hand past the multicoloured Post-it notes that were dotted around the world. ‘Every single one represents a peak like the one we saw today.’

  William squinted at them. Felt a shiver go through him.

  Each note on the map was covered in handwritten text, and it was only now that he saw what they said. First a date, at the top, then the time, and underneath that the duration in minutes and seconds. The last row was a number, in petabytes: the size of the peak.

  ‘Altogether, at least fifty occasions,’ she said when she spotted him attempting to count them. ‘Fifty peaks that we can safely say were the same thing as today.’

  She bounced her fingertips over the Post-its, out onto the wall, touching the various colour printouts that hung around the map. Of course. William took a step closer. All the vivid printouts were small versions of the same digital map that Palmgren had just shown him on the screen, rainbow-coloured lines of internet traffic, shifting around the world in line with the time zones.

  On each of the printouts was an area that shone white, more intense than all the others.

  ‘Since when?’ he asked.

  Forester took a step back, reaching towards the North American continent.

  ‘The nineteenth of September this year. A hacker attack disrupts the internet across swathes of America. Several banks are hit. The NASDAQ. I’m sure you’ve read about it.’

  William rubbed his face. The nineteenth of September. Just days after that walk down the corridors, the one where he gave himself the sack and left his job for the last time.

  Thanks for your help, coincidence.

  ‘As I told you,’ he said. ‘I’ve been having other stuff to contend with. It may be that I missed the odd news story.’

  ‘This was quite a big deal in the media. No one could say where it had come from, they were blaming it on everyone from independent hackers to the Iranian military, but none of it could be proved.’

  ‘Because it wasn’t true?’

  Forester answered by not responding.

  ‘That was the first time we saw it,’ she said, ‘but not the last. If you look for the centre of it, you end up here somewhere.’ She placed her hand just off America’s East Coast. ‘Brookhaven, a little place on Long Island, north of New York. Since then, we’ve counted fifty similar incidents. Each one just like today’s.’ She pointed to the map as she spoke: ‘Rio de Janeiro. Lisbon. Marseille. Yokohama. Los Angeles.’

  ‘Coastal cities,’ said William.

  ‘Well spotted,’ said Forester. ‘Some resulting in short power outages, some affecting essential services. Sometimes we got away with just a fright.’

  ‘And you think there’s a reason they’ve chosen these particular cities?’

  That wasn’t really a question. He had a very good idea what the answer was going to be, and Forester nodded in response, and lifted her head upwards, over the map, looking now at the Nordics, Sweden, Stockholm.

  ‘Today’s power cut,’ she said, and shook her head. ‘Three hours and forty minutes. That’s bad enough. But what happens if it’s allowed to go on for longer? Days, weeks, or more?’

  There was only one answer: society would collapse. One way or another, it would capsize, it was just a question of how quickly and how violently and what would go down first.

  No one would have any money. First because all the electronic payment methods would stop working, and only the lucky few who happened to have cash in hand when the outage came would see themselves through the first period–a few days perhaps, or a little longer. After that, though, their head start would be gone. No one would have access to their accounts, and banks would not allow withdrawals while systems were down, and before long they’d close their branches to avoid threats and demonstrations and the chance of violence.

  Then again, money or no money, if the power cut lasted, before long there’d be nothing to buy. Perishables would go stale and rot, leaving just dried goods and tins, and no one would be able to cook them on their lifeless electric hobs.

  Would there be rioting? Probably. Would that help? Hardly.

  Yet that would be just the beginning. If the electricity stayed off, what would happen then? To healthcare, communications, transport of goods and essentials? Pumps and sewage works would be at a standstill, supplies of fresh w
ater would run out everywhere, for everyone. It wasn’t hard to imagine what people might be capable of then.

  ‘And that’s if we’re lucky,’ she said, when he’d had enough time to think. ‘That’s if we’re just talking about the electricity supply.’

  William nodded. It could, of course, be coincidence that the attacks had taken place in those locations. Could. He looked over at the map again, letting his eyes flit between all the Post-it notes: New York, Rio, Lisbon, Marseille, Los Angeles. All of them were central nodes where the internet traffic came together and where data was distributed onwards, places where enormous data cables emerged from the ocean and their traffic redirected across the continents.

  ‘You think they’re trying to knock out the entire internet?’ he said eventually.

  ‘What would be worse?’ Forester said. ‘Knock out? Or take control of?’

  William swallowed, looked from one to the other, and heaved a long, exasperated sigh.

  ‘I get the anxiety,’ he said. ‘I get your questions, I get that you’ve pulled me in for questioning, and that you’re withholding information until you know what to make of me.’ He glared his bafflement. ‘What I don’t for the life of me get, is why.’

  No one said anything.

  ‘What makes you think that the emails I received have anything at all to do with this?’

  ‘We don’t,’ said Forester. ‘We don’t think anything. We know.’

  15

  The mere smell of Major John Patrick Trottier’s chai latte had Mark Winslow feeling distinctly nauseous as he sat there in the soft leather seat opposite. He didn’t say anything, although he suspected that maybe he should, instead waiting patiently while the ageing officer flipped through papers in his black satchel. He noticed the name on the paper cup, and didn’t say anything about that either.

  ELVIS. Dead clever. Really.

  They had had more of these meetings than Winslow cared to remember, and every time Trottier had insisted on buying his tea under a new name. Perhaps it was meant as an expression of humour, or a quiet protest against the secrecy surrounding the project, whatever else it was, it was unnecessary. All he was doing was making their unmasking more likely–wasn’t that guy called something else yesterday?–and how anyone could work in intelligence and yet be quite so daft defeated Winslow.

  He kept a lid on those thoughts though. It could be he was just oversensitive and was getting stressed about nothing. Maybe what they’d told him as a kid was true: that he was weedy and brittle and had inherited his nerves from the wrong side of the family. Not that he thought so, not really, but on those days when the stress built up and the sting of the stomach acid ripped at his insides, the doubt returned.

  They’d been travelling for several minutes before Trottier finally spoke.

  ‘This is happening right now,’ he said. They had just passed Trafalgar Square, although neither man had so much as looked up through the tinted rear windows.

  The folder he handed over looked like it was full of printouts, and Winslow took it, leafed through–and was none the wiser.

  ‘It comes from the internet,’ Trottier said, and took a slurp from the Elvis cup. As if that explained it.

  The pictures showed fire engines, fire, an apartment block shrouded in darkness, people standing around watching. Sure enough, these were printouts, from various internet news sites, and he saw that the headlines were all in Polish.

  ‘The street is called Ulica Brzeska. The city is called Warsaw.’

  There was something deliberately condescending about the way he said it, and once again Winslow felt like he should say something. But what?

  ‘Should this mean something to me?’ was all he asked.

  ‘I have no expectations.’

  Winslow swallowed. The heartburn was coming.

  ‘I’ll give you the abridged version,’ said Trottier. ‘According to the papers, the fire broke out at around eight, in a building that was supposed to have been evacuated ahead of its impending demolition. We happen to know that somebody was living there.’

  ‘Somebody? As in someone we know?’

  ‘Not us.’ He moved his index finger in a circular motion, encompassing the pair of them. ‘Not us, but–us.’

  Winslow nodded blankly. Here we go again. Territorial pissings, lines in the sand. We who have worked in the field, and you who haven’t, we the Secret Intelligence Service and you who can’t even be trusted to shuffle papers at a desk without popping antacids like sweets.

  He really should say something about that. After all, it was the older guy who reported to him, not the other way around, and if one of the two was higher-ranking it was Winslow. Nevertheless, it was as though his own lack of military rank diminished him. That, and the fact that he wasn’t even half Trottier’s age, let alone that his role was essentially that of a messenger boy.

  ‘So what is it you’d like me to convey?’ he said eventually.

  Trottier explained the situation quickly and concisely, with the tone of voice as if everything was being said in passing. As if that somehow made it more permissible to pass it on.

  The fire had set a bell ringing in one of their registers, he explained, because the man who’d been living there had been on their payroll. During the Eighties he’d worked as a scientist behind the Iron Curtain, and had been paid at regular intervals in exchange for information. That had continued until 1991, and since then he had stayed on their lists of former contacts.

  ‘What is he up to nowadays?’ asked Winslow.

  ‘That’s the thing. Nowadays, he doesn’t even seem to exist.’

  Winslow glanced up.

  ‘His name is Michal Piotrowski. He’s got a social security number and an address and a number of small bank accounts, but they haven’t been touched for years. He doesn’t appear to have a job, no income of any sort, nothing.’

  ‘And now he has died in a fire.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Winslow met his eye again.

  ‘There was mains gas in the house. The whole place was wood, just about. It’s going to be impossible to tell whether or not there was anybody inside.’

  ‘You mean he just wants it to look like he’s dead.’

  ‘During the course of yesterday, Michal Piotrowski booked at least twelve different trips leaving Warsaw. All on different cards–those same accounts he hadn’t touched for years. Besides those, he booked a number of onward journeys: from Gdansk, from Krakow, from Berlin, each one heading in a different direction. All booked online, using various public terminals. Some paid for, others not. Some he had rebooked, jigged about, changed to a different departure. He left others untouched.’

  ‘Red herrings?’

  ‘Clearly.’

  They said nothing for a while as they crossed the bridge. Raindrops snaked across the side windows, transforming the view to daubs of light.

  Winslow broke the silence.

  ‘So your conclusion would be that we’ve found ROSETTA.’

  ‘I didn’t say that.’

  ‘And what have they got out of AMBERLANGS?’

  For the first time in the journey, Trottier met Winslow’s gaze, with a look that was now no longer condescending, but troubled and honest, and meant for a colleague sitting in the same boat.

  ‘His name is William Sandberg. He’s a cryptologist in the Swedish Armed Forces. The local staff are convinced that it wasn’t him.’

  ‘How about your lead interrogator? What’s her opinion?’

  Trottier gave a sigh.

  ‘Their picking him up has put us in a really precarious situation. If he knows anything about Floodgate and he tells them something while there are Swedish personnel in the room…’ His voice tailed off to a murmur, even though no one could hear them. ‘I have decided not to let Forester know any more than is absolutely necessary.’

  ‘And now you’re worried that she won’t be able to say stop if he starts saying too much?’

  ‘Amongst other things,’ sai
d Trottier. ‘Many other things.’

  As Trottier leant back in his leather seat, it struck Winslow that the other man had, for the first time ever, asked his advice. Not in explicit terms, but as silence fell again, an unuttered question hung between them.

  What do we do now?

  ‘Give me your honest opinion,’ said Winslow. ‘What do you make of it?’

  ‘I believe Major Forester could do with some support.’

  ‘Fine. Well, in that case I think you should give it to her.’

  With that, the conversation was over. With a tap on the screen separating them from the driver, Winslow signalled that it was time to go home.

  ‘William? Let’s get back to the email.’

  By the time that Palmgren piped up, he’d been quiet for so long that his ex-colleague had almost lost track of his presence. He was leaning on the wall behind William, almost as if to lie low there until it was his turn.

  ‘From ROSETTA1998 to AMBERLANGS,’ he said. ‘The last of the emails you received.’

  ‘That’s another thing I don’t get,’ said William. ‘If you were monitoring me, how come you didn’t know that I’d received another two emails?’

  Palmgren nodded. As though that, in a way, was the right question.

  ‘Because we weren’t monitoring you.’

  ‘You can’t have been monitoring the sender. Considering that you don’t know who it is.’

  Palmgren didn’t answer. Instead, he headed over towards the television.

  ‘Do you remember when the email was sent?’

  ‘The twenty-seventh of November,’ said William. ‘Early in the morning. Can’t remember what time exactly.’

  ‘Three minutes past nine,’ said Palmgren. ‘And twenty-six seconds, to be precise.’

  And then he stopped, in front of the screen. He placed his fingertips on the map there, in the north-eastern corner of Europe. Poland?

  ‘Nine zero three and twenty-four seconds.’ He pointed the remote and clicked through, one second at a time. ‘Nine zero three twenty-five. And now, here’s when your email is sent.’