Acts of Vanishing

by Fredrik T. Olsson

  ‘It’s all happening tonight.’

  The taxi driver’s voice. Christina turned towards the front again.

  ‘This little thing,’ he said, beaming into the rear-view mirror. His hand was resting on a little black box next to the meter, its diodes flashing and displaying digits that must mean something to those in the know. ‘Two thousand, off eBay. As long as the police don’t sort their new comms system out, it’s my best-ever purchase.’

  ‘Police radio?’ said Christina.

  He nodded. ‘If they can listen to us, then why we can’t we listen to them?’

  She gave him a weak smile, avoiding the obvious question of why he thought the police were listening to him, and glanced through the rear window again.

  ‘Accident in the Kaknäs TV tower,’ he said, clearly proud of his knowledge. ‘Explosion, possible casualties. Do you know the codes?’

  She spent precisely half a second negotiating with herself.

  ‘Take me there,’ she said.

  ‘I should think it’s all cordoned off.’

  ‘I’m from the press,’ she said. ‘It’s only ever as cordoned off as you make it.’

  19

  The middle-aged detective at the centre of the whole mess was called Magnusson. He stood with his feet apart, in the middle of a floor that was covered in brochures and cups and crushed rubble, trying to get a handle on the situation.

  Christina Sandberg, her name was. Suddenly, from out of nowhere, she had materialised in their midst, amongst all the technicians and firemen, then marched right into the lobby despite the tape and flashed her press badge and asked a stream of questions–was it an accident? Was anyone hurt? Any connection with the power cut earlier?

  He’d ended up having to physically stop her. Through gritted teeth, he’d explained to her that if she didn’t get lost this instant he would personally make sure that she was locked up and put on bread and water, and even if that wasn’t a particularly plausible scenario the message had got through at last and the woman had allowed herself to be escorted out.

  Now he stood there, trying to get a grip.

  ‘Magnusson?’

  A young voice behind him. It was the same constable who had led the woman away just seconds earlier.

  ‘She wants us to call her a taxi. Says her phone is dead.’

  Magnusson felt his energy waning.

  ‘You know what?’ he said. ‘Go back out and tell her we don’t cordon off scenes because it looks attractive. Tell her that she committed a crime when she shoved her way in here and tell her I’ve been on since this morning and my patience runs out at lunchtime.’

  The constable stayed put. Had he just been given an order he was expected to carry out, or had it just been his boss blowing off steam?

  ‘And when you’ve done that you can call her a cab and make sure she gets out of here. The further away the better.’

  That was an order, and his young colleague headed off down the long concrete walkway towards the car park.

  It had only been twenty minutes since Sergeant Eskil Magnusson had walked that route in the other direction. When the call went out he and the youngster had been down by Frihamnen docks. They’d put on their blue lights and had been the first unit at the scene. A big explosion, the radio operator had said–gas, maybe a bomb, nobody knew.

  Even so, his first thought had been that the whole thing was a false alarm. The walkway had brought him to a lobby entrance with glass panes polished to the point of invisibility, and behind them an organised chaos of books and T-shirts and Stockholm souvenirs.

  Only after a few seconds had he registered the crunch underfoot. The concrete ground was strewn with tiny shards of glass, razor-sharp and ground to a lethal white flour, and now he realised that the immaculate glass doors were nothing of the sort. They weren’t transparent; they were no longer there. The panes had been shattered from the inside, and spread down the walkway, and the chaos that greeted him wasn’t so organised after all. Like someone had grabbed the whole structure and shaken it, that’s what it looked like, and a shaken Magnusson had reached for his phone and asked the control room to send the Fire Brigade and an ambulance.

  At this point he’d heard a voice in the middle of the mess.

  ‘The lift,’ it said.

  She was no older than twenty-five, was wearing a top emblazoned with Stockholm’s coat of arms, and was sitting on the edge of an upturned bench, her eyes glazed and her face and hands flecked with blood.

  ‘I was the one who called.’

  She had seen the whole thing, and only now she made things come together. The explosion had not been an explosion. The force that had shattered the lobby had come from the lifts. As Magnusson clambered further inside, past piles of debris and junk, he found the lift doors lying on the floor, thrust out of their frames like the buckled lid of a tin of herring left for too long. Concrete and plaster had collapsed, leaving both lift shafts open, and inside them thick cables ran straight upwards into the darkness.

  The lift itself had fallen thirty storeys. A couple of metres down were the remains of what had been the lift car, hugely crumpled and compressed, and within ten minutes the whole of Kaknäs Tower’s lobby was cordoned off and pulsating with emergency blue.

  Then they had found the body.

  This information came courtesy of the young constable, explaining it all in a lowered voice as he waited for the taxi switchboard to answer. His hand held his work phone, his pocket contained five hundred newly earned krona in hundred-krona notes, and opposite him in the car park stood Christina Sandberg who promised not to name him in her article.

  Finally they were told that a car would be with them in ten minutes, and Christina gave him her card, shook his hand and asked him to call her if anything else turned up. Then she made her way through the car park, past the array of emergency services vehicles parked there. Kaknäs Tower was veiled in fluttering blue light. An amazing shot, if her mobile hadn’t been dead.

  Somehow, she thought, this had to be linked to the power cut. Which was true–only not in the way she thought.

  20

  It had been one of those long hot summers that only exist in memory. When life was a series of terrace bars and billowing clothes, when each new dawn kept yesterday’s promise of warmth, and it all went on for so long that you began to think that it was going to be like this for ever.

  It wasn’t, of course.

  The warmth had arrived to crown an outstanding summer. The move into town, to the apartment, had been a perfect decision–no lawn to plague your conscience, an endless range of local watering holes, and when Sara got back from Washington without being mugged or assaulted they had enjoyed the tail end of the summer and the big city together, days and nights on end.

  Even Warsaw had turned out to be a fairy-tale city.

  It was August by the time they arrived there. None of them had been to Poland before, neither Christina nor Sara nor he himself, and they had been transported down green avenues towards a core of high-rise buildings, the same schizoid mix of ultra-modern and historic that you’d find in any long-lived city, barring the fact that the no-nonsense fifties architecture was a bit more no-nonsense than average, and that the really historic buildings were actually just reconstructions of what had once been there. They checked in to a hotel a few blocks away from the old town, grabbed a coffee from a chain they’d seen in London, then strolled off on foot to the huge structure known as the Palace of Culture and Science. They saw it sticking up between the buildings long before they got to it, towering high above the city like a gigantic stone monument, a dazzling vanity project that reached over two hundred metres into the sky and somehow managed to invoke both the Iron Curtain and downtown Manhattan simultaneously. And it was there, on the enormous stone steps leading up to the eastern entrances, that William had been greeted by a man with a warm, intimate handshake.

  ‘William Sandberg!’ The man smiled broadly and took a touch too long letting go of his hand
.

  He had an unkempt, long non-hairstyle, two eyebrows grown into a single sweep, and further down a scraggy beard that told two stories: first, that this was not a man who cared too much about his appearance, second, that he had just helped himself to the buffet visible inside.

  William had smiled politely and searched his memory. ‘Do we know each other?’ The newcomer smiled through the crumbs.

  ‘We’ve never met,’ he said. ‘But I’ve heard so much about you.’

  And perhaps William ought to have reacted. Maybe he should have found it off-key. He was here as a conference delegate, just a member of the audience, yet the man’s tone was so warm and sincere that it had been too familiar by half.

  Then again, why not? Above the large entrance banners were proclaiming a conference about the future, and the place was crowded with mathematicians and physicists, all of them with sunglasses and casual clothes and their families around them. Several hundred of the world’s finest brains were gathered in the same place. Who could be anything other than open and personable in a world like this?

  The man had shifted his attention towards Christina and Sara, shaken hands with them as he asked, ‘Family?’–though he’d already understood–and Christina and Sara had introduced themselves, and then it was his turn.

  ‘My name is Michal,’ he said, as if that information would explain everything, and with that he handed over a business card. Or rather, what served as a business card. It was more of a handwritten note, scratchy letters, as though scribbled down at speed, and under stress.

  ‘Michal Piotrowski. Biology’s my field.’

  With that he’d pointed up towards the entrance, said something about it being cooler in there, and Sara and Christina had climbed the first step up towards it.

  Behind them, Piotrowski had put his hand on William’s shoulder.

  ‘I am so glad you decided to come,’ he said. A quiet voice, almost in confidence, an intimate moment between two men who’d never met.

  So glad?

  William had allowed himself to be led up towards the long row of high glass doors, and he hadn’t seen it, but in that very instant, the first light grey cloud had appeared in the eternal summer sky.

  As William pushed his chair back from the desk, rolling away from the screen before coming to a halt halfway across the room, summer and warmth and happiness were as distant as they could possibly be.

  The email client had come up with three hits. Two inbound, one sent, all five years old. He’d scrolled down to the first of them. An invitation from a research institute that some kind soul had so generously sent to him.

  When he clicked it open the memories revived in an instant. Sitting at the top of the message was the institute’s coat of arms, an etched profile of Copernicus within a roundel emblazoned with text, and underneath was an extravagant leaflet and an invitation which was too good to be true. If he could shout back in time, he’d tell himself to turn it down, to stay in Sweden and do what he always did with casual invitations: throw the stuff in the bin and get on with his job.

  But the past was what it was.

  A conference that could change your future.

  No shit.

  Your friend, Michal Piotrowski.

  At the top of the message window was the subject line–three short words in English which revealed that this was a forwarded invitation–and next to that was the recipient field, with William’s work email in it.

  But it was the remaining field that interested him now. The sender. The name was Michal Piotrowski, but what mattered was the email address he’d hidden behind: ROSETTA1998. This was incontrovertible evidence that William Sandberg had had contact with the address they were linking to the

  attacks.

  Sandberg had two choices. He could either go back down to Palmgren and Forester, and tell them about the emails and that he did in fact know who the person behind them was. But what would happen after that?

  William Sandberg had been let down by the world, and that was the profile they were always looking for, someone who had lost everything and wanted revenge. He fitted the bill to a T. He had conducted illegal archive searches. He had accessed systems he was not authorised to use. His wife had left him, his daughter had got into drugs, and in the end he’d been sacked by the Swedish Armed Forces. They’d join it all up and, Look!, they’d say. Look, we’ve got ourselves a scapegoat!

  He was convicted in advance, because that’s what they wanted, and even if he might eventually be able to prove the truth, that would take time–time he did not have.

  He found the handwritten note where he’d expected to find it, in a binder full of old receipts and mileage claims and other business cards he’d accepted out of politeness. It was even more scrappy now, and bleached by time, but more or less as legible as it had been when he first took it five years ago.

  Name. Address. And a single contact detail. The Hotmail address.

  He stayed in his chair until his thoughts had taken shape, and when he rolled back to the desk again he had already decided. It took only a few seconds to open the computer’s toolbox and jot down the necessary lines of code.

  There was nothing striking about the car at all. It was metallic brown and maybe a year or so old, an ordinary family-size Nissan with a tow-bar, the bottom of the rear windscreen lined with stickers in a neat, well-organised row as a record of where the owners had spent their holidays. It was parked well outside the police cordon, a single lonely car in an otherwise empty car park, and it might have been that that piqued Christina Sandberg’s interest.

  She hadn’t noticed it when she’d stood there by the entrance, but now, as she walked away from Kaknäs Tower and out towards the road to meet her taxi, she saw it parked up by the ticket machine, shining in the light of one of the street lamps.

  Sure, it could belong to one of the staff. Or indeed a jogger or a dog owner who’d parked there before running out into the uninviting slush. That was possible. But not likely.

  Christina stopped in her tracks. Behind her, the sweep of blue-light emergency vehicles continued. In front of her the car park opened out on to a road that curved off into the darkness, and beyond that joined the main road, yet there was no sign of the lights of the taxi she’d ordered.

  She changed direction, sauntering and nonchalant and slow, all to demonstrate that she was doing nothing other than waiting for her taxi–this was no curious journalist, this was a tired, freezing-cold fellow human with a dead phone who needed to keep moving in order to stay warm.

  She was almost over by the car when she felt herself gasp. Maybe her brain had made the connection long before she’d understood just what she was looking at, either way the realisation crept inside her consciousness, made her pick up the pace for those last few yards, forget all that stuff about sauntering and pretending that nothing was going on.

  The rear windscreen. The stickers, bottom left. Seeing them felt like déjà vu, of summer and happiness, a visual token that sent her back in time and made her regret everything and want to do it all differently. The design was a circular decal in shiny foil paper, black text looping around an etched face in the middle. The closer she got to it the clearer that face became.

  Copernicus. And around it, the letters boasted that this car was driven by someone who once attended a conference on the science of tomorrow. The Futurology Conference. In Warsaw.

  It wasn’t until she was bathed in bright white light that she realised that she must have been standing there for several minutes. The car that stopped behind her was a spluttering diesel Mercedes, and still in a daze, she heard herself confirming in the direction of the headlights that yes, she was Christina Sandberg.

  ‘Car troubles?’ the driver said as she sat down in the back seat.

  ‘No. That’s someone else’s.’

  She fastened her belt, feeling her pulse thud hard inside her ears, struggled to grasp what this was all about.

  Her daughter, who was suspected of causing the po
wer cut. Her husband–that’s still what he was, after all–who was also suspected of something and was being kept at Armed Forces HQ for reasons no one was willing to divulge. And on top of that, someone had died in a lift accident, tonight, just now. Someone who, it would seem, had been a delegate at the same conference that they had attended, that glorious summer.

  You’ll see, it will all come together…

  ‘Any suggestions?’

  The taxi driver looked at her in the rear-view mirror. Not that he minded sitting in the car park and watching the meter ticking away, but was that really what she’d had in mind?

  ‘Have you got a torch?’ was her reply. The driver hesitated briefly. He opened the glove box and pulled out a long LED torch.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Christina. ‘Just give me two seconds.’ Then she opened the door and retreated into the darkness to march over to the metallic brown estate car, shining her torch through the windows, searching but not knowing for what.

  Until she spotted it. And realised that, coincidence or not…

  Fucking Tetrapak. You’ll see.

  On the passenger seat lay a rectangular jiffy bag. One end was ripped, the seat was strewn with its padding, and on top of that lay an empty, open CD case.

  But that wasn’t what made up her mind. It was the shiny semi­circle peeking out of the car stereo.

  Christina Sandberg had never smashed a window in her life, but there’s a first time for everything.

  21

  ‘Sweden. You’ll love it.’ That’s what they’d said. And then they’d given her a staff team, slapped her on the back and wished her good luck. Now she was here, she didn’t like it one bit.

  Cathryn Forester was standing on the flat, square roof of the equally square HQ, and her face was being whipped by a horizontal, ice-cold precipitation that could not accurately be described as either rain or snow. She was freezing, and she was tired, and everywhere she looked the windows of Stockholm looked back at her like tiny hot-tempered dots.