Acts of Vanishing

by Fredrik T. Olsson

  Eventually he had found a cashpoint on Högbergsgatan.

  It was out of the way, a good distance from the metro station and the main roads, and the street was long enough to allow him to get away if a car should turn up. Even more important though was the fact that it was surrounded by alleys and passageways, most of which would take him down towards Slussen.

  He felt himself holding his breath as he fed the first card into the machine.

  Most of them hadn’t been used for years, and some of them he wasn’t sure had ever left his wallet. Several had been foisted on him in connection with various purchases, with the front emblazoned with an electronics company’s logo or a petrol station or an airline, and each time he’d thought, fine, if you want to give me a few hundred krona discount in exchange for me signing up for a card I’m never going to use then that’s your problem, not mine.

  Now, they were the cards he was rooting for.

  He was torn from his thoughts by the beeping of the machine, so harsh and loud that it made him jump, then look up and down the street for fear that someone might have heard. Had he forgotten the PIN? Fuck. Two attempts remaining.

  Maybe he should’ve started at the other end, with one of the cards he used every day, but if there was one thing he was sure of it was that they’d be watching those. If he started with one of the others it just might take them longer, and the more time he could steal for himself, the better his chances of success.

  If he could just remember the PIN. Idiot.

  Around him, the street was still black in both directions, a thickening snowfall glittering under the street lamps. No cars, no footsteps, no police with their weapons drawn. Not yet.

  He closed his eyes. Tried to see the pattern in front of him. The path his fingers took across the keypad, mathematics as images, just like the way he worked. And then tried again. Right, left, up, back?

  The silence lasted for ever. And then, thank God, at last he heard the whirr of the cogs, and he grabbed the notes hungrily as they emerged, stuffed the ten five-hundred notes in the inside pocket of his wet coat. Then he pulled the pen from his mouth, leaving the cap between his teeth while he wrote the four-digit code on the back of the card.

  Once he’d done that, he moved on to the next one. Maximum withdrawal, five thousand, code on the back. Now the next one. And the next. With each card the adrenalin mounted, but he forced himself to stay put, even as he grew more and more convinced that they were already on their way.

  Palmgren walked through the empty hospital, footsteps echoing past departments with alarming names, between walls adorned with childish murals. Wherever he went, his path was lined with trees and lakes and sunshine children, and it gave him the creeps. It’s a hospital, he wanted to scream, not a bloody children’s book.

  But most of all, he wanted to scream at William. So he was in shock, fine. Tired, worn out, grief-stricken, all of that. But that was no excuse. He wasn’t stupid. They’d be watching his cards and he knew it, which either meant he was desperate or just taking a big punt, and both of those were beneath him.

  He walked past the hospital canteen, closed for the night, out onto the turning circle beyond the glass doors, and stopped there, let his eyes drift for about half a second across the expanse in front of him until he found what he was looking for.

  The car was a dark metallic grey Passat. Two men in puffer jackets sat in the front, and he vaguely recognised them from earlier–maybe they’d been at Central Station to arrest William, he wasn’t sure.

  He walked over, tapped on the window, waited as it sank into the door with an electric whine.

  ‘Am I screwing things up by talking to you?’

  The smile that came back was intended to be sardonic.

  ‘It’s not you we’re watching. We’re waiting for Sandberg, if he decides to turn up.’

  ‘Of course you are,’ said Palmgren. ‘That’s why you’re here while he’s at a cashpoint three miles away.’

  It was a gamble, but the silence that greeted it proved him right. They had also been informed, which meant that the only explanation for their presence was that they were there for his sake.

  He returned their smile.

  ‘All right,’ he said. ‘Listen. I suggest that we head down there together.’

  ‘Our orders are to stay here,’ said one of them.

  ‘What, even if I leave?’

  That seemed like a possibility they hadn’t even considered.

  ‘Let’s say you really are waiting for Sandberg,’ said Palmgren. ‘Do you think he’s stupid enough to show up here? That he won’t suss you sitting here?’

  No reply.

  ‘Suggestion: you saw me leave. You had to make a decision and you chose to keep me under surveillance instead.’ Then, when the replies were still not forthcoming: ‘I’ll be sitting in your back seat, I think you can reasonably claim to have had your eyes on me throughout.’

  He opened the rear door, prepared for an objection, didn’t get one.

  ‘Högbergsgatan, please. You can put the meter on if you like.’

  He got a tired look in the mirror, but instead of saying anything, one of them turned the key in the ignition, and moments later they were rolling down the hill, away from the hospital.

  Palmgren checked his watch. At this time of night it wasn’t going to take more than seven, eight minutes to get to Högbergsgatan, going via Västerbron and Hornsgatan, bus lane or not. With any luck, he thought, they’d get there before the others. And then? He didn’t know. Maybe he’d be able to distract them again? Maybe he would spot him before they did, and lead them off in the wrong direction?

  He shook his head at his own thoughts. The city was full of cops with a single task. Every available unit was looking for William Sandberg, and he wasn’t going to be able to pull off a diversionary manoeuvre alone. Especially not without being discovered, which he’d definitely prefer.

  But, able or not, William was a friend. And the moment that thought passed through his head, it came to him that he had never doubted it.

  William Sandberg was innocent. He knew that now.

  Now all he had to do was help prove it.

  They’d just accelerated down the hill towards Drottning­holms­vägen and jumped the red light without stopping, when the Security Police agent in the passenger seat grappled his phone out of his pocket.

  He lit the screen, read something, and put it back.

  ‘Message?’ said Palmgren. No answer. ‘Is it about Sandberg? Do they know where he’s heading?’

  He saw the policeman up front adjust his position in the seat, cross his arms, then glance over his shoulder.

  What the hell was that? A smile?

  ‘As far as we know,’ he said, ‘he’s not heading anywhere.’

  They must have seen the shock in Palmgren’s eyes.

  ‘He’s still on Högbergsgatan, and so far he’s taken out money on five different cards. I’m not sure he’s quite as clever as you’re making out.’

  The first car was there within three minutes. It had been driving down Sveavägen when the call went out, had carried on through the tunnel and out on to Central Bridge, flashed over the water at well over 120 kilometres an hour, and then finally up to Medborgarplatsen with just a few hundred metres left to their target.

  On the giant screen in the JOC it was shown as a numbered white cross in the middle of the huge digital map of Stockholm. Rows of jaws were clenched in the auditorium, following the car as it travelled across the city centre, with the others not far behind. The whole city was crawling with crosses, all with a single instruction, to arrest William Sandberg, and they dashed to the target like flies to a sugar cube.

  He’d made five withdrawals. That meant he still had two unused cards to go. However, they hadn’t received any updates from the cash machine for over thirty seconds, which could well mean that he’d already moved on. But just as well, there could be something was holding him up–perhaps he was struggling to remember a P
IN, or else something had spooked him and he’d hidden in a doorway, waiting for the danger to pass before he completed the last two withdrawals.

  Either way, they were about to find out. The first ‘X’ was just seconds away.

  They held their breath, waited, and when the car finally reached the target and no reports came, they room was left with wildly fluctuating thoughts, simultaneously convinced that the police were busy wrestling him to the ground right now, and on the other equally certain that he was gone and that now they were tracking him down between the buildings.

  Nervously waiting, until the speakers crackled.

  ‘Come in, over,’ said Forester.

  The next minute, the mood of the room crashed.

  Sitting behind his screen, Jonas Velander closed his eyes in relief. Just two seconds, he thought to himself. Two seconds while this roller coaster powers down, till my pulse stops lurching and I can think straight again.

  When the police had finally responded at last to Forester’s call, they did so with the news that William was gone. She received the news with impressive calm and a renewed instruction to keep up the search, then stood without moving for several seconds, looking out over a room that was every bit as quiet and focused as herself. Whether there were others in the room who felt the same relief as he did, he had no idea, but Forester’s silence could only express disappointment.

  ‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘That would have been too easy, wouldn’t it?’

  Her tone had been meant to mask her disappointment, but failed completely, and when at last she set out across the room the vexation in her step was impossible to miss.

  One of the walls was covered with maps of various parts of the country, and over by the large-scale map of central Stockholm, Velander saw her turn and stop. Then she stretched one hand out over the island of Södermalm, with her thumb covering Högbergsgatan, her little finger making a slow circling motion.

  She was weighing up their odds. And while she made her calculations over by the map, Velander performed his own.

  The odds were still stacked against William. He was in poor shape to begin with, and on top of that he’d had a long, exhausting day. Say he managed to move ten kilometres an hour–Velander quickly revised upwards: okay, make it twelve. That would mean that with every passing minute William could move two hundred metres further away from the cashpoint–they had no way to know in which direction. That meant that for the first three or four minutes he’d still be on the island. It was, after all, a limited area, and there was only a handful of bridges he could leave by.

  But give him five, and they’d no longer know for sure. If they hadn’t picked him up by then he might have moved on to any of the neighbouring districts, from where the number of bolt-holes would multiply.

  As he opened his eyes again, he saw Forester down by the map, working the same permutations but hoping for quite a different outcome, and for a moment he couldn’t help feeling sorry for her. Everywhere you looked were alleyways, passages and tunnels, paths and steps that cars could not pass. And whatever they did, there were more streets in town than there were squad cars.

  On the big screen, the white ‘X’s had already started leaving Högbergsgatan. They spread out across Södermalm, searching the surrounding streets at random.

  And the minutes passed.

  Four. Going on five. Soon the window would be closed, and before long William could be sitting in safety–he’d managed to withdraw twenty-five thousand, and that would keep him going for quite some time. Forester’s only hope would be for him to make another withdrawal, pop up on the map and narrow their search area again, but even if William had exposed himself to an insane and extravagant risk, he wasn’t stupid. He’d taken one chance, and he wasn’t going to do that again.

  It was Agneta Malm’s voice that got him to look up. She was right by his ear, shouting with a force that jolted him upright.

  ‘There!’ she yelled. ‘We’ve got a withdrawal. A new one.’

  When Velander looked at the screen in front of him the dismay he felt made the ground shift underneath him.

  What is wrong with the guy?

  Agneta Malm had noticed it first, because that seemed to be her vocation. A new line of text had appeared on the screen in front of him, a code and some coordinates and a new transaction of five thousand krona, and now Forester was hurrying to see it for herself.

  ‘Put it on the map,’ she said, and Velander did as he was told, his fingers dancing over the keys, before double-checking that the coordinates were correct and then pressing return.

  Up on the big screen there was already a light blue dot in the middle of Högsbergsgatan, where the first cash machine was located. Now as the second dot appeared, the room gasped in chorus. They had underestimated him completely. They’d tightened the net far too slowly, no one had spotted him slipping through, and Velander rubbed his face and forced himself not to swear.

  After basically getting away, now this.

  Right next to him, Forester pulled the microphone towards her mouth.

  ‘Turn the cars around,’ she said. ‘Head north. He’s in the city centre.’

  Palmgren sat in the back of the dark grey Passat, grasping the handle above the window as the car shook and bounced over cobbles and potholes. It shot out onto the square at Södermalmstorg, skidding in the wet snow and leaving two long dark trenches of water in the spotless white as it cut across the open space, onto the carriageway on the far side, and onwards towards Slussen.

  Palmgren couldn’t for the life of him work out what William was up to. Their car had been one of the very last to arrive at Högbergsgatan, beaten to it by a whole convoy of blinking blue lights. Even so, it was perfectly clear that the game had been lost. There were far too many doorways and almost as many side streets, all leading in turn to more doorways and more side streets down which William could have disappeared. Everything was covered with powdery snow. Whichever way he’d gone, nature had managed to sweep up his traces behind him.

  And then suddenly, in the flood of Palmgren’s relief, another withdrawal. Not only that, of all fucking places it was at Central Station.

  Palmgren let his head slump over against the window, biting his lip to keep himself from swearing. Sure, there was a part of him that couldn’t help but be impressed. It had taken William less than ten minutes to cross the black waters of Riddarfjärden, and, assuming that no vehicle had helped him it meant that he must have sprinted all the way like a middle-distance runner. Straight over the bridge and presumably, for much of the time, in full view.

  Above all though, it made him furious. William’s only hope was to go into hiding, and of course he knew it, so why was he sticking his head out?

  Palmgren was barely done thinking that thought when the radio announced another update. William wouldn’t let it drop. From Central Station he’d headed up on to Klarabergsviadukten. From there, on to Sergels Torg. At each new location he made only one withdrawal then moved on, and in the back seat Palmgren felt despair and anger and a thousand other emotions erupting at the same time.

  They were crossing the bridge at Skeppsbron, with the palace on their left and the Grand Hotel on the right. He saw the blue lights moving on a parallel course on the other side of the water, and yet more racing in from Riddarholmen and turning off onto Vasabron. They were converging from all directions, between them they would block William’s route through the city, and there was no longer anything Palmgren could do about it.

  The three cars arrived at Hamngatan just seconds apart. The first tore down the hill from Sergels Torg, speeding over the brow so that the undercarriage scraped on the tarmac, a deliberate shortcut over the raised tramlines. Its sirens blared, its blue lights flashed, and a beam of white shot out from the front to strike the red frontage of the building next to the NK department store, the cashpoint, and the figure hunched over the keypad.

  From Norrmalmstorg, an identical beam of light swung through the darkness, playing between the
sandstone pillars of the arcade before finally settling on the same ATM and the same target.

  In the third car to arrive sat Lars-Erik Palmgren. He saw the first two screech to a stop, saw the two agents from his own car leap out with their weapons drawn, and from where he was sitting he could make out the black silhouette running down the portico in a final attempt to escape.

  Way over there the shadow darted through the sandstone passage, out between the pillars and straight into the road, several times almost slipping over on the icy tram tracks but each time regaining balance and running on towards the park.

  There the hunt ended. A new pair of headlights approached from the direction of the Opera House, spreading their icy cold light through white-dusted trees, and from his spot by the department store Palmgren saw the silhouette finally caught in a crossfire of light: headlamps, torches, bellowing police officers approaching from every direction.

  A heavy tackle brought the shadow to the ground. The scene filled with more and more colleagues, all with weapons drawn and grunting adrenalin-fuelled orders–Lie still for fuck’s sake, you’re not getting out of it this time.

  Then, inexplicably, he saw the police loosen their grip and let go. Backing away, exchanging glances, pushing fingers to ears and lifting their mics to their mouths, as though they couldn’t quite believe what they saw.

  The radio in the front seat crackled as it relayed their calls.

  ‘It’s the wrong person,’ someone said. ‘It’s not him,’ said another. ‘It’s a woman.’ A third voice.

  Utter silence from colleagues in the briefing room. And then, with short, hesitant pauses: ‘Await further instructions.’–‘We’ve got a little problem.’–‘There are two new withdrawals.’