He felt the man’s scepticism, well aware that it was justified. Couldn’t he have said that he was fixing a pipe instead? Wouldn’t that have been more logical? Idiot. He’d smiled politely for so long that he thought he was about to get cramp, and eventually the old man nodded, opened the bathroom door, and walked in ahead of William. It took only a couple of seconds to shut him in there, and then immediately push a chest of drawers in front of the door to prevent the man from escaping.
‘I really am so very, very, sorry,’ William called through the door, at the same time noticing an unexpected richness and variety in the old man’s collection of swear words. ‘I just need to get out of here. It’s a very long story.’
Afterwards he’d proceeded to turn off all the lights, turned to face the door one last time, and promised that he would call reception as soon as he possibly could to tell them where the man was sitting.
And then he’d opened the window into the courtyard.
As the last of the policemen–the one wearing civilian clothes–made his way back through the hatch, William stood there in the window recess outside the old man’s room and waited for another few seconds.
Across the yard was a property long since in disuse. According to the faded sign he’d seen on the street side, alcohol had once been sold around the clock, but today nothing was sold there, ever. The windows facing into the yard were boarded up with planks and plywood sheets. Some had buckled and curled because of the moisture, and he should be able to rip them off with no real resistance.
He was only going to get one chance, and he couldn’t keep waiting for ever. He jumped down onto the tarmac with a much bigger thud than he had hoped, before sprinting past the junk over to the windows on the far side and wrestling with the rain-sodden plywood sheets that bent and twisted in his hands without coming loose.
Behind him, light after light came on as the police continued their search of the hotel. He knew that at any moment, someone might look out and see him, but he batted away that thought, concentrating instead on his task.
He could feel his cold fingertips being shredded against all the sharp edges. His own blood mixing with the acidic water from the wood. Then, finally, the rusty nails gave up.
Rebecca Kowalczyk was already sitting with the key in the ignition. She looked at her watch for the umpteenth time, drumming her hands on the steering wheel. One more minute, she thought to herself. She’d lost track of how many times she’d said that. One more minute, then I’m out of here.
She could still make out one of the riot vans in her rear-view mirror, sticking out of an alley a long way away, but no movement, no police, nothing. And then each time a minute passed, she gave him another one, because maybe it meant that they hadn’t found him.
She couldn’t just wait around indefinitely though. She didn’t know who he was, or what he’d done. She wasn’t even sure if she was doing the right thing. The only thing she did know was that somehow he had something to do with Michal, and that she had nothing left to lose.
She’d just turned the key and started the engine when there was a knock on the window beside her. Dressed in a blue suit and a windcheater, clearly inadequate for the prevailing conditions, he looked like a haggard bus driver with bags under his eyes. Without saying a word she opened the central locking, waited for him to sit down, and pulled out from the kerb before he’d had the chance to put his belt on.
They drove in tense silence, watching the police riot vans shrinking in the rear-view mirror, expecting black-clad men with automatic weapons to rush onto the street at any moment, pointing guns in their direction. But nothing happened, and finally they turned a corner, past street after street, pulled out onto the tram lines and drove on in silence.
The first person to say anything ended up being her.
‘I think maybe we should introduce ourselves.’
42
Rebecca Kowalczyk had recognised him straight away. She’d been standing by her window, looking without seeing, when she noticed that her unfocused gaze had zoomed in on a face she’d seen before. When it dawned on her just what she was looking at, the realisation sent a chilling shock right through her.
Him. There. But why?
She’d stood there, motionless, for ages. Observed him across the yard, just the other side of the burning pile of rubble that she herself had caused, a new view of the street that had emerged as the building collapsed. He had come no closer than the cordon on Ulica Brzeska, a reasonable distance from which to observe the glowing ruins that had once been her lover’s home–no, her home. Theirs.
It was already late afternoon. She’d spent the night in the flat he’d bought her for nothing, the one with an entrance from one of the parallel streets which she always, without exception, headed for after work. Normally she would just pick up any post from the doormat before going back downstairs, out through the back door and across the yard to Michal’s building, watchful as he had instructed.
Now that building was gone. Instead she made the bed that she hadn’t slept in since it was put there, paced sleeplessly between pieces of furniture that were only there to give the impression that the flat was occupied, made tea because you have to have something inside you, and then let cup after cup go cold on the kitchen table.
She kept on being drawn to the window, watching the embers dancing in the darkness. When the dawn arrived and the feelings ought to have eased up they had carried on as before, brooding and painful, and she missed him terribly.
Then, in the end, he’d turned up. Less than twenty-four hours earlier she’d seen him on a blurry photo in her lover’s apartment, shot from a distance as he left his home or got out of his car or laughing with a wife and a daughter. An envelope full of secret pictures, stuffed in the middle of their personal photo albums. Who was he? Friend or enemy?
She felt the grief turning into frustration–she had to know, but had no one left to ask, and deep down she knew that even if Michal had been there he would have shaken his head like he always did and explained that he couldn’t tell her more than she already knew.
‘For my own safety,’ she hissed into nowhere, and only realised she’d done so out loud when she heard her own voice. ‘Fuck you, Michal, you can go to hell!’
Twelve years of secrecy and furtive meetings, twelve years because he’d once had an accident. But times change, they change and you must be able to let go of the past. Michal Piotrowski though, could not. He just was who he was. And maybe all of this had proved him right.
She had eventually made up her mind. She’d grabbed a jacket from the back of a chair, run down the steps and to the front door, and rushed round the block to get out onto the street from the other direction. She stopped by the tape, on the other side of the firemen busily fighting the blaze, and stood there, hands deep in her pockets, just like him. She’d watched the glowing embers and the water, just a curious neighbour, nothing more, and throughout she had kept an eye on the man with the cropped greying hair on the other side of the road.
Should she make contact? Should she leave it?
When he finally started to walk away, she had already decided to follow him. She ducked under the incident tape and flashed an apologetic smile towards the firemen as she mumbled something about living just over there, then swapped to the opposite pavement so that she could follow him more discreetly, and the further she followed him, the more convinced she became: he was scared.
He was making the same kind of sudden decisions as she had been taught to make. Piotrowski had shown her how to avoid being followed, how you stop and head back the way you came, and now the grey-haired man was doing just that. At various points she had to let him out of her sight so as to avoid being discovered, but she knew the area and was able to choose an alternative route each time, then rejoin his, invisibly and at a safe distance.
From Targowa he’d turned off and gone into the market. He’d bought clothes and what looked like a mobile phone, before finally checking into a hotel that
she’d often passed on her way home. Using all her charm, she’d managed to persuade the receptionist to give her the name of the man who had just checked in. He had eventually explained that the man came from Sweden, and his name was Söderbladh, Karl Axel.
Then she’d gone after her car, parked in a spot that gave her a view of the hotel, and asked herself what the hell to do now. Make contact? Lay low, keep shadowing him, find out who he was? Or just drop it altogether?
It took less than half an hour before the first van arrived. It pulled up around the corner, less than fifty metres from her own car. The men who emerged were dressed in black jumpsuits, bulletproof vests with police emblems, and as they pressed themselves to the wall to avoid being seen from the hotel windows, Rebecca Kowalczyk realised that her mind was already made up. As she pulled out her phone and asked reception to put her through to Karl Axel Söderbladh, she hoped that she’d made the right choice.
Once Rebecca’s story was done, they sat in silence for several minutes. She had stopped the car at the bottom of a gravel slope down by the river, on what seemed to be half sandy riverbank and half landfill site, and where big neglected shrubs hid them from almost every direction. They could see the water shining in the darkness, slight movements caused by eddies in the flow. They could see bridges spanning the river both upstream and downstream from their position. Their outlines blurred in the drizzle, and the odd siren blasted from far away, sometimes accompanied by a caravan of blue lights sweeping past over the water. Maybe they were looking for them, maybe not.
‘So where is he now?’ William finally said.
He looked at Rebecca’s profile in the seat next to him. The smooth, almost circular silhouette of her shaven head.
‘What is it that your fiancé is trying to achieve?’
He said it with a trembling, suppressed anger, and she shook her head evasively.
‘He had pictures of you,’ she said. ‘Taken in secret.’
‘I can imagine,’ said William. Sat silent before changing the subject. ‘I was contacted by Michal Piotrowski two weeks ago. Three emails, no sender, almost no content. Said he wanted to meet me, but never turned up.’
He gave her a summary: the emails, the arrest at Central Station. He told her about the power cut, the internet traffic, and how Swedish intelligence suspected him of being part of a terrorist network that was threatening to devastate the world electronically. And throughout, he maintained a tone that demanded explanations, as though the responsibility to make sense of it all had been passed over to her to her now that Piotrowski was unavailable.
Finally, he told her about the CD. That the girl in the internet café was his daughter, that she’d stolen the CD from him–and that this was something he still hadn’t told his colleagues at HQ.
‘I came here to find out why the hell he’s dragged me into this,’ he said. ‘If he is gone now, it means that he’s left me with this shit in my lap.’
‘He didn’t have a choice,’ she hissed.
‘And how do you know that?’
‘Because I know him,’ she said. ‘Michal Piotrowski and I have been together for twelve years.’
There was accusation in her voice, and he waited her out.
‘We don’t have a favourite restaurant, because the whole time we’ve been together, we’ve never gone to the same place twice. We never book a table. We just happen to meet in the bar. We never leave together, never get in the same car. The only exception is when we’re abroad, but never under our real names, and never without looking over our shoulders.’
For a brief moment she lost herself in the words, as though suddenly unsure which tense she should be using–‘see’ or ‘saw’?
‘One other exception,’ she went on. ‘His apartment. He felt safe there, we could be ourselves, he could be sure that no one could see him there. And now it no longer exists.’
She closed her eyes.
‘He fought against it, right to the end.’
‘Against?’
‘Against us.’
When she opened her eyes again, she did so with a sad smile.
‘But there are some forces that are beyond our control.’
He said nothing.
‘I like to compare it to life itself,’ she said. ‘Today I’m a biologist. Researcher in evolution, specialising in neurobiology. But the whole time I was growing up, I wanted life to be something special.’
‘What do you mean by that?’
‘What I’m saying. I wanted life to be something divine, something that could only occur here, on this Earth, because then it would mean something.’
William looked away quickly, anxious. And she noticed, and couldn’t help smiling.
‘No, not divine like that. I’m a biologist, not someone who believes the world was made in a week five thousand years ago. But all the same, what I wanted deep down was for all these millions of years of evolution to be something unique and special and—’
She searched for the words but didn’t find them.
‘But life is stronger than that. Life doesn’t need meaning. Everyone who’s been in a lab knows what I’m talking about. However sterile you think you’ve made something, however inhospitable and uninhabitable–if you leave it alone for long enough, and happen to add just the tiniest prerequisite, the slightest contamination, then suddenly you come back to it and it’s full of fungus and bacteria and—’ She shrugged. ‘And life.’
She looked at him.
‘You don’t control that. That’s the only way I can explain it. Life wants to exist, so that’s why it does. As soon as there’s the slightest little opening.’ She paused, and when she spoke again her voice was heavy with regret. ‘It’s the same with love. It shouldn’t have happened, and yet it did.’
She shrugged again. Sat quietly behind the wheel for a long time.
‘Why did he fight it?’ William said eventually.
‘Because he was scared.’
‘Scared of what?’
From one moment to next, the conversation seemed to have changed. She turned the key in the ignition, still staring through the windscreen, her voice suddenly sharp as she answered.
‘Scared that his past would catch up with him.’
With that, the headlights came on, followed by the sound of the engine.
‘Even so,’ he said to her profile. ‘How has all this got anything to do with me?’
Instead of answering, she reversed the car out from the bushes. She steered it up the sandy bank and on towards the patched-up tarmac of the road above.
‘Who is he afraid of? Why is someone after me? And how did they find out that I’m here?’
‘I found you. Why wouldn’t they be able to?’
‘Because it’s impossible,’ he snorted back. ‘I threw my phone away. I paid for the hotel in cash. I haven’t left a single electronic fingerprint since I left Sweden!’
She drove along the river until the buildings fell away, becoming fewer and lower. They were already pulling onto the motorway by the time she finally took a deep breath.
‘What if they don’t even need that.’
43
As they left the motorway, the silence in the car was total. The city skyline had long since thinned out and gone, city had given way to suburb, residential areas to industrial estates, and then the darkness and the countryside took over completely. With the fields came the mist. Everything became blurred, the inky blackness ahead of them turned light grey in their headlights, and the only thing that told them they were moving was the constant stream of white lines.
Gradually, the lines became smaller. The road narrowed, surrounded by frozen fields on either side. Ahead, a huge, shapeless oscillation of light was growing sharper and clearer in the mist.
‘I know what this is going to sound like.’
That was the first thing Rebecca had said for several minutes, and William waited for what was coming next, but she just sat staring straight ahead, not saying a word, making tiny ad
justments with the wheel on the almost straight country road.
Slowly, the light ahead of them coalesced into a building, an enormous cigar of glass and steel that seemed to cut loose from the damp, illuminated by icy cold industrial floodlights.
‘Have you heard of psychotronics?’ she said after a long wait.
William stared at her.
‘And here’s me thinking I’m the one who’s losing it,’ he said.
He peered over at her, hoping for a smile, some kind of ironic grimace confirming that they were on the same page. There was none. When he eventually looked away he could feel the unease swelling in his chest.
What if they don’t even need that?
‘Of course I have heard of psychotronics,’ he said after a long pause. ‘And I’ve heard of MKUltra. Just like I’ve heard of the tooth fairy and Father Christmas.’
Rebecca still said nothing. He let his back sink into the seat, thoughts taking shape, thoughts he didn’t want to think.
There were countless conspiracy theories about the Cold War. Psychotronics was just one of them. The superpowers of the day had been obsessed with two things, and those things had combined to eliminate all traces of rational thought. The first was to secure a position of superiority, regardless of the cost, and to never fall behind. The second was to constantly speculate about what projects the other side was engaged in.
A child could see how this would lead to a self-fulfilling rumour mill, but the world wasn’t run by children but by middle-aged men, and the outcome was an ever greater fear of the other side’s success. That in turn led to scientific research that no sensible person would ever have allowed to take place.
One of those projects was the CIA’s MKUltra.
For long periods in the nineteen-fifties and sixties, huge sums had been ploughed into projects about telepathy, brainwashing and mind reading. In big futuristic laboratories, rows of earnest men in uniforms and white coats had stood behind one-way mirrors, and quite seriously observed the efforts of their subjects to telepathically communicate geometric shapes to one another.
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