‘What the hell is going on?’ she screamed as she ran.
The only thing he could think about was that someone had just tried to kill them, remotely. And however unlikely that explanation seemed, they had to get out of here before that someone succeeded.
When Christina came back in, everything lay in total darkness. The buzzing from the transformers and the fans had disappeared, the light had gone out and the only things visible were the weak silhouettes of the furniture, barely revealed by the faltering glow from the stove. The power was gone. Again.
‘What’s going on?’ she’d asked.
Instead of answering, Alexander Strandell grabbed the phone out of her hands, threw it into his dark grey box of electronic devices, and with that in his hands and a torch stuffed under one arm, he rushed past her and out the door.
They ran through impenetrable darkness, Christina one step behind, with only a hemisphere of light from his powerful torch to help them plant their feet. It was slippery underfoot and freezing cold, the ground creaking like dry planks in an abandoned house, and it was only after a while that Christina understood that the weak glow in the sky wasn’t moonlight after all, but something else.
It was light. Here and there were stripes of reflected lights, perhaps from roads, or the houses along the road that led back into town. Somewhere, not that far away, the electricity was working as normal. She felt relief spread through her body. Could it be that simple? That this was just something that had happened where they were? Perhaps something perfectly mundane, like a fuse?
‘It’s only here,’ she called towards the back in front of her, and he spat back without stopping.
‘Of course it’s only here. They’ve found you. They’ve found you at my place. They’ve found us.’
He was fumbling with her mobile as he spoke, his fingers still holding the box while his thumb was busy with the cover, eventually managing to pull the back off. He let it fall to the ground, followed by the battery and then the rest of the phone.
‘Have you got anything else on you?’ he shouted over his shoulder. ‘Tablet? Pager?’
‘Nothing,’ said Christina. ‘How could they have found me here? Just because I was on the phone?’
‘Who were you talking to?’ he said.
‘He called the paper,’ she said in an attempt to defend herself, and it stopped Strandell in his tracks.
‘William? You were talking to William?’ Darkness or not, it was impossible to miss the contempt. ‘They’re looking for him! Now they know where you are! And now it’s us they’re after! You come to me with your CDs and your questions, you come here with your problems and your most wanted husband and your daughter. I never asked to get dragged into this!’
‘You’re already involved,’ she said. ‘One of the discs went to you. Your name was on Piotrowski’s wall. You couldn’t be more involved than you already are.’
He stood for two seconds. Then he lowered his voice. ‘So what do you think we should do now?’
‘We need to find my daughter’s computer.’
‘And where is that?’
‘Well, that’s what I don’t know,’ she said. And made her way past Strandell in the darkness, walked through the gate and blipped her car key. Two warm yellow pulses spread through the darkness as the Volvo unlocked its doors.
‘Come with me,’ she said.
Strandell caught up with her, apologetic, sighing. Sorry, he seemed to be saying, we’re in the same boat, and then he put the plastic box down on the ground and reached out towards her.
‘Allow me,’ he said.
Before she could think, Christina gave him the car key. The next thing she knew, she was watching him coil his arm and then release, throwing the key high into the air and down into the blackness of the forest.
‘What the fuck are you doing?’ she wailed.
‘Does it have GPS?’ he said. ‘Theft-protection? Direct communication with roadside assistance?’
She was too shocked to respond.
‘I’m not getting into a modern car. Especially not yours. And especially not two minutes after you’ve made a call from my property and brought about–all this!’
There he was, the mad conspiracy theorist, but on the one hand, he was right: somehow they’d been discovered. And on the other hand, he was scaring her. It was there now, that intensity verging on madness that everyone was always joking about. Maybe she’d made a mistake after all. Maybe he was nuts, maybe he wouldn’t be able to help her anyway.
‘And how do you suggest we get out of here?’
He strode to the fence and pulled up a large tarpaulin.
‘No fucking way I’m driving that,’ she heard herself saying. The last time she’d seen it was on the pavement outside the newspaper offices, with Tetrapak lying on the snow in her headlights. It was rusty and heavy and probably as old as she was, and now he was dragging it across the frozen earth, before resting it on its stand just in front of her feet. ‘I haven’t been on a moped since I was eighteen!’
‘Who said you’d be driving?’
The emergency stairwell was icy cold and pitch-black, aside from the strobing flash of the alarm as they sprang lap after lap down the winding staircases, Rebecca first, with the sharp bangs of William’s footsteps on the metal stairs right behind her.
All the time, thousands of questions kept fighting their way into her mind, mixing with the screaming alarm around them. How could Michal be the reason for all of this? What had he done? Who knew about this? He was dead, she was sure of that now, and whoever had killed him had just tried to kill her too. And if it weren’t for William Sandberg they would no doubt have succeeded.
When they reached the ground floor she pushed open the heavy metal door into the lobby, pointed past the circular reception desk and over at the glass entrance on the far side of the floor.
‘That way!’ she shouted. Rushed out onto the open floor. And in the next instant she felt the weight of his body slam against hers.
With a forceful tackle, the Swede seemed to be attacking her from behind, and she could feel them falling together, the pain of the floor hitting them and their momentum carrying them across the shiny surface until they came to a halt right by reception.
‘Close your eyes!’ he screamed into her ear, pulled her body close to him and curled up protecting them both.
In a split second the entire floor was covered by tiny shards of glass, millions of razor-sharp projectiles slicing across the surface from one single direction, and it took her a few seconds to understand where the hell they came from.
It was the lift. It had tried to kill them again. William must have seen it hurtling downwards through its transparent shaft, and he’d flung them to safety, saving her life for the second time in a matter of minutes. They’d slid to the shelter of the built-in stainless-steel desk just as the lift car smashed into the floor on the other side, and now they were lying there next to each other in the foetal position. But the building had two attempts left.
‘William,’ she yelled.
He looked over. The desk had provided shelter from the first plunging missile, but the two remaining lift shafts were in full view. And in one of them the cables were thrumming with frantic force.
They stood up as one, throwing themselves onto the desk, rolling over to the shelter of the other side, and as they did so they caught a last glimpse of the lift, the cables shuddering with acceleration, twanging like rubber bands as though some giant finger had just plucked them.
Their landing behind the desk synchronised with the crash as the second lift was pulverised against the ground. Again, they heard the crushing of glass as the shaft burst into millions of fragments, the storm of them lodging in the defensive wall in front of them. Then comparatively quiet again, but for the non-stop flashing and wailing.
The stayed between the two semicircles of the reception desk, hugging the floor, waiting and listening. One lift intact.
‘They’re waiting for us,�
�� William said behind her.
She turned towards him, saw what he was looking at, and knew that he was right. Directly above them were the banks of screens that William had noticed on the way in, and they saw themselves on monitor after monitor, crouched behind the reception desks in the centre of the building. Whoever it was that wanted to see them dead certainly had the upper hand. There were cameras everywhere, and the moment they left their refuge, their hunters would know it was time.
It was going to take at least a couple of seconds to reach the doors. By then, lift number three would have done its job.
‘We’ve got no chance,’ she said. ‘What do we do?’
As she turned towards him she saw that he already had an answer.
When the applause died down, Simon Sedgwick ordered all his employees into position. The office itself certainly did not appear to be anything out of the ordinary, looking like the open-plan layout of a media company, but for two things. First, the three further floors at the base of the building which they had at their disposal. Where the garage stopped, and the lifts had their final calling point, two unassuming steel doors led to an enormous refrigerated hall across three floors, subterranean and full to the brim with endless rows of storage servers quietly flashing green. Second was the shortwave radio equipment installed at the very back of the room.
From his desk next to the large windows, Simon Sedgwick watched his staff start their machines and double-check their internal networks, which were isolated from the wider world, and made sure that everything was ready to receive. Small-scale testing was one thing, but very soon, enormous volumes of data would be streaming in via shortwave signals. Words and sentences identified by complex algorithms that would then be stored for repeated analysis, and as the algorithms learned from their own mistakes their accuracy would get better and better.
Simon Sedgwick took long, pleasurable breaths while he sucked on a pencil and told himself that the metallic taste of graphite was an acceptable nicotine substitute.
His baby was about to make its way out into the big wide world. It really felt like that, a baby, with everything that entails–the chance to grow, get bigger and learn over time. He was as proud as any father, proud of what they’d achieved in technical terms, proud of being able to make the world a safer place.
Of course he too had had his doubts. Once he’d had the same objections as everyone else, and referred to the arguments about people’s private lives and integrity. Then gradually, insistently, his reservations had melted away. Society had always watched over its citizens. Nothing had changed, other than technology.
But in the end, timing brought them down. With a political debate marked by fear of an omniscient state, one in which the intelligence services were portrayed as the enemy, no one had dared to goad public opinion. Instead, the system that Simon Sedgwick had developed was voted down, long before it even came to light. Overnight, the large working group in the European Parliament was disbanded, just as its existence had never officially been acknowledged in the first place, and so, at a stroke, with no minutes or official records, years of research and development became redundant and the activities quietly mothballed.
It was the young chap who’d got hold of him the next morning. The neurotic-looking one, he with the ulcer. The instructions he’d been bringing were extremely clear, but while it was a relief to be able to keep working, most of all Sedgwick couldn’t stop hating them for their cowardice. For their hiding behind diplomatic number plates and civil servants with stomach ulcers, for their sitting there on the opposite bank of the river, knowing full well that his system was necessary, but lacking the courage to say it loud.
How many of them were there? The whole department? A handful? Just the Defence Secretary himself? Did that even matter? All he knew was that he’d spent over a year completing the system and that now, finally, he’d received the order he’d been waiting for. Just as he knew that the whole damned department would deny all knowledge if any of it ever came out.
When the first confirmation arrived he had been chewing for so long that the pencil had disintegrated and his mouth tasted of lead. Sector after sector shouted up to him that they were ready, men and woman every bit as proud and as nervous as he was, and across the desks and on the pillars the screens were still blank. Waiting for the last order to be given.
The final keystroke would be his.
He had already typed the short command, and as he rubbed his hands together, and blew into his palms, he couldn’t help smiling. My daddy’s a hacker. That’s what she’d said. The little monkey. As soon as he got home he was going to sit down on the edge of her bed and give her a big hug, and when she asked him what had happened he was going to tell her straight.
Daddy’s not a hacker, he’s a hero.
Daddy helps the government to save the world.
They were only going to get one chance. Their opponents had one lift left, a huge projectile of glass and aluminium, and their only escape route was across a huge open expanse of floor. No matter how fast they ran, the lift would beat them. So they’d have to forget about running.
From their position between the semicircular desks, they could see their own movements on CCTV. Shots of them crawling towards the far end of the reception desk, images of Rebecca sitting in one of the office chairs, hunched over, crouching like a child. And of William climbing onto the five-pointed foot of the chair.
He tried some short, experimental push-offs. First in one direction, then the other, just a few inches at a time, making sure that the castors rolled as they were meant to.
‘Are you sure about this?’ Rebecca asked him.
‘Office champion, two years running,’ he said, knowing full well that that was a whopper. And the second after that, he thought to himself ‘do or die’.
He counted the flashes, looking for a rhythm, and then, protected by half a second of darkness, he kicked the chair away out from the reception. He jumped up onto the legs, and they both curled up like a bobsleigh team to get as much out of the momentum as possible, and then came the next flash. Next thing, the third lift was released.
It was like moving from one foxhole to another. Only a dozen metres or so, yet it took an eternity, an exposed route where anything could happen, and they saw it all in the flashes, one frozen instant at a time.
The lift careering through the glass shaft.
The exit coming towards them, the large emergency release bar across its width, which would just take a push to open and let them slide straight on out.
They could feel the wheels shuddering across the pieces of glass on the floor, split seconds where the chair seemed to almost topple over, but all they could do was curl up even tighter, lower the centre of gravity and hope that the momentum would keep them upright for those last few metres. Every moment seemed determined to go on for ever, until at last, at last, they reached the door.
And it was only then they realised what force those first two lifts had exerted.
With their arms crossed in front of them they pushed at the bar while they were still rolling, but instead of swinging open it refused to budge. The thick doorframe had buckled from the impact of the flying glass and it was now vibrating like the Plexiglas round a hockey rink. The energy of the impact jarred painfully through their bodies, and William thought to himself that if there was one thing he hated above all else it had to be glass walls.
At the far end of the lobby, the lift approached the ground.
‘Close your eyes!’ he screamed.
Rebecca did as he said. And then came silence.
In the big operations room, south of the Thames, fifty people were sitting holding their breath. With the push of a button, everything had changed, a revolution that no one knew about, and now all they could do was wait and see if everything had gone according to plan. Hopefully, system after system across the globe had received their signal, flickered into life and begun its task.
And no one was any the wiser. No one could
see the countless black boxes blinking into life around the globe. No one could see the phenomenal stream of communication passing through them, or see it being collected and analysed and filtered out. And no one could see the shortwave transmissions that the boxes were sending, invisible fragments of countless conversations, compressed and packaged and sent in the form of grating noise to a secret office south of the Thames.
In city after city, continent after continent, they awoke from their slumber, from New York to Rio de Janeiro to Lisbon, from Stockholm to Marseille to Yokohama, and it was unprecedented and unlawful and there was no sign of it anywhere.
It took almost a minute for the shortwave receivers to nervously start blinking green. A moment later the large screens were covered in data and words and digits, they were collated and flickered past, replaced by new ones, and what had been an endless, thirsty silence disappeared in a storm of applause.
Years of waiting, ended by a single click. Floodgate was live. And the world was a safer place.
The impact never came. For a couple of panicked seconds, they heaved at the emergency exit, a last forlorn attempt, shook it again and again, with the darkness of the car park just outside the glass. So near but completely out of reach. And they closed their eyes, even though they knew it wouldn’t help, ready to be pierced by a hail of flying glass when the third lift hit the ground.
Instead, the noise of the sirens gave way to the sound of metal on metal, the long, whining screech as the lift’s emergency brakes activated. The only flashes were as the ordinary lighting came back on, hundreds of fluorescent tubes suddenly hissing into life throughout the enormous atrium.
In an instant, as though someone had flicked a switch, everything had gone back to normal. The vast lobby looked like a war zone, dusted with a fine layer of glass, the furniture and walls shredded by the thousands of airborne shards. In the last of the three shafts, the lift hung motionless, just a couple of metres above the ground.
Acts of Vanishing Page 28