Acts of Vanishing

by Fredrik T. Olsson

  For a moment, they stood silent. Hell had broken loose, and then changed its mind, and both states took some getting used to.

  ‘Watch out,’ said William eventually.

  With all his strength he took the chair, turned it upside down like a five-pronged hammer, and battered the seized-up emergency exit door until it finally gave way.

  Outside the doors, they stood tasting the silence, searching the horizon for blue lights and listening out for sirens, certain that they were still hearing both and then realising that it was the after-effects of the alarm. For several minutes, they said nothing, waited until their ears grew used to the sound of silence, until the darkness had stopped flickering and the dizziness had slowly subsided.

  ‘What is there around here?’ asked William.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Not much. Forest, fields, farm buildings. Most of them are disused and have been bought up. Waiting to become industrial estates, whenever the economy picks up.’

  William glanced over at Rebecca’s hire car across the tarmac.

  ‘We’re going to have to leave here on foot.’

  ‘Do you think they can see the car too?’

  ‘See it, or worse. As soon as we start it up it’s going to connect to all sorts of networks. GPS, media player, theft protection. If they could find us in there, they can find us in the car, and I don’t want to be doing a hundred down the motorway when someone who doesn’t seem to like me very much takes control.’

  She said nothing. They were in a fevered dream. Someone had tried to kill them remotely, and the hire car was brand new and well equipped. Maybe he was right. It was all too weird for her to even know what she really thought.

  ‘So where are we going?’ she asked.

  ‘Away,’ he said. ‘Away from here. That’s all I know.’

  Leaving the car in the car park, they continued on foot out onto the country road, with the motorway and Warsaw behind them.

  They wandered in silence in a landscape consumed by the mist, where the damp swallowed all the sound. They headed onwards, and in the distance the cigar-shaped building dissolved into a white, featureless glow.

  Before long they heard the rustling of trees. They ducked off the road, finally daring to hope that they might have made it.

  52

  Every day is someone’s first day at work. Someone, somewhere trying out their chair for the first time, dispensing their first coffee from the machine, clipping on their name badge and feeling overwhelmed by a sort of self-conscious pride.

  Today, her name was Liv McKenna. She’d just turned twenty-five, she’d recently graduated from the University of Birmingham and loved playing tennis; she’d played the cello in a student drama group and in the lonely hearts ad she posted online when she’d moved she’d described herself as classically trained–which was a massive exaggeration, but who cares? She was new to her flat in Ipswich, new at work, and new to the large, light grey control room that looked like the bridge of a spaceship from a seventies sci-fi film.

  On the evening of the fourth of December she was starting her first shift at Sizewell, a nuclear power station a hundred miles north of London. The evening when what could never happen, did.

  53

  They’d been walking for over an hour when they decided to stop for the night. On one side of the road was a dark concrete building on a gravel yard, surrounded by rusting barrels and piles of objects that might be called scrap but which were barely worthy of the name. Angular, reddish-brown car skeletons were strewn across the gravel, as though this had been the site of a great battle between rival vehicles, one in which a whole army of fallen cars had been left to lie there and die.

  Several large holes in the rickety fence were evidence that the property had long since been looted of everything of value, and William and Rebecca bent double to squeeze through one of them, and over to a hinged door on the gable end. A decent heave was all it took to force it open, and once the gap between it and the frame was big enough for them to pass through, they were met by a blend of frozen odours inside: damp, oil, dirt. From the deep window recesses along the roof came the tuneful clearing of throats as the resident pigeons shuffled themselves and wondered who was disturbing them in the middle of the night. But that was all. No alarm, no people.

  They felt their way along the walls to a panel with an outsized switch plate, and when they finally managed to get the ceiling above them blinking into life, purpling fluorescent tubes on their last legs alternated with ones that had already given up, a glance was all it took to realise how lucky they were to have kept close to the wall.

  The building was a workshop. There were heavy tools and trolleys everywhere, all reddish brown with rust, some spread out across the floor, others waiting on dirty benches, as though they’d been abandoned in the middle of a never-completed task. In the centre of the room, a dark green tarpaulin was draped over what was presumably a small car, and alongside that was a long, deep inspection trench, without so much as a suggestion of a screen or a handrail. If they had walked through the middle of the building, the ground would have disappeared from under them.

  ‘It doesn’t feel like it’s our turn to die today,’ said Rebecca.

  ‘Tomorrow is another day,’ said William.

  At the far end of the building, a door led through to a small kitchen. It was a couple of steps up, worn and filthy and without a single square centimetre where black smudges and oily fingers hadn’t left their indelible mark. There was, however, running water and electricity, and in one of the cupboards they found some coffee that had been opened for months, maybe longer. And even if the taste had essentially gone, they brewed a pot and drank in silence as their body heat slowly returned.

  The first one to say something was Rebecca.

  ‘What happens now?’

  She sat on one of the kitchen chairs, staring straight ahead, her hands cupping one of the mugs from the cupboard.

  ‘We try and arrange a spot to sleep in,’ said William. ‘Then tomorrow we get out of here.’

  ‘I didn’t mean what happens now,’ said Rebecca. ‘I meant what is going to happen. Now.’

  She threw her hands up, pointing at nothing in particular, at existence, a now that meant the rest of her life. Where would this end? What was she going to do?

  ‘I’ve got nothing to go back to,’ she said. ‘Michal’s home was my home. And if he was in danger, then so am I.’

  ‘We don’t know that he’s dead,’ said William.

  ‘Yes,’ said Rebecca. ‘I know it.’

  They slipped back into silence, exhaustion catching up with them.

  ‘We need to find the discs,’ she blurted suddenly, her tone so forceful that it made her sound like a teenager who had just decided to start a band, the same conviction that nothing was going to get in the way.

  ‘There’s nothing we can do,’ said William. ‘We just have to wait.’

  Rebecca shook her head. ‘That message was for me. The notes on the glass walls. I was supposed to notice your names. If something happened to Michal I was to track you down.’ She saw William’s resignation and continued. ‘Even if your wife finds the third one, even if they identify what he’s hidden on them, there’s nothing to say that they will be able to decipher what it is.’ She was now bolt upright, and her voice was pleading and assertive at the same time. ‘Michal gave me a job to do. I don’t plan on sitting around doing nothing.’

  William said nothing. He knew that feeling only too well: the duty to complete a task, for his sake, as though Piotrowski might magically rise from the dead if she only did it right. A way of fleeing from the grief. The same kind of escape, he realised, that had brought him here.

  ‘I need to get to Stockholm,’ she said, interrupting his thoughts. ‘You and I need to get to Stockholm and find out what it was Michal wanted us to do.’

  ‘If I could get there I would. But I’m a wanted man in Sweden, apparently here too, and besides that, someone is so keen to get
rid of us that they hotwired a whole office complex.’ He put his cup down. ‘That sort of thing impresses me. I don’t know how you feel about it, but when someone goes to the trouble of half-demolishing a building for my sake, it grabs my attention.’

  He could hear the jeering in his voice, and he didn’t want to fight, but he badly needed sleep and they were getting nowhere.

  ‘I wouldn’t get past a single ticket inspector. Not a passport control, a customs officer, nothing. The instant I try to book a trip out of here I’ll be getting a single to the interrogation room.’ A pause, before he rounded off. ‘I’ve been there once already, and let me tell you, the service is appalling.’

  ‘He gave me a job to do,’ she said. ‘I want to get it done.’

  ‘How,’ said William. Not like a question, quite the opposite. He spoke it as a statement, a quiet, sorrowful barb to have her grasp it once and for all. There was no way for them to escape: all they could do was sit and wait, keep their heads down, and hope, first that Christina could lay hands on the last CD, and then that she could somehow send it to William in Warsaw. But Rebecca was equal to him.

  ‘If it’s borders that are blocking us,’ she said, ‘then we’ll have to avoid borders.’

  When the coffee was all finished, Rebecca stood up and walked into the little office off the kitchen. In there she found Warsaw phone books, years old, pulled up a wobbly chair and proceeded to lose herself in the rows of names. William had no choice but to leave her to it, and headed back into the cold garage.

  It was a long shot, but she was probably right. It was their only chance.

  Dawid Ludwin. The man who’d once made contact with Piotrowski, the airman who had passed secrets to the West and who had remained a friend. For a long time, he’d been out of Michal Piotrowski’s life, but when the car bomb exploded, taking Gabriella instead, Dawid Ludwin had tracked him down again, full of remorse at the thought that he had been the one to introduce Michal to a world he had never chosen for himself.

  Rebecca had not met him on more than a handful of occasions, but that was only part of the problem. The last time they’d met he had been scarred by an illness that he had tried, and failed, to make light of. The truth was that she wasn’t even sure whether or not he was still alive, but if he was, if he was still flying light aircraft, if all the stars aligned, then he might be their chance of getting to Sweden without passing go.

  As Rebecca threw herself into searching the mildewed phone books, William went over to the inspection trench, pausing by the green tarpaulin. If Rebecca was right, they were going to have to get back into the city and then continue northwards. They would need a vehicle.

  The first thought that struck him as he removed the tarp was that they still did. The car hidden under the cover was a Polski Fiat. It was riddled with rust, with a windscreen cracked from one side to the other, and judging by the size of it, it was something you put on rather than got into. The paint job might possibly be called sky blue–in as much as there was any of it left–and inside, the seats stank of mould and the rock-hard belts looked as though they would do more harm than all but the most severe collision.

  In his youth, William had been the unhappy owner of a Volkswagen 1200, and his standing joke had been whether to take it to the junkyard or put it out with the recycling. The more he looked at the Fiat in front of him, the more certain he became that the same thing applied here, but they couldn’t afford to be choosy. The tyres appeared to be intact and roadworthy, so if they could just get the engine going they might have a chance of getting out of there.

  There was no key in the ignition, and a quick search of the workshop left him with no alternative. He dived in underneath the steering column, ripped off the brittle plastic covering below the dash and let his fingers fumble through the multicoloured wires underneath. There were far more than he’d expected. Lying on his back in front of the driver’s seat he followed the cables to the point where they disappeared into a panel and continued towards the engine at the back.

  William Sandberg had never hotwired a car in his life. Something told him though that a Fiat manufactured at an unknown point in the 1970s was a fine place to start, and he walked around the car, opened the hood at the back and looked for the point where the cables from the ignition emerged.

  As he stood there with his hands inside the engine, he realised that he was enjoying it. It came to him that he’d been missing it–losing himself in a radio that had stopped working, or pulling the motherboard out of a PC, just because he could. Others had green fingers, William used to say, his were electric.

  He’d spent much of his childhood building, screwing, understanding, and it would eventually lead him to his career, to programming and encryption and logic. At that point the fun had disappeared. Hobby became duty, life got in the way. It had been years now since he’d dismantled a radio for the hell of it, and the more time had passed, the more he had lost track of why it mattered.

  His fingers memorised which cables led where, and when his hands could reach no further he backed off and tried to sort them visually. In places they hung untethered, like thin multicoloured spaghetti, and at the back of his mind his thoughts turned to the cables in Piotrowski’s enormous office.

  He thought about Christina. About the man she’d met, whose name had been on the glass wall. He thought about the CDs, the internet attacks that didn’t look like normal attacks, and last of all, he thought about psychotronics. About the possibility that someone had heard what he was thinking, his actual thoughts, and that they might be doing so now, despite being nowhere near him.

  No. That didn’t make sense. If someone could read his thoughts, why weren’t they here already? Why hadn’t they found him until he called Christina, why let him wander all this way with Rebecca without sending people to pick them up? Someone had tried to kill him, over and over again, and now they had him cornered, now there was nothing to stop them, and yet—

  He looked down at his hands, at the different-coloured cables that needed to be rewired in order to bring the car to life. And as he looked up again, he could feel himself smiling. He wasn’t being followed. He was a moving target, but followed he was not. No one had come after them, because whoever wanted to kill them couldn’t.

  No one had read his mind, he knew that now, and he stood up, racing through everything in his head one more time: Rosetta, the cables, psychotronics, the slides showing the data peaks, the ones Forester had shown him, warm-coloured zones that climbed from resting blue to yellow and red and blistering white-pink. And then the images from the lab.

  There it was. His focus had been wrong. He’d seen the woman lying there in the dentist’s chair with all the wires on her head, seen the text that showed her answers emerging on the screen, and all he’d done was try to deny it, when he should have been asking what exactly he was looking at.

  He was just putting away his tools when Rebecca emerged from the kitchen.

  ‘William?’ She was scared. No, more than that, she was terrified.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked her. ‘What’s happened?’

  ‘The TV in the kitchen. Now.’

  She ran back towards the door, constantly checking that he was still behind her. And then, in the doorway, she stopped again, her voice cracking.

  ‘Are we a part of all this?’

  54

  Mark Winslow picked up the phone in his office and sensed trouble. It was Higgs on the line, ordering him to put the TV on. Seconds later he was running down the corridor towards the meeting room at the far end. The room was full of his colleagues, most of them young like him, still at work although it was late evening. They let him squeeze in, twenty or thirty heads facing the large screen without breathing.

  In his Kensington apartment, Secretary of Defence Anthony Higgs stood alone with the phone in his hand. In a bed many miles away, Simon Sedgwick was woken up by his wife. Throughout England, the same thing was happening, and across Europe, and around the globe. In living rooms
and offices, anywhere at all with a TV screen, people gathered, staring but not speaking.

  The reporters, on the other hand, had plenty to say.

  Liv McKenna could taste blood in her mouth. She was standing paralysed in the middle of the large control room at Sizewell, panting harshly but impossible to hear above the shrill alarms wailing all around her. Wherever she looked, people were rising from their desks, voices were reading meters, shouting numbers, panic seethed behind each syllable, and in the middle of the room she stood motionless, terrified, and full of self-loathing, as though she’d just arrived at the scene of a road accident, and knew precisely what to do but couldn’t, rigid with shock.

  It all had begun with a light. One single flashing light on a control panel with thousands of others, and of course it had made her nervous, who wouldn’t be? It was her first day after all, and this wasn’t any old workplace.

  At first, the calm around her had made her feel safe. There were procedures for everything, and of course there was a procedure for this too. Checklists were checked, corrections made, and one by one the proper actions taken. Calmly. Expertly. Methodically. Without results.

  The light did not go off. Instead, it was joined by others. Somewhere beyond the reactor hall’s thick walls, down in the deep tanks, the reactor refused to do as it was told.

  Systems were being shut down and restarted, whole rows of buttons now flashed yellow and red and green, the place glared with light, and everywhere the various panels shouted out for attention, screaming out numbers and levels and WARNING.

  Liv McKenna swallowed to keep the nausea at bay.

  On the large red button in the centre of the console was the word SCRAM, and even though it should have been a straightforward decision, it wasn’t. Ordering an emergency stop on a nuclear reactor in the middle of the process wasn’t something to be done lightly–the risks of damage were substantial, and it could be months or even longer before it was possible to get the generators back on line. On the other hand, they had a nuclear reactor that was not obeying orders. It was the sole option left, and so the necessary phone calls were made, actions approved, orders issued, and the authorised finger pushed the button.