‘Say what?’ she said.
He didn’t answer. And eventually she opened the folder instead.
For a long time she sat there like that, not sure what to say. Looking up at her behind the cover sheet was a great bundle of paper, page after page full of lists, codes, times, abbreviations. And it meant nothing to her.
‘What is this?’ she finally managed.
‘Mobile masts,’ said Tetrapak. ‘Isn’t it?’
Palmgren nodded. ‘Masts, calls, times. All the data that the operator registered about the phone that Sara was carrying.’
‘So what use is it?’ asked Christina. ‘If we can’t see where she went after the power cut, why are you giving me this?’
‘Because what we can see is where she was before that.’
After a while, the road signs started to feature place names like Makow and Przasnysz and Ostroleka, and when they’d been going for another half-hour, William steered the Fiat off the motorway to take to narrow, winding country roads. In the far, far distance, they could see the sky slowly beginning its shift from black to dark blue, a sliver of morning across the bonnet each time the road swung towards south-east.
Rebecca looked at her watch: it was approaching six. It was going to be dark for at least another hour. They hadn’t spoken for a long time.
Life occurs where the prerequisites exist.
That’s what he had said. Rebecca’s own words, but she’d used them in a completely different context, and it annoyed her. It was as though he’d hotwired her argument and used it against her, twisting what she’d meant. And she wanted to refute it, wanted to but couldn’t, and that wound her up even more.
‘We call it the internet,’ he’d continued. ‘An infinite number of carrier wires running back and forth across the entire planet. Wires incessantly sending data back and forth across the whole system. And what is thought, if not data? What is the brain, if not an infinite number of wires?’
Once again, the words were her own. And who was she to say that he was wrong? Over and over again, she had seen life blossom in test tubes and Petri dishes that she had believed were sterile. Because it could.
Once upon a time, billions of years ago, the Earth had been a dead planet, and then suddenly the temperature and the chemical elements and whatever else was necessary were right, and look what happened. And now, in the space of just ten, twenty years, man had covered the surface of the planet in a tangle of wires. A subterranean network of neurons and synapses, without anyone realising that’s what it was. The branches had grown into a gigantic web, impossible to monitor, millions of kilometres of cables transporting data back and forth, an unintentional artificial brain that had been allowed to grow into something far larger than any scientific experiment could dream of.
It was the irony of it all that made it so hard to accept. The irony that while scientific institutions poured billions into their attempts at creating artificial thoughts, building expensive installations in Switzerland and the USA, it had all happened of its own accord, right before their eyes. Life occurs because it wants to.
‘Let’s say I accept what you’re saying,’ she shouted through the noise of the engine. It was the first thing they had said to each other for a very long time. ‘Say we’re fighting against some kind of magical consciousness with a capital C. Something that’s omnipresent, whose eyes are every online camera in every corner of the world, whose synapses run right into every computer, every network, every—’ She paused. ‘Nuclear power station.’
For a second she clenched her jaw, trying to hold the words in. As insane as it sounded, it was equally frightening to say it out loud.
‘Someone who hears and sees every electronic word we send to each other, because every single connected unit, every lift and lock and telephone, is part of the Consciousness.’ She stared intently at William’s profile, as if it was all his fault. ‘Then why?’ she said. ‘Why is the Consciousness out to get you?’
‘First of all,’ he said, ‘you don’t have to accept anything. Reality goes on as normal whether you accept it or not.’
That was hardly the answer she’d been after. She stared out of the side window, demonstratively, as though it wasn’t reality that was the problem, but rather William’s unwillingness to change it.
‘To answer your question though,’ he went on. ‘I don’t think it is out to get me. I think Piotrowski knew something. Something that’s on those discs, something that must not, under any circumstances, come out. Piotrowski sent emails to my address. And then, when I logged in to the same address on a public computer in Stockholm…’ He shrugged. ‘That’s how I think it happened. No, that’s how it must have happened. The only reason I’m a target is because Piotrowski sent something to me.’
‘Something that you don’t even know what it is.’
‘Not yet.’
Whether she liked it or not, there was logic in what he was saying. That was why the data peaks had looked like they did, the ones registered by the military that had caused the power cuts. That was why they hadn’t been aimed at a specific target. That was why they’d seemed like a big muddle of impulses being sent back and forth. And above all, that was why they had occurred at the moment William’s daughter had inserted the CD into the computer.
It wasn’t an attack, it was a reaction.
‘If that’s the case,’ she said, ‘how are we ever going to be able to stop it?’
He sat in silence for some time before he replied: ‘I don’t know.’
He kept on driving, jaws chewing away on thin air, resentful eyes staring at the road ahead of them as though it had somehow wronged them.
‘If what you’re saying is right,’ she said after a while. ‘If that’s how it is, why this? Why the attacks, the power cuts, the nuclear stations?… if the Consciousness really exists, what does it want to achieve?’
William looked over at her again.
‘That’s what we need to find out before it’s too late.’
Once that had been said, there was nothing more to say, and they sat in silence as the road carried them eastwards, through dense woods and open fields, through curtains of spattering rain. They sat deep in their own thoughts, both of them thinking the same things. How people all around the world sat with their hearts in their mouths, how nuclear powers stations in city after city were out of control, and how they were sitting here in a rickety old car, its engine battling through the rain along the winding road through Polish forests, the only two people on Earth who knew how it had happened.
They had only just got out of the forest, when the curves straightened out and revealed the bright red warning flares laid out across the road.
59
Earlier that evening, the mobile operator had provided Swedish Armed Forces with lists of masts and calls, and Velander had set to work plotting the last movements of Sara’s phone. Sooner than anyone had hoped, he had managed to identify a couple of masts that kept recurring, and once a team of Security Police colleagues were sent out to look for the right spot, it hadn’t taken them long to find it.
Now, Palmgren followed the same route, past the alley where the official entrance to Gröna Lund’s amusement park was located, continuing along the white-dusted roads, past the eighteenth-century buildings and the boarded-up cafés. Christina was sitting in the passenger seat, her eyes fixed on the black steel skeleton behind the buildings, struts and towers and rolling sections of rails in silhouette against the night sky like the ribs of a great dead beast.
As they turned away from the waterfront and stopped at a narrow, dead-end alley, it was as though she didn’t have any words left. They left Tetrapak and his dark grey box in the back seat of the Volvo–it was seven years old, he’d been careful to establish before getting in, and lacked both GPS and a media player–and once they were out in the cold air Christina let Palmgren guide her across the snow-covered cobblestones. Further in, one of the red planks had had its nails clawed out of it, and from there the path l
ed on into the amusement park, long since closed for the winter.
When they’d squeezed through and out the other side it was as though the darkness grew even thicker. They walked past deserted tarmacked areas, saw lamps that were not blinking, pastel colours and Tyrolean motifs that seemed to have faded to blue-grey outlines.
At the far end of an open passage stood a corrugated tin shed, and beyond a pile of tarpaulins and metal brackets was a low metal door, where Palmgren stopped. He pushed the junk to one side, opened the door, and nodded at Christina to step inside. Slowly and cautiously, she ducked under the doorframe, continuing alone into the darkness on the other side.
It seemed to be storage. There were stacks of tables and chairs, huge wooden boxes that might be dismantled stalls, all packed in to protect them from the ravages of winter. And then, far across the room, she could just make out something that didn’t belong there.
When her feet arrived at the mattress, she stopped. She waited for her eyes to grow used to the darkness, only to realise at last that it wasn’t going to get better, however long she waited.
This was it. Instead of the room waiting in their apartment, her own room, with heating and clothes and food and them, rather than all of that Sara had chosen to sleep here, on a thin, grey mattress on top of two pallets, under a duvet that was filthy, damp and freezing.
She didn’t know when exactly she’d fallen to her knees, just that she had, feeling the cold seeping up from the ground, through the mattress and into her legs. She didn’t know exactly when she’d picked up the duvet either, nor when she’d decided to hold it tight, just that she’d buried her face in the damp cloth in the hope of smelling her scent, and finally she’d allowed herself to scream out, hoping that the synthetic filling would muffle the sound.
When they emerged back out through the hole in the fence, Tetrapak was standing outside the car. Christina could feel Palmgren’s arm under her own, leading her through the snow and the darkness without her registering any of it. Whatever she’d been hoping to find in there, she hadn’t. Not the CD–which of course was not the least bit surprising, people from HQ had been there before her and why would she have more luck than they had?–but above all, she hadn’t found any answers. All those whys would remain whys, all the ifs and the whens and the what could we have done differently would stay that way for ever.
And that was what finally made her break down, what made Palmgren rush into the dark room to help her to her feet again, and it was through that tangle of thoughts that she now saw Tetrapak hurrying up the alleyway towards them. The look in his eyes was the pure opposite of Christina’s. He was full of urgency and energy, and in one hand he was holding Palmgren’s folder with the lists from Sara’s phone.
‘Whose number is this?’ he said before he’d even got to them.
He held up a page towards them despite being far too far away for them to have any chance of reading it, pointing at the illegible digits, his eyes flitting between Christina and Palmgren.
‘She called three times,’ he said when neither of them replied. ‘When the power cut was over. Who was she calling?’
Christina felt Palmgren pulling her towards him. As if to protect her, as though Tetrapak’s enthusiasm was just another path to disappointment and he didn’t want her to go through any more of that today.
‘We’ve already followed those up,’ he said brusquely.
Tetrapak shook his head. He pointed to the three telephone numbers at the bottom, explaining that all three calls were made in quick succession, just after eleven p.m., on the evening when Sara Sandberg would soon be dead.
‘Two mobile numbers, one landline. This one is yours, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ Christina said. She wanted to point, but couldn’t muster the energy to raise her arm. ‘The top one is William’s. The one under that is mine. The third is the landline at Skeppargatan.’
She saw Tetrapak switch his attention to Palmgren. A demanding, exhorting look, as though he had grasped some key factor that no one else cared about. ‘Look at the duration,’ he said, holding the folder out in front of him, like a persistent child trying to draw attention to something important.
‘For fuck’s sake,’ Palmgren exploded. ‘Can’t you hear what I’m saying?’ He grabbed the folder from Tetrapak’s hands and pointed at the calls down at the bottom. ‘Eight seconds. Twelve seconds. Thirty. Does that tell you anything?’ Tetrapak didn’t reply. ‘As I understand it, you are not a big fan of the authorities,’ said Palmgren. ‘Occasionally, however, we do get things right.’
He gave Christina an apologetic look before explaining: ‘Velander made test calls. William’s voicemail greeting is eleven seconds long. Christina’s is even shorter. Sara hung up those calls long before she had the chance to say anything.’
‘Not the last one,’ Tetrapak said. ‘The one to the apartment. That was thirty seconds, thirty seconds is a long time.’
‘I know that. But if Sara had left a message on the landline we would have found it.’ Palmgren gave Christina another apologetic look. ‘We had people in William’s apartment that same night. They recovered the tape from the answer machine and it was blank.’
They arrived at the Volvo. Palmgren opened the back door, and when Christina spoke, she did so with such a weak voice that neither of them heard what she said.
‘What did you say?’ said Palmgren. Quietly, gently, like a parent to a newly woken child.
‘It hasn’t worked for years. The answering machine. The one at Skeppargatan.’
‘Well then, who did she speak to for thirty seconds?’ said Palmgren, hushed.
‘After four rings it diverts to William’s mobile,’ she said. She grabbed the folder from Tetrapak to read for herself. That detached feeling was gone now, and she scanned the incomprehensible rows of telephone numbers and times. ‘Lassie,’ she said, ‘Lassie, did you listen to William’s voicemail?’
‘I don’t know.’
She held out her arm towards him.
‘I want to borrow your phone.’
This time, Tetrapak didn’t try and stop her.
If Sara Sandberg had known that those were to be the last words she would ever say, perhaps she would have said something else. Then again, perhaps she wouldn’t. If she had suffered, why shouldn’t they? Why could she not torment them the way they had tormented her?
Standing in a narrow alley by the closed entrance to Östermalmstorg’s metro station, she could feel the gentle wind of subterranean warmth stroking past her as it climbed out of the stairwell. Mobile in one hand, fingers trembling against the screen as they tried to decide whether or not to make the call.
They had turned their backs on her. They’d put in a metal grille, a big thick gate, and what was that if not a signal that she was no longer welcome?
All of a sudden, it was as if she no longer had anywhere to go. She could go home of course, back to Djurgården and the tin shed, but she couldn’t bring herself to, not any more. She had seen the hallway stretching into the darkness, the parquet flooring’s fishbone pattern pointing towards her own room, mocking angles showing the direction that she couldn’t get to. She had smelled the smell. Of home, of Mum and Dad, and now she missed them so much it hurt.
In the end, her fingers had made up their mind and made the call.
William’s mobile was off. She couldn’t know, but he was at Swedish Armed Forces Headquarters and his phone was being looked after by the guard while he was being interviewed.
Christina’s phone didn’t receive her either. Its battery was flat after an evening without electricity, but Sara couldn’t know that either, and the feeling that they were deliberately trying to avoid her, the bastards, grew inside her. Now, when she needed them most.
Last of all, she tried the home number. It rang twice, three, four times. And when the call was forwarded to William’s voicemail she gave up.
‘I miss you.’
Those became the first words she said.
&nbs
p; Two days later, her mother would stand by a broken fence around the back of Gröna Lund amusement park. Over and over again she would listen to those few seconds, the first words that she’d heard from her daughter in ages and the last that she would ever hear.
‘I miss you and I want to come home,’ said Sara from another time. ‘So why are you locking me out?’
Christina listened, eyes closed, propped against Palmgren’s Volvo, as though she could make time stand still just by playing the message again and again, as though Sara was still around, somehow, as long as her voice was.
‘I know I’ve done wrong,’ said Sara. ‘But I didn’t know it would end up like this. I saw the briefcase, sitting there in the hall, and I should never have taken it, but I did, and I…’
For half a second, she hesitated, a silence that was far too long in those precious, limited moments, and Christina held her breath as she waited for the next words.
‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ she said. ‘But Dad? If you get this? The meeting is cancelled. I’ve got a CD that you’re supposed to have, and a warning that you shouldn’t go to the meeting, and it’s all postmarked Warsaw, and is this anything to do with me? With him? With whoever he is, that you refuse to tell me?’
The words were pouring out of her now, stumbling over tears and rage and worry over not having passed on the warning in time, a large, foul-tasting cocktail of emotions that could not be processed.
‘Forgive me,’ she said, finally. ‘Mum. Dad.’
Sara’s voice that weak, perhaps in tears, perhaps just sniffling in the cold.
‘I just really want to come home.’
She stood with the phone in her hand for another couple of seconds, and on the other end, a digital answering service recorded her breaths, a message in a bottle that might arrive or might not.
They were at opposite ends of time and space, yet they were right by each other, Christina standing in silence, Sara breathing, living, present. There.
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