He debated with himself for half a second. Decided against it.
‘I can help you,’ he said instead, despite not knowing whether it was true or whether the youngster was even interested in any kind of help. ‘Tell me, who are you? What are you doing here?’
‘I just want to keep my word, that’s all. I know she used to stay out here.’
‘Keep your word?’
‘She made me promise.’
‘Promise what?’
‘To give her what was stuck in the computer.’
Palmgren felt his body go rigid. ‘Have you got the CD?’ The pressure on his chest increased, pressing him even harder into the ground.
‘I don’t know anything about anything,’ the kid said in a voice that hardened and caused him to breathe out even more of his infected air towards Palmgren. ‘All she said was that it was important. She was going on about the power cut, said that she was the one who’d made it happen.’
‘Why did she think that? Did she say anything else?’
‘I don’t know any more. I don’t want to get involved.’
‘Listen to me,’ said Palmgren, and he felt a searing pain in his chest as he raised his voice. ‘I’m as far from Drugs Squad as you can get. I’m in the military. Not even that, I’m part of a staff who sit around planning what to do if a foreign power threatens this country. I don’t give a damn what you sell or to whom, all I’m interested in is whether Sara said anything to you.’ The kid didn’t answer. ‘And I don’t know if you’ve seen the news, but right now there’s a terrorist attack in progress against almost a hundred nuclear power stations around the world. And if Sara knew anything about that, then please, please, tell me.’
The kid stared at Palmgren.
‘I’ve done my bit now,’ he said. ‘That’s all I can do.’
And then, for a second, he seemed to hesitate. He looked around, halfway between Palmgren and the black sky above, a head turning in all directions to judge distances and bearings.
‘Sorry about this,’ he said eventually.
‘About what?’ said Palmgren, and as he spoke felt the air leaving his lungs as the youth pushed down with his knee, his ribs creaking and his whole body trying to curl up with pain. All he could manage was to shift onto one side and then lie there on the sparkling white ground, rolled up like a felled striker in the penalty area, his chest pounding whilst the sprinting feet disappeared between all the boarded-up tombola stands and away out of sight.
Palmgren rolled onto his back. When his lungs had finally assured themselves that they were back in action, they allowed him to sit up. Elbows on the ground, then just the palms of his hands, and in the end he was able to raise himself. Breathless, tender, but otherwise okay. He could no longer see the youngster, in any direction. The question was where he’d gone, who he was, and–if he did have Sara’s CD–how they were going to find him again.
Not till he hauled himself upright did he look down and see the shiny disc that the kid had left lying on the ground next to him.
The police hadn’t seen the little car stopping at the end of the bend, but when the HGV behind slammed on its brakes, beeping and flashing, they couldn’t miss it. The urgency of this manhunt had made them nervous, and as seconds turned to minutes, they started to move towards it, cautiously and with weapons drawn.
And when they caught sight of the silhouette in the headlights of the HGV, none of them dared take any chances.
‘Police!’ they screamed. ‘Hands on your head! On your knees!’
They ran with arms crossed, torches propped under their weapons, shouting their orders in English with the words of the wanted bulletin echoing around their heads. Potential terrorist. The man they were looking for was involved in what was happening across the rest of the world, in country after country where, unlike Poland, nuclear power was used. He was dangerous, possibly armed, and all of them felt the buzz of adrenalin and fear.
‘Down on the ground! Hands where we can see them!’
When they got there he was already sitting perfectly still alongside the little Fiat, hands on his head just as they had ordered, far too paralysed to offer any resistance. They manhandled him away from the car, pushing his arms and legs onto the tarmac so that he could pose no threat. He was wearing a black padded jacket, with a fur-lined hood that had glided up over his head, and it was only when they rolled him over that they could see who it was–or rather, who it wasn’t.
The face peering out from the hood belonged to a man with a reddish beard. He was thirty, tops, with pale skin, steel-framed glasses, one lens with a horizontal crack in it, perhaps caused by their recent manoeuvre, perhaps not. Either way, he was clearly petrified. And definitely not the grey-haired, middle-aged man they’d seen in their pictures.
‘I was just going to ask if she needed help,’ he said in breathless, rolling Polish. ‘She was in my way.’
He nodded towards the lorry–towards the open door of the cab he’d just jumped out of. And when the police turned their torches on the little Fiat they saw a bald woman sitting inside.
‘There’s something wrong with the engine,’ she said. ‘Do you think you could give me a bump-start?’
After the police had worked out who everyone was–a young Polish trucker heading for the Baltics and a woman from Warsaw undergoing chemo–only the formalities remained. With an empty look in her eyes, Rebecca looked on as the police worked their way around her little car. They peered carefully through the windows, bending down and covering every corner, as if maybe there might still be a square centimetre that they hadn’t seen and in which a fully grown man might be able to hide. The back seat, passenger seat, boot–even the flimsy mat on the floor.
They didn’t manage to find a terrorist anywhere. No Swedish perpetrator curled up hoping to avoid detection. And when the police walked past her passenger door without noticing that it wasn’t quite closed, she knew that she’d made it.
Rebecca Kowalzcyk was alone again. Now it all was down to her: to get herself to Sweden and to tell the people who needed to know.
62
It took less than five minutes for them to drive from Gröna Lund to the Swedish Armed Forces Headquarters on Lidingövägen, and when Palmgren got back to the car the temperature inside it hadn’t even had time to drop.
‘Did you get them?’ Christina asked as he climbed into the driver’s seat.
‘I suppose so,’ said Palmgren, starting the engine, right arm around the passenger seat to get a better view as he reversed out. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing.’
The last bit was said with a quick but telling glance towards Tetrapak in the back seat, and then, before putting the car into first to carry on up the road, he let his hand fish around in his coat pocket, pulled out William’s bunch of keys and passed them to Christina.
‘I’m going to be in all kinds of trouble trying to explain why they’re missing.’
After that Skeppargatan was only another few minutes away, where there was no traffic and you weren’t looking out for one-way streets. They snubbed the slow old wooden lift and rushed up the stairs, a clatter of soles to break the dense silence right the way up until they were greeted by the beautiful double doors to the apartment on the top floor.
The whole way up, Christina clutched her handbag tight against her body. There, hopefully, was the answer, in the discs that Michal Piotrowski had sent; where William was so convinced that there had to be a hidden message. And if there was one place they were going to be able to retrieve it, it was here.
Across the opening where the double doors met was a bright yellow sticker proclaiming that the apartment was cordoned off and was not to be entered by unauthorised persons. Palmgren sliced it in half with his car key, mumbled something about being as authorised as we’re going to get, and nodded at Christina to unlock them.
It was the grille on the inside that made her understand. A month ago, she’d left this apartment, dumped the keys through the letterbox and vowed
never to return. Back then, the only things separating the apartment from the landing outside had been the thin wooden doors, the beautiful double doors with their leaded windows, the ones that would greet her with their warm welcoming colours whenever she came home late and William had left the hall light on.
Now though, they were joined by an impenetrable black barrier. One that was neither warm nor welcoming.
‘Why are you locking me out?’
That’s what she’d meant.
‘When did he put this in?’ It was as much as she could manage.
‘I don’t know,’ he said.
She unlocked the grille and showed Tetrapak into William’s study, unlocking that heavy door on the way. Her thoughts would have to wait. There was no time for brooding, not now, when they finally had something that might contain the answer to what was going on: the power cut, the nuclear power stations, the lot. That was what mattered.
‘Make yourselves at home,’ she said. ‘And if you have even the tiniest little question, I will not have any kind of answer whatsoever.’
What was meant to be a wry smile ended up as no more than a tired grimace, and she was left standing there as Alexander Tetrapak Strandell occupied William Sandberg’s well equipped home office. It didn’t take him long to get his bearings. He moved between the various shelves and racks, his fingers following cables that had been neatly bound into hidden bundles under the desk, then started up machines and computers before finally sitting down at the desk. Christina handed him the CDs and he lined them up in front of him, while the computers coughed and grunted and flickered into life.
‘I’m going to disconnect us from the internet. We don’t want what happened to Sara–or what happened at my place–to happen here.’
Christina nodded. ‘You do whatever you like.’
He turned back to face the desk, identified the right cables and then pulled them out from the back of the computer, and turned to face them again.
‘Also,’ he said, this time with an awkward smile, ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m used to working alone.’
As Palmgren and Christina made their way into the living room, they could hear the clack of the bearded man’s fingertips speeding up behind them. There was something in the combination of the sounds, the tapping on the keyboard, the fans, the whirring of all the hard drives, and the smell of the place, the feel of the loose wooden floor tiles, all of it, that flung Christina back into a time that no longer existed. It was as if she had happened to walk through a tear between dimensions, as though she was walking in with her winter coat and gloves into an apartment that was full of summer.
Round every corner, she expected to see them–William, Sara, herself–expected to see the sun shining in over the rooftops and straight into all of the rooms, where they would sit in that golden yellow light, eating breakfast or reading books, and then when they noticed her they would look up with puzzled expressions, feeling the cold that she’d brought in with her and sensing that something was wrong. Then she would warn them, warn them about the future and about Warsaw and about saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, and how they should never, ever, install a grille in the hall.
But they were gone. The living room was dark, the lights off, and Christina and Palmgren turned on the lamps by the window, sat down on separate sofas, and said nothing for a long time.
On a long bench along one of the walls was the television. They put it on with no sound, blurry footage of illuminated power stations alternating with pictures of roadblocks and maps with cities highlighted in red. Still no one knew what was going on, why it was happening, how it could be stopped. And with no sound, the panic in the eyes of reporter after reporter was clear. Not their dread of the looming nuclear disaster, that everyone might conceivably be dead before long, but panic at being pushed in front of the cameras to say the same thing for the umpteenth time.
That no one, no one, had the faintest idea about anything.
‘What happened?’ Palmgren asked after a long silence. ‘With you, with Sara. Why did she disappear?’
‘I’ve been a print journalist all my life,’ Christina said. ‘My job is to give as simple and straightforward an account of events as possible. A caused B which led to C. But in this case?’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. All of a sudden, life was like this. With a whole fucking alphabet of events that led to one another.’
‘I’m not asking the journalist. I’m asking you.’
Christina took a deep breath. ‘We didn’t realise,’ she said carefully. ‘We didn’t realise how important it was. Knowing where you come from–who you are, why you’re here, the emptiness of being without context–we didn’t get it.’
She looked around the room. Tables and chairs and sofas where she might have sat, if now had been some other time.
‘She knew. Of course she did. She noticed that something happened in Warsaw. And when we told her that she was adopted she realised that that’s who we’d met–her real father–and she demanded to know who he was, screaming, threatening us. But we just didn’t dare.’
She lowered her voice, as if Sara was actually there, as though she was reluctant to talk about someone in the third person in their presence.
‘We were so scared of losing her that we didn’t dare to tell her. And that was why we lost her in the end.’
That was the last thing she said before she went quiet and her eyes sank to the floor, settling on a rug that she had once chosen and demanded that it be delivered on time. A rug that once had been inexplicably important, just like everything else around her–the sofas they’d waited for months to receive, the table that barely fitted into the stairwell. The room was full of must-haves, and it was as though it was no longer possible to remember why it had all once mattered so much.
Christina hated tears, but as she looked up at Palmgren she knew they were on the way. ‘It was that simple. A led to B which caused C. Can you put a headline on that?’
They sat opposite each other for another half-hour before Palmgren was the first of them to lie down on the sofa. On the other side of the oh-so-important coffee table, Christina did the same, and they lay there without sleeping, the ceiling above them flickering in the uneven light of the television images.
On screen, the security experts and the politicians were having their say. One of those speaking about the security situation was UK Defence Secretary Anthony Higgs.
When Higgs appeared on screen, Winslow was still sitting in his boss’s office. At the bottom of the frame, microphones danced and jostled like the cast in a puppet show, and beyond them the Defence Secretary tried to compose himself for a statement. The questions that came were predictable, and the answers were just the ones Winslow didn’t want to hear.
We will never negotiate with terrorists.
We can never allow anyone to take the whole world hostage.
And then, straight to camera, as though Higgs was hoping that the perpetrators were sitting in front of their televisions, listening intently to his every word:
We intend to take every possible measure to find those responsible.
Winslow turned the sound off, and sat down to stare at the floor, letting the TV carry on miming its message. How had he ended up here? Floodgate. It had sounded like such a good idea.
Maybe it was like Higgs said, maybe it was too late to change their minds. He didn’t know. All he knew was that it went too fast, the world, everything, and that he didn’t have the capacity to keep what he thought separate from what he had to do. He caught himself staring over at the large windows. He was four storeys up, was that enough? The thought shook him. Where did that come from?
Instinctively he took a step into the middle of the room, away from the windows, repeating to himself that a thought is not the same as an action, that everyone thinks dark thoughts now and again, and this didn’t mean that he was ill. Considering the state of things, he thought to himself, the opposite was probably true.
When he had fi
nally composed his thoughts, Higgs had already left the screen. The pictures now came from a studio, and Winslow pointed the remote and switched off the TV altogether.
He could see his own reflection in the black screen, and hoped that Trottier had been right after all. That Floodgate would save the world one day.
Had William known who the man was talking on the television in the corner of the depressing eating area, he would probably have paid him rather more attention. As it was, he stood there just inside the draughty doors of the run-down petrol station with his mind on other things.
It had been two hours since he’d left Rebecca. Right the way through he’d thought he wasn’t going to make it, that he’d delayed too long and that the police would catch sight of him, either as he hurried across the field next to the road or, worse still, before he’d even managed to get out of the car.
That he’d made it out at all was down to Rebecca. She was the one who’d realised that the truck driver was already on his way down to come and talk to them, and she’d undone their belts and ordered: ‘Swap with me! Swap with me now!’
Ahead of them, the torches had been getting closer. Behind them, the lorry driver’s footsteps were approaching. And William had folded himself as small as possible, struggled to squeeze underneath Rebecca, as her contorted body wrestled its way over him in the other direction.
He was only halfway when he realised that he was stuck, that his jacket had snagged on something, maybe the seat-belt buckle, and he’d grimaced, writhing back and forth to try and get free, forcing himself not to pay attention to the hard seat backs behind him or the huge, merciless gearstick that was pushing deeper and deeper into his belly the more he struggled.
For a moment he pictured it: this was how it was going to end. The police were going to get there and rip open the car doors, and he’d be lying in the foetal position across both seats, entangled in a cagoule, and above him a woman with no hair bracing herself with hands and feet against whatever part of the car’s interior was nearest and saying how do you do in Polish. It might have been that thought that helped him.
Acts of Vanishing Page 34