At the Central Station just across the street, a handful of police stood waiting; a few more were standing, lights flashing, by the shopping centre opposite. In all probability, there were even more on the other side of the building. And there he stood, a lone man with a shaved head, not heading anywhere. How long would it be before they wondered why?
The coffee in the mug he was holding had long since gone cold, yet he still took a sip every now and then. In his other hand was his wallet, and he was pretending to swipe at the black leather with his thumb, hoping that anyone looking from a distance would think he was flipping through his phone, just a man waiting for something, passing the time by reading news sites or social media, the way that people do.
He stood there for another five minutes before deciding that he’d waited long enough. Maybe he had got Christina’s message wrong after all. He walked down the steps, trying to keep the back of his head turned towards the police on the street, and skirted around the enormous stone palace to head in the other direction.
The congress hall. That’s what she’d written, there was no doubt about that. She’d written Wednesday, that was today, at three, which was now, so how else could he have taken it?
He’d just turned the corner in front of the building, and was walking past the tower’s southern façade, when he realised that he hadn’t been paying attention.
He heard footsteps behind him. He hesitated, but forced himself not to look, to carry straight on without letting on that he’d heard. Was it cops? Someone else? He picked up the pace, and when he saw the next corner of the building coming into view, he turned in there and stopped at the bottom of the stone steps leading to another of the place’s many grand entrances. He fished out his pretend phone again, pretending to check something pretend-important, looking around so discreetly that no one could possibly notice. But the pavement behind him was empty.
Had he imagined it? Was it emotions taking hold again? He strove to breathe evenly, trying hard to work out what to do next. Maybe he ought to try and find somewhere where he could borrow a computer, have another look at Christina’s column. There had to be a public library around somewhere, and if he just managed to avoid the police and was careful in places with CCTV, maybe he could ask directions without being discovered.
Just as he made up his mind, he felt a hand on his shoulder. He spun around, much too fast, and as he met the young man’s eyes he realised that his assailant was every bit as terrified as he was himself. He couldn’t be much more than twenty. Tall and wide, neither muscular nor overweight, just big, but in proportion, including the powerful hand that had managed to envelop the whole of William’s shoulder at once. His beard was a shock of single straggly blond hairs, apparently competing with each other to be the longest on his face, and a dark blue tattoo peeked over the top of his tracksuit top.
He stood a couple of steps above William on the stairs, an arm’s length away, carefully maintaining that distance. Presumably he had realised that William had heard him coming, and cut diagonally up the steps to disappear behind one of the pillars. Just the way that William had tried to hide from the police moments before.
‘Name?’ said the lad.
William swallowed. Was this the meeting he’d been waiting for?
‘My name is William Sandberg,’ he said. ‘I come from Sweden.’
It was the longest of seconds before the reply came.
‘You don’t look like they said you would.’
66
They say that people choose dogs that look like themselves. As William approached the white van that was parked at the far end of the car park, it occurred to him that the same thing seemed to apply to cars.
Just like its owner, this car was unnecessarily large, clumsy and–particularly right now–irritatingly conspicuous. It was basically an old Ford Transit, but someone had done their best to disguise that fact. What had once been white was now covered in brightly coloured, fractal-patterned designs, obviously painted by hand on several different occasions, with the same aesthetics as the tattoo poking up above the youngster’s neckline. Not only that, but it was conspicuously badly parked too, the front wheels having mounted the kerb.
William’s first thought was that it was an outside broadcast car for a local radio station, but the closer they came, the more obvious it was that he was looking at something distinctly homemade. One front wing was home to a small forest of antennas, and the vehicle’s entire length was topped with a roof rack onto which a further rack of aerials had been attached. Along one side, someone had written an incomprehensible acronym in massive purple letters.
‘It’s my handle,’ the man said when he saw the look in William’s eyes. ‘SQ1TJP. My friend does custom graphics.’ With that he blipped open the van with an angry beep–brilliant, William thought to himself, if we’re bound to draw attention, let’s be consistent–and then led him around the vehicle and up to the back doors. They were covered in text. In a spiky font the car announced that it had participated in a series of amateur radio competitions, all with weird names and all hosted in different European cities.
‘I won all of them,’ the other man said. Then he banged on a blank space on the right-hand door. ‘I’ve saved some room for next season.’
‘Impressive,’ William heard himself say, and felt the tone giving the opposite message.
The man whose handle was SQ1TJP stopped.
‘Listen, right. I don’t know who you are. I was promised money if I found you down here. I dropped everything I had planned, and I’d love to know why.’
‘I don’t know any more than you do,’ said William. ‘Could you start from the beginning?’
‘Do you know a guy called SM0GRY?’
William could feel the fatigue overpowering him.
‘I’m not very good with names,’ he said.
‘Doesn’t matter. He’s a radio amateur, like me. And he sent me a message that he wants you to have.’
With that, he opened the door, and if the outside of the van looked like a teenage boy’s bedroom, it was nothing compared to the scene inside. With the exception of the two seats up front, none of it was original. Along the windowless sides, two narrow desks had been installed, and in between them were two desk chairs in plum-coloured crushed velour. Underneath it all was a floor that had been covered with a bright purple carpet, perfectly matching the decals on the outside.
Beyond that, the décor consisted of various types of electronic equipment. Rectangular black boxes stacked on top of each other, some obviously radio equipment, others probably signal amplifiers of some kind, others still apparently hard discs. On the walls, printed lists and flatscreen monitors battled for space. There were cables and wires dangling all over the place, some of the coiled ones leading to headsets or microphones. All in all, it looked like a cross between one of the military’s old radio cars and the pride and joy of an Eighties boy racer, and William picked one of the desk chairs while SQ1TJP closed the doors behind them. He squeezed his large frame into the other one, chatting as he turned on the power and started up his machines.
‘Earlier in the autumn, I was contacted by a man in Stockholm. He’d recorded some transmissions that he didn’t know the source of. We ended up having a whole load of amateur radio enthusiasts from all over the world helping him to measure the strength of the signals and the delay to try and locate the transmission site.’ He turned to face William, unsure as to whether or not it was relevant. ‘It turned out that they were coming from London, and that responses were coming from all kinds of places around the globe. Chaotic noise, like a modem on speed.’
He peered at William, as if waiting for a reaction. William, though, had nothing to say, and eventually the young man continued.
‘Anyway,’ he said. ‘That was the last I heard from him. Until today.’
On the table in front of him was a laptop, a bulky, heavy machine with shock-absorbent rubber corners, and thin black cables connecting it to the screens above.
‘The first thing he made me swear to was that none of the gear in here is connected to the internet. Then, that I wasn’t to show you anything until I’d made sure you weren’t either.’
‘Believe me,’ said William. ‘You can’t get more offline than I am right now.’
‘Good. Then I am to show you this.’
Even as the monitors flickered into life, William had an idea of what he was about to see.
He leaned forward, studying the image appearing on the screens in front of him. A protracted silence fell between them as he saw them filling with ones and zeros, an endless stream scrolling away, page after page, and still proceeding.
‘Is this what I think it is?’ he asked.
‘According to the guy in Stockholm, it’s data from a CD. And according to him, you’ll know what to do with it.’
William could taste his own heartbeat in his mouth.
‘Do you know what this is about?’ the young man said.
‘I need to borrow your computer,’ was all he said.
‘Listen,’ the tattooed radio enthusiast said as he stared straight at him. ‘I think I’ve been very helpful. I was given a promise by your friend in Stockholm, and if you’re planning to rip me off—’
‘You’ll get your money,’ William barked. ‘But as of now, that’s not my top priority. Do you read the news at all or do you spend all your time doing this’–he gestured to the decals, the equipment–‘kind of thing? Right now, millions of people are wondering what the hell is happening to the nuclear power stations at sixty-seven different locations across the globe. What you have there might be able to give us the answer. So I’d say that your biggest problem isn’t whether you’re going to get paid, your biggest problem is whether or not we’re even going to live long enough for me to work out what this means!’
‘You’re bluffing,’ said the youngster. ‘Otherwise you would’ve paid by now.’
William sighed. Pulled his wallet from his inside pocket. In the large compartment in the middle were the last of the notes that the lorry driver had changed for him on the boat, and he grabbed them all and handed them over.
‘I don’t know how much is left. I’ve spent a bit. But that’s my worldly wealth right now.’
A pause. ‘Who are you?’ was all the young man said.
‘I’m going to take that as a yes,’ said William and pulled the laptop over. ‘In the meantime, you make sure to get this van out of here, preferably out of Warsaw, and away from anywhere there might be police.’
The young man swallowed loudly.
‘Is it you they’re looking for?’
‘If it is,’ William said, with a level stare, ‘then I’m sure you appreciate how silly it would be for us to be sitting in a customised van in the middle of downtown Warsaw, right?’
‘Fine,’ he said. ‘But we’re not finished with the money.’
‘If you get us out of here you can have whatever you want. Get caught in a police check and I’ll tell them I take my orders from you. Deal?’
The young man smiled for the first time during their whole conversation.
‘You’ve no idea how much time I’ve spent on driving games.’
He clambered between the two front seats and wriggled behind the wheel, like a normal-sized person borrowing a hobbit’s car, and put the key in the ignition. William studied him, asking himself whether the bit about driving games was good news or bad.
The next minute, the massive V6 powered into life.
Superintendent Katryna Pavlak hated terrorists, and not just for the obvious reasons. After all, most people hate terrorists, because they destroy society and openness and everything else that makes humans civilised beings. Katryna Pavlak hated them for that too, of course. But that wasn’t all. The thing was that she’d already served her time as dogsbody. She’d been let into the warmth, she’d climbed the ranks, she had a workstation with a desk and routines and a pot plant, and now here she was, out in the rain again, and it was the terrorist’s fault. That’s why she hated him so profoundly.
According to reliable sources, his name was William Sandberg and he was Swedish. He was probably still in Warsaw, which is why they had called on every available resource and freed up everyone possible. The aim was to have as high a police presence as possible, which of course looked great on paper. In reality it meant every last bastard had to put their shoes on, go outside, and start walking.
The chief problem was the mission itself. Orders were to keep a close eye on anything that might be suspicious–but what did that mean, really? Within a couple of months of completing her training, she’d pretty much seen it all. People dressed up in metal suits? Check. Happy, laughing teenagers bleeding all over? Check. Fully grown adults jumping on the roof of a parked car until it crumpled? Check there too. Performance artists, live-action role players, music video shoots.
But she’d also seen people who looked like they were sunbathing on park benches but were in fact dead from overdoses, conscientious undergraduates financing their studies by selling drugs, well-dressed polite gentlemen whose computers contained images that would cause the most hardened person to throw up.
What was normal was abnormal, and that was a rule without exception. What was suspicious, in other words, could never be distinguished from what wasn’t. And now an entire police force had been deployed with just those orders: to look for something that couldn’t be seen. And that, Katryna Pavlak hated more than anything.
She was standing on the square in front of the entrance to the Palace of Culture and Sport’s café, with a newly bought coffee in one hand and a shrink-wrapped sandwich in the other, and despite having stood there for several minutes, she was yet to taste any of it. Instead, she was listening to the struggle going on inside her.
Normal or not? The car at the far end of the car park was a white Ford Transit with blacked-out windows. Or rather: used to be white, until some bodging custom decal maker had plastered it with swirly patterns and a combination of letters that was impossible to pronounce. As if that wasn’t enough, it was covered with more aerials than your average communications satellite. All in all, it faced her with a dilemma that was profoundly irritating.
No idiot would hide out in a car that looked like that, and definitely not a suspected terrorist, and especially not one dangerous enough to threaten the entire planet. For that reason, said a stubborn voice inside her, despite that being the worst argument in history, for that reason, perhaps he might be hiding in there? Because no one would believe that he was hiding somewhere so visible?
It was a logical argument that tripped itself up, and she knew as much. No, hiding somewhere that attracts a lot of attention isn’t clever. Even if automatically disqualifying itself from suspicion on the grounds of being too stupid, it still meant the place had been noticed. And where’s the gain in that?
Warsaw was covered in places to keep yourself invisible for real. Hotel rooms, warehouses, apartments. So why take the risk of being seen, just because you were double-bluffing and hiding in a place that was visible?
All that took her back to square one. No idiot would hide in a vehicle like that, and for that reason Katryna Pavlak looked at the sandwich and the coffee she’d just bought, threw the lot in the bin, and started walking.
She’d lost her appetite anyway.
The young radio enthusiast had just straightened up in the driver’s seat and started the booming engine when a knock came at the window.
William froze. He pushed himself up against the side of the van to make himself as hard to see as possible, praying silently that it was a passer-by or a tourist or whatever, just not the police. That, of course, went completely unheard.
The woman outside the window was wearing a dark blue uniform, and as the young man wound down the window, smiled at her and said something apologetic in Polish, William noticed that he was holding his breath. He stayed like that until he thought his lungs would burst, right until he heard her move away from the
vehicle and start talking to herself nearby, short, questioning sentences as if she were talking into a radio.
‘It’s cool,’ said the young man up front. He said it without moving, a soft, almost inaudible tone. ‘She’s just checking the vehicle against the register. Nothing’s going to happen, all my documents are in order.’
William breathed out. And as the radio conversation outside started to sound lighter, almost conversational, he felt himself getting increasingly restless. He had the material now. The information from Piotrowski. He didn’t have the time to sit and wait, and eventually he flipped up the laptop screen and scanned the reticent data once more.
His immediate attempts at converting the digits into text had resulted in nothing. All he got was complete gibberish, regardless of what format he tried or what bit-length he was using, and before long he had been forced to admit to himself that it was rather more complicated than he would have wished. The text was encrypted, and all William could do now was try and break that encryption to get at the content.
As the conversation outside the van continued, he let his fingers travel over the keys. He was going to have to write a basic program that could chew through all the ones and zeros, convert them into letters, look for a pattern and then, from there, find a solution. The only question was, how?
There was a countless number of ciphering methods out there, all built in different ways, with various derivatives, the initial values of which had an infinite variety. Simple methods like dislocation and transposition he might be able to try, but if the texts were encrypted with keys then the problem was exponentially larger. It would be impossible for him to manually write a program capable of cracking a cipher like that, and even more impossible for a modest workaday laptop to provide a result within the foreseeable future.
What was most frustrating of all though, was the fact that the text was encrypted at all. Why go to the trouble of hiding something on a CD, so slyly and cleverly and impossible for an outsider to even see, and then still choose to encrypt it as well?
Acts of Vanishing Page 37