Acts of Vanishing

by Fredrik T. Olsson

  By the time the policewoman had finally returned the young man’s licence up front, William was deep in the coding. The two exchanged a few pleasantries, the lad wound his window up again, and then, in a split second, everything turned around.

  Maybe she’d caught sight of him behind the driver’s seat, maybe it was the tapping of keys that leaked out, whatever it was, the young man had just restarted the engine when he saw her movement in the rear-view mirror.

  ‘Oi!’ he shouted over his shoulder, trying to warn William but too late.

  The doors to the back of the van were opened from outside, and for one frozen second he stared into the eyes of a woman in a dark blue police uniform. The next, she backed away fumbling for her weapon.

  ‘Drive!’ shouted William, which was exactly what the kid was already doing. And as they fled out of the car park, William wrestled with the back doors and eventually managed to close them.

  They raced through Warsaw on squealing tyres, William thrown back and forth between shelves and side panels, and the terrified amateur radio enthusiast steering them through the wet streets of the city.

  ‘Who are you?’ he screamed at William. ‘Who the fuck are you?’

  At least there could be no doubt that he had devoted countless hours to racing. He accelerated down the broad streets, nipped in and out of lanes, avoiding oncoming traffic at the last possible second. Every now and then, the sirens returned, but he almost always seemed to manage to shake them off, hunched behind the wheel like a big kid at an amusement park.

  For every new turn, William felt the nausea burgeoning inside. The screen was vibrating and bouncing in his lap, and he swallowed, tried to concentrate, but was eventually forced to give up. By that point he had managed to knock up a simple program–it was rudimentary, but at least it was something–that would trawl through the text again and again, testing it against algorithms and calculating whether the results resembled anything like actual words. As a cryptological tool, it left rather a lot to be desired. It was, on the other hand, demanding enough that it would probably keep the computer busy for hours, and right now there wasn’t much he could do about it anyway.

  Just as he began to run the program, his driver yelled at him again: ‘Who are you?’

  In front of them, oncoming vehicles swerved onto the pavements, pedestrians dove for cover, buildings and road signs flashed past like a film on fast-forward.

  ‘I’m innocent,’ William shouted back. ‘But they think I’ve got something to do with the nuclear power stations.’

  He saw his driver shake his head in disbelief.

  ‘It doesn’t get any worse than this. This is as bad as it fucking gets.’

  William very much hoped that the young man was right.

  67

  Superintendent Pavlak was sitting in the passenger seat with a tight grip on the door handle. Every now and then she’d catch a glimpse of the van, way, way ahead of them on the arrow-straight boulevard. For long periods it disappeared into the gathering gloom, hidden behind cars and trams, only to pop out again as it changed lanes or crossed the tramlines, or swung off and carried on down side roads in the hope of getting away. Inside her, a new internal conflict was raging.

  The first thing she’d done after the van had driven off was to rush back to her unit and tell them what had happened. Together they’d given chase, and she’d radioed in that they were in pursuit of a customised Transit with two occupants, and that the vehicle had almost run her over during a routine check. That was all she’d said, because it was all she knew for sure.

  But driving through the city at speeds that were potentially lethal, not only for them but for the general public, she was all too aware that the man in the back could well have been him. Could have. Was that good enough? Aside from his age, nothing fitted the description. The man they were looking for had greying hair and was probably operating alone, while the man in the van had a shaved head and a companion–a man who according to the car registration database was called Fabian Bosko, an active amateur radio enthusiast, and quite obviously a very accomplished driver.

  She could imagine the ribbing, the jokes, the years of snide comments if she’d got it wrong. What was even worse though was that she would be diverting resources–if Pavlak reported that the vehicle they were pursuing might be carrying the Swedish suspect then every available unit would be dispatched to stop it. Police across the city would leave their posts to prioritise a single target, and Jesus, she didn’t know for sure. That man might be a wanted terrorist–or he might be an amateur radio enthusiast who happened to have a bag of weed in his pocket.

  Deep down though, she knew what she had to do, and once they lost the van in the alleyways approaching the old town, she made a decision. For the second time, fear made the choice. The fear of having done too little. She lifted the digital radio handset from the dashboard, cleared her throat and called the control room. Reported that the description didn’t match one hundred per cent, but that the suspect could well have shaved his head, in which case it might have been him.

  ‘Can you repeat that,’ said the operator.

  She saw her colleague’s quizzical expression in the driving seat next to her. Now though, there was no turning back.

  ‘We’re following a car,’ she said in a clear loud voice, ‘a white Ford Transit with custom decals, and covered in aerials. It is probably carrying William Sandberg.’

  As soon as the information went over the police’s digital radio, was recorded on their hard discs for documentation and was forwarded as a registered event in their internal system, the news spread like wildfire through all active units. Her colleagues threw themselves into their vehicles, seatbelts clicked into place, blue lights were switched on.

  The Warsaw police were preparing to stop William Sandberg.

  And not just them.

  Fabian Bosko, amateur radio enthusiast, roared at the top of his voice, a sound instantly overwhelmed by the sustained angry beeping of horns from buses and lorries, many of which sounded to William like they were only centimetres away from the van’s thin metal sides. Then came the sound of braking and squealing tyres. Up front, the youth was spinning the wheel one way and then the other, a one-handed manoeuvre that made the car swerve, skid, spin side-on to the traffic before he accelerated out of the turn.

  So great were the G forces that William was literally thrown backwards. He slammed into the back doors with a thud that left him winded, and he could feel the doors vibrating so much that for a second he could see a crack between them open, letting in the sound of the tarmac rushing beneath them.

  He grabbed hold of the shelves along the side, hoping that they would bear his weight and keep him inside the van if the doors did open. From the driver’s seat, he heard Bosko’s voice through the chaos. He was screaming in a falsetto, swearing in a mixture of Polish and English, presumably unaware of which was which.

  ‘How the fuck,’ he screamed to no one in particular, and ‘We had fucking green,’ and ‘What is going on?’

  ‘What the hell are you doing?’ shouted William once the air had returned to his lungs. He hauled himself through the van, clinging hard to the fixtures to stay on his feet, slow, forward-leaning steps against the violent acceleration.

  ‘They got green too,’ the youngster replied. ‘I thought we were going to fucking die.’

  He pointed out towards the traffic flow all around them, hands still shaking after his evasive manoeuvres.

  ‘They just drove straight out into the crossing, right in front of me, coming at me like rifle pellets out of nowhere! We had green, and then suddenly we all did, and feel my fucking pulse, Jesus, feel my pulse!’

  William leaned forward between the front seats and looked out. He could see flashing blue lights behind them in the wing mirrors. Above them, he saw the street lights, the tall masts carrying the power above the tramlines, the road signs flying past in a constant stream. And… of course.

  ‘Whatever you see,’
said William, ‘keep driving. Don’t stop for red lights, don’t stop for anything, drive.’

  ‘What the fuck is going on?’ said the young man.

  ‘Cameras,’ said William. ‘That’s what’s going on. Traffic cameras.’

  Just as Palmgren entered through the security scanners at HQ, Velander grabbed hold of his arm. He more or less dragged him through the corridors, fuming with worry and stress. ‘We’ve been trying to get hold of you all morning,’ he said through clenched teeth. ‘Why the hell haven’t you had your phone on?’

  ‘Has something happened?’ Palmgren said, avoiding the question. What could he say? I’m sorry, I fell asleep on the sofa in William Sandberg’s apartment? Not the greatest excuse, yet marginally better than I’m sorry, a bearded amateur radio enthusiast with paranoid tendencies told me to keep my phone off.

  Velander pulled him towards the briefing room without answering, and it was only now that Palmgren noticed how empty the corridors were. He felt the anguish wash through his stomach–the feeling that something big had happened without him noticing, that while he was dozing on William’s sofa, the world had taken a step closer to carrying out its own death sentence.

  ‘Is it the power stations?’ he said, expecting a yes.

  ‘No,’ said Velander. ‘It’s William.’

  It took a moment for the penny to drop.

  ‘Is? What do you mean? What about him?’

  Velander replied by pulling even harder on Palmgren’s arm. He upped his pace but said nothing, because how on earth could you explain what was happening now?

  ‘What’s this about?’ said Palmgren. ‘Do we know where he is? Have we found him? Tell me!’

  Eventually Velander stopped and tried to find some way of saying it. But there really was no way that didn’t sound preposterous.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No, not us.’

  When they entered the JOC’s large auditorium the air was so thick that it was only just breathable. It was as though the entire staff of the building had congregated in one place, and were now breathing the same air, letting it pass in and out of each other’s lungs until there wasn’t a drop of oxygen left anywhere.

  And all of them were staring straight ahead at the huge screen down at the front. Its surface was divided into a mosaic of smaller sections, four across and four high, and each of the sixteen boxes was showing video in blue-grey tones. It was all filmed from various angles, and in the centre of each image was a customised Ford Transit van with antennas on the roof. It was hurtling down streets that Palmgren didn’t recognise, pulling tight turns at unfamiliar junctions, swerving round the wrong side of traffic islands and shooting straight through red lights at a speed that looked incredibly dangerous.

  ‘Where’s this coming from?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s a stream from the Polish police,’ said Velander. ‘They’re saying that William is in that van.’

  Palmgren pushed his way towards the front of the room. Past all the chairs, workstations, all the way down to the spot that was reserved for the officer in charge. Forester was standing there, her eyes showing the same sheer concentration as the rest of them.

  ‘It must be every bloody camera in the whole city,’ Palmgren said.

  She nodded without saying anything. Ahead of them the car continued its crazy journey across Warsaw, northwards along the river, handbrake turns as it met police cars head-on, then back towards the centre, traffic lights constantly changing ahead of it, crossing streams of traffic that were appearing out of nowhere with terrifying timing, and each time the Ford managed to avoid collision by what looked like a matter of millimetres.

  Not once did it disappear out of shot. Sometimes it was shown only as a small dot, filmed from a great height, perhaps from traffic cameras, possibly weather drones. Sometimes it appeared through large windows, with goods and customers in the foreground as if the camera was inside a shop and just happened to be facing the street outside.

  ‘How the fuck,’ Palmgren said eventually. ‘How the fucking hell can the Polish police have access to all these cameras?’

  ‘This is the thing,’ she said. ‘They don’t.’

  As Sebastian Wojda sat down at the back of the large communications room at police HQ, he did so with a feeling that something wasn’t right. He ought to have been pleased. They had him now. What was bothering him was that he couldn’t grasp why.

  The pictures had come to them. They came from nowhere, without any request, and no one knew why. Streams that were otherwise used for traffic management had suddenly changed, cameras that would usually show static images of junctions and tunnels were suddenly, without warning, showing a single car from a variety of angles, constantly switching to new cameras at the pace of an action blockbuster films, with images from sources that simply could not be part of the police’s network.

  Someone was supplying them with the footage. But who? And to what end?

  There he was now, driving across the screens in front of them, right across the city in a van at breakneck speed, the man who had called himself Karl Axel Söderbladh but who, according to colleagues in Stockholm, was actually William Sandberg.

  But there was still too much that couldn’t be explained. None of the Swedes had heard of him using an alias, much less that he was on Interpol’s most wanted list.

  And when word of their surprise had reached Wojda, it hadn’t taken a lot of effort to establish that Interpol didn’t know that either. The truth was that no William Sandberg–or, indeed, Karl Axel Söderbladh–had never appeared on their list. Sure, he was on it now, that they could all see from the website, but there was no unit or department or administrator who could admit to having put him on there. After a search of the backup systems it turned out that he wasn’t in them either–he’d quite simply never been a wanted man, until suddenly he was. William Sandberg, alias Karl Axel Söderbladh, had appeared on the list at exactly the same time as he’d shown up at Hotel New York.

  Having said all that, there was no denying that he was wanted. Maybe not by Interpol, but he had escaped from the Swedish military authorities, and once they’d established that he was in Warsaw they had submitted a formal request for the Polish police’s assistance in tracking him down. Which was precisely what was happening on the screens at the front of the room.

  Sebastian Wojda rubbed his forehead. There was just too much that didn’t add up. Like how a lone man in Warsaw could be behind the biggest terrorist action ever seen. Like why, in that case, he had been moving around outside, in the centre of the city, instead of lying low. And above all, why had he checked in to a fleapit in Praga instead of finding a safe hiding place and running his operations from there?

  And then, on top of all the other questions there were the pictures that had turned up out of nowhere, infinitely well timed and helpful, without anyone having asked for them. Somebody powerful wanted them to catch him. Simple as that. Which meant that someone was directing their operation–and the question, which nobody seemed to have had time to ask, was why.

  As he left the comms room, Wojda thought to himself that a perk of finally capturing William Sandberg would be the chance to ask him just that.

  Once hell had broken loose, it refused to stop. Traffic lights were changing all around them, going red before their eyes without even passing amber, almost as though they’d suddenly changed their mind at that second. As though everything was deliberately aimed to stop them. Which of course it was.

  All along the route their path was crossed–literally–by other vehicles. Trams were given the signal to proceed, all four approaches were let through junctions at the same instant, constantly creating chaos and blocking their way, and behind the wheel of the Ford the man with the adolescent tattoos and downy ’tache managed to avoid them all at the very last second. Time and time again he heard his beloved bodywork scraping against cars that he thought he’d just managed to avoid, and equally often he could feel the entire van bouncing across laybys and over kerbs as he sw
erved off the carriageway.

  ‘What the hell is going on here?’ he screamed. ‘Where are all these cars coming from?’

  William didn’t reply. He knew the answer wasn’t going to improve the situation. Well, you know, you’ve heard of the internet, right?

  ‘I’m not going to make it. We’re fucked.’

  Now that was a far more plausible statement. Even if the thousands of hours spent on driving simulators had undeniably produced results, it didn’t mean that the young man would be able to keep it up for ever. William was already noticing how his reactions were getting slower. How the margins were getting smaller, and his voice was getting more panic-stricken with each new swearword.

  ‘You can,’ William shouted, without believing it himself. ‘You can do this!’

  But the problem was that reality didn’t have a pause button. There was no respite between tracks where you could crack your knuckles and take a swig of energy drink as you waited for the next race, instead, the stimuli were relentlessly rushing towards them: new cars, new junctions, new dangers threatening to bring them to a final halt. And sooner or later, the brain loses its ability to make new decisions.

  Every now and then William glanced at the laptop. It was resting on his knees, flapping precariously at every sharp turn, the screen flickering with new illegible combinations of letters while the program continued its efforts to find some meaning amongst all the ones and zeros. He could feel the processor fans working overtime, how the shock-absorbent chassis was almost burning his knees, yet still without any indication that the program was getting any closer to its goal.

  Had he got it wrong after all, tried to make it too easy by only testing basic encryptions? Should he have forced himself to go deeper, to dig down to all that theoretical knowledge he knew was buried inside him, all the stuff he hadn’t used for such a long time because life had got in the way?