He pushed away his thoughts. It wouldn’t have made a difference. The software that was now chewing away in front of him was the best he could do in the time he had, and given that the loop was still working, it was still possible that the solution was waiting further down the line. His program had yet to find the right cipher, and for all he knew, every new second that passed could be the one where it happened. When the letters would stop flashing past and arrange themselves into neat, legible words.
But that second never came. Instead, the moment arrived when they didn’t have any more seconds in hand.
It actually came when things were looking up. The young driver had just changed his approach–‘Fuck it,’ he’d screamed, ‘you’re paying!’–and then changed down and floored it. He’d run a string of red lights, leaning over the wheel, grinding his teeth as he explained that now he had a plan now. He knew how he was going to get them out of the city.
He’d steered the van up onto the tramlines in the central reservation, scorching at 120 kilometres an hour along a section where motor traffic was strictly forbidden, which also meant that there were no other cars to get in the way, and he wove between trams at breakneck speed as William did his best to hold on.
After a while they had passed through a long, vaulted tunnel. On the other side they could see the river, and from there, according to Bosko, it would take some serious misfortune for them not to make it up onto the motorway. ‘If we make it that far we’ll be okay. This is a V6, you know.’
But serious misfortune was precisely what awaited them. They had just cut through a queue of waiting cars at the lights, passed the stop line and turned onto the wide highway that runs along the river, when the bright lights through the side window made William look up.
He only saw the eyes of the jeep driver for a split second, yet they still managed to etch themselves fast throughout the tumult that followed. He saw a dark-haired young man, his white unbuttoned shirt and his black blazer, but above all, the fear in his eyes, as though his car had pulled out into the traffic of its own accord, as if someone else was driving and not him, full speed and straight into the left side of their white Ford like a deliberate interception.
When the impact came, it was far too powerful to resist. Behind them radio equipment was torn from its shelves, flying like heavy projectiles around the inside of the van, slamming into the opposite side like a volley of shotgun pellets. The whole vehicle spun on its axis, a pirouette on slippery tyres, the river outside the windows replaced by cars and high-rise buildings as the surroundings swept past.
In the passenger seat, William pushed himself against the door, hoping that it might help him beat the worst of the impact despite not wearing a seat belt, clinging for all he was worth to the laptop and praying that it would survive.
Alongside him the young man was screaming. He shrunk his huge frame into a tiny ball as he saw the barriers racing towards him, the mesh fencing that separated the road from the building site on the riverfront, and the next moment they powered straight through them, a tangle of noise and events and piles of earth, and ahead of them they saw the ground running out as it met the water with a steep bank.
Fabian Bosko closed his eyes. William Sandberg did the same. And then the world turned upside down.
They hadn’t seen the trench in the middle of the riverbank, but they probably owed their lives to its existence. Without it, the van would never have managed to stop before the iron poles holding a retaining wall in place at the edge of the fast-flowing river, and while the drop might have been a only few metres, the Ford would have been no match for the swirling currents, uninviting and black and icy cold.
Instead, their journey ended in the machine-excavated crater. They fell down into it with the back end pointing straight at the sky, as though the car had actually come flying like an aircraft and crash-landed in the sand, and from behind came an avalanche of shelves and radio receivers, sliding across the purple floor towards them, and with that, the journey was finally over.
‘Are you okay?’ asked William in the resonant silence that followed.
‘I’m alive,’ came the reply. ‘I think.’
‘You’ll get your money. One way or another I’ll make sure you get paid.’
He slapped the young man on the back–part comforting gesture, part thank you–grabbed the laptop from where it was lying on the cracked windscreen, and before the kid could speak, William was gone, climbing over the seats and through the tilting load space like a mountaineer scrambling up a purple mountain, barging open the door and out into the darkness.
He paused for just a second. Then he started running. He could feel the moisture from the river whipping his face, the massive darkness growing with each metre he put between himself and the upturned van. He heard the police cars screeching to a halt up on the road, but he didn’t turn around, not once.
He ran along the water’s edge, heavy steps through the junk and the spoil where the floodplain was being prepared for construction. Running as fast as he could, faster, feeling each breath clawing at his throat and filling his mouth with the taste of blood.
They would soon discover that he was no longer in the vehicle. Then they would start chasing him with spotlights and dogs, they would work out that he’d fled along the river, and by then he needed to have got away from there.
He kept running, with his heart pounding in his chest and a scalding-hot computer in his hand, hoping that it was set up to keep working even when the lid was closed. He was aiming for the next bridge, desperately hoping that it would lead him to safety.
When he saw the trains rumbling across the river, he knew where he was going next.
68
As Christina climbed out of the taxi outside the newspaper’s offices, the pavements were full of people heading home from work. She had just woken up. The sub-zero temperatures had come to stay this time, and she could feel the frost nipping at her, turning her newly washed hair crispy and stiff in a second.
There was something about the cold that made her feel awake–an expectation that came with the crisp dry air, an energy to look ahead that she couldn’t remember when she’d last felt. Now if only there was something to look ahead at.
Beyond the glass of the entrance, today’s top stories shouted at her from printouts mounted in clip frames.
NO PROGRESS AT NUCLEAR POWER STATIONS
EVACUATIONS IMMINENT. HOW TO PREPARE.
If only.
‘So what now?’ said the taxi driver behind her, voice sharp. She was still holding the door.
‘Oh,’ she said and poked her head back in. ‘Sorry. So you carry on to Bromma, to—’ She hesitated, then nodded the question over to Tetrapak at the far end of the back seat. He leaned forward towards the driver and gave his address.
‘That’s going on the paper’s account too,’ said Christina, and the driver put the car in gear and prepared to pull off, but still didn’t close the door.
‘Well then,’ she said, bent over, looking at Strandell. ‘What does one say? Thanks for your help?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Thank you. And if we survive all this, I’ll send you an invoice.’
He didn’t mean that. They exchanged melancholy smiles, a feeling that this, somehow, was goodbye. Their work was done. Now they were going their separate ways, and who knew if they would ever see each other again?
‘You do that,’ she said. ‘And don’t be shy. You need a new moped.’
Just as Christina straightened up and put her hand on the edge of the door to finally send the taxi on its way—
‘Christina!’
Beatrice’s voice drilled through the evening darkness, quivering with anguish and scorn, and behind it came the woman herself, rushing out through the main doors in a sea of vivid fabrics.
‘Where the hell have you been?’ she said. ‘I’ve been calling your mobile, I’ve been trying to get hold of you everywhere. I even sent people to your place, but you weren’t there ei
ther.’
‘I know,’ said Christina. ‘It’s a long story.’
Beatrice arrived at the taxi and caught sight of Tetrapak in the back seat. For two long seconds you could see a rolodex of thoughts proliferating across her face.
‘It’s been a long day,’ said Christina, a smiling shake of the head to halt Beatrice’s train of thought before it careered into the buffers. ‘I’ll tell you all about it sometime, but right now we’re hoping that William—’
‘Sorry,’ her friend cut her off. ‘But you’re going to have to come upstairs. Now.’
‘What is it?’ said Christina. ‘Has something happened?’
‘Yes. You have a visitor. A woman from Poland, with no hair.’
Christina was taken aback, but Tetrapak peered out from the back seat.
‘From Poland?’
‘Yes. She says she’s got a message from William.’
69
William followed the water’s edge in the darkness until the building site gave way to a walkway, to modern designer quaysides of varying heights, dotted with wooden benches with a view of the river. There was street lighting here, which meant that there might be cameras, and he could do without those right now.
He turned off from the riverbank and rushed across the road, dodging oncoming cars and lorries in a barrage of horns, then stopped in a park on the other side to get his bearings. He needed somewhere where he could sit undisturbed with the computer, when he could double-check those lines of code he’d cobbled together in the back of a careering transit van, see if there was any fine-tuning he could do to raise the odds on the program succeeding.
Deep down he knew that the battle was already lost. The program was primitive, if you were generous. It was like trying to prise open a safe with a toothbrush, the chances of it busting Piotrowski’s encryption were embarrassingly small, and he was an idiot for ever having convinced himself otherwise.
Another issue was the computer itself. It was a shock-resistant unit in a casing that was designed for use in the field, and as far as he could make out it was incredibly expensive–but for completely the wrong reason. Not because it was fast, but because it was tough. And even if that had been a boon during their journey, now it was time that was in short supply.
When he heard the clanking of the trains he set off again. He thought of Sara, and of the people he used to meet on his nightly rambles–the ones who had the metro as their bolthole, with its tunnels where they could disappear into the darkness, where people rarely or never intervened to move them on. Now he was doing as they did, heading for the screech of metal on metal, hurrying along back streets and alleyways under cover of darkness.
He had just crossed one street when his eyes met a stare from a window. He backed off at once, changed direction and picked up the pace, and only when he came round the corner onto the next street did he come to the realisation that the eyes he had stared straight into had been his own.
His hair was gone, his face was lined and worn, his eyes staring and desperate. He hadn’t recognised himself.
Had it come to this? That he was terrified of his own reflection?
Once he reached the tracks he followed them outside the fence, forcing his way along embankments and through thorny undergrowth, until he saw the rails disappearing into a brick-lined tunnel and on into the darkness. There was a hole that looked to have been used by many before him, and he squeezed between mesh panels, rushed towards the tunnel and carried on into it with his body pressed tightly against the wall.
He had to stand there for several seconds as he waited for his eyes to grow accustomed to the gloom. It was dark outside, but this was even worse–the odd light in the roof of the tunnel was doing its best to spread a listless glow along the trackbed, but the damp and the dust conspired to kill it off before it even reached the ground. Staying close to the wall meant remaining more or less invisible, so he carried on in, hugging the edge, all his senses constantly straining to detect any sign of an approaching train.
He had just started to worry that the tunnel might never end when a small culvert opened up in the wall alongside him. He left the track behind him and turned off up the narrow passage, as far as he could to get out of sight from the rails. And there, furthest in, he found himself standing in complete darkness.
Breathless, exhausted, he let himself close his eyes, a couple of seconds of respite before he took up the struggle again, before he opened up the computer to see whether there was any more he could do.
He’d been standing there for a few seconds before he realised what was missing: it was utterly silent in here, save for the sound of water somewhere, the gentle trickle of droplets searching their way down the walls and into the channels running along the floor. And that was it.
He crouched on the floor, put the computer down and let his fingers find the catch to open the protective casing. It really was true. The fans had gone quiet.
There were three possible explanations, he thought, as he fumbled around the aluminium edges. Either the computer had overheated in the closed position and stopped working, or else the battery had run out and the computer had died, or else—There. He had found the catch.
Or else it had gone quiet because the program had finished working.
The lid opened with a click and he lifted it, waiting for three eternal seconds for the screen to come to life. The program was finished. It had stopped, not because it had found a solution, but because it had worked its way through all the instructions that William had given it, and now it was ready, waiting for new instructions, without having found anything at all.
The hope drained out of him. He had obviously underestimated the computer’s performance–gamer, he thought to himself, of course he’s going to have a high-end machine–and instead of chewing away for hours it had already reached the end of the road. And now, the screen was empty. At the bottom, a blinking cursor awaited new instructions. And that was it.
William slumped to the floor. Somewhere along the line, it came to him, there must be a point where it falls to someone else to take over. He needed to rest, to catch up, to let go, and if the world came to an end while he was doing so, it could hardly be his fault. Weren’t there at least a couple of billion others who could take up the baton, at least for a little while?
He let his head fall back against the wall behind him, felt the cold, the smell of damp. Was this what it had been like being her? Was this how it had been to be his daughter–hidden, insecure, with nowhere to go?
He understood her now, and he wanted to explain it, but to who? He understood that feeling of constantly lying low, the feeling of being looked upon with disdain, people seeing him and thinking they knew what kind of a man he was. And why not? If even he couldn’t look at his own face without running a mile, why would anyone else be able to?
Jesus Christ. The reflection had scared the life out of him. Was that how it felt when you stopped being the person you once were? Like staring into a mirror and seeing something you weren’t expecting…
Sometimes your mind can think a thought without remembering what that thought was. Like when you’re looking for a name, a city, what’s it called again, and suddenly the answer has sailed past on the inside of your skull, as though someone had drawn a curtain and then instantly pulled it shut again.
As William opened his eyes again, that was how he felt. He’d been thinking about something, which had led him to think of something else, and in the process the solution had appeared, a single frame in the long film that is life, and then it was gone.
What was it he’d been thinking? Sara. Tracks. Loneliness. No. That didn’t help. The car chase. Run. Scared of his own reflection.
That was it. The reflection.
He stood up, pulled the computer across the gravel, and opened the lid again. He lifted his concentration from his mind, as though the thought was still so fleeting, so vulnerable, that he needed to let it formulate itself before it disappeared again.
It didn’t though. On the contrary, the more he thought about it, the more logical it became.
If you’re going to hide something on a CD, why then would you also encrypt it? He’d asked himself that question, but he hadn’t listened to it, instead he’d focused on the programming, creating that bloody useless decryption program when he really should have been doing the opposite. When he should have realised that, of course, the file wasn’t encrypted at all.
He scrolled through all the ones and zeros, as all the questions he should have asked line up one after the other. Like why he had sent only one file. One message. One possible arrangement?
If the message had been stored as he thought, through the differences between three discs, then there was not one, but two possible interpretations.
If one of the discs was used as the baseline, the unaltered sequence to compare the others against, then the other two gave either a one or a zero each time they deviated from it. But how could anyone be sure which disc was one and which was zero?
You couldn’t. There were two possible results, complete mirror images of each other. There was, quite simply, a fifty per cent chance that the figures he’d been given were correct–and the chance of the code he’d just tried to crack actually being the inverted version, like a photographic negative, was the same.
As his fingers danced across the keys, there wasn’t a cell in his body that wasn’t convinced that he’d finally cracked it. This was simple, obvious, logical. He was sitting in a tunnel in Warsaw, ice cold from the ground and from the wall he was leaning against, but nothing bothered him; he wasn’t thinking about anything beyond the single program he was writing to accomplish a single task: to change the ones to zeros and vice versa, and then convert them into letters.
When he finally finished, he took a deep breath, scanned the lines of code to make sure he’d typed it correctly, and pressed Enter.
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