Amberlangs.
At the bottom of the stairs, there had been more signs. First were the split-flap display boxes showing train times, all rattling away to be replaced by Sara’s misarticulated word, then came the wall-mounted advertising screens, where ads for fast food and cinema screenings gave way to the same thing. They guided him out of the station, down a short flight of stairs to the shops, and now he hurried through the closed underground shopping arcade, half-sprinting across floors still wet from the footsteps that had crossed them during day, looking around as he went for something that would show him which way to go next.
He passed windows with books and pretzels, displays with flashing lights that tried to create a festive feeling . In shop after shop there were new electronic signs waiting for him, sometimes of the red dot-matrix variety with scrolling text, sometimes just faded monitors with special offers. One by one he saw their messages disappear to be replaced with symbols guiding him onwards.
He carried on past passages and more shops, a maze of small businesses that were not much more than holes in the wall, and after a while he had lost track of how far he had come and where he might be heading.
Somewhere behind him was the station hall. Perhaps deserted by now, with the departure boards back to displaying their ordinary information. But, more likely, it might well be crawling with police and their SWAT teams looking for him, perhaps even making their way down to the same maze of shops. They could be right behind him, seconds away from catching up, he didn’t know. But there was nothing he could do.
The words echoed inside him, the words from the message that had shone at him from the computer, sitting in the darkness of the railway tunnel.
If you don’t have a past, who are you?
If he was right, they meant there still was hope.
All he could do now was trust the directions, have faith that the arrows were leading him to safety, away from the police, and then–where?
Where do you meet someone who is everywhere?
74
The name of the girl under the thin duvet was Lova, but it could have been just about anything. As her father bent down beside her bed to wake her with a strained, stressed tenderness, she was just one of hundreds–no, thousands–of girls and boys with names like Lova and Signe and Malte and Gustav, all gazing up from washing-powder-scented pillowcases, curled up under pastel-coloured bedclothes with childish patterns. They’d only just gone to bed, hadn’t they? It was the middle of the night, wasn’t it? Why were they getting up now?
In their grey bungalow not far from Forsmark, Lova hurried down the hall, her hand gripped tightly in her father’s. It was all mysterious and unusual and actually quite exciting. There were three weeks left till Christmas. They could be going to the living room, perhaps to sit down by the tree and unwrap presents and dip saffron buns in milk, perhaps Father Christmas had come early, and she could feel the excitement in her tummy but then they passed the living room and the kitchen and the sparkling decorations in the windows.
The man waiting at the door was no Father Christmas.
He was tall, had heavy boots and dark green clothes, standing with one foot on the steps as if he was waiting for them to come with him. His voice was stern but restrained, and as her dad pushed her arms into her winter overall, with just her light blue towelling pyjamas underneath, she could see how much he was shaking.
‘Jesus, Mia,’ he shouted right over her shoulder so loud it hurt her ear, and she was just about to tell him that when her mum came running out of the bedroom in her coat and jeans and with long black streaks of makeup down her face.
‘Just leave the stuff!’
Everything was strange. If Mum answered at all, it wasn’t anything anyone could hear. She was carrying a blanket and a book, as though she’d just picked two things up as she went without giving any thought to what they were, and underneath her jacket the bump that was Lova’s little brother hopped up and down as she walked. Once they were all together they carried on through the garden, following the man dressed in green towards the bus that was waiting on the road.
Her friends and friends’ parents were there, as well as neighbours and grown-ups she’d never seen before, all of them dressed in flapping pyjamas, with hairstyles that made them look as if they’d just woken up. Panic in their eyes.
When Lova got on the bus, it wasn’t exciting any more. Behind them were more buses waiting to be filled just like theirs, and the sound of grown-ups crying was everywhere, and eventually they all drove off in a long line.
In buses around Forsmark and around Oskarshamn and sixty-five other nuclear power stations around the world, thousands of other children named Lova and Malte and Liam and Abigail and Charlie and Yusuf and Ecrin were sitting holding tightly onto their parents’ hands as their parents fought to hold back the tears.
In country after country, national and regional governments and civil defence forces sat in meetings. They sat at highly polished tables, quiet and serious, waiting for the evacuations to get under way, asking themselves if perhaps they ought to have waited a little longer. Yet they all knew that it might already be too late, and that barring a miracle, it was now just a matter of hours before the tragedy could no longer be averted.
It was just after midnight, and there were eighteen days left until Christmas. The only thing anyone was hoping for was to live to see it.
When Palmgren found Forester, she was standing in a little room on the top floor, by one of the windows looking out over the city, gazing out towards the light and the homes that formed the cityscape.
In every window there would be someone, nervously waiting for what was going to happen next, some glued to their televisions or computers, others already starting to pack as they waited for the evacuation to reach them. Maybe they were shaking with fear, or crying, maybe they were busy doing irrational things like cleaning, washing up, folding laundry, as if having some control over the small things might help them to handle the ones that could not be understood.
Palmgren walked over and stood alongside her, watching the traces of her breath appearing and disappearing on the glass.
‘I grew up with the arms race,’ she said after a long time. ‘When I was eight, we used to read these comics in school, cutesy pictures of what to do when war comes, not if but when, atomic explosions drawn in crayon and a man and woman facing a mushroom cloud, as if it were a sunset.’
She pulled her finger across the glass, idly creating meaningless horizontal streaks on the window.
‘I remember classmates telling me that those pictures had given them nightmares for years afterwards. The way they would raise their hands in class to ask questions: was it really true that you would lose all your teeth, and would it really only take a single push of a button to bring it all about? Every night they would pray that they’d wake up the next day, and every morning they’d wake up and hope that they survived until bedtime.’
When the condensation made her fingertips wet she wiped the window dry with her elbow until the lights of Stockholm outside were sharp and in focus once again.
‘But me?’ A shake of the head. ‘I don’t know why, but that stuff never bothered me.’
She glanced over at Palmgren, with a look that almost seemed to apologise.
‘After the arms race came the oil crisis, then the hole in the ozone layer, then climate change. Because you can never be happy, right? We always need to be afraid of something. A hundred years ago it was the comet that was going to wipe us out, and a hundred years from now it will be something else.’
She paused for a moment.
‘We have always, always, been heading for death. I don’t know how I came to realise that at eight years old, but I did. Through the years, and with all those threats, I have never actually been really scared. Then came this.’
Palmgren looked at her. He saw what couldn’t be seen–the moisture behind her eyes, the hot, burning sensation of feelings that had no other way out. They were as f
ar from being friends as it was possible to be, but what did that matter now?
‘We’re going to make it,’ he said.
She nodded, without believing him for a minute.
‘We’re going to make it for the same reasons we’ve made it before. Because we don’t jump to conclusions. Because we use common sense. Because none of us wants to die.’
When Forester finally felt her voice returning, she breathed a deep, anxious sigh.
‘If you’re right, if William isn’t involved in this, then why is he on the run?’ Her gaze was sincere now. ‘He tricked us. He got the police to dispatch to the wrong place, he misled all of us with a false video stream–how can you possibly interpret it any other way?’
‘If he was involved,’ said Palmgren, ‘why would we have been seeing those pictures in the first place? What did William stand to gain by showing himself there, taking the risk that we would get there in time, instead of just staying out of the way?’
‘I know. But if he isn’t involved, what’s the point of the loop? I’m not saying he’s acting alone, I’m not even saying that he’s doing it willingly, there could be many layers we don’t know about, but who would go to the trouble of showing us a doctored CCTV sequence unless it was because he was one of them?’
Palmgren didn’t answer straight away.
‘I know what your government’s policy is. Yours and mine and the whole world’s: not to negotiate with terrorists.’ Forester’s eyes said What do you mean by that? ‘Could it be as simple as William not having that policy?’
‘Negotiate with whom?’ she said. And when Palmgren didn’t answer, she let out a long sigh. ‘Well. I hope you’re right.’
‘So do I,’ said Palmgren.
With that, he put his hand on her shoulder, and she let him, and it didn’t occur to either of them that they were standing there looking out, just like the cartoon couple in Forester’s book.
A minute later they returned to the corridor. Fear or not, they had work to do, and in silence they headed back through the building to take the steps down to the JOC. Just as they stepped into the stairwell, they heard two skidding feet sliding to an abrupt halt at the bottom.
‘Palmgren?’ Velander’s voice wound its way up past all the floors.
‘Yes?’
‘It’s Christina. Christina Sandberg. She’s been trying to reach you.’
Velander was a couple of flights beneath them in the stairwell, with the same erratic breathlessness as usual.
‘What about?’ said Palmgren.
‘I don’t know. But she says it’s important.’
Palmgren reached Velander’s floor in just a few giant steps. He stopped opposite the bright red face, stretched out his hand and waved encouragingly with his fingers. It took Velander a couple of seconds to realise that he hadn’t made himself understood.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Not on the phone. She’s waiting at the entrance, with two others and a box of gadgets.’
Once the lightboxes and signs had led William up and out into the pouring rain, he realised that the subterranean shopping centre had brought him further than he’d thought. On one side, his view was of large shops with huge window displays, Christmas decorations glittering through all the wet. The other side was a road carrying tramlines and cars, like a wide tarmac boundary between where he stood and the park, with the Palace of Culture beyond that.
The streets were more or less empty. Only the occasional car splashed through the deep puddles. From a distance, he could see hunched jackets dashing through the rain, shiny umbrellas reflecting a different colour each time the large advertising hoardings changed their image. He stood at the top of the steps he’d just come up, and looked slowly at the light boxes, the special offers and logos and slogans competing to make him hungry, thirsty, or persuade him that he needed a newer, better mobile phone.
No sign, though, of the word he was looking for. No message anywhere aimed directly at him.
He could hear sirens far away in the distance, and on the other side of the park, easily five hundred metres away, he could see the neon blue lettering of Central Station. The building remained surrounded by black armed-response vehicles, parked all over the place as if they’d been abandoned before they’d even stopped, and on the surrounding main roads he could see even more of them heading that way. Any minute now they would broaden the search, and there he was, in plain view. Why was nothing happening? Why was he not getting any more directions? What was the point of leading him out here just to leave him hanging? Was it that he’d arrived? If that was the case, where had he arrived at?
That was when his gaze happened to settle on the phone box. It stood on a corner of the long pedestrianised area that surrounded the stairs up from the shopping centre, alone and incongruous, as if a rare rectangular fungus had grown from the tarmac and then been covered in posters. In the middle, the black receiver was resting on its metal cradle. Still, silent.
He wandered over to it in slow, lingering footsteps. Could it really be that simple? It wasn’t what he’d been expecting, but why not? Why shouldn’t he be contacted by phone, just as well as any other method? Two days earlier he would not have been able to contemplate the notion that what we call the internet had a consciousness, and now he was standing there unable to imagine it having a voice. He’d been wrong then, so what was to say he wasn’t wrong now too?
‘I’m here now,’ he said into thin air, the rain pouring down his face, his hand resting on the receiver.
One minute. Two. And he turned around on the pavement again, looking carefully in every direction, towards the skyscrapers and the Palace of Culture and over at the grand frontages and the shops, stretching out his hands just as he had done at the Central Station, scanning windows and lightboxes to no avail. Had he got this wrong?
Then, slowly, slowly, he felt eyes on him. Something had made him feel like he was being watched, and he stopped, trying to see what it could be. Was there someone there? Someone hiding?
There: the black taxi parked by the kerb. Perhaps it had been there a while, perhaps it had just arrived. The eyes he had felt were peering out from the half-open window, and from inside the darkness a voice said something in Polish.
‘I’m sorry,’ William answered, in English. He spread out both hands. I don’t understand you, I can’t help, ask someone else.
The voice raised itself a notch, now speaking in broken English.
‘Did you order?’ it said. ‘It says I should pick you up here.’
‘Pick who up?’
‘I got an order, through the system.’
William couldn’t help but smile. Through the system.
‘For an… Amberlangs?’ the driver said, squinting at him. ‘Is that right?’
William nodded, walked over to the taxi, opened the door and sat down in the back.
‘I didn’t book it myself,’ William said without any further explanation. ‘Did you get an address?’
The driver looked at him through the rear-view mirror. Sceptical eyes, surveying the dirt, the wet, the ill-fitting clothes that had been through it all.
‘If this wasn’t already paid for, I’d be asking you to get out again.’
‘I’ll remember that next time.’ William said with a wry smile, mostly to himself, and then saw the driver hesitate one last time.
Instead though, he turned around, steered out on to the soaked tarmac, and headed down towards the bridges and the river. It was not until he saw the motorway that he realised where they were heading.
75
Ten minutes after they’d all assembled in the meeting room on the ground floor, Forester noticed that she was struggling to breathe. The temperature, she told herself.
On the wall in front of them the big flatscreen TV set was on, spreading both heat and light. It was connected to the laptop in the middle of the table, a battered, cracked old thing that looked ready for some museum of technology, and which in turn was connected to a series of humming hard d
iscs and other units that were all combining to raise the temperature in here by at least a couple of degrees. Plus, there were six of them in a room where you couldn’t open the windows.
The real reason, though, had nothing to do with a lack of oxygen. The cause was stress, a feeling of detachment from reality, an unwillingness to digest everything that the strange bearded man had just shown her.
‘I don’t understand.’
It was a pretty accurate summary of all the things whirling in her head at that point. Like how on earth could a living caricature of a trawlerman, this ham radio enthusiast, be sitting in a room inside the Swedish Armed Forces’ headquarters giving her information? Lists of dates. Sound recordings he’d made of the shortwave band. Long strings of digits that had suddenly been recited on frequencies that had been dormant for years, six, nine, two, two, a ghostly, lifeless voice that had then been replaced by wild trumpet blasts of data. Blasts that had been answered by transmitters around the world, at the same places and on the same dates as the attacks, and which–and this was the worst of it–had since moved up a gear and become long, uninterrupted data streams on hundreds of different channels.
She was sweating, she was struggling for air, and all of it was his fault.
‘I don’t understand,’ she said again. ‘All these transmissions… you claim that they’re coming from London?’
‘Not all of them. The number sequences, yes. But the data blasts are like a dialogue. As though London is calling and then getting replies.’
‘From New York, Rio de Janeiro, Lisbon,’ she said.
‘Amongst other places. Marseille, Yokohama, Los Angeles. Everywhere, across the globe.’
For a second Forester caught herself wanting to just scream out loud–Trottier! Explain for Christ’s sake–but Trottier was no longer around, and out of nowhere came that feeling of inadequacy again, the feeling that she’d been given a task she wasn’t capable of completing. Or, worse still, that they had chosen her specifically because they didn’t think she was up to it, so that they deliberately and purposefully could control her and keep her in the dark—
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