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The days that change your life for ever start off like all the others.

No one wakes you saying today might be a bit tough, so have another piece of toast, take your time and enjoy your coffee, because it will be a while before you learn to enjoy life again. There’s no one putting an arm around you, preparing you for what’s about to happen. Everything is as normal, right up until the point where it no longer is.

As the afternoon gloom descended over Stockholm on Monday the third of December, no one knew that the threat level in the country had just been raised to ‘elevated’. No one knew that inside the Swedish Armed Forces’ great brick-built headquarters on Lidingövägen, men and women with uniforms and name badges were sitting waiting for the worst to happen.

And no one knew that the massive power cut that was about to hit at six minutes past four was just the start of something much bigger.

The men sitting inside the white van up on Klarabergsviadukten, the road bridge over Stockholm’s Central Station, had no idea what they were waiting for. Or rather, who. They didn’t know what he was going to do, who he was going to meet, how it was all going to look. Nor did they know why, which was of course what worried them most.

Inside the van’s cramped loadspace, the silence was absolute. From the outside, it looked like any other anonymous delivery vehicle. Presumably, it had seemed spacious and generously proportioned when they bought it. After that, they seemed to have got carried away. Someone had given free rein to a team of technicians with an extravagant budget, and now the van was so full of screens and electronics that it felt less like a workplace and more like a boy’s bedroom full of expensive kit.

A cubic metre’s worth of space nearest the driver’s cab had been consigned to computers and other electronic gizmos that probably carried out important tasks, but appeared not to do much more than flash red and green. Along one side hung two banks of flat screens, and behind a long thin desk below the screens sat four grown men, which was at least two too many.

The two who sat at the keyboards were of markedly different ages but unfortunately shared a similar BMI. Immediately behind them were the two men in charge: the one who the others called Lassie when he was out of earshot, and the one called Velander, an IT expert in civilian clothes, of completely indeterminable age, with glasses that seemed to get constantly steamed up in the heat inside. They stood hunched against the roof, shoulder to shoulder, eyes glued to the screens and the fuzzy grey CCTV images being relayed from within the station.

It was the older man who spotted him first, two minutes ahead of schedule.

‘What the fuck are you doing here?’

His voice was no louder than a whisper, but everyone heard, and once they’d spotted the subject they saw it too.

It might have been something about his movements–the jerky gait, perhaps–or maybe something else. Whatever it was, a burst of concentration filled the tiny space, the same sudden alertness that comes when you catch sight of an ex in the corner of your eye during the interval at the theatre, someone you haven’t seen for years but who stands out from the crowd and holds your gaze.

He’d changed.

He was trotting, rather than running, his hair untidy in the breeze, as though he’d just got up–although it was late afternoon. This from a man who’d always been so well dressed, so well coordinated. Who’d been sharp, in good shape, who no one quite believed when he told them he’d turned fifty–several times, as had been the standing joke these last three birthdays. Last time was so much fun I thought I’d turn fifty again this year.

It was as though, in the space of just three months, age had suddenly caught up with him. He looked tired, broken, with his overcoat hanging as if it had just been thrown over him and his jeans soaked with slush up to the knees. As he jostled through the crowds and across the blue-grey marble floor, a blue-grey mac in a sea of blue-grey passengers, he did so with movements that were forced and spasmodic, full of a buzzing intensity.

He kept appearing and disappearing as he moved between cameras, rushing onto the vaulted concourse, past the great frescoes and over towards the new escalators at the far end.

Surely it wasn’t him they were waiting for? But if it wasn’t, what was he doing there, now?

‘What do we do?’ asked the one with the steamed-up glasses.

‘We wait,’ said the one whose name wasn’t Lassie.

And then, for two long minutes, not a word from anyone inside the van.

It had been only seven minutes to four when the bright yellow taxi stopped on Vasagatan outside Stockholm’s main station to drop William Sandberg off into the slushy afternoon gloom that was Monday the third of December.

Thick layers of dark grey cloud hung where the sky should have been, the air so thick with mist that the noise of the traffic and all the roadworks seemed to meld into a single indistinct clamour. Construction lights and Christmas illuminations struggled gamely to overcome the murk, and the scaffolding and tarpaulins that clung to the surrounding buildings gave the impression that someone had clad the whole city in an orthodontic brace to reset it.

He was tired today, just like yesterday, and the day before that. If he’d given it any thought he would probably have noticed that he was hungry too, but if there was one thing he’d managed to cut out it was thinking of stuff like that. He’d stopped when he realised that his feelings were consuming him, literally eating him up: they were gnawing him from the inside with big, brutish bites, and now what was left of what was once William Sandberg was at least ten kilos lighter.

It’s the method the tabloids forget, he used to say. Find yourself something really worth worrying about.

He picked his way through the heavy, wet snow outside the main entrance, following it into the departure hall, where it turned to a cinnamon-brown mush, and where the fusty smell of dirt and damp clothes mixed with the aroma of takeaway lattes and people on their way home.

William Sandberg, though, noticed none of it. Not the smell, not the flush of his face as the wind gave way to the still warmth indoors, or the irritated elbows that jerked out in frustration as he pushed his way through the crowd towards the northern exit.

It had been less than two weeks since that first email, and in precisely seven minutes’ time he’d be in position, on the Arlanda Airport Express platform.

Precisely, because that’s what it had said.

All he felt was hope–and fear–they came in tandem.

He’d been waiting by the bright yellow ticket machine for at least five minutes before he realised that he’d been looking for the wrong thing.

The platforms had been full of businessmen with briefcases, people with blank looks who seemed to be hibernating inside their own heads, waiting for a train to take them to somewhere they didn’t want to go. But William had been looking for something else: faces that didn’t want to be seen, people in dirty coats, with heavy plastic bags and loop after loop of damp scarves muffling their restless, freezing eyes. The kind who hid themselves behind bulky clothes, layers protecting them from both the biting cold and any unwanted contact with the rest of the world.

Maybe, he’d allowed himself to think–maybe one of them had finally got in touch. Someone, at last, with something to tell him, who’d made contact to reveal an address or even point the way, anything at all that would help him along.

Sandberg had hoped. And if only he hadn’t, he probably would have seen the man on the other platform much sooner.

He was well over thirty. He had a headset in one ear, a studied vacant look despite being perfectly alert, and clothes so painfully ordinary that once you’d noticed him he stuck out like a child trying to hide behind a curtain.

His suit was silver grey. On top of it he wore a short overcoat that was so tightly buttoned at the waist that the bottom of his suit jacket poked out like a short pleated skirt, and below his trousers sat a pair of clumpy, anonymous trainers. All in all, it was a look that screamed discreet! as loud as it possibly could.

What caught William’s eye, though, was the phone call. It seemed to contain more silence than talk. There were long periods when the thin wire just hung from his ear with nothing to do, and when the man eventually did open his mouth it was for single short interjections. That was it. In between he stood waiting impatiently, head darting distractedly from side to side looking at nothing in particular.

Slowly, William felt himself moving to a state of readiness.

It was already five past four by the time the Arlanda train rolled in to the platform. The driver’s cab stopped by the buffers just in front of him, the train’s hundreds of yellow tons puffing and dripping as the passengers wove their way past each other to board or alight. Gradually the swathes of people formed streams in various directions–to the main hall, the taxi ranks, other platforms–and gradually too it emerged that there were some who weren’t going anywhere at all.

The discreet man with the headset, for one–and then someone else. He stood on the same side of the tracks as William, further down the platform, and he too was wearing a headset, sporting the same bland clothing, and having the same kind of conversation, short, sharp responses into the mic: they were talking to each other.

Something was wrong. William had been instructed to be in situ at precisely four p.m., and the word ‘precisely’ bothered him, because five minutes had passed and no one had shown up–no one, but for the two with the headsets. Were they waiting for the same person as he was? Or worse still–waiting for him?

He looked around. The crowds along the platform had slowly thinned out, and everyone not boarding was heading somewhere else. William had noticed the men with the headsets because they weren’t doing either, and now he was making the same mistake.

He hesitated for two seconds before making up his mind. The meeting, as far as he was concerned, was cancelled. He looked for a gap in the stream of passengers, sidled in and turned to follow the crowd towards the station hall.

He managed a single step.

‘Amberlangs?’

The man blocking William’s path had a chest so broad that it might have looked funny in another situation. Now, though, it was too close for comfort. He was wearing the day’s third improbably discreet outfit–maybe they’d bargained for a discount–and now he stood massively still, with his legs apart and arms ready at his sides. But ready for what?

‘And you are?’

In his mind, he bit his tongue as he was saying it. Shouldn’t he be playing dumb?

‘Nice and calm,’ the man replied. Northern accent, a cold, curt order. ‘You come with us and nothing will happen to you.’

Us? Who were they?

‘When you say “happen”,’ William said, to buy some time. ‘Would you care to elaborate on that?’

When the Northerner slid his jacket to the side, the weapon across his chest was all the elaboration William needed.

The days that change your life for ever start off like all the others. Everything normal, right up until the point when it isn’t.

When the power went, at six minutes past four, leaving vast tracts of Sweden in total darkness, it was just like any other day. A damp, cold afternoon in the no-man’s-land between seasons, neither autumn nor winter. At Stockholm Central Station the lights went off, the waiting locomotives lost power and lapsed into silence, screens and signs went dark. At hospitals and airports, emergency generators swung into action, on the roads and rails the lights and the signals disappeared, causing jams and confusion. It was irritating, for sure, and a bloody scandal too–with people getting stuck in lifts or on trains with no signal and what kind of society do we live in anyway. But for most people, that was all it was.

For William Sandberg, on the other hand, it was the start of an evening that would see his life lose its meaning.

For the men in the white van up on Klarabergsviadukten, it was confirmation that things were getting worse.