7

William Sandberg leaned over the table in the darkness. Just a movement, a change of position, yet it expressed an underplayed sarcasm; a tired protest, mute and invisible, but that no watcher would have missed.

‘I,’ he said. Then: ‘Don’t. Know.’

They had let him wait in silent solitude for another twenty minutes before at last they opened the door. Then they had almost hovered into the room, their features blue in the emergency lighting, and in the darkness the smallest sounds had become near-tangible events: clothes rustling as they moved, chair legs scraping against the floor as they sat down, papers being laid on the table.

The one on the left had introduced herself as Cathryn Forester, as though that was something very special and worth boasting about. And as Major, as if that was too. And then, in perfect Swedish, only with a slight English accent, she had introduced the face next to her.

William had long since recognised him. The height, the heavy gait, the presence. The bastard. Not that he’d had any reason to make assumptions, he knew that too, but as his former colleague had floated into his seat across the table, William had realised that deep down, he’d been assuming that Palmgren wasn’t part of this. Lassie, he’d thought, would be on his side. Regardless of why William had been brought in, whatever all this was about, Palmgren would intervene like the older cousin in the playground, protesting and rushing to help as soon as he heard he was there.

Instead he’d sat down and set out his papers, every bit as formal and reserved as the English Major to his right. Clicked nervously with an invisible pen, hidden in the darkness without saying a word.

She, on the other hand, had managed more. She had asked methodically and at length about things they already knew, name, age and kiss my arse, he’d thought to himself but made sure not to say out loud.

Then there was that question that kept coming up, again and again, the one William would have been only too glad to answer if he could. Except that he did. Not. Know.

‘So you keep saying,’ she said.

‘Oh, you did hear then,’ he answered. ‘I thought that, since you had to ask so many times, maybe your hearing went with the lighting.’

He found himself playing for time without even knowing why, resorting to sarcasm to slow the conversation down, no matter how unviable a strategy. What was she doing here, a foreign officer, in an interrogation room inside the Swedish Armed Forces HQ? It was all deeply alarming. In more ways than one.

‘Is it a person?’ she said. ‘An organisation? Is it an acronym?’

This time he didn’t answer at all, and when he didn’t she steeled herself before repeating the original question, for the umpteenth time. Word for word, the same deliberate, over-articulated delivery.

‘Who. Is. Rosetta?’

‘It is a sender,’ he told her. ‘What more do you want me to say?’

‘We know that. But who?’

William shook his head. His energy was draining. The darkness sapped him, as did the lack of time perception, and there were moments when he thought he saw a movement in the blackness, as if one of them had raised a hand, or there was some fourth person in here that he hadn’t seen until now. Each time, though, he realised that it was just his brain filling in the gaps of its own accord.

‘I realise that you have to ask me that,’ he said, straining to maintain his focus. ‘But I’ve run out of synonyms now. I don’t know.’

‘Which brings us on to question number two,’ she said. ‘Isn’t it rather odd that you ended up going there?’

Here we go again.

‘Isn’t it odd that you show up at just the right spot, at just the right time, with no idea who asked you to?’

He could feel his pulse rate rising. They’d just begun to scratch the surface, yet already they had questions he couldn’t answer. Waiting in line were others, ones that he didn’t want to answer.

Please, he said to himself. Please don’t go there.

‘Tell me,’ he said instead, a last attempt to seize the initiative. ‘Tell me why I’m here.’

From the other side of the table, silence.

‘I understand that this has to do with the power cut. I just don’t see how.’

‘What makes you think that?’

He saw Forester’s teeth twinkle opposite. Was she smiling? Her voice certainly wasn’t.

‘Because I struggle to believe it’s pure coincidence. You jump me at Central Station. At that very moment, this happens.’

He made an invisible gesture out into the darkness, towards the walls, the ceiling, all the things that should be bathed in the sterile, bright white light of fluorescent tubes, but were not. ‘So instead of asking me questions I can’t answer, please: tell me what has happened.’

For a second, Forester breathed in as though she was negotiating with herself. As though, for an instant, she might consider answering. Instead, she reached for the stack of papers on the table in front of her.

On top of the stack was some sort of plastic document wallet, possibly white or yellow, but under the emergency lighting it was as ice blue as anything else. She laid both hands on top of it. Two rubber bands signalled that the folder was closed and would remain so for the time being.

‘Can you tell me what happened three months ago?’ she asked.

Not there. Not there.

‘I can,’ he said. ‘But you already know.’

‘You were sacked.’

‘I was encouraged to resign.’

‘How did that feel?’

Feel?

‘Is that why you’re here? You’re a shrink?’

‘Did you feel hurt? Hard done by? Did you feel you’d been treated unfairly?’

William felt the sweat just starting to find its way down his back. Here we go. Whatever she suspected him of doing, it was utterly clear why she suspected it, which meant that the interrogation room was a corner he’d painted himself into, all on his own. Chances were she’d already heard colleagues telling her how he’d changed.

‘Did you feel you wanted to demonstrate your skills? Show what you can do? Show your employers what they’re missing?’

William shook his head. Across the table sat a woman making accusations without saying what they were, and the one person who should be speaking on his behalf was sitting right beside her not speaking at all.

‘Say something,’ he said eventually. ‘For fuck’s sake, Lassie.’

The words found their way out of him, tired, almost silent, and he looked Palmgren straight in the eyes that he could not see. Come on. Show us which side you’re on, now.

For the first time, he heard Palmgren breathe in.

‘Why did you go to ground, William?’

Of all the things to say.

‘Did I? Did I really?’

‘We tried to get hold of you.’

‘That’s one of the drawbacks of sacking someone. They don’t tend to be on call so much after that.’

Palmgren didn’t respond. ‘We needed your help,’ he said instead.

William could hear the sarcastic retorts lining up inside his head, knew what he ought to say: ‘I don’t think I’m the right person to help you with anything, unless what you’re looking for is someone to come in here and be obstructive. Unless you’re suffering an acute shortage of people wallowing in self-pity and creating conflicts and–what else was it you said?–becoming a risk for the whole operation.’

That’s what he should have said. And on another day, in another life, that’s just what he would have done, and afterwards he’d have smiled with dark eyes and added, ‘If I’m wrong, if that is what you’re looking for, then I think the team investigating the Olof Palme case still have a couple to spare.’

His weapon of choice was sarcasm, and after thirty years in the Forces it was the only one he had full command of. Now he was sitting there, and it was loaded and ready for use, but the anger had gone and all he felt was regret. Regret and resignation and please, let me go.

‘For the last time,’ was all he said, ‘why am I here?’

The question hung, unanswered, in the thick, dry silence until Forester spoke again.

‘Because we feel the same as you. We find it hard to believe that this was a coincidence.’

Every time Christina got into one of the paper’s cars, she wondered what kind of people her colleagues really were. The light blue Volvo was only a year or so old. It had been driven only by adults travelling to interviews and reports, from A to B and back again. Yet somehow it still had the appearance of belonging to a sugar-addicted family on a road trip. There were crumbs and wrappers and remains that couldn’t be identified, and Christina swept it all onto the floor, forming a pile of rubbish along with the stuff that other colleagues had swept down before her.

‘Right,’ Beatrice said as she got into the passenger seat beside her. ‘What have you saved for us?’

‘I’m shooting from the hip,’ said Christina, ‘but I know someone who ought to have a bit more information about this than we do.’

‘And you think he’s going to want to talk to you?’

‘I know he doesn’t want to talk to me,’ she replied. ‘But he hasn’t been there in three months.’

Beatrice’s response was a questioning silence, and instead of answering her, Christina leaned forward and turned the key in the ignition.

Christina lived a different life now. She had started again. And she had done so in a freezing cold flat in Sollentuna. It was described as ‘furnished’ in the ad, and had it not been Beatrice who’d found it for her, she’d probably have turned on her heel as soon as she set foot inside. Editor or not, every night Christina Sandberg left work she went home to a faded lino floor, a cathode-ray TV perched on a stool, and a single bed whose previous occupants she’d rather not speculate about. She hung her clothes on a hanger outside the wardrobe, since the inside stank of damp and neglect. Her nightly ablutions were performed in front of a wonky bathroom cabinet made of wafer-thin steel and above a washbasin scarred with permanent reddish-brown trails left by the constantly dripping tap.

It had already been a month. She hadn’t realised until she saw the rent invoice lying on the hall floor, a month of my life in this place, she’d thought to herself, but the truth was she’d been lucky to find anywhere to live at all.

A month since she cleared out her old wardrobe at Skeppargatan, jotted a concise explanation on a notepad she left on the kitchen table and then pushed her keys through the letterbox as she left. He still hadn’t so much as called her. Maybe he hadn’t even noticed that she’d left.

So no, he wouldn’t want to talk.

‘That’s about the only thing we have in common right now,’ she mumbled in response to her own thoughts, and put the headlights on full beam to light their way out of the car park.

It was Beatrice’s yell that got her to slam on the brakes. She saw it first, the feeble yellow light that suddenly appeared as they pulled out of the garage and accelerated over the pavement and the bike lane. Her first thought was what the fuck is that? Her second was that it had to be a moped.

They felt the wheels lock and glide across the ice, the judder from the brakes as the car slid forward, then that instant of uncertainty before the bang came.

The noise of the moped’s engine cut through all other sound. It cut through the crunch of metal on metal, the squeal of the parka gliding across the windscreen, the clatter as the whole thing finished its scraping course across the bonnet and fell off the other side, where a worrying silence followed.

Across the road they could see the darkness of the park, bare trees lined up in their headlights, and just in front of the bumper a steady moped headlight shone right up into the mist, signalling ‘Here I am’.

Christina Sandberg had run someone over. And if they did need help, there was going to be no one to call.

She flung herself out of the car and undid her seatbelt, roughly in that order, which wasn’t the right one, until she finally managed to extricate herself and cleared her own car door.

The man who lay in front of her car was staring straight at her. Two eyes sandwiched between a woolly hat and a full white beard. As far as she could see there was no blood, and at least that was something.

‘Are you okay?’ she asked. ‘I didn’t see you.’

His answer wasn’t what she expected.

‘Christina Sandberg?’ A voice she didn’t recognise, fevered and full of urgency.

‘And you are?’ she said.

‘I’ve been calling you. You never call back.’

She leant over. Did she recognise him? But before she had time to speak he reached out, grabbed hard at her lapel, and then pulled himself up using her body as support until his face hung just inches from hers–harried eyes and damp, flushed cheeks bathed in the light of the car headlamps.

‘They’ve known about this all along,’ he puffed. Then with a penetrating stare: ‘They knew that this was going to happen.’

‘Thirty years you worked here, isn’t that right?’

William let his silence concur.

‘You’re one of the Military’s best cryptologists. You’re a trusted, well-regarded colleague–that’s what everyone’s told me. Then suddenly, six months ago, out of nowhere–you’re not any more. You start accessing systems you’re not authorised to see. You conduct searches of sensitive directories with no supporting explanations. You refuse to answer questions, you engage in various forms of misconduct, you become unpredictable.’

He wobbled his head. It was a ‘yes’, a ‘no’ and a ‘who gives a shit’ all rolled into one.

‘Am I mistaken?’

‘If that’s what it says in your notes then that must be the case.’

He said it with a glance at the file on the table, trying to provoke her into revealing its contents. She either missed his gesture in the darkness, or simply ignored it.

‘Can you tell me why?’ was all she said.

‘I’m not a big fan of convention,’ William said loudly, trying to sound authoritative, failing utterly. ‘But wasn’t there a good European one?’

It all came out a lot less cocky than he’d aimed for, and he was grateful to the darkness for hiding his regret. Hopefully they would at least have grasped what he meant. Somewhere amongst all the articles and paragraphs of the European Con­vention on Human Rights there was a very applicable passage, and if they planned to breach it, he didn’t mean to let it pass unnoticed.

All prisoner have a right to know what they are accused of.

‘Why?’ he asked again. ‘Why am I here?’

He could feel glances being exchanged in the darkness. Was he imagining it, or was there something they weren’t agreeing about?

William waited for them. Then, eventually, it seemed that their glances had produced a decision. Palmgren leant forward.

‘William?’ he said. His tone was direct and serious. Headmaster to pupil. Traffic warden to someone who’s just parked his Porsche in a disabled bay and then cartwheeled off. ‘We know that you respond to the codename AMBERLANGS.’

The word caused the ground underneath him to sway. It was the first thing they’d said to him on the platform, yet he’d managed not to make the connection until now: that was the evidence, right there. They had read his emails. What more did they know?

‘We know that you showed up for a meeting at Central Station with a person or group of persons who might go under the alias ROSETTA. Not only that, we have reason to believe that they–and by extension you–are involved in one or more terror plots against Swedish and/or international targets.’

For a second, William looked for a smile in the darkness, but none came.

Was he being serious? Lars-Erik ‘Lassie’ Palmgren? Dram of Lagavulin with a drop of water Lassie? Tennis twice a week until his Achilles packed in Lassie, the man he’d known for almost thirty years–how could he be sitting there, suddenly transformed into accusing me of terrorism Lassie?

William clenched his jaw.

‘There were a whole lot of assumptions in that sentence,’ he said.

No answer.

‘Would you like to tell me just why you’ve arrived at that conclusion?’

Palmgren gave Forester another quick glance. She had no objection. Palmgren got to his feet.

‘Right now, a great swathe of Sweden is in complete darkness. The whole of the east coast, from Sundsvall down. We don’t yet know exactly how many are affected–authorities can’t communicate with one another, no information is getting to the public, masts and transmitters are all down. Telecoms, radio, TV, everything.’

William swallowed. He’d guessed it was significant, but on that scale? He felt the moisture of sweat creeping down over his back again.

‘How?’

‘Sixteen zero six today, this afternoon.’ Palmgren was still doing the talking. ‘A short circuit in a substation near Årsta caused a minor fire. The automatic fuses tripped and the security precautions worked as intended: the electricity supply was automatically diverted via other substations to avoid any overload. That caused another blowout somewhere else, and with each incident there were fewer and fewer alternative routings available to deal with an accumulating load. Eventually the system couldn’t take any more and the whole system was knocked out.’

William said nothing.

‘That,’ Palmgren continued, ‘is the official version.’

Oh shit.

‘So there’s an unofficial one?’

‘The automatic fuses blew. That much is true. However.’ Palmgren took a deep breath. ‘There was no fire.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

Forester made an invisible signal to Palmgren to take his seat again. That’ll do, she said without saying a word.

‘I am sure you’ll understand if we don’t share our information until you have shared yours.’

She picked up the file, the one that had been left lying on the table like a flat, unuttered threat, pulled the rubber bands away, one snap, two snaps, slowly and carefully like she enjoyed dragging it out. Inside was a single sheet of paper, which she illuminated with her phone as she slid it across towards William.

A laser printout. Almost completely devoid of content, except a single line of straight letters, striped and of varying clarity due to low ink levels. A toner cartridge somewhere was still being kept at work long after its due date. Still having budget problems, William thought. But said nothing. We’re expected to defend a nation but we can’t afford stationery. Didn’t say that either.

Instead, he said: ‘Yes,’ then: ‘I recognise that. That’s one of the emails I got.’

‘One of?’ Forester’s voice betrayed more surprise than she had probably intended.

‘Yes. One of them.’

‘Can you explain what it means?’

‘It means what it says. What else could it mean?’

She was still waiting him out. And he could feel himself getting more frustrated.

‘I don’t know! What else can I say? If it means anything more than what it says, I don’t know what that is.’

There was a hint of desperation in his voice now, and he could hear it himself. He didn’t want to fall apart, but then again, why not? Maybe that was the only option left, a collapse and a breakdown that would force them to see that he knew nothing, that he was feeling tired and sad and fuck off, just let me go home and do that alone.

‘Seriously,’ he said, slowly, with a tone that contained all that, ‘what is going on?’

Perhaps she saw him give up. Maybe she saw fatigue take him over. Whichever it was, she leaned back in her chair and turned off the light on her phone.

‘You first,’ she said.