Standing in the empty lunch room on the third floor, Christina was struck by how rarely you experience something that’s never happened to you before. Even big, unexpected events tend to be familiar in some way, as if they’d already been built into your life, and somehow belong when they eventually turn up.
Hitting a moped rider, though, was a first. Especially in the middle of a massive power cut, and especially a man who knew her name and who demanded to be let into the building because he had something vitally important to show them.
Now he stood over by the sloping windows, his face floating in the darkness, lit up by the open laptop in front of him. On a chair beside him lay the dark grey plastic crate that he’d had tied to the old moped’s rusty pannier rack. With a steady stream of ‘Oh dear, oh dears’, he proceeded to pull out all the electronic devices that he’d had to rescue out of the sludge down there, checked them one by one, connected them up with twisted cables and attached them to the filthy car battery at the bottom of the crate.
Normally, the cafeteria would be buzzing with activity at this time of day, but now it was deserted and empty. It had taken only minutes for the rolls and salads to disappear from the chilled cabinets, hungry colleagues stockpiling in case the power cut lasted, and on the now cool hotplates spherical pots offered only the very last, ice-cold dregs of coffee. A handwritten note was all that remained of the kitchen staff, and every now and then she would hear colleagues approach from the stairs, read that the power cut had closed the canteen, then shuffle off again in disappointment.
But Christina’s focus remained on the man who stood by the windows: the weird homemade device taking shape, the seriousness in his face as he cobbled it all together. An uneasy sensation that this was indeed something she’d never experienced before.
‘Maybe you should’ve hit him a bit harder.’ That was Beatrice. She was standing next to Christina, leaning against one of the darkened fridges, her murmur barely audible. ‘I’ve always wondered what he looked like. I have to say I’m disappointed.’
Christina smiled an invisible smile in the darkness.
His name was Alexander Strandell. And if they’d known that earlier, he wouldn’t have been standing there at all.
His beard looked like it had climbed off the front of a packet of throat lozenges. He had zinc-white hair that it would be impossible to pull a comb through, that seamlessly wound its way into his equally white beard, framing a circular face that was pitted and swollen, marks left by an adolescence that had refused to pass unrecorded.
Tetrapak. That’s what they called him. And even if neither of them had met him he had been a standing joke long before Christina had joined the paper. He was a medically retired amateur radio enthusiast, living in a small house in Alvik, and every time someone recounted a story about him there were more aerials in his garden, thicker layers of tinfoil on his windows, and still less credibility to his tip-offs.
No one knew who had been present at that meeting when his nickname was coined. It may be that it never even took place. The story went that it was the early nineties–even the Eighties, according to some–and even back then, Strandell had been notorious in the trade. There wasn’t a single tips line at a single Swedish paper that hadn’t at some point received a call from him, claiming to have intercepted some secret radio transmission, each time equally convinced that he had uncovered a global conspiracy that absolutely could not be discussed on the telephone.
Despite being constantly fobbed off with varying shades of polite professionalism, he continued to make contact–and then one day, towards the end of the last century, someone had finally agreed to meet him for lunch.
The first thing the man had done was to clear everything from the restaurant table. Saltshaker. Pepper mill. The little wilted pot plant. Everything had been shifted onto neighbouring tables because they’re always listening, and according to the legend he’d then lowered his voice to explain how anything could be a microphone, his eyes darting around as he told them you’re not safe anywhere.
What this earth-shattering tip had been about had long since been streamlined out of the tale, but when they got to the coffee, and the bowl containing the sugar and the small pyramid-shaped packets of milk were placed in front of them, the radio amateur had reacted as though something had just bitten him on the leg. He’d thrust the chair away from the table, imploring the waitress to remove the goods at once–now, straight away, have we even ordered that?–and there he sat, keeping his distance till she finally did as he’d asked.
In the end, the journalist couldn’t resist. When lunch was over and they both stood up to leave, he took a detour past a nearby table and let one hand pluck a handful of the miniature milk tetras from the sugar bowl. Next minute, as they squeezed out through the revolving door, he’d dropped a couple into his visitor’s overcoat pocket.
Not that he ever got to see the result, but the mere thought of the man’s reaction when he got home and realised that his pocket held two of the terrifying packets, presumably having eavesdropped on him all afternoon–that alone had won the tale legendary status. Over the years, it had been told at Christmas dos and work parties so many times that it had in the end become true. Whether or not it had happened was neither here nor there.
After that lunch, Strandell’s tip-offs had grown increasingly rare. Despite that, he would still make occasional contact, always to warn of some extreme event in store. And always, without exception, when there really was no time to listen to him.
It took him almost seven minutes to plug in all the devices on the table, and when he was done he got to his feet and beckoned the two women over.
‘Background,’ he said when they were in place. ‘My name is Alexander Strandell. I’ve been in contact with you before.’
The pause that followed confirmed that this did not come as a surprise to either of them. So he carried on talking, gesticulating as he did so to underline the importance of what he had to say.
‘I’m not stupid,’ he said. ‘I know you don’t take me seriously. But just give me these ten minutes. I think you’re going to agree with me about this.’
‘Seven of them have already gone,’ Christina said. ‘Tell us why we’re in here with you and not out there doing our job.’
Instead of answering he bent over his little set-up on the table.
The computer was black, the size of an encyclopaedia volume, and might once have been considered both cutting-edge and ultra-portable. Seen with today’s eyes, it was heavy and awkward, and the blue-green desktop screen revealed that the operating system was at least three generations too old. His dirty fingers hammered in commands via a keyboard whose letters and symbols had been worn away by years of use, and the result was a whirring from the hard drive along with a riot of windows and data tables. Some of them displayed barely discernible columns and values, while others displayed curves and wave movements that could stand for just about anything.
‘The first time I heard it was back in summer,’ he said as he carried on working. ‘Early August, to be precise. This is my first note.’ He pointed at a row of numbers as though it might help them to understand. It failed to do so.
‘Heard what?’
‘Their transmissions.’
Something about those words caused Christina to sit up straight.
‘Who are they? What transmissions?’
He didn’t answer. Instead, he used the arrow keys to steer the cursor up to the top number in one of the windows. A date, as far as Christina could make out, and next to it a time, and something resembling a graph showing peaks and troughs. A sound file?
He looked up at them. Pressed return.
For a second, Christina could feel her stomach protesting inside her. What the hell was this about?
Two. Four. Six. Nine. Three. One.
A voice. A woman’s. It was so devoid of feeling, so monotonal, that it seemed to balance on the cusp of death. Crackling digits, read aloud in English in a slow, meaningless series, rang chillingly through the empty lunch room.
Seven. Nine. Nine. Two. Four. Four. Seven.
They stood there, listening without breathing, and when the dirge ended it was followed by a tone that played for a few seconds before the count resumed again. Exactly the same numbers, the very same monotone.
Two. Four. Six. Nine. Three…
When the bearded man finally turned it off, Christina was standing with her arms wrapped tightly around herself, her hands gripping firmly at her upper arms as though she was freezing with cold.
‘What is it?’ she said eventually, her unease sneaking through.
‘It’s a number station,’ he said.
‘And what is that?’
‘That’s the thing. No one knows.’ He looked at them with deadly serious eyes, lowering his voice. ‘Long story short,’ he said. ‘The shortwave band. It spans two to thirty megahertz. It is divided into countless transmission frequencies, all of which are arranged into area of use and type of traffic. In favourable conditions, you can hear transmissions from any part of the globe.’
He paused. Now he had their attention, and his enjoyment of that fact was plain to see.
‘The first reports of this kind of number station came in the early nineteen hundreds. No one knows who the sender is, no one knows who the receivers are, just that they’re there, on different frequencies. Spouting their sequences, incessantly, day in and day out.’
‘Why?’ Beatrice’s voice sounded just as unsettled as Christina’s.
‘No one knows for sure. Coded messages? Signals to spies out in the field? Maybe. What we do know, on the other hand, is that most of them disappeared along with the Cold War.’
At that point he paused for several beats, as though having come to the heart of the matter he was about to share with them.
‘And that’s just it,’ he said. ‘This particular frequency has been dormant since the nineties. Until now.’
The room fell silent, and the bearded man known as Tetrapak looked at them with an ominous intensity, waiting for them to say something.
‘Who is transmitting?’ It was Christina who spoke first. ‘What does it mean?’
‘I believe it to be instructions.’
‘Instructions for what?’
For a moment, he said nothing. Instead, he flung his arms wide, towards the windows. Towards the power cut and the silence and all that empty darkness out there.
‘For today.’
There was something about the way he said it. In his voice, the devices strewn on the table, the meaningless numbers, in the implication that it had something to do with a Cold War that no longer existed and–for Christ’s sake, she asked herself, had she really got snarled in the ramblings of a person afraid of coffee creamer?
‘I don’t understand what you mean,’ she said, for want of anything better.
‘After a while, the transmissions were altered,’ was his reply. ‘Significantly.’
‘In what way?’
He bent down over the screen, clicked down to another date in the list, finger poised above the keyboard.
‘This is the nineteenth of September.’ A pause. And then he tapped the space bar.
As he did so, both women backed instinctively away. What came pouring out of the computer now was not words, but a prolonged blast of amalgamated, atonal noise, scraping and hissing and familiar yet not, a grating sound that lasted for almost a second before it disappeared again, just as sharply and abruptly as it had come.
What the hell was that?
Christina and Beatrice stood frozen as the echo disappeared into the empty lunch room, followed by a couple of interminable seconds of discomfort while their memories caught up.
It sounded like a modem. That was it. Like a computer connecting to the internet, that sound that could be heard at every desk in the mid-nineties until technology moved on and eventually disappeared like a species with no place in the food chain–but this sound was faster, deeper, richer.
‘Suddenly it’s as if the entire ether is awash with transmissions,’ Tetrapak said before anyone had managed to distil their thoughts into words. ‘They are all on frequencies surrounding the number station, unusually clear and pronounced, short blasts of sound that last for a few seconds. Day after day. At around the same time too.’
He returned to the lists on his screen, played a few new transmissions consisting of scraping noises, grizzling cacophonies that alternated as he made his way down through the list. They were becoming more and more frequent, he explained through the din, and above all they were coming at various levels of intensity and from different sources. Sometimes they were echoed at once by another transmitter, sometimes close by and sometimes from a completely different part of the globe. He had never heard anything like it before, and it had scared him, and then he had grasped what it was.
Receipts. The repeats were confirmations of delivery, from someone who had received the message confirming that it had arrived.
‘It was as though they were fine-tuning a system,’ he said, his face expressing pride and seriousness and foreboding in a single expression. ‘As though they were constructing a whole new channel of communication. What we’re listening to is computers talking to one another, on frequencies that haven’t been used since the end of the Cold War.’
Christina looked at him. What he was saying was fascinating and terrifying at the same time. But isn’t that also the mark of a good conspiracy theory? That it seems to have some basis in fact, that it’s plausible, and if you get yourself sucked in from the likely angle then you don’t see all the gaping holes elsewhere?
Even if what he said might actually be true–even if this was an entirely new and secret mode of communication–there was no evidence whatsoever pointing to any connection with the power cut. Even less to suggest that there was in fact anything strange about it.
‘I still don’t understand,’ she eventually said. ‘I don’t understand what you think this has to do with today.’
At that point he turned to the computer again. He switched off the sound, letting the silence settle as the swirl of computer bleeps echoed out in the darkness.
‘Shortwave,’ he said. And then he expanded. ‘Who uses shortwave when we’ve got the internet?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Christina. ‘You tell me.’
‘Whoever knows that the internet’s about to go down.’