14

It hadn’t been even three months since William Sandberg had last walked down these very corridors. Then, it had felt completely right. Not just right, liberating. He had been marching towards the exit, spitting out percussive consonants, serving to deliver one creative insult after the other. No one would be left in any doubt as to his opinion. As though there was any risk of that.

Completely right then. And now? To be honest, pretty fucking embarrassing. It was a bit like storming out of a room only to find that you’ve entered a wardrobe, falling from high status to low in an instant, the only difference being that the instant had lasted three months and that the wardrobe in question had been one called grief.

Now here he was again, a Calvary pilgrimage of shame across worn-out lino floors, a stroll back down the path he’d sworn never to take again, because is that what you get for thirty years of service in this place? Reprimands?

They had, of course, been right. He had gone beyond his remit: trawled journals and downloaded CCTV and checked police records that he had no business accessing. But he had a daughter to find, and even if he’d had time for trivialities like seeking permission it would never have been granted.

Wherever he looked, there was feverish activity. Streams of serious-looking staff with intensity and concentration in each step, eyes full of steely focus that went straight through him, no greetings. Carrying papers and with shoulders pressing phones to sweaty ears. And despite the good news–that no one had time to comment on his reappearance–a new layer of unease was rapidly emerging.

He saw a constant cavalcade of faces he didn’t recognise. The building’s uniformed staff were rubbing shoulders with people who shouldn’t even be there: the Security Police, the National Defence Radio Establishment, and God knows who else–staff who presumably thought they were wearing civilian clothes but who in fact were just wearing a different kind of uniform that consists of polo shirts and chinos with a neat, ironed crease.

Above all, though, every now and then he spotted uniforms that he couldn’t immediately identify. Some were NATO, he knew that much, others were from the neighbouring Nordic countries, others he would need to see up close to be able to place. Palmgren hadn’t been exaggerating. Everyone was frightened. And when he said everyone, he’d meant everyone.

The room they called Briefing was a large, no-expenses-spared meeting room, well equipped with soft leather desk chairs and a glass table that stretched from one end of the room to the other. There were no windows, no risk of anyone seeing in, and if you were really paying attention you would notice that the inside of the room was rotated ever so slightly, like a slightly skewed box inside another. This to ensure that the interior walls were not parallel to the exterior ones, so that no sound could leak out to surrounding corridors.

What happens in Briefing stays in Briefing.

As Palmgren ushered William into the room, the first thing he saw was that it had changed. It had been reconfigured into a makeshift control room, in which every place at the table was now a workstation, with open laptops and looping extension cables. Everywhere you looked, open notebooks and half-empty coffee cups testified to the fact that this room was full of activity, even if it was now devoid of people, as though the others had been removed just for their sake.

The most striking change, though, was that the room had now been equipped with an enormous world map.

The map, several metres wide and taking up most of the wall that faced out towards the corridor, was of the good old-fashioned worn-out roller-blind type, cloth-backed and unfurled from a long wooden cylinder. The edges were frayed after at least fifty years of being moved and rehung in various locations, the text bleached by sunlight, or possibly just damp and old age. Within a broad sweep north of the eastern Mediterranean the borders had been drawn and redrawn down the years, some with ink, others with pencil, perhaps a laconic way of saying that some of them weren’t likely to last very long.

It was all incredibly analogue, and for a minute William felt like he was attending a military briefing in an Elsa Beskow story. As though he wasn’t quite sure whether he was about to be informed of an existential threat to the country’s borders, or just to learn about Swedish wild mushrooms.

‘Call me old-fashioned,’ said Forester. William turned around to see her nodding at the map. ‘The advantage of paper is that for someone to succeed in listening in, they’ll have to be close enough that we can see them.’

Now he noticed for the first time that the roller-blind map was covered in brightly coloured Post-it notes. They were scattered all over the world, each one carefully handwritten. As well as that, the map was surrounded by coloured laser prints on A4 paper, neatly lined up and stuck straight on the wall. From a distance they might be area charts, or small weather maps in bold colours.

‘My name is Cathryn Forester.’ She stretched out her hand as though they hadn’t just spent half an evening together. ‘I work for the British Secret Intelligence Service. And I’m sorry if our collaboration got off on the wrong foot.’

In the light she seemed both younger and taller than he’d imagined down there in the darkness. The hint of freckles, partly concealed by her red hair, made her seem gentler, more human–though the piercing stare of her startling blue eyes was enough to offset any redeeming features.

He saw her hand from the corner of his eye but pretended not to have noticed.

‘Can we get one thing clear before we go any further?’ he said. ‘What, exactly, is my official status right now? Am I on duty, or a former colleague here to visit? Or should I be ready to be pinned against the wall by the Burton’s brothers again?’

‘I’d be lying if I said that your colleague and I didn’t have differing opinions of your innocence or otherwise,’ she replied.

‘Very well,’ said William. ‘Honesty is good.’ A pause before he straightened his neck with a click. ‘Trust is better, but honesty will have to do.’

She looked back with a flawlessly bland expression. Either she’d missed the venom altogether, or she’d got it and was now displaying just how unimpressed she was. Whichever it was, it put him out, and it annoyed him.

‘Innocence of what?’ Better to move things forward.

Forester turned to Palmgren and nodded for him to reply.

‘William,’ he said, ‘I would like to point out that as yet, your employment has not formally ended. That means that your oath of secrecy still applies.’

William waved his hand dismissively. Don’t start giving me the rulebook, after thirty years. Palmgren took that as a confirmation, then nodded towards the big screen on the wall opposite.

‘Right now, the internet news sites are shouting over each other,’ he said. ‘Heavy black headlines about the fire that plunged half of Sweden into darkness–you know the drill. But again, that fire never happened.’

He located a remote control on the tabletop and then pointed it at the TV. The image that popped up was another map of the world, except that instead of the faded pastels this one had white details on a black background, sharp thin lines that marked national borders, and light grey vertical lines where time zones met.

No more than five or six metres separated the two maps–the crumpled one behind them and the one just summoned on screen–but each metre represented at least ten years of technological advance, from complex mechanical screen-printing to a digital high-res representation of the world which could zoom and scroll at the touch of a button.

When Palmgren clicked the remote again, a wealth of information appeared on the map. From east to west, and all across the world, it covered the continents with bright spots in various colours, the dots joined by a series of lines in a spectrum of hues, all connected to thousands of other dots in country after country.

It looked like an airline route map. Or perhaps international trade routes for the transport of goods. William guessed that it was neither.

‘Internet traffic?’

Palmgren nodded. ‘This is a graphic representation of the amount of data sent via the internet at a given time. The colour shows the volume. The warmer the colour, the more traffic.’

He nodded towards the top of the screen.

‘Keep an eye on the clock.’

Immediately above the map were an array of small fields containing numbers and other information, among them the time and date. Palmgren clicked through with the remote, hour by hour, day by day, and as he did so the map changed.

‘You see how the colours follow the time of day? This is pretty much what it looks like, day in day out. Where it’s daytime, the colours are red: large files, people working and exchanging information. Where it’s evening, the colours are cooler: film and music and social media. At night it falls to blue–automatic systems and alarms and God knows what else, the odd late-night surfer. But this is today.’

He held down one of the buttons to single out the details on the timeline, then hopped forward with small short clicks.

Eventually, the clock showed 16:00–the same time that Sandberg had found himself by the Arlanda Airport Express; six minutes before the lights went out; six and a half minutes before he slammed up hard against the glass door and was dragged out to the waiting Volvo.

Palmgren kept clicking through, slowly now.

On the map below the numbers, all the lines across Europe looked like a greenish spider’s web, a continent gradually slowing down to turquoise and closing its offices and going home for the day. In the West, the American continent was slowly awakening in yellow and orange, while in the East, Asia lay in deep blue sleep, thousands of monochrome rainbows reaching in and out from common nodes all over the world.

16:05, Swedish time. 16:05 and thirty seconds. And then abruptly, without explanation, the lines’ appearance changed. From their cooling, bluish tones, Europe’s lines flared up in yellow again, and then orange, then deep red. It started with its epicentre on the east coast of Sweden before immediately spreading via the spider’s web, out across the seas and on to the countries beyond them, and the colours passed red and turned pink, and after pink came white, and for a couple of hundredths of a second almost the whole of Europe was illuminated by an all-consuming white-hot light, before declining again through yellow to green and then finally to the same low-intensity blue-green as moments earlier.

It looked like seaside illuminations, like a rainbow explosion bordering on pop art. But it was nothing but a graphic representation of what society feared most.

‘An attack,’ said William.

In the top row, the clock had stopped at 16:06:33:50, and what he had seen was an enormous peak in data traffic–a peak that had lasted a little under two seconds. That disappeared as fast as it arrived, and coincided exactly with the power cut.

‘That’s what it looks like, doesn’t it?’ said Palmgren.

The answer was surprisingly close to being a no. Was it truly?

‘Certainly does,’ said William. ‘A Trojan or a virus on thousands of computers, just waiting. Activated at a predetermined time, to attack a substation and cause disruption. What else could it be?’

‘You’re right,’ said Forester. ‘And you’re wrong.’

William turned towards her.

‘What we’re looking at is an overload of data traffic, yes. An overload that caused not just one but several substations in the region east of Stockholm to fail. When they couldn’t deal with the volumes of data involved, they simply shut down. And when substation after substation automatically redirected the power grid via substations that had also failed… Well, you know what happened.’

‘So how am I wrong then?’ said William.

Forester spent a moment formulating her reply.

‘Right: it’s a peak in internet traffic. But wrong: it is not an attack.’

‘But is in fact…?’

‘An attack is something aimed at one or several targets. Correct? But this peak… it has no target.’

William looked at them in turn. Maybe fatigue was getting to him. Right now, he didn’t know what they were talking about.

‘The substations?’ he said.

‘The substations were knocked out, yes. But they were neither more nor less exposed than everything else.’

William opened his mouth but was unable to find any questions. Palmgren cut in instead.

‘Imagine someone sticking a twig into an ants’ nest. Imagine that, but with information instead of ants. What you see on the map is a veritable stream of data, in all directions simultaneously, a chaotic exchange between all these IP addresses that lasts for one and a half, almost two seconds. And then that’s it.’

He leaned forward.

‘We’re talking about an incredible number of data packets sent off in all directions, not to a specific address, but just back and forth between all of these nodes, between every single little laptop and access point that is online in this region.’

‘Nobody attacked anybody,’ Forester explained. ‘Or: everyone attacked everyone.’

‘And as a result, the power disappeared,’ said Palmgren.

Quiet again. They waited for William to make the next move.

‘I realise that you’re probably trying to get me to answer something right now,’ he said. ‘But I’m tired, possibly even a bit thick. Either way, I don’t have the energy to work out just what it is you want me to say.’

No one answered. A quick glance from Palmgren to Forester was returned with an equally short glance in the other direction.

‘Let me ask you this,’ William said eventually. ‘Why are you showing me this?’

‘Because what happened today…’ said Forester, pausing momentarily. ‘It’s not the first time that we’ve seen it.’

Christina Sandberg had grown up with no siblings, in an extended family with no children. That’s probably why she was such an expert at playing on her own.

She’d realised early on that her favourite pastime was observing the world from afar, and even as a child her diaries had been full of observations about things that happened to others rather than things that happened to her. She loved to see the big picture, to analyse instead of joining in. For many years she’d also been obsessed by creating small worlds of her own, making dolls’ furniture and miniature towns out of cardboard and packaging. Not for playing with, but just for imagining what might be happening to the people who lived there.

Fortunately the family had had an almost endless supply of shoeboxes and wrapping, and while other kids her age were presumably out playing on the street, she would embark on voyages of discovery in boxes, transforming them into tiny furnished realities.

When Christina stepped out of the dark blue military-registered Volvo outside the Swedish Armed Forces HQ at Lidingövägen 24, she was struck by how the building in front of her looked like it was created the same way. It stood like a loveless colossus next to the road, a rectangular box for an enormous pair of sensible shoes, and along the walls, an equally enormous child had carved out window after window in straight, orderly rows and then said Mummy, look what I’ve done.

And behind all the little toy windows were toy soldiers on toy chairs, and one of them was her husband, and that was beyond understanding. Six months ago he’d been a respected, in-demand cryptologist, a man who gave presentations and was hired out on tasks, and who was important and secret enough that every time someone happened to ask what he did for a living, his whole face melted into a friendly, evasive smile, as he steered the conversation elsewhere and unnoticed.

Now he was the one being interrogated. Because they had some questions. That had to be a bad thing.

She walked through the heavily guarded entrance, before handing in her mobile at reception, passing through a metal detector and placing her bag to be X-rayed. Beyond security waited the man who had called her.

‘We’re very grateful that you were able to come,’ he said while lifting her handbag out of the dark blue plastic tray. ‘We have a number of questions we’d like answered.’

‘I can only say the same thing,’ she replied.

She flashed a silent smile as she hung the bag on her shoulder, then followed him through the thick plate-glass doors into the big shoebox.

William had been sitting in silence for so long that eventually they’d have to ask him whether there was something he hadn’t grasped.

Everything, he’d been tempted to reply, but signalled to them instead to keep going, and Forester walked over to the school map and stood in front of it. Mercator’s Projection, the one that makes Sweden appear to be much bigger than it actually is. Like a metaphor for all of Sweden’s political self-belief, he heard himself thinking before he swept the thought to one side.

‘Each and every one of these’–in a sweeping gesture, she moved her hand past the multicoloured Post-it notes that were dotted around the world. ‘Every single one represents a peak like the one we saw today.’

William squinted at them. Felt a shiver go through him.

Each note on the map was covered in handwritten text, and it was only now that he saw what they said. First a date, at the top, then the time, and underneath that the duration in minutes and seconds. The last row was a number, in petabytes: the size of the peak.

‘Altogether, at least fifty occasions,’ she said when she spotted him attempting to count them. ‘Fifty peaks that we can safely say were the same thing as today.’

She bounced her fingertips over the Post-its, out onto the wall, touching the various colour printouts that hung around the map. Of course. William took a step closer. All the vivid printouts were small versions of the same digital map that Palmgren had just shown him on the screen, rainbow-coloured lines of internet traffic, shifting around the world in line with the time zones.

On each of the printouts was an area that shone white, more intense than all the others.

‘Since when?’ he asked.

Forester took a step back, reaching towards the North American continent.

‘The nineteenth of September this year. A hacker attack disrupts the internet across swathes of America. Several banks are hit. The NASDAQ. I’m sure you’ve read about it.’

William rubbed his face. The nineteenth of September. Just days after that walk down the corridors, the one where he gave himself the sack and left his job for the last time.

Thanks for your help, coincidence.

‘As I told you,’ he said. ‘I’ve been having other stuff to contend with. It may be that I missed the odd news story.’

‘This was quite a big deal in the media. No one could say where it had come from, they were blaming it on everyone from independent hackers to the Iranian military, but none of it could be proved.’

‘Because it wasn’t true?’

Forester answered by not responding.

‘That was the first time we saw it,’ she said, ‘but not the last. If you look for the centre of it, you end up here somewhere.’ She placed her hand just off America’s East Coast. ‘Brookhaven, a little place on Long Island, north of New York. Since then, we’ve counted fifty similar incidents. Each one just like today’s.’ She pointed to the map as she spoke: ‘Rio de Janeiro. Lisbon. Marseille. Yokohama. Los Angeles.’

‘Coastal cities,’ said William.

‘Well spotted,’ said Forester. ‘Some resulting in short power outages, some affecting essential services. Sometimes we got away with just a fright.’

‘And you think there’s a reason they’ve chosen these particular cities?’

That wasn’t really a question. He had a very good idea what the answer was going to be, and Forester nodded in response, and lifted her head upwards, over the map, looking now at the Nordics, Sweden, Stockholm.

‘Today’s power cut,’ she said, and shook her head. ‘Three hours and forty minutes. That’s bad enough. But what happens if it’s allowed to go on for longer? Days, weeks, or more?’

There was only one answer: society would collapse. One way or another, it would capsize, it was just a question of how quickly and how violently and what would go down first.

No one would have any money. First because all the electronic payment methods would stop working, and only the lucky few who happened to have cash in hand when the outage came would see themselves through the first period–a few days perhaps, or a little longer. After that, though, their head start would be gone. No one would have access to their accounts, and banks would not allow withdrawals while systems were down, and before long they’d close their branches to avoid threats and demonstrations and the chance of violence.

Then again, money or no money, if the power cut lasted, before long there’d be nothing to buy. Perishables would go stale and rot, leaving just dried goods and tins, and no one would be able to cook them on their lifeless electric hobs.

Would there be rioting? Probably. Would that help? Hardly.

Yet that would be just the beginning. If the electricity stayed off, what would happen then? To healthcare, communications, transport of goods and essentials? Pumps and sewage works would be at a standstill, supplies of fresh water would run out everywhere, for everyone. It wasn’t hard to imagine what people might be capable of then.

‘And that’s if we’re lucky,’ she said, when he’d had enough time to think. ‘That’s if we’re just talking about the electricity supply.’

William nodded. It could, of course, be coincidence that the attacks had taken place in those locations. Could. He looked over at the map again, letting his eyes flit between all the Post-it notes: New York, Rio, Lisbon, Marseille, Los Angeles. All of them were central nodes where the internet traffic came together and where data was distributed onwards, places where enormous data cables emerged from the ocean and their traffic redirected across the continents.

‘You think they’re trying to knock out the entire internet?’ he said eventually.

‘What would be worse?’ Forester said. ‘Knock out? Or take control of?’

William swallowed, looked from one to the other, and heaved a long, exasperated sigh.

‘I get the anxiety,’ he said. ‘I get your questions, I get that you’ve pulled me in for questioning, and that you’re withholding information until you know what to make of me.’ He glared his bafflement. ‘What I don’t for the life of me get, is why.’

No one said anything.

‘What makes you think that the emails I received have anything at all to do with this?’

‘We don’t,’ said Forester. ‘We don’t think anything. We know.’