15

The mere smell of Major John Patrick Trottier’s chai latte had Mark Winslow feeling distinctly nauseous as he sat there in the soft leather seat opposite. He didn’t say anything, although he suspected that maybe he should, instead waiting patiently while the ageing officer flipped through papers in his black satchel. He noticed the name on the paper cup, and didn’t say anything about that either.

ELVIS. Dead clever. Really.

They had had more of these meetings than Winslow cared to remember, and every time Trottier had insisted on buying his tea under a new name. Perhaps it was meant as an expression of humour, or a quiet protest against the secrecy surrounding the project, whatever else it was, it was unnecessary. All he was doing was making their unmasking more likely–wasn’t that guy called something else yesterday?–and how anyone could work in intelligence and yet be quite so daft defeated Winslow.

He kept a lid on those thoughts though. It could be he was just oversensitive and was getting stressed about nothing. Maybe what they’d told him as a kid was true: that he was weedy and brittle and had inherited his nerves from the wrong side of the family. Not that he thought so, not really, but on those days when the stress built up and the sting of the stomach acid ripped at his insides, the doubt returned.

They’d been travelling for several minutes before Trottier finally spoke.

‘This is happening right now,’ he said. They had just passed Trafalgar Square, although neither man had so much as looked up through the tinted rear windows.

The folder he handed over looked like it was full of printouts, and Winslow took it, leafed through–and was none the wiser.

‘It comes from the internet,’ Trottier said, and took a slurp from the Elvis cup. As if that explained it.

The pictures showed fire engines, fire, an apartment block shrouded in darkness, people standing around watching. Sure enough, these were printouts, from various internet news sites, and he saw that the headlines were all in Polish.

‘The street is called Ulica Brzeska. The city is called Warsaw.’

There was something deliberately condescending about the way he said it, and once again Winslow felt like he should say something. But what?

‘Should this mean something to me?’ was all he asked.

‘I have no expectations.’

Winslow swallowed. The heartburn was coming.

‘I’ll give you the abridged version,’ said Trottier. ‘According to the papers, the fire broke out at around eight, in a building that was supposed to have been evacuated ahead of its impending demolition. We happen to know that somebody was living there.’

‘Somebody? As in someone we know?’

‘Not us.’ He moved his index finger in a circular motion, encompassing the pair of them. ‘Not us, but–us.’

Winslow nodded blankly. Here we go again. Territorial pissings, lines in the sand. We who have worked in the field, and you who haven’t, we the Secret Intelligence Service and you who can’t even be trusted to shuffle papers at a desk without popping antacids like sweets.

He really should say something about that. After all, it was the older guy who reported to him, not the other way around, and if one of the two was higher-ranking it was Winslow. Nevertheless, it was as though his own lack of military rank diminished him. That, and the fact that he wasn’t even half Trottier’s age, let alone that his role was essentially that of a messenger boy.

‘So what is it you’d like me to convey?’ he said eventually.

Trottier explained the situation quickly and concisely, with the tone of voice as if everything was being said in passing. As if that somehow made it more permissible to pass it on.

The fire had set a bell ringing in one of their registers, he explained, because the man who’d been living there had been on their payroll. During the Eighties he’d worked as a scientist behind the Iron Curtain, and had been paid at regular intervals in exchange for information. That had continued until 1991, and since then he had stayed on their lists of former contacts.

‘What is he up to nowadays?’ asked Winslow.

‘That’s the thing. Nowadays, he doesn’t even seem to exist.’

Winslow glanced up.

‘His name is Michal Piotrowski. He’s got a social security number and an address and a number of small bank accounts, but they haven’t been touched for years. He doesn’t appear to have a job, no income of any sort, nothing.’

‘And now he has died in a fire.’

‘Perhaps.’

Winslow met his eye again.

‘There was mains gas in the house. The whole place was wood, just about. It’s going to be impossible to tell whether or not there was anybody inside.’

‘You mean he just wants it to look like he’s dead.’

‘During the course of yesterday, Michal Piotrowski booked at least twelve different trips leaving Warsaw. All on different cards–those same accounts he hadn’t touched for years. Besides those, he booked a number of onward journeys: from Gdansk, from Krakow, from Berlin, each one heading in a different direction. All booked online, using various public terminals. Some paid for, others not. Some he had rebooked, jigged about, changed to a different departure. He left others untouched.’

‘Red herrings?’

‘Clearly.’

They said nothing for a while as they crossed the bridge. Raindrops snaked across the side windows, transforming the view to daubs of light.

Winslow broke the silence.

‘So your conclusion would be that we’ve found ROSETTA.’

‘I didn’t say that.’

‘And what have they got out of AMBERLANGS?’

For the first time in the journey, Trottier met Winslow’s gaze, with a look that was now no longer condescending, but troubled and honest, and meant for a colleague sitting in the same boat.

‘His name is William Sandberg. He’s a cryptologist in the Swedish Armed Forces. The local staff are convinced that it wasn’t him.’

‘How about your lead interrogator? What’s her opinion?’

Trottier gave a sigh.

‘Their picking him up has put us in a really precarious situation. If he knows anything about Floodgate and he tells them something while there are Swedish personnel in the room…’ His voice tailed off to a murmur, even though no one could hear them. ‘I have decided not to let Forester know any more than is absolutely necessary.’

‘And now you’re worried that she won’t be able to say stop if he starts saying too much?’

‘Amongst other things,’ said Trottier. ‘Many other things.’

As Trottier leant back in his leather seat, it struck Winslow that the other man had, for the first time ever, asked his advice. Not in explicit terms, but as silence fell again, an unuttered question hung between them.

What do we do now?

‘Give me your honest opinion,’ said Winslow. ‘What do you make of it?’

‘I believe Major Forester could do with some support.’

‘Fine. Well, in that case I think you should give it to her.’

With that, the conversation was over. With a tap on the screen separating them from the driver, Winslow signalled that it was time to go home.

‘William? Let’s get back to the email.’

By the time that Palmgren piped up, he’d been quiet for so long that his ex-colleague had almost lost track of his presence. He was leaning on the wall behind William, almost as if to lie low there until it was his turn.

‘From ROSETTA1998 to AMBERLANGS,’ he said. ‘The last of the emails you received.’

‘That’s another thing I don’t get,’ said William. ‘If you were monitoring me, how come you didn’t know that I’d received another two emails?’

Palmgren nodded. As though that, in a way, was the right question.

‘Because we weren’t monitoring you.’

‘You can’t have been monitoring the sender. Considering that you don’t know who it is.’

Palmgren didn’t answer. Instead, he headed over towards the television.

‘Do you remember when the email was sent?’

‘The twenty-seventh of November,’ said William. ‘Early in the morning. Can’t remember what time exactly.’

‘Three minutes past nine,’ said Palmgren. ‘And twenty-six seconds, to be precise.’

And then he stopped, in front of the screen. He placed his fingertips on the map there, in the north-eastern corner of Europe. Poland?

‘Nine zero three and twenty-four seconds.’ He pointed the remote and clicked through, one second at a time. ‘Nine zero three twenty-five. And now, here’s when your email is sent.’

He clicked once more, and although William was well aware of what must be coming next, it was still gripping. The screen showed a similar flare-up in data traffic, but this time the centre was right in the middle of Poland: the same expanding spider’s web, or perhaps it was more like a sea anemone, with tentacles growing outwards and filling up with a glowing white for a second, then two, and then back down through all the colours of the rainbow before disappearing.

William caught himself holding his breath.

Warsaw? It was a possibility he hadn’t even considered.

‘I don’t know who sent me that email,’ he said, and instantly regretted it.

Dammit. Not the logical response at this point, but it was too late, it couldn’t be unsaid, so he spoke up to continue instead before anyone else noticed the same thing.

‘And what’s the connection with the attacks? For a start, it’s nowhere near a coastline. And also…’ He rubbed his eyes as he strove to put his thoughts into words. ‘Also–do you mean that somebody sent me an email in the middle of an attack in progress?’

‘If we had all the answers we wouldn’t be asking you so many questions, would we?’

That was Forester. Her expression made it clear that she was still expecting him to explain it all to them, and not the other way around.

‘I know what it looks like,’ he said eventually. ‘It looks like I’m somehow involved, I can see that. But I don’t know how, don’t know why, and most importantly, if I am, it’s without my consent.’

Palmgren waved his hand dismissively. That was another conversation, and they had other things to talk about first.

‘In the middle of this surge,’ he said, pointing at the screen. ‘Right here, in the absolute epicentre, is the University of Warsaw’s main library. I’m guessing you won’t be all that surprised when I tell you that their log shows that someone logged into a Hotmail account minutes earlier. From one of their public terminals. As ROSETTA1998.’

William got the picture. That’s how they’d found his email, and how they’d known about the meeting at Central Station. But what did they want him to do with that information?

‘I still don’t understand,’ he said, and that was partly true.

Two thoughts were scrabbling around his head, competing for his attention. One was the nagging sensation that their suspicions were not completely unfounded after all, but for reasons they could not possibly know. The other was the irritating hunch that there were still things they weren’t telling him. On the one hand they were still treating him as a suspect, while on the other they were asking for help.

It cut two ways. Were they showing him all this to ask for his opinion, or were they trying to force him into admitting something he hadn’t done?

He was just about to ask them out loud, when a thought dawned on him.

‘Wait,’ he said. ‘The centre of today’s—’ The anxiety was raw in his voice. He hesitated, before going on. ‘—was it my house?’

Palmgren did not keep him waiting.

‘No,’ he replied. ‘It’s worse.’

There was something in his tone that sent William bolt upright. It was the same one he had used when he’d collected him from the bathroom–full of commiseration and empathy, as though some ordeal waited to beset him. Something tragic and troubling, and that everyone but William had already seen.

Palmgren had zoomed in on the map, closer and closer to Sweden, the east coast, Stockholm, before approaching it and getting a final approval from Forester.

‘The activity that we saw today,’ Palmgren said, standing next to the screen, ‘had its epicentre… right here.’

It took a minute for William to work out where he was pointing.

Downtown Stockholm. Hötorget Square.

‘And?’

Once again, the answer was just slightly too slow in coming.

‘I am so sorry, William.’

That was Palmgren. Eyes so sincere that William felt the cramp invade his stomach without knowing why.

What the fuck is this about?

‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘So sorry to be putting you through this.’

The room that Velander had asked Christina to wait in was an unwelcoming reception room on the lower ground floor. It was just metres away from the entrance, separated from the rest of the operation to keep people without clearance from getting too deep inside the Swedish Armed Forces’ quadratic secret heart. It had dirty grey windows overlooking the dirty grey courtyard, and the only plants visible there were the winter-bare rosehip bushes. Along with the expanse of concrete slabs, they combined to make the view all the more depressing. You are now on Government property, they seemed to say. No unnecessary happiness.

When the door opened and William was shown in, he didn’t even look her in the eye. Instead he was led in behind her before taking up position a comfortable distance away, leaning against the wall to avoid his face ending up level with hers. His stare was fixed on Palmgren to avoid any contact.

‘If this is a blind date, we can stop it here,’ he said. ‘Neither of us is quite that blind.’

Palmgren feigned not to have heard.

‘This is difficult for me too,’ Christina finally added, and William sniggered. Compassion and accusation hand in hand, thank you for that.

‘How about we just do what we normally do,’ he replied flatly. ‘We’ll each of us comfort ourselves.’ And with that, the conversation was over before it had even begun. Snide barbs had won the day, and if anything was going to be said, it was going to be Palmgren that said it.

‘I realise that you have questions you’d like answered.’ He stood between them, looking for the right way to get started. ‘First of all, I didn’t know. I didn’t realise…’

He looked sorrowfully at Christina, hoping to avoid having to utter the words. Words about separation, drugs, their searching for Sara.

‘We didn’t either,’ Christina said quietly. ‘There are a lot of things we realised far too late.’

Silence again, the room full of eyes avoiding contact with each other: furthest in was Velander, sitting by the wall. Forester stood nearest the door, and in the middle of the room, in between two people who no longer loved one another, there was Palmgren, getting ready to say things he didn’t want to say.

‘And I am terribly sorry for asking you to come,’ he said in the end. ‘But we do need your help to understand all this.’

He nodded in Velander’s direction. On the shelf next to him was a set of electronic devices: a DVD-player, an amplifier, and a grey desktop computer. They were stacked haphazardly, cobbled together as though no one had bothered to do it properly because the components would be obsolete even before the last cable was pinned up and hidden from view.

An average-sized, unbranded flatscreen TV hung on the wall. With a couple of clicks Velander summoned a flat, blurry film loop onto it, but it took both William and Christina a couple of seconds to decipher what they were seeing.

Everything seemed to suggest that the image was one of a large office. It was filmed from above, striped and in low resolution, the colours over-saturated and smeared by a camera that had been in the same position for years.

No, not an office. A hall. Everything was poorly and strangely lit, the only light coming from the illuminated rectangles that seemed to be arranged in rows throughout the room. Workstations, that’s what they were, overexposed computer screens in small cubicles. At each keyboard a pair of hunched shoulders, and beyond the reception desk a glass door where pale blue faceless people hurried across equally pale blue flooring.

An internet café?

At first neither of them could work out what they were supposed to be looking at. Then in an instant they both realised why Palmgren had apologised so profusely.

William’s reaction was the more visible. He was overcome with icy emptiness, felt himself losing his balance, as though his emotions had crept up behind him and were now pushing a boot into the back of both his knees at once. He steadied himself on the table, stock-still without knowing what to say, and beside him Christina stood motionless. The selfsame emotions, but invisible, internal.

A young man had entered the scene in front of them. He was dirty, wearing a padded jacket with the hood pulled tight around his face. A thin, empty rucksack hung on his shoulders, and he had just stopped to say something to the guy behind the desk–and then he turned his head so that his face was in view of the camera.

The young man in the coat wasn’t a man at all.

‘One minute later,’ said Palmgren, ‘the power supply to half the country is cut off.’

William was the first of them to speak, clearing his throat several times to rid his voice of the shock. His eyes were fixed on the screen.

‘What the hell is she doing there?’