24

William Sandberg wanted to cry, but didn’t know how. He sat on the wipe-clean seat floating through the city on flashing blue lights, his daughter lying on the stretcher next to him covered with a blanket, even though she couldn’t feel the cold. Together. At last. In an amberlangs.

Yet somehow it wasn’t her. Her face was drained of everything that had once been Sara Sandberg, she had eyelids that someone else had closed, and she jolted in time with the bumps in the road, side to side with no resistance.

He could feel his thoughts jostling in panic, mixing and colliding, grief and emptiness on one side, everything else on the other.

What now? They were going to drive him back to HQ. And then?

The world was being subjected to electronic attacks. Somehow, everything pointed to a single person, the last person on Earth he’d want to meet–and to himself. Eventually, they were going to find those damning emails about the conference. Even if his hard drive was by now–hopefully–formatted, that just meant that it would take them longer, not that it would keep them out for ever. And once they knew he wasn’t telling them everything, how many chances were they likely to give him then?

There was only one person who could prove William’s innocence. Unfortunately, it was himself.

As soon as she opened the door to Sandberg’s room, Forester knew that Velander’s fears had been justified.

His computer was there, on the desk right in front of her. It was surrounded by blinking diodes on hard drives and storage devices, all whirring at full speed. She knew she was too late, yet she still rushed over to the computer, because you’ve got to try. She grabbed the devices on the desk, pulling out cable after cable without even thinking about what was connected to where.

The screens around her went black, fans fell silent, the green lamps on the units in the rack slowed down. Before long, all of them had stopped pulsing, instead flashing red to warn that the connections had been lost and the processes cancelled.

Everything was wiped, his hard drives, backups, everything, and whatever there’d been to begin with was now gone. All overwritten with random digits several times over to make it impossible to recover.

And this she knew for sure: you do not wipe all your own files unless you’ve got something to hide. Major Cathryn Forester took out her phone and punched the number to the Emergency Services’ control room.

The woman behind the wheel was Jenny Bodin. She was a paramedic with ten years’ experience behind her, but as she replaced the radio handset her only thought was that she’d never experienced anything like this.

It had started as a routine call-out–sad, yes, tragic and unfair, but routine all the same. The girl had died before they got there, and along with her colleague Bodin had attempted all possible resuscitation techniques to no avail. The girl was declared dead at the scene, and the man who was clearly her father had demanded to travel with her in the back. They’d driven through the darkness, blue lights but no sirens, and everything was normal. Until the call came.

All of a sudden they were no longer transporting a deceased girl and her father. Instead, the control room explained that they’d been contacted by Military Command and informed that the man in the back was under suspicion of terrorism, a highly potential escape risk, and must under no circumstances be allowed to leave the ambulance until they arrived.

She felt a surge of adrenaline, but forced it back. The man in the back had no way of knowing that he’d been uncovered. They were separated by a robust wall with a reinforced glass pane, and the ambulance was being escorted by two unmarked police cars. Nothing could happen, she told herself. That call changed nothing.

When Jenny Bodin seconds later heard the sound of breaking glass, her first thought was that she must have hit something. She ducked and slammed on the brakes, shielded herself from the shards flying all around her, mind racing to figure out what she hadn’t seen in time.

Then she felt the arm around her neck.

Palmgren hung up. He sat in the second of the two tailing cars, both of them dark-coloured Volvos, behind the ambulance. An officer from the Security Police sat in the driver’s seat next to him.

‘Was that about Sandberg?’

Palmgren held back the answer. He had been saying stuff like What are you saying and That can’t be true and Are you absolutely sure?, and oh yes, Forester had been completely fucking sure, and as little as he wanted to he was now in a car with a bunch of colleagues who would very much like to know what it was all about.

‘Contact the other car,’ he said to the agent behind the wheel. ‘We’ll pull in close to the ambulance, them first, us at the rear. That ambulance is not to stop until we arrive at the hospital, no matter what.’

They all knew what it meant. Something had happened and now they were worried that Sandberg was about to flee, and the driver lifted the receiver and was just about to speak. Instead of that, chaos broke out.

It was the turn of the woman’s head that got William to make up his mind. The slight change in the driver’s expression, the suddenly self-conscious undertones that came with pretending nothing was happening. The conversation didn’t last for more than seconds, but it was enough to tell him that the call was about him, and for a couple of short moments he observed the two paramedics through the glass panel, one hand hugging his daughter’s.

Through the window, their own blue lights mixed with those coming from the Security Police vehicles. They were cruising tight behind like cygnets behind a hurrying parent, and in one of them was Palmgren, and maybe he was on William’s side, maybe not.

It took him four seconds to find the emergency hammer.

In front sat the two paramedics–their seat belts fastened, he noted, telling himself that that was a good thing. Hopefully no one was going to get hurt, including himself, and he looked at Sara one last time, squeezed her hand.

Now the emptiness thundered through him, rolling in like a wave down a drained canal, and once it was happening it was so powerful that it couldn’t be stopped. Finally, finally he cried.

Then he raised the hammer and smashed the panel between him and the cab.

Palmgren screamed, but no one could hear him over their own voice.

Right in front of them, the ambulance was dancing. There was no better word for it: it started with a swerve, as though the driver had tried to avoid something in the road, but before it had straightened up again it slammed on the brakes with no warning, and the wheels locked and skidded uncontrolled through the treacherous slush.

Right behind the ambulance, the first Volvo had just begun its overtaking manoeuvre. Now they panicked too, brakes slamming on to no effect, and spinning over the central markings into the oncoming traffic. On the road ahead, cars were streaming off the steep Västerbron bridge. Behind them, a necklace of cars bound for Kungsholmen and the Essinge Islands. If you had to lose control at high speed, this was not the place to do it.

Without words, Palmgren watched as the Volvo lost traction, saw the approaching cars brake on the slippery tarmac, gliding and jerking out of the way and straight into parked cars.

But most of all he saw the ambulance trying to manage the skid, steering into the slide, and all at once driving on two wheels. From behind, it looked like figure skating, a feat of poise and balance on one set of wheels, and for an instant it hung like that, frighteningly close to tipping over and sliding on its side.

The driver next to Palmgren reacted at once. He slammed on the brakes and spun the wheel in a desperate attempt to turn their car through ninety degrees and stop before they smashed into the cars in front. Through the side windows, they could see the ambulance still dancing. It had regained its balance and managed to thud back onto all four wheels again, but the speed it was travelling at meant the performance was not over. Instead, it reared up again, but this time in the opposite direction, and slid across the tarmac on the other two wheels, a missile in flight.

Palmgren felt himself holding his breath. On one side was the oncoming traffic, on the other the steep embankment. And no vehicle could balance like that for long.

William realised a thousandth of a second too late that the ambulance was going to fall. He clutched for a hold but didn’t find one, and when it finally tipped onto its side he was thrown helplessly through the cab, the kinetic energy slamming him against the roof like a rag doll, with tubes and trays and equipment flying as tarmac pounded on steel. The ambulance had flipped over, and was now careering across the damp ground.

The first thing he saw as he opened his eyes was the side window. He’d landed on what had been one of the walls but which was now grinding along the tarmac, and he could see the ground rushing underneath him like a sander belt, with only the shuddering window between it and him.

He reacted without recourse to his brain: grabbing at anything solid, pulling himself clear of the window with all his strength–and at that moment the window gave out. It exploded into a cloud of glass particles, and William shielded his face with his arm, pushed his body against what had been the roof but was now a vertical wall, feeling how new shards were released from the rubber seal with each new impact.

Ahead of him was the partition between him and the cab. Beyond that, he could see the windscreen, and beyond that reality had flipped and was rushing sideways towards them, and in the midst of that reality was a bridge railing…

When the Armco barrier crushed the windscreen, straight through the middle as though they’d driven into an upright pole, the momentum caused the whole vehicle to lift, teeter on its front end and then cartwheel over the barrier and down the verge beyond.

The world around William, meanwhile, was rotating. Tubes and bags and binders were torn from their compartments and holders and thrown around like a shirt in an enormous washing machine, with the sound of shrubs and ground as they reeled forwards. The necks of the paramedics swung and rocked helplessly like rag dolls. The forces at work ripped the rear doors from their hinges, crushing them against the rough ground, sending glass and particles flying in all directions as the world outside span.

And in the midst of it all was Sara. Lifeless, strapped in, rotating along with everything else. Him and her and an amberlangs.