44

After a while, suburban Bromma stops being Bromma and becomes forest. Metal roads become gravel, Thirties villas with effect lighting become small summer hideaways in overgrown gardens, empty and infirm, like abandoned elderly folk waiting for eternal rest.

Christina Sandberg let the news team’s light blue Volvo struggle through a more and more hostile layer of snow, away from the main road and across pitted roads past rows of little post boxes. She passed signs that told her she wasn’t allowed, and she thought about turning back–but to what? Instead she kept going, just a little bit further, and then further, passing minute after minute of wooded track without seeing a single house.

Eventually the road ended with a robust fence of thick wooden poles. A boom barrier blocked her path, complete with a little yellow sign. Private, it said, and she stopped, found herself just sitting there behind the wheel.

She was already regretting it. But there was something about what he’d said that made it impossible to turn around, not now. He was the last fragile straw for her to clutch at in a world that had lost everything, her only alternative to darkness and loneliness and emptiness. The only way she could avoid facing herself.

After a moment’s hesitation, she turned off the engine and stepped out into the darkness. A vast starry sky had begun to push its way through the gaps in the clouds, and the silence was different out here–clearer and drier and rustling of crystals.

Slowly, she approached the barrier. The road on the other side seemed to run on into the darkness, but no matter how she peered she could make out nothing at the far end–no buildings, no lights, nothing. And sitting in a warm, locked car had been one thing, but now, alone in the darkness with the cold biting her skin, what was she supposed to do? Climb inside? Shout and see what happened? Or just leave?

Truth was she knew nothing about him. He seemed harmless, but what does seemed mean? He was a conspiracy theorist, fearful verging on paranoid, and there might be all kinds of installations on the plot–weapons, traps, God knows what–and suddenly she changed her mind—

She had just started to back away when the light came on. The next thing she knew, she lay on the ground, her eyes were stinging, arms folded in front of her face to shield her from the intense whiteness that shone from everywhere. She had recoiled, slipped on the frozen ground, and now her knee hurt, her back too.

Motion sensors. Of course he had motion sensors. He was paranoid, and if anyone was going to have an alarm round the perimeter of their land it was him. She could make out at least six different floodlights, mounted on the gateposts and the trees around her, and as she lay there like a human deer, frozen in the headlights of an oncoming car, she slowly realised that the floodlights might just be the beginning. Maybe she’d triggered an alarm somewhere, perhaps there would be dogs barking before long, loping towards her on the other side of the fence.

She had just managed to haul herself off the slippery ground when she sensed that she had company.

‘Who’s there?’ she said.

‘I thought you said you had my number.’

She swallowed.

‘What I want to talk about may not be suited for discussing over the phone.’

Seconds later she heard the barrier swing open. Alexander Strandell, better known as Tetrapak, emerged from the darkness, and beckoned her to follow him.

The instant Rebecca Kowalczyk switched on the lights, William realised that resistance was futile.

The space they had just entered wasn’t so much of a room, more of an auditorium. All along the far side were floor-to-ceiling windows, like a bowed, transparent wall, and to the left the scene was dominated by what looked like a small command and control centre. There was a plinth, raised two steps higher than the surrounding floor, above which a handful of office chairs faced a long, continuous desk, white and sterile like a worktop in a kitchen catalogue.

The thing that really grabbed his attention though was the other half of the room.

‘Tell me this isn’t what I think it is.’

‘How would I know what you think it is?’ Rebecca said behind him. ‘That’s impossible, right?’

She passed him and stepped up onto the bridge, steps that sounded hollow and that echoed as she climbed up onto the plinth and sat down at the desk, her back to William and facing the thing that he couldn’t tear his eyes away from.

In the middle of the right-hand side of the room, three freestanding booths had been erected. They were separated from the rest of the room by huge glass blocks, decimetre-thick uneven panes that made the reality on the other side seem like indistinct ripples. The glass walls were decorated here and there with bright yellow Post-it notes, like a reluctant demonstration that there was actually some activity going on amidst all the sterility and high design.

In the middle booth was something that could be best described as an office. There was a desk, chalky white and basically empty, save for a few bundles of paper at one end. On one side of it was a simple office chair and on the other a soft electric recliner–a contraption somewhere between a dentist’s chair and a business-class seat on a long-haul flight.

The thing that had caught William’s eye though, was the light grey ribbed plastic tube hanging from the ceiling. He walked over towards it. A thick bundle of multicoloured wires emerged from the tube, fifty, maybe more, bound together like colourful nerves spilling from a grey plastic spinal cord. They were lying in neat bundles on each desk, and at the end of each cable was a shiny disc.

‘EEG,’ he said.

‘Pretty much,’ she said. ‘But 2.0.’

He turned towards her just as she put her hand onto the surface of the command desk. A weak purple glow lit her skin from underneath, sniffing its way along her palm for a second, then once more in the opposite direction before disappearing, leaving the surface as white and empty as before.

It took a second, then the room sprang to life. From the control desk, a series of matt-black screens rose up in front of each of the chairs, the size of paperback books and integrated into the desk surface like minimalist white loft hatches in a minimalist white ceiling. Below each one the desk glowed with a weak, warm light, presumably projecting keyboards in front of the operators.

But William’s eyes were fixed firmly on the wall in front of her. In a single, silent movement, it seemed to crack into diagonal lines, turning into triangular panels and slowly rotating out of view like the shutter in a camera lens, disappearing into the floor and up into the roof and revealing another bank of matt-black screens. He counted at least eighteen of them, all connected in sequence to an enormous screen that ran the entire length of the control desk, and for a second it reminded him of sitting in the military’s own command centre, but 2.0, as Rebecca put it.

Her voice woke him out of his thoughts.

‘Two million euros, and you can’t even get Champions League on it.’

She seemed almost to be whispering to herself, and he observed her from the corner of his eye, watching the screen being reflected in her eyes.

‘Twelve years. We worked here for twelve years, me and Michal. Not once did he start the system up without saying that.’

Her fingers tapped away at the invisible keyboard in front of her, summoning two flashing commands onto the built-in monitor directly in front of her, and in the next second the huge wall of monitors above was filled with information. Diagrams and tables formed rows of well-defined, neatly laid out fields, all without content, white squared patterns on a black background. In the centre, the framed image showed a video, blue-grey but pin-sharp, a desk seen from above, and a number of cables and—

William turned around. Sure enough, right above the workstation in the booth behind them was a ceiling-mounted camera, a shiny black dome whose picture was being relayed onto the screen in front of them.

He lowered his head instinctively, an attempt to shield himself in case there were more. The pinhead-sized black circles on the command desk? Probably. The other glass domes in the room, above the entrance, by the booths, in the centre of the floor? Most likely. But were they in use? Were they recording right now? He held his breath, forcing himself to repeat the same mantra as on his way in: that no one could know that he was here. That as long as he made sure to cover his face then no one was going to find him. Unless, of course, she’s right.

He hated himself for thinking it, but the thoughts refused to go away. What was all this? The brightly coloured cables on the desk. The EEG. Michal Piotrowski’s sophisticated nonsense.

‘Worked on what, exactly?’ he asked, as he climbed up onto the platform next to Rebecca.

Over on the screen, one of the fields had caught his eye more clearly than everything else. It showed an array of oval diagrams, lined up in order alongside the video feed–schematic representations from various angles, picked out in white against the dark background. They were maps of the human brain.

‘What am I looking at here?’

Her answer made him shiver.

‘We call it Project Rosetta.’

Christina didn’t really know what she’d been expecting, but as she walked through the hall and into a living room, she realised that she hadn’t been expecting a home. There was a faint smell of a dinner he must have cooked very recently, onions fried in butter perhaps, a sweet, welcoming scent that mixed with fresh coffee and the smoke that leaked from the wood-burning stove. In the middle of the room was a three-piece suite in mottled, satchel-brown leather, and beyond that a desk of dark-stained wood, all straining under the weight of neat piles of books and periodicals or equally well-stacked electronic devices.

The ceiling was low. The walls and ceiling panels were made of yellow pine, and the floor strewn with overlapping thick rugs bearing deep red patterns and giving the room a dry, calming quiet. The stacks of books and magazines spread out in all directions, on shelves, on the floor, on tables, on chairs, and try as she might, she could see no evidence of tinfoil around the windows, no chicken wire lining the walls to disrupt electronic bugging devices, nothing to suggest that this was the home of a paranoid lunatic terrified of wide-reaching, awful conspiracies.

‘Disappointed?’ she heard Tetrapak ask behind her.

She noticed his squinting smile, two warm eyes and something resembling a dimple that caused his beard to gather in a tuft on one cheek.

‘I’m not quite as mad as people expect. Sorry about that.’

He gestured towards a stool in front of one of the bookcases, and she realised for the first time that it actually belonged to a grand piano that seemed to have retired from music some time ago, the flaking nut-brown varnish on its closed lid hidden under even more piles of books. She sat down, while he took a seat by the desk.

‘I didn’t expect you to get in touch,’ he said.

‘Neither did I,’ she replied. ‘First of all, you should know I’m not here as a journalist. I can’t promise you a single letter about you or what you tell me, not in my paper, nor anywhere else. All I can promise is that I’m going to listen.’

‘That’s a start.’

‘When you came to me yesterday,’ Christina said. ‘What was it you wanted to warn me about?’

‘Exactly what I said. That the power cut was just part of something much bigger. And that the authorities knew it was coming.’

‘And that’s based on the radio communications that you’ve come across. On frequencies that have been silent since the Cold War.’

‘Amongst other things.’ She gave him a quizzical look, and he explained himself. ‘I can show you small, insignificant articles from newspapers from around the world. I’m sure you can find even more in your archives.’

‘Articles about what?’

‘About power cuts, commonplace everyday events from around the world. A collapsed substation here, a faulty transformer there. But if you compare all the dates with those of the transmissions…’

‘They match?’

‘Not only that. After each one, the trials have been ratcheted up a notch, increased in frequency. As though each new event is making it even more important to put it into action.’

‘It?’ she said. ‘I don’t understand. What are you telling me we’re looking at?’

‘I believe that it is a new analogue communication system. Something not dependent on the internet, something that will continue to function even if everything else is knocked out.’

‘Why would everything else be knocked out?’ she asked. ‘By whom?’

‘That,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘That is the question I would like to ask them.’ He nodded at the electronics on the desk, modern hard discs with blinking diodes next to cumbersome radio receivers with heavy buttons. ‘And no,’ he said. ‘I don’t know who they are. The authorities. Swedish Armed Forces. Military organis­ations from around the globe. All or none of the above.’

The conversation halted for a moment, neither of them knowing how to continue.

‘Can I ask you something,’ Tetrapak said in the end. ‘Why are you here?’

‘Because I’m starting to worry that you might be right.’

William stood in silence. Rosetta. Just like the email address, the sender of the three short emails that had got him to turn up at Central Station, the one that, one way or another, was behind everything that had happened. A stream of connections flooded through his head, dizzying and far-fetched.

What if they don’t even need that.

‘As in the stone?’ he said.

‘As in the stone.’

William turned away his head. He knew what it implied and he didn’t like it. At the end of the eighteenth century, Napoleon’s troops had discovered a stone in Egypt, a stone with three sets of inscriptions, each of them in one ancient language. With that as a key, science managed for the first time in modern history to decipher Egyptian hieroglyphics. The Rosetta Stone was nothing but a lexicon. A lexicon for translating an unknown language into something that could be understood.

‘Thoughts are nothing more than electrical impulses,’ she said before he’d had time to protest. ‘It’s really no stranger than that. It’s not magic, not witchcraft, just science, pure and simple. Electricity can be measured, the rest is just about creating a meter that’s up to the job. All you need is a lexicon.’

She turned towards the desk again, another rattle of fingertips on the non-existent keys before she leaned back in her chair. At a stroke, everything came alive. All of the tables, diagrams and empty data fields crackled into action, with values nervously flickering around zero. In the blue-grey booth of the video feed, the CCTV showed two people sitting down.

It was a recording. Images and data that were stored on hard discs, and that were now being played back in synch.

A woman, probably about sixty, sat in the dentist’s chair. The backrest had been lowered to almost horizontal, and pretty much her whole head was covered in the discs that William had noticed over on the desk. She had her eyes closed, and countless electrodes attached all over her scalp and forehead and right the way down her neck, all connected by the colourful cables to the light-grey tube.

The chair opposite her was occupied by a noticeably younger woman wearing a white lab coat draped loosely over a simple jumper, long dark hair that fell into playful curls across her shoulders.

It wasn’t until he saw her face that he realised it was Rebecca.

‘What am I watching?’ he said.

‘Wait,’ was her reply.

He watched the recorded Rebecca Kowalczyk pull a file towards her across the tabletop, get out a piece of paper, presumably covered in text, then glance briefly at the ceiling and smile. Straight into the camera, straight into William’s eyes.

The moment burned itself onto William’s retina. Of course it wasn’t him she was smiling at. The person sitting at the control desk when the recording was made was Piotrowski, and what he’d just seen was an intimate look between lovers.

On the screen in front of them, Rebecca turned her attention to the woman in the chair. She tucked her hair behind her ear, put the sheet of paper on the desk, read silently from it. Short, simple texts, as if she was asking a series of questions.

In that same instant, the schematic diagrams of the woman’s brain were transformed. They flipped through a spectrum of colours, shining like rainbows in stark contrast to the colourless room. Rolling surfaces and lines appeared across the cerebral hemispheres, shifting from blue to green to yellow to red, colours representing neural activity, changing rapidly as the video Rebecca continued to ask her questions at a calm, unhurried pace.

In a single second William could feel his thoughts rushing back to the day before, to the briefing with Palmgren and Forester, the huge maps with the similar colour schemes showing the attacks that had caused power outages.

Somehow, this scared him more.

‘The woman you’re watching is from an agency,’ said Rebecca. ‘We’ve never met her before, we don’t know her name, nothing. Her only instruction is not to say anything out loud, and what you’re seeing on the screens is her brain activity as I ask some prewritten questions. This is from the twenty-sixth of November, only three weeks ago. It’s the very first time.’

‘First time what?’

Rebecca didn’t answer. She nodded towards the wall instead.

‘I’m activating Rosetta now.’

Her fingers tapped a few strokes on the keys in front of her. And then:

‘This isn’t possible.’ William’s voice.

But it was.

Word by word, he watched the screen in front of them filling up with text, sentences evolving and stacking on top of one another to form a long, long feed as Rebecca read the short questions from her page.

He didn’t need to ask, but he did anyway.

‘Where’s the text coming from?’

‘It’s her answers,’ she replied. ‘Her answers to my questions.’

He sat there not saying a word. He could hear Rebecca still talking to him, but it was distant, and he still could not tear his eyes from the screen. He could hear her telling him about all the work that had led them to the moment they were watching, about their struggles to decouple the brain’s conscious thinking from the chaos of impulses and reflexes, about the incredible amounts of processing power they had deployed to find the needles of syntactic thought in the haystack of all the incidental noise. All the times they’d said that this is our last attempt. If this doesn’t work, we’re giving up. Just one last try.

‘And then, finally,’ she said. ‘Finally, we succeeded. The words on the screen are the computer’s own transcription of the electrical impulses in her head.’

The words on the screen kept coming, one word after another in a language he did not understand, but still: Rebecca and Piotrowski had achieved the impossible. They had found a key to decode all the chaotic nuances pulsing back and forth in the woman’s brain that were actual thoughts, and then managed to translate them into words.

Psychotronics.

It isn’t possible to read someone’s thoughts.

‘What you’re showing me now,’ he said, finally. Got to his feet, climbed down from the platform, and sat in the empty booth behind them. ‘Even if you have managed it, even if you can transcribe other people’s thoughts into words…’ He pointed at the knot of wires and electrodes resting on the table. ‘Even if that is the case, it still doesn’t explain how they found me in Warsaw.’

Rebecca didn’t answer, and William sharpened his tone.

‘I know I’m tired, I know I haven’t been myself for a very long time, but I think I would’ve noticed if someone had taped electrodes to my head.’

‘If we have managed this?’ answered Rebecca with an apologetic shrug. ‘How do we know that no one else has, somewhere else? How do we know they don’t do it better?’

‘If that were true,’ he said, ‘why me? Why would anyone be so keen to read my thoughts that they would follow me all the way here? My thoughts are really not that interesting. Ask my ex-wife.’

‘I don’t know how much you know about Michal Piotrowski’s past,’ Rebecca said, pretending that she hadn’t heard.

If you only knew. He didn’t say.

‘I used to say that he was afraid of ghosts,’ she said. ‘That he needed to let go of the old, needed to move on… But, ghosts or not, maybe he was proved right in the end.’

‘What do you mean by that?’

She lowered her voice.

‘We struggle for years to get Rosetta to work. Then, finally, we pull it off–and from that day, almost from that moment, it’s as though everything about his behaviour went into a slide.’ She gestured towards the screens. ‘It was historic. This was an incredible breakthrough, we should’ve been celebrating, should’ve done something. Instead, he became a recluse. Wouldn’t say why, but I could see it in his face.’

She paused.

‘Michal was scared. No. Michal was terrified, in fear of his life.’

‘What is it you’re trying to tell me?’

‘What if he read a thought that he wasn’t supposed to know about?’

William hesitated. It was as if the conversation was slipping from his grasp, and he could feel the frustration building inside him. The next stage, he knew, would be rage. And he didn’t want that.

‘Why are you telling me this?’ he said, with all the composure he could muster. ‘Why bring me here, why let me see this, what’s the point of it all?’

‘Because you are the only one who can help me. Somehow, you’ve got something to do with all of—’

‘I’ve got fuck all to do with this,’ he shouted. ‘I’ve got my own life, hundreds of miles from here, I’ve got nothing to do with what happened to Michal Piotrowski and nor do I want anything to do with it!’ He felt a dam breaking, and behind it months of self-loathing and longing, and thousands of other emotions that he couldn’t control. ‘I’m not here to help anyone but myself. I’m here because, regardless of how Michal Piotrowski may have been, however innocent and kind-hearted you would have me believe, he has brought this on me. Not the other way around. And even if everything is as you say it is, even if he did read someone’s thoughts, what right does that give him to drag me into this? Why can’t I live my life in peace?’

He could feel the pressure easing, the dam emptying faster than he’d expected, and how his ranting grew empty, lost meaning.

‘I can’t help you,’ he said quietly. ‘All I know is that I’ve been accused of something I haven’t done. And I can’t take it any more.’

They stayed sitting there for a long time. Her by the control desk, him in the booth, looking at the wall of glass blocks, next to all the wires that could read people’s thoughts.

‘Why did he have pictures of you in his apartment?’ she asked again at last. He didn’t respond. ‘You hate him for something, don’t you?’

‘I don’t hate him,’ he said. ‘I just promised myself never to go anywhere near him ever again.’

Her eyes narrowed. Again?

‘Why not?’ she asked.

He looked out of the window for a long time before he answered.

‘Because I was afraid he was going to take my life away.’