45

‘I really don’t know where to start,’ said Christina.

‘I know the feeling.’ Tetrapak looked at her from across the room. ‘Don’t think about it. Don’t worry about what’s important and what’s trivial, don’t look for connections. Just say what you know, in whatever order you like. We can build context around it afterwards.’

She took a long pause, arranged the events of the past twenty-four hours into some kind of order, and tried to transform them from fragments to a story that could be told. Then she did.

She told him about William’s arrest, about the sighting of Sara at the café, and when she’d finished, she looked down at the table. It was Strandell’s turn to say something, and she was longing for him to do so, as though the silence belonged to her, and the longer it was allowed to go on, the less credible she would seem.

‘I want you to tell me why you decided to come to me,’ he said.

‘Because I couldn’t think of anyone else.’ And then, opening her handbag. ‘I want to know if you can tell me what this is.’

When Alexander Strandell saw what she was offering him, his hand recoiled as though he’d burned his fingers.

‘Where did you get that?’ he asked, eyes flaring with fear, as though the CD that she held out had managed to frighten him through its mere existence.

She replied by telling him what she knew. About the man who had met his end in Kaknäs Tower, about the car and the window sticker that she’d recognised. And about the CD in the car stereo, the broken window, the envelope lying on the seat with the Warsaw postmark.

‘It’s as though everything leads back to that fucking conference,’ she said. ‘We should never have gone there. But how were we to know?’

‘What do you mean, know?’ he said.

‘That’s a whole different story,’ she said.

‘Something tells me it might not be.’

She looked up. What was he saying now?

‘Do you know whose car it was?’ he said.

She went back to the handbag, pulled out an envelope, the yellow, padded one that had been lying on the passenger seat along with the CD case. She turned the scratchy letters towards him, the addressee’s name underneath the Polish postmark. Per Einar Eriksen.

‘The car was registered to that name too,’ she said. ‘All I know is that he’s a professor.’

‘Human consciousness,’ he said with a whisper.

‘Do you know who he is?’ she said.

‘Not to talk to, no. Not personally.’

‘But?’

‘But he was a very good speaker.’

Tetrapak stood up and walked over to one of the bookcases. When he turned around he was holding something out towards her, and what sent a shiver through her was not the yellow envelope in his hand, the scratchy letters forming Alexander Strandell’s address, the same writing as the envelope she’d found in the car, with the same Polish postmark in the corner. Nor was it the flat, rectangular shape she felt inside it, the rattling plastic that she hurried to pull out from the envelope and that she knew was going to be an identical CD. Instead, what shook her was what he said.

‘Here’s what I think,’ he said. ‘I think we’ve all been to the same conference.’

On day three, the storm had broken. The sky above Warsaw had remained bright blue, with quivering, unforgiving heat. Everyone was waiting for the thunder. In the great hall, long tables were decked with complimentary champagne and canapés, and everywhere you looked, conversations were taking place in ball gowns and evening dress. Behind closed doors, catering staff had clattered through their final preparations ahead of the closing gala dinner, and William had felt well rested and content and even a little bit tanned.

He’d just got himself another glass of bubbly from one of the tables when Piotrowski came over to him.

‘You have a wonderful family,’ he’d said, with a broad smile, pretty much out of nowhere. An odd thing to say, but William had smiled in response, mumbled something about Warsaw being a beautiful place, as though that compliment would repay the first.

And then, there had been a pause that went on for just a little bit too long.

‘You must be wondering why I was so keen for you to attend,’ Piotrowski had said. ‘I’ve been thinking about how to make contact with you for a long time. It ended up being like this. I hope you’ll forgive me for that.’

‘What do you mean?’ said William.

‘I’ve had my eye on you,’ Piotrowski said.

He said so cordially, but the words made William straighten up, and he felt a shiver run through his stomach. What was this about? Politics? East and West?

‘Oh, not for military reasons,’ said Piotrowski, as though he’d read William’s mind. ‘The Cold War is over, and if it isn’t, we’re in the West now, however ironic that might be.’ He gestured towards the walls–they were in a building built by Stalin, in a city that had once lent its name to everything east of the Iron Curtain. ‘I have lived in the same city all of my life, and yet one day I moved from East to West without so much as lifting a finger.’ He shrugged. ‘Not that I’m complaining. It just takes some getting used to.’

‘Explain had my eye on you,’ William said.

‘I know that you are fifty-two years old. That you grew up in Saltsjöbaden, that you’re a self-taught electronics nut and mathematician, a qualified engineer employed as a cryptologist by the Swedish Armed Forces Headquarters. I know that your wife’s name is Christina Sandberg, forty-six, journalist.’

‘That’s not having an eye on someone, that’s having a spare ten minutes to do an internet search. What are you trying to get at?’

Piotrowski hardened his tone, barely noticeably, but enough.

‘Two years ago you sold the big house in Täby and bought an apartment on Skeppargatan in Stockholm. Your daughter moved from Näsbypark school to Norra Latin and she finished the ninth grade last spring. She likes fencing and riding. She smokes ten a day, but you don’t know that.’

The last sentence caused the cold cramp in his stomach to harden. What the hell was this about?

‘I don’t know what you think you’re doing’–William felt his grip tighten around the champagne glass in his hand–‘but if you’re trying to get at my daughter…’

He bit off the rest of the sentence, panned across the hall with his eyes and felt a new chill when she was nowhere to be seen. Christina was standing a couple of metres away, and when he saw her unprotected skin in the scooped back of her gown he felt how what had been exciting and elegant as they left the hotel was suddenly transformed into something naked and vulnerable. She was chatting with a group of other visitors, but Sara wasn’t one of them.

‘She’s standing by the entrance,’ said Piotrowski. ‘Don’t worry—’

‘If you think you can threaten me,’ William hissed. ‘If you think you’re going to get to me by threatening my family—’

‘Believe me,’ the Pole said calmly. ‘The last thing I want to do is threaten your daughter.’

They stood there, eyes locked. What was going on? Extortion? An attempt to recruit him by a foreign power? That was unthinkable, ridiculous, but it was all he could guess at.

‘Why did you invite me here?’

Piotrowski put his hand on William. Calm down, it meant. I’m your friend. And then he smiled a smile that was as polite as it was insincere.

‘Come on,’ he said. ‘Let me show you around.’

Once William started telling his story he didn’t stop for breath. He stood by the windows, watching the distant glow of Warsaw in the mist, and eight hundred kilometres away, his estranged wife was sitting in a house that smelled of woodsmoke and rugs, telling the very same thing.

‘You know how some people can just change beyond recognition when they face an unexpected situation?’ she said. ‘Maybe they witness an accident, or go through a crisis. You know how people say that you don’t know how anyone’s going to react until it actually happens? William’s eyes. That look. That walk. I’d never seen him like that before.’

It was the moment that they later referred to as ‘the Thunder’, the day broiling, when William strode through the crowd, a look on his face that she’d never seen before and that terrified her. He’d grabbed her by the arm–too firmly, too desperately, his voice shaking with stress and rage–put her champagne glass down on the table and hissed that they had to find Sara now. That moment had marked the end of their summer.

Christina allowed her eyes to meet Tetrapak’s. ‘It has to be him who sent the CD, who’s behind all of this.’

‘In that case,’ he said. ‘Where do I fit in? Why would he have sent a CD to me?’

‘You must have met at some point. You must have talked to each other.’

He shook his head, unsure.

‘Around fifty,’ she said. ‘Not scruffy, but maybe a little bit rough and ready. Bushy eyebrows, greying hair. His beard too.’

‘It’s five years ago. How am I supposed to remember that?’

‘Try,’ she said. And then, almost reluctantly, she added: ‘Warm, welcoming, almost jovial.’

He stared into space, racking his memory.

‘I remember a man I spoke to during one of the breaks. I know we exchanged business cards. Well, business card might be pushing it’–he signalled inverted commas with his fingers as he said it–‘I remember looking at it afterwards and noticing that it was handwritten. Name and address, in pencil. And a Hotmail address.’

‘That was him,’ Christina said. ‘The one William got was the same, we joked about it at the time.’ Her tone went up a notch. ‘You must have talked about something. What did you say to each other?’

‘As I say, it was five years ago. I know that we worried about the same things: bugging, surveillance, tracking, how we can never be sure that no one is watching. How new technologies can be used against us, on the premise that it’s the right thing to do.’

The thought crossed her mind to ask how much truth there was in the story about coffee creamer that had given him his name, but then she thought better of it.

‘You must have said something that left an impression?’ she asked.

His smile was ironic.

‘People often say I do. Not usually in a good way.’

She smiled back, more out of politeness than anything else, and they were left sitting in silence, as if they’d somehow reached an understanding.

‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘why are you so sure this is about Piotrowski?’

‘Because, one way or another,’ she said, then restarted the sentence. ‘One way or another we’ve been scared of this ever since then.’

‘Scared of what?’

‘Scared of him coming back.’