49

William had never called a tips line in his life, but now, as he fished his brand new phone out of his suit pocket and went to his wife’s newspaper’s homepage, that’s what he did.

Back at home, he was still a wanted man. The risk of her phone being tapped was significant, and if it was, then a phone call from Poland was hardly about to go unnoticed. A call to her newsroom, on the other hand, would just be one of many, and when he called the number, had the good fortune to get Beatrice on the line and asked her to transfer him through to Christina, he could feel himself clenching his fists in hope that his number wasn’t being relayed.

He moved away from Rebecca, over to the gigantic windows, stood staring out although there was nothing to see. When Christina finally answered, he could feel his own voice disappear.

‘It’s me,’ he said, his voice cracking. Perhaps it wasn’t fair of him, she’d had no way of knowing that it was him calling, no chance to choose whether she wanted to take it or not.

‘Wait,’ said Christina, finally. ‘Two seconds.’

He heard her making excuses to someone, then the hum of the wind and the night as she went outside, the crunch of snow. He resisted the urge to ask her where she was, who she was talking to. That was no longer any of his business.

‘William, where are you? Are you okay? What’s going on?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘It’s one great big bloody mess.’

‘You’re a wanted man,’ she said.

‘I know.’ And then, his voice paper thin: ‘Christina? Have you spoken to Palmgren?’

‘Yes.’ A long pause. ‘I said goodbye to her at the hospital.’

With that, the silence returned. There were a thousand things to talk about, but none to discuss on the phone.

‘So no, I don’t know what’s going on,’ William said eventually. ‘And I don’t know how you or I or Sara fit in. Not beyond the fact that somehow it must have something to do with Michal Piotrowski.’

‘So I understand.’

William was taken aback.

‘How did you come to that conclusion?’

‘It’s a long story,’ she said. Then she surprised him again. ‘That CD that Sara had. I think there are two more.’

For a moment, he could feel everything starting to sway.

‘What makes you think that?’

‘Well, I’m holding one of them right now.’

‘What? How?’

‘That’s a long story too. The short version is that I found it on the back seat of a car.’

‘What car?’

‘A brown one, if you must know. A Nissan. Belonged to a professor named Per Einar Eriksen.’

She hadn’t finished talking before he had already spun around. Slowly, almost cautiously, he wandered back towards the booths, the dividing glass walls, the Post-it notes.

‘What do you know about him?’ he said, looking straight at the name again as he did so. ‘Who is he? Have you spoken to him?’

It took a moment before she answered.

‘He’s dead. An accident. A lift.’

William could feel the walls closing in around him. It was as if each new attempt at thought brought him to the same paranoid conclusion, that everything was a conspiracy and directed right at him, and he hated himself for even thinking it. Conspiracy theories are the lazy man’s escape. They are the brain’s way of avoiding thought, a perpetual motion device for logic, where fear becomes its evidence and its fuel both at the same time.

An accident. It could of course be an accident. So why couldn’t he convince himself to believe that?

‘William? Are you still there?’

‘Michal Piotrowski is gone too,’ he said. ‘But he left a message behind.’ He looked at the glass blocks, reading each letter. ‘The message includes three names, mine, Per Einar Eriksen, and an Alexander Strandell. I was hoping that you’d be able to help me find them.’

It took a second.

‘I’m here now,’ she said. ‘I’m at Alexander Strandell’s place.’

‘You’re where?’

Christina gave him a quick summary. She told him about the meeting with Tetrapak, about his recordings of radio transmissions, about the CD she’d taken with her in the hope that he might be able to help her decipher it. And finally, about Tetrapak’s own, with piano music on it.

‘Piano?’ he said.

‘Chopin. We don’t know why.’

He reached for a chair, couldn’t summon the energy to pull it over, and slumped onto the edge of the desk instead. As if the weight finally become too heavy for him to stand–their daughter, the paranoia, everything.

‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry for everything.’

‘Me too.’

They stayed on the call without saying anything, Christina in a frosty woodland garden, William in a cigar-shaped glass tower. Stood in the company of each other’s silence.

‘It’s cold,’ she said eventually. ‘I have to go back in.’

William nodded. Stood up from the desk, turned his head to leave the room. And in that instant, everything fell into place.

‘Christina?’ he shouted, to stop her hanging up. ‘Christina, are you there?’

It was a second before the phone had rustled back to her ear again.

‘What is it?’

‘The discs,’ he said. ‘I think I know what they are for.’

He stood there, right in front of the glass walls again, seeing the rectangles melt together, forming letters. And he smiled.

‘We need all three of them.’

Fifteen hundred kilometres away, Simon Sedgwick lit his third consecutive cigarette. He stood staring at a shop window display where mechanical Christmas decorations moved listlessly around toys in a miniature snowy landscape.

He was worried. Everything had escalated just as he had said it would, and now they were one step behind, if not more. Had it not been for him–and his colleagues, he corrected himself, him and all his colleagues–those weak-kneed bastards would probably not even have noticed the attacks until it was too late.

He blew the smoke out towards the dead landscape on the other side of the glass.

If they’d only had the wherewithal to be scared of the right things. Of terrorists, of attacks, of whoever it was out there, trying to hurt them. Instead, they spent all their energy worrying about three-line whips and votes and the consequences of having broken international agreements. What use are polling numbers if you don’t even survive until the next election?

The only person he had been able to rely on was Trottier. Now the decision lay in the hands of a politician, and it was all taking its time, despite the pattern being as clear as it possibly could be: at every location where Floodgate had been installed and tested, it had been met with an instant and untraceable counter-attack. Massive amounts of data, hitting them in the right places at the right time even though neither should have been possible to predict.

Someone was one step ahead. And there was only one solution.

He’d been standing by the window for more than ten minutes by the time the diplomatic limousine passed by, a dark reflection hovering past the Christmas display. He ditched the cigarette, watching the clear red glow land in a puddle and float away, and walked the twenty metres over to where the car had stopped.

‘You should see a doctor about that,’ he said to the young man sitting opposite once he’d climbed in.

‘Thanks for your concern,’ said Winslow. He popped the lid back on the antacids without any further comments, and then tapped on the partition as a signal to the driver to start driving. They sat in silence as the shops and festive decorations shrank away behind them.

‘Give me your honest opinion,’ said Winslow.

‘You’ve already got it,’ came the reply. ‘You know exactly what I think.’

Winslow swallowed the last of the chewy tablets, the mint flavour mingling with the stinging sensation in his chest, and waited for it to finally make a difference.

It wasn’t until the lights of Hyde Park’s Christmas fair danced through the window that he spoke again.

‘It looks like you’ll be getting an early Christmas present.’

William waved at Rebecca to come, placing the phone on the desk between them.

‘Christina,’ he said. ‘I’m going to say this in English. You’re on speaker now.’

Then he led Rebecca by the shoulder and placed her in a spot where she could see right through all the glass blocks.

‘Tell me again. The discs. What’s on them?’

‘Music,’ Christina answered from the crackly speaker. ‘Piano concertos. Chopin.’

‘Nothing else? No more? Nothing hidden?’

‘According to Strandell here, no, nothing.’

‘I think maybe there is after all. Something that no one, and I mean no one, would be able to find.’

‘What?’ Christina said down the line.

‘Differences.’

He paused. Gave Rebecca a long, apologetic look. She had been right all along.

‘Music is data. We’re all agreed on that, right? The sound on a CD is made up of ones and zeros, just like everything else, like documents or images or whatever you like. But there’s something in sound that other data doesn’t have,’ he said. ‘Background noise.’

The fatigue was long gone now. Finally, he was functioning normally, he could think and come to conclusions and do what he was best at. Piotrowski had given them a riddle. And he had solved it.

‘Every second of recorded sound,’ said William, walking around again, ‘consists of thousands of small packets of data. Tens of thousands of little samples, each one saying what it should sound like in that very microsecond.’ He gestured as he talked, a slicing motion as he demonstrated how each second was chopped into small, small pieces. ‘Let’s say that you change the value on a particular sample. Perhaps a change right in the upper reaches of the register, in a noise that the human ear can barely discern. And if you keep doing that, change something here, something there, throughout the disc… when you play it back, it still sounds perfect. The music sounds exactly as it’s supposed to, and in background you’d hear a noise, or perhaps it would even be so subtle that you couldn’t even hear it if you tried. The best thing though? Even if you were to hear it, it would still just be noise. Because how can you tell the right noise from the wrong noise?’

He pointed over at the glass walls again. It was as simple as it was brilliant. On their own, they were merely three glass walls with randomly distributed Post-it notes. Just as each CD merely included an hour’s worth of classical music.

‘But,’ he said. ‘If we take the sound from all three discs–if we compare them, bit by bit, sample by sample–then, I promise you, we’re going to discover small, subtle differences that Michal Piotrowski has inserted, and that won’t be apparent until we’ve got all three. And if we collate those differences…’

If William was right, there was a message waiting for them. Maybe a picture, maybe a document or a sound file–everything is data, and data can be hidden within other data, and whatever it was, Michal Piotrowski had hidden it within a chaos where it would go unnoticed.

Smuggled under cover of a piano concerto. Just like the old days.

‘William,’ Christina said down the line.

‘Yes,’ said William.

‘We’ve only got two.’

It took a couple of seconds for the penny to drop.

‘What do you mean?’

‘Sara’s is gone.’

He felt the world sway again. He grabbed the phone, turned off the speaker, and moved away from Rebecca, over towards the window.

‘How? How can it be gone?’

Somewhere, far away, he could hear Christina’s voice explaining what Palmgren had told her. That the rucksack, the computer and the CD had been missing when they found Sara’s body.

‘Where are you, William?’

He stood in silence for a moment before he answered.

‘I’m afraid this is going to sound insane,’ he said. ‘But you cannot contact me. Not online. Not by phone. They know where I am, they know my movements. I don’t know how.’

‘Who?’

‘I don’t know that either.’

‘It doesn’t sound insane,’ she said, and then corrected herself. ‘Yes, it sounds insane, but I think you’re probably right.’

He could hear her breathing in the silence that followed, closer than they’d been for months, knowing that as soon as he hung up it would it would be gone.

‘I’ll find Sara’s CD,’ she said, finally. ‘And I’ll let you know when I do.’

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘How are you going to do that?’

It took a couple of seconds for her to reply.

‘I think you’ll notice.’

Alexander Strandell couldn’t help but smile. He had been right all along, and finally, he had made himself understood. The woman standing in his garden and talking to her editorial team was a journalist at Sweden’s biggest-selling tabloid, with a byline pic showing her striding towards the camera with just the type of self assurance and intelligence that would normally turn him into a mumbling rag doll, and that’s exactly how he’d felt as he’d left the newsroom on Kungsholmen just twenty-four hours earlier. An outmanoeuvred, shambling failure.

Now though, she was here to listen to him. He was on the inside now. And whatever was waiting round the corner, threats or terror or goodness knows what, he would much rather be involved, helping out, than be standing on the sidelines and considered an idiot. That’s what he was thinking as he glanced out at the woman standing in his garden.

And at that very moment, everything disappeared.

In a second, it was as though the world around William and Rebecca exploded in light and sound: out of nowhere came sirens, whining with an intensity that made thinking impossible, scraping on eardrums like thousands of nails on a blackboard. Lights everywhere, flashing in short, sharp pulses, deliberately designed to paralyse an intruder while police and security rushed to arrest them.

‘They know we’re here!’ shouted William above the noise. Scared, angry, blaming himself. Maybe Rebecca had been right all along. Maybe they knew what he was thinking—

He didn’t get to finish that thought, as Rebecca grabbed hold of his arm and steered him out of the office. The alarm was paralysing, and he found he was no longer able to think or see or move in a single direction, and he gratefully followed Rebecca’s instructions, hurrying down a route she’d walked hundreds of times before.

They only got as far as the frosted door leading out onto the gangway. It was locked, immovable, and the electronic keypad sitting next to the frame was no help either. He turned to face her.

‘They’ve got us,’ William said. ‘They won.’

Rebecca called her response through the sirens.

‘Only if we let them.’