58

The images on Palmgren’s laptop struck such fear into Christina that she could sense the taste of blood in her mouth. They were sitting in his kitchen among token Christmas decorations, side by side on the long bench, surrounded by the hyacinth scent from the wilting Christmas bouquet in front of them. The laptop displayed photos that had been wired around the globe as she and Strandell had struggled their way through the night, interspersed with headlines from her own newspaper and hundreds of competitors. In Christina’s stomach, that teenage terror hung colder and hollower than ever.

‘Sabotage’ wrote someone. ‘Virus’ said another. ‘Terrorism’ featured in all of them.

Tetrapak was the first one to break the silence.

‘It’s connected.’

‘What?’ said Palmgren. ‘What is, and with what?’

Tetrapak attempted to formulate his response, failed to find the words, and instead pulled his electronic equipment towards him.

‘The things that are happening,’ he said, gesturing towards the window, ‘they are connected to… this.’

He started up his computer, gave a brief version of the explanation he’d given Christina and Beatrice in the newsroom, about the shortwave frequencies, the ones that had lain dormant for years and then come to life. He showed the long lists of sound files, played the tuneless chant of digits that he’d recorded from the shortwave band, and then the short bursts of screeching data that had replaced them.

When his presentation was over and the screeching code disappeared, Palmgren was the first to break the silence. ‘With all due respect,’ he said. ‘I understand that you have given this a lot of consideration. I don’t think, however, that any of us would be well served by focusing our efforts on the wrong things.’

‘I’m sorry?’ said Tetrapak.

‘What’s happening out there is down to hypermodern security systems. It’s the largest electronic attack we have ever seen. I have great difficulty imagining what it might have to do with an obsolete technology that hasn’t been used for twenty years.’

Tetrapak’s eyes narrowed.

‘What you have difficulty imagining might not necessarily have any bearing on what is actually happening. Wouldn’t you agree?’

‘Forgive me for being so direct,’ Palmgren said. ‘But how am I to know that what you are playing even comes from the frequencies you are talking about?’

‘Are you accusing me of lying?’

‘No. I am simply asking how I am supposed to know that you’re not.’

Tetrapak stood up, in between bench and table, fury causing the words to back up deep in his throat, leaving him wagging a threatening finger but without any words to accompany it.

Instead, he returned to the box. He dug out the portable shortwave radio, muttering irritation as he attached it to the car battery at the bottom, and then, from the tangle of cables and wires, he pulled out a thin, homemade wire aerial. He attached it to a large suction cup, with deliberate exasperated movements, and finally stuck it forcefully to one of Palmgren’s windows.

‘You can call me many things,’ he said. ‘You can call me madman. Tinfoil hat. You can call me Tetrapak, I know that everyone does.’ He sat down again, checked that everything was properly connected, and gave Palmgren an icy stare across the table. ‘But liar? No one calls me a liar!’ And with that he switched on the radio.

The kitchen filled with noise.

Tetrapak looked up, totally stunned. However he’d intended to prove his statements, this wasn’t it. Where he had expected to find perhaps a few short blasts of data, if he was lucky enough, he found a wall of sound. Suddenly, and with no warning, it was as if the airwaves were overflowing with data, and the short, fleeting modem tones had soared into an endless swell of strident noise.

When, a few seconds later, it occurred to Tetrapak to change frequency–and then to keep on changing it–he found the same thing up and down the band. It streamed out from everywhere, from the frequencies where the lifeless voices had recited their digits, from channels that had been silent for decades, the same type of unrelenting noise kept echoing around the gloomy kitchen like an unsettling, haunted concert, played out of tune. Eventually Christina barked at him to turn it off.

‘What was that?’ Palmgren said after a silent interval.

‘I don’t know,’ said Tetrapak. ‘I’ve been monitoring these frequencies for almost six months. But this? This is something else. And if you are going to try and tell me that it’s a coincidence, for this to be happening at the same time as all that…’ he gestured from his computer towards Palmgren’s and back again. ‘You must see that too,’ he said. And this time, there was no resistance from anybody.

‘I need to borrow your phone.’

Christina looked at Palmgren from her spot on the sofa. It was late, she had an editorial team that was bound to be wondering where on earth she’d got to, and presumably a number of superiors wondering the same thing in louder voices. Her phone lay somewhere in the woods in Bromma without its battery, sending any calls straight to her voicemail, and meanwhile, she was sitting in a kitchen in Saltsjöbaden being no use to anyone.

None of that she said out loud, but Palmgren nodded back, excused himself briefly and strode out of the kitchen.

There was a grunt from Tetrapak: ‘So you’re planning to let them find us all over again?’

‘I need to speak to the newsroom. They need me.’

‘Are you sure about that? Because as far as I can tell they’re getting on just fine without you.’

He gestured towards the computer. And he was right of course, yet she still couldn’t help but be provoked by it—

‘You know that you’re being bugged,’ he said, cutting her off before she had a chance to respond. ‘And the choice is yours. But does it really feel like a good idea to give yourself away again?’

‘They can’t know that I’m here. Palmgren’s phone is secure.’

‘How do you know that?’ he said. ‘How do you know that the newspaper isn’t being monitored, just waiting for you to call so that they can track you down again?’

Christina bit her lip.

‘The world is under terrorist attack,’ she said. ‘And you think I should just sit and watch it happen?’

‘Isn’t that the definition of what a journalist does?’

That hurt. Christina felt rage swell inside her, her hands grasp ever tighter on thin air, clenched fists of ice that would like nothing more than to stand up and smack him in the mouth.

She didn’t though. It wasn’t Tetrapak she was angry with, it was everything else: the powerlessness, the fear, this paranoid sensation of being observed, and the frustration of not being able to wave anything off as nonsense.

‘I don’t know you,’ he said finally, ‘but I do know journalists. And what you need to be doing right now is putting it together, creating news, not just writing about them after the fact. You should find out what’s going on, who’s behind it and whether it can be stopped. You won’t do any of that sitting in front of a computer in an office.’

The interchange tailed off, and they sat in silence until Palmgren came back into the room bearing his phone in one hand and an opaque plastic folder in the other. He sat down facing them, passing the phone to Christina as he did so. She took it, but held it, couldn’t decide.

‘There’s one more thing you should know,’ she said instead. Leaned in towards Palmgren. ‘About a man called Michal Piotrowski.’ In short, matter-of-fact sentences, she told him about the man who had probably sent William the emails, who also happened to be their daughter’s biological father, and who had been the reason for William’s trip to Warsaw.

Palmgren listened without interrupting, and when Christina continued she did so with a voice that expected to jar on its listeners.

‘The CD that Sara had,’ she said. ‘There are two more.’

She saw Palmgren freeze up on the other side of the table.

‘Where?’ he asked.

‘We’ve got them here,’ she told him. ‘That’s not what matters though. What matters is the fact that we can’t do anything with them.’

She explained how she’d come across the disc in the car by Kaknäs Tower. How she’d taken it to Strandell’s, and how he had turned out to have one too. And lastly she told him about the call from William, and his realisation that the CDs contained a message that could only be accessed by having all three of them, and when she was done, Palmgren sat motionless for several seconds.

‘I thought I asked you to make sure I was first to know,’ he said.

‘I’m here, aren’t I?’ When he didn’t respond, she continued: ‘I haven’t written a word about this. I’ve been digging, I’ve found this, and now I’m here. That was what you asked of me.’

‘And what would you like me to do for you now?’

‘We need the third disc.’ She saw him hesitate. ‘And by we,’ she said, ‘I mean us. Swedish Armed Forces, you, me, all of us. We need it to understand what’s going on—’

‘We don’t have it,’ he said before she’d finished speaking.

‘I know. But it must be somewhere. At some point between the café and Central Station she got rid of it, and it must be possible to see where she went along the way. Cameras, witnesses, what do I know. You must be able to work out where she’d been. Right?’

Palmgren looked down as she spoke. His hands were already placed carefully on the folder in front of him, as though he was protecting it from something. Or perhaps as though he was trying to protect someone else from it?

‘Yes and no,’ he said apologetically. Stopped himself, started over. ‘I want you to know that I only received this material last night. I was waiting for a chance to give it to you.’

‘Give what?’ she asked sharply.

‘She had a mobile phone on her.’

‘You said she didn’t have anything. At the hospital, when I asked you. You said she had nothing on her.’

‘I said she didn’t have a CD. That was what you asked me, and that’s what I told you. They had though taken her phone and…’ He fell quiet, drumming his fingers on the folder. ‘Before you get your hopes up that this might lead somewhere,’ he said, ‘let me explain. We’ve been looking for the CD too. The problem is that during the power cut, for several hours, there were no tracks to follow. No masts able to register her phone. Basically all public cameras off line. She could have been anywhere.’

He lifted his arms and thrust the folder over to her.

‘I’ve been trying to work out how to say this.’

‘Say what?’ she said.

He didn’t answer. And eventually she opened the folder instead.

For a long time she sat there like that, not sure what to say. Looking up at her behind the cover sheet was a great bundle of paper, page after page full of lists, codes, times, abbreviations. And it meant nothing to her.

‘What is this?’ she finally managed.

‘Mobile masts,’ said Tetrapak. ‘Isn’t it?’

Palmgren nodded. ‘Masts, calls, times. All the data that the operator registered about the phone that Sara was carrying.’

‘So what use is it?’ asked Christina. ‘If we can’t see where she went after the power cut, why are you giving me this?’

‘Because what we can see is where she was before that.’

After a while, the road signs started to feature place names like Makow and Przasnysz and Ostroleka, and when they’d been going for another half-hour, William steered the Fiat off the motorway to take to narrow, winding country roads. In the far, far distance, they could see the sky slowly beginning its shift from black to dark blue, a sliver of morning across the bonnet each time the road swung towards south-east.

Rebecca looked at her watch: it was approaching six. It was going to be dark for at least another hour. They hadn’t spoken for a long time.

Life occurs where the prerequisites exist.

That’s what he had said. Rebecca’s own words, but she’d used them in a completely different context, and it annoyed her. It was as though he’d hotwired her argument and used it against her, twisting what she’d meant. And she wanted to refute it, wanted to but couldn’t, and that wound her up even more.

‘We call it the internet,’ he’d continued. ‘An infinite number of carrier wires running back and forth across the entire planet. Wires incessantly sending data back and forth across the whole system. And what is thought, if not data? What is the brain, if not an infinite number of wires?’

Once again, the words were her own. And who was she to say that he was wrong? Over and over again, she had seen life blossom in test tubes and Petri dishes that she had believed were sterile. Because it could.

Once upon a time, billions of years ago, the Earth had been a dead planet, and then suddenly the temperature and the chemical elements and whatever else was necessary were right, and look what happened. And now, in the space of just ten, twenty years, man had covered the surface of the planet in a tangle of wires. A subterranean network of neurons and synapses, without anyone realising that’s what it was. The branches had grown into a gigantic web, impossible to monitor, millions of kilometres of cables transporting data back and forth, an unintentional artificial brain that had been allowed to grow into something far larger than any scientific experiment could dream of.

It was the irony of it all that made it so hard to accept. The irony that while scientific institutions poured billions into their attempts at creating artificial thoughts, building expensive installations in Switzerland and the USA, it had all happened of its own accord, right before their eyes. Life occurs because it wants to.

‘Let’s say I accept what you’re saying,’ she shouted through the noise of the engine. It was the first thing they had said to each other for a very long time. ‘Say we’re fighting against some kind of magical consciousness with a capital C. Something that’s omnipresent, whose eyes are every online camera in every corner of the world, whose synapses run right into every computer, every network, every—’ She paused. ‘Nuclear power station.’

For a second she clenched her jaw, trying to hold the words in. As insane as it sounded, it was equally frightening to say it out loud.

‘Someone who hears and sees every electronic word we send to each other, because every single connected unit, every lift and lock and telephone, is part of the Consciousness.’ She stared intently at William’s profile, as if it was all his fault. ‘Then why?’ she said. ‘Why is the Consciousness out to get you?’

‘First of all,’ he said, ‘you don’t have to accept anything. Reality goes on as normal whether you accept it or not.’

That was hardly the answer she’d been after. She stared out of the side window, demonstratively, as though it wasn’t reality that was the problem, but rather William’s unwillingness to change it.

‘To answer your question though,’ he went on. ‘I don’t think it is out to get me. I think Piotrowski knew something. Something that’s on those discs, something that must not, under any circumstances, come out. Piotrowski sent emails to my address. And then, when I logged in to the same address on a public computer in Stockholm…’ He shrugged. ‘That’s how I think it happened. No, that’s how it must have happened. The only reason I’m a target is because Piotrowski sent something to me.’

‘Something that you don’t even know what it is.’

‘Not yet.’

Whether she liked it or not, there was logic in what he was saying. That was why the data peaks had looked like they did, the ones registered by the military that had caused the power cuts. That was why they hadn’t been aimed at a specific target. That was why they’d seemed like a big muddle of impulses being sent back and forth. And above all, that was why they had occurred at the moment William’s daughter had inserted the CD into the computer.

It wasn’t an attack, it was a reaction.

‘If that’s the case,’ she said, ‘how are we ever going to be able to stop it?’

He sat in silence for some time before he replied: ‘I don’t know.’

He kept on driving, jaws chewing away on thin air, resentful eyes staring at the road ahead of them as though it had somehow wronged them.

‘If what you’re saying is right,’ she said after a while. ‘If that’s how it is, why this? Why the attacks, the power cuts, the nuclear stations?… if the Consciousness really exists, what does it want to achieve?’

William looked over at her again.

‘That’s what we need to find out before it’s too late.’

Once that had been said, there was nothing more to say, and they sat in silence as the road carried them eastwards, through dense woods and open fields, through curtains of spattering rain. They sat deep in their own thoughts, both of them thinking the same things. How people all around the world sat with their hearts in their mouths, how nuclear powers stations in city after city were out of control, and how they were sitting here in a rickety old car, its engine battling through the rain along the winding road through Polish forests, the only two people on Earth who knew how it had happened.

They had only just got out of the forest, when the curves straightened out and revealed the bright red warning flares laid out across the road.