62

It took less than five minutes for them to drive from Gröna Lund to the Swedish Armed Forces Headquarters on Lidingövägen, and when Palmgren got back to the car the temperature inside it hadn’t even had time to drop.

‘Did you get them?’ Christina asked as he climbed into the driver’s seat.

‘I suppose so,’ said Palmgren, starting the engine, right arm around the passenger seat to get a better view as he reversed out. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing.’

The last bit was said with a quick but telling glance towards Tetrapak in the back seat, and then, before putting the car into first to carry on up the road, he let his hand fish around in his coat pocket, pulled out William’s bunch of keys and passed them to Christina.

‘I’m going to be in all kinds of trouble trying to explain why they’re missing.’

After that Skeppargatan was only another few minutes away, where there was no traffic and you weren’t looking out for one-way streets. They snubbed the slow old wooden lift and rushed up the stairs, a clatter of soles to break the dense silence right the way up until they were greeted by the beautiful double doors to the apartment on the top floor.

The whole way up, Christina clutched her handbag tight against her body. There, hopefully, was the answer, in the discs that Michal Piotrowski had sent; where William was so convinced that there had to be a hidden message. And if there was one place they were going to be able to retrieve it, it was here.

Across the opening where the double doors met was a bright yellow sticker proclaiming that the apartment was cordoned off and was not to be entered by unauthorised persons. Palmgren sliced it in half with his car key, mumbled something about being as authorised as we’re going to get, and nodded at Christina to unlock them.

It was the grille on the inside that made her understand. A month ago, she’d left this apartment, dumped the keys through the letterbox and vowed never to return. Back then, the only things separating the apartment from the landing outside had been the thin wooden doors, the beautiful double doors with their leaded windows, the ones that would greet her with their warm welcoming colours whenever she came home late and William had left the hall light on.

Now though, they were joined by an impenetrable black barrier. One that was neither warm nor welcoming.

‘Why are you locking me out?’

That’s what she’d meant.

‘When did he put this in?’ It was as much as she could manage.

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

She unlocked the grille and showed Tetrapak into William’s study, unlocking that heavy door on the way. Her thoughts would have to wait. There was no time for brooding, not now, when they finally had something that might contain the answer to what was going on: the power cut, the nuclear power stations, the lot. That was what mattered.

‘Make yourselves at home,’ she said. ‘And if you have even the tiniest little question, I will not have any kind of answer whatsoever.’

What was meant to be a wry smile ended up as no more than a tired grimace, and she was left standing there as Alexander Tetrapak Strandell occupied William Sandberg’s well equipped home office. It didn’t take him long to get his bearings. He moved between the various shelves and racks, his fingers following cables that had been neatly bound into hidden bundles under the desk, then started up machines and computers before finally sitting down at the desk. Christina handed him the CDs and he lined them up in front of him, while the computers coughed and grunted and flickered into life.

‘I’m going to disconnect us from the internet. We don’t want what happened to Sara–or what happened at my place–to happen here.’

Christina nodded. ‘You do whatever you like.’

He turned back to face the desk, identified the right cables and then pulled them out from the back of the computer, and turned to face them again.

‘Also,’ he said, this time with an awkward smile, ‘I don’t mean to be rude, but I’m used to working alone.’

As Palmgren and Christina made their way into the living room, they could hear the clack of the bearded man’s fingertips speeding up behind them. There was something in the combination of the sounds, the tapping on the keyboard, the fans, the whirring of all the hard drives, and the smell of the place, the feel of the loose wooden floor tiles, all of it, that flung Christina back into a time that no longer existed. It was as if she had happened to walk through a tear between dimensions, as though she was walking in with her winter coat and gloves into an apartment that was full of summer.

Round every corner, she expected to see them–William, Sara, herself–expected to see the sun shining in over the rooftops and straight into all of the rooms, where they would sit in that golden yellow light, eating breakfast or reading books, and then when they noticed her they would look up with puzzled expressions, feeling the cold that she’d brought in with her and sensing that something was wrong. Then she would warn them, warn them about the future and about Warsaw and about saying the wrong thing at the wrong time, and how they should never, ever, install a grille in the hall.

But they were gone. The living room was dark, the lights off, and Christina and Palmgren turned on the lamps by the window, sat down on separate sofas, and said nothing for a long time.

On a long bench along one of the walls was the television. They put it on with no sound, blurry footage of illuminated power stations alternating with pictures of roadblocks and maps with cities highlighted in red. Still no one knew what was going on, why it was happening, how it could be stopped. And with no sound, the panic in the eyes of reporter after reporter was clear. Not their dread of the looming nuclear disaster, that everyone might conceivably be dead before long, but panic at being pushed in front of the cameras to say the same thing for the umpteenth time.

That no one, no one, had the faintest idea about anything.

‘What happened?’ Palmgren asked after a long silence. ‘With you, with Sara. Why did she disappear?’

‘I’ve been a print journalist all my life,’ Christina said. ‘My job is to give as simple and straightforward an account of events as possible. A caused B which led to C. But in this case?’ She shook her head. ‘I don’t know. All of a sudden, life was like this. With a whole fucking alphabet of events that led to one another.’

‘I’m not asking the journalist. I’m asking you.’

Christina took a deep breath. ‘We didn’t realise,’ she said carefully. ‘We didn’t realise how important it was. Knowing where you come from–who you are, why you’re here, the emptiness of being without context–we didn’t get it.’

She looked around the room. Tables and chairs and sofas where she might have sat, if now had been some other time.

‘She knew. Of course she did. She noticed that something happened in Warsaw. And when we told her that she was adopted she realised that that’s who we’d met–her real father–and she demanded to know who he was, screaming, threatening us. But we just didn’t dare.’

She lowered her voice, as if Sara was actually there, as though she was reluctant to talk about someone in the third person in their presence.

‘We were so scared of losing her that we didn’t dare to tell her. And that was why we lost her in the end.’

That was the last thing she said before she went quiet and her eyes sank to the floor, settling on a rug that she had once chosen and demanded that it be delivered on time. A rug that once had been inexplicably important, just like everything else around her–the sofas they’d waited for months to receive, the table that barely fitted into the stairwell. The room was full of must-haves, and it was as though it was no longer possible to remember why it had all once mattered so much.

Christina hated tears, but as she looked up at Palmgren she knew they were on the way. ‘It was that simple. A led to B which caused C. Can you put a headline on that?’

They sat opposite each other for another half-hour before Palmgren was the first of them to lie down on the sofa. On the other side of the oh-so-important coffee table, Christina did the same, and they lay there without sleeping, the ceiling above them flickering in the uneven light of the television images.

On screen, the security experts and the politicians were having their say. One of those speaking about the security situation was UK Defence Secretary Anthony Higgs.

When Higgs appeared on screen, Winslow was still sitting in his boss’s office. At the bottom of the frame, microphones danced and jostled like the cast in a puppet show, and beyond them the Defence Secretary tried to compose himself for a statement. The questions that came were predictable, and the answers were just the ones Winslow didn’t want to hear.

We will never negotiate with terrorists.

We can never allow anyone to take the whole world hostage.

And then, straight to camera, as though Higgs was hoping that the perpetrators were sitting in front of their televisions, listening intently to his every word:

We intend to take every possible measure to find those responsible.

Winslow turned the sound off, and sat down to stare at the floor, letting the TV carry on miming its message. How had he ended up here? Floodgate. It had sounded like such a good idea.

Maybe it was like Higgs said, maybe it was too late to change their minds. He didn’t know. All he knew was that it went too fast, the world, everything, and that he didn’t have the capacity to keep what he thought separate from what he had to do. He caught himself staring over at the large windows. He was four storeys up, was that enough? The thought shook him. Where did that come from?

Instinctively he took a step into the middle of the room, away from the windows, repeating to himself that a thought is not the same as an action, that everyone thinks dark thoughts now and again, and this didn’t mean that he was ill. Considering the state of things, he thought to himself, the opposite was probably true.

When he had finally composed his thoughts, Higgs had already left the screen. The pictures now came from a studio, and Winslow pointed the remote and switched off the TV altogether.

He could see his own reflection in the black screen, and hoped that Trottier had been right after all. That Floodgate would save the world one day.

Had William known who the man was talking on the television in the corner of the depressing eating area, he would probably have paid him rather more attention. As it was, he stood there just inside the draughty doors of the run-down petrol station with his mind on other things.

It had been two hours since he’d left Rebecca. Right the way through he’d thought he wasn’t going to make it, that he’d delayed too long and that the police would catch sight of him, either as he hurried across the field next to the road or, worse still, before he’d even managed to get out of the car.

That he’d made it out at all was down to Rebecca. She was the one who’d realised that the truck driver was already on his way down to come and talk to them, and she’d undone their belts and ordered: ‘Swap with me! Swap with me now!’

Ahead of them, the torches had been getting closer. Behind them, the lorry driver’s footsteps were approaching. And William had folded himself as small as possible, struggled to squeeze underneath Rebecca, as her contorted body wrestled its way over him in the other direction.

He was only halfway when he realised that he was stuck, that his jacket had snagged on something, maybe the seat-belt buckle, and he’d grimaced, writhing back and forth to try and get free, forcing himself not to pay attention to the hard seat backs behind him or the huge, merciless gearstick that was pushing deeper and deeper into his belly the more he struggled.

For a moment he pictured it: this was how it was going to end. The police were going to get there and rip open the car doors, and he’d be lying in the foetal position across both seats, entangled in a cagoule, and above him a woman with no hair bracing herself with hands and feet against whatever part of the car’s interior was nearest and saying how do you do in Polish. It might have been that thought that helped him.

In a last desperate lunge he stretched one arm out in front of him, fumbled the door open and grabbed the chassis with his other hand. He pulled for all he was worth, and eventually he heard the nylon rip and slithered out through the opening on Rebecca’s side. As he thudded onto the ground with no way to break his fall, there was not a single part of his body that wasn’t sore, yet there was no time to lie there, and he crawled across the rain-soaked tarmac towards the ditch.

He pressed himself into the grass and the mud, the ice-cold damp seeping through every seam. And then, only then, did he notice that he hadn’t closed the door properly. He lay there perfectly still, quite convinced that as soon as they noticed the door the game would be up. With his face in the dirt he counted each passing second, and only when the tone of the conversation began to soften, when he heard Rebecca’s licence being returned and then everyone helping to give her a bump-start, did he dare to hope that they’d got away with it.

Eventually she drove past the red flares. The HGV had driven on, and the road ahead was empty. That’s when he hauled himself up, soaking wet, freezing cold, and started walking back in the direction they’d come from. From now on, it was all down to Rebecca.

It was only after two hours of walking that he could see the illuminated logo of the petrol station he’d remembered from some time earlier. It was hovering there, like red clouds in the damp air, and he stopped well short of it, studying the aging premises until he was quite sure that the two cameras on the forecourt were the only ones they had. After that he slipped in along the frontage and carried on through the squealing door, hiding his face behind his elbow as he dealt with a coughing fit that was only partly faked.

Apart from the ones outside, there was just one more camera, behind the till, facing whoever was paying, and directly behind the sleepy shop assistant were three monochrome monitors which showed exactly what fields the three cameras covered.

Finally, William chose a soft drink from a vibrating refrigerator, walked over to the till and pointed at the hot dogs slowly rotating on the rollers, making sure to stay out of camera view as he paid. Lastly, he asked about the three computers. They stood at the other end of the store, in what was, according to the sign, a cafeteria but was actually no more than a few battered chairs and tables on an equally battered section of floor. Four zloty got him a code for an hour’s surf.

He chose one of the terminals, sat down with his meal, and read the headlines from the world’s newspapers as he ate. He had ploughed through all the major international titles, then the Swedish, and finally Christina’s own, when he realised that the words were all merging. He couldn’t remember when he’d last slept. On the ferry? On the vehicle deck on the way to Poland? Sandberg peered over at the man behind the till and thought to himself that four zloty was a reasonable price for an hour’s sleep in a chair.

‘The bastard!’ Tetrapak’s voice echoed down the long hallway, full of something that lay between joy and admiration and pride, and while his legs powered towards William’s room as fast as they could carry him, he turned towards Christina and Palmgren, who were close behind. ‘That bastard knew exactly what he was doing! And if it hadn’t been for William we wouldn’t have had a clue!’

Christina could still taste sleep in her mouth, and was busily trying to piece together where she was and why.

‘He was right,’ grinned Tetrapak as he sat down at William’s desk. ‘When you listen to them, they sound identical, but if you go through the content of the discs as binary data, and compare them, digit by digit—’

‘Did it work?’ she said, rubbing her face to try and wake up.

Strandell smiled at them.

‘I’ve never heard of information being concealed that way before, but William was right. They’re there–tiny, tiny deviations, impossible to notice. Right up until you put them side by side.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Palmgren.

‘What do you know about logical connectives?’ The silence that ensued was an answer. ‘Okay, I’ll keep it short. Data is stored as ones and zeros, we know that. Logical connectives are a way of comparing series of ones and zeros to get a new result. If you put two series next to each other and compare them digit by digit, there are two possibilities. A: both digits are the same–two ones, or two zeros, it doesn’t matter which.’

He demonstrated both possibilities with his hands: two palms, two backs.

‘Or B: they’re both different.’ He turned one hand over, then both, so that when one hand was showing its palm, the other one was showing the back. ‘A one on one, a zero on the other. Do you follow?’

‘Uh huh,’ Palmgren answered. The universal sign for No, I haven’t got a clue what you’re on about, but you go on.

‘If both are the same we call that true. Different and we say false. If we then let the digit one represent true and zero represent false, then we have a whole new series of ones and zeros that wasn’t there to begin with.’

‘And this new series,’ Christina said, without having understood any more than Palmgren. ‘That’s the message?’

Tetrapak shook his head. ‘I struggled with that for a while,’ he said. ‘What I got was only the difference between two series. And the zeros just tell you where the differences are. How could I turn that into a message?’ He picked up the CDs on the desk in front of him. ‘That’s when I got it. That’s why there are three of them.’

Tetrapak was sitting in William’s office chair, glowing with pride, while Christina and Palmgren stood in the doorway, radiating cluelessness.

‘Is there any point in us asking you to explain?’ said Christina.

‘It’s not as difficult as it sounds. Put a disc in the middle. Let’s call it disc zero. One on the left, one on the right. We’ll call them true and false respectively. Okay?’

He arranged them on the desk in a line.

‘And then we go through all the discs. Digit by digit, bit by bit, sector by sector. If all three are the same, we do nothing. We move on to the next one. If the one on the left deviates? We say false. If the one on the right does? True.’ He let his finger swing back and forth between them as he said it: ‘True, false, true, false. One, zero, one, zero. And that way, we get a new series.’

‘And if the one in the middle deviates?’ asked Palmgren.

‘I know. I was terrified that might happen, because then the whole thing would’ve collapsed. But these two’–he pointed to the outer ones–‘never have the same value unless the one in the middle does too.’

Several seconds of silence, as Tetrapak waited for someone to ask the right question.

‘Okay,’ Christina said. ‘What’s the upshot of all this?’

‘The upshot is this,’ he said, then touched the keyboard to bring the screens to life.

‘What are we looking at?’ Christina said eventually.

‘I wish I knew,’ said Tetrapak.

The entire screen was filled with endless rows of ones and zeros, nothing more. No text, no message, nothing that seemed to have any kind of logic to it whatsoever.

‘It’s a digital sequence, but of what I don’t know. I’ve tried everything I can think of. I’ve tried converting it to sound, to an image, to every kind of file I’ve ever heard of. And a few more besides.’

‘Text?’ Palmgren’s voice, dry and crackly and obviously not used for a while. ‘Isn’t it just ASCII?’

‘That’s where I started,’ said Tetrapak. ‘I’ve used every kind of character code in existence’–he pointed at the screen, pressing a key for each new utterance. ‘ASCII. ANSI. UTF-7. UTF-8. UTF-16.’

With each keystroke, the screen changed form. Instead of ones and zeros it shifted to displaying rows of symbols and letters, incomprehensible and arranged in what seemed to be a random order. Each new kind of character code caused the letters to be replaced with others, but always lacking any kind of discernible pattern, and always completely illegible.

At a stroke, Christina could feel the energy drain out of her. All the expectation and hope that she’d allowed herself to build up since Tetrapak dragged them out of the living room disappeared, to be replaced by something else. Disappointment? Perhaps. Frustration? Certainly. Rage? No, actually. But she was tired and full of emotions, and one fucking way or another it was all going to have to come out.

‘You seriously mean to say that this is it?’ she said, and realised that she was shouting. ‘Do you really think that you’ve solved anything, that we’ve made a single step forward, that this helps us in some way?’

‘I’ve done everything I can,’ Tetrapak shot back. ‘Whichever format I choose, the result is nonsense. Text? Nonsense. Sound? Noise. Image? Blur. Noise, nonsense, blur. That’s it. What I think about it all doesn’t change a bloody thing.’

He hammered the space bar again, causing the screen to hop back to ones and zeros. And then he took a deep breath, letting his voice settle before he spoke again.

‘This is all I can get out. What we are looking at is what is hidden on Piotrowski’s discs. And yes, there’s something stored here, it could be a message, maybe something else. But how to make it readable…?’

He shook his head, resigned. I haven’t got a clue. It was as though he suddenly recognised himself again, realised that he was still the same person he’d always been. The one that no one believed, who made mountains out of molehills, who time and time again was left standing with a phone to his ear when the caller hung up, the one who knew that they were laughing at him. Palmgren saw that.

‘You’ve done a great job,’ he said. ‘But I don’t think we’re going to get any further on our own.’

‘What do you mean?’ said Tetrapak, staring at him.

‘The text is encrypted,’ said Palmgren. ‘That’s the only logical answer. We’ve received a coded message, but we don’t have a key. What we do have is people whose only task is to crack such codes–people like William. But we can’t get hold of him right now, can we?’ He looked at the time. ‘It’s almost morning. Headquarters is only a couple of minutes away. I think it’s time we stopped trying to do this on our own—’

His wince of pain tore at his chest where Acetone had knelt on him. He had reached across the table to pick up the discs, and the last thing he’d expected was for Tetrapak to grab hold of him, a tight grip around his wrist, two eyes staring straight into his own.

‘Leave them where they are,’ said Tetrapak.

‘What are you playing at?’

‘I don’t know you. I know that Christina says you’re a good person. I hope she’s right.’

Palmgren felt that a snigger was the most appropriate response. What the hell was this?

‘And I know you call me conspiracy theorist. I know you’re always laughing at me, I know all of that. But for once–listen to me. Listen to the madman. And see what happens.’ No one said anything. Eventually he let go of Palmgren. ‘I think Piotrowski sent them to us, and only us, for a reason.’

‘Are you trying to suggest that it might be dangerous for Swedish Armed Forces to find out whatever is on those discs? Because if you are, I’m afraid I’m going to have to disappoint you. The Swedish Armed Forces haven’t been particularly dangerous to anyone for a very long time.’

‘I’m not saying that your colleagues have anything to do with this, Palmgren. I’m saying that Piotrowski was afraid of something. So afraid, in fact, that he sent this in such a way that it could never, under any circumstances, be read by the wrong person. Nevertheless, someone is after us. Per Einar Eriksen is dead, Piotrowski himself has disappeared. William is alive, but on the run without even knowing why.’ He paused. ‘Is it really that strange that I want to find out what this is? Before we tell anyone else that we have it?’

‘So what do you think we should do?’ said Christina.

When he looked at her, his eyes seemed to have lost their energy. As though their pointless fight had eroded his determination, as though what he had planned to say next had lost its appeal.

‘There is one question that you haven’t posed, one that I have the answer to.’

He looked back and forth between the two of them.

‘I think I know why Piotrowski chose us. William, because he would be able to crack the code on the discs; Professor Eriksen, because his research concerned the same fields as Piotrowski’s; me…’ He shrugged his shoulders. ‘Maybe because of the conversation we had in Warsaw, maybe because we were both worried about the same sorts of things. I don’t know exactly why. But I’m glad he did. I need the keys to your car.’

This last was directed at Palmgren, and it had come so suddenly that for a moment he didn’t know how to reply.

‘Why? Where are you going?’ said Palmgren.

‘Nowhere. I’m going to get my box.’

Palmgren hesitated, then pulled the key from his pocket, gave it to Tetrapak and watched him hurry for the door.

‘What’s this question we haven’t asked?’ Christina shouted after him.

‘William,’ Tetrapak replied without stopping. ‘If William’s in Poland, how are we going to get the codes to him?’ He carried on backing out of the hall while he waited for them to understand.

‘Shortwave?’ said Christina.

‘Yup. It will take me a couple of hours to transmit the codes over to Warsaw.’ Then he turned around, continued towards the front door, and spoke knowing they could still hear. ‘Once that’s done, we just need to think of a way to let William know they’re there.’