71

Palmgren had been standing at the back of the room throughout the madness of the car chase, and time and again he’d thought to himself that now, now it’s all over, and in the end the car had reached the river and proved him right. When, minutes later, it emerged that William Sandberg had disappeared from the wrecked vehicle, and that the young radio enthusiast who’d been driving him swore he didn’t have a clue where William was heading, his emotions had collapsed altogether and he had been forced to leave the room.

Now he was standing up on the roof, right over by the edge, the corner where he hadn’t stood for years but where he used to head for a crafty cigarette back in the days when he was a smoker. He missed that, he thought to himself. Not the smoking, but the breaks. The air biting at him, reminding him what was actually real, and what only really mattered within the four walls of the little world beneath him. Back then, those two things could be kept separate.

Now, engineers around the world were battling to defeat their own security systems, barriers designed to protect the power stations from attackers but now keeping themselves out. In country after country, authorities were sitting in crisis meetings, faced with decisions that no one wanted to make but that they would soon be compelled to.

Cities would have to be evacuated. Roads would need to be closed. Police and the military would need to force people from their homes, hospitals, from public spaces, and there would be chaos and panic and riots.

No one wanted to be first. Nor, on the other hand, did anyone want to act too late, and across the globe, the point of no return was approaching. Seen in that light, he thought, perhaps the odd cigarette wasn’t such a big deal after all.

When he heard the metal door opening behind him he realised that he’d been away for far too long. His shirt felt stiff from moisture that had almost frozen in the wind, his fingers ached from the cold he’d forgotten all about.

It was Velander. He stopped as soon as he set foot outside the door, his face sweaty from running the stairs, his glasses white grey with condensation.

‘William,’ he said. Then he had to breathe again.

‘What about him?’ said Palmgren.

‘He’s back.’ And then, as soon as his panting stopped: ‘I think he’s trying to make contact.’

For the duration of the gallop down the steep metal staircase, thoughts were flying through Palmgren’s head.

Contact? He could feel excitement swelling in his chest. If William was trying to make contact, it could mean only one thing: somehow he’d managed to crack the code, decipher the message, understand what the secret was that the Pole had sent them, and that had triggered all of what was now going on around them. It meant that now, at last, it was about to turn around. It had to.

He couldn’t wait for the lifts, instead taking the staircase down another floor. He was onto the next, around the banister and heading for yet another flight when he realised that Velander’s respiration was getting farther and farther behind.

‘Where are you?’ he called up the stairwell.

‘I’m coming,’ came the reply, and Palmgren waited, impatient like a child.

‘Where is he?’ he shouted, hearing the footsteps getting closer. ‘Is he on the phone? Where’s he calling from?’ No answer. ‘A payphone?’

At that moment Velander finally came into view, one storey up, bright red and wheezing as he came round the corner.

‘No,’ he said, his face contorted in response to the unfamiliar lactic acid. ‘No, not the phone.’

‘Fucking hell, Velander, is he here?’

Velander shook his head, and rested a hand on the banister.

‘He’s in Warsaw. At the Central Station. On a camera.’

The remainder of the sprint went twice as fast, and now it didn’t matter one bit whether Velander got left behind or not. What he had just said had to be wrong. There was no reason why William should show up on a CCTV camera–now, voluntarily, immediately after escaping from the Polish authorities. He was in a city where there was a uniform waiting around every corner, ready for instant response, and Jesus, there must be a better way of making contact than CCTV!

He ran all the way to the JOC, swung the doors open with such force that they were left vibrating in their frames, and burst into the auditorium to get himself a view of what was happening. And as he did so, he found that Velander had been right.

The room was full of colleagues, all standing or sitting by their places, all transfixed by the bank of screens at the front, save for quick glances over at Palmgren, wondering what he was going to make of all this. The picture was indeed from a CCTV camera. It showed a large, empty space, a waiting room, probably twenty metres wide and at least as deep, with high windows on each side under a large, vaulted roof. At the far end of the image, a broad staircase led down to an invisible underground, and at the top of the screen was an overexposed departures board.

Now and again a passenger walked through the shot, some with bags and others without. But above all, in the centre of the floor stood a lone man. Shaven head, filthy fleece, eyes focused high on the wall–no, the ceiling, as if he was looking for something that couldn’t be seen.

‘Central Station in Warsaw,’ Forester said from her position. And when Palmgren’s eyes met hers: ‘It is him.’

Palmgren walked through the room, right over to the wall, unable to tear his eyes away from the man. But Forester was right. His hair was gone, and the clothes wrong, but the mannerisms and the look in the eyes were his.

Why the hell was he standing there? As if he wanted to be found, to be arrested, standing completely still in the middle of a waiting room in Warsaw? No, wrong, not completely: slowly, slowly, William kept turning around on the spot, his arms slightly open as if to gesture Here I am. And throughout, his eyes kept scanning the walls, and the ceiling, as though he was looking for something in particular.

Contact. That was it. William Sandberg was looking for cameras.

‘How long has he been standing there like that?’ Palmgren said after a while.

‘We got the stream four minutes ago,’ said Forester. She looked at him with an empathy that took him by surprise. ‘They’ve already got a SWAT team on its way.’

The level of concentration in the communications room in Warsaw’s main Police Station was absolute. Fingers rattled across keyboards, radio calls were received and confirmed, information was shouted back and forth across the room.

The police cars’ positions. ETA. The situation at Central Station.

The last one, time after time, was unchanged.

The image stream had appeared less than ten minutes earlier, and it had shown him standing there, in the middle of the grand ticket hall: wet, haggard, and with a shaved head, but there was no doubt it was him. Occasionally he seemed to be looking straight into the lens, and each time that happened Wojda could feel a pang inside him, as though Sandberg could somehow know that he was there, making contact through the screen.

‘William Sandberg…’ he said quietly, to himself, at a volume that was drowned out by all the other noise in there.

Who are you? What do you want? What is it you’re trying to achieve?

Down on the switchboard the lines were still busy: private individuals whose property had been destroyed in the wild chase, newspapers wanting details of the pursuit and whether it was connected to the suspected terrorist and whether rumours that he’d managed to escape were accurate. Pretty well every unit had been involved in one way or another, giving chase or attempting to cut them off or to block possible escape routes, and yet–hats off to him–William Sandberg had still managed to escape.

It just didn’t add up. Who goes to all that trouble, and then suddenly appears of their own volition, exposing themselves like this? William Sandberg wasn’t simply a terrorist, he was something more, something they had yet to understand. And as Wojda said all these things, quietly, to himself, he moved towards the screens, until the large central screen with William on it occupied his entire field of vision.

It was almost like being there himself, in the middle of the cold, empty hall that was Warsaw’s Central Station, hovering in one corner and looking down onto the floor of a world that consisted of diluted, silent pixels. Where lone passengers passed by like blurred shadows in the periphery while the man in the middle stayed standing where he was, rotating with slow steps, round and round and round like a weird, still dance—

Wait a minute.

‘Can we get to that camera?’ Wojda shouted over his shoulder. ‘Can we steer it from here?’

The answer came from behind him that no, it was just a stream, they couldn’t control it at all.

‘Can we zoom in then? What’s the resolution on this footage?’

He still didn’t take his eyes off William, and behind him he could hear his question being passed from one colleague to another, fingers hammering away at keys until someone called back.

‘The stream is in HD.’

‘And what we’re showing on screen…?’

‘Isn’t.’

‘Give me one to one then, for fuck’s sake!’ said Wojda, and he heard the venom in his tone too late. They were all as strained by the stress and concentration as he was, and no one was deliberately trying to conceal or obfuscate anything. He glanced quickly backwards, not sure who he had given a rollicking. ‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Just… put up the zoomed-in footage. Please.’

From the corner of his eye he saw the image freeze and then jerk. A couple of keyboard commands almost doubled the size of the images, as the incoming stream adjusted to the screen resolution.

William was now twice the size, still rotating. Wojda’s eyes followed him closely, first the back of his head, then in profile, then fronton. And yes. He had been right.

‘He’s saying something!’

He said it straight out now, unabashed, and the silence in the room confirmed that now he’d pointed it out they could all

see it.

‘What’s he saying?’ someone said. ‘What is it he’s saying?’

Wojda focused at the lip movements. I. Want? Yes, that was it. He repeated the words to himself, in time with the mouth on the screen, once, twice, kept doing it until he was absolutely sure. And then, when he was, he turned to everyone in the room.

‘I know what he’s saying.’ He took a deep breath. ‘William Sandberg is saying that he wants to negotiate.’

The spacious hall that formed the heart of Warsaw’s Central Station was cold and empty and echoing. The high ceiling caused sounds to bounce around in a never-ending repetition, and the stark lighting was in harsh contrast to the evening darkness outside.

It was late. Only the occasional passenger could be seen walking through the hall, hurrying towards the platforms to catch the last train home, all of them doing their best not to look at the man in the middle. He looked like a tramp, an addict, and he was moving round, round and round like no normal person ever would. If I don’t see him he won’t see me. That’s what they were thinking, all of them, and they picked up their stride, giving him a wide berth, and heaving sighs of relief once they were past him.

William didn’t even see them, so busy was he staring along the walls, across the ceiling, down the pillars. The hidden cameras were up there somewhere. Hopefully there would be several, and he could be seen by all of them.

Over and over he repeated his words, clear, exaggerated mouth movements with no voice. Revolving slowly so as to say them in every possible direction.

He didn’t have much time. The police could see him, he was sure of that, and if the cameras were online he was visible on the internet.

The only question was who would see him first.