82

Nothing changed, yet as soon as it happened he knew. The silence was the same, the buzzing silence of a low-frequency hum, from screens and fans and electricity through cables and fluorescent tubes and bulbs. The darkness was unchanged too, just as the shine from the darkened screens, when backlight forced its way through empty spaces and made the pixels glow eerily black.

There was no hand to hold. No muscles to separate one moment from the next, struggling to stay around just one second more but losing the fight and disappearing. No grip that gently loosened, no gaze that went empty and made its peace behind eyelids.

Just silence, the same before and the same afterwards. Yet William Sandberg knew he was alone in the room.

To the world, the change was no greater than for William. Someone struggled to load a web page at the first attempt, some were logged out without warning, searches that should have given plenty of results drew blanks. But who cared about a few internet hiccups on a night like this?

All around the world people sitting at their computers checked their cables or restarted their modems or refreshed the page, and the next second everything was working again. And with that, the world had changed, and no one noticed a difference. No one, apart from those who knew.

Anthony Higgs had heard them trudging up the corridor, closer and closer, shouting at civil servants and advisers to drop whatever they were doing and move away from their computers. In room after room, his colleagues were ordered onto the floor to make sure they offered no resistance. Or, more to the point, to make sure no one started deleting evidence.

He heard boots stomping across the floor. Weapons jingling against their straps and hooks. And then, when the door behind him was forced open, he heard their surprise–safety catches being taken off and weapons raised, the hesitation in their silence that followed, the wind rushing in through the open window.

Over there, on the other side of the river, he could see Sedg­wick’s office, and if the people in there had looked up at precisely that moment, they would have been able to see a Defence Secretary jump from his Whitehall window.

Outside Lars-Erik Palmgren’s villa in Saltsjöbaden, the only trace of everything that had happened was an unfamiliar moped.

As he stepped out of his car, he could feel the grief grow with every step, the same sense of loss you get from seeing an accident on the motorway, when you see the fire engines and the paramedics and the bowed heads. You don’t know who it is, but you still feel a pang.

He walked through the front door. Let his coat and his shirt fall to the floor as he went. And finally collapsed onto a bed that felt lonelier than ever before.

As Forester left the HQ, the woman from Poland was standing there, waiting by the entrance. She stopped at her side, both with freezing cold feet, hands in pockets, rocking gently to try and keep warm.

‘What are you going to do now?’ said Forester.

‘I don’t know,’ said Rebecca. ‘Go home, I guess.’

That could have been that. It wasn’t until the first taxi arrived and Rebecca opened the door to get in that either of them spoke again.

‘We’re alive.’ That was Forester. ‘Let’s make the most of it.’

Rebecca nodded, closing the door.

She spent the length of the journey to Arlanda Airport asking herself where home really was.

When Christina climbed out of a taxi at the newspaper offices for the second time, the posters were once again shouting out headlines in black letters. This time though, it was relief and joy, and perhaps that was exactly what she should be feeling.

Yet she felt melancholy as she turned back to the taxi driver, just like last time, and asked him to carry on to Bromma on the newspaper’s account. The same Alexander Strandell in the back.

‘You’ve got my number,’ he said, for want of something better.

‘But we never call it,’ she said, with a smile.

‘I know. It’s terrible.’

As the taxi headed towards Drottningholmsvägen to carry on out to Bromma, she could have sworn that he turned around and looked at her.

William Sandberg stayed for a long, long time. He kept talking, softly and straight into thin air, calling and waiting and hoping for an answer. In the end though, he’d stopped. Accepted what he already knew. And he sat there, in a white chair next to the white control panels, in a room that was emptier than anyone could see.

It was there that William met the new day, and for a long time he sat looking out the window, watching the sky rise through a spectrum of colours, listening to the humming computers that had once identified a consciousness that should not have existed. One which, he knew, no longer did.

And, as always, where someone used to be, only emptiness remained. With that emptiness inside him, William Sandberg stood up and left.