Acts of Vanishing
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Synopsis
A city in darkness. A hero in disgrace. His daughter in the gravest danger. With its heart-pounding action and breakneck pace, Acts of Vanishing is the perfect blockbuster thriller.
One winter evening just before Christmas, Stockholm is plunged into a sudden, citywide blackout. Radio, internet, phone service--all cut out simultaneously, cloaking the city in darkness and silence.
On the pitch-black streets, a young woman carries a message for her estranged father. It may be the key to reversing the blackout and preventing further attacks. But someone powerful is determined to stop her from delivering it...
In an eerily quiet newsroom, journalist Christina Sandberg tries to piece together what's happening. She has a terrible feeling that, somehow, her ex-husband William is involved...
Code breaker and cyber-security expert William Sandberg recieved an anonymous email, immediately before the blackout, with very specific directions to be followed. His erstwhile colleagues in the state military police are very aware of this correspondence. Sandberg is taken into custody-just when he most needs to be in action to clear his name, find his daughter, and save the country from disaster.
Release date: April 24, 2018
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Print pages: 464
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Acts of Vanishing
Fredrik T. Olsson
No one could possibly have known that he was going to be right here, simply because he hadn’t known himself.
He hadn’t made his final decision until two days before. He had booked trips to various destinations, rebooked, and then collected tickets he had no intention of using. Quite deliberately, he had left everything open until the very last minute, and yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that someone must have known exactly what he was thinking. Of course no one could–that was impossible, he of all people should know–but even so, the thought sent a chilling anxiety through him.
He’d got rid of the greying, tufty beard. He’d trimmed his hairline to make it look like he was receding, even though he wasn’t. His eyebrows, which over the years had converged into a single, long and bushy skein, had been plucked and tweaked into two thin lines. For the first time in his life he had spent hours standing in front of a mirror, concentrating on his own face. By the time he was finished he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to pick himself out in a crowd.
He’d rented a year-old BMW in a garage that could, at best, be described as dubious. He had paid in cash without proving his identity, and no one could have seen him, no one could know where he had gone. He was safe.
And yet, here he was. Sitting in the dry silence of the car, hearing nothing but the thud of his own heart, and the rhythm of rain against the roof.
Maybe he should’ve known something was up.
Perhaps not as soon as the level-crossing barriers blocked the road in front of him, not then, even if he’d felt a twinge of fear in his belly as he rounded the long bend. As the red-and-yellow pole reached across the road in front of him, right there in the darkness, the bell hammering peevishly alongside.
He had stopped with the blinking red eye of the crossing gate just in front of him, one lone car in the darkness. Waited a minute, maybe two. No trains passed, yet the bell stopped.
That brought another wave of anxiety. The silence as the clanking died out, the mechanical movement as the barriers rose, leaving just him and the level crossing, strangers in the silent winter night, deep in rural Skåne. All he could see was the darkness and the wide expanse of field on the far side of the tracks. Empty slabs of rock-hard clay seemed to go on for ever until they disappeared into the grey-white mist, red dots glared at him from high in the air where lonely turbine blades rotated out of sight.
He had forced himself to snap out of it. There was nothing to be afraid of. The train must have passed before he arrived, or maybe it had broken down or got stuck at the points somewhere–it didn’t matter. What mattered was he needed to get going. He was in a foreign country, with a long trip ahead of him, and no time to lose.
He’d started the engine and gently rolled up and over the tracks. And that’s when everything had happened.
The world around him had gone black. The whole car switched off at a stroke: the headlights that should have illuminated the road ahead, the rear lights that should have cast a faint red glow behind the sloping rear windscreen, and above all–the engine.
He turned the key in the ignition to restart it. Nothing. Once more, and then again, and he heard himself bark Start for fuck’s sake, slamming his hands against the wheel.
The moment he grabbed the door handle was the moment he realised what in fact he knew already: that no matter how much he heaved and strained, the doors would stay closed and locked, and nothing was going to change that. It was the same with the windows: however hard he pushed, however much he stabbed at the buttons in the door panel, no matter how he struggled, the car was going to stay just as locked and dark and dead.
It was then that the barriers started coming down again. It was then that he heard the hissing, and it was then that he knew.
He was lying stretched across both front seats when he caught the first glimpse of the lights. He stamped his soles against the window, his pulse raging inside his eardrums, the taste of terror and iron and blood even in the few seconds left until it would happen.
He could see the glass shudder under his soles but not give way, the approaching headlights flooding the dirty surface, and he closed his eyes and all he could hear were the sounds. The wailing thrill from the rails beneath him. The heartbeats thick in his mouth.
And then the horn as the train driver spotted the blacked-out car, a relentless honking that would be the last thing he ever heard, the grating scrape of iron biting into iron, trying to brake when it was already too late.
The days that change your life for ever start off like all the others.
No one wakes you saying today might be a bit tough, so have another piece of toast, take your time and enjoy your coffee, because it will be a while before you learn to enjoy life again. There’s no one putting an arm around you, preparing you for what’s about to happen. Everything is as normal, right up until the point where it no longer is.
As the afternoon gloom descended over Stockholm on Monday the third of December, no one knew that the threat level in the country had just been raised to ‘elevated’. No one knew that inside the Swedish Armed Forces’ great brick-built headquarters on Lidingövägen, men and women with uniforms and name badges were sitting waiting for the worst to happen.
And no one knew that the massive power cut that was about to hit at six minutes past four was just the start of something much bigger.
The men sitting inside the white van up on Klarabergsviadukten, the road bridge over Stockholm’s Central Station, had no idea what they were waiting for. Or rather, who. They didn’t know what he was going to do, who he was going to meet, how it was all going to look. Nor did they know why, which was of course what worried them most.
Inside the van’s cramped loadspace, the silence was absolute. From the outside, it looked like any other anonymous delivery vehicle. Presumably, it had seemed spacious and generously proportioned when they bought it. After that, they seemed to have got carried away. Someone had given free rein to a team of technicians with an extravagant budget, and now the van was so full of screens and electronics that it felt less like a workplace and more like a boy’s bedroom full of expensive kit.
A cubic metre’s worth of space nearest the driver’s cab had been consigned to computers and other electronic gizmos that probably carried out important tasks, but appeared not to do much more than flash red and green. Along one side hung two banks of flat screens, and behind a long thin desk below the screens sat four grown men, which was at least two too many.
The two who sat at the keyboards were of markedly different ages but unfortunately shared a similar BMI. Immediately behind them were the two men in charge: the one who the others called Lassie when he was out of earshot, and the one called Velander, an IT expert in civilian clothes, of completely indeterminable age, with glasses that seemed to get constantly steamed up in the heat inside. They stood hunched against the roof, shoulder to shoulder, eyes glued to the screens and the fuzzy grey CCTV images being relayed from within the station.
It was the older man who spotted him first, two minutes ahead of schedule.
‘What the fuck are you doing here?’
His voice was no louder than a whisper, but everyone heard, and once they’d spotted the subject they saw it too.
It might have been something about his movements–the jerky gait, perhaps–or maybe something else. Whatever it was, a burst of concentration filled the tiny space, the same sudden alertness that comes when you catch sight of an ex in the corner of your eye during the interval at the theatre, someone you haven’t seen for years but who stands out from the crowd and holds your gaze.
He’d changed.
He was trotting, rather than running, his hair untidy in the breeze, as though he’d just got up–although it was late afternoon. This from a man who’d always been so well dressed, so well coordinated. Who’d been sharp, in good shape, who no one quite believed when he told them he’d turned fifty–several times, as had been the standing joke these last three birthdays. Last time was so much fun I thought I’d turn fifty again this year.
It was as though, in the space of just three months, age had suddenly caught up with him. He looked tired, broken, with his overcoat hanging as if it had just been thrown over him and his jeans soaked with slush up to the knees. As he jostled through the crowds and across the blue-grey marble floor, a blue-grey mac in a sea of blue-grey passengers, he did so with movements that were forced and spasmodic, full of a buzzing intensity.
He kept appearing and disappearing as he moved between cameras, rushing onto the vaulted concourse, past the great frescoes and over towards the new escalators at the far end.
Surely it wasn’t him they were waiting for? But if it wasn’t, what was he doing there, now?
‘What do we do?’ asked the one with the steamed-up glasses.
‘We wait,’ said the one whose name wasn’t Lassie.
And then, for two long minutes, not a word from anyone inside the van.
It had been only seven minutes to four when the bright yellow taxi stopped on Vasagatan outside Stockholm’s main station to drop William Sandberg off into the slushy afternoon gloom that was Monday the third of December.
Thick layers of dark grey cloud hung where the sky should have been, the air so thick with mist that the noise of the traffic and all the roadworks seemed to meld into a single indistinct clamour. Construction lights and Christmas illuminations struggled gamely to overcome the murk, and the scaffolding and tarpaulins that clung to the surrounding buildings gave the impression that someone had clad the whole city in an orthodontic brace to reset it.
He was tired today, just like yesterday, and the day before that. If he’d given it any thought he would probably have noticed that he was hungry too, but if there was one thing he’d managed to cut out it was thinking of stuff like that. He’d stopped when he realised that his feelings were consuming him, literally eating him up: they were gnawing him from the inside with big, brutish bites, and now what was left of what was once William Sandberg was at least ten kilos lighter.
It’s the method the tabloids forget, he used to say. Find yourself something really worth worrying about.
He picked his way through the heavy, wet snow outside the main entrance, following it into the departure hall, where it turned to a cinnamon-brown mush, and where the fusty smell of dirt and damp clothes mixed with the aroma of takeaway lattes and people on their way home.
William Sandberg, though, noticed none of it. Not the smell, not the flush of his face as the wind gave way to the still warmth indoors, or the irritated elbows that jerked out in frustration as he pushed his way through the crowd towards the northern exit.
It had been less than two weeks since that first email, and in precisely seven minutes’ time he’d be in position, on the Arlanda Airport Express platform.
Precisely, because that’s what it had said.
All he felt was hope–and fear–they came in tandem.
He’d been waiting by the bright yellow ticket machine for at least five minutes before he realised that he’d been looking for the wrong thing.
The platforms had been full of businessmen with briefcases, people with blank looks who seemed to be hibernating inside their own heads, waiting for a train to take them to somewhere they didn’t want to go. But William had been looking for something else: faces that didn’t want to be seen, people in dirty coats, with heavy plastic bags and loop after loop of damp scarves muffling their restless, freezing eyes. The kind who hid themselves behind bulky clothes, layers protecting them from both the biting cold and any unwanted contact with the rest of the world.
Maybe, he’d allowed himself to think–maybe one of them had finally got in touch. Someone, at last, with something to tell him, who’d made contact to reveal an address or even point the way, anything at all that would help him along.
Sandberg had hoped. And if only he hadn’t, he probably would have seen the man on the other platform much sooner.
He was well over thirty. He had a headset in one ear, a studied vacant look despite being perfectly alert, and clothes so painfully ordinary that once you’d noticed him he stuck out like a child trying to hide behind a curtain.
His suit was silver grey. On top of it he wore a short overcoat that was so tightly buttoned at the waist that the bottom of his suit jacket poked out like a short pleated skirt, and below his trousers sat a pair of clumpy, anonymous trainers. All in all, it was a look that screamed discreet! as loud as it possibly could.
What caught William’s eye, though, was the phone call. It seemed to contain more silence than talk. There were long periods when the thin wire just hung from his ear with nothing to do, and when the man eventually did open his mouth it was for single short interjections. That was it. In between he stood waiting impatiently, head darting distractedly from side to side looking at nothing in particular.
Slowly, William felt himself moving to a state of readiness.
It was already five past four by the time the Arlanda train rolled in to the platform. The driver’s cab stopped by the buffers just in front of him, the train’s hundreds of yellow tons puffing and dripping as the passengers wove their way past each other to board or alight. Gradually the swathes of people formed streams in various directions–to the main hall, the taxi ranks, other platforms–and gradually too it emerged that there were some who weren’t going anywhere at all.
The discreet man with the headset, for one–and then someone else. He stood on the same side of the tracks as William, further down the platform, and he too was wearing a headset, sporting the same bland clothing, and having the same kind of conversation, short, sharp responses into the mic: they were talking to each other.
Something was wrong. William had been instructed to be in situ at precisely four p.m., and the word ‘precisely’ bothered him, because five minutes had passed and no one had shown up–no one, but for the two with the headsets. Were they waiting for the same person as he was? Or worse still–waiting for him?
He looked around. The crowds along the platform had slowly thinned out, and everyone not boarding was heading somewhere else. William had noticed the men with the headsets because they weren’t doing either, and now he was making the same mistake.
He hesitated for two seconds before making up his mind. The meeting, as far as he was concerned, was cancelled. He looked for a gap in the stream of passengers, sidled in and turned to follow the crowd towards the station hall.
He managed a single step.
‘Amberlangs?’
The man blocking William’s path had a chest so broad that it might have looked funny in another situation. Now, though, it was too close for comfort. He was wearing the day’s third improbably discreet outfit–maybe they’d bargained for a discount–and now he stood massively still, with his legs apart and arms ready at his sides. But ready for what?
‘And you are?’
In his mind, he bit his tongue as he was saying it. Shouldn’t he be playing dumb?
‘Nice and calm,’ the man replied. Northern accent, a cold, curt order. ‘You come with us and nothing will happen to you.’
Us? Who were they?
‘When you say “happen”,’ William said, to buy some time. ‘Would you care to elaborate on that?’
When the Northerner slid his jacket to the side, the weapon across his chest was all the elaboration William needed.
The days that change your life for ever start off like all the others. Everything normal, right up until the point when it isn’t.
When the power went, at six minutes past four, leaving vast tracts of Sweden in total darkness, it was just like any other day. A damp, cold afternoon in the no-man’s-land between seasons, neither autumn nor winter. At Stockholm Central Station the lights went off, the waiting locomotives lost power and lapsed into silence, screens and signs went dark. At hospitals and airports, emergency generators swung into action, on the roads and rails the lights and the signals disappeared, causing jams and confusion. It was irritating, for sure, and a bloody scandal too–with people getting stuck in lifts or on trains with no signal and what kind of society do we live in anyway. But for most people, that was all it was.
For William Sandberg, on the other hand, it was the start of an evening that would see his life lose its meaning.
For the men in the white van up on Klarabergsviadukten, it was confirmation that things were getting worse.
It hit the city centre first.
In the metro tunnels, the lights and the motors died at once. Darkness enveloped carriage after carriage, and passengers toppled en masse as the automatic brakes slammed on, forcing the trains to a halt in a few dozen metres. Above ground the street lights and the advertising hoardings fell dark. Escalators stopped, espresso machines died in the middle of filling cups, swearing and frustration everywhere. In a matter of moments the darkness marched out in a widening circle, from one neighbourhood to the next, out from the city, through the peripheral concrete estates and further on across the country. At the centre lay Stockholm, like a pitch-black maze in the pitch-black afternoon.
Everything stood still. And in the middle of the junction between Sveavägen and Rådmansgatan sat Christina Sandberg in the back seat of a taxi.
Her driver had spent the first part of their journey from Sollentuna endangering both of their lives, sitting with his eyes fixed on his yellow monochrome display, frenetically tapping away at various codes in the hope of landing his next fare, whilst simultaneously displaying an impressive range of expletives every time a fellow motorist happened to distract him from it.
They had just turned off Birger Jarlsgatan when Christina thought to herself that maybe she had better put her belt on. The next minute, though, it was too late.
At first she didn’t grasp what was going on. It was as if they’d just entered a tunnel, but there were no tunnels on Rådmansgatan, and she looked up, out at what seemed to be a blacked-out version of her home town. No illuminated window displays, no Christmas decorations, no traffic lights, no visible lighting anywhere. That was the last thing she managed to discern before everything, suddenly and without warning, was replaced by blurred perpendicular lines.
It wasn’t the HGV that hit them, the one that came roaring from their left, whose driver must have interpreted the disappearing red light as the signals turned green. Say what you like about the world-class swearer in the front, but there was nothing wrong with his reflexes. He slammed on the brakes and spun the wheel in a single manoeuvre, flinging Christina across the back seat as she felt the car jolt and shudder across the slush beneath them, and maybe it was professionalism, maybe just good fortune, but whatever it was it gave the lorry room to sneak past them with just millimetres to spare.
But when the bus came at them from the opposite direction, they didn’t have a chance. It appeared behind the vanishing lorry, speeding flat out and straight ahead, and now there was no time to react. The collision with the taxi’s offside wing was like two pool balls smashing into each other, and Christina felt herself sailing along the leather seat, weightless and in slow motion, helplessly floating like a crash-test dummy in a blazer and immaculate make-up.
So there she was, sitting in the middle of the Sveavägen–Rådmansgatan junction, alive but dazed, squashed into one corner of the back seat and with a view of a bonnet with a heavy bus wedged across it like a huge red vice.
The silence was almost overwhelming. All she could hear was the sound of her own breath, blending with the breathing from the front seat, and the quiet static hum seeping out of the car stereo.
‘Are you okay?’ she asked.
She saw a nod, two shocked eyes in the rear-view mirror.
‘Are you?’
When she confirmed that she was, he mumbled something about terminating here and all change please and that she didn’t need to worry about the fare.
The first thing she noticed as she clambered out was the way the darkness seemed to stretch in all directions. The sky was black, below it the street lamps loomed invisible and dark, and then below them the leaden fronts of buildings spreading in all directions, disappearing into nothing.
One direction led towards the high-rises around Hötorget’s marketplace. The opposite direction was towards the tower of the Wenner-Gren Center. But none of it could be seen. The sole relief came from the cold, dimmed lights of the cars that had stopped around them, the fine drizzle drifting through the headlight beams and the odd driver still behind their wheel, face glowing faintly in the light from the dashboard.
Out of nowhere, she could feel the darkness closing in around her, her pulse racing for no reason. An almost paralysing terror, a wordless, exhilarating sensation that reality had ceased to operate: someone had flicked a switch on all the world, and from now on, this was how things were going to be.
She knew that feeling far too well, and shook it off. It was just a power cut, she told herself, someone had drilled through a cable somewhere or forgotten to calibrate a fuse. There was no reason at all to release a load of pent-up thoughts that weren’t going to lead anywhere.
Instead, she looked around her and tried to turn her thoughts somewhere else. A quick assessment of the news value: Central Stockholm Plunged into Darkness. Wasn’t that your headline right there?
Of course it was, and she pulled out her phone to ring the news desk, then stopped as the display lit up.
No signal.
She braced herself as the fears came back at her, focused even harder on the job. This, she thought to herself, was more than a headline. This was a massive story. If the inhabitants of Sweden’s capital were stuck without electricity, with no means of calling for help, and if it was also going to stay this way for a while… This was a security issue. This was about society as a whole. That made it worth whole tanks of ink.
Christina Sandberg looked around her. She raised her phone above her head, fired off a few shots with the camera pointing straight at the darkness, the junction with all the stationary cars, crumpled bodywork strewn around, the odd motorist using the light from their phones to inspect the damage.
She’d already composed the first few lines by the time she passed Tegnérlunden’s open space on her way to her office on the island of Kungsholmen.
Across the platforms and trackbeds at Stockholm Central Station, darkness fell like a cupped hand. Pupils that had accustomed themselves to the artificial light struggled to see again, and at once all points of reference disappeared–contours, colours, everything.
Hearing, though, was a different matter, and what William could hear was the cocking of a gun.
Just a few inches in front of him, the Northerner had raised his weapon, and William closed his eyes in a pointless reflex, utterly sure that he was about to die.
But in that case, what did he have to lose? The darkness was his saviour, he told himself, and flung himself headlong into the crowd, not knowing who he fled from, or why, but determined to try.
He raced towards the station building, his arms like snowploughs, dislodging anyone in his path, determined that if he could just get into the big hall he’d be able to melt into the crowd and get away. He could hear footsteps coming after him, voices calling him to stop, as if they thought maybe he would change his mind and turn around if only they suggested it loudly enough.
Ahead of him, the main building was getting closer. He could see the weak light sources in there, the green phosphorescent EXIT signs telling him he was on the right track, and he picked up the pace—
The glass doors into the hall could not be seen in the darkness, but they could be felt. The pain was so intense that he was convinced at first that he’d been shot. He’d been sprinting for what seemed like safety, and in the darkness the plate-glass doors had been completely invisible, with the motors that should’ve slid them from his path as dead as everything else.
He felt his whole body scream in pain, heard his neck crick, and his face and his ribs and a metallic taste in his mouth; maybe this was what dying felt like… It took him only a second to realise that he must be still alive. Otherwise he wouldn’t have felt the pain redouble as they grabbed him from behind. First as the stranger’s hand grabbed his, then as he pushed William’s forearm up between his shoulder blades, and then again as his face and chest slammed up against the glass for a second time and were held there.
Ahead lay the dark main hall of the station, on the far side of the door. Behind him were three invisible men in discreet clothing, and in between he could feel his face squashed ever flatter against the glass as if to yield a vacuum-packed version of himself. And whatever he might’ve been expecting by the airport express at precisely four o’clock, it sure as hell wasn’t this.
Sandberg had allowed himself to hope. Now the hope was gone. Slowly, he stopped resisting.
Christina Sandberg had got as far as the bridge over to Kungsholmen before she stopped for the first time.
From there, the whole of Stockholm should have been visible, in all directions. The city centre with Södermalm as the backdrop. The TV masts in Nacka that should’ve been pulsing with sharp, white flashes behind the silhouettes of hotels and office blocks. They weren’t though. Wherever she looked she could see nothing but darkness. Kungsholmen, Karlberg, Solna, Vasastan, invisible, lost in a dense, impenetrable night.
For a second, she felt her mind wander. From out of nowhere came the thoughts of her, the guilt and the sorrow that always waited just around the corner. She would be out there somewhere, too, she who had turned her back on them, betrayed them, and, to be honest, who had helped force her and William apart. That kind of thinking was forbidden, yet she couldn’t help it. It was impossible not to lay some of the blame onto her, and the mere thought of doing so spread a new layer of guilt on top of all the others, set the anxiety spinning like a child pushing a roundabout in the playground and not stopping until it’s going way too fast.
She was out there somewhere. In all likelihood so was he, always on the move, running from whatever it was that kept him moving, himself or his conscience, or maybe from Christina, and–fuck it. She was the news editor at one of Sweden’s largest tabloid newspapers, and to stand here feeling sorry for yourself gets nothing done.
All around, the city lay in darkness. She set off again, over the bridge, then on between the buildings. This, she reminded herself, was big news.
The girl who was about to die but didn’t know it yet was struggling against two different things at once.
First was the struggle against her own body, this body that couldn’t quite manage to hold her upright, or move as fast as she wanted. The one that had aged so grossly–though it was only twenty years old–that it made people recoil, as much as she wished they wouldn’t. This body that right now was elbowing its way through the vast and impenetrable darkness of the metro station under Hötorget’s marketplace.
Then there was the struggle against the tide of pumping panic. What the fuck had she done?
Everything was in darkness. Everywhere, invisible puffer jackets seemed to be heading at random in all directions, the only things visible being the EXIT signs, glowing in feeble pale green along the walls. How could all this have been her fault?
She shouldn’t even have been here. She should have stayed home–whatever home meant–home where she could keep out of people’s way and live her own so-called life. The amusement park had closed for the winter in September, so if you managed to avoid the security guards and the builders, if you knew the hideouts no one bothered to check, you could sort yourself a place to live for six months–nicely enclosed, and under a roof and with heating. What more could you want?
Home, she could have replied, if anyone had asked, was on the exclusive island of Djurgården. Quite the hotspot.
No one asked though.
Home was where she’d loved to be as a kid, where lamps had flashed their gaudy colours, where cars rattled along the roller coasters and voices screamed with happiness–and from time to time one of the voices had been her own.
Now the lamps were off. Tarpaulins were stretched over the rails and over the metal and fibreglass cars. It was like the aftermath of a party when everyone’s gone home. And in the middle of all that, behind thin wooden walls and corrugated iron, was her home. Cold, damp, insecure–and yet it still made her proud in a way she couldn’t quite explain. She had her own life–a shitty life, okay, but it was her shitty life and not theirs, and that was all that mattered.
At least that’s how she’d used to feel. But things change. Now she was
He hadn’t made his final decision until two days before. He had booked trips to various destinations, rebooked, and then collected tickets he had no intention of using. Quite deliberately, he had left everything open until the very last minute, and yet he couldn’t shake the feeling that someone must have known exactly what he was thinking. Of course no one could–that was impossible, he of all people should know–but even so, the thought sent a chilling anxiety through him.
He’d got rid of the greying, tufty beard. He’d trimmed his hairline to make it look like he was receding, even though he wasn’t. His eyebrows, which over the years had converged into a single, long and bushy skein, had been plucked and tweaked into two thin lines. For the first time in his life he had spent hours standing in front of a mirror, concentrating on his own face. By the time he was finished he wasn’t sure if he’d be able to pick himself out in a crowd.
He’d rented a year-old BMW in a garage that could, at best, be described as dubious. He had paid in cash without proving his identity, and no one could have seen him, no one could know where he had gone. He was safe.
And yet, here he was. Sitting in the dry silence of the car, hearing nothing but the thud of his own heart, and the rhythm of rain against the roof.
Maybe he should’ve known something was up.
Perhaps not as soon as the level-crossing barriers blocked the road in front of him, not then, even if he’d felt a twinge of fear in his belly as he rounded the long bend. As the red-and-yellow pole reached across the road in front of him, right there in the darkness, the bell hammering peevishly alongside.
He had stopped with the blinking red eye of the crossing gate just in front of him, one lone car in the darkness. Waited a minute, maybe two. No trains passed, yet the bell stopped.
That brought another wave of anxiety. The silence as the clanking died out, the mechanical movement as the barriers rose, leaving just him and the level crossing, strangers in the silent winter night, deep in rural Skåne. All he could see was the darkness and the wide expanse of field on the far side of the tracks. Empty slabs of rock-hard clay seemed to go on for ever until they disappeared into the grey-white mist, red dots glared at him from high in the air where lonely turbine blades rotated out of sight.
He had forced himself to snap out of it. There was nothing to be afraid of. The train must have passed before he arrived, or maybe it had broken down or got stuck at the points somewhere–it didn’t matter. What mattered was he needed to get going. He was in a foreign country, with a long trip ahead of him, and no time to lose.
He’d started the engine and gently rolled up and over the tracks. And that’s when everything had happened.
The world around him had gone black. The whole car switched off at a stroke: the headlights that should have illuminated the road ahead, the rear lights that should have cast a faint red glow behind the sloping rear windscreen, and above all–the engine.
He turned the key in the ignition to restart it. Nothing. Once more, and then again, and he heard himself bark Start for fuck’s sake, slamming his hands against the wheel.
The moment he grabbed the door handle was the moment he realised what in fact he knew already: that no matter how much he heaved and strained, the doors would stay closed and locked, and nothing was going to change that. It was the same with the windows: however hard he pushed, however much he stabbed at the buttons in the door panel, no matter how he struggled, the car was going to stay just as locked and dark and dead.
It was then that the barriers started coming down again. It was then that he heard the hissing, and it was then that he knew.
He was lying stretched across both front seats when he caught the first glimpse of the lights. He stamped his soles against the window, his pulse raging inside his eardrums, the taste of terror and iron and blood even in the few seconds left until it would happen.
He could see the glass shudder under his soles but not give way, the approaching headlights flooding the dirty surface, and he closed his eyes and all he could hear were the sounds. The wailing thrill from the rails beneath him. The heartbeats thick in his mouth.
And then the horn as the train driver spotted the blacked-out car, a relentless honking that would be the last thing he ever heard, the grating scrape of iron biting into iron, trying to brake when it was already too late.
The days that change your life for ever start off like all the others.
No one wakes you saying today might be a bit tough, so have another piece of toast, take your time and enjoy your coffee, because it will be a while before you learn to enjoy life again. There’s no one putting an arm around you, preparing you for what’s about to happen. Everything is as normal, right up until the point where it no longer is.
As the afternoon gloom descended over Stockholm on Monday the third of December, no one knew that the threat level in the country had just been raised to ‘elevated’. No one knew that inside the Swedish Armed Forces’ great brick-built headquarters on Lidingövägen, men and women with uniforms and name badges were sitting waiting for the worst to happen.
And no one knew that the massive power cut that was about to hit at six minutes past four was just the start of something much bigger.
The men sitting inside the white van up on Klarabergsviadukten, the road bridge over Stockholm’s Central Station, had no idea what they were waiting for. Or rather, who. They didn’t know what he was going to do, who he was going to meet, how it was all going to look. Nor did they know why, which was of course what worried them most.
Inside the van’s cramped loadspace, the silence was absolute. From the outside, it looked like any other anonymous delivery vehicle. Presumably, it had seemed spacious and generously proportioned when they bought it. After that, they seemed to have got carried away. Someone had given free rein to a team of technicians with an extravagant budget, and now the van was so full of screens and electronics that it felt less like a workplace and more like a boy’s bedroom full of expensive kit.
A cubic metre’s worth of space nearest the driver’s cab had been consigned to computers and other electronic gizmos that probably carried out important tasks, but appeared not to do much more than flash red and green. Along one side hung two banks of flat screens, and behind a long thin desk below the screens sat four grown men, which was at least two too many.
The two who sat at the keyboards were of markedly different ages but unfortunately shared a similar BMI. Immediately behind them were the two men in charge: the one who the others called Lassie when he was out of earshot, and the one called Velander, an IT expert in civilian clothes, of completely indeterminable age, with glasses that seemed to get constantly steamed up in the heat inside. They stood hunched against the roof, shoulder to shoulder, eyes glued to the screens and the fuzzy grey CCTV images being relayed from within the station.
It was the older man who spotted him first, two minutes ahead of schedule.
‘What the fuck are you doing here?’
His voice was no louder than a whisper, but everyone heard, and once they’d spotted the subject they saw it too.
It might have been something about his movements–the jerky gait, perhaps–or maybe something else. Whatever it was, a burst of concentration filled the tiny space, the same sudden alertness that comes when you catch sight of an ex in the corner of your eye during the interval at the theatre, someone you haven’t seen for years but who stands out from the crowd and holds your gaze.
He’d changed.
He was trotting, rather than running, his hair untidy in the breeze, as though he’d just got up–although it was late afternoon. This from a man who’d always been so well dressed, so well coordinated. Who’d been sharp, in good shape, who no one quite believed when he told them he’d turned fifty–several times, as had been the standing joke these last three birthdays. Last time was so much fun I thought I’d turn fifty again this year.
It was as though, in the space of just three months, age had suddenly caught up with him. He looked tired, broken, with his overcoat hanging as if it had just been thrown over him and his jeans soaked with slush up to the knees. As he jostled through the crowds and across the blue-grey marble floor, a blue-grey mac in a sea of blue-grey passengers, he did so with movements that were forced and spasmodic, full of a buzzing intensity.
He kept appearing and disappearing as he moved between cameras, rushing onto the vaulted concourse, past the great frescoes and over towards the new escalators at the far end.
Surely it wasn’t him they were waiting for? But if it wasn’t, what was he doing there, now?
‘What do we do?’ asked the one with the steamed-up glasses.
‘We wait,’ said the one whose name wasn’t Lassie.
And then, for two long minutes, not a word from anyone inside the van.
It had been only seven minutes to four when the bright yellow taxi stopped on Vasagatan outside Stockholm’s main station to drop William Sandberg off into the slushy afternoon gloom that was Monday the third of December.
Thick layers of dark grey cloud hung where the sky should have been, the air so thick with mist that the noise of the traffic and all the roadworks seemed to meld into a single indistinct clamour. Construction lights and Christmas illuminations struggled gamely to overcome the murk, and the scaffolding and tarpaulins that clung to the surrounding buildings gave the impression that someone had clad the whole city in an orthodontic brace to reset it.
He was tired today, just like yesterday, and the day before that. If he’d given it any thought he would probably have noticed that he was hungry too, but if there was one thing he’d managed to cut out it was thinking of stuff like that. He’d stopped when he realised that his feelings were consuming him, literally eating him up: they were gnawing him from the inside with big, brutish bites, and now what was left of what was once William Sandberg was at least ten kilos lighter.
It’s the method the tabloids forget, he used to say. Find yourself something really worth worrying about.
He picked his way through the heavy, wet snow outside the main entrance, following it into the departure hall, where it turned to a cinnamon-brown mush, and where the fusty smell of dirt and damp clothes mixed with the aroma of takeaway lattes and people on their way home.
William Sandberg, though, noticed none of it. Not the smell, not the flush of his face as the wind gave way to the still warmth indoors, or the irritated elbows that jerked out in frustration as he pushed his way through the crowd towards the northern exit.
It had been less than two weeks since that first email, and in precisely seven minutes’ time he’d be in position, on the Arlanda Airport Express platform.
Precisely, because that’s what it had said.
All he felt was hope–and fear–they came in tandem.
He’d been waiting by the bright yellow ticket machine for at least five minutes before he realised that he’d been looking for the wrong thing.
The platforms had been full of businessmen with briefcases, people with blank looks who seemed to be hibernating inside their own heads, waiting for a train to take them to somewhere they didn’t want to go. But William had been looking for something else: faces that didn’t want to be seen, people in dirty coats, with heavy plastic bags and loop after loop of damp scarves muffling their restless, freezing eyes. The kind who hid themselves behind bulky clothes, layers protecting them from both the biting cold and any unwanted contact with the rest of the world.
Maybe, he’d allowed himself to think–maybe one of them had finally got in touch. Someone, at last, with something to tell him, who’d made contact to reveal an address or even point the way, anything at all that would help him along.
Sandberg had hoped. And if only he hadn’t, he probably would have seen the man on the other platform much sooner.
He was well over thirty. He had a headset in one ear, a studied vacant look despite being perfectly alert, and clothes so painfully ordinary that once you’d noticed him he stuck out like a child trying to hide behind a curtain.
His suit was silver grey. On top of it he wore a short overcoat that was so tightly buttoned at the waist that the bottom of his suit jacket poked out like a short pleated skirt, and below his trousers sat a pair of clumpy, anonymous trainers. All in all, it was a look that screamed discreet! as loud as it possibly could.
What caught William’s eye, though, was the phone call. It seemed to contain more silence than talk. There were long periods when the thin wire just hung from his ear with nothing to do, and when the man eventually did open his mouth it was for single short interjections. That was it. In between he stood waiting impatiently, head darting distractedly from side to side looking at nothing in particular.
Slowly, William felt himself moving to a state of readiness.
It was already five past four by the time the Arlanda train rolled in to the platform. The driver’s cab stopped by the buffers just in front of him, the train’s hundreds of yellow tons puffing and dripping as the passengers wove their way past each other to board or alight. Gradually the swathes of people formed streams in various directions–to the main hall, the taxi ranks, other platforms–and gradually too it emerged that there were some who weren’t going anywhere at all.
The discreet man with the headset, for one–and then someone else. He stood on the same side of the tracks as William, further down the platform, and he too was wearing a headset, sporting the same bland clothing, and having the same kind of conversation, short, sharp responses into the mic: they were talking to each other.
Something was wrong. William had been instructed to be in situ at precisely four p.m., and the word ‘precisely’ bothered him, because five minutes had passed and no one had shown up–no one, but for the two with the headsets. Were they waiting for the same person as he was? Or worse still–waiting for him?
He looked around. The crowds along the platform had slowly thinned out, and everyone not boarding was heading somewhere else. William had noticed the men with the headsets because they weren’t doing either, and now he was making the same mistake.
He hesitated for two seconds before making up his mind. The meeting, as far as he was concerned, was cancelled. He looked for a gap in the stream of passengers, sidled in and turned to follow the crowd towards the station hall.
He managed a single step.
‘Amberlangs?’
The man blocking William’s path had a chest so broad that it might have looked funny in another situation. Now, though, it was too close for comfort. He was wearing the day’s third improbably discreet outfit–maybe they’d bargained for a discount–and now he stood massively still, with his legs apart and arms ready at his sides. But ready for what?
‘And you are?’
In his mind, he bit his tongue as he was saying it. Shouldn’t he be playing dumb?
‘Nice and calm,’ the man replied. Northern accent, a cold, curt order. ‘You come with us and nothing will happen to you.’
Us? Who were they?
‘When you say “happen”,’ William said, to buy some time. ‘Would you care to elaborate on that?’
When the Northerner slid his jacket to the side, the weapon across his chest was all the elaboration William needed.
The days that change your life for ever start off like all the others. Everything normal, right up until the point when it isn’t.
When the power went, at six minutes past four, leaving vast tracts of Sweden in total darkness, it was just like any other day. A damp, cold afternoon in the no-man’s-land between seasons, neither autumn nor winter. At Stockholm Central Station the lights went off, the waiting locomotives lost power and lapsed into silence, screens and signs went dark. At hospitals and airports, emergency generators swung into action, on the roads and rails the lights and the signals disappeared, causing jams and confusion. It was irritating, for sure, and a bloody scandal too–with people getting stuck in lifts or on trains with no signal and what kind of society do we live in anyway. But for most people, that was all it was.
For William Sandberg, on the other hand, it was the start of an evening that would see his life lose its meaning.
For the men in the white van up on Klarabergsviadukten, it was confirmation that things were getting worse.
It hit the city centre first.
In the metro tunnels, the lights and the motors died at once. Darkness enveloped carriage after carriage, and passengers toppled en masse as the automatic brakes slammed on, forcing the trains to a halt in a few dozen metres. Above ground the street lights and the advertising hoardings fell dark. Escalators stopped, espresso machines died in the middle of filling cups, swearing and frustration everywhere. In a matter of moments the darkness marched out in a widening circle, from one neighbourhood to the next, out from the city, through the peripheral concrete estates and further on across the country. At the centre lay Stockholm, like a pitch-black maze in the pitch-black afternoon.
Everything stood still. And in the middle of the junction between Sveavägen and Rådmansgatan sat Christina Sandberg in the back seat of a taxi.
Her driver had spent the first part of their journey from Sollentuna endangering both of their lives, sitting with his eyes fixed on his yellow monochrome display, frenetically tapping away at various codes in the hope of landing his next fare, whilst simultaneously displaying an impressive range of expletives every time a fellow motorist happened to distract him from it.
They had just turned off Birger Jarlsgatan when Christina thought to herself that maybe she had better put her belt on. The next minute, though, it was too late.
At first she didn’t grasp what was going on. It was as if they’d just entered a tunnel, but there were no tunnels on Rådmansgatan, and she looked up, out at what seemed to be a blacked-out version of her home town. No illuminated window displays, no Christmas decorations, no traffic lights, no visible lighting anywhere. That was the last thing she managed to discern before everything, suddenly and without warning, was replaced by blurred perpendicular lines.
It wasn’t the HGV that hit them, the one that came roaring from their left, whose driver must have interpreted the disappearing red light as the signals turned green. Say what you like about the world-class swearer in the front, but there was nothing wrong with his reflexes. He slammed on the brakes and spun the wheel in a single manoeuvre, flinging Christina across the back seat as she felt the car jolt and shudder across the slush beneath them, and maybe it was professionalism, maybe just good fortune, but whatever it was it gave the lorry room to sneak past them with just millimetres to spare.
But when the bus came at them from the opposite direction, they didn’t have a chance. It appeared behind the vanishing lorry, speeding flat out and straight ahead, and now there was no time to react. The collision with the taxi’s offside wing was like two pool balls smashing into each other, and Christina felt herself sailing along the leather seat, weightless and in slow motion, helplessly floating like a crash-test dummy in a blazer and immaculate make-up.
So there she was, sitting in the middle of the Sveavägen–Rådmansgatan junction, alive but dazed, squashed into one corner of the back seat and with a view of a bonnet with a heavy bus wedged across it like a huge red vice.
The silence was almost overwhelming. All she could hear was the sound of her own breath, blending with the breathing from the front seat, and the quiet static hum seeping out of the car stereo.
‘Are you okay?’ she asked.
She saw a nod, two shocked eyes in the rear-view mirror.
‘Are you?’
When she confirmed that she was, he mumbled something about terminating here and all change please and that she didn’t need to worry about the fare.
The first thing she noticed as she clambered out was the way the darkness seemed to stretch in all directions. The sky was black, below it the street lamps loomed invisible and dark, and then below them the leaden fronts of buildings spreading in all directions, disappearing into nothing.
One direction led towards the high-rises around Hötorget’s marketplace. The opposite direction was towards the tower of the Wenner-Gren Center. But none of it could be seen. The sole relief came from the cold, dimmed lights of the cars that had stopped around them, the fine drizzle drifting through the headlight beams and the odd driver still behind their wheel, face glowing faintly in the light from the dashboard.
Out of nowhere, she could feel the darkness closing in around her, her pulse racing for no reason. An almost paralysing terror, a wordless, exhilarating sensation that reality had ceased to operate: someone had flicked a switch on all the world, and from now on, this was how things were going to be.
She knew that feeling far too well, and shook it off. It was just a power cut, she told herself, someone had drilled through a cable somewhere or forgotten to calibrate a fuse. There was no reason at all to release a load of pent-up thoughts that weren’t going to lead anywhere.
Instead, she looked around her and tried to turn her thoughts somewhere else. A quick assessment of the news value: Central Stockholm Plunged into Darkness. Wasn’t that your headline right there?
Of course it was, and she pulled out her phone to ring the news desk, then stopped as the display lit up.
No signal.
She braced herself as the fears came back at her, focused even harder on the job. This, she thought to herself, was more than a headline. This was a massive story. If the inhabitants of Sweden’s capital were stuck without electricity, with no means of calling for help, and if it was also going to stay this way for a while… This was a security issue. This was about society as a whole. That made it worth whole tanks of ink.
Christina Sandberg looked around her. She raised her phone above her head, fired off a few shots with the camera pointing straight at the darkness, the junction with all the stationary cars, crumpled bodywork strewn around, the odd motorist using the light from their phones to inspect the damage.
She’d already composed the first few lines by the time she passed Tegnérlunden’s open space on her way to her office on the island of Kungsholmen.
Across the platforms and trackbeds at Stockholm Central Station, darkness fell like a cupped hand. Pupils that had accustomed themselves to the artificial light struggled to see again, and at once all points of reference disappeared–contours, colours, everything.
Hearing, though, was a different matter, and what William could hear was the cocking of a gun.
Just a few inches in front of him, the Northerner had raised his weapon, and William closed his eyes in a pointless reflex, utterly sure that he was about to die.
But in that case, what did he have to lose? The darkness was his saviour, he told himself, and flung himself headlong into the crowd, not knowing who he fled from, or why, but determined to try.
He raced towards the station building, his arms like snowploughs, dislodging anyone in his path, determined that if he could just get into the big hall he’d be able to melt into the crowd and get away. He could hear footsteps coming after him, voices calling him to stop, as if they thought maybe he would change his mind and turn around if only they suggested it loudly enough.
Ahead of him, the main building was getting closer. He could see the weak light sources in there, the green phosphorescent EXIT signs telling him he was on the right track, and he picked up the pace—
The glass doors into the hall could not be seen in the darkness, but they could be felt. The pain was so intense that he was convinced at first that he’d been shot. He’d been sprinting for what seemed like safety, and in the darkness the plate-glass doors had been completely invisible, with the motors that should’ve slid them from his path as dead as everything else.
He felt his whole body scream in pain, heard his neck crick, and his face and his ribs and a metallic taste in his mouth; maybe this was what dying felt like… It took him only a second to realise that he must be still alive. Otherwise he wouldn’t have felt the pain redouble as they grabbed him from behind. First as the stranger’s hand grabbed his, then as he pushed William’s forearm up between his shoulder blades, and then again as his face and chest slammed up against the glass for a second time and were held there.
Ahead lay the dark main hall of the station, on the far side of the door. Behind him were three invisible men in discreet clothing, and in between he could feel his face squashed ever flatter against the glass as if to yield a vacuum-packed version of himself. And whatever he might’ve been expecting by the airport express at precisely four o’clock, it sure as hell wasn’t this.
Sandberg had allowed himself to hope. Now the hope was gone. Slowly, he stopped resisting.
Christina Sandberg had got as far as the bridge over to Kungsholmen before she stopped for the first time.
From there, the whole of Stockholm should have been visible, in all directions. The city centre with Södermalm as the backdrop. The TV masts in Nacka that should’ve been pulsing with sharp, white flashes behind the silhouettes of hotels and office blocks. They weren’t though. Wherever she looked she could see nothing but darkness. Kungsholmen, Karlberg, Solna, Vasastan, invisible, lost in a dense, impenetrable night.
For a second, she felt her mind wander. From out of nowhere came the thoughts of her, the guilt and the sorrow that always waited just around the corner. She would be out there somewhere, too, she who had turned her back on them, betrayed them, and, to be honest, who had helped force her and William apart. That kind of thinking was forbidden, yet she couldn’t help it. It was impossible not to lay some of the blame onto her, and the mere thought of doing so spread a new layer of guilt on top of all the others, set the anxiety spinning like a child pushing a roundabout in the playground and not stopping until it’s going way too fast.
She was out there somewhere. In all likelihood so was he, always on the move, running from whatever it was that kept him moving, himself or his conscience, or maybe from Christina, and–fuck it. She was the news editor at one of Sweden’s largest tabloid newspapers, and to stand here feeling sorry for yourself gets nothing done.
All around, the city lay in darkness. She set off again, over the bridge, then on between the buildings. This, she reminded herself, was big news.
The girl who was about to die but didn’t know it yet was struggling against two different things at once.
First was the struggle against her own body, this body that couldn’t quite manage to hold her upright, or move as fast as she wanted. The one that had aged so grossly–though it was only twenty years old–that it made people recoil, as much as she wished they wouldn’t. This body that right now was elbowing its way through the vast and impenetrable darkness of the metro station under Hötorget’s marketplace.
Then there was the struggle against the tide of pumping panic. What the fuck had she done?
Everything was in darkness. Everywhere, invisible puffer jackets seemed to be heading at random in all directions, the only things visible being the EXIT signs, glowing in feeble pale green along the walls. How could all this have been her fault?
She shouldn’t even have been here. She should have stayed home–whatever home meant–home where she could keep out of people’s way and live her own so-called life. The amusement park had closed for the winter in September, so if you managed to avoid the security guards and the builders, if you knew the hideouts no one bothered to check, you could sort yourself a place to live for six months–nicely enclosed, and under a roof and with heating. What more could you want?
Home, she could have replied, if anyone had asked, was on the exclusive island of Djurgården. Quite the hotspot.
No one asked though.
Home was where she’d loved to be as a kid, where lamps had flashed their gaudy colours, where cars rattled along the roller coasters and voices screamed with happiness–and from time to time one of the voices had been her own.
Now the lamps were off. Tarpaulins were stretched over the rails and over the metal and fibreglass cars. It was like the aftermath of a party when everyone’s gone home. And in the middle of all that, behind thin wooden walls and corrugated iron, was her home. Cold, damp, insecure–and yet it still made her proud in a way she couldn’t quite explain. She had her own life–a shitty life, okay, but it was her shitty life and not theirs, and that was all that mattered.
At least that’s how she’d used to feel. But things change. Now she was
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Acts of Vanishing
Fredrik T. Olsson
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