Borderline Page 3

  ‘Annika …’ Jimmy Halenius said, trying to stand in her way.

  She slapped him across the face. ‘This is your fault,’ she said.

  And then she left the Frog conference room.

  Chapter 2

  The truck was lurching along slowly. There were no roads where we were going. The wheels bounced over lumps of rock and caught in holes. Plants scraped the chassis, branches brushed the truck’s covered sides, the engine roared and the gears shrieked. My tongue was swollen, and stuck to the roof of my mouth. We hadn’t had anything to drink since that morning. Hunger had subsided to a rumbling ache, and dizziness had taken over. I hoped that the others’ sense of smell had stopped working at the same time as mine – or, at least, that Catherine’s had.

  Sébastien Magurie, the Frenchman, had finally shut up. His nasal whining had made me wish they’d get rid of him as well. (No, no – what am I saying? I didn’t mean that. Definitely not. But I’d found him hard to deal with before this had happened. But enough about that.)

  On the other hand, I admired the Spaniard, Alvaro. He had kept his cool throughout, and hadn’t said anything unless he was spoken to. He was lying at the back of the truck, where the shaking and bouncing were worst, but hadn’t uttered a word of complaint.

  To begin with I tried to keep track of which direction they were taking us. The sun was at its zenith when we were stopped, possibly slightly to the west, and at the start we were driven south (I think, which was good, because it meant we were still in Kenya, and Kenya is a functioning state, with maps and infrastructure and mobile phones), but after a few hours I think we turned east (which was nowhere near as good: it meant we were somewhere in southern Somalia, part of the country that had been in a state of total collapse and anarchy for the past twenty years since civil war had broken out). But today I was pretty sure we were heading north, then west, which ought to mean that we were back more or less where we had started. I realized this wasn’t very likely, but I had no way of knowing.

  The first thing they did was remove our watches and mobile phones, but it had now been dark for a while, which meant it was something like thirty hours since we’d been abducted. Someone must have sounded the alarm. After all, we were an official delegation, so help should be on the way.

  I worked out that it must be about six o’clock in the evening in Stockholm – Kenya is two hours ahead of Sweden. Annika must have been told by now, and was probably at home with the children.

  Catherine was lying against me. She had stopped sobbing, and her cheek was pressed against my chest. I knew she wasn’t asleep. My hands were tied behind my back – they’d been numb for several hours. The men had used those narrow strips of plastic with a ridged underside that could be tightened but never undone – cable ties, I think they’re called. They cut into your skin. How important was blood circulation to your hands and feet? How long could you manage without it? Were we going to be left with lasting damage?

  Then the truck hit a particularly vicious hole and my head collided with Catherine’s. The truck stopped at a severe angle and I found myself pressed up against the German clerk’s generous frame, as Catherine slipped down towards my lap. I could feel a bump growing on my forehead. Doors opened, and the angle of the vehicle’s lean intensfied. The men were yelling – it sounded as if they were arguing. After a while (five minutes? A quarter of an hour?) they fell silent.

  The temperature was dropping.

  Catherine started to cry again.

  ‘Can anyone reach anything sharp?’ Alvaro said quietly, from the back of the truck.

  Of course. The cable ties.

  ‘This is totally unacceptable,’ the Frenchman, Magurie, said.

  ‘Feel around you for a protruding part of the truck,’ the Spaniard said.

  I tried to feel along the floor of the truck with my fingers, but Catherine was lying on top of me, the German was pressed up against me, and my fingers had lost their agility. A moment later we heard a diesel engine approaching.

  It stopped next to the truck and some men got out. I heard a clatter of metal and angry voices. The canvas roof of the truck was pulled open.

  * * *

  Anders Schyman was sitting in his glass box looking out over the newsroom. He preferred to think of the open-plan office as the newsroom, even if, these days, it also contained Marketing, sales analysts and the IT department.

  It had been a thin day for news. No major disturbances in the Arab world, no earthquakes, no politicians or reality-TV stars making fools of themselves. They could hardly lead again tomorrow with the chaos caused by the weather. Yesterday they had warned of chaos, today they had reported on the chaos, and Anders Schyman knew his readers (or, rather, he trusted the sales analysts). They’d have to lead with something other than the snowstorm, and for the time being they were considering an emergency solution. Patrik, still annoyed that his story about Ikea’s collapsing roof hadn’t worked, had found something on an American website about a woman with something called ‘alien hand syndrome’. After an operation, the two halves of sixty-year-old Harriet’s brain had refused to co-operate, each side refusing to allow the other to dominate. One consequence was that some of her limbs no longer obeyed orders from her brain. Among other things, poor Harriet was regularly attacked by her right hand, as if it were controlled by some extra-terrestrial force (hence the name of the condition). It could hit or scratch her, give her money away or undress her, and she was unable to stop it.

  Anders Schyman sighed. Here he sat, aware of a global exclusive, while his staff out in the newsroom were putting together a front page about alien hand syndrome.

  He had certainly considered ignoring the Justice Ministry’s plea for secrecy and publishing the story about the missing EU delegation anyway, but a residual measure of inherited ethics from his time at Sweden’s national broadcaster had stopped him. And, to a certain extent, consideration of Annika. The blogosphere’s conspiracy theories about how the media protected their own were wildly exaggerated, and the reverse was usually the case (everyone had an unhealthy obsession with their peers and consequently went overboard on what other journalists said and did), but he could still have a modicum of common human decency. And, besides, the story was hardly going to run away from them. So far, only those most closely concerned had been informed of events, and there were no journalists among them – he had been given assurances about that.

  His main concern was what this would do to Annika – and what he would do with her. He got up and went to stand by the door, where his breath fogged the glass.

  It was a new age out there. There was no longer any room for reporters who did in-depth investigative stories. What was needed were multimedia producers who could come up with filmed items for television, write short online updates and maybe put together an article some time in the evening. Annika belonged to a dying breed, at least on the Evening Post. There were no resources to cover complex legal cases or investigate complicated criminal networks, the sort of things Annika was predisposed towards. He knew she regarded having to work on Patrik’s wacky ideas as a form of punishment, but Schyman couldn’t carry on making a distinction between her and the others for ever. He couldn’t afford to keep her in Washington or slap Patrik down every time he came up with one of his daft ideas. The Evening Post was still the second largest newspaper in Sweden, and if they were ever going to beat their main rival they needed to think more broadly, more imaginatively.

  He needed Patrik far more than he needed Annika.

  He turned away from the glass door and walked restlessly around his little office.

  It wasn’t as if she’d done a bad job as a foreign correspondent – far from it. For instance, she’d covered the murder of the Swedish ambassador to the USA a year or so ago in an exemplary fashion. And getting back together with her husband seemed to have done her good. She’d never been a bundle of happiness and contentment, but the year she had spent separated from Thomas hadn’t been much fun for anyone around h
er.

  Schyman didn’t want to think of how she might react if anything happened to Thomas. He was aware that he was thinking very coldly, almost callously, but the Evening Post was no care home. If Thomas didn’t come back, the only option would probably be to lay her off with a hefty redundancy payment, then hope that the mental-health services and her own social network could handle the fallout.

  He sighed again.

  Alien hand syndrome.

  For Heaven’s sake.

  * * *

  ‘When’s Daddy coming home?’

  They’ve got a sixth sense, Annika thought, stroking her daughter’s hair. ‘He’s working in Africa, you know that,’ she said, tucking Ellen into her bed.

  ‘I know, but when’s he coming home?’

  ‘On Monday,’ Kalle said irritably, from his bed. ‘You never remember anything.’

  When Annika had lived on her own with the children in the flat, Ellen and Kalle had had their own rooms. Annika had slept in the living room. That hadn’t worked when Thomas moved back in. Kalle had had to share Ellen’s room, which he had taken as a personal insult.

  She looked over to her son’s bed.

  Should she tell them? What could she say? The truth? With a bit of a positive spin?

  Daddy’s gone missing in Africa and probably won’t be home on Monday. In fact, he may never come home so you’ll be able to move back into your own room, Kalle. That’ll be nice, won’t it?

  Or lie, to be kind?

  Daddy thought it was so exciting working in Africa that he decided to stay on a bit longer. Maybe we could all go and visit him some time. How about that?

  Ellen hugged Poppy (new Poppy: as the original had gone up in flames when the house had burned down), curled up into a ball and closed her eyes. ‘Sleep tight,’ Annika said, switching off her daughter’s bedside lamp.

  The living room was in semi-darkness. The lamps left by the last tenant glowed warm and yellow in the window alcoves. The television was on with the volume turned down. It looked like Leif G. W. Persson was talking on Crimewatch, a programme she usually tried to see. The blonde woman he was working with said something, then a recording started to play. The two presenters were walking among kilometres of files and recorded interviews. It must be the Palme archive, she thought, picking up her old mobile. No missed calls or texts.

  She sat down on the sofa with the phone in her hand, and stared at the wall behind Persson. Schyman and a mobile number she didn’t recognize, presumably Halenius, had been calling her non-stop on her work mobile since she’d left the Frog conference room. In the end she had switched it off. Almost no one knew the number to her personal mobile, just Thomas and the school, her friend Anne Snapphane and a few others, and it lay in her hand like a dead fish.

  In spite of the gloom, all the colours seemed clearer than usual. She could feel her pulse beating.

  What should she do? Should she tell? Could she tell? Was there anyone she had to tell? Her mum? Thomas’s mum? Should she go to Africa to search for him? But who would look after the children if she did? No, she couldn’t call her mum. Could she?

  She rubbed her face with her palms.

  Barbro would be upset. She’d feel sorry for herself. Everything would be so difficult. The conversation would end with Annika trying to comfort her and apologizing for burdening her with all this worry. Always assuming she wasn’t drunk. If she was, she wouldn’t get any sense out of her at all. Either way, it wouldn’t be a good conversation, and that wasn’t because of Thomas or Africa.

  Barbro had never forgiven Annika for not coming home for her sister Birgitta’s wedding. Birgitta had married Steven (who was as Swedish as you could get, in spite of his name) towards the end of the American presidential campaign, and Annika had neither wanted nor been able to abandon her new job as correspondent to go to a party in Hälleforsnäs village hall. ‘This is the most important day in your sister’s life,’ her mum had snapped, from her flat in Tattarbacken.

  ‘Neither you nor Birgitta came to my wedding,’ Annika had countered.

  ‘Yes, but you got married in Korea!’ Uncomprehending indignation.

  ‘So? How come distances are always so much shorter for me than you?’

  She hadn’t spoken to Birgitta since the wedding. And not much before it, if she was honest. Not since she’d left home at eighteen.

  And she didn’t feel like calling Berit either. Admittedly, she’d keep the news quiet, but it didn’t feel right to burden a colleague with knowledge of the missing EU delegation.

  Obviously she ought to tell Thomas’s mother, Doris. But what could she say? Your son hasn’t answered his mobile for several days, but I wasn’t bothered at first because I thought he was off fucking some other woman?

  She got up from the sofa, still clutching her old mobile, and went out into the kitchen. A new electric Advent candelabrum, from Åhléns at Fridhemsplan, was shining weakly in the kitchen window. Kalle had chosen it. Ellen was in the middle of an angels phase and had been allowed to get three fridge magnets of little cupids instead. The plates with the remnants of that evening’s Indian takeaway were on the draining board; she switched on the light and began to load the dishwasher mechanically.

  There was comfort in those methodical gestures, turning on the tap, holding the brush, rinsing off the food with a circular motion, putting the brush back into the drainer, stacking the plates in the right part of the dishwasher.

  Without any warning she started to cry. She dropped the cutlery into the sink and sat on the kitchen floor as the hot water ran.

  She stayed like that for a long time.

  She was pathetic. Her husband was missing, and there was no one she could call or talk to. What was wrong with her?

  She got up, turned off the tap, blew her nose on a sheet of kitchen roll, and went into the living room with her mobile.

  No missed calls or texts.

  Annika sat down on the sofa. Why had she never managed to build up the sort of network Thomas had? Old football friends and schoolmates, some people he knew in Uppsala, a bunch from work and the other guys in his hockey team. Who did she have, apart from Anne Snapphane?

  They had worked together during Annika’s first summer at the Evening Post, but then Anne had moved into broadcasting. Over the years, their friendship had had its ups and downs. Annika’s time as Washington correspondent meant they hadn’t had much contact over the three years she was there, but they’d seen each other a bit more in recent months. They would meet for coffee on Saturday afternoons, maybe go to a museum on a Sunday.

  Annika found it relaxing and undemanding to hear about her friend’s escapades and high-flown plans. Anne was always on the point of a breakthrough. She was meant for big things, all of which would eventually culminate in her becoming a celebrated television presenter. She came up with new television formats every week, quizzes and chat shows; she was constantly checking out new possibilities for documentaries, and accumulated masses of research in the hope of finding problems to uncover in some investigative programme. Usually her ideas got no further than a blog entry or a cheery Facebook update (Anne wrote a popular blog that she called ‘The Wonderful Adventures of a TV Mum’, and had 4,357 friends on Facebook). As far as Annika was aware, she had never written more than half a page on any of her television pitches, and she never had time to meet any commissioning editors. She earned her living as a researcher for a production company that made reality shows.

  ‘Annika! God, it’s so weird that you’ve phoned. I was just thinking about you.’

  Annika shut her eyes. Someone cared after all.

  ‘Those brown Tecnica boots, do you need them this weekend?’

  ‘Thomas has disappeared,’ Annika managed, then started to sob helplessly. Tears ran down her mobile and she tried to wipe them away so it wouldn’t get waterlogged.

  ‘Fucking bastard,’ Anne said. ‘Why can’t he ever manage to keep his trousers zipped up? Who’s he after this time?’

  Ann
ika blinked, and stopped crying. ‘No,’ she said, ‘no, no, not like that …’

  ‘Annika,’ Anne said, ‘you don’t have to make excuses for him. You mustn’t take the blame for this. It isn’t your fault.’

  Annika took a deep breath. ‘You mustn’t say anything because the whole thing’s confidential for the time being. His delegation has gone missing, on the Somali border.’

  She had forgotten the name of the town.

  Stunned silence flowed down the line to her. Then Anne said, ‘A whole delegation? What the hell were they travelling in? A jumbo jet?’

  Annika blew her nose on the kitchen roll. ‘There were seven of them, in two cars. They disappeared yesterday. Their guard and interpreter have been found dead, shot in the head.’

  ‘Oh, Annika! Have they shot Thomas as well?’

  A little wailing sob rose from her stomach. ‘I don’t know!’

  ‘Christ, what are you going to do if he dies? And how are the children going to cope?’

  Annika rocked to and fro on the sofa, her arms wrapped tightly round herself.

  ‘Poor, poor Annika! Why does everything seem to happen to you? God, I feel so sorry for you. You poor thing …’

  It was nice that someone cared.

  ‘And poor Kalle – imagine him having to grow up without a father. Has Thomas got life insurance?’

  Annika stopped crying again. She was speechless now.

  ‘And Ellen’s still so little,’ Anne went on. ‘How old is she? Seven? Eight? She’ll hardly be able to remember him. Annika, what are you going to do?’

  ‘Life insurance?’

  ‘I don’t want to sound cynical, but you have to be practical at times like this. Go through all your papers and see where you stand. Do you want me to come over and help you?’

  Annika put her hand over her eyes. ‘Thanks, maybe tomorrow. I think I’m going to bed now. It’s been a tough day.’

  ‘God, of course, you poor thing, I do understand. Call as soon as you hear anything, okay?’

  Annika sat for a while on the sofa with the mobile in her hand. Leif G. W. Persson had gone home and the beautiful woman on the late news had replaced him. They were showing pictures of the chaos caused by the snow all over Sweden – stranded lorries, overworked tow companies, the roof of an indoor tennis court that had collapsed … She reached for the remote and turned up the volume. So much snow falling in November was unusual, but hardly unique, the woman was explaining. There had been similar events in Sweden in the 1960s and 1980s.