The Nightmare

36

The parking lot in front of Saint Göran’s Hospital is hot and the air is thick and muggy.

Inside the meditation room, Erixson easily maneuvers his wheelchair around what has truly been converted into a base of operations. Erixson has accumulated three phones, which now all ring at once.

Joona carries in the computer and puts it on a chair. Johan Jönson is already there. He looks to be about twenty-five years old. He wears an ill-fitting black tracksuit, has a shaved head and thick eyebrows that grow straight across his face. He comes up to Joona shyly. He shrugs off the shoulder strap of his red computer bag, and shakes Joona’s hand.

“Ei saa piettää,” he says, while he pulls out a thin laptop. Erixson pours some Fanta from his thermos into small, unbleached paper cups.

“Usually I put the hard disk in the freezer for a few hours if it’s wobbly,” Johan says. “Then I plug in an ATA/SATA contact. Everyone has a different method. I have a pal over at Ibas who uses RDR and he doesn’t even meet his clients in person-he just sends all the shit over an encrypted phone line. Usually you can save most stuff, but I don’t want to just get most of it-I want it all! That’s my way, getting each and every crumb, and then you need a program like Hanger 18…”

Johan Jönson throws his head back and pretends to laugh like a mad scientist: “MWA-HA-HAH!”

“I’ve written it myself,” he continues. “It works like a digital vacuum cleaner. It picks up everything and arranges it according to time down to every microsecond.”

He sits down on the altar rail and connects the two computers. His own computer clicks faintly. Typing commands at a furious pace, he studies his screen, scrolls down, reads some more, and types in a new set.

“Is this going to take a while?” Joona asks after a few minutes.

“Who knows?” Johan replies. “Not more than a month.”

Johan swears to himself and writes a new command and then observes the blinking numbers.

“I’m just joking,” he says after a while.

“I realized that.”

“In about fifteen minutes we’ll know how much can be retrieved,” Johan continues. He looks down at the piece of paper where Joona has written the time and date for Björn Almskog’s café visit.

“The history is usually erased in batches, which can be difficult…”

Fragments of old graphics pass over the sun-bleached screen. Johan shoves a piece of snuff underneath his lip without paying any attention to it. He wipes his hands on his pants and waits with half his attention on the screen.

“They’ve done a good job cleaning this one,” he says. “But you can’t erase everything. There are no secrets anymore… Hanger 18 finds places no one knows exist.”

Johan’s computer begins to beep and he writes something down as he reads through a long table of numbers. He writes something else and the beeping stops at once.

“What’s that?” Joona asks.

“Not much. It’s just hard to get through all the modern firewalls, sandboxes, and faked virus protection. It’s amazing that a computer can even work at all with all these preventive measures.”

Johan shakes his head and licks a bit of snuff away from his upper lip.

“I’ve never even had one antivirus program and-hey, look out.” He interrupts his own lecture.

Joona comes closer to look over Johan’s shoulder.

“What do we have here? What do we have here?” Johan says in a singsong voice.

He leans back and rubs his neck as he starts writing with his other hand. He presses ENTER and smiles to himself.

“Here we are.”

Joona and Erixson stare at the screen.

“Just give me a second… this is not easy. It’s coming out in small bits and fragments.”

Johan hides the screen with his hand and waits. Slowly letters and pieces of graphics appear.

“Look here, the door’s opening… now we’ll be able to see what Björn Almskog was up to.”

Erixson puts the brakes on his wheelchair and leans far forward so he can see the screen.

“Damn it all, this is just a few dashes.”

“Look in the corner.”

“Okay. He’s used Windows,” Erixson says. “Very original.”

“Hotmail,” Joona says.

“Logging in,” says Johan Jönson.

“Now things are getting interesting,” says Erixson.

“Can you see a name?” Joona asks.

“It doesn’t work like that; you can only move through time,” Johan says as he scrolls down.

“What’s that?” Joona points.

“Now we’re in the folder for sent mail.”

“Did he send something?”

On the screen there are graphic fragments of advertisements for cheap trips to Milano, New Y k, Lo dn, P ris. Farthest down in the corner, a light gray tiny number, a time: 07:44:42 a.m.

“Here we have something,” says Johan Jönson.

Other fragments are appearing on his screen:

rec I contact ith

“Ads to connect with people.” Erixson grins. “I’ve tried those, and they never work…”

He falls silent at once. Johan has carefully scrolled past incomprehensible graphic garbage and stops. He pushes back from his machine with a big grin.

Joona takes his spot and peers at the monitor to read what’s at the center of the screen:

Carl Palmcr

Ck ph graf. Rec I contact withi

Joona feels hair rising on the back of his neck. Palmcrona, he thinks again and again as he writes down what he sees on the screen. He tries to think clearly and breathe calmly. The small stab of an oncoming migraine comes and then goes.

Erixson stares at the screen and swears to himself.

“Are you absolutely sure Björn Almskog wrote this?” Joona asks.

“No doubt about it,” replies Johan Jönson.

“Absolutely sure?”

“If he was at this computer at this point in time, he wrote this e-mail.”

“So it is definitely from him,” Joona tells himself, wanting to make sure, but his thoughts already zoom away. “What the fuck,” Erixson whispers.

Johan Jönson scans the address field fragments scattered over the screen: “crona@isp.se.” He drinks Fanta straight out of the thermos. Erixson leans back into his wheelchair and closes his eyes for a moment.

“Palmcrona,” murmurs Joona again, his voice tense in concentration.

“This is fucking crazy,” Erixson says. “What the hell does Carl Palmcrona have to do with all this?”

Joona silently walks out the door, concentrating on his thoughts and leaving his colleagues behind. He walks quickly down the stairs and out of the hospital into strong sunshine. He hurries across the parking lot to his black car.