Black Noise (24 page)

Sitting in the window seat of row fifteen on the aeroplane, Mari leans back and breathes deeply. Now she can let go and just let everything be.

So much has happened in such a short time. They have been struggling to keep up.

When Lia returned from meeting with profiler, Holywell, Mari understood immediately what was ahead. They had to leave, to do what the police couldn’t.

Lia was afraid. Mari could see that. The others at the Studio could see it too.

Mari looks at Lia sitting next to her on British Airways flight 0065 to Nairobi. Lia isn’t afraid any more. In little more than twenty-four hours she has begun to adjust to the idea of going to confront a man who has killed so many.

Mari offered Lia the option of staying in London. Lia was torn, hesitant about leaving but feeling such a strong pull as she watched the others prepare for the journey.

‘I think this is going to be hard,’ Mari said. ‘And that this will change us.’

After that everything was settled. When you give a person a chance to choose a new, stronger self, just the option can help them get a grip. The only reason to cling to the past is fear, and Lia has already learned to surpass herself.

Courage is not just a character trait, Mari thinks. It is also a skill. You can learn it and practise it. The hardest thing is to combine it with knowledge: to know what is coming and still move forward.

Lia had needed to ask for time off from
Level
for the trip. That hadn’t been easy, she had told Mari. The AD position moved further away in Lia’s eyes, beyond the horizon, the moment she notified her boss Martyn Taylor that she was suddenly going on a trip without any specific return date.

Mari knows Martyn – they’ve met several times – actually, they are quite well acquainted – but Mari didn’t help Lia with this. If Lia wants to become the artistic director at
Level
, she will have to earn the place herself.

Taylor was confused and then irritated. Finally he gave in though. Mari knows why: Lia is that good. Martyn Taylor has recognised it. He knows that this is a woman he has to hold onto, a woman who can sometimes be stubborn and impossible to restrain, which is exactly why she is so promising.

Taylor agreed to find some cover, he agreed to having Lia notify him of her return date when it suited her, he agreed to everything. When Lia saw that, her doubts about the journey melted away. She understood that something very unusual was happening but that it must be done.

Lia got her time off, dropped by to see Gro at Mr Vong’s flat and rang her parents in Finland.

They have all packed for a trip of unknown duration. With Rico and Paddy’s help they are taking all the tools they might need and a good deal they can’t imagine ever needing. Three large cases full of technology, all with import documentation. Weapons transport has been entrusted to a reliable courier firm that will deliver them in such a way as to prevent any connection to the Studio.

Rico’s programs haven’t been given to anyone or declared on any customs form. At some borders they would be considered weapons, entire weapons systems, which was what they actually are.

All of this supports them as they set off, along with the reason that they have to go.

Mari is not afraid now. She has met men and even women who have killed people. The others at the Studio know some of these cases, but none of them knows everything, and Mari intends to make sure it stays that way.

Leaving the Studio was hard. Away from the Studio she feels more vulnerable.

But this man is too evil. These deeds cannot be overlooked.

Is he calling to them? Could he know they are tracking him?

No. His videos have challenged anyone to stand up to him. He believes he is invincible, worshipping his idol with acts and images no one could stop, ascending to the level of his idol and beyond.

Mari intends to drop him like a tiny pebble into a ravine. Like an insect, without mercy, without warning, in mid-flight. The man who
took Berg from them will not continue his grotesque slayings. Not if it depends on Mari.

Berg.

Mari looks at Lia sitting next to her. With them on the same row of seats, across the aisle, sit Paddy and Rico. They are preparing for a strange task. That is why Mari wanted Lia, the least experienced of them all, next to her.

‘I’ve written something,’ Mari says.

Lia looks at her with bright eyes.

Maggie is travelling to Stockholm. The whole Studio is on the move, and life as they know it is changing. Maggie is going to Berg’s memorial, to represent all of them.

When Maggie goes to the service, she will see a chapel full of strangers. She will move amongst those strangers, into a room where everyone sitting is connected only by having known Berg at different stages of his life. For Maggie it will be an honour to be Berg’s friend in that company.

Maggie asked Mari to write the eulogy she will give at the service.

‘If I write it myself, I’ll cry like a baby,’ she explained.

Mari understood. When someone else writes the words, they are easier to speak. Maggie and her roles. She is so used to learning speeches someone else has written and making them her own. Conveying only the emotion meant to be conveyed.

‘I wrote this for Maggie at the service,’ Mari tells Lia and hands her a folded piece of white paper.

Lia opens the paper and silently reads the words Maggie will soon read in a small chapel in Stockholm.

I remember his way of arranging his work tools. A place for everything and everything in its place. We reveal ourselves to others in these little things.

I remember his way of closing doors.

His look when we talked about someone whose life was full of hidden trials.

How quickly he calmed himself after an argument.

And how once he had realised that he touched people too infrequently – and decided that to avoid becoming a grumpy old man
he had to start patting people on the shoulder and hugging his friends more.

We think we show ourselves to others in grand gestures, in our accomplishments, but it is in these everyday things we see the reality. What we are, not just what we pretend to be.

For many he was a beloved relative or friend. Or set designer or master carpenter.

To me he was a miracle man.

What I saw of him in everyday things – in his way of arranging tools, closing doors, looking at those close to him – that was beautiful. He loved the things he made. He loved people.

I can’t do that. I can’t love anyone. Not now. My grief is too much.

I grieve so much for him.

Someday I may be able to think differently, but now I think: a human being is a falling tree. We have only the time it takes a tree to fall to the ground. We hold each other up, but in the end all trees fall.

Miracle man. I don’t know if I was strong enough to hold you up.

I remember you.

Mari watches Lia fold the piece of paper and place it in her pocket. Lia looks away and Mari turns as well to avoid intruding on her grief.

Leaving on an aeroplane, high in the sky, there is a feeling of disconnection from everything. For a moment, nothing can break.

Immediately upon arrival, in the taxi on the way from the small Kisauni Airport towards Stone Town, two things became clear.

First, it was hot. A heat that washed over them and came closer and penetrated deeper than any heatwave in England. In the early evening air was a promise of the cooling breeze that would rise from the ocean, but it hadn’t started yet. Their clothing stuck to their skin.

And, secondly, there was no electricity.

Rico laughed out loud when he realised. The entire Zanzibari main island of Unguja had no mains power.

Kisauni Airport had lights, which was why they didn’t notice immediately, but when the taxi driver started talking about how hard life was without electric lights and they saw in the waning daylight that no lamps glimmered within the houses, the situation was clear.

‘How did we not know this?’ Rico said, grinning at Mari.

The power outage made Mari solemn.

‘This could be a problem,’ she said. ‘I don’t know why we didn’t know about it.’

She and Paddy had spent hours reading the Zanzibari news. Rico had found out everything he could about the level of technical equipment available on the island. None of them had grasped that the island wouldn’t have power.

Once they arrived in Stone Town, they discovered why they hadn’t easily discerned the problem from London. No electricity was already everyday life here. Because it had been going on for months and the telephone network still worked, the problem was no longer news, or at least no one was going to talk about it on the travel websites.

The issue lay with the cable coming from the mainland, along the floor of the ocean, the desk clerk at the Cinnamon Hotel told them. The cable was broken, probably snapped by a ship carrying out maintenance work. No one knew who the guilty party was because apparently no one was investigating. Or repairing it.

‘Maybe they’ll do it on the mainland,’ the receptionist said. ‘Yes, they should do it.’

The receptionist at the Cinnamon was an older man used to foreign travellers. The hotel was beautiful, an old renovated white building.
It took its name from the local spice tradition: Zanzibar had once been a notable centre of the spice trade.

They had chosen their accommodation carefully so they would have space for all of Rico’s equipment and adequate privacy. The whole hotel had only six rooms, of which they occupied four.

‘We heard that a tourist disappeared on the island recently,’ Mari said to the receptionist. ‘A Frenchman.’

‘No,’ the receptionist replied. ‘That is not possible.’

‘Why not?’

Zanzibar – or the main island of Unguja, which is generally just called by the name of the whole island group – was generally a very safe place. There were around 600,000 residents, but other than the capital, the other population centres were mostly villages. Between those buzzed mopeds and
dala dala
– beaten-up vans that operated as minibuses. A few passenger aeroplanes came to the island each day, and a ferry ran to the mainland, but mostly people just lived day-to-day lives.

‘This is a very peaceful place,’ the man assured them.

Mari did not believe him. For Lia these suspicions and a power outage affecting the entire island were downright bewildering. If they hadn’t realised it at the Studio, how could they prepare for what was ahead of them? But Mari and Rico’s way of handling the issue quieted any concerns.

Everyone on Unguja used generators, the man at the desk had said. They always turned them on at dusk. The hotel guests could charge their phones and use other electrical devices for several hours each night, and the generator could be available at other times as necessary.

‘Not good enough,’ Rico said.

Several of his devices had such sensitive batteries that the potential voltage spikes coming from a generator could damage them. And under no circumstances was Rico going to allow the Topo anywhere near a dirty power source like that. Immediately he rang a company in Nairobi and ordered a charger that would store power from the generator and then charge their batteries with a more even current. It would arrive on the next plane.

Rico had arranged Internet access in advance. The Topo had its own satellite connection, and they also had a separate satphone. The
case that contained the small base station was a bother to carry, but it ensured them uninterrupted, secure access any time they wanted.

The power outage might also benefit them, Mari said.

‘How?’ Lia asked.

The island’s phone network was unlikely to function without issues, and they were almost certainly the only ones with twenty-four hour access to an IT arsenal and good network connections, Mari explained.

‘Not even he could have all this. At least not as protected from disturbances like ours are.’

He
, Lia thought.

He
was also here somewhere. Maybe close.

It was already dark by the time they had moved into their rooms. Thick candles illuminated the rooms – despite the receptionist’s promises, the hotel was saving the generator. They were lodging right in the heart of Stone Town, in the centre of a rambling collection of narrow lanes. When they gathered in the lobby to go out, Rico handed each a small torch. They were so light that you could hang one from a buttonhole but bright enough to be useful.

The colour of Stone Town was the bleached white of sand. The buildings were whitewashed, and those that were painted properly were still white. Here and there they noticed that familiar dirty yellow ochre – the colour they had used Rico’s hacker friends to identify just a short time previously. Between the old buildings were some smaller structures, some made of concrete. By looking closely, in places one could see that stones and even coral were sometimes mixed with the cement. Mari had worked out why: to save on construction costs.

As they walked the streets, they listened as one generator after another growled into life. Still light only flickered from within the buildings and outside a few small shops. Mostly it was dark.

In this labyrinth they would have easily lost their way, but Lia and Paddy quickly pieced together their route. The important thing was to know the main thoroughfares and your own position relative to them. In the darkness of the evening and in amongst the buildings, landmarks were difficult to see, but they committed the street corners to memory as they went.

Stone Town was an entirely new kind of experience for Lia, a mixture of African and Middle Eastern characteristics, Islamic culture and the ever-intrusive commercial brands of the West. Barefoot children roamed the streets, with the sound of a bicycle bell ringing here and there. In front of the buildings sat men in colourful tunics and small hats. The women were less visible – they had to be in the kitchens of the city watching boiling pots.

White-skinned foreign travellers were easy to pick out here, but, on the other hand, there were a lot of them in Stone Town. Lia thought she could also see a few foreigners in the mass of people who had taken up more permanent residence. These navigated the winding, bumpy streets more comfortably, and their clothing was a combination of western and Zanzibari.

Was one of them
him
?

Paddy had set the rules for moving about in the city. They always had to go in pairs if possible. Never without weapons, but only Paddy and Rico carried them constantly. Lia still didn’t feel completely confident with a weapon, and Mari didn’t want one.

They also had other tools, Mari said. Lia wasn’t sure she wanted to know what that meant, but Mari’s confidence was reassuring.

They ate dinner at a small Indian restaurant located in the centre on the first floor of an old building. The place filled quickly. The reason was the tandoor: the restaurant was not dependent upon the generators because it had an old-fashioned wood-fired oven out of which poured dark, sweet, slightly smoky aromas.

By day the restaurant must offer a good view of Stone Town’s busy main street, Kenyatta Road. Now, in the darkness, they could only see dim lamps and flickering candle flames.

They had to be like any other tourists, Mari said. They had to behave like tourists while they investigated where Theo Durand had disappeared. First thing in the morning they would have to meet with the local police and look into any leads.

Wanting to show off his language skills, the waiter at the restaurant churned out English and French as he presented the food, along with a brief lesson in the local Swahili. When he had taken
their orders, Mari asked whether he had heard about the disappearance of a French tourist on the island.

No, the waiter assured them, no one had disappeared in years.

‘He’s lying,’ Mari said quickly after the man had left.

According to the news, there had been numerous hold-ups in Zanzibar over the years, and travellers had got in other trouble as well in the archipelago. Because someone didn’t always investigate what happened to tourists, and many of them might just have left the area on their own, disappearances weren’t necessarily reported to anyone.

Lia was exhausted from the journey, the heat and the whole situation. The conversation was scanty. They were all just waiting to get to bed and start work in the morning.

After dinner, Paddy and Lia led them back to the hotel through the warrens of Stone Town without a moment’s hesitation. Minus the constant feeling of danger, strolling here might be nice some day, Lia thought.

She sneaked a glance at Mari. She seemed calm, as if arriving on the island had removed all uncertainty and set a clear goal in front of her.

As if she knows what’s ahead.