Borderline Read Online Free Page B

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