The Frequency of the Dead – Chapter 7
The Second Disappearance
Petra Sulc was not answering her phone. Mira tried six times across the following morning, then went to the apartment two streets from Harrow Lane that Petra had mentioned in passing. The building was a converted warehouse, solid and anonymous. The door to apartment 3B stood open by two centimeters, which was two centimeters more than it should have been.
The apartment inside was not disheveled — there were no signs of struggle, no overturned furniture, no broken glass. What there was, instead, was absence. The absence had a specific quality that Mira had encountered before, in decommissioned broadcast facilities: the feeling of equipment recently removed. Cable impressions in the dust. Rectangular outlines on the shelves where receivers had stood. Power strips with some sockets emptied. Someone had come and taken only the technical equipment.
They had left everything personal. Petra’s coat. Her reading glasses. A small framed photograph on the windowsill — two women, young, in front of a radio tower, squinting into the sun. On the back, in faded ink: Dagny and me. Kovacs Station. 1981.
Dagny Holt and Petra Sulc. They had known each other for over forty years.
Mira put the photograph in her bag. She was not entirely sure it was legal. She also wasn’t entirely sure any of this was legal anymore — not in the tidy way she’d always kept her career, inside the lines, following procedure. She was already, she realized, over a line. She had entered two apartments belonging to missing or dead people. She had removed evidence from one. She had not reported any of this to anyone.
She justified this to herself with the fact that the text messages had told her not to report it. Which was a poor justification, and she knew it. But the alternative — reporting to her office, to a director she now regarded with a new suspicion she hadn’t earned yet but could feel forming — seemed like the kind of move that the text messages existed to warn her against.
She called the phone number that had been sending her messages. This time, it rang twice before being answered. Not a text. A voice. Male, older, with a quality of controlled calm that she associated with people who had been in difficult situations for so long that their baseline had changed.
“You found Petra’s apartment,” the voice said.
“They took her equipment.”
“Yes. They do that. It sends a message without being actionable — no assault, no kidnapping you can prove. Just equipment gone, person gone. Very clean.” A breath. “Petra is alive. She is being kept somewhere that I haven’t yet located. They want to know how much she decoded.”
“Who is ‘they’?” Mira asked, for the second time.
“An organization that was created by Vilhelm Ost in 1988,” the voice said, “inside the Quiet Office, using government resources and without government authorization. An organization built to do one specific thing. And that thing, Ms. Voss, is what the signal has been broadcasting for six weeks. Casimir Lund found out what it was. That is why he is dead.”