George messes around with the computer until an impatient Klara decides he’s too slow and pulls it away from him. She pushes the card into the reader. Its icon appears on the computer’s empty desktop. She clicks the icon and a dialogue box asks for a password.

‘Okay,’ she says to Jacob. ‘This is it. Read what you got on your phone.’

Klara counts, checks the numbers, letters and symbols. Sixteen on the phone. Sixteen on the screen. In the same order.

The slight murmur of the other guests. The clinking of the cups. The surreal normality of this morning.

She meets George’s eyes, then Jacob’s. ‘Okay,’ she says. ‘Here we go.’

Without waiting for a response, she presses Enter.

Immediately the dialogue box disappears from the screen and a folder pops up. Inside sit four documents with the names: Stockholm, Brussels, London and Rome. Jacob and George lean closer so they too can see the screen. Klara glances at Jacob.

‘It doesn’t look like drone pictures,’ she says quietly.

He doesn’t answer, but she can see his face blanch, notices his breath becoming shallow and laboured.

‘Open Stockholm,’ George says.

Klara takes a deep breath and double-clicks on the document. A regular PDF that takes a moment to open up and fill the screen.

‘For fuck’s sake,’ George says in frustration and stands up.

The document is in Arabic, with bolded headlines and bullet points and checkmarks beneath them. Like schedules and checklists of some kind.

Klara feels her spirits sink. She turns to Jacob. ‘But wait. Maybe you know Arabic? You were…’

But he just shakes his head. ‘I took a couple of semesters,’ he says. ‘I can order coffee and ask about the weather. I know the alphabet and could spell my way through that, but I have no idea what it means.’

Klara continues scrolling down in the document, and then she stops. ‘George, check this out.’

‘What?’

He hunches down next to her again, and she points to the screen where a map of a couple of blocks in central Stockholm has appeared. The castle, the water. And – with a circle around it – the Opera. Below the map there are photos of the Opera House from various angles. Entrance, ticket office, the foyer. Some of the pictures contain red, numbered arrows. They seem to match text in the document.

‘What the hell is this?’ George whispers.

Klara looks at his damp, frozen face. He already knows, but she says it anyway.

‘This… is a plan for a terrorist attack.’

25 November

Malmö

Jacob leans forward towards the screen, as if getting closer would make it somehow easier to read Arabic.

A terror attack!

How could he have been so naive, so incredibly stupid? Allowed himself to be fooled so thoroughly.