The Last Compromise

by Reevik, Carl

  ‘The Commission, specifically the atomic energy department, records the type and amount of nuclear material, and their people go there and check whether the figures are correct and whether the material is really there,’ Hans continued. ‘Sometimes they come unannounced. This concerns nuclear power plants obviously, but also hospitals with radiology departments, universities, and private research companies that use small quantities of radioactive material.’

  Tienhoven heard him out, then he turned to Viktor. ‘And?’

  ‘It looks like we detected an anomaly in the pattern,’ Viktor said. He was very kind. During their project Hans had only asked the right questions at the right moments. He was not a scientist, he was a lawyer. After law school, and before passing the Commission’s entrance exam, he had worked at his country’s chief prosecutor’s office. During the project it had been Viktor who had done all the statistics, all the math.

  Viktor carried on. ‘Over the last twenty-four months there have been four sudden drops in the reported amounts of radioactive material. Not just smaller amounts from one month to the next, but sudden deviations from the statistical pattern.’ He opened the laptop. The screen lit up and was reflected in Viktor’s glasses. He turned the laptop around so that it faced Tienhoven.

  Tienhoven looked at the screen; Hans could see it, too. There was a vertical axis to the left, a horizontal axis at the bottom, providing half a frame to a whole crowd of zigzagging curves running from left to right. Some of the curves had prominent ravines, spikes pointing downward. Four drops, at uneven intervals. They were fat and obvious, because their edges were formed by several curves dropping at the same moment.

  ‘Again,’ Hans said. ‘To see this you have to crunch the numbers, as we did. As Viktor did. It could be that nuclear material has gone missing in four European countries, simultaneously on four specific occasions, within the last two years.’

  ‘These are deep drops,’ Tienhoven noted.

  ‘The drops in actual numbers are not significant,’ Viktor explained. ‘What is significant is the drop in proportion to the amounts that would be expected statistically. The deviation from the normal deviation. And that’s what these curves show. In addition, here we have isolated the figures for just one specific type of nuclear material: low-enriched uranium in the form of fission targets, the final form in which it is delivered to reactors. In the total of all nuclear materials used every year in Europe, these dips would not be detectable at all.’

  Hans kept a straight face as Viktor was explaining it. In truth he’d had to look up what fission targets were, for at least Hans had never heard the term before. Apparently enrichment meant making the uranium more usable for reactors; targets were the finished product, pieces of metal that were then subjected to a hail of whatever particles they bombarded them with.

  Tienhoven waited for a moment, then he turned to Hans. ‘Why did you choose to look at nuclear material reports, and not something else?’

  ‘It was a test run,’ Hans said. ‘To see whether the method would generate results in a case where the information consists of large sets of numbers. It could’ve been something different.’

  ‘Why low-enriched uranium?’

  ‘We did several materials. This was the only one where there was an anomaly like you see it on the screen.’

  ‘Where is the direct relevance to anti-fraud?’

  ‘The relevance to anti-fraud, I think, lies in the records of our own atomic energy department,’ Hans said. He’d known this question would come. ‘If their records are clean, if everything is accounted for as far as they are concerned, we can hand this over to the national authorities of the four countries in question. Let them deal with it. Or let the atomic energy people start a probe of their own. But if the records are not clean, if there really is something, and Commission staff knew or should have known about it but they didn’t tell anyone,’ Hans looked over to Viktor, pausing for a moment. ‘Well, then there could be grounds to start an anti-fraud investigation.’

  Viktor and Hans both looked at Tienhoven. Viktor did because he had been looking at him all the time anyway. Hans did because he needed his opinion. His decision. And some praise perhaps.

  ‘Thank you,’ Tienhoven said finally, getting up from his chair. Hans and Viktor also got up. ‘You and Hans will work on this together I suppose,’ Tienhoven said. ‘Hans is still project manager. But this is not an official investigation. It’s still experimental research. Have a safe trip back to Luxembourg.’ He shook hands with Viktor, nodded to Hans, and left the room, leaving the door open.

  Well, so much for the praise. But it was fair enough, objective completed. Hans looked at Viktor, his black hair, his small glasses, his shaven chin, his mute grin. The guy was on loan from the statistics department, temporarily attached to anti-fraud to help build statistical analysis capacity to search for illegal activity within the Commission. He might stay here for good once the project would be over. Viktor would keep doing all the math, Hans would cover the investigative side of the project. And for now Viktor was still based in Luxembourg, and the offices of the Commission’s atomic energy department were partly in Luxembourg as well. It all made sense.

  ‘Are you all right with this?’, Hans asked Viktor. Viktor just smiled at him, saying nothing. ‘So, let’s. When’s your train leaving?’

  ‘In four hours.’

  ‘All right, we can get coffee from the machine and have a look at the atomic energy staff, and at their work. A lot of information is accessible from here.’ Hans was a project manager now, or so the boss had just said, so it was time to start managing the project. ‘Apart from that we need to check the actual content of those nuclear reports, see where exactly the irregularities are. Maybe it’s nothing at all, or it’s something harmless. But maybe somebody is stealing uranium all over Europe. As you just heard, we have the official green light to spend some more time on this now.’

  ‘We already have the Commission reports, we had used them for the first analysis,’ Viktor said. ‘Now we need the raw data from the national authorities, in the form in which it arrived at the Commission in the first place. I suppose they are Excel sheets with lists of figures and some text. If you can get the raw data within three and a half hours, I can save it on my laptop and work on it on the train.’

  Hans nodded and encouraged Viktor to follow him out into the corridor and towards the coffee machine at its end. A little celebration coffee was in order. They were still at an early stage, but things were definitely looking up.

  Luxembourg

  ‘I don’t know,’ Hoffmann said while getting comfortable in the passenger seat of the car parked fifty metres down the street from the newsagent’s shop. A black Audi, it would normally have looked very neat and shiny, but compared with the tank-like luxury cars that were cruising on the streets of Luxembourg it looked unremarkable. ‘This is either not an operative at all, or he’s playing some kind of game.’

  ‘Tell me,’ the man in the driver’s seat said as he started the engine, checking the mirror to enter the stream of cars heading towards the motorway belt around Luxembourg. It was around noon, traffic wasn’t very heavy. Hoffmann and the man at the wheel both spoke neutral standard German, no particular regional accent. The car had a fast acceleration, and the man at the wheel used it.

  ‘He draws attention,’ Hoffmann explained. ‘He goes in to buy cigarettes and chewing gum. He waits in the queue for two minutes, holding his wallet all that time like an idiot. Then he buys cigarettes, but not the standard type from a standard brand. He buys the menthol type. Then he forgets the chewing gum and gets into the queue for a second time. Makes a second purchase within five minutes without leaving the shop. Now the saleslady will remember him for an hour.’

  Hoffmann had been standing three spots behind Zayek in the queue, watching him. Then, when Zayek had returned to the end of the queue, Hoffmann had found himself standing directly in front of him. Hoffmann had short fair hair and he wore a grey jacket.
Him the saleslady would not remember.

  ‘Where were you standing?’, the man at the wheel asked, driving straight ahead towards the cloverleaf.

  ‘Behind him in the queue, then in front of him.’

  ‘He noticed you,’ the man said, turning onto the motorway heading east and accelerating towards the German border which was less than half an hour away. ‘He didn’t want to behave like an operative. Or he wanted to have a closer look at you, so he got back in the queue behind you. Maybe both.’

  Hoffmann looked out the window on the passenger’s side, watching the grey sky and the woods and the fields and the power lines next to the motorway as they raced back to base.

  2

  Hans returned to his office. He had just said goodbye to Viktor and seen him to the elevator. There’d been a handshake, but it had been somehow bungled and awkward. Either way, Viktor had left the Brussels anti-fraud building with his black rectangular bag containing his return ticket to Luxembourg and his laptop that was now full of raw data.

  Getting the raw data had been relatively easy, because the IT unit within anti-fraud could grant access to all work-related virtual computer drives within the Commission. Unlike access to personnel records or other semi-private data, this didn’t even have to be approved by a director. Together Hans and Viktor had clicked themselves through the atomic energy drives and folders, and had found a treasure chest of reports sorted by month and by country. They hadn’t had anyone from atomic energy itself to explain it, because Hans had preferred not to alert them to their little probe. They may have felt like they were being investigated, which they weren’t. Not yet. In any case Hans and Viktor had found what they’d needed on their own.

  Without closing his office door, Hans took out his keys and opened the steel filing cabinet to take stock of his open cases. There were cardboard boxes and stacks of paper, clustered together to represent the hardcopy versions of the accumulated material from various ongoing investigations. The new nuclear dossier was definitely the hottest of them all. The star of the cabinet, as it were.

  Not that the other cases were trivial or boring. They were just in different stages of ripeness. There was the director in a policy department on consumer safety, for instance. The department was charged with drafting common standards, so that manufacturers could comply with just one set of safety regulations for the whole European Union, rather than with over two dozen different national standards. Not easy if every European country has its own ideas about what’s necessary and what’s not. But that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that the director had hired a consultant who was also her nephew, without disclosing the family link. A secretary had blown the whistle. From the personnel records Hans knew that the consultant’s last name was also the director’s maiden name, and that both had been born in the same city. He also had the details of the parents of both persons, because they were also included in the record. To have definitive proof, all he had to do was request, with Tienhoven’s approval, the birth certificates of the consultant’s parents. If even one of the grandparents was the same as one of the director’s parents, Hans would wrap it up and recommend questioning the two: the nephew as a witness, the aunt as a suspect. Hiring relatives was unethical but not in itself illegal. Hiding a conflict of interests was.

  Another one was the port authority in Estonia. The port of Tallinn had received European funding to expand the harbour and dig deeper approaches for heavier cargo vessels. What was suspicious was the fact that six out of seven works contracts so far had been awarded to the same construction company. A competitor had complained to the Commission, and anti-fraud had considered itself empowered to investigate since the European Union’s financial interests were at stake. The Commission was co-financing after all. Hans still needed to work through the files to see the reasons why the other companies’ bids had been rejected, even though in some cases their prices had even been lower than the winner’s. He had already done about half. Some of the reasons were fishy, he pardoned his pun. There were no direct links between the port’s project leader and the company as far as Hans could tell, but there could be indirect links, mutual interests. Or it could be simple corruption. All those were harder to detect.

  ‘Hi Hans.’ Her familiar friendly voice came from the corridor. ‘How are your statistics coming along?’ Caitlin from the money-laundering investigation unit stood in his doorway.

  ‘Hi Caitlin, yes, great, maybe I’ll find some gangsters and put them in prison.’

  ‘Maybe they’ll try to bribe you at last.’

  ‘It would be about time,’ Hans said. ‘I’m here for three years, and nobody has offered me any bribes yet. What’s wrong with this place?’

  ‘Exactly. Why did you even come here. Afternoon coffee later?’

  Hans took out his mobile phone to check the time. He had gotten used to not wearing a wristwatch.

  ‘Twenty minutes?’, he proposed.

  ‘I’ll stop by to pick you up.’

  She left. Caitlin was a few years older than Hans. She had a son, an Irish husband, a relatively common English last name, and a Gaelic version of that same name that Hans had learned to pronounce quite well. To Hans she compensated for a lot of the seriousness that was surrounding him. Yes, coffee, absolutely.

  Hans returned to his open cases in the cabinet in front of him. A similar but rather less complicated case than the Estonian contract fraud was the embezzlement in Portugal. A rural town had obtained European development money to build roads that didn’t exist. It looked like they had covered existing roads with a cheap layer of asphalt and redesignated them with a new number, keeping the rest of the money for themselves. The written documentation was almost ready. At anti-fraud they still hadn’t decided whether they should hand it over to the Portuguese police completely, or whether they should go and investigate it themselves with local assistance. Hans preferred an on-the-spot inspection, arriving in a convoy of cars to check the tarmac and question the mayor right there, in his own city hall. Telling his secretary to please give them some privacy, to close the door, and not to put through any phone calls, thank you. How cool would that be? Very.

  There were some smaller dossiers and a few preliminary cases to determine whether a full investigation was even necessary or not. But the nuclear fraud case was definitely the one that would bump the others down the list of priorities once it would really get going. Now Hans would finish up the director and her nephew, and then continue on Estonia and Portugal while he waited for news from Viktor about the atomic affair. Portugal first. True, in Estonia contracts were still being awarded while the Portuguese roads wouldn’t go anywhere. But Portugal would be ready for the next stage very soon, while Estonia required a few more weeks, and it would have been a shame to let Portugal wait even though it was almost ripe. Hans took out the aunt-and-nephew file, put it on his desk and locked the cabinet.

  ***

  ‘Ready to go?’

  Hans nodded enthusiastically, locked the file in his cabinet, and followed Caitlin outside. They took the stairs, not the elevator, down to the third floor, and entered the cafeteria. At the counter Hans bought them a cup of coffee each because last time Caitlin had paid for the two of them.

  They took their cups and sat down at a small table for two at the wall. The tables at the windows were all taken, but there wasn’t much to see outside anyway, here on the lower floors. Just the windows of the office buildings across the street, which were partly reflecting the grey sky over Brussels.

  The caterer holding the cafeteria concession in their building did a decent job. The coffee was good and not overpriced. The firm certainly knew that there were dozens of cafés just around the corner, so the competition kept standards up. It must be tougher in cafeterias in the middle of nowhere, Hans thought. These were market forces, and the occupants of the Commission’s anti-fraud building were fortunate to be at the good end of a deal where it actually worked.

  ‘How are the casinos doing?’, Hans aske
d, holding his cup in his hand.

  ‘Making money, what else,’ Caitlin said. Caitlin was going after casinos which held a state license or a monopoly on gambling in seven different European countries. The idea of money laundering was always the same, though. The mafioso comes to the casino with three million dirty euros, loses a third at the blackjack table, and comes out with two million clean euros. Look what I just won.

  ‘Are they cooperating?’

  ‘The casinos, yes,’ Caitlin said. ‘Most of them, most of the time. It’s not their fault, really. Apart from the fact that they’re casinos to begin with.’

  The casinos themselves were a purely national matter, to the extent that purely national matters still existed within the European Union. But if proceeds of fraud affecting the European Union’s financial interests were being laundered, then the Commission had a stake. That’s what the Commission argued, anyway.

  ‘I should check it out for myself, though,’ Caitlin said, putting her coffee cup back down for the moment. ‘You know, an on-the-spot inspection at the roulette table. To get into it, get a feel for it.’

  ‘Take the corporate credit card,’ Hans said. ‘Declare it as travel expenses.’

  ‘My thoughts exactly. The name is Bond, I am with my friend, the European taxpayer, it’s all right.’

  ‘Credit limit: not applicable.’

  ‘It’s what the banks did, why not me. Are you going home for Easter?’

  Yes, the banks had surely plundered the European taxpayer. Hans knew it wasn’t that easy, though, and Caitlin knew it, too. The taxpayer couldn’t have been completely innocent for all those years of happiness on borrowed money. Still, one way or the other, now there were youth protests all over the news. Unemployment was up again.

  ‘Not sure if I can make it,’ Hans said. ‘Julia won’t be there. I might go see my parents, though. And a few dozen of my brothers and cousins. You?’