by Reevik, Carl
Cologne, Germany
Hoffmann was sitting at the desk, drinking milk from a carton. It wasn’t his own desk, just a little table in a hotel room, with a laptop attached to a small printer. He looked out the window. The only thing he saw was a lot of roofs against a greyish sky. The heavy dark twin spires of the Cologne Cathedral should have been dominating the view, but they didn’t. There were hardly any places in this city from which you could actually see them.
He looked back down to his laptop. They had been to Zayek’s rented apartment in the border town of Wincheringen, which hadn’t been entirely legitimate because it was on German territory. They had been to his workplace, which had been more legitimate because it was abroad. He had seen him at the newsagent’s shop. He had a summary of his old file from the army, and some material from his later workplace in Germany. The papers were right there, lying on the bed.
The man at the wheel had already returned to Berlin in a different car, so Hoffmann had to wrap it up by himself. If this had been a proper operation they would have been given proper resources. But it wasn’t. Just a check. Hoffmann hadn’t even been told who exactly the source was. Instead, he’d been lectured: don’t provoke the Russians too much unless you really mean it. And we don’t mean it, not for the moment. And don’t be messing around inside the Commission too much. German foreign intelligence activity inside the European Commission, the central apparatus of the European Union of which Germany is itself a member? What would people say?
Hoffmann could only hope that the man at the wheel had been wrong about yesterday. About Zayek, about the queue in the shop. Although he was almost certain that the man had been wrong about both. Either way, his instructions were clear.
Hoffmann picked up the phone and dialled a number. He waited, then said, ‘Yes. I think we’re ready.’
Brussels
Hans returned from a quick lunch. With Caitlin it would have taken longer, but he had just needed to stuff his mouth with nutrients and return to his post. He picked up the phone on his desk and dialled Viktor’s number. A few piles of paper had accumulated around the phone, and he had to pull the cord around them. ‘Hi Viktor, it’s Hans in Brussels. Do you have a moment?’
‘Of course,’ Viktor replied. Hans wasn’t sure whether that was true, because at the other end of the line there were people talking in the background. Talking, but not laughing. Some kind of a meeting. But Viktor had said of course, so Hans felt entitled to ask.
‘Tell me, just briefly, since you are in Luxembourg, what do you know about the atomic energy department there? I don’t mean the official stuff, I mean the work reality.’
‘It’s not a very attractive place to work,’ Viktor said. ‘It’s at the Commission, but it’s not in Brussels. It’s in Luxembourg, where no-one wants to live. And within Luxembourg it’s not here on the Kirchberg plateau, where all the European institutions are, but in Gasperich, at the opposite end of town. It’s an office building in the middle of nowhere.’
Hans thought about the price and quality of coffee in canteens without any competition from cafés across the street.
‘That’s what makes it unattractive?’
‘For people with kids, yes,’ Viktor replied. ‘Our kids go to school right here on Kirchberg, it’s next door. But if you work in Gasperich and the kids are on Kirchberg, you first have to commute to school, drop off the children, then drive to work to Gasperich, then all the way back to pick up the kids, and then back home again. Either only one parent works, or both work and take turns somehow. The mother of one of the kids in our daughter’s class works over there. She hates it. It tires her out.’
‘There’s only one school in the whole town?’
‘It’s the European school. They teach in almost all the languages. If your kids speak for example Swedish at home, they go to a class with other Swedish-speaking children and they have a teacher from Sweden. It also makes it easier to go back, because your kids can continue and finish school in the normal Swedish system. And it’s a good school.’
‘I see.’ Hans knew from colleagues that the main logistical challenge in a new job was not getting familiar with the work or finding an apartment. It was the school and the day-care for the children. Now he heard it confirmed once again. He said, ‘Okay, anything else?’
‘No.’
Hans was still holding the receiver to his ear. Viktor had hung up.
Luxembourg
Zayek had finished high school in his German home town in the mid-nineties, which had been a perfect moment, geopolitically speaking. The Cold War had been over, but Germany had not yet abolished conscription, and had still been drafting young men for about a year into either military service or an alternative civilian service. Russia, meanwhile, had no longer been what it used to be in Soviet times, but it still had retained some of its appeal as a vaguely evil power. The black navy fur hats with the red stars, later replaced by golden double-headed eagles; the rusting but impressively heavy submarines and the crumbling concrete facilities in the snow. Perhaps this appeal was just something Russia had inherited, not something it had genuinely deserved or had actually earned at the time. It had been relatively benign, or just toothless, on the international arena. However it still had nuclear weapons, and a foreign intelligence service, and certain interests that it sought to promote. And movies had still exploited all this to great effect, even or in fact particularly in the nineties, with the camera swinging over the Kremlin to the thundering chant of an army choir. And the intelligence gathering back then would have been much the same as it had been in the Cold War. Less of the expensive technology perhaps, compared with America, except for old spy satellites maybe, but instead more of human intelligence. Contacts, sleepers, informants. That was the real stuff. Like Yul Brynner playing a Soviet defector who wasn’t a defector at all, but an operative sent to harm Western agencies by falsely denouncing their loyal members as double agents. Or that Brandauer movie, where the Russians wanted to provoke the Americans into telling them what they wanted to know from a source, in the hope that they would reveal what they didn’t know so the Russians could infer from that what they did know.
When it came to choosing sides, for Zayek it had clearly been Russia. Working for Germany’s own BND, the foreign intelligence agency, while still living inside Germany itself would have been pointless. And Zayek had felt no connection to America, the banal leader of the West. No, it had to be Russia. You could spy for the Russians in the nineties without leaving your country, and it would still be a crime, but a much more harmless crime than it would have been during the Cold War. And an intelligent crime, too.
And so he had gotten himself recruited into the German army, rather than into the civilian service, in order to make photocopies of maps and technical drawings and lists of names and numbers, and pass them on to the Russians. At least that had been his plan, because at that point he hadn’t established any contact with any Russian agency yet. He’d wanted to approach them from within the army. His parents had felt visibly uncomfortable when he had come to visit them on weekends wearing his camouflage uniform and his heavy boots. They would have been happier had he entered the civilian service. But he had accepted this as a price to be paid. At the age of twelve or thirteen he had read the memoirs of a German spymaster, an old Nazi basically, who, with American help, had built up the West German BND after the war. And Zayek had remembered a phrase: ‘You sacrifice everything, your marriage, your health, and at the end you look back and see nothing but the ruins of a broken life.’ Or something like that. Brilliant.
JRC-PRR, 0-26-9, uranium-235, 55.3, 6623
JRC-PRR, 0-26-9, uranium-235, 51.2, 6656
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Whether his parents approved or disapproved of his subsequent life choices didn’t matter much now. His mother had died eight years ago, and by that time he hadn’t been talking much to his father anyway. Now he certainly didn’t. The man was living with a new wife somewhere. And since Zayek didn’t have any brothers or sisters, hi
s old German identity was completely gone. He had notified his town authorities that he was moving abroad, to Luxembourg, which had been more or less true. Now he wasn’t a missing person, he was just registered as having moved abroad with an unspecified address. And at his current residence in Wincheringen on the river Mosel he had registered under his new Bulgarian identity. His passport was clearly the result of some sort of manipulation, because the picture in it was his own, but for the rest it was perfectly valid. When it expired he’d just prolong it. Or maybe apply for German citizenship; how bizarre would that be, to ask to have your real nationality back.
‘Anneli!’, he shouted through the open doors, putting a smile into his voice just like she had done in the morning. ‘You want a coffee?’
‘Yes, let’s go and have coffee,’ Anneli said, quietly. She had been standing in his open doorway.
Zayek looked up to her with his eyes wide open. He was somewhat surprised. ‘Okay, great!’
Good thing he hadn’t smoked in the car, because now he was smelling just fine.
4
It was getting late, and Hans was stuck. People had been walking past his open office door all day, some of them had come in for a brief chat. He’d even thought of closing the door at some point.
At first he had been considering to simply ask around, like normal people within the Commission would have done. Everybody knew someone. Except he could hardly just ask around without drawing attention, suspicion even. Hello, I’m from anti-fraud, do you know who exactly draws up the nuclear reports? Yes, but who actually is the first person to receive the raw data? No, don’t worry, it’s just a routine question, please don’t call your boss.
It was the same for Viktor over in Luxembourg, who was surely known to be associated with anti-fraud. And he didn’t want to ask Tienhoven to contact some fellow boss at atomic energy. Then he had briefly talked to Julia on his mobile phone, a few minutes of conversation during an afternoon break, their voices transmitted electronically across the continent. He had suggested that she should call the atomic energy department from her place, pretending to be a journalist for a local paper, or something like that. Over the landline, it would show up as an international call, completely from outside. She had gotten angry with him, about his stupid games, about her having a lot of work, why didn’t he just date his boss, you child.
Now Hans stared blankly at his screen which had long returned to sleep mode.
He had met Julia at a student dorm. It had been a decrepit former hotel that had been due for demolition already a decade earlier, but it had still provided something of a communal home for a few of his friends. And for some of hers, too, it had turned out. He’d seen her a few times there and had talked to her only briefly. Then, one night, they’d all been baking pizza together, and Hans and Julia had been assigned the task of cutting up salami and vegetables. They’d stood next to each other, alone in the small kitchen, while in the room next door the others had been enthusiastically trying to open a can of maize with a beer bottle before trying it the other way around. When Hans had rested his hand on the kitchen table Julia had gently touched the nail of his index finger with the tip of her own index finger. He’d kissed her on the lips. Then he’d kissed her again, and she had opened her mouth a little. It had been an overwhelming sensation.
He’d felt obliged to spend the rest of the pizza evening sitting next to her. And to call her the next day. They’d had some more overwhelming moments after that night at the dorm. But not too many, in proportion to the number of years that had followed. And now, for the third year in a row, they even lived in different countries, seeing each other only during holidays or on some extended weekends. Hans was firmly based in Brussels. What was he supposed to do? What was he doing here?
He was born and raised in Estonia, the new generation. Too young to really remember the Soviet days. Yes, my name is Hans. No, it’s an Estonian name. Yes, it’s also a German name. No, I’m not German. Yes, from Estonia. No, not Latvia, the one above Latvia. Yes, right next to Russia. No, Estonian is not very similar to Russian. Yes, it is very similar to Finnish. Yes, it’s great that Estonia is part of the European Union now. He had been explaining it a lot, patiently, cheerfully, sharing hearty laughs about the silly confusion every time as if he’d been explaining it for the first time in his life. And he would keep explaining it patiently and cheerfully until the day he would die. But right now he was at the heart of that very European Union which his native country had joined, right here in Brussels. And he was meant to do his job.
He was doing it well. And he was doing it correctly, too. To get the Tallinn harbour extension file, for example, he’d had to sign an extra declaration about there being no conflicts of interest, since the case concerned his home country. He’d made an honest declaration. That was more than could be said of the director who’d hired her own nephew. Who had hired a consultant who was suspected to be her nephew, to be precise, soon they’d know for sure.
Hans looked at the phone sitting next to his dormant screen. Time to call in some favours with a fellow countryman. He looked up and dialled the number, and waited for Siim to pick up his phone.
‘Siim Kruuse.’
Hans greeted him, ‘Tere Siim, kuidas läheb?’
‘Tere Hans. Thanks, I’m fine. Your number suppression keeps creeping me out, though.’
‘How about a beer or two?’
‘Or three? Murphy’s, like last time?’
‘Perfect, at eight?’
‘Let’s say nine, I have to wrap up some stuff here. And I’ll leave the car at work, too. There are twenty construction sites around our building now, I’m faster on foot. And freer.’
‘All right, see you there!’
‘Sure thing, bye!’
Hans hung up. Siim didn’t exactly owe him any favours. None at all, in fact. But they were both Estonian expats of the same generation. They may not necessarily have met, let alone gone out for beers, back in Estonia. While Hans had been at the chief prosecutor’s office, Siim had been working at the Tallinn branch of a Swedish bank. Yet here in Brussels they were compatriots from a tiny nation of not even one and a half million people, inside a European Union of half a billion inhabitants. Ties that bind. Besides, Siim had actually turned out to be a likeable guy.
Hans didn’t have much to wrap up for the moment, and he would obviously walk, too, since he had a driver’s licence but no car. There just was no need for one here in Brussels, he went to and from work either by bus or on foot. He decided to leave the office, take a long walk and have a kebap at the Turkish place halfway between anti-fraud and Murphy’s. He knew that Siim would do something similar before coming to meet him.
***
They sat at a corner table made of dark heavy oak, in the pleasant gloominess of an Irish pub not far from the European quarter of Brussels. The place was called ‘Not Murphy’s’, an attempt at being somewhat witty about naming your pub which, Hans thought, wasn’t even bad. Or not very bad. People nevertheless called it Murphy’s, obviously. There was happy but unobtrusive Irish folk music, and cheerful chatter, and darkness, and warmth. And there was dark, cool, frothy Guinness from the tap. Hans didn’t particularly like it, but he did like the combination of it all, which to him included the taste of the beer. And if it was fresh and cold, like it was in this place, it was quite drinkable. The glass standing in front of him on the heavy oak was absolutely fine, for instance. But then it wasn’t his first tonight. It wasn’t Siim’s first, either.
‘So here’s to our mutual fatherland,’ Siim said, toasting. They both had a swig.
Siim was from the north of Estonia, a town between Tallinn and the Russian border. Hans was from Tartu in the south. They had met in Brussels, at the housewarming party of a mutual acquaintance of theirs, a girl from Denmark. Afterwards Siim had gone on spending a lot of time at that flat. He had fallen in love with the Danish girl’s flatmate.
‘How’s life at transport, still doing the railway thing?�
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‘What do you mean ‘still’,’ Siim protested. ‘Now it’s getting political, which is the sexy part.’
Siim was working in the policy department for transport and infrastructure. Their current big project was European legislation on common standards for the certification of train engineers and railway crews. The point was to make sure countries recognised each other’s training and certificates, so that international trains would not have to change crews every time they crossed a border between two European countries. A classical example of European legislation making cross-border exchanges easier and bringing costs down, Hans had thought the first time he had heard about it. The countries were getting real value for money out of the organisation they had founded.
‘The draft texts and the impact assessments are all ready,’ Siim continued. ‘That’s the Commission’s part of the job. To work out a proposal, as usual. The European Parliament likes it, or most of them do, which is good enough. But now the national governments of the member countries themselves must decide whether they want it or not.’
Siim took just a small sip, because he wanted to keep talking.
‘And they are all in favour in principle,’ he continued. ‘But then they all come and want an exception for themselves. They want their drivers to be able to cross into other countries, but they don’t want drivers from abroad on their own rails in return. They want exceptions for their train drivers’ unions or some other lobbies. Or they want to change the common training standards. Some countries don’t want to bring their existing national standards down, others don’t want high standards imposed on them. The British don’t want any of it, they say we’re an island and most of our railroad traffic is purely internal. Which is true, in fact, but they threaten to ruin it for the rest as well.’
Hans took a swig and suppressed a little burp.