by Reevik, Carl
Clarke looked over to Tienhoven with a barely concealed grin. ‘Willem, what do you think about doing a research study?’
Tienhoven duly obliged. ‘One university will write that we have the powers, the other will write that we don’t. Probably they will both say both things, and let us draw our own conclusions. And then they’ll have a conference and spend the rest of their research money on wine. But we need a solution now, don’t we.’
Hans grinned. His boss really must have had a lot of experience with various legal professionals, including academics.
‘Exactly,’ Clarke said. ‘Research studies is what you do if you don’t really want to do anything.’
Hans cleared his throat. ‘Mister Clarke, if I may.’ Hans had never believed that he was being paid to just sit there and keep his mouth shut. It had never really hurt him or his career to speak up. Sometimes it had in the short run, then he’d felt bad all day about having said something stupid, but never in the long run. ‘The reason why anti-fraud is involved to begin with is because there could be a possible cover-up of irregularities inside the Commission. Possibly a deliberate falsification of European reports, by a man who possibly committed fraud while going through the job competition.’
They were all looking at him, and their look was relatively benevolent. Only Madame Bresson looked a bit wary. Hans continued, ‘If individual national authorities can give us clues, for whatever reason, then normally they are welcome. This has happened before, in fact it happens regularly.’
Clarke nodded. ‘And the legal service has never objected to this, and I think the legal service is right.’ He nodded to Bresson, then turned to Tienhoven. ‘Willem, what do you think?’
Tienhoven agreed. ‘We’re not going to hunt any spies. We are fighting fraud. If we find anything serious in any other direction, I suggest we will stop immediately and report to you before taking any measures.’
Clarke heard him out with a content expression in his face, then looked over at Bresson. She didn’t say anything. Clarke got up, everyone else got up as well. ‘All right,’ he said, to no-one in particular. ‘The investigation is opened on these terms, and in close cooperation with the BND.’
He nodded to Tienhoven, then to Hans, and left the room. Bresson quietly said goodbye and followed him outside. Tienhoven closed the door from the inside and sat back down again. Hans sat down as well.
Hans asked, ‘Was it okay that I said that?’
Tienhoven shrugged. ‘What you said was right, that’s why I supported you.’
‘Well it’s just going very fast now, all of a sudden. The Bulgarian language thing could be nothing, and the analysis of the nuclear reports is not ready yet either.’
‘What, you’re getting cold feet now?’ Tienhoven shook his head. ‘Don’t worry. Clarke had already made up his mind anyway, you saw it yourself. Now the investigation into Zayek is open. We’ll get the standard notification by e-mail as soon as he signs it and his secretary pushes the button, and then it’s official. So the question is: what do you propose we do now?’
Hans took a breath, and then answered. ‘I guess we have no choice but to confront Zayek in Luxembourg. The Germans want to do it right now, for their own reasons, and we’ll have to do it at some point, too. Plus, we have just been instructed to do it together with the Germans, which the Commissioner had wanted as well.’
‘I think so, too,’ Tienhoven replied. ‘For us it will be a normal questioning, first about his Bulgarian language skills, then about the nuclear statistics. And then the Germans can ask their own questions.’
‘This sounds like it’s very neat. But is it?’
Tienhoven lowered his voice, too. He put both his hands on the table, palms down. ‘The thing is that we cannot prevent national authorities from talking to our staff. We’re not that special. We are just citizens of countries, residents of countries. The Germans want to have one of our staff arrested, they can do that, if he’s a crime suspect. They want to talk to him before calling the local police, they can do that, too. In that case it would be even better if we were present, this Zayek is still a Commission employee, he has rights. Either way, once Zayek is arrested and indicted somewhere, we’ll be out of the game completely. We’ll never know what it’s about.’
That was the longest speech Hans had heard his boss pronounce in a long time.
Hans asked, ‘What if he runs away?’
‘The evidence will still be there. His records, the statistics.’
Hans nodded.
Tienhoven looked at his watch. Hans checked his phone. ‘I don’t know where this Hoffmann is now,’ Tienhoven continued. ‘But we could take the car and meet with him in Luxembourg, or at a petrol station along the way. I’ll ask Gabriela to cancel the afternoon meetings.’
Hans wanted to be sure he understood correctly. ‘We do it right this afternoon?’
‘We leave right now, as soon as Hoffmann confirms the meeting. What did you think?’
Hans thought for a moment. ‘Do we tell him about the uranium?’
‘We’ll tell him the truth,’ his boss replied. ‘And the truth is that we don’t have definitive proof, but that we do have indications. Maybe they have indications of their own, or more. This is a joint operation, after all. Don’t forget that Germany is not an enemy. It’s not even a foreign country. It’s a member of the European Union.’
Hans nodded again. Just yesterday Tienhoven had warned him about manipulations and oil and beer. But he did have a point now. Commission staff often developed a certain wariness of certain European countries, or of certain groups of countries, or of all countries collectively. Like Siim had with his railroad legislation. But the truth was that the European Union existed precisely because of, and to the benefit of these countries. The Union consisted of these countries. They weren’t protesters outside the door. They were the shareholders.
Hans and Tienhoven left the meeting room together and walked back up the corridor. Tienhoven continued to his own office, while Hans made a stop at his in order to check his e-mail. First, he wanted to have one last look at his inbox before leaving. His work e-mail couldn’t be accessed from outside the anti-fraud building, not even with a one-time code sent to a registered mobile phone, like it was possible in all other Commission departments that weren’t investigating each other’s fraud. Second, he wanted to print out Viktor’s follow-up analysis, the two Excel sheets. He wanted to have them available in case the discussion with Zayek required pointing out specific occasions of disappearing uranium. He only had Holland as well as Poland as the second country so far, but maybe that would be enough. He clicked on the icon and his printer started making the usual noises.
While it was still working, Hans took a breath and left his office to go see his boss again. Tienhoven was already sitting behind his desk and looked up. ‘Yes?’
Hans entered and closed the door behind him. The door to the secretary’s office was closed already.
Hans said, ‘I’m sorry, but don’t you still think that this is all going a bit fast?’
Normally Hans preferred fast to sclerotic, and his boss knew that, but this here was different, in nature not just degree.
Tienhoven got up from his chair, walked over to the small round table in the corner, sat down and invited Hans to have a seat, too. Hans gladly obliged.
‘For example,’ Hans said. ‘Why does the Commissioner ask the anti-fraud department to deal with spies? And we just say yes and go there. On a case that isn’t entirely ripe yet, together with the BND, which is an intelligence outfit and not a police force, and which has a defector and a plan that we know nothing about?’
Tienhoven heard him out, then he waited for a few moments before answering. ‘I understand what you mean,’ he said. ‘But these things sometimes happen.’
‘Us exposing Russian spies?’
‘Not that, of course, but things happening very quickly, very suddenly,’ Tienhoven clarified. ‘Your first question is easy. Normally the
Commissioner wouldn’t have given it to anti-fraud but to anti-spy. Except there is no such thing as anti-spy in the Commission. We come fairly close with our sorta-kinda-police job, and we already work for her.’
‘Okay, so second: why do you think the Germans want to share this with us? Why do they want to expose him together?’
‘Political considerations, undoubtedly,’ Tienhoven shrugged. ‘To stress the spirit of European collegiality, to not come across unilateralist, what do I know. But it doesn’t even matter. We should be happy, because otherwise this Zayek would already be in a German prison awaiting a hearing, and all we’d do here is make photocopies for the German prosecutor.’
Hans tried a smile. Tienhoven had always been a pragmatic manager, it was just that in Hans’s time there had never been a situation like that. Usually there was plenty of time to consider plenty of information. Now they had neither one nor the other, but they had to decide all the same. And it was absolutely true. The worst thing would be to sit around, do nothing, let the spy get arrested, and then end up making photocopies for others. Oh sure, Tienhoven had said they weren’t going to hunt any spies. But Hans understood very well that this was more or less exactly what they’d be doing. Hunting corrupt mayors who stole road-building money was of course also very exciting, but now he felt they were entering a whole new league. Now Hans was smiling for real.
Saint Petersburg
Werner Ott finished talking, and waited for a reply. He pressed the receiver to his ear. The encryption technology that the consulate used diminished the audio quality a little.
‘Did he change his mind?’, the serious voice at the other end of the line asked.
‘He didn’t say anything to me,’ Ott said. ‘He just left. When I went to check his room last night it was empty.’
‘Nothing else?’
‘Nothing else.’
The voice paused. ‘All right, thank you.’
‘Goodbye,’ Ott replied and hung up.
It was all for the better. Ott hadn’t asked what this meant for the validity of the information that the visitor had provided. Berlin wouldn’t have told him, and he didn’t need to know. Anyway, this type of situation was rather something for the embassy in Moscow, not for a regional consulate like theirs, he thought. Besides, it wasn’t entirely unproblematic even there. When he’d been posted to Warsaw as a young man, back in the eighties, they’d received a defector, too, and it had turned out very ugly for the poor man. And for his wife, too. Thank God they hadn’t touched the child; they had sent it to grow up with the grandparents. The times had been different then, of course. But regardless of the times, none of this was ever a game.
Belgium, Motorway E411, direction Luxembourg
Tienhoven and Hans were sitting in the boss’s private car, a spacious Renault, and Hans felt a lot like chatting. They were heading southwest past Namur and towards Arlon and the Luxembourgish border. They would meet with Hoffmann on an agreed parking lot along the motorway, so they still had some time to kill.
The plan was clear. Meet with Hoffmann, go to Luxembourg, talk to Zayek. Hans and Tienhoven would ask Zayek about how he had gotten onto the reserve list without speaking Bulgarian. Maybe there was a harmless explanation. If so, they would then ask whether he knew anything about any falsified nuclear reports. Maybe there was a harmless explanation for that, too. If not, they could still make further checks, because the evidence wasn’t going to run away. All the files were there. Whether Zayek would still be there himself was beyond their control anyway. After the Commission, it would be Hoffmann’s turn to ask whatever questions he had. Then it would be up to Hoffmann to decide whether he would call the police or not, which would have been true in any case, with or without them. At the end of the day, anti-fraud was neither a counter-intelligence service nor a police. For any use of force they depended on local operational assistance from the national authorities.
Hans looked out the window. The road signs were showing the first exit into the city of Namur, the next one would come two kilometres later. It meant that they had covered almost a third of the distance to Luxembourg.
Now, after all the initial excitement and before the real show would start, Hans would have loved to talk about miscellaneous things. He had learned from Tienhoven that the Dutch expression for this was ‘to talk about cows and calves’. The problem was that Tienhoven himself was such a taciturn driver, no cows no calves. Not that he was particularly chatty when not driving, apart from the litany-length monologue earlier in his office. But in the confined space of a car without any music on, and without any conversation being opened by the hierarchical superior, Hans felt very acutely that the situation was not quite as exhilarating as it could be.
Perhaps he could ask Tienhoven about his old work back at Utrecht. Maybe Hans’s unflattering memories of the brutalist concrete city were unjustified. He’d been to Utrecht only once, together with Julia, and that had been an accident. It had been just before Hans had learned that he’d passed the Commission’s job competition, when they’d lived together in Estonia. They had decided to make a trip over the weekend, and to have some fun in Amsterdam, in the way people were supposed to have fun in Amsterdam. Hans hadn’t been sure about it, he’d known nothing of the city, and Julia had seemed only lukewarm about the idea, too. But somehow they’d persuaded each other that this was a thing that people had to do at least once.
So they’d booked a cheap flight to a small regional airport in Eindhoven, and taken the bus to the train station in the inner city, and then the train to Amsterdam. Normally it would have taken them a mere two and a half hours to get there. Except their train had got stuck. It had been autumn, and leafs had fallen on the tracks, making it dangerous for trains to roll on them. Hans had wondered whether this had been the first time in the history of the Netherlands that leafs had come off the trees in autumn. In fact this was precisely what everybody around them in the train had said, too. Every autumn the damn leafs fall on the damn rails, and every time the national railway company is completely overwhelmed by the logistical challenge of this totally unexpected freak event.
Their train had crawled to Utrecht central station and released the passengers into the hideous concrete jungle to survive on their own. Hans would even have found it a little exciting to be stranded in an unknown city like that. Julia had found it totally unexciting to be stranded in an unknown city like that. They’d found a frighteningly cheap hotel for the night. The bed had been soft like warm butter in the middle, worn out by generations of couples making love on it, putting the centre of their weight on the exact centre of the mattress. Hans would have loved to see whether the bed could handle some more repeated downward pressure, but Julia hadn’t been in the mood for any of that. The following day they’d spent mostly indoors because it had been raining. They hadn’t felt like going to Amsterdam at all, and in the evening had returned to Eindhoven airport. The trains had been running again. They’d slept on the plane. Afterwards Hans would have preferred to have stayed in Estonia and gone to Lake Peipus instead. It was a large lake, so large it was almost a sea. He’d spent many pleasant evenings there growing up. There at least he would have enjoyed the wide view over the calm water.
Hans blinked a few times. So yes, his boss’s time in Utrecht was absolutely a potential topic for discussion, for shared memories even. Maybe Tienhoven had arrested someone in the very hotel Hans and Julia hadn’t had any sex in.
Or he could ask about his daughter. So Willem, the young woman on the picture, that’s your daughter, right? Or your niece? My brother Lennart has two daughters, speaking of which, who’s the girl on the photo?
No.
Hans glanced at the golden wedding band on his boss’s right hand. It had always been there. Maybe another opening for a question.
Suddenly the hand with the wedding band moved. Tienhoven checked the clock on his car’s dashboard and took out a little plastic cylinder from his jacket, popped open the lid with his right thumb whil
e steering with his left hand, and pressed it against his lips. Then he closed and pocketed the cylinder and took a sip of water from the plastic bottle that had been fixed in a cup holder between his and Hans’s seat.
A sizeable minority among the colleagues at work believed that these were Ritalin pills to keep his brain running at high performance levels. The majority opinion held that it was heart medication. However that majority, in turn, was split into three camps of roughly equal size. Two camps were favouring a different type of medication each, while the third group didn’t know enough about the subject and just stuck with ‘heart medication’ in general. Hans was one of these agnostics, supporting the broader heart theory because he’d seen his boss fall silent sometimes, as if he was listening to his own heartbeat. Tienhoven’s secretary Gabriela had never said a word, even when some colleagues had asked her more or less directly. She kept her mouth shut like a taciturn Estonian grandfather. Or, as the Russians put it, she revealed nothing, like a captured Soviet partisan during interrogation. Maybe now was a good moment to ask Tienhoven about his heart. But maybe it was not.
Tienhoven put the water bottle back into the holder and said to Hans, ‘Remind me about your open cases, please.’
All right, why not. Hans cleared his throat. ‘One is the director who probably hired her nephew as a consultant. I meant to ask you, actually, to approve a request of the birth certificates of the consultant’s parents. If it’s true we can schedule a questioning.’
‘Please explain to me why you want to see the birth certificates, instead of just asking her if the consultant is her nephew.’
‘She’s a director,’ Hans replied. ‘It wouldn’t seem appropriate to make allegations without having the proof already. What if she denies it? Then we’d have to say all right, we’ll check out whether what you say is true, and then we’ll get back to you.’