by Reevik, Carl
Becker hung up and inhaled some smoke. His colleague Felten had done the consultancy building, maybe this would yield results from people who’d finally remember being in the lobby and seeing something useful, and who’d find the time and the kindness to tell the police about it. But that would be probably tomorrow, too.
Becker tried Hans Tamberg’s mobile phone number again, but nobody answered. Then he looked up the Commission’s switchboard number and asked to talk to Willem Tienhoven’s colleagues or secretariat in Brussels, to see whether they knew anything about the man’s whereabouts, or could tell him more about this surprisingly light heart attack. But nobody answered that call either.
This day was over, Becker decided, at least as far as this case was concerned. Tomorrow he’d go to the firm that lost the camera footage. Then he’d need to talk to the chief prosecutor about where to find Lieutenant Lawrence, US Army. Then he’d need to wait for Doctor Offerbrück’s autopsy, nothing to be looking forward to. Not because of the gory details, but because of the man himself. Then he’d need to wait for the chemical analysis of the explosive, and the prints matching and the DNA results. Only once the identification was positive would he notify the Bulgarian embassy about the demise of one of their citizens.
In the meantime Becker would need to get a hold of Willem Tienhoven plus Hans Tamberg from the European Commission. Becker refused to regret having let Tamberg leave. There’d been no reason to deprive him of his liberty by locking him up. The young man was a witness, and he wasn’t a mafioso. But it was clear that he hadn’t even told him half of what he knew.
France, Motorway E25, direction Thionville
‘Mama, he’s doing it again!’
Anneli held the steering wheel and blocked out the shouting from the back seats. She was thinking. About the day, about her conversation with the police inspector. The headlights were on, because it was getting dark. In Finland they always had to be turned on, even in daylight.
‘Mama! With his chewing gum!’
She had answered all the inspector’s questions in Theodorakis’s office. How are you feeling? I’m all right, thank you. How do you know Monsieur Zayek? We work in the same unit. What do you do? We process reports for the Commission. And Zayek? He, too. We all do.
‘Mama, I’m telling you, it’s getting worse!’
‘He’s lying, I didn’t do anything!’
What happened here today, Madame Villefranche? Someone came into his office. How do you know? I heard it, our office doors are always open. How many people? Two, I believe, but he talked with only one man. What language? English. What did they say? I don’t know, I didn’t hear and I didn’t listen. And then? They left together. Then after a while I heard police sirens on the street. How well did you know Monsieur Zayek?
‘Mama, he won’t stop! It’s disgusting!’
‘He’s a liar, a liar!’
‘Stop it, both of you!’, she snapped. ‘Eric, leave your little brother alone! Matti, stop whining because of every petty little thing!’
She hated it. She knew that she shouldn’t yell at them. Of course it was she who had given them the chewing gum Boris had bought her on Monday in the first place, but that wasn’t the point. The point was that she and her husband had agreed that they would try to avoid the yelling. That they would check on each other in case things got out of hand. They had agreed a number of times already. Because every time she or her husband yelled at them, the mood turned even more aggressive. The boys would snap back at them, and at each other. It was a vicious circle. The only way out was to stay calm and patient. If you are calm, they are calm, they behave more normally, which allows you to be even calmer and nicer and happier. And then they are happier. But by God, it cost her so much energy.
How well did you know Monsieur Zayek? Like I said, we were co-workers. We went for coffee sometimes, but not often. Did you like him? You shouldn’t say this about the dead, but to be honest: a little, but not very much. Why do you think the anti-fraud people came to talk to him? I didn’t know they were anti-fraud. Did he have enemies, were there any other reasons he might have been in trouble? I’m sorry, Inspector, I have no idea.
Everything she had told him was the truth.
She took a deep breath.
‘Okay boys, I’m thinking of an animal, it’s a mammal, and it starts with the letter V.’
‘La vache!’
‘In Finnish, Eric.’
‘Oww, Mama!’
‘Villisika!’
‘Yes!’ The wild boar, exactly. The younger one was always a little quicker.
‘Do another one! But a difficult one, not one for babies.’
In another twenty minutes they would be back home. She needed to talk about the news of her dead colleague, a man who had worked in the office right next to hers, and whose life had ended so abruptly and so violently, and so close to her workplace. She had talked to Ilona and Pedro, of course. She’d had to listen to Stavros’s hypocritical sermon, like the other two. But she felt she needed to end the day by reading to the boys and, once they’d be in bed, by opening a bottle of wine, calling to talk to her father, and, once her husband would be home, talking it all through with him, too, sharing a quiet evening with him. It had been a tough day.
She turned the steering wheel by just a few degrees to follow the slight bend of the motorway heading south.
12
Hans and Viktor had just crossed the Belgian border and were heading north and west in the direction of Brussels. Viktor kept a steady speed. It was a smooth ride through the wooded landscape that was slowly turning dark green and grey.
‘Are you sure this isn’t a problem, Viktor?’
‘It’s fine, Hans. Let me just quickly call my wife.’
He took his phone from his pocket and touched the screen to dial a contact’s number. He held it to his ear.
‘Hi, listen, is it okay if I take the car?’ He spoke to his wife in English. Mixed marriage. ‘I’m bringing a colleague to Brussels. No, the colleague from anti-fraud. I’m giving him a lift to his office. Yes. Yes I know they are, I just wanted to be sure. Okay. Yes, tonight, of course. Ciao!’
He touched the screen again and pocketed the phone. Then they drove on in silence.
‘Is everything all right?’
‘It’s fine,’ Viktor replied. ‘I’ll just drop you off and head back home. I have to be at home tonight because tomorrow morning we’ll need the car to bring the kids to school.’
‘And now?’
‘The kids are visiting friends of ours anyway, they will bring them back to our place later tonight. My wife’s at home, but she doesn’t need the car right now.’
Hans looked around him. He had seen cars of friends with children, they were rubbish bins on wheels, full of crumbs and empty packages and fossilised fried potatoes. He had also seen childless people’s cars, immaculate, without a speck of dust. Like Tienhoven’s car, which was hopefully still parked outside the Commission building in Luxembourg, because otherwise it would have meant the fool had driven his own car after a heart attack. Hopefully he’d be in a bus or taxi now. Either way, Hans had expected Viktor’s car to be either very clean or very dirty. But Viktor’s car was in the middle. Not immaculate, but not messy either. In fact, Hans realised he didn’t care very much. He touched his eyebrow. The crust was gone, but it still hurt.
Viktor asked, ‘Why were you in Luxembourg?’
Hans put his hand back down. Viktor was right. It was time to put some order into the questions that needed answering.
Hans turned his head left to face Viktor. ‘We were investigating the falsified nuclear reports. And, by extension, the missing uranium.’
Viktor kept his eyes on the road ahead of him. The headlights were on. Hans faced forward again, watching the red tail lights of the car in front of them.
‘We talked to a man from the atomic energy department,’ Hans continued. ‘We went there together with someone from the German foreign intelligence agency.’
Viktor didn’t react.
Hans added, ‘The Germans think the man was a Russian spy.’
A car with a noisily powerful engine overtook them. Viktor kept his speed steady.
‘And then this man died,’ Hans added. ‘During the questioning, in the hotel where you picked me up.’
‘So you think the man who might have been a Russian spy was the one who falsified the nuclear reports.’
Why hadn’t he asked how exactly the man had died?
‘I can’t be sure,’ Hans replied. ‘You told me yourself that it seems like uranium really is disappearing. Based on the samples so far. It could be that the man was involved, it could be that he was a spy. It could be that he died because of his involvement. It could be that he just died and that the other things have nothing to do with each other.’
‘How did he die?’
There you are. Hans thought about it. Indeed, how did he die?
Hans said, ‘I lost my phone. Do you have an internet connection to a Belgian network on yours?’
‘Yes I do.’
‘Can I borrow it to check the news? Maybe they’ll tell us what they think happened.’
Viktor handed him his phone. Hans opened the internal news outlet of the European Commission. It had happened close to one of their offices, involving one of their employees, maybe there would be a notice to staff or a press release.
Viktor asked, ‘Should you be using a mobile phone right now?’
‘Why not? I’m not a fugitive. I think. And it’s your phone. Here, I found it.’ He read it out aloud. ‘This afternoon a staff member died a violent death near his workplace at the European Commission in Luxembourg. He died in the blast of a small explosive charge, a spokesman of the Luxembourgish police said. Police refused to comment on whether they considered it a killing, an accident or a suicide. The European Commission has offered full cooperation to the national authorities, Commissioner Maria Schuster-Zoll told the press.’
Viktor didn’t reply. Hans closed the news. He noticed that the phone was down to its last bar of battery life.
He gave Viktor his phone back, and said, ‘I think we can rule out an accident. The explosive charge was probably inside his mouth.’
‘So either he killed himself, or someone shoved in a hand grenade.’ Viktor hadn’t paused at all, not even for a second.
‘A military hand grenade wouldn’t have fit. They trained us on them back in Estonia.’
‘I assume the head was damaged or missing?’
‘Missing.’
‘Maybe it wasn’t inside his mouth, just near his face.’
Hans shook his head. ‘Still, even one of the smaller, offensive hand grenades would have torn apart the body, too. It was something very small.’
Viktor veered left and overtook a heavy lorry. He smoothly got back into the right lane. Then he cleared his throat and said, ‘So let’s assume the dead man was a Russian spy. You come to investigate and he kills himself, or someone else kills him, either because you came or because of something else.’
Hans almost showed a content grin. He was pleased to hear Viktor’s logic. That was precisely the value of talking things through with somebody else.
‘Okay.’
Hans waited for a continuation of Viktor’s train of thought. It came one kilometre later.
‘Let’s assume it’s not something else, but the fact that you came to investigate. In that case, whether he was killed or whether he killed himself, he had to die in order to protect something. A secret.’
Another noisy sports car overtook them.
Viktor continued, ‘And that secret could be that he was inside atomic energy and involved in making uranium disappear, or it could be something else.’
‘Or that he was a spy, but didn’t steal the uranium.’
‘Why not?’
Hans shrugged. ‘Because I guess that Russia has enough uranium already. On the tips of their missiles.’
Viktor turned the wheel and overtook an empty tourist coach.
‘It’s not necessarily for themselves,’ he said as he veered back into the right lane. ‘It could be to embarrass someone, or to drive a wedge between two other parties.’
This was more or less what Tienhoven had said, too. To expose someone or something at the right moment, right before a gas deal or before elections.
Viktor continued, ‘I’m not an expert, but as far as I know uranium is traceable. Its origin can be determined based on its physical properties. Russia has Russian uranium. So why would Russia be interested in obtaining quantities of Western uranium?’
To disrupt something. At the right moment.
‘Okay,’ Hans said. ‘Coming back to the earlier choice. Either he blew himself up, or he was blown up, because he was exposed. Or it could be because of something else, and because that something else is happening right now. His time had simply come.’
In that case it was unlikely to be a suicide. Which Hans thought wasn’t very likely to begin with. Earlier today he had seen an alleged professional Russian spy collapse and vomit after a few moderately threatening questions. He’d seen an unknown man hurt his hand, trying to grab his phone thinking he’d been photographed. And he’d seen a German spy following the supposed Russian spy towards the bathroom, then hiding, then beating and suffocating Hans in order to steal his phone. Some suicide.
‘What are the current affairs related to Russia that could have triggered all this?’, Hans asked both Viktor and himself, although his thoughts were already pointing in a particular direction.
‘Number one news are the youth protests in Southern Europe,’ Viktor said.
‘Er, yes,’ Hans replied. That was the last thing he would have brought up. ‘But this is hardly the Russians scheming. It’s more that half the youths there have been unemployed for such a long time.’
‘Half the workforce,’ Viktor said.
‘Excuse me?’
‘The unemployment rate is calculated in relation to the workforce, not in relation to the whole population.’
Hans wasn’t sure what Viktor meant.
‘Let’s say you have ten young people,’ Viktor continued, still as calmly as before. ‘Six are studying at university, two have a job, two are unemployed. How high is the unemployment rate?’
‘Well, two out of ten, no? Twenty percent.’
‘No. It’s two out of four. Fifty percent. The students do not count because they are not jobseekers. They’re sitting exams. It’s shocking to hear it’s fifty, but out of the total it’s actually only twenty. Which is still high of course.’
Hans thought about it. ‘There are young people who stay at university simply because they cannot find a job.’
‘If they are jobseekers even while they study they count as unemployed, because they are actually part of the workforce. Hence the need to talk to people about their work situation, instead of just looking at registered unemployment.’
Hans remembered what Viktor had said on the phone the other day about taking samples. But this had nothing to do with either Russia or uranium. What was he talking about?
They drove on for another few kilometres.
Hans resumed, ‘So what’s currently important, apart from the riots?’
‘Lots of things are important, and lots of those things have an actual or potential link to Russian interests, either now or at some point in the future,’ Viktor said as he overtook a sportive but slow car. ‘It could be anything between the Middle East and what Russia considers to be its sphere of interest in Eastern Europe. Already before Ukraine, many have seen Russia as a long-term continental security threat.’
‘But that’s the point,’ Hans said. ‘Maybe that’s why I’m not getting it. The Commission plays hardly any role in security matters. Each country wants to decide these things on its own, so they keep all their powers to themselves. The Commission takes the back seat. It’s NATO they should be interested in.’
‘Maybe they have put a hundred
times more spies into NATO than in the Commission, I don’t know,’ Viktor shrugged. ‘I certainly would have, if I were them. But I just don’t know. It could be nothing at all. It could be something relatively grave, such as the building of a dirty bomb. Or it could be something relatively innocent, such as theft of uranium for financial gain, black-market operations. Or something in the middle. A scheme to obtain or divert Western uranium in order to harm certain interests and advance some others.’
‘A dirty bomb?’ Hans turned to look at Viktor again.
‘A regular bomb that is stuffed with radioactive material. It’s not a nuclear bomb, but if it goes off it contaminates the area around it.’
A dirty bomb with Western uranium in Russian hands. Hans’s thoughts were racing. But Viktor was right, neither of them was an expert. Can you even use uranium from a reactor for that? Was it necessarily from a reactor?
‘Viktor, it doesn’t have much battery life left, but can I please use your phone again?’
Viktor handed it to him. Hans dialled the switchboard number. It wasn’t too late yet, it should be fine.
‘Siim Kruuse, please. Transport. Thanks.’
The usual sounds and noises.
‘Tere Siim, it’s Hans. I’m on my way to Brussels.’
‘Hans, was that you in Luxembourg? The guy in the explosion was from atomic energy, wasn’t that the department you called from my phone?’
‘Yes, and that’s why I’m calling now. I need a favour.’
‘Another one? Last time you said there wouldn’t be any trouble, now people die in explosions.’
‘It wasn’t people in the plural, it was only one person. Listen, I need to talk to your fiancée.’
‘Clarissa’s not my fiancée yet. We’re only thinking about it.’
‘Where is she at the moment?’
‘I told you, in Holland. The research reactor in Petten.’