by Reevik, Carl
‘Who would be capable of erasing such a recording?’
‘For a cyber-attack at such a level, for one that can’t be traced back to the hacker, and to thoroughly overwrite erased memory so you can’t properly reconstruct it, you’d need very advanced technology. Plus a lot of computing power to find and breach the backup servers in the first place. All I can say is that this wasn’t a lone guy sitting in his mother’s basement.’
‘I will need your name,’ Becker said.
‘Clara Weber.’
‘Thank you. Please let me know if you find anything.’ Becker gave her his business card, shook her hand, turned around and left.
Outside he checked his watch. Maybe he was getting used to it after all. Anyway, if he hurried now he could still catch the chief prosecutor at police headquarters.
He opened the car door, pressed his back against the back rest of the driver’s seat, and let his body glide down with as much friction as possible to slow him down in the descent. Once his behind had touched down, he took out his mobile phone and made the first of two calls.
‘This is Becker, it’s about the lost camera footage from the hotel. You heard? Yes, I need you guys to come to a local company named Luxecur. The contact is Clara Weber. She says their computers have been hacked, I have no way of telling whether it’s true. No, no uniforms for the moment, only some IT technicians. Just take some van and come and check it out. Yes. Thanks.’
He touched the screen and dialled the next number.
‘Becker here, did the Commission guys call back? Yes, I thought so. Call me on this phone if they do. Is Jacques still in the building? All right, I’m on my way. Fifteen minutes.’
Becker buckled up and started the engine.
16
Hans, Siim and Clarissa sat down around the kitchen table. Now all of them were showered and fully dressed. They had eaten pre-baked reheated rolls with butter and cheese or jam. Each of them was now holding a coffee cup. The round black object was lying in the middle of the table between them.
Siim was the first to speak. ‘What did you get into, Hans?’
‘That’s the point,’ Hans said. ‘It’s me. Not you guys.’
Hans had no way of knowing precisely who had put the tracker on Siim’s car, but he knew fairly well who it was not. It was not the Commission, because they didn’t do such things. It was not the police, neither Luxembourg nor Belgium nor the Netherlands, because they could have simply stopped the car. It was probably not Hoffmann, because he’d had a perfect opportunity to ask or take whatever he’d wanted to ask or take in the gloomy hotel corridor.
‘It’s about something I have, or something I know,’ Hans continued. ‘Or what they think I have, or what they think I know. In any case you stay here. A Dutch police car will pick me up, I hope. Once I’m gone you should be able to continue living your life as before, leave the compound, go into town, whatever. When this is all over, we’ll have a beer in Brussels.’
Siim offered, ‘What if it isn’t you, Hans, but me? I mean, I was joking about my secret railway plans, but there are actually some big commercial interests at stake there.’
Clarissa asked, ‘Your railway plans are not written by just one person, I hope?’
‘You’d be surprised,’ Siim grinned. ‘But no, you’re right.’
They all took a sip of coffee.
‘So what do we do with the GPS tracker?’, Siim asked. ‘In the movies we would now glue it to some random car, to mislead the pursuers.’
Hans thought about it. ‘I don’t think that’s necessary, or smart. They had all night to come here. Maybe they’re sitting behind some dune outside the compound right now. Maybe there is a drone hovering above Petten. Either way, the tracker is where the car is, that’s not the problem. What’s important is that they should see me leave.’
Hans thought of something that he had. The box, and the code. He didn’t want to try and open the box’s locks again, so he brought the serial number he’d copied in the hotel lobby.
‘Does this code look familiar to you?’, Hans asked Clarissa. She had a look at the back side of the sheet and shook her head.
‘This could be anything,’ Siim said, after having a look, too. ‘Where’s it from?’
‘From the box that turned out not to be radioactive,’ Hans said. ‘Someone attacked me in the hotel when it happened, he might have dropped it.’
He might be looking for it.
‘What’s inside the box?’, Clarissa asked.
‘Air, the code, nothing else,’ Hans said.
‘There could be fingerprints on the box,’ Siim offered.
Hans shook his head. ‘A man who’s worried about his prints wears gloves.’
Although, had the attacker been wearing gloves when he’d squeezed Hans’s fingers?
‘Maybe particles of whatever had been inside the box,’ Clarissa suggested.
A car sounded its horn outside on the yard. The three looked at each other and got up. Hans led the way outside.
It was still windy on the yard, and raindrops were falling on the compound and the buildings and cars and people inside it.
In the middle of the yard stood a big, dark blue van with iron grating welded to the windows. A man was standing next to it. He had a muscular but compact body. A policeman, not a bodybuilder. He was completely bald and wore dark blue trousers with large pockets sewn onto the thighs, and a dark blue woollen pullover with two pens sticking out of the breast pocket. There were epaulettes with stripes sewn onto the shoulders. Water drops had formed on the man’s bald head.
As Hans approached him, the man asked, ‘What’s your name?’
‘Hans Tamberg.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘Rotterdam police.’
The man pointed at the door on the passenger’s side, mutely telling Hans to get in. A professional routine, Hans thought. He’d had surgery in a hospital once, and several nurses in a row had approached him and asked him more or less the same questions. Not ‘ah you must be Hans’, but ‘state your name, state what surgery you’re undergoing’.
Hans turned to face Siim and Clarissa. He quickly hugged them, one after the other, and turned back to the van. There were long words stencilled on the side of the car. Koninklijke Marechaussee. Nothing else, no stripes, no crowns, no lions. That had to be more than just police. It came across as some kind of a military gendarmerie, which was exactly what Hans needed. Maybe the back of the van was full of riot gear to beat up football hooligans with. Or racks with automatic rifles. Hans got in, the bald gendarme started the diesel engine, switched the windshield wipers inside the grating to interval, turned the van around and drove towards the exit. Once they’d passed through the gate he turned right and accelerated. At the next intersection Hans saw a patrol car waiting for them. It was the same dark blue as the van, and it had a bar of flashing blue lights on the roof. Perfect, Hans thought. It’s a convoy.
Luxembourg
When the elevator doors opened on Becker’s floor, he saw the chief prosecutor come out of his office. ‘Jacques,’ Becker said. ‘Good thing I didn’t miss you.’
‘I just checked in your office, you weren’t there, but now I have to leave,’ the chief prosecutor replied. ‘Follow me to the car, okay?’
They shook hands. Jacques Majerus was not only chief prosecutor of Luxembourg, he was also the older cousin of Becker’s ex-wife. During the divorce Becker had expected that whatever family connection they’d had would be cut off, but it had turned out differently. Becker got along fairly well with his ex-cousin-in-law. They weren’t exactly friends in any classical sense, though; Becker always knew that. It was absolutely clear that Jacques wasn’t just some relative but someone older, and there had never been any doubt that he was several hierarchical steps higher than Becker. Not just in the way an inspector is the superior of a junior policeman, but in the way a man who was half politician was superior to ordinary civil servants. His royal highness’s chief prosecutor
Jacques Majerus had constant meetings with the minister of justice, weekly meetings with the minister of the interior, monthly meetings with the prime-minister. Several times a year he’d join the wining and dining with the Grand Duke himself. Becker had never toasted with the monarch. He’d last seen him, on a national day parade ages ago, as his highness had waved to the crowd. Becker had been standing in that crowd. That was as ennobled as it got. All this meant that the chief prosecutor was still the chief prosecutor, except that Becker could call him Jacques, turn to him to resolve thorny questions, and expect him to return his calls within one or two days. Which was more than could be said of other inspectors, who had less influential ex-cousins-in-law.
‘How’s Pascal?’, Majerus asked as they entered the elevator to go back down to the ground floor.
‘Your nephew is considering job offers,’ Becker replied. ‘Either geological research, or finding gas fields under the sea for the big British and Norwegian energy companies. Actually it’s research in both cases, but one is academic and the other is commercial.’
‘He should do both.’
‘That’s what I told him, too. First one, then the other.’
‘I meant both at the same time,’ Majerus replied. ‘Dig oil and gas for the companies, then write a doctoral thesis about it. You have to be pragmatic with these things. Oh, happy birthday Didier.’
‘Thank you.’
The elevator doors opened and they stepped outside. A uniformed policeman was waiting for Majerus, ready to take him to his car.
‘Just come with me, we’ll talk in the car,’ Majerus said. ‘This dead man Zayek is causing a lot of, shall we say, unease.’
They walked together to a waiting black limousine. As always Becker noted that it had a licence plate with a very short number. He had seen the delicate but dead serious logic of the licence plates during the national day parade. First some heavy black limousines had arrived, but they’d still had ordinary licence plates. The next wave of black limousines had shown off their two-digit combinations. In the end the Grand Duke’s car had arrived. No licence plates at all on that one, just the royal colours.
They reached the car, the engine was already running. Majerus got in the back, sitting on the right. Becker sat next to him, to his left. The driver was behind the steering wheel, and Majerus’s assistant had already been sitting in the passenger’s seat. The uniformed policeman who’d brought them to the car walked out onto the street and stopped the traffic, so that the driver could get the car and his passengers smoothly on the road without having to wait for a gap or, God forbid, crane his neck. The man turned the wheel right, and within seconds they were on their way to the city centre. A giant freight plane thundered above them and rose into the sky ahead of them. So they are lifting off from left to right now, Becker thought.
‘So what do we know, and what do you need,’ Majerus asked Becker. The assistant turned around in his seat and was now sitting basically with his back to the windshield. This wasn’t a man giving another man a lift. This was a work meeting that happened to take place inside a moving car.
‘We know three things,’ Becker said. ‘One is that two Commission people, plus one outsider, were talking to Zayek in the lobby right before he died. The second is that there’s been some kind of fistfight at the reception counter mere moments before he died. And the third is that probably some hacker erased all security camera recordings, but the IT people are checking on that right now.’
‘Have you positively identified the body?’
‘Not yet, I’ve ordered fingerprints, and we should get DNA samples from Germany today, that’s where he lived.’
‘Assuming it’s Zayek, who killed him?’
‘I don’t know yet. That’s why I wanted to see you.’
‘What do you need?’, Majerus asked.
‘I have two identified witnesses, and I would like to talk to both of them.’
Majerus waited. There was no need to ask whether there was a problem. Clearly there was.
‘One is an American officer named James F. Lawrence,’ Becker continued. ‘He was checking out of the hotel when it happened, and he was involved in the fistfight. I can send you his exact details as soon as I’m back in the office. Will this car take me back?’
‘Didier, please. Who is the second witness?’
Did that mean yes or no? The assistant started writing something down in a little booklet.
Becker continued. ‘The second is a man named Hans Tamberg, he was one of the Commission people, and he was involved in the fistfight, too. He should be in Brussels, but he doesn’t answer his phone. His boss can’t be reached either. His secretary says he’ll call back.’
Majerus’s assistant continued scribbling away.
Becker said, ‘Now, I don’t know anything about the American, except that I want his point of view. I definitely know that Hans Tamberg is either lying or at least hiding something very big. And I need you in order to get to both of them.’
The driver turned left at a salmon-coloured corner pub building and drove down a steep slope into a gorge, crossed the rail tracks that led through it, and drove up again, turning right onto a straight road lined with tall trees to continue towards the city centre.
‘This is not an easy one,’ Majerus finally said. ‘You know yourself how low the statistical murder rate in our country is. A fraction of a corpse per one hundred thousand people per year, it basically doesn’t happen. And it should stay that way, because we’re the host country for a whole orchestra of international agencies. We don’t want to make them nervous. The banks are already nervous because they might lose their tax benefits, now we don’t want the European institutions to start worrying, too.’
The car descended into another valley along a cliff. In a moment it would cross the Alzette river, climb back up and emerge on another plateau with another residential area.
‘I understand you don’t want to sit around all day trying to reach some Brussels bureaucrat who doesn’t answer his phone,’ Majerus continued. ‘That’s why I’ll make the request to the Commission directly. The victim was one of their employees. They want this resolved, they help us do it. Now about your American.’
The car reached an intersection. The avenue to the left led towards the central railway station and the two and a half streets that constituted the seedy part of town. The avenue to the right crossed the wide Petrusse gorge via a tall stone viaduct connecting this plateau to the inner city proper, with the boutiques and the government ministries and the cafés and the non-seedy bars. And that was where the car turned.
‘With the Americans it’s a bit different,’ Majerus said. ‘We’re part of NATO, and we contribute to international military missions and so on, but you know we shouldn’t push it too much. We have a population of half a million. They barely care about countries that are a hundred times our size, let alone us. I’ll send a request, don’t worry. But I think the key is, as always, European cooperation. The Commission helps us with this Hans Tamberg, and if you then still need your James Lawrence, then we’ll ask for him together, as Europeans.’
Becker looked out the window to his left. For just a moment he tried to enjoy the view of the neat buildings of the city centre, of the enormous Luxembourgish flag above the gorge, of the golden goddess standing on her tall obelisk, a laurel wreath in her extended hands. She would have been shining brightly if the weather had been better. She disappeared from view as the car turned right into the castle-like complex of buildings housing the country’s supreme courts.
Majerus shook hands with Becker and reminded him to send the exact details of both witnesses to his assistant. Then he and the assistant got out, closed the doors behind them and strode towards one of the entrances.
‘Back to the airport?’, the driver asked.
‘Yes please,’ Becker replied and shifted his behind over to the right, where Jacques Majerus had just sat. So ‘Didier, please’ had meant ‘yes, it will take you back’. But if he
was being chauffeured in a limousine with an impressively short number on the licence plate, then at least he should sit in the boss’s place, he felt. Becker liked the fact that his ex-cousin-in-law was trying to find solutions and help out, but that was about it. This wasn’t his world. It was clear why Jacques was having daily meetings with ministers and Becker was not.
The Netherlands, Motorway E19, direction Rotterdam
The trip from Petten to Rotterdam would take them about one and a half hours, and all that time the bald gendarme wouldn’t say a single word. He drove in silence, following the dark blue patrol car and the mute blue flashlights on its roof. This suited Hans very well, because it allowed him to do some thinking. There was nothing to do, and nothing to see. He was sitting immersed in the steady roar of the diesel engine, the drumming of raindrops on the roof and the grating and the windshield, and the hiss of the tyres of overtaking cars on the asphalt that was getting wetter every minute.
First, why was he being followed? Before the who came the why. He would go through it in the way Viktor had done it the day before. Either it was because of the Zayek situation, or it was because of something else, something unrelated. Hans felt it safe to assume that it was not something unrelated.
Assuming it was about Zayek, what exactly was it? Like he’d said to Siim and Clarissa, it could be something he knew or something he had. What he knew was what he’d seen. He’d seen Hoffmann, but so had everybody else, and that man didn’t seem to be someone who was hiding his face. He’d seen Zayek, who was a Commission employee in the open. Or he had been when he was still alive. He’d seen the tight-lipped attacker, right before the American soldier had grabbed him by the shoulder. If the attacker had just shoved an explosive device into Zayek’s mouth, he might have been concerned about being spotted and committed to the electronic memory of a camera phone. That’s why he’d wanted to take Hans’s phone, thinking that Hans had taken a picture. But he’d been in a hotel with security cameras, which would show him leave the bathroom area seconds before the explosion. The man hadn’t been wearing a mask, not even sunglasses. He had blue eyes, Hans had seen them. Hans was a witness, more or less, but not much more so than any other person in the hotel lobby, and certainly not more than Tienhoven, say. Assuming Tienhoven knew as much as Hans did about this whole affair.