The Last Compromise

by Reevik, Carl

  Visser took a step forward and started proclaiming something to everybody in loud Dutch. Hans understood ‘politie’, ‘helpen’ and, again, ‘container’.

  Everybody turned around and stared at him; nobody moved.

  So there was no boss. Visser walked over to a young man, almost a teenager, and put his hand on his shoulder. ‘You, what’s your name?’

  ‘Bas van den…’

  ‘Ah, my first name is also Bas!’ Visser turned back to Hans without removing his hand from the guy’s shoulder, winked, and said to Hans, ‘That’s a short form of Sebastiaan.’

  Hans approached the two, leaving the uniformed policeman behind, and they stuck with English.

  Visser took his hand away from the controller’s shoulder and said, ‘The container was sent here by A&C in Vienna.’

  Young Bas hesitated. ‘Can I see a paper or something?’

  All the other controllers had returned to their own work.

  ‘Do you really need the paperwork?’, Visser asked. ‘Do you know what will happen if we come to visit you every day, to check all your stinky containers from Stinkystan one by one?’

  ‘Er, yes, I do need the paperwork.’

  Visser grinned and showed him a printed certificate defining the ambit of the Commission’s investigation and requesting the assistance of the Dutch police. It had Tienhoven’s signature on it.

  Hans wasn’t sure this was enough to search premises or to take evidence. Actually he knew it wasn’t enough. But maybe Bas junior just needed something sufficiently persuasive in writing, so he was covered against his own boss.

  Bas turned to face the control panel and started typing away on his keyboard. A list of entries appeared on one of the screens in front of him.

  ‘These are the incoming shipments from A&C Vienna,’ Bas said. ‘They are not sailing from Vienna, obviously. They come from different countries with a sea port, as you can see here it’s mostly Australia. This is what arrived here in the last six months.’

  Hans’s heart sank. The whole screen was filled with rows of letters and numbers, and it was just the first screen of nine.

  He took a breath and asked Bas, ‘Can you show me the shipments that have been cancelled in the past two years?’

  Bas looked up to him, then turned back to his panel and started typing again. The screen showed only four entries. They all included the word Petten.

  ‘What are those?’, Hans asked.

  Visser was still standing behind Bas’s other shoulder, looking at the screen, too.

  ‘The code identifies it as cargo with ionising radiation. I’d have to search deeper to find out what it was.’

  ‘No, that’s okay, can you just tell me the dates?’

  Hans took the printout of Viktor’s list from his jacket pocket.

  ‘Here they are,’ Bas said, pointing to a smaller screen to the right of the main one.

  Hans looked at the dates on the screen and compared them with the suspicious months on his list. It was no match.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Just check the last month. Where did the containers intended for Petten go?’

  Bas started typing. The large screen changed, then the small screen displayed a new list.

  ‘They were all put on lorries for road transport to Petten,’ Bas explained. ‘Except one, which was loaded onto another cargo vessel.’

  ‘And where did that vessel go?’

  ‘Wait.’ Bas made the destination port appear on the small screen, and said, ‘Through the North Sea, around Denmark and into the Baltic Sea. The destination is Tallinn, Estonia.’

  Hans paused. But not for long.

  ‘Can you please check all the instances in the past two years when a shipment intended for Petten was sent further to Tallinn?’

  Bas didn’t even look up anymore. He typed, and the large screen showed a new list of four entries.

  ‘The dates?’

  They appeared on the small screen. Hans compared them with his printed list. They fit. Every time the reported use of uranium dropped Europe-wide in a statistically unusual way, a container had been diverted from Petten to Tallinn via Rotterdam. Hans remembered what Clarissa had said. Petten received the uranium not just for itself, they also distributed some of it to other users abroad. That’s why one diverted container had in the end affected four different countries.

  ‘When will this last container arrive in Tallinn?’

  ‘Tomorrow morning, I guess.’

  Hans stood upright again and turned to Visser.

  ‘What can we do about this?’

  Visser shrugged.

  ‘I can feel that you want to follow that container, yes?’, he said, with a half-suppressed grin that Hans found condescending. ‘But I will tell you how it is. From our point of view nothing illegal happened here. Stuff arrives and leaves, that’s normal, it’s a seaport. I assume that Petten hasn’t brought any charges about being robbed. And now that ship is clearly outside Dutch territorial waters anyway. If you think it’s an international criminal operation, we’ll help, together with Austria and Estonia and the Commission and whatever. I’m ready to contribute.’

  It was absolutely evident that Hans was in no position to mobilise international police efforts of any kind. His own investigation was probably closed by now, while he himself was still the subject of a Luxembourgish police investigation that was very much open. That left Hans with two options. Prince Ivan on the horse had to choose between three roads, Hans’s choice was much easier.

  The first option was to return to base, say hello to Tienhoven, do some more honest explaining to the Luxembourgish police, be told nothing at all by the director-general let alone the BND, add almost no information to a case that was closed anyway, and continue going after aunts hiring their own nephews. Whoever was tracking him would just catch up with him in Brussels. In the meantime, a freighter would continue steaming through the seas of northern Europe, carrying radioactive cargo to the capital city of his homeland. Hans would one day open the newspaper, and read about what happened to it in the end. If Russian-backed militias detonated a dirty bomb in Tallinn, with Russia denying it had supplied the uranium by pointing at its Western origin; if the militias went on to claim that they would feel much safer in a separate Russian-speaking new border republic of Narva, rather than in a collapsing Estonian state; if in fact they would feel even safer as part of Russia proper; if Russia that way managed to carve out a chunk of Estonia without triggering a NATO response… then Hans could shrug, fold the newspaper, and tell himself that he had done everything he could.

  All that was the first option. The second was the option that Hans had already chosen.

  He said to Bas, ‘Can you print out the details for this last container, the serial number, the name of the ship and so on, please?’

  Bas pressed a few buttons.

  Hans turned back to Visser, ‘I need to go to Tallinn. Can I book a flight from one of your computers at the police station?’

  ‘Sure thing,’ Visser said. ‘Thanks Bas!’

  He slapped the young man on the shoulder. Hans nodded to Bas, in a much more dignified way. ‘Thank you.’ He shook his hand.

  18

  ‘This is Doctor Offerbrück, I really believe you should come over to the autopsy room now.’

  Becker almost grinned, but he didn’t, because this meant either very good or very bad news, and it called above all for concentration. He ignored the thunder of the cargo plane lifting off from the airport outside his window.

  ‘I’m coming.’ He hung up, left his office, hollering to the unit secretary next door that he’d be at Kirchberg hospital, and took the elevator to the ground floor. ‘Over to the autopsy room’ had in reality meant ‘over to my hospital’. The moderate number of mysterious deaths in Luxembourg didn’t justify keeping a specialised lab just for the police.

  Becker left the building and headed for the parking lot. Jackpot, a big fat black SUV was standing right there. Becker hurried, dragging
his wobbly body over to the guard in his booth, to put his signature in the log and claim the car before anybody else could.

  He got in very easily, thank you very much, buckled up, started the engine and drove off. There wasn’t anyone to stop the traffic for him, so he waited for a gap in the stream of cars on the street that ran parallel to the airport’s runway. He turned right and took another right after a few hundred metres, driving down into a narrow ravine. It was the typical urbanisation in the valleys: a gap between two plateaus that offered just enough space for one road and one row of houses on either side, their back gardens rising almost vertically up the slope.

  After another few hundred metres he turned right again, and the SUV engine hummed discreetly as it pulled the heavy car and its heavy driver up to the Kirchberg plateau. Most of the European institutions were clustered at the plateau’s southwest end. The northeast end, where Becker’s car now emerged, was the site of a large hospital complex.

  ***

  Doctor Offerbrück was waiting for him behind the opaque glass doors at the end of a long white corridor that looked like a brightly lit maintenance shaft inside a windowless spaceship. They were three floors below street level. They shook hands and Offerbrück led Becker to a table in the middle of the room. The floor, the walls and even the ceiling were covered in white tiles. There were other tables and cabinets and sinks along all the walls. A magnifying glass on an extendable arm was suspended from the ceiling above the table in the middle. The only object on that table was a metal tray. Becker mentally braced himself to see what he expected to see. But the tray contained only a few clean and bloodless splinters of metal.

  Becker was half relieved and half disappointed. He looked questioningly at Offerbrück.

  ‘These are fragments that I recovered from the inside of parts of the skull,’ Offerbrück explained. ‘Crime scene picked up everything that had been lying around in the bathroom, but this here was buried in the bone and came here with the body.’

  They both leaned over the tray.

  ‘What are they? Tooth fillings?’ Becker immediately regretted offering a theory, because chances were that these were not fillings, and that Offerbrück would immediately exploit this. But he didn’t.

  ‘They are not fillings, but they also must have been inside his mouth when the charge exploded,’ he said. ‘I believe that these are parts of the fuse, the trigger mechanism.’

  Doctor Offerbrück took a sheet of paper from another table and handed it to Becker. ‘This is the chemical analysis of the unexploded remnants of the material.’

  Becker had a look. The sheet contained twenty or thirty rows of figures and abbreviations; some of them he recognised as chemical elements.

  ‘The explosive charge is absolutely generic,’ Offerbrück explained. ‘The main ingredient is a standard nitroamine, with paraffin wax to stabilise it. It’s used in hand grenades in armies all over the world. Except here someone must have disassembled a normal grenade, or built the charge from scratch with the same ingredients, because the explosion was very small. It’s custom-made for a human head, apparently, or mouth rather. And the fuse must have been custom-made, too, which brings me to the fragments here. What I wanted to show you is this.’

  Offerbrück took a forceps, squeezed it, and picked up one of the fragments from the tray. With his other hand he pulled down the magnifying glass and turned on the circle of lights around the glass. It lit up the optically enhanced splinter. Becker looked through the glass, his cheek almost touching Offerbrück’s, and he immediately saw what the man must have meant.

  A small symbol was engraved at the edge of the splinter. It was a circle and a bar, connected to each other with a little line. Becker tilted his head. Depending on how he looked at it, the symbol resembled a round street sign on a pole with a broad base, or an upper-case O and an I with a dash between them.

  Becker asked, ‘What do you think this is?’

  ‘I had no idea when I saw it. Then Doctor Senninger stopped by, to take tissue samples from the body for the DNA matching. Senninger used to organise the school exchanges with our Russian twin town. And he had a look and told me what it could be.’

  Offerbrück was almost glowing, Becker had never seen him excited like that. Maybe it was the fact that we was dealing with, it was safe to say, a bizarre homicide, rather than with some car accident.

  Offerbrück revealed his discovery. ‘It’s the Russian letter Yu, as in Yuri Gagarin. The marks to its right look like part of a next letter or number.’

  Becker looked at the splinter, then at Offerbrück. There had been nothing mean in what the doctor had said so far. And the bizarre homicide was turning more and more political, with a lobby full of mysterious Americans and secretive Commission investigators, and with disappearing camera footage. And now this.

  Becker asked him, ‘What do you think this means?’

  ‘You’re the investigator,’ Offerbrück said, again without any maliciousness in his voice. ‘But it looks like it’s been manufactured with Russian spare parts. Although perhaps other languages use that letter, too, like Bulgarian or Serbian maybe.’

  Zayek had a Bulgarian passport, his boss at the Commission had mentioned that. But Bulgaria wasn’t particularly known for its weapons industry. Becker nodded and decided to share his first thoughts. ‘It can mean a lot of things, Doctor. It’s manufactured in Russia and used by somebody who didn’t know that, or didn’t care; or by someone who wanted to actually tell us it’s Russian; or by someone who wanted us to believe it’s Russian even though it’s not. Or it’s a double bluff, Russians deliberately planting Russian letters so we’ll think it can’t be them. And so on. Or it’s not Russia but Bulgaria, or both, with a mafia or oligarch or ex-KGB connection.’

  The more Becker’s mood darkened, the more Offerbrück lit up. Any moment the hair on his head would catch fire, his ears radiated a light that was enough to read a book under.

  ‘Please tell me, Doctor,’ Becker said, returning to the more immediate questions of the case at hand. ‘Why would anyone go to the trouble of using this custom-made device instead of, say, shooting the man in the head?’

  Offerbrück tried to assume an earnest look again.

  ‘From a technical or anatomical point of view, I’d say it doesn’t make much of a difference, Inspector,’ he said slowly, but Becker felt nevertheless how eager the man was to move on to the perspective in which it would make a difference. ‘The net lethality is probably the same. There are a few percent of gunshots to the head that aren’t lethal, because the bullet fails to cause the necessary trauma to the brain or major arteries or the spinal cord. An explosion would most certainly be lethal, but then the charge might malfunction, especially if the victim chews or salivates on the fuse.’

  Becker waited for the next part, and he didn’t have to wait very long.

  ‘The key is probably the logistics,’ Offerbrück continued, lowering his voice. ‘Concealment and transportation. Whether it’s an assassination or a suicide, such a charge is much easier to carry around than a gun. A charge won’t even look much like a weapon. You can keep it in your pocket, in case you need it later. Modern detectors at airports would pick up the explosive, but otherwise it looks relatively harmless. A gun, on the other hand, is a completely different story.’

  Becker nodded. ‘What do you think about the head that’s missing as a result?’

  ‘It might theoretically prevent the victim’s identification, but not here in Europe, and especially if you already know who the victim probably is. Even without fingerprints, DNA testing and matching of tissue to samples from people’s apartments is not very complicated here. For Zayek you’ll have the result of the quick DNA test later today, for example, which will allow you to tell whether it’s probably him or definitely not him. If it’s probably him, we’ll do the big test to be sure, and the final results will be ready early next week. If that’s positive, too, as were the fingerprints, you can pronounce him dead and inform any
authority that needs to know.’

  ‘Okay,’ Becker said. ‘So coming back to the charge, it’s the logistics of the weapon itself. Or maybe the powerful message that a big messy explosion sends.’

  ‘It could be both. Yes, it could be both.’

  Offerbrück’s excitement had not diminished at all, if anything it had picked up again.

  ‘Thank you for this, Doctor,’ Becker said. ‘I appreciate your help.’

  ‘You are welcome,’ Offerbrück said. ‘And I heard it’s your birthday, all the best wishes to you.’

  They shook hands. Becker wasn’t entirely sure what was going on. Maybe Offerbrück was drunk. There surely were enough chemicals in this basement to survive a nuclear winter without ever sobering up. But Becker decided to put aside the sarcasm for now, and to be neutral the next time they’d talk. If Offerbrück would show the same kindness, Becker would reciprocate.

  19

  They were back at the noisy police station.

  ‘The next flight from Amsterdam to Tallinn leaves tomorrow morning,’ Hans said, looking up from the screen. He was sitting at one of the dozens of desks in the open office space. Its usual occupant had gone out for a coffee or a smoke or both. ‘I just booked it.’ It’d had to be business class, everything else had been taken. Hans’s credit card had allowed him to pay for the trip, and he could only hope that his credit limit would also allow him to book the return. But that was a problem he’d solve later.

  ‘You can stay at the police station if you like,’ Visser offered. He was standing on the other side of the desk, with an empty coffee cup in his hand. ‘Then I can tell you if we receive news from the Bulgarian police this afternoon. And tomorrow we’ll give you a lift to Amsterdam airport. But no marechaussee this time, a normal cop car, okay?’

  ‘Where do I stay tonight?’

  ‘Prison cell.’

  Hans wasn’t sure what to think, but after all that had happened he liked the idea of staying in the security of a police station for the night. His face didn’t seem to express his satisfaction, though.