by Reevik, Carl
‘They haven’t unloaded it yet,’ Saar said. ‘It must still be waiting. Oops, no, it’s leaving.’
The ship in the distance sounded a horn that they could hear in Saar’s office.
Hans felt like grabbing Saar by his collar. ‘Why is it already leaving if it hasn’t unloaded?’
‘What do I know,’ Saar shrugged. ‘Maybe they just changed crews, or refuelled their diesel engines before sailing to where it’s more expensive.’
‘Stop the ship right now!’, Hans yelled at Saar. The man hurried outside to his secretary’s office. It was empty again.
‘She has the mobile phone numbers of the supervisors on the docks,’ Saar apologised. ‘Maybe she’s in the canteen or having a smoke or…’
Hans didn’t wait for any further hypotheses. He rushed past Saar, swung through the antechamber into the corridor, found a staircase to his right, slammed open the door and ran down the stairs, taking three or four stairs at a time. He threw himself against the staircase door on the ground floor, ran through the entry hall and outside. He sped around the building and headed straight for the dock. He heard a second horn from the ship in a distance that still hadn’t diminished much. The port was huge. Containers that had looked like lego bricks from far away were now the size of bungalows. He kept running, breathing heavily through his mouth. He had barely reached the end of the first ship that was moored to his left, and there were still two more to go before the Karelia even began.
He saw the Karelia slowly move out sideways into the open water. He could hear the roar of its engines. He wasn’t even halfway past the second ship. It was hopeless. Once he’d arrive he could only wave his hands at the crew to turn around, except ships like that barely even had a crew, and they wouldn’t do it even if they’d see him. He saw a dock worker in the distance, he was slowly walking towards Hans. Hans’s speed started decreasing. He was panting as he reached the end of ship number three. The Karelia was already fifty metres out in open waters. Hans looked up, there wasn’t a human soul on deck, and the windows of the bridge only reflected the clouds. He couldn’t see anyone in there.
‘Can you stop. The ship.’ Hans puffed in the direction of the dock worker as he came closer. The man was wearing a yellow vest and an orange hard hat.
‘No,’ he said, calmly. ‘Why?’
Yes, indeed, why? What would he say to them? Please turn around, you forgot something, and while you’re here please show me your cargo?
‘Fuck!’
Hans bent forward, supporting the weight of his upper body on his extended arms, his hands gripping his knees. He slowly got this breath under control.
The dock worker stood there, looking at him.
The ship made a turn and its engines roared up again to push it out into the sea.
Hans got up, turned around and strode back past the last ship he’d just passed, heading back to the building he’d come from. At the start of the second ship he increased his pace to a jog.
***
When he arrived, the secretary was back at her workstation. Hans walked right past her into Saar’s office. ‘Excuse me,’ she said to him, dutifully jumping up from her chair.
‘It’s okay,’ Saar shouted to her, just in time before Hans slammed the door shut behind him.
‘First, where is the Karelia going,’ Hans said, sitting down in his visitor’s chair, breathing heavily.
Saar waited for the second question. Hans snapped, ‘What are you staring at me for? Go look it up! For God’s sake, in your own interest I hope you can figure this out.’
Saar checked his screen.
‘It’s crossing over to Helsinki, Finland.’
Okay. At least that’s inside the European Union, Hans thought. But he had no time. These ships were hulks, but they were surprisingly speedy. He’d just seen the swift turning manoeuvre himself.
‘Call the coast guard,’ Hans said. ‘Tell them there are people traffickers on the ship, with refugees trapped inside one of the containers. In this nuclear container from Rotterdam. Women and children are suffocating. Now, do it right now.’ For the second time today Hans handed Saar the receiver of his own phone.
It was his only hope. Any other type of contraband, and the Estonians would just call the Finns and tell them to wait for the ship on the other side of the Gulf. And for the Bogatyr it would be too late now anyway. It would have long left Estonian territorial waters and be escorted, if anything, by the Russian navy.
Saar finished his call, hung up and nodded to Hans.
‘You know, all this takes us very far, you and me,’ Saar said. ‘There are no suffocating refugees, or you would have said so right away. I will apologise to the coast guard, of course, and say that I got an anonymous tipoff, that’s all. But I’m afraid that there is nothing more that I can do for you.’
‘There is, don’t worry,’ Hans said. He got up and looked out the window. Somewhere from the far left of the port area a coast guard vessel sped up, following the Karelia which had become a red dot in the blue sea. ‘It’s a big favour you owe me. Now we find out about the Russian ship, the Bogatyr.’
Hans sat back down again.
‘What about it?’, Saar asked. Either he genuinely wanted to know, or he was getting cheeky with him again.
‘What did it have on board when it came here?’
Saar waited for a moment, then typed on his keyboard, read the text on his screen for a while, and then said to Hans, ‘Various containers, including one with uranium. The inspectorate was informed.’
‘Who’s the owner?’
‘Of the ship or of the cargo?’
‘Of the cargo.’ Hans thought he was being very patient.
‘A Russian company called Yadrotech, registered in Moscow. It says here the cargo was put on the Karelia.’
Hans breathed out. His hair was still a little wet from the sweating.
‘So now we wait for news from the coast guard, yes?’, Hans said, trying to relax in his chair. ‘And please ask your secretary to get me some coffee.’
Saar got a little irritated again. ‘Look, I’m not a hotel. I have meetings, she already cancelled two because of you.’
Hans got up and shoved a pile of papers from Saar’s desk down onto the floor. Most of the stack fell down like a bent brick, some individual sheets took off and sailed away in the air before settling two metres from Hans’s feet. Saar hadn’t expected that, his mouth was open, showing the ends of his teeth.
‘If you have meetings then go,’ Hans said. ‘I’ll pick up your phone if they call. If they don’t call and you’re not back in time I’ll press redial and call them myself. Get me a coffee. I’m staying right here.’
***
Hans had just finished his coffee when Saar came back in. The man really had left his office to meet someone somewhere else. The papers were still lying on the floor.
Saar left the door to the antechamber open, sat down in his chair and started going through the stack of thin files his secretary had placed there. He did it without looking at Hans. The files contained miscellaneous documents Saar had to sign. The secretary hadn’t picked up the papers from the floor when she’d come in, either.
While Saar silently did what he was paid to do, Hans continued the train of thoughts he’d started. Amid the running and the searching, this was the quietest and most fruitful moment for reflection he’s had since sitting next to the bald Dutch gendarme for one and a half hours.
It came down to only two options, and both implied a diversion of cargo from one destination to another. Hans already knew, or was fairly certain, that a container with uranium intended for the Petten reactor had been diverted right after its arrival from Rotterdam, and that it had been loaded onto the Karelia and brought to Tallinn. The continuation now depended on whether the container had changed ships here in Tallinn or not.
Hypothesis number one was that it had. It would mean that someone must have very quickly lifted the Petten container off the ship and put it onto th
e Russian freighter Bogatyr, which by now was probably approaching Kronstadt, the historical island fortress and Russian navy base guarding the approaches to Saint Petersburg. That meant Western uranium had been illegally transferred to Russia, right under the noses of the authorities of at least two European countries.
Hans thought about what Clarissa had said in Petten. There were thousands of nuclear transports going on every day. There simply was no way they could check them all.
For the Karelia, which had continued from Tallinn over to Helsinki, and which had hopefully gotten intercepted by the Estonian coast guard, this meant that it was either sailing empty, as far as the crucial container was concerned, or that it was indeed carrying whatever the Bogatyr had brought to Tallinn. Maybe nuclear waste, maybe just waste.
In any case it could have been a cargo swap, to get uranium into Russia. Zayek in Luxembourg knew about it, covered it up, and had to die because his own cover had been blown, if not by the defector in the German consulate then by Hans and Viktor with their statistics. The attacker in the hotel had been the killer. Tienhoven had a weak heart and had suffered a real heart attack. Hoffmann had been helping the Commission to get to Zayek before stealing Hans’s phone for some reason, maybe indeed to get the picture for a thorough analysis. Maybe it really did work better if you had the phone itself. Anyway, at least for the rest it all made a lot of sense.
Except that it could well be that there hadn’t been any cargo swap in the first place. Thus, hypothesis number two was that no-one had changed containers, like Saar had said. The old man was sitting quietly at his desk, reading and signing one document after another.
The no-swap scenario would mean that the Bogatyr had arrived with whatever uranium it had been carrying, and that it had left again without unloading its cargo either. A trip from Russia to Estonia and back, undertaken for no reason except to make it appear as if the Petten container was being shipped to Russia. The real Petten container, though, would be right where it had been: on board the Karelia, sailing to Finland.
Hans considered what this would mean for whatever had happened in Luxembourg. It could be that scenario one had been the Russians’ plan, and that someone had upset it. The diversion starts in Rotterdam; the Petten research is cancelled, the uranium goes to Tallinn and should continue to Russia, except someone had sent the Bogatyr back empty and diverted the cargo to Finland instead. Someone on the inside or from the outside stole the cargo. Instead of a swap there had been an intercept. Zayek had to die, either because he’d known of the original plan, or because he’d found out about the diversion to Finland. The killer in the hotel had protected either the theft to Russia or the theft to Helsinki. Or both.
The alternative was that Helsinki was just another navigation point in the container’s journey, and that this had been the plan all along. Rotterdam, then Tallinn, then Helsinki, then Russia. But why would anyone bounce the cargo up and down the Gulf of Finland, instead of just shipping it straight to Saint Petersburg? Besides, in that case it would have made no sense to lie about the Bogatyr, saying it had the Petten uranium even though it was empty, only to put the real uranium on the next ship or train from Finland to Russia.
No, Hans thought. It would be either a direct transfer to Russia with a cargo swap, or someone had intercepted the cargo and was diverting it to Helsinki instead.
Saar’s phone rang. The man saw the number on the display and looked at Hans in a way that made it clear that this was a call that was of mutual interest to them both.
Okay, Hans thought. Now we’ll find out.
Saar picked up the phone.
‘Yes. Yes, thank you for calling me back.’ There was a long pause. Saar started massaging his eye with his index finger as he listened. ‘I see. I’m very sorry, I thought it was a worrying… Yes, I know. Still. The nuclear container... I see. Thank you. Yes, goodbye.’
Saar hung up, and no further explanation was necessary. It was option two. The intercept.
‘That was the coast guard,’ Saar quietly explained, leaning back in his chair. ‘They told me not to worry, not to hesitate to call them in the future if anything’s suspicious. But there hadn’t been anything suspicious on the Karelia. They stopped the ship, boarded it, checked it with scanners and dogs and I don’t know what. No people, no drugs, no weapons, no nothing.’
‘What about the nuclear container?’, Hans asked.
‘The only nuclear container on board contained nuclear material, as far as they could tell without opening it. According to the manifest, it had been brought from Russia and was intended for Helsinki. Which, by the way, is exactly what the port records say. The Karelia arrived from Rotterdam, unloaded, picked up Russian cargo and sailed to Finland.’
‘Except you said it didn’t actually unload. Someone swapped the designation of the container but not the container itself.’
Hans and Saar looked at each other. Hans felt they had reached the end of the fruitful part of their cooperation.
‘One last thing,’ Hans said. ‘Please print out the details for both the Karelia and the Bogatyr. I don’t want to copy it by hand.’
The key word had been ‘last thing’, undoubtedly this was what made Saar comply promptly. He clicked on an icon and printed out a sheet with the shipment details of one ship, and then did the same thing for the other. He took out both sheets from the printer next to his desk.
‘The cargo of the Karelia is intended for the University of Helsinki. The recipient is a Professor Mäkinen.’ Saar said. ‘But just so that we are clear about this,’ he added, still holding the sheets in his hand. ‘I give you this, and the matter that we talked about will disappear.’
‘You will never see me again, Mister Saar.’
Saar smiled, flashing his long teeth. Hans smiled as well as he took the sheets, folded them in half, got up and shook hands with him. The handshake signified relief and mutual gratitude.
Hans left the office, leaving the door open behind him and saying goodbye to the secretary. She didn’t respond.
Maybe I will make it go away, Hans thought as he walked down the corridor to the elevator. He had already compromised the Commission’s investigation into the contract fraud anyway, just by being there and by saying the things he had said. And Saar had been very helpful, he had to grant him that. But then again he might just as well return to his Brussels office, take all the evidence he had compiled about this harbour business, and send it anonymously by mail to the Estonian chief prosecutor’s office. It would become a purely national investigation, without any Commission involvement. His former colleagues would be just delighted. They might even take out the champagne from the office fridge for the occasion. But that he could still decide later.
22
Hans sat in the cafeteria of the passenger ferry from Tallinn to Helsinki, finishing his sandwich and drinking coffee. He’d gotten a seat at a window, at a small table for two. All the other tables at the windows were occupied, too, and so were some of the larger tables in the middle of the room.
Buying a ticket had been no problem. Evading drunks had been more of a challenge. The ferry was a pleasure boat for Finns crossing the sea to Estonia to get as much cheap alcohol in one return trip as was physically possible. This meant carrying as much beer on their person as was legally allowed, and drinking the rest right there. But not all of them got completely wasted on the way home. Some of the older folk had gone straight downstairs to the dance bar, to do the rumba and the cha-cha. The Finns loved it. The sea outside was more grey than blue, but the swell wasn’t very strong. With this many Nordic passengers having a good time, it was a good thing the waves weren’t any rougher.
Hans didn’t particularly like the sea itself. When it came to open waters, he still preferred Lake Peipus, which was so large that the other shore wasn’t visible on the horizon. It had very still waters, and long sandy beaches in places. And, as was typical for an Estonian coastline, the pine forest reached right up to the beach. The painting in Saar�
�s office may have been an awful piece of kitsch, but that was only because of the fake peasants in their costumes. The landscape itself had been depicted quite correctly, and quite beautifully. Hans had spent many summers sitting in the shade of the trees, only to occasionally dip into the water and then to return; first to the beach to dry off in the sun, then to the shade to cool down.
As he’d grown older, other pleasures had come to accompany the bathing. There had been some tentative smoking on the beach. There had been some tentative kissing under the trees. That was before he’d discovered the part which went far beyond kissing, but that had come much later. Above all there had been a lot of beer-drinking, singing and card-playing with friends. One time he and his brother Lennart had borrowed dad’s car and driven the forty kilometres from Tartu out to the lake in the middle of the night, together with four more friends, to see the sun rise above the water. They had taken turns who would lie in the boot of the car. They’d returned with a pleasantly shared feeling of guilt, even though they hadn’t done anything. They hadn’t wrecked the car, hadn’t gotten drunk, nothing had happened. They had all just sat there and watched as the sky above the water had turned from black to grey to pink and blue.
Hans held his half-empty cup of warm coffee to his mouth.
When he put it back, a man was sitting in the chair across the small table. Black leather jacket, dark hair, blue eyes, tight lips.
‘Give it back to me, please,’ the man said in accent-free Russian.
Give it back.
So Hans wasn’t a witness, it wasn’t about something he knew or had seen. It was about something in his possession. That was a good start, he thought. Objects you actually can give back. Knowledge you can make disappear by being thrown off a ship.