Into a Raging Blaze

by Andreas Norman

  “Yes, absolutely.”

  They had clearly talked through what they would say before the meeting. There was a script and Nils Bergh was obviously not adhering to it. Mellqvist glared irritably at Bente and Kempell. He was suspicious. He looked stiffly at the others around the table, as if to remind them of certain agreements. Naturally, they didn’t want people from Counterespionage snooping around the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The Security Service always meant trouble for people like them: it was bad press and put things in flux, upsetting a carefully maintained order. These men had built their careers on avoiding things like this.

  “Can you describe how she handled the report?” said Bente after a pause, pretending to ignore Mellqvist.

  “She sent it to Justice.”

  “Just to them?”

  He smiled self-consciously. “As far as I know.”

  “We are investigating in the utmost detail, of course.” Mellqvist interrupted again, worried by all the questions. “But the idea that there are others behind Dymek seems far-fetched at present.”

  “I’m not so sure,” said Kempell slowly.

  “Oh.” Mellqvist stopped in surprise.

  Kempell turned back to the Head of the Security Policy Department again. “Do you remember anything unusual about her behavior, before her trip?” he said.

  “No . . .” The department head thought about it. “No, she was doing her job. There was nothing that . . .” He then shook his head as if to underline what he had said. “Dymek went to Brussels on a regular basis. But when Justice contacted us . . . we understood that things weren’t right. So we took action.” He looked at the others, worried, and cleared his throat.

  Kempell let this gloomy train of thought hang in the air a moment.

  “Can you describe Carina Dymek?”

  “How do you mean?”

  “As a person.”

  “Um . . . she was good. Thorough. She did an excellent job, I would say. There were no issues with her.”

  “Does she work for anyone else?” said Kempell.

  At first Bergh looked at Kempell uncomprehendingly. When the implication of the question dawned on him, his face froze. His gaze wandered off. “No, it . . .” He cleared his throat and fell silent.

  “Sorry?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  His face was now formed into a tense, unhappy grimace. It was as if the words sucked the air out of him. That the Security Policy Department at the MFA had, by mistake, leaked such a sensitive report was a minor catastrophe, but to have been infiltrated would be an outright nightmare. Bente didn’t envy him, but they couldn’t take his wellbeing into account. They needed answers, and it was the painfully honest answers that mattered.

  “Do you think she is a spy?” Bergh burst out and stared at them. “Is that it?”

  He looked pale, as if awaiting a death sentence.

  “No,” said Kempell. “It is one scenario. One of several potentials.”

  The poor man fell back into his chair. Everyone looked uncomfortably at him and waited until he had gathered himself.

  “What should we do with the Brits?” said the administrative director, who had been sitting in silence throughout.

  Kempell sat quietly for a second. Bente knew what he was thinking. They couldn’t say too much about the Brits, not at this stage. Contact with Green and MI6 would be dealt with through Bente’s channels of communication, no one else’s. Everyone waited for Kempell to say something, but he just looked placidly at the others and nodded. “The most important thing now is to stop the spread of the information. We will probably have a better picture in a few days.”

  “Good,” said Mellqvist acidly. “Because we don’t want the foreign minister to have to stand up in front of the media and explain this one.”

  “I don’t think anyone wants that,” said Kempell.

  Kempell needed to smoke after the meeting. Bente walked with him down to Strömmen. Hadn’t he quit? she asked. He looked at her in surprise, as if wondering silently which of his other habits she was familiar with. No, no, it was just that the Service had become smoke free, not that he had.

  Her cell rang. It was Mikael, in Brussels.

  “Green has been in touch,” he said. “They’re sending people to Stockholm.”

  “Wilson?”

  “Probably.”

  Green had promised to get back to her. Presumably the Brits would be flying their people in within a day. He didn’t know more. He hung up.

  “They’re sending Wilson.”

  She noticed how Kempell stiffened; he didn’t like surprises. No one had expected the Brits to react so quickly and send people to Stockholm at this early stage, not even Kempell.

  They looked across the flowing water rushing between them and the parliament building. Roger Wilson. That meant that London was taking the incident seriously. With a little luck it also meant more help from the British apparatus.

  Bente had met Wilson on two occasions: once at the base in Bagram, five years ago, and once in London, shortly after the notorious operation in Hamburg, carried out by his team. She was familiar with his methods.

  “This is going to get messy,” said Kempell.

  “But it’s good that we have London on our side.”

  “I’ll never trust them. You know that.” He blew smoke. “MI6 does what it likes, and to hell with us.” He smiled. Kempell’s skepticism of all foreign security services was so firmly rooted that it had become part of his personality. “And I’d take care around that Wilson. You remember what happened in Hamburg,” said Kempell.

  Yes, she remembered. Marienstrasse. It had taken the Germans six months to clear up after that infamous insertion. Those who knew Roger Wilson at all, which was a very narrow circle of people, respected him but knew that it was wise to keep a certain healthy distance. He worked with his own team. He moved through gray areas.

  12

  Stockholm, Thursday, September 29

  Carina leaned forward toward the screen and zoomed in. The resolution was poor, the picture was grainy. She wasn’t sure. Was it really him? Jean?

  He was standing in the background, a few meters behind the Director General, and to the left of the picture. He was dressed in a suit, like everyone else, and standing with his hands in his pockets, talking to a woman who was turned away from the camera. He didn’t seem aware that he was in the photo; it was the Director General and his smiling colleagues in the foreground who were being photographed, but the focus had also fallen further back so that Jean’s face stood out in the background. She brightened the picture slightly and examined his face, then zoomed in on that part of the photo until a strange, grainy picture of a ghost filled half the screen.

  Yes, it was him. Jean.

  Greger had suggested they should meet at a bar in Kornhamnstorg in the Old Town. Late in the afternoon on a weekday like this, the place was half empty. Here they could talk in peace.

  Her head still felt heavy. After finding the picture, she had fallen asleep, exhausted, and had slept like the dead for fifteen hours. She had been so light-headed when she woke up that, for a second, she’d thought she had dreamed the picture and was forced to check it was still there, that she hadn’t been mistaken, after all. But there he was—Jean.

  Jamal had called her several times from Vienna without her noticing. She was almost angry with him for not coming straight home to Stockholm, despite the fact that she had personally persuaded him to stay. She knew it was childish. When she’d called back, his cell had been switched off. She’d left a message. Then she had texted Greger a link to the picture of Jean. I’ve found him.

  Greger turned up just as she was buying a latte. He embraced her and they sat down at one of the tables by the window.

  “I didn’t think you would be in touch so soon,” he said. Greger was noticeably happy. He hurried to the bar and ordered an espresso before returning, knocking back his coffee, and then saying, “So you’ve found him.”

  “Y
es. I think so.”

  She brought up the picture on her cell and zoomed in.

  “And you’re sure it’s him?”

  “As sure as I can be.”

  Greger leaned forward and studied the picture. He noted the web address of the link, typing it into his own phone, then looked at her, impressed. “Good work.” He examined the picture again. “Okay. But you don’t know what he’s called.”

  “Like I said, he said he was called Jean. And that he worked for the EU Commission. That’s all I know. I’m guessing he works for the Directorate General that looks after interior security and police matters in the EU.”

  Greger looked at her uncomprehendingly.

  “GD Home,” she said.

  “Okay?”

  “That’s what it’s called. Here . . .” She handed over a list of names and EU abbreviations—words she guessed were useful when looking for a civil servant at GD Home. “That’s the reference number for the report he gave me.”

  Greger noted it on his cell.

  “Aren’t you going to show it to your bosses?” he said.

  Show them the picture? Oddly enough, the thought hadn’t even crossed her mind. Yes, perhaps. Then she felt the doubt forcing its way through. No, not just a picture—that wouldn’t be enough. They wouldn’t believe her. Look, here’s the man who contacted me in Brussels. So what? She needed more facts.

  “I have to find him first. Do you think that it’s possible?”

  “Shouldn’t be a problem.”

  Greger sounded so sure that, at once, she felt worried. It occurred to her that she hadn’t asked him the obvious question about what he intended to do. “I don’t want to do anything illegal, Greger.”

  He laughed and made a dismissive gesture. “Don’t worry. I’m just going to talk to some people I know. They’re cool.”

  Johan Eriksson leaned forward over her cell and looked at the photograph. He had called her and asked how she was, whether she wanted to meet. He was the only person at the department who had been in touch.

  “Yes, that’s the Head of GD Home,” he said and pointed at Manservisi. “And she’s his adviser; she’s worked on police coordination a lot. I met her in Brussels once, at a conference,” he said and smiled so broadly that Carina refrained from asking more.

  “And him?”

  She enlarged the picture so that Jean’s face filled the small screen of the cell. He creased his forehead. Carina didn’t know anyone with as many contacts and acquaintances in the business as Johan Eriksson. Regardless of whether they were in Brussels or Stockholm, people would approach him to say hello all the time, people she knew nothing about. For a few seconds Johan seemed to be turning through a huge, internal Rolodex. No, he said finally. Not someone he knew.

  “Are you sure?”

  He looked at the picture again, and shook his head. “Why do you want to know?”

  “He was the one who contacted me in Brussels.”

  Johan Eriksson examined the picture again. No, he didn’t recognize him.

  “Quite sure?”

  He shook his head once again. “Sorry.”

  She put away her cell and looked across Gärdet. An Irish setter was running around on the wide expanse of grass and sniffing at things. It was Johan’s dog, sorrowfully looking for a tennis ball that he had thrown. Carina struggled to rein in her disappointment. Deep down, she had hoped Johan Eriksson would exclaim, “Oh, him!” Like he normally did.

  “So it’s him who has caused all this trouble for you?”

  She nodded.

  There was a cold wind. After a while, the dog rushed back with the ball in his mouth. Johan threw it again. What was she going to do, then? he wondered. Was she going to contact him?

  “I have to get hold of him,” she said.

  “And then what will you do?”

  “We’ll see.”

  “People are talking about you,” he said, after a while.

  “What are they saying?”

  Johan Eriksson sighed. “You know. Bullshit. Like, that you were working on behalf of someone else.”

  “What? For who?”

  “A foreign power.” He laughed uncomfortably.

  “Who thinks that?”

  “The management.”

  They looked at the dog in silence, a distant dot on the grass.

  “It’s not true. You know that, don’t you?”

  “I know,” he said slowly. “You don’t make mistakes like that.”

  Johan was probably her last friend at the department. Most people would eventually see her as guilty. But Johan Eriksson knew her too well; they’d worked together closely. He would never distrust her.

  “You might not know this,” he said after a pause, “but I almost got sacked four years ago.”

  He had been in Kosovo with a Swedish delegation. They’d had meetings with KFOR, with the EU, and with the new government. The entire delegation was staying at the old Grand Hotel in Pristina and the hotel was ice cold. Every day they’d spend half the night in the bar, because it was the only place in the whole hotel that was heated, possibly the only place in all of Pristina. One evening, a guy showed up there and had a few beers with them. He was an American—aid worker; nice guy; talkative—had been in Kosovo for three years. Before he left, he gave them a report.

  “It was a CIA product. It showed that several ministries in Kosovo were involved in drug smuggling and that people at the EU office were acting as middlemen.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I showed the report to the management back at home. They told me to forget about it and threatened me with suspension. Do you understand what I’m saying?” He looked at her seriously. “Bad timing. The EU had taken over after the UN’s failure in Kosovo. Everything was a fucking mess and it was crucial for the EU to show it was possible to change the country. A disclosure like that would have destroyed all confidence in the EU. It would have been a catastrophe.”

  “They probably deserved it.”

  “Of course.” He shrugged his shoulders. “But who cares about justice? That’s never been a priority.”

  13

  Stockholm, Thursday, September 29

  A concentrated calm prevailed over the technical unit of the Security Service in Stockholm. Bente had brought dinner, which she had eaten in one of the computer labs, sitting at a computer in the chilly room. Occasionally someone would pass by on the other side of the frosted glass, which looked into the corridor.

  The benches held measuring instruments, and some computers hummed. On one trolley was Carina Dymek’s computer. The technicians had removed the hard-disk casing and exposed the electronics; the machine was a mere tangle of wires and circuit boards.

  They had gone to the MFA at lunchtime and the contents of Dymek’s office had now been sorted into around twenty plastic bags, which were standing in the room next door. The report was no longer there; they had quickly established that. Not the original or any copies.

  After taking apart Dymek’s computer, the technicians had brought up all the raw data; they sorted her files, retrieved her Internet history, recreated deleted documents, and searched the hard drive for encrypted information, hidden codes in picture and sound files.

  Carina Dymek’s hard drive was very messy. The overwhelming impression was that she was an unstructured person. Thousands of documents were sorted in what was, presumably, a unique order that only Dymek knew, under a range of different subjects, in hundreds of folders, dating back years. Bente clicked back and forth through the documents, opening and closing files at a brisk pace, occasionally stopping to read a paragraph in a memo written by Dymek. She had a driven, exacting style—straight to the point, no funny business. These were the traces of a hard-working young diplomat.

  It was almost nine when she stopped for a break. The corridors lay empty. Two technicians were still in the room next door, running an analysis on Dymek’s Internet history. Bente got a coffee and joined them.

  She liked technic
ians. They had the kind of practical skills that analysts lacked. They could sift for fresh information that moved an operation forward. What they did was disentangle names, times, IP addresses, and hundreds of other parameters, before doing a huge jigsaw puzzle to find out how it was all connected. With the help of the technicians, you could see a pattern, identify relationships, habits, risky behavior, and threats.

  “Here’s Dymek’s web traffic. At least the traffic that was on the government’s port eighty,” one of them explained.

  The logs were there—every occasion that Carina Dymek had gone online, neatly recorded. The screen was filled with rows of Internet addresses and technical data, dates and times, movement through pages. This was Dymek’s digital existence for the past six months, everything she had visited on the Internet from her work computer. The rows ran down the screen, quickly, like a manic demon knitting a furious stream of characters. She could distinguish different addresses: Stratfor, Hotmail, BBC, state.gov.

  Dymek had regular habits; tracking her behavior was like following an even diurnal cycle. Every morning, she logged in at the same time, plus or minus fifteen minutes. Almost no casual browsing; no unusual addresses. She usually checked her private e-mail account between ten and twenty minutes before starting work. During the day, she spent half an hour on different news sites, both Swedish and international. In the afternoon, she would log in briefly on various websites for think tanks. Foreign affairs, Stratfor, Crisis group. All work related. Every day, there were constant logins to EU pages.

  Bente leaned forward. It ought to be quick to discern any deviations. All organizations checked their employees, and the Government Offices were stricter than most. They ran automated checks on civil servants’ computers and, when they discovered suspicious behavior, it was standard procedure to observe the employee to establish whether there was a threat. Deviations were always visible. But Dymek’s Internet history showed no signs of abnormal activity, nothing that shouldn’t be there. Just like her hard drive. The government’s servers had also been intact throughout the entire period, explained one of the technicians. The detectors on the outside of the network’s firewalls and in what was referred to as the demilitarized zone—for example, the router circuitry—were all working properly. The encryption system for documents had not raised any alarms about intrusions; the firewalls were all up. The report had not been downloaded.