Into a Raging Blaze

by Andreas Norman

  “Are you okay?” Alex looked up while her fingers continued to clatter across the keyboard.

  Carina nodded and looked at Alex as she continued to concentrate on her work. Now and then Alex would stop and—in a smooth, slightly absentminded movement—reach for her coffee mug, before continuing her rapid finger dance across the keys; she was clearly deeply engrossed in work that amused her, because she was smiling. After a while, she finished. She stretched, cracked her fingers, got up, and went to the stereo.

  “There!” said Alex. She was in great spirits, and took a few small, happy dance steps on the floor as a heavy bass came out of the speakers. “We’ve found him.”

  Carina didn’t understand at first. Jean? “Have you found Jean?”

  “Greger called. They just need to double check a few things, but he was certain.” Alex pulled out a cigarette and lit it. “He’s coming over this evening.”

  A quiet jubilation grew inside her. Just a moment before, everything had been so hopeless. On the way back from Fruängen, she had decided she would call the Security Service and let them bring her in before things got worse. She laughed and got up.

  Now there was once again a chance for her to prove who had given her the report, that it wasn’t she who had leaked the report, but that she had done exactly the opposite—she had done the right thing all along and was innocent of all their accusations.

  “Can I see?”

  Alex logged in and brought up the thread. The latest post was only a few minutes old. Five usernames were connected and, while Carina was watching, the screen brought up a new post: The Waterloo address—cross ref with other parameters. Running telephone reg again just for safetys sake. Ok, logging out now J afk 15 min . . .

  Alex leaned over her shoulder, scrolled down a few hours. “Here.”

  Yes, they had actually found him. She had begun to lose hope. The whole idea of finding a person with the help of a fuzzy photo had started to seem unlikely to her, like something out of a Bond film, but she hadn’t wanted to say that to Greger. She laughed. In front of her on the screen she could see them discussing addresses, alternative names, checking records.

  “Bernier,” she read aloud. “He’s named Jean Bernier.”

  The weakness that had been dripping through her body like a heavy molten metal, pushing her into the ground, was gone. Instead she felt a tough determination filling her to the brim. She would never give up. Never.

  For one, prolonged, wavering moment, they sat in silence and looked at the screen, surrounded by the pulsing music.

  “Why are you looking for him?”

  “Jean Bernier? It’s his fault. If he hadn’t contacted me then none of this would have happened. I need him to prove that I’m not guilty.”

  Alex sat quietly for a moment. She had pulled up her legs underneath her and was sitting cross-legged on the sofa, which made her look even more like a backpacker in India, with her baggy pants and long hair, which she pushed to one side.

  “What did he want, then? I mean, why did he choose you?”

  “I think . . .” Carina said and then stopped herself. She thought about how he had caught up with her after the meeting. Everyone had been so repulsive. She remembered how much the French representative had provoked her with his usual, well-formulated way of arguing for the review of border controls in the Union. They had talked about migration flows, about security—as if it was about swarms of locusts. “He gave me the report because I had a conscience. That’s what he said.”

  Alex looked at her thoughtfully, took a final drag on the cigarette, and stubbed it out on the foot of a lamp. “So do you have one?”

  “I guess so.”

  She had always been proud to work in the Foreign Service. She had never doubted Swedish foreign policy, not really. She had always believed that, if you did a good job, things would be okay. And yet, here she was, in hiding.

  Greger turned up at around seven, along with the enormous, shaven-headed guy who introduced himself as Victor. “Great party yesterday,” said Greger, grinning knowingly. “You really came alive.” Apparently she had been completely impossible to wake up, even when they had tried to carry her to a mattress in the study. Did she feel better? Victor smirked when he thought she wasn’t looking.

  They sat around the coffee table, each with a cup of coffee. Greger pulled out a notepad filled with handwritten numbers, jottings, and a grainy black-and-white printout of the photo. It was very pixelated but she could still see clearly that it was the face of the man in Brussels.

  “It took a few days, we had to double check a few things, but I’m pretty sure we’ve got the right guy.”

  “Jean Bernier.”

  “Exactly.” Greger turned the pages of his notepad. “French citizen, lives in Brussels. The thing is, there were five Jean Berniers in the Brussels area. But there was only one who matched the photo—the one you said you met.” Greger tapped the printout. “He works at the EU Commission, in something called . . . GD Home. He’s a lawyer. Although perhaps you already knew that.”

  It seemed right. GD Home, or the Directorate General for Home Affairs, as its full designation ran, was the part of the EU Commission that dealt with matters concerning police cooperation, terrorism and organized crime, and border controls.

  Greger cast an eye at her briefly before continuing. “He often turned up in connection with departments . . .”

  “A2 and A3,” said Victor, who was half reclined in one corner of the sofa.

  “Exactly. Victor managed to get on to an EU server,” said Greger with a grin.

  “Okay.” She kept her mouth shut, tried not to think about what that actually meant. It was illegal.

  “We acquired an extremely informative list,” Greger continued and passed her a piece of paper.

  She glanced down it: a list of names, roles, titles. “What is this?”

  “Employees at A2.”

  Someone called Markus had found a page on LinkedIn and, through that, they had been able to compare the information with the Belgian motor-vehicle register, Victor explained in a satisfied tone. Then they had run the picture through various recognition software before managing to hack into an EU server. “That solved most of it. I put a Trojan on it . . .”

  Greger and the others keenly discussed various technical issues, which very quickly became incomprehensible to Carina. She half-listened while reading the list. There were around one hundred names and, in amongst many others, it said, Bernier, Jean.

  GD Home had legislative powers for anything to do with migration, law enforcement, which data could be stored and for how long, as well as hundreds of other areas. Their reports shaped thinking in the capitals of the Union.

  The EU Commission consisted of eighteen Directorate Generals and each Directorate was fighting to survive. As one-eyed giants, those working on competitive matters saw competition in everything; GD Home probably saw the world as nothing but a matter of interior security. The Directorate General always tried to expand its influence through repackaging politics and recovering important issues to its own corridors, winning over member states, winning over the EU parliament. It employed cadres of researchers and experts, courted capitals and their governments, and then made proposals. Its reports landed on the tables of governments and told ministers what was good and what would never fly. It shaped European politics. It had the power to change the lives of millions. It was from those corridors that Jean Bernier had come. He had sought her out. But what had he expected? She flipped through the list again. Did he think he would be able to go against a giant like the EU Commission? Perhaps he was just crazy. She sighed.

  “Here are the addresses.” Greger tore a page out of his notepad: a list of telephone numbers and addresses. They had been forced to check all Berniers in Brussels to be sure, he explained. There were eight; five of them were called Jean. It was hard to say which of the addresses was right, but it was probably this one—he tapped his finger on the one at the top; it was circled—a
n address in Waterloo, in the southern quarter of Brussels. She nodded. Waterloo: that was the right area. Affluent, prosperous, lots of diplomats and civil servants in the EU bureaucracy lived there.

  “This is great. I’m so, so grateful . . .”

  “No problem.” Greger laughed. The pleasure had been all theirs.

  Carina took the notepad and slowly turned through the pages; she looked at the photograph of Jean Bernier for a long time. She hadn’t thought that it was possible to find out so much information about one person, but they had been thorough. Here was everything she needed. It was possible.

  29

  Stockholm, Wednesday, October 5

  Bente was in the backseat of the patrol car and looked across the small, suburban square as they rolled past. A few teenagers were smoking on a bench. A man with a walker was coming out of the grocery store. Otherwise, there were just some normal shops where very little was happening: a video store and a hairdresser, a liquor store.

  A phone call from Dymek to Badawi had come in the evening before. The address had been traced to a pizzeria. The investigators at Counterterrorism had already interviewed the employees during the morning. They had been able to identify Dymek and recalled that she had come in at around six o’clock and made the call from their phone, before leaving on foot. Counterterrorism was working on the hypothesis that she was within walking distance, no more than two kilometers radius. There were around five thousand households within that area. A person could hide for a long time in an environment like that.

  The car slowed down. The police officers in the front seat looked to the side and studied the two young individuals on the bench. Then they moved on. The faux leather seats squeaked. No one said anything. They were ordinary police and knew nothing about the investigation, didn’t know who Bente was, only knew she was in the Security Service and that she was to accompany them on a search of the area. They were curious, but reserved. That suited her just fine. She had no desire to engage in small talk.

  The residential areas opened out into an expanse on either side of the road: black-green shrubbery, tower blocks, and parked cars. They passed a playground. A group of children were running around the enclosed area; they stood out like colorful stains against the dark asphalt.

  Everyone left traces. It was unavoidable. Dymek might have left the suburban area, might not even be in the Stockholm region, it didn’t matter. The IRC channel had provided hundreds of digital footprints and Counterterrorism was now following them, connecting them to physical addresses. Of the approximately fifty people who had visited the discussion thread, around forty had unprotected IP numbers. They had been identified by Counterterrorism and checked against records; they were not of interest and had been ruled out of the investigation. That was how it worked: identify, sift, prioritize. Five or ten people were left.

  Two days of signals intelligence had begun to provide results. The British netspionage had closed in on the IP addresses of three of the usernames using the IRC channel. One of these was in Malmö and two were in the Stockholm area. Early that morning, they had implemented intrusive measures against the individual in Malmö and were now able to follow their traffic and discern patterns, behavior, which pages were visited. The people were young, clever programmers and had no previous criminal records. No extreme views—they were not jihadists—just supporters of Internet liberalism. What was emerging was a loose group on the IRC channel who knew each other, who socialized. The individuals were spread across northern Europe, Canada and the USA. There was nothing that tied them to any crime, but the interceptions were productive, the footprints led on.

  The police driver turned around. Did she want to see more? They could do another lap. She shook her head: no, that was enough. There was nothing else to see here. They headed toward the arterial road.

  At Globe City, they turned off and stopped in front of a corner shop. One of the officers asked if she wanted anything. The driver went in and returned with a bottle of water and three cups of coffee. She thanked him and strolled away with her coffee, checked her cell and looked in the window of a clothes shop. The two police officers remained by the car and chatted, glancing at her when they thought she wasn’t looking.

  The office was full of people when she returned to the Counterterrorism department at the Security Service building. She sat down at a free computer and logged in. Masses of new e-mails had flooded in during the morning, and she almost missed what Hamrén had sent her and the heads at Counterterrorism at nine thirty-five—he had also copied in management. It was short—only a few sentences. Hamrén informed everyone that an agreement had been struck with British signals intelligence, Government Communications Headquarters. It was a temporary reinforcement of the investigation. They would now be able to draw on GCHQ’s significant resources, he wrote. Everyone was encouraged to cooperate in full.

  Hamrén was happy to work with Brits and liked to move quickly. But bring in GCHQ? Was it even allowed to use British signals intelligence against targets on Swedish soil? GCHQ had processors strong enough to penetrate any encryption out there. They had entire departments filled with mathematicians who could pull apart civilian algorithms in a matter of days. From their headquarters in Cheltenham, the British followed the behavioral patterns of over fifty million people online every day, via their signals intelligence. Their supercomputers could, at any given moment, process billions of phone calls, e-mails, and transactions. She had visited the facility, together with the Head of the FRA and a select group of people from the northern European security services, where they had spent two days discussing how best to track terror suspects who had left Schengen, how to target signals intelligence against third countries. GCHQ was the crown jewel of the British intelligence service. It was from Cheltenham, through their network of over fifty offices worldwide, that British signals intelligence was managed. The headquarters was three hours from London, in the midst of grassy hills and small, picturesque villages filled with stone cottages and rose gardens, with names like Bishop’s Cleeve and Minsterworth. She would never forget the way in which GCHQ looked like an enormous gray doughnut in the middle of the soft landscape—an alien body.

  She found Hamrén in his office. Wilson was there too. She had really wanted to talk to Hamrén alone and was close to leaving, but Hamrén had already seen her.

  “So we’re bringing in GCHQ?” She spoke Swedish. Wilson looked at her cautiously. It was clear he didn’t understand—that was just fine.

  “Yes, that’s right.”

  “A bit dramatic, don’t you think?”

  “Oh?” Hamrén turned his back to her and put some papers in a file.

  “I don’t understand why you’re involving the Brits. The Section has sufficient resources.”

  “The Section has nowhere near enough resources, Bente. We need to move forward more quickly. The summit is next week. We need to act in the next few days.”

  “Sorry,” Wilson interrupted. “Are you talking about GCHQ?”

  Hamrén nodded.

  “Is there a problem?”

  “No, not at all,” said Hamrén with wooden smile.

  “This isn’t how we normally work,” Bente said to Wilson.

  “With GCHQ?”

  “In investigations.”

  “So how do you work?” Wilson looked at her in amusement.

  Hamrén tried to interrupt her, but she beat him to it. “It’s not in proportion to what’s going on.”

  Wilson looked at her in surprise. “I don’t think you’re taking it seriously enough,” he said without dropping his gaze from her. “We’re facing a terror attack against the EU.”

  Hamrén nodded emphatically. “We’re taking the threat seriously, Roger.”

  “Clearly not all of you.”

  Bente had intended to tell Wilson that she was probably the one who took things the most seriously around here, but Hamrén interrupted her. He clicked his fingers—a hard little explosion in the middle of the room. “That’s en
ough, Bente,” he muttered. “We’ll talk later.”

  She sat back down at her seat and worked for an hour, but she was angry, found it difficult to concentrate. All the voices, all the people moving around her—it all annoyed her. Just before lunch, a situation report arrived. She read the e-mail slowly. So-called intrusions were being made into the IRC channel with support from British resources, apparently. With the help of GCHQ, data was being sorted, automated searches of relations and patterns were being carried out, parameters compared. Targets could quickly be distinguished. A further sixty-five targets had been localized and tagged with physical addresses. Two more encryptions had been penetrated. One of the usernames, Frontline, had been tracked down to a residential address south of Stockholm, another to an address in Berlin. It was pointed out in the report that GCHQ had huge databanks that gave them the ability to test data against a large volume of stored phone and web traffic, transactions, and state records. The prospect of being able to identify all suspects was considered good.

  She went to the IRC channel and scrolled slowly through the discussion. Hundreds of new posts had been added in the last twelve hours. The tone was disciplined, but easygoing. They were discussing practical things. Someone had now found Jean Bernier’s home address. Have you checked the car? wrote Redstripe at one point, and got a yup from Frontline just minutes later, together with an extract from the Belgian motor vehicle register.

  Hamrén irritated her a great deal. He was wrong, she thought. The tone wasn’t at all typical of what extremist websites normally sounded like, not even among autonomous communities. Extremists had a completely different tone. There was something naïve here, as if the people involved were basically playing a game. They were joking. She knew that Counterterrorism was convinced that this was some kind of attack planning—she had thought that herself, initially—but it didn’t make sense. If this was attack planning, why choose Jean Bernier in particular? She had never heard the name before. A normal lawyer at the EU Commission.