Into a Raging Blaze

by Andreas Norman

  She read on and noted that the username Redstripe was the one leading the discussion. Perhaps Dymek was hiding behind a username like this one? Redstripe. She opened Dymek’s profile and brought up the photograph provided by the MFA. Set against a gray-white background was a young woman with determined features. Dark blond, longish hair. Serious gaze. Desk officer Dymek. This woman was a diplomat, a trained lawyer. Her bosses had described her as clever, ambitious. Would she have friends on a website for programmers? Would she socialize online with hackers and the generally antisocial? It didn’t make sense.

  Hamrén came toward her along the corridor. She stood to meet him and he came right up to her, forcing her against a frosted-glass wall.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” he said in a low voice. He was furious.

  “Jesus! What’s up with you?”

  He had surprised her. If she had been a man, he would have physically shoved her, she was sure.

  “You’ve crossed the line.”

  “Surely justified criticism should be voiced?”

  He stared at her. People nearby were looking at them, she noticed.

  “You’re welcome to contribute to the investigation. But take care not to piss off our partners. Understand?”

  “I have to be able to discuss the investigation with you—what shape it is going to take—surely?”

  “That’s wasn’t what you were doing. You crossed the line.”

  She looked at him and decided, quite calmly, that she would no longer take him into consideration. Hamrén thought he had the right to lay down the law with her; she would beat that out of him soon enough.

  “My dear Roland,” she said sweetly. “You will not tell me where the line is. You’re letting the Brits make far too many decisions.”

  He looked at her, his face quite empty. “You know that we need them. Their intelligence is world class. Coming into my office and insulting Wilson is completely unacceptable. If you carry on like that then you have no business being here. Is that clear?”

  Bente met his gaze. She could have bitten his head off, the little twit. But she was canny enough to know not to, not now, not while surrounded by curious onlookers. She nodded slowly.

  30

  Stockholm, Thursday, October 6

  Everyone’s gaze turned toward Bente as she entered the room. Wilson smiled with exaggerated friendliness toward her. His assistant, Sarah, stared. Hamrén merely glanced briefly at her and looked back down at his papers. She was not welcome. The Head of Directed Surveillance had stopped when the door had opened and turned toward Hamrén. Bente pulled out a chair and sat down, without saying a word.

  “It’s okay. Go on, Peter.”

  The Head of Directed Surveillance cleared his throat uncomfortably.

  “Yes. As I was saying, all we have to go on is the phone call. We still have no definite information about where the meeting between Badawi and Dymek will take place, only that they agreed to eat dinner at Badawi’s some time during the evening. We’ll still be able to retain reasonably good control of the situation. If they take a walk, it may be across a large area, but no more than a few kilometers in radius. A team will follow them, ready to provide coordinates for where Badawi and Dymek are. We’ll be near Badawi’s apartment—here.” He pointed at a map, spread out on the table. Others leaned forward. “There is a building site near his address; the first team will gather there. The second team will follow them on foot. If they take the nearby Tvärbanan light-rail system, then the second team will follow. We also have a small team up by the station, here.” He pointed.

  Wilson was looking at Bente, right across the table. He had a puzzled, thoughtful expression, as if wondering what to do with her. The others noticed this and fell quiet. It became so quiet in the room that she could hear the murmur of traffic outside the building. The woman from MI6 was the only person to continue taking notes in her notebook, before she too glanced up and looked at Bente, expressionlessly.

  They didn’t dare drive her away. However much they wanted to, they couldn’t ignore her, despite her questioning of their investigation. She was from the Section. They needed her; Security Service management listened to her. The sun streamed through a gap between the faded curtains, lighting up the projector screen that was still on the opposite wall. Bente concentrated on relaxing her face completely and meeting their gazes.

  This was the third meeting since yesterday of the operation’s command group; she had missed the two previous ones. She hadn’t been told. They had changed the times, moved venue, and not told her. It was pure chance that she had caught sight of Hamrén’s assistant an hour ago; Bente had waylaid her, forced her to go to her computer, log in, and give her the meeting times. Hamrén was sitting diagonally across the table, twirling a pen between his fingers and looking at her with no particular facial expression, as if he was waiting. She met his eyes. He blinked and looked away.

  “Well then,” Hamrén said, turning to Wilson, who hadn’t moved an inch. Everyone was waiting, even him. He wasn’t in charge here, it struck her. Someone had told him that Bente Jensen was to be kept out of the loop. Or the decision had been taken after a discussion between those sitting at the table now. Perhaps Wilson had turned up in Hamrén’s office, pulled the door shut, and said a few choice words. Hamrén listened to London.

  “I think we’re done,” muttered Wilson.

  “And Badawi?” Bente interjected.

  Bugging of his phone and the rooms at his address was ongoing. They had been listening in to his apartment, his cell, and his e-mails. It wasn’t giving them much. Since his return from Vienna earlier that day they had heard only music—classical—and the sound of Swedish TV. Even his work computer at the Ministry of Justice was being watched. There was little activity, nothing unusual. The hypothesis that Counterterrorism was working off was that he was awaiting fresh orders from Cairo.

  “He’s under control,” said Hamrén.

  He truly was under control. The technical unit had intercepted a text message sent by Badawi to Dymek less than an hour ago; they had agreed to meet at the Skogskyrkogården subway station. They could arrest him whenever they liked. Wilson rapped his knuckles against the table, as if to emphasize what he was saying. He wanted to hear every word said. Every word. Hamrén nodded. They quickly ran through the evening’s operation, step by step. A select group from the department would make up a cell team of two cars. A group of British specialists would participate. Positions—here and here. Wilson pointed at a map of the area. They briefly discussed communication procedures, wavelengths for radio contact. Instructions for effective fire.

  “Do we have any more on Bernier?” Bente said to the room at large.

  They had begun to rise. Hamrén had already thanked all present and closed the meeting when she posed the question through the scraping of chairs. Hamrén said nothing while Wilson pretended not to have heard.

  “What do you mean?” The woman from MI6, Sarah, had turned her unmoving, narrow face toward her. London’s analysis was that one of the EU Commission’s employees was under threat, she explained rapidly. “That’s our assessment. A targeted attack against that individual, probably to make an example of him.”

  That was the Swedish assessment of the situation too, added Hamrén.

  Everyone vanished into the corridor and dispersed into the office. They tried to pretend she didn’t exist. She watched Hamrén and Wilson leave together. The leadership team would presumably start to talk about her as soon as they resumed their conversation somewhere else in the building. She left the floor without looking around.

  It was cold in the subterranean parking lot. She got into the car and turned the ignition key, switched on the radio and the heating, then drove out of the city center, to the west, across the Traneberg Bridge, and continued along the main road. She was in no hurry, and she needed time to think.

  The arrow on her navigation system pointed straight ahead. The road ran north, alongside the subway line, past small su
burban centers and expansive residential areas behind sound screens bordering the road.

  Soon enough, she reached a leafy suburb filled with villas. She turned off at a crossroads, rolled on to a residential street, and stopped at a turning circle to check the address.

  The Dymek couple lived on one of the side streets, in one of the smaller wooden villas. They had lived here since the middle of the eighties. This was where Carina Dymek had grown up.

  Her mother was Swedish, born in Stockholm. Upper secondary school teacher, recently retired. The father was a Pole, born in Gdansk. Immigrated at the start of the seventies, Swedish citizen since 1988, employed at an upper secondary school in Blackeberg. He was a former officer of the Polish army and, unlike many Poles in exile from that period, not an outspoken opponent of the communist regime in Poland. There was a fuzzy, old note about that in the report from the archives. No hits on their criminal records. According to the Swedish Tax Agency, the couple also owned a house north of Norrtälje—probably a summer cottage.

  They lived on a small plot with a lawn, shrubs, and a fruit tree in the corner, bare and gnarled. There was a slightly sour smell of brown, wet leaves and burning smoke. Someone was having a bonfire. Not a soul was in sight.

  She parked the car at a sufficient distance from the house for the registration plates to be unreadable, pulled out her camera, and took around ten photos, mostly for the sake of it. Then she got out of the car and walked toward the house, moving past slowly and looking up at the windows, before continuing on a lap around the block. A peaceful area with no social problems, this was where teachers, bank clerks, and nurses lived: stable people who represented the median of the Swedish population. Back in the car, she got out her phone and dialed the Dymeks’ number.

  A woman answered. “Hello?”

  “Is this Agneta Dymek?”

  “Yes?”

  Bente used a cheerful and friendly voice—light and lively. She said she was calling from the broadband company and wondered if she could ask a few questions about their Internet use.

  “By the way, does Carina Dymek live at this address?” she said, as if in passing.

  Carina? No, she didn’t live there. She had moved out years ago. The woman reluctantly answered her questions.

  Dymek’s mother was telling the truth; her daughter wasn’t in the house. Bente would have noticed if she had tried to hide that Dymek was staying with her parents. The mother’s calm and slightly distracted tone also suggested that she knew nothing about what her daughter was involved in.

  After the conversation, Bente drove around at random, as if in a dream, and finally ended up at Bromma airport. Next to the airport were two large supermarkets, old hangars that now housed their stock on kilometers of shelving. She parked the car in the middle of the parking lot. She looked across its expanse. It was a weekday afternoon and the cars were few and far between. She would be alone here. Sitting behind the wheel, she slowly turned the pages of Dymek’s file.

  Twenty years in the business had taught her when to listen to her gut—the weak signals that told her something wasn’t right. A worry. About what, she didn’t know. She had brought a bundle of reports and parts of Dymek’s dossier in a file: e-mails, transcribed phone calls to Badawi—some items dated as recently as yesterday—and the list of what had been found in Dymek’s apartment during the search. There were reports from GCHQ and other British intelligence reports on the Muslim Brotherhood, the Ahwa group, their structures.

  She got out of the car and stretched her legs. A leaden gray bank of clouds towered above the supermarket. The storage units and office buildings around the airport cast dark shadows. Rain was in the air.

  Why would someone like Carina Dymek be in contact with an extreme wing of the Muslim Brotherhood? The question suddenly formed in her head. Why?

  British intelligence was convinced, and there was some sort of threat associated with the IRC channel, they had discovered. The British had shown a connection between Dymek and Badawi and the Ahwa network. Still, there was something that didn’t make sense. She looked up at the dark, looming clouds. Empty plastic bags danced in the wind, swirling away across the tarmac. She couldn’t work it out. An MFA civil servant, mixed up in the planning of an attack against a summit meeting? Bente had spent the last day focusing almost exclusively on the operation targeting Dymek and Badawi; she had barely had time to think, only time to manage the stream of details—thousands of pieces of information that could be combined endlessly. But did she actually understand what was going on? Could she see the threat? A lot suggested that there was a threat to the safety of the nation, yet she still didn’t understand. Would a person like Dymek risk everything by collaborating with terrorists? Perhaps, out of loyalty to her boyfriend. But she was no convert. Was she being blackmailed? Perhaps. But blackmailed by the Muslim Brotherhood? It seemed so peculiar.

  Badawi: the clear connection to the terrorist organization. He was compromised, involved—the only question was, how deep? The evidence for that was stronger; the intelligence provided by the British was convincing. But Carina? The lines ran in parallel and seemed to generate a true picture—but, paradoxically, something didn’t add up. It was like an Escher print that tricked the eye.

  And the photograph. The target.

  She caught sight of her face in the angled car-door window, monstrously contorted.

  On the way back into the city, she stopped at a gas station. She needed to think and was craving coffee. She got out of the car, twisted the gas cap off, and put in the nozzle. The pump began to whirr away at her side just as her cell rang. It was Mikael. Yes, she could talk.

  “The man in the picture: Jean Bernier.” Mikael’s voice disappeared in the racket.

  “Yes?” She took a few steps away from the car.

  The Commission had confirmed the identity of everyone on the picture. The man in the middle was, just as Bente had thought, the Director General, Manservisi, the Italian. The two young girls next to him were both administrators in the department that dealt with migration policy—completely uninteresting. The man in the background, staring straight into the camera just as the picture was taken, was Jean Bernier. He was a lawyer. Worked at GD Home reviewing EU Commission proposals concerning police and intelligence matters. Mikael had his CV. French citizen. Educated at the Sorbonne and Harvard Law School. Fifteen years as a human rights lawyer at the UN in Geneva, four years in New York and, as of six years ago, working at the EU Commission. He had been involved in the review of the European Intelligence Service proposal.

  “But, Mikael, we know this. Why is he of interest to an IRC channel? Why is he a target?”

  “Yes, but listen: we checked him out with the Belgian police. He’s dead.”

  “What?”

  She stopped.

  “They found him about a week ago, next to a lake in northern Belgium. He and his wife had a hideaway there. A neighbor found him in the garden.”

  She looked around to make sure no one was listening, which of course no one was. In the eyes of others, she was just a middle-aged woman on her cell at a gas station.

  “Is it confirmed?”

  “Yes. He had diabetes. The first preliminary examination showed insulin shock, apparently.”

  “No signs of violence?”

  “No. Nothing. He had been there for a while. Not seen since Thursday, two weeks ago. They’re going to attribute the death to natural causes.”

  Dead since Thursday a fortnight ago. She got out her pocket calendar. The 22nd of September: the same day Dymek left Brussels.

  “He must have died shortly after Dymek got the report.”

  That a person like Jean Bernier was dead was no coincidence. All her professional experience had taught her to distrust chance. His death looked like a coincidence, and it was precisely that which convinced her it wasn’t. Real coincidences were stragglier, more abrupt. But here was a perfect coincidence, and perfect coincidences were normally the result of well-planned and caref
ully executed human actions.

  “I can check with the Brits.”

  “No,” she said. “Hold off on that.”

  “Okay.”

  Mikael fell silent.

  “What does the EU Commission say?”

  “They were shocked and so on. But one of our sources in their HR department checked the records for us. Bernier had been disconnected from his work for the last few months—signed off on sick leave several times.” Mikael leafed through some papers at his desk in Brussels. “And he had received warnings. There’s a note here that says he was going to be reassigned.”

  “Good. Carry on looking into his background. See if you can find a colleague willing to talk.”

  Mikael was quick. That was why she liked him—for his ability to read situations, to see potential ways to access new information. He had already let one of the signals intelligence operatives at the Section discreetly hack into the EU Commission’s server to search Bernier’s e-mail account. There was probably a colleague, someone Bernier had worked with a lot. But it would take a little time. They had tried to build a timeline of Jean Bernier’s last week alive, but it was slow work. The Belgian police were suspicious of organizations like SSI. Mikael would get in touch when he had more.

  Dead for two weeks. She went inside to pay for her gas and bought a coffee that was so hot she could barely keep hold of the paper cup as she came back out to the car. A heavy raindrop hit the windshield with a loud, hollow thud as she got behind the wheel. Then another a second later.

  The rain hammered on the car roof, ran down the windows. The windshield wipers didn’t have time to shovel aside all the water. She got stuck in a jam a few hundred meters from the Security Service building. While she slowly crept closer, the downpour got worse and rattled furiously against the window. Water ran across the pavements in wide rivers and formed huge pools at the congested crossroads. All traffic was at a standstill; all people had turned into crouching, hurrying figures.