Into a Raging Blaze

by Andreas Norman

  She ate lunch at the hotel. The restaurant was teeming with cheerful employees of a global audit firm. She had no idea what a controller did, but a sign in the lobby welcomed all senior controllers to a two-day conference at the hotel. She looked at them and felt downhearted. There was something ridiculous about adults with name badges, as if some guardian had put the badge on them in order to easily include them in a count of beef cattle. Her mood wasn’t improved by the slow delivery of her Caesar salad. For some reason a silly little thing like the kitchen forgetting her salad made her question the entire idea of coming to Brussels. Somehow she had imagined that everything would sort itself, if only she came here, but now she had arrived, things were just as complicated as they had been in Stockholm.

  After lunch, she wandered around the city. She was in the heart of central Brussels, among the EU offices, banks, and international organizations. She turned down Rue du Trône and began to walk toward Parc de Bruxelles. It was unusually mild weather. Clusters of civil servants with pass cards fluttering on lanyards around their necks passed her. The Swedish Brussels delegation was only a few blocks away. If everything had been as usual, she would have gone there to check her e-mail, say hello to some colleagues. But nothing was as usual and it would be a long time before it was again.

  At Regentlaan, she went into a shop that sold cell phones. She needed a new one; the kind of handset she had lost was of course not available, but would also have been very expensive. She listened, stony faced, to the assistant who showed her different models. Finally, she chose the cheapest available phone on pay-as-you-go. She had promised herself not to be bothered by her lost cell, yet she was grieving for it and in an unusually bad mood when she approached the Royal Palace. She walked up along one of the gravel paths and ended up in the wake of guided tour. The tourists stepped on to the lawns and took photos of each other with the heavyset palace in the background, despite the small signs that strictly stated that walking on the grass was not permitted. The palace, with its expansive parks and pompous statues, had once been the center of a great power, ruling over the heart of Africa. In annoyance, Carina pushed past the tourists taking photos of a statue of Leopold II on horseback; they were seemingly quite unaware that the king had devastated an entire continent.

  She crossed the avenue and entered the larger park next to it. At its northern end, she found a bench that was set to one side. It felt restful to sit alone. She looked across the empty lawns and the dark green avenues of trees. In the middle of the park was a noisy stone fountain. A jogger ran past at a slow pace and there was a woman pushing a stroller along one of the gravel paths. Parc de Bruxelles at lunchtime on a Friday. She was left in peace.

  She turned the pages of her notes. At the top of the first page, she had written, Bernier. Beneath that, a list of phone numbers.

  There was no point in delaying things; she would just get more nervous. She got out her phone and gathered her thoughts for a second. Then she dialed the first number. She almost knew it by memory.

  Hold music.

  An operator broke in, in French. “La Commission Européenne, bonjour.”

  “I’m looking for Jean Bernier,” she said with the professional tone she had spent years practicing while working at the Ministry, and which she could produce at a moment’s notice.

  After a few seconds, the operator said that Jean Bernier wasn’t in the office.

  “That’s strange. I’m calling from the Swedish representation and had agreed a telephone meeting for now,” she said.

  It was important to keep talking, not to seem crestfallen. She turned to the page in her notebook where she had written down a few names from the personnel list for GD Home, department A3.

  “Perhaps you can connect me to one of his colleagues?”

  She knew how it worked; if you sounded sure enough and could give a name that matched one in their phone database, you could get past the exchange. She was connected. For a second, the turgid hold music returned, then a woman answered.

  “Bonjour, how can I help you?”

  “I’d like to speak to Jean Bernier.”

  “But you’ve called Mr. Steigl.” She had presumably been connected to a secretary. “Who is speaking?”

  “Anna Svensson, at the Swedish delegation. I’m looking for Mr. Bernier—Jean Bernier. It’s concerning a matter he’s discussed with the delegation. I was connected here by the operator,” she said with a tone of certainty, as if she didn’t have time for this kind of nonsense. Plausibility was important; she needed to sound reasonably stressed, but not obstinate. If she was lucky, the secretary would connect her internally within the department just to get rid of her.

  “But Mr. Bernier isn’t in,” said the secretary, already doubtful.

  “Oh.” She maintained the stressed tone, implying that this was very inconvenient in her hectic working day. “That’s strange—I was asked to call today.”

  “What was it concerning?”

  She said it was about a report from the directorate. A proposal that would be appearing under agenda item five at the summit the following week.

  “Oh.” She could hear the secretary had become noticeably stressed. “Yes, I understand . . . I’m sorry; Mr. Steigl is in a meeting. I can ask him to call you back.” Carina said that wasn’t necessary and asked to be reconnected to the exchange.

  A new operator was connected. That was correct, Jean Bernier was not available. No, he hadn’t left any message about his absence.

  Carina thanked her and hung up.

  Not available. That could mean anything—that he was just somewhere else in the building and would be back soon, or that he was away from work for a week—what did she know? She would have to try again later under a different name; she didn’t dare use her own. There was always the risk that a warning had gone out about her name and that some alert individual would note her calls and send a message to Stockholm. Then the EU Commission would pull down the shutters—she couldn’t let that happen.

  The city spread out in all directions around her. She had never really thought of Brussels as a city. For her, Brussels was carpeted corridors, conference rooms, quick lunches, and long meetings about European security policy. The city itself was something she had mostly glimpsed from the back seat of a taxi on the way to or from the airport. Brussels was a place of work that you got home from on the seven-thirty flight. But now she was here in this city with millions of people, of which she was looking for just one. She needed to think through what she was going to do.

  She navigated her way through the streets around the park and came out by the Grote Markt. The City Hall, with its jagged pinnacles, stretched into the clear sky.

  After a few hours of brisk walking, she found herself somewhere in south Ixelles, where she stopped for a coffee. She was in one of those small local places with organic teas and a girl with Rasta dreads who made the coffee. There were FC Brussels scarves pinned above the bar and a large flat-screen TV was on the wall, showing Formula One cars racing soundlessly around a track somewhere in Europe. She ordered a double espresso and a small brandy and asked for a phone book.

  Greger had said the name was one hundred percent right, that the guy who called himself Jean had the surname Bernier. But she wanted to be sure of the address. She turned to the page with surnames beginning with B and found the column of Berniers.

  There were three Jean Berniers. One lived in a suburb, in Schaerbeek. That couldn’t be right. The second was Professor Emeritus Jean Bernier and lived in the city center, near Grote Markt. That sounded wrong; the Jean Bernier she was looking for was unlikely to be a Professor Emeritus. But the third one . . . She smiled. Greger was right—the phonebook said that the third Bernier lived in the south of Brussels, in Waterloo.

  34

  Brussels, Friday, October 7

  Some kind of monitoring, a form of hostile activity, was being directed against them. SSI’s leadership team was sitting around Bente in her office, listening to Rodriguez.
There was no doubt that she and Mikael had been followed on the way to Florian Klause’s apartment after they had left the café. The question was whether SSI was the primary target or whether they had gotten caught up in a reconnaissance operation against Klause, or someone else. They had discovered three men and a woman following her and Mikael after they had left the café, said Rodriguez. It was standard procedure to reconnoiter before the Head of SSI had scheduled meetings. The café at Rue Vifquin had been deemed secure; there had been nothing there to raise suspicion. It was when she and Mikael had left the café that they had noticed something was wrong. A man had followed them.

  Bente couldn’t remember anyone following, but Rodriguez was certain. During the walk to Klause’s apartment, they had spotted four people—there were probably more. They were, without doubt, professionals; based on their patterns of movement and the way in which they were coordinated, these people were probably well trained in intelligence work. It had all gone so fast, Rodriguez hadn’t had time to contact her or Mikael before they reached the apartment. She hadn’t answered her phone either, said Rodriguez with a tired expression. The pursuers had positioned themselves in the area surrounding Klause’s apartment. They had probably noticed that the Section had discovered them and chose to abort.

  “Did we intercept any radio traffic?” She turned to the Head of Signals Intelligence.

  There hadn’t been time to locate them. It had all gone so quickly; they were gone before they had managed to contact the cell team to search frequencies, let alone crack encryptions.

  “But we have photographs.”

  Rodriguez brought up around thirty photos on his laptop. They were taken from the surveillance team’s van using a telephoto lens. In one picture, she could see herself and Mikael on the street. Twenty meters behind them was a man in a hoodie. Then another series of pictures of a woman buying a newspaper at a street kiosk that Bente remembered had been opposite the main door to Florian Klause’s building. She was thin, dark-haired, wearing a polo shirt and leather jacket. She was standing so that her face was visible in profile. No one that Bente knew, of course. Then photos of a young guy in a denim jacket, wearing headphones, walking along the pavement, presumably on the other side of the street from where Bente and Mikael had been. He was turning his head, as if casting a glance across the street.

  “Try to identify them,” said Bente and nodded at the screen. “I want to know who is watching us. Name, employer—whatever we can find. Check with other services. The French. Interpol.”

  Mikael nodded and made a note.

  They discussed the level of threat against SSI. According to their signals intelligence, there had been nothing to previously suggest that the Section was a target. The physical plant was intact: no tampering with code locks or doors, no intrusions recorded, no unauthorized persons had been into the Section. The premises had been swept just a month ago—no microphones or other hostile equipment had been found in the building or in their server room to the south of the city—and no hostile code in the computer equipment either. No members of staff had shown any signs that could be deemed threatening. It was terrible even to contemplate that someone in the Section might be in pay of another power; Bente knew how loyal everyone was. But she was in charge and the security of SSI was her top priority. She ordered Mikael to run security checks on all personnel—their e-mails, their phone calls and meetings for the last three months. A tense atmosphere filled the room.

  “Do we need to evacuate the office?” She looked at them.

  Rodriguez was certain that they had managed to disrupt whatever operation was currently being undertaken against them. The hostile monitoring was also unlikely to have traced them back to the office. No one had followed when they had driven back toward the Section after evacuating from Florian Klause’s. She nodded. They had driven at breakneck speed through the city, following a route that Rodriguez had designated for rapid extractions. Three fast car changes, for safety’s sake, then back to SSI the long way around. Their address had not been revealed.

  But some form of monitoring had been ongoing against SSI—or against her, to be more specific. It was entirely possible she had been under surveillance since landing at Brussels airport in the morning. It was entirely possible that they had been waiting for her at the airport and then shadowed her from there, followed her taxi home and then to meet Mikael. The question was—who? She had her suspicions, but said nothing.

  Signals Intelligence was going to send the photos to Stockholm and run them through the FRA’s databases. Perhaps they might get a hit on something. Apart from that, Bente wanted all staff to minimize their movements. No meetings around the city for the next forty-eight hours unless there were crucial operational reasons to do so. No movements on foot. Contact by cell with family members and other outsiders was forbidden as of now, for two days. Then they would conduct a review. With regard to radio communications, they were to be kept to a minimum: no more talk on the Section’s wavelengths than was absolutely necessary. An additional security check of the premises would be carried out. She turned to the Head of Liaison and asked him to contact the Belgian police to try to secure surveillance footage and other material where the hostile operatives might have been caught. She also instructed him to see whether Belgium’s security service had any hits on the people photographed by Rodriguez. As they went through the motions, she began to feel calm. They were safe, for now.

  The meeting broke up. Mikael stayed behind while the others left the room. Once they were alone, he got out the rumpled envelope and put it on her desk. She sat quietly for a while and thought. So someone was watching them. That poor young apprentice probably needed police protection, it occurred to her. But that couldn’t be helped; they couldn’t look after him. She looked slowly through the pictures Rodriguez had left.

  “I think we’ve been very naïve, Mikael.”

  She told him how she had begun to have a clear sense that things were not right while she was in Stockholm, and that feeling had only grown. She explained, without being certain whether Mikael believed her. It didn’t matter right now. She needed to say what she was thinking to someone she trusted, needed to get the thoughts out, hear the words so that they became real, and then get Mikael’s assessment.

  Fact one: the British knew about Jean Bernier. They knew about him from the start. He was a problem for them, just like Klause said. He was a cog in the machinery, pulling the wrong way, and over time had come to pose a real problem for them. Jean Bernier contacted Carina Dymek, by methods unknown, and they met.

  “On the 22nd of September, here in Brussels,” Mikael interrupted.

  “Yes. And I think Dymek is telling the truth. Jean Bernier gave her the EIS report.”

  “And she shared it with a few people in the Ministry of Justice,” said Mikael promptly. “With her partner, among others, who has been shown to have close links to the Muslim Brotherhood.”

  “Yes. So they say.”

  He looked sharply at her. “What do you mean?”

  “Mikael, how do you know that?”

  “What? How do I know what?” he said in hard tone of voice, as if he didn’t really want to continue this conversation. He was close to switching off, ceasing to listen to her.

  She said lightly, “How do you know it’s true?”

  He flinched and looked at her with an austere expression around his mouth. “Well, among other things, thanks to the British intelligence we’ve received—”

  “Not among other things,” she interrupted him. “Only thanks to the British intelligence. Do we have any other source that points in the same direction? Even one? Have the Germans or the Danes got any information like that? Have the French? We don’t actually know anything except what the Brits have told us.”

  “But . . . why would . . .” He stared at her, open-mouthed. “MI6 are reliable. We’ve evaluated their information.”

  “Mikael, listen to me.”

  She explained that, when they had found
the IRC channel, MI6 had said they didn’t know anything about Jean Bernier—didn’t know who he was. When it turned out he was a civil servant at the Commission, directly involved in the work on the EIS report, she had become suspicious. She had begun to wonder. The Brits were deeply involved in the EIS proposal; they knew every single official at the EU Commission who was working on the proposal, and naturally they must have known who Jean Bernier was—so why had they claimed they didn’t?

  “He was problem for them,” she said. “Klause confirmed that. And yet the Brits said that Bernier was unknown to them. Then, just after we found the IRC channel, they used that to suggest Jean Bernier was a target for terrorists. Convenient, don’t you think? But odd at the same time. Why just him—a normal civil servant at the Commission? Why would he be a target for terrorism? And why did we find out that he was a target, precisely when we did?”

  “Because they didn’t know before.”

  “No. Because they hadn’t had to invent it before then.”

  “So you’re saying they’re lying—the British are lying?”

  “I don’t believe their intelligence.”

  Mikael looked at her as if she were crazy. His slightly condescending, slightly amused expression irritated her and made her want to hurt him.

  “Do you remember when we found out that Dymek had leaked the report? I met Green that day,” she said, with a sense of cruel satisfaction as she saw Mikael’s surprised expression, which he quickly tried to hide. He didn’t know about the meeting.

  “Oh?”

  “Green was angry—or more like pissed off—and he said nothing about terrorist threats. He was pissed off about the leak, Mikael. He wanted us to stop it, as fast as we fucking could.”

  “The leak was a problem—we thought that too,” said Mikael with a shrug of his shoulders.

  “That’s not the point,” she said and wished for a second that she didn’t have to say another word, that she didn’t have to explain, that she could just transfer the contents of her brain to him, wordlessly, through some kind of telepathy. “They were worried about the leak, because the leak was the real problem. And still is.”