“Hello?”
It sounded as if someone had picked up the phone and was still there at the other end of the line, but she wasn’t sure; the line was bad. Sunlight cut sharp contours across the streets of Cairo. She wandered into a small side street where the midday heat was not as remorseless.
“Hello? This is Carina. Carina Dymek. Can you hear me?”
The poor phone line made it sound like Alex’s voice was coming out of a mineshaft. “Carina!” she burst out, and then, as if she had really meant to say something else, she said, “Where are you?”
“In Cairo.”
“Cairo?”
“Alex, I . . .”
Words were being delayed and Alex interrupted her. “Have you seen the news?”
“No.”
“. . . Greger, I think.”
It was hard to hear Alex; the words were all fragmented. But she guessed what Alex had just said.
“. . . the hell? I’ve not fucking done anything!” she heard Alex say, as if she was at the end of an echoing tunnel. Then her voice was suddenly close by, shrill and whiney. She spoke quickly and breathlessly. She was frightened. “Greger said it was cool, that it was just something you needed help with. My site has been down since this morning and they’ve arrested Greger. I don’t know what’s happened to Victor—he’s not answering his cell. No one’s answering. What the fuck have you done? Who the fuck are you?”
Carina sank down on to the pavement and closed her eyes. Greger, arrested? A big bus rumbled past, dangerously close, but she didn’t care. Her arms were numb; she could barely keep the phone to her ear. “Alex, listen,” she said and tried to sound calm. “It’s all a misunderstanding. It’ll be all right.”
“How—?”
Carina interrupted her. “I’m going to sort this out. You have to trust me.”
“Fuck you!” exclaimed Alex, her voice cracking. “I don’t want to go to prison. I haven’t fucking done anything. I’m a computer programmer, for Christ’s sake, and I just let you do what you wanted on my site. I wasn’t in control—how the fuck could I have been? There must be—”
“Alex. Alex, listen,” Carina said firmly in an attempt to break through the rattling stream of words. All she really wanted to do was cry. Everything had gone wrong—everything. She had to find a TV, she thought. As soon as she was done with the call. Only Alex could do what she was going to ask for. It was her last chance. With immense effort, she managed to soften her voice. “Alex, please. Listen to me.”
There was silence at the other end of the line.
“I don’t have time to explain everything,” she continued rapidly, afraid of losing Alex’s attention. She gathered her thoughts and spoke slowly, as if to a frightened child. “It’s a misunderstanding. Whatever has happened, we have done nothing wrong. Okay?”
“Okay,” she heard.
“I want to ask you for a favor.” She took a breath. “Under your fridge there is a bundle of papers and a USB stick.”
“Under my fridge?”
“Alex, listen!” she shouted and for a moment she was quite certain that Alex would hang up. But her tone of voice had the intended effect: Alex swallowed the questions that were probably on the tip of her tongue and abruptly fell silent. “You have to get the USB and the papers. Do you understand? It’s very important. Can you do that for me?”
“Okay.”
“Under the fridge, there’s a small plastic grill. Take it off. The papers and USB are inside.”
She waited impatiently while Alex went to the kitchen. It was so surreal to imagine the small apartment in the south of Stockholm, so infinitely far away from the lane where she was standing, sweating in the close heat. She heard a rattle and a scraping sound as Alex put the phone to one side.
After a frustratingly long time, Alex’s voice returned, loud and clear: “There.”
“Have you got it all?”
Yes. Alex had it all: the report, the secret documents and the memory stick. It was all still there.
“Was it you who put them all there?”
“Yes. I had to hide them.”
“. . . looks secret. What is it?”
“It’s a report.” She couldn’t explain now, the line was too bad, but promised to explain everything later, even though she silently doubted whether such an opportunity would ever arise. “Three of the documents have green stamps on them. Do you see them?”
Yes, Alex had them.
Carina took a deep breath. For the first time in a very long time, she felt a weak, budding sense of hope. It might work. But they had to act quickly. If the police had shut down Alex’s site and arrested Greger and the others, it was only a matter of time before they came looking for Alex too. But there was no point in telling her that, it would only scare the living daylights out of her.
“Hello? Alex, can you hear me?”
It seemed as if the line had been cut, and she swore aloud. But Alex was still there—her voice audible but delayed.
She had been right: Alex had a scanner. Carina quickly began to explain, and waited while she listened to Alex turning on her computer and then, page by page, scanning the short documents: the records from the secret meeting in The Hague, the grotesque instruction not to inform parliament about the EIS, and the annex. Finally, Alex copied the report on the memory stick.
Then: “. . . do I do now?”
Carina swallowed. What she was now going to ask Alex to do would irrevocably change their lives in ways she couldn’t foresee. But that couldn’t be helped. It had to be done.
“Go to my e-mail,” she said, and spelled the password to her private e-mail account. She had to repeat it twice before Alex heard it properly. But now she did exactly as Carina told her to, quickly, without any objections.
“Okay.”
Carina got out the crumpled note and read the e-mail address for the Guardian. She had considered other options, but had chosen the British daily newspaper. They understood British politics; they would take it seriously. If the Guardian made a big deal about the EIS and showed that the entire project had taken place without the knowledge of any elected politicians, there was still a chance that she and the others drawn into this would be exonerated.
“Also copy in these people,” she continued, and read the names of the Swedish MPs on the Advisory Committee on EU Affairs. They were well-known politicians; over the years, Carina had become familiar with their debating techniques and their innermost beliefs. How many times had she prepared data for the foreign minister or other junior ministers so that they could provide watertight answers to all the razor-sharp, piercing questions about the government’s EU policies? But now she was no longer a civil servant, she served no one. It was their right to know the truth and her damn democratic duty to inform them. She slowly dictated the short message that would be the first thing read by the recipients when they opened the e-mail, and waited. The heat beat down on her head. Sweat ran all over her body in small, sluggish rivulets.
“Send it now,” she heard herself say. “Send all the files.”
Shortly thereafter, Alex’s voice penetrated through a wall of noise. There. Now it was sent.
“Good.” But she doubted that “good” was really the right word. There was no triumph in her actions; this was just something that she had been forced to do, and now it was done. Hopefully, it would absolve her and all the others she had pulled into the case. She felt hopelessly tired. Without caring about the stares of the passersby, she squatted down to rest in front of a dirty yellow façade. “That’s great,” she repeated in a low voice.
“. . . now?”
“What did you say?”
“What do we do now?” Alex repeated.
“I don’t know, Alex.” She just wanted to cry. She bit her lip and managed to say, “But thank you. You don’t know what this means.”
“. . . problem.”
The line crackled. It whistled and whined as if an electric storm was sweeping in between them. Alex�
�s voice was subdued, the words indistinct.
“I can’t hear you.”
“. . .”
“I’ll be in touch, Alex. Speak soon. Okay?” Carina cupped her hand over the phone to hear better. But the line had already been cut off.
She got up laboriously, crossed the street and headed to a small café where, the whole time, there had been three elderly men watching her. She asked in English if there was a TV in the café. They looked at her, puzzled, as if she was a complete idiot, and said nothing. A young man came out and asked if he could help. He looked so eerily like Jamal that, at first, she was thrown. Of course he had a TV. With an amused expression, he led her inside the dark, cool room. The young man reluctantly changed channel to BBC World on the small flat-screen TV in the corner and indicated that she should sit.
She stayed there while some men stared at her from the next table, until, finally, the news she had been waiting for came on.
TERRORIST CELL IN STOCKHOLM UNCOVERED, was the headline. A probable terrorist attack had been averted, said the newscaster, after three people, suspected of planning attacks against targets in the EU, were arrested in Stockholm in the early hours of Saturday morning. According to anonymous sources, one of those arrested was a thirty-two-year-old Swedish civil servant with connections to Islamist networks. A grainy film sequence showed a task force moving around on the street outside the main door of an apartment building. Just as the segment ended, she recognized the building: it was Hammarby Sjöstad, outside Jamal’s building.
“No!”
She flew up from her seat. The men at the next table had lost interest in her, but now fell silent and looked sideways at her in disapproval.
No. That couldn’t be right. Not Jamal. She was tired; she must have been mistaken. But, naturally, she had not been mistaken; she had recognized the door, the gray exterior, the small sushi place. A sob swelled in her throat. It was all her fault. She fumbled with the remote control, which was still on the table. Her hands shook so much she could barely flick between the channels. Finally, she found another English-language news channel and waited. A similar report appeared. It was brief, but the same shaky images flicked past: heavily armed police moving in and out of Jamal’s building.
She rushed out of the café, got out her cell, and called Jamal’s number. But his phone was still turned off. The call was connected, crackling, and she went straight to his voicemail. For a few seconds his voice was so close, so soft, so familiar: “Hi. You’ve reached Jamal. Please leave a message. I promise to get back to you as soon as I can.”
“Jamal, it’s me!” she shouted through the din of the traffic hammering along the avenue. “Please call me. If you get this.”
She blurted out the number for her new cell. Standing in the middle of the hubbub, she cried violently with the phone pressed to her breast, as if it contained the last remains of the man she loved. A boy playing nearby stopped and squinted at her curiously, occasional passersby glanced at her, but most people hurried past without even noticing her, occupied with their own lives.
48
Brussels, Tuesday, October 11
Bente was woken by a muffled sound from downstairs. The surrounding bedroom was dark and motionless. Fredrik was asleep, curled up on his side of the bed, barely visible under the duvet. She lifted her head from the pillow and listened. There it was again: a ringing sound. Their private landline phone was ringing, on the hall table. She got up quickly and reached for her dressing gown, which was on a chair. Another quavering noise came from the hall before she managed to find her slippers and sneak out of the room. Fredrik stirred in his sleep, but didn’t wake up.
Her body felt heavy. The last few weeks of work were beginning to take their toll, and she had drunk rather more wine than she was used to last night. But not all evenings were alike. The Brits had made a laughing stock out of them, and that angered her. It was as if, only now, when it was all over, was she able to let out that anger. She had tried to be in the moment with Fredrik and the boys, but her thoughts had kept running away, anger had made her distracted and sullen, and she had poured herself another glass of wine. She was quiet at dinner and for most of the evening; she had wished the boys a distant good night after Fredrik had put them to bed. When she and Fredrik were alone, they had watched the news and then a silly French comedy on TV. She had noticed that her husband was hoping they would have sex, but he hadn’t made a fuss and had gone to bed alone. She had stayed up until he was asleep and the house was silent. Sitting at the kitchen table, she had leafed through old magazines she hadn’t had time to read, while her thoughts continued to grind away.
The phone kept ringing. She hurried through the house. The stairs creaked in the silence. She picked up the receiver just as it rang again.
“Hello?”
It was Mikael.
“Why are you calling this number?”
“Your cell is off.”
It was true; she had turned it off last night. She normally kept her cell on, but for once, after speaking to Hamrén, she had decided not to take anymore work calls. Mikael sounded wide awake, as if it was ten in the morning and he had just had his second espresso.
“You need to come in. Things are afoot.”
She didn’t ask what, since they were on an open line. “I’ll call from the car.”
She reached the freeway quickly. The road to Brussels was almost deserted at that time of morning. Mikael answered right away when she called and she asked what had happened. While she listened, she noticed how she rapidly became more alert.
“We need to call people in,” she said.
Mikael had called in a group of technicians; they were already conducting signals intelligence. They needed analysts too, she said. They briefly discussed a number of practical details. She would be there within quarter of an hour.
She gently increased her speed and swept along the empty highway. She smiled to herself. What Mikael had told her changed everything.
There were two hours left until dawn and the streets were desolate, like the abandoned architecture of lost civilizations. She let the car rush forth over roads on which she normally spent hours in traffic jams. A muted joy rippled through her. Maybe, it struck her, this was what they called schadenfreude. For the first time in many days, she felt strong and decisive, like the Head of SSI that she wanted to be.
A few minutes later, she reached the tunnel.
She slid along Rue du Trône. The streets were bathed in an inky blue darkness. Pedestrian lights changed without a soul crossing. It was as if the district had been evacuated.
She entered through the frosted doors of Integrated Systems, said good morning to the two men from the protection team sitting at reception (who were always ready to cheerfully answer the questions of anyone who had mistakenly ended up there, or answer fire in the case of an attack), passed through the perimeter security door lock arrangement, and entered the Section.
The command room was fully staffed. She stopped and looked at the screens on the wall for a second. TV images from news programs were running on several, and there, on the largest, was the Guardian’s website. The news was the main headline on their site, unsurprisingly.
Mikael approached and handed her a coffee. “It’s out now.”
“I can see that.”
The Brits had intercepted a conversation from an unknown Egyptian number yesterday afternoon, Swedish time, Mikael explained. MI6 had sent a flash to Stockholm and Counterterrorism, but Stockholm had forgotten to notify SSI.
Forgotten. She gave a crooked smile. She doubted that Hamrén had merely forgotten to tell her; after all, she had talked to him only twelve hours ago. But it didn’t matter. What was now happening changed the situation entirely.
The conversation had been recorded by the British signals intelligence station in Cairo and also by the American systems. They had received a copy of the audio file, said Mikael. Bente nodded impatiently; they could deal with that later. She knew how it all work
ed. Within minutes, a transcription of the brief exchange was sent to Stockholm and London, the call was logged on British servers in Cheltenham, and the American signals intelligence center at Fort Gordon in Augusta, Georgia generated a flash to Langley before digital copies were forwarded to the NSA’s servers in Utah and filed away as a microscopic particle among billions and billions of other pieces of data.
Carina’s call had been to a certain Alexandra Gustavsson, a resident in the south of Stockholm.
“What exactly did she leak?”
“The Commission’s EIS proposal and three memos from the Ministry of Justice—all green-stamped. Enough to uncover the lot.”
No one had guessed that the EIS material was hidden in Alexandra Gustavsson’s apartment, Mikael continued. It was now under surveillance. The National Criminal Police were preparing an operation to bring Gustavsson in within the hour for interview.
“That girl is the least of their problems right now,” Bente said drily. That strange, gloomy joy made her smile. Mikael looked at her in surprise and then turned back to one of the screens where Bente was examining the Guardian’s website.
“The story went up an hour ago.”
She nodded. It was a good story, a real scoop for a paper like the Guardian. ILLEGAL EU SPY ORGANIZATION REVEALED. It was a headline many editors would kill for, she thought quietly. The preamble told her that there was “a secret organization to fight terrorism established by the EU Commission and a number of EU member state governments.” According to “documents from the Commission and the Swedish government,” it said, “the organization would be kept secret from the EU parliament and elected politicians in member states.” She skimmed through the story, which included phrases like “death patrols” and “extrajudicial arrests.”
This news would spread like wildfire. There were probably already dozens of editors around the world preparing to splash the news, TV crews already on their way, right now, to lay siege to the homes of the politicians and civil servants responsible.
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