Until a couple of weeks ago, when it was decided that I no longer belonged there. It. Was. Decided. Maybe I hadn’t had much experience in making decisions, but this was a decision I didn’t agree with. I had to start somewhere.
‘Karl,’ I said, ‘what you guys do here is terrific. Really. Without Kirsten and Vince and without you all I’d be wasting away in some hotel. I wouldn’t know what I know now. And I’m very grateful to you all for that.’
‘So behave yourself if you’re so grateful.’
‘That’s what I’m doing.’ I pointed to the photo of the gutted room. ‘I didn’t do that. I know who did, though, and I know they did it to catch me. Or Vince first and then me. It doesn’t matter. So what are you asking, really? That I pick up my stuff and leave? So you guys don’t have to be afraid anymore of the people who are looking for me? Is that what you’re asking? And should Vince leave, too? And all the people here who’ve been connected to that goddamned network—do they have to leave?’ My voice cut through the big room like a knife. Not a keyboard or a telephone could be heard. Only the constant hum of dozens of computers, the murmur of technology that has replaced silence almost everywhere.
‘What we do here is safe,’ said Karl.
‘I was safe, too,’ I said. ‘I was the safest person I knew.’ I saw Sacha get up from her work table behind him. Noiselessly she approached us until she was standing right behind Karl. She tapped him on the arm.
‘Karl?’
‘Not now, Sacha.’ He was about to turn away. Sacha grabbed his arm and held him back.
‘Karl,’ she said. ‘I’m in.’
55 The world is too small for us
Behind the scenes at the Larkowl Group the power was there for the taking. It was a foundation in which the biggest companies in the United States had combined forces. Construction companies, weapons manufacturers, oil companies, information technology, computer manufacturers, private security firms and many more saw it as a platform for defending their interests. The foundation maintained contact with politicians and military officers who lent their names to various commissions, joint ventures and trade delegations, for a great deal of money. It was a cartel of power and capital that asserted its influence without the slightest bit of restraint. The archives showed activities taking place all over the world. And wherever it went, the group displayed an unparalleled drive.
‘Here, this was what you were looking for, right?’ said Sacha. She clicked her mouse and the request for a password appeared on the screen. She typed something and eight stars appeared in the field. She clicked on ‘next’ and two new fields opened up. In the first was an eight-figure number. The second was empty.
‘This was the hardest part,’ said Sacha. She typed the eight figures into a laptop that was next to her standard keyboard. The laptop made a quick calculation and soon produced a new code consisting of five numbers and two letters. Sacha copied that code into the second field, and soon a new image appeared on the screen. A text. No more than two lines.
Roadmap for Interzonal Strategic Confrontation
Forward Defense program
Sacha clicked with her mouse. The text disappeared and a new one took its place.
Never fight a war at home if you can fight it somewhere else.
M. Miller
What followed was a description of RISC, a program for the active defence of Christianity against the advance of Islam and the threat of radical fundamentalism. In silence we read what the plan entailed and how it was being carried out. It was crystal clear, far too clear. Not only because of its smug self-assurance but also because of its scale. A strictly controlled information war was being carried out to ensure that the strategic confrontation did not take place in the United States. To avoid such a scenario, the polarization in Europe was being intensified. Research studies and reports were being manipulated in every conceivable way so that governments would always opt for the toughest policy. These policies provoked violent reactions from Muslims. Minor and major attacks in France, Germany, England, Spain and the Netherlands had steeled these countries in their decision to adopt the hardest line possible.
The confrontation was already taking place, and Mr. Miller made sure we were kept sufficiently frightened. Terrified. Because without fear the confrontation doesn’t work. Time and again, the most alarming figures were chosen as the basis for policy. Factions of the Christian political parties were given reports that they could use to lambaste every moderate opinion. Mr. Miller was the linchpin in an information war and Europe was the theatre of operations.
‘Everything is always different than what you think,’ said Karl. ‘How in God’s name did you get mixed up in this?’
‘Here we’re all mixed up in this,’ I said. ‘The only difference is that now we know. But don’t worry. I’m leaving the day after tomorrow. I’m going to Brussels.’
‘Brussels,’ he said. ‘Right. And what do you think you can accomplish there?’
‘I can get my life back. Because the man who can prove my innocence is in Brussels.’
‘How’s he going to do that? By furnishing you with an alibi?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘By confessing to the crime himself.’
Karl said nothing. He pressed his lips into a tight frown. His forehead looked more expansive than ever. ‘Solid plan,’ he said, and without waiting for my response he turned to Bernie. ‘How many UMTS lines do you have in the camper?’ he asked.
‘Three. And a dish.’
‘Can you be ready to leave by the end of the day tomorrow?’
Bernie nodded.
‘Great. Sacha, can you expose the Larkowl Group website to the press?’
‘With a couple of minor alterations.’
‘Vince, how’s it going on the anti-software for Mr. Miller?’
‘It’s not,’ said Vince. He shook his head. ‘No matter what we write, there’s always a new security layer.’
Karl cursed softly. ‘We still have forty-eight hours to do something about that, which is more time than we’ve ever needed. Okay?’ With that he turned back to me and poked his index finger into my chest. ‘We’ll talk again tomorrow at the end of the day. I don’t want to see you until then.’
Emma called. She had searched the whole house. The only thing she could find was a small, rolled-up note in the peephole between her shed and Gijs’s garden house.
‘A note in that particular spot, it must mean something,’ she said. ‘It’s got to. No one knows about that place. I almost overlooked it myself. He must have put it there the one day he was home. After the hospital. Except I can’t make head nor tail of the message. Here, listen …’
I heard her fiddling with a scrap of paper. The faint rustling sound was clear over the phone. She read.
‘W. is available.’
She paused. ‘Do you understand that?’ she asked. ‘Because I certainly don’t.’
‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘I think W. is his Uncle Walter. He’s at the Ministry of the Interior. I met him once. Apparently he’s in contact with Gijs. Or Gijs with him. Or whatever. I’ll figure that out later on.’
‘Let me know,’ she said. ‘As soon as you learn anything. Because I’m really starting to miss the boy next door.’
Bernie was in the shed, converting the camper into a high-tech communication centre. The little countertop had disappeared and had been replaced by a workbench. Three flat screen monitors were hanging on the wall, and next to them was a panel with telecom connections and a stack of headsets. Bernie was lying under the workbench with cables and cords all around him.
‘Be with you in a minute,’ he said. He fastened the cables somewhere with a click, plugged in the cords and tucked everything away in a ready cable holder. Then he reappeared, sliding out carefully on his back. The interior of the camper had been radically changed. All traces of domesticity were gone. Now it looked more like a conference room, and even the dining table and benches seemed to fit in.
‘Plug and play,’ he said
. ‘All the connections are in the wall. The entire countertop with everything included. Taps, drainage. Just click ’em out and click the workbench in. Easy peasy. The computers are already installed.’ He opened the kitchen cabinets. Cleaning supplies to the left, and on the right three identical PCs side-by-side, tightly secured in a plastic frame. On a shelf above was a battery of modems. Broadband. Red and green LED lamps flickering. ‘Standard camping gear,’ he said. ‘What can I do for you?’
‘I have to call someone,’ I said, ‘but I don’t want anyone to know where I’m calling from. Not even afterward by tracing the number.’
‘Okay.’ Bernie nodded and looked at the equipment he was installing. ‘Now?’
‘Can you manage it?’
‘I think so. A couple of minutes.’ He reached under the workbench, pulled out a kind of fold-out stool and sat down at the keyboard. He clicked casually through several menus and created connections that only existed in computers. I watched Bernie in silence. He was a heavy-set man in his early thirties. Big hands and fat fingers that obeyed his every command with remarkable speed and precision. His touch on the keys was light, lighter than mine. I hammered away with far too much force, as if the energy I was pounding in would be reflected in what I typed. Not him. He didn’t fight with the equipment. Nor was there any reason to do so, since he and the machines were on the same side. He knew the world that existed behind the buttons, so he never had to get rough with them.
That’s what I thought, and that’s what I felt here all around me: the will of people to bond together, both with each other and with the invisible systems that control so much of our lives.
‘Oh, no, sorry,’ said Bernie, not to me but to the screen, and with nimble fingers he remedied his mistake. ‘There, is that better?’ From behind the little door came a satisfied hum. Bernie looked fixedly at the formulas and codes flashing by on the screen until the computer finally settled down, producing a tiny, discreet little noise.
Beep.
‘I thought so,’ said Bernie. He picked up a cordless phone.
‘What number?’ he asked.
I gave him the number of Walter Eberhuizen, Secretary-General of the Ministry of the Interior.
Bernie keyed in a much longer number. ‘Satellite connection, onto the internet via the secure server of that friend of yours in South Africa and then off again and onto a landline to The Hague. Not all that complicated, but it has to be good enough. Here.’ He handed me the phone.
I listened to the connection being made, its progress marked by a series of clicks and peeps, via a mechanism that was orbiting the earth to a country on the other side of the equator and then back to the Netherlands. Amsterdam—The Hague. The world is too small for us.
‘Eberhuizen.’
I jumped. I had not expected to get the man himself on the line but his secretary. After a bit of spluttering I regained my composure. I explained who I was, that we had met a couple of weeks earlier in connection with a possible assignment for HC&P and that subsequent events had unfortunately made any further contact impossible.
‘I know very well who you are, Mr. Bellicher. Even without the explanation.’
‘I was afraid you might.’
‘The question is whether talking to you is such a good idea. We can’t talk about the work. The assignment is moving along, the first phase is almost completed and as I understand it you are no longer associated with the firm. And that’s not surprising considering the things you’re suspected of having done.’
I barely heard the last comment. I was stuck with the third sentence. ‘The assignment is moving along?’ I asked.
‘Yes, of course.’
‘You haven’t cancelled it?’
‘No. It was quite unclear for the first few days, but later I discussed it at length with Van Waayen, and Gijs told me how things stood, so …’
‘Gijs?’ I asked. ‘Is Gijs in charge of the assignment?’
‘No, what gave you that idea? Frans Stutman is here, nice fellow. Gijs is gone, by the way. He’s with the whole EU team in Brussels.’
‘In Brussels,’ I said. So Gijs wasn’t in the United States after all. He was a couple of hundred kilometres away. If his Uncle Walter was right, then I knew exactly where to look for Gijs. The European headquarters of HC&P was not just a sterile building with work stations and conference rooms. It was the European heart of the company. People from all over the world went there for training and projects. The big EU assignments were contracted out and divided there. Parts of them were farmed out to offices in other countries, but occasionally international teams were assembled, with specialists who sometimes spent months in Brussels. To avoid having to put everyone up in hotels for their entire stay, HC&P had had a new tower added on to the main office with small apartments and suites, a restaurant, a movie theatre, a bar, a fitness centre and a swimming pool—all the facilities a modern consultant needed. The entire building, including the offices, had even better security than the office in Amsterdam. No one got in without the right pass. For Gijs the opposite was true: you couldn’t get out without that pass, either. Everything was equally luxurious, but in practice the building was as effective as a prison.
‘When was the last time you spoke to him?’ I asked.
‘Less than a week ago, last Monday.’ He hesitated. ‘Why do you ask?’
‘I can’t find him,’ I said, ‘but now that I know where he is, I’m reassured.’
‘So should I be reassured as well?’
‘I don’t know what you’ve heard,’ I said, ‘although I can guess most of it.’
‘Mr. Bellicher, you’re charged with two counts of murder. You’re the most wanted man in the Netherlands. I would very much like to be certain of seeing Gijs at my fifty-ninth birthday party in two weeks.’
‘You will, if I have anything to do with it,’ I said.
‘Splendid.’
‘But actually I’m not the one to ask,’ I said. ‘Mr. Van Waayen is.’
There were a few seconds of silence. I waited for him to speak. I didn’t know what he was waiting for (everyone has his own procedure for dealing with these things).
‘I can tell from the tone of your voice,’ he finally said, ‘that I probably shouldn’t do that. Or am I hearing you wrong?’
‘No, you’re hearing me just fine.’ I felt a smile spread across my face. Eberhuizen was holding the door open for me. ‘Personally I have a couple of questions for Mr. Van Waayen myself,’ I said. ‘Maybe I can include yours while I’m at it?’
‘Mr. Bellicher, as long as you give me sufficient reason, I’m man enough to ask my own questions. I think that’s a better way of going about it. If I knew where you were, I’d have to alert the police. So I think our conversation is over now. Don’t you?’
Eberhuizen had been clear about what he expected of me. The door wasn’t open that wide, not yet.
Kirsten was sitting on the back deck of one of the little boats moored to the dock behind the building. I cautiously clambered on board and sat down beside her. Wordlessly, we both looked at the water and the heavy traffic running between the northern part of the city and the centre. Boats of all shapes and sizes were going in every conceivable direction, some fast, others strikingly slow. Unhindered by streets or sidewalks, parks or buildings, everyone chose the most direct path to their destination. People were free on the water, they could go whereever they wanted, and the result was a swarming, teeming mass. All the routes intersected. There were a couple of simple rules, but otherwise everyone kept an eye on everyone else. It wasn’t that hard.
‘You going to see Dad tomorrow?’ Kirsten asked.
‘If you’re going, I’m going.’
‘And if I’m not going?’
Silently I looked out at the boats, at the satisfaction people got out of steering a vessel. Taking their lives in their own hands. Setting their own course. ‘Then I’m going anyway,’ I said.
‘Then we’ll go together,’ said Kirsten. She laugh
ed. ‘And we’re going to Brussels together, too,’ she said. Before I could respond she continued. ‘Because I’m not hanging out here in this shed all by myself.’
‘Not with Vince?’
‘Vince is also going,’ she said.
‘Together in the camper?’ I asked.
She laughed. ‘Why not?’
I looked at her, eyebrows raised so high that they made wrinkles in my forehead. ‘Does he know about you?’
‘That’s none of your business.’
‘No, of course it’s none of my business. Duh, I get that, too, you know.’
‘So why did you ask?’
‘Because I want to know,’ I said.
We looked down in silence at our legs, dangling over the surface of the water. Kirsten stared out at the far side of the IJ.
‘Yes,’ she said.
‘Intense,’ I said.
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