The Silent War

by Andreas Norman

  He has been out cycling the country lanes all morning and has just got home, he explains while still gasping a little. Cycling, how amusing! She didn’t know he cycled. While he catches his breath, she tells him the news.

  ‘Are you certain it was him?’

  ‘Yes, I’m certain.’

  He falls silent, breathing heavily.

  ‘What does Stockholm say?’

  ‘I haven’t heard from them.’

  Mikael thinks it can wait. They have a teleconference with Roland Hamrén scheduled for Monday about the British leak; can they find out more about the dead man before then? Perhaps an analyst can run some searches on the story, but nothing more than that.

  A shrill shout can be heard from the street. She asks Mikael to call the on-duty officer and ask them to keep an eye on the news, then hangs up. She shuts down her computer and puts it back in the safe along with the small memory stick, before locking it carefully and then checking the handle anyway. May the secrets she stores there never trickle into their home.

  Something is wrong, that much is obvious from the voices. Then Fredrik comes in the front door. His voice is muffled, and Rasmus is responding with loud, angry replies.

  When she appears in the hall the boy is standing there in his full kit, muddy and raging. He squeezes past and stamps up the stairs.

  ‘What’s happened?’

  Fredrik looks tense. Rasmus got angry during the match and ended up in a fight. He doesn’t want to talk about it.

  She can hear Rasmus crashing around upstairs, throwing things in his room. It is as if the boy is carrying an impermeable darkness within him. A wild frenzy that can be unleashed by nothing at all and sweep them all along in its wake. And now it has happened again.

  Rasmus is in the bathroom, huddled up on the toilet seat with a despondent, wretched expression, as if he has just returned from the battlefield. She coaxes his shoes off his feet. Show me, she says. Reluctantly, he pulls off his jersey. On the side of his ribcage she can see a large, ugly bruise. He grimaces. He has been struck there. She says nothing else, but helps him to undress and leaves him. A little later, she finds him in his room, straight out of the shower and looking melancholic. There is no point in talking to him, not when he has that tough, withdrawn look. When he looks like that, he refuses to talk to anyone; it is as if he tries to annihilate everything around him with silence.

  Daniel is sitting on his bed practising chords on the guitar. She knows it is better for Daniel to avoid being at home when his little brother is angry. Because Fredrik is going to talk to Rasmus and the boy is likely to throw a tantrum.

  ‘Come on,’ she says.

  Daniel looks up.

  ‘Why?’

  He sullenly fingers the strings.

  ‘You can get some driving practice,’ she says.

  She likes being in the car with Daniel and seeing him behind the wheel of their large car; it makes him seem strangely grown-up. He drives safely, with considered movements, and she can see that he manages to absorb what is going on in the mirrors.

  She has always thought that they are alike. When he was little, he was able to learn entire rhymes off by heart, he observed things and saw connections; she got the impression from early on that he understood what the adults were talking about.

  The sun is shining. Everything is glittering.

  Is it unnatural to love one child more than another? If it’s wrong, she still can’t change it. If Rasmus died, she would carry on, but if Daniel disappeared, then everything would come tumbling down for her.

  The sun transforms the damp road into a blinding white ribbon. She is forced to squint to discern the road and the oncoming traffic.

  ‘You need your sunglasses,’ she says.

  He is driving a little too fast, and is very close to the cars in front. Everything is being corroded by the dazzling light.

  ‘Slow down,’ she says. ‘Pull over here.’

  He mutters and slows down. They pull into a lay-by.

  He doesn’t have his sunglasses with him. She opens the glovebox and roots around, finding Fredrik’s glasses. He can borrow them, and she takes her own. Out of the corner of her eye, she sees Daniel quickly lean forward towards the floor and when she turns to give him the glasses he straightens up.

  The world is presented in mild shades of green.

  ‘What’s that?’ she asks, but he simply shakes his head: nothing. But she can sense it at once, the suppression, something unsaid.

  ‘What do you have in your hand?’ she asks.

  He looks at her quizzically.

  ‘What did you find?’

  He opens his fist. In the palm of his hand is a pearl earring. She picks up the small piece of jewellery. It is beautiful, a genuine pearl with a delicate setting of white gold. She has pearl earrings, but this is not hers.

  ‘Was it here in the car?’

  ‘Yes,’ he says.

  ‘Give it to me,’ she says.

  *

  The store stretches out in front of them in long, straight rows. She knows where things are, how the shelves are arranged. Daniel walks quietly beside her. She dispatches him in various directions. She loves doing the shopping, not for the sake of the food, which doesn’t interest her at all, but because the structure of the shop appeals to her. Here, everything has a function, and there is care in ensuring that everything is in the right place and in orderly rows. If she didn’t work in intelligence, she would be quite satisfied working in a supermarket, maybe as the purchasing manager, or perhaps in charge of ensuring the shelves were stocked and that supply lines were functioning. She likes to fantasise about having a job like that as she slowly fills the trolley with what a family needs for a week. It gives her a calm sense of satisfaction. But today, she is struggling to concentrate on that feeling, with her hand repeatedly sliding into her trouser pocket to touch the cool, smooth surface of the pearl.

  Fredrik is lying on the sofa with his eyes closed when they get home. She unpacks all the bags and then goes to look in her jewellery box upstairs in the bedroom, but just as she thought, there is no pearl earring like it. She can’t remember whether the football mum who rang the doorbell this morning had earrings like that. Perhaps. Sitting next to Fredrik on the sofa, she pulls out the piece of jewellery and shows it to him.

  ‘Do you know who this belongs to?’

  He looks at her sleepily.

  ‘No . . . Isn’t it yours?’

  ‘No. It’s not mine.’

  He lifts himself up and she wishes that he would kiss her, would run his hand over her T-shirt and touch her breast. She wants to feel his intention, that he wants something. But nothing like that is going to happen; he looks exhausted, lying half reclined on the sofa. He has borne the brunt of Rasmus’s fit of rage.

  ‘What’s the name of the woman you gave a lift to the football this morning?’

  He yawns. ‘Elisabeth?’

  ‘Perhaps this is her earring,’ she says.

  She looked good. Elisabeth. Fit and slim, with the kind of spirited charisma that she knows Fredrik finds attractive. A woman like that might very well make a pass at him. She can see them together in the car, him joking with her, her nervously touching her ear lobe and thinking about how she’d like to sleep with him, and then the earring falling.

  ‘What exactly happened at the football?’

  Fredrik makes a parrying gesture. There was a fight. He doesn’t feel up to telling her more.

  This response awakens a piercing irritation in her. Isn’t he taking his son’s problems seriously?

  ‘Rasmus kicked another boy and was sent off.’

  Reluctantly, he explains how it began. Rasmus scored, but the referee disallowed it since he had already stopped play because one of the other team’s players had been fouled. Rasmus couldn’t accept the referee’s deci
sion and started fighting. He struck an opposition player. Then he chased the lad across the pitch until he caught up with him and kicked him to the ground.

  Late in the evening, when the boys are asleep and Fredrik is watching TV, Bente goes up to her study. Sitting at the family computer, she logs into various social media.

  She has several accounts to enable her to follow Fredrik. She also follows the boys, logging in now and then to see what they are saying, which pictures they are posting, keeping an eye on them – it’s no stranger than her occasionally going into their rooms to look for cigarettes or anything else that might suggest they are keeping secrets from her that she ought to know about. She cares about her family and wants to know what they are doing.

  Her own accounts are obviously fake. But ‘fake’ is a naive description given the context, because who presents their true self via these kinds of sites? A clever, funny, successful, smiling, flattering self, perhaps. But a true self? Fredrik’s Facebook profile is probably as close as you can get, as he posts indiscriminately and seemingly without any ulterior motives. He is clearly unaware of the privacy settings, since his account can be seen by around two billion users.

  She examines Fredrik’s pictures. He has posted some new photos of himself and the boys from when they had coffee at Grote Markt a week ago. There are also some new photos of people she doesn’t recognise, all wearing suits. Colleagues, perhaps. In one of the pictures, they are sitting around a table, while in another they are standing by a bar.

  She enlarges the picture and looks at a woman standing next to Fredrik. No earrings. She clicks through to the woman’s account but finds no photos of her wearing pearl earrings.

  Bente has forbidden him from posting photos of herself or mentioning her at all. The thought of it is terrifying, because pictures like that could jeopardise her entire professional life. But sometimes she wishes that she was in a picture too, that she could be together with him even there.

  Elsewhere, she finds two short tweets from Friday: #NordicBusiness. He is holding the camera up to take a selfie. Two men are in the photo and she recognises one of them from the embassy reception. In the dark, she also glimpses a third person, presumably the woman with them, but she is turning away and her face isn’t visible, only some of her hair and one ear. She zooms in and on the ear there is an earring. But it is hard to see; it might be a pearl or it might not.

  With a pang of shame, she realises what she is doing: she is investigating. But it is out of love. No harm has been done. And it can’t be helped, the pearl earring is worrying her.

  The subdued sound of the TV can be heard from downstairs.

  She turns off the computer and goes to the bathroom. Apart from the sound of the TV, it is so quiet that she has the feeling that Fredrik is no longer down there. Perhaps he has fallen asleep. The silence beneath the sound of the TV is like condensation in the air, an ominous tranquillity.

  3

  The clear morning light slants onto the parquet, fading the images on the TV as if the bright weather is trying to dissolve everything taking place on the box. During the night, the Assad regime has carried out air raids over northern Syria. Two men appear from a collapsed house supporting a third with blood on his face and shirt. They barely avoid tumbling to the ground under the man’s weight as they stumble across the strewn chunks of concrete. A man hurries past with a child in his arms. A boy. The boy is injured, his face dirty. The sequence is shakily filmed.

  Jonathan turns off the TV and goes into the bedroom. He has to continue packing. Kate appears behind him in the doorway. He folds a white shirt into the bag.

  ‘When are you going?’

  ‘The flight is in three hours.’

  He says it as if the trip were a burden, to ensure she doesn’t notice how keen he is to get away. In some ways, he wishes things were different, that he missed Kate when he was gone from home. But it hasn’t been like that for a long time. Things were different before Brussels, when she still had her job at the bank.

  He starts to fold a second shirt.

  The Kate standing behind him is someone else entirely from the cheerful, outspoken woman he ended up next to at a seminar on international finance in Oxford, the happy and candid and beautiful woman with clear opinions. He admired her, but that was a long time ago.

  ‘Is it for work?’

  ‘Yes, it’s work.’

  The first posting in Amman had been an adventure for them, and Damascus too. He remembers the young, open couple they once were.

  Perhaps it was when they returned to London after the Damascus years, perhaps that was when it changed, he thinks to himself. The doctors said it was inexplicable. It wasn’t a surprise – they had been trying for a long time.

  She so longed for children. So did he, but for him it wasn’t the same thing. He wonders whether that grief within her has ever healed. She became a different Kate, thoughtful and taciturn. Something between them hardened.

  ‘Send my love if you see anyone I know.’

  ‘I’ll make sure I do.’

  He knows that it is a sacrifice to live with him, to move from country to country. It is partly because of him that she didn’t secure the career she had dreamt of in the world of banking. Now she is involved in every imaginable charity project. He is glad she has found a way to move on, but he is sick of the fact that she always has to talk about the most unfortunate, as if she can think of nothing else. She exaggerates, and he knows he can’t say that without riling her, and what’s more, it is as if she blames him for all the world’s evils. She is loyal, a faithful wife who has given up a lot, yet he is unable to muster more than tepid sympathy for her.

  He folds another shirt.

  This afternoon he’ll be with Frances. He longs for her so much that all he feels is anger towards Kate, as if she is in the way. Beautiful Frances, so sharp and playful. Since they began seeing each other in secret, he has been unable to look at Kate without being irritated by her. It vexes him that she thinks she knows what’s best for him, for them, when she hasn’t got a clue.

  All at once, he can imagine Frances naked and he closes his eyes, desire running through him like a tremor. She has become such a natural focal point in his life that he sometimes forgets that Kate is completely in the dark.

  ‘How long will you be gone?’

  ‘I’m not sure. A few days. It depends.’

  She knows that he can’t provide an exact answer to the question and yet she asks it, and it annoys him. It is as if she no longer cares about their agreements, he thinks, but on the other hand neither does he. Usually he makes up one excuse or another to escape to London, but on this occasion he actually has a legitimate reason.

  They never talk about his work or his travels. That whole world is an unspoken presence that occasionally breaks through the surface of daily life, before once again sinking. Kate respects it. She knows that when she married him she also married MI6. His ‘I do’ involved a check of her and her finances and employment and friends and family: everything was assessed to discover any dependencies, vulnerabilities or threats.

  ‘They’re bombing Aleppo to bits.’

  ‘Yes, it’s awful.’

  He knows what she wants, but he isn’t willing to have that discussion now. Kate has spent the entire morning on the phone with volunteers. She is raising money for refugees and the cash is flooding in. She is naive to think that he might be able to be part of her work. Perhaps she just wants them to have something in common, but it doesn’t work, he thinks.

  Of course, he knows more about Syria than what they say on the news. He reads the reports that come in via London and knows everything there is to know about the escape routes from Syria and the situation in Schengen. That’s what she wants him to say something about. But does she really think that he can tell her what he knows? The fact that she even tries to get him to break that silence is just stup
id. He has no right to give her that information, not even if it could save lives. Sometimes he wonders whether she has forgotten what ‘secret’ actually means. If he were to tell Kate the things he actually knew, Kate would presumably mention them to a few volunteers, who in turn would call people in their networks to tell them about the situation around the borders, to provide warnings of air raids, to provide situation reports that only those with secret information could be aware of, and all those conversations would, without a doubt, be captured by signals intelligence and be traced back to him.

  The bag is stubborn when he tries to close it. He tugs at the zip. It reluctantly gives in and its resistance makes him unreasonably annoyed. He sits down heavily on the bed. Only then does he discover Kate is no longer there.

  When he takes off he feels deeply happy. The plane is lifting him away from the heavy gravitational pull of Brussels, up through the clouds, towards heaven. He is free. An hour later, when he emerges from the gate at Heathrow, he is in an excellent mood, full of expectation, as he always is when London is close.

  Although he wants nothing more than to get to his destination, he consciously saunters through the airport, stopping in a shop and observing the other passengers from the flight hurrying past him across the gleaming, newly polished floors.

  He recognised one of the men on the flight. A Swede. Presumably someone from the embassy who was at the reception the day before, so there is probably no danger, but he wants to be sure. The only thing you can rely on is your methods; everything else just leaves space for guessing and worry – cracks through which the paranoia can seep in.

  He catches sight of himself in a small mirror on a table with make-up on it: a serious face, with short, curly red hair and sharp blue eyes. No one takes any notice of a man like that, but if they knew who he was, he reflects with satisfaction, they would be impressed. Perhaps even frightened. He does a lap of the shop, impulse-buying a bottle of burgundy that he knows Robert likes.

  At the luggage carousel, he watches the bags passing by at a languid tempo, as if they were deliberately moving slowly. All he wants is to get to the hotel. In the taxi, he tries to avoid getting worked up over the slow-moving traffic. The city is unfolding around him. Saturday afternoon is a wonderful time in London, as Londoners cut loose and join the weekend throng outside pubs and shops. He loves this dirty, overpopulated city.