The streets filled with dark, leafy trees and tall white stone façades stretch away from him in all directions. He can’t risk a taxi, so he walks. After a while he reaches the main thoroughfares and wanders along feeling like an idiot. If only he could find a pub. All he wants is a beer, but it is as if the city itself is against him.
It is so unfair that Robert hates him; wouldn’t it be beautiful if Robert just let Frances go so they could all be happy? It is a fantasy and he wishes it was true. Lost in his thoughts, he walks towards Paddington and jumps when someone right beside him says his surname – not his real name but the false one being used for the operation.
‘Bradswaithe!’
He looks up and has no time to react before the handlers are standing in front of him. One of them takes hold of his arm.
‘Let go of me!’ he hisses, before realising how absurd the situation is and calming down. ‘Yes, yes,’ he mutters, getting into the backseat of their car.
The other handler passes him his mobile.
‘Grandma wants you to call her.’
Where the hell did you go? says the coordinator when he gets through.
‘No more bloody nonsense like that,’ she adds. If he needs exercise he should do a few laps of the garden.
He apologises.
Stay sharp, she interrupts. Vermeer has been in touch. A representative of Ahrar al-Sham is willing to make contact with them shortly, so they need a suitable meeting place.
Give me three options, she says, and get back to me.
At night he is back in the House. He walks down the stairs. His fingers search the rough wall. He has to go a long way down – it is as deep as a well. The basement chill fills the darkness. This is somewhere you perish. He still has to go all the way to the bottom because he knows that is where it all begins. Yet he just wants to walk away from it and up to the light. He is scared. He reaches the final steps, and then he is lying on the floor, his face pressed against the stone floor, and someone says to him: ‘Take hold of the arms. Hold him down.’ His legs kick, searching for footing. He writhes; they can’t hold him down because then he won’t know what’s going to happen. An arm strikes him in the dark. He defends himself, and the arm flounders like a disgusting worm in the darkness. He has to stop it. The arm gesticulates and waves in the air, then he grabs hold of the wrist. ‘I have it,’ he shouts. He holds on so tightly his fingers go numb. ‘Hold him down,’ someone shouts. ‘Let go of me,’ he screams, trying to get loose. He runs, rushing up the stairs; it is all so hopeless. The stairs are steep, he struggles to make progress. There is no mercy. He knows that if he stops he will be lost. Then he stops. He should leave, but he can’t. He slowly starts going down the stairs again and wakes up panting and knows he can’t get out, that it won’t end. The ruby-red numbers at his bedside show it is just after five in the morning. The room is silent.
12
It is early but the young analyst Anne is already waiting on a chair outside Bente’s office. When she spots her boss, the young woman gets up. It almost looks like she is going to offer a salute. With a subdued good morning she follows Bente into her office.
Overnight, they have succeeded in breaking into the encrypted parts of the target’s phone, she explains once the door is closed. Fredrik Jensen – the target, she corrects herself with an embarrassed grimace – uses a messaging app called Signal.
Bente is familiar with Signal. Many criminals and members of terrorist networks use the service since its encryption is so powerful.
‘I understand. Show me.’
Anne sits next to her at the computer and opens a program that provides a view of Fredrik’s phone. She is serious in a way that only young people can be, unused to working directly with her boss and therefore unnecessarily formal. ‘Do you want me to show you?’ she says, and Bente waves impatiently. ‘Yes, yes, show me now.’ She scrolls down the never-ending thread of messages on the screen.
Darling, Fredrik has written to the woman.
A little further down he refers to her as my kitten. The other party in the thread is a woman calling herself Jane Smith. The woman caresses him with words. You’re beautiful, she says. Handsome.
It is beyond doubt what she has in front of her. His deceit is sorted into neat chronological order; there are more than five hundred messages. She forces herself to read on; perhaps because she needs to see the honest, pure filth, so that she could later say there was no turning back. This is the end of the relationship she thought was a constant, the love between her and Fredrik that she had believed was only between them. One heart, sent at 9.56.
Darling, I miss you.
‘Is it all from his mobile?’
‘Yes. And only from Signal. They only communicate using that service . . .’
The analyst looks anxious. This is naturally a strange situation for her. They are talking about her boss’s husband as the subject of surveillance.
‘Start from the beginning.’
The very first message is three weeks old. It is from the woman, Jane: I would like to see you again.
She tries to pretend that she is working, that this is just another mobile phone they have infiltrated. She wants to remain professional, but the words – the damned words – eat into her with their awful silkiness and sexual charge. She can’t contain herself. She hadn’t expected him to be so uninhibited in his deceit, as if nothing else were at stake.
I want you.
See you tomorrow? Heart.
She excuses herself, half choking, and just makes it to the toilet. She had yoghurt with fruit and a cup of tea for breakfast and now it sprays out of her in a brown mess. Afterwards she rinses her mouth, washes her face and listens attentively for any sounds in the corridor outside, thinking that this must be what it is like to be betrayed. Should she cry? She isn’t sure. It doesn’t feel like she is in her body; it feels foreign, as rigid as a piece of wood.
She has seen him disappear into his thoughts and believed that he was just thinking about work or was distracted, but perhaps he was daydreaming about this woman. He must have compared her with the other woman, it occurs to her, and seen deficiencies.
Anne is sitting facing the door, as pale as if she had just been informed of an unexpected death. She hands Bente a glass of water, and it is such an unexpectedly considerate gesture that she feels a large sob catch in her throat. The water is ice cold. It is the best glass of water she has had for a long time.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Anne says in low voice.
They slowly scroll through the thread.
They quietly continue reading: they have agreed to meet one evening three weeks ago, at the end of October. Perhaps Fredrik already has the address, because it isn’t here, just Come round to mine. Heart. Checking the date may be a form of self-torture, but she has to, and quickly compares it to the family calendar on her mobile. Yes, there it is: Fredrik, Copenhagen.
All these trips to Copenhagen.
‘Go to the beginning,’ she requests. Then they read. The most recent messages are from the day before. From Fredrik, sent just after nine. That means it was just after he had dropped her off in the morning.
Can’t wait for Sunday. Heart.
She has given Rasmus a lift to a friend’s house, where he is going to watch football, and when she returns and comes in through the front door, she can hear that Fredrik is at home. She can hear him rattling around the kitchen. Her pulse increases, because she realises that it is going to happen now. She slowly takes off her shoes and coat.
Fredrik has taken the dish filled with lasagne from the fridge and is in the process of cutting out a large, sticky piece when she enters into the room, and it hardens her resolve because there is something devastatingly bitter about seeing him standing there helping himself to food that she has cooked and that he is taking for granted he can eat. She has to make an effort not to go up to h
im and strike him down with one blow from her fists.
‘Hello,’ he says.
She leans against a kitchen counter.
‘I know what you’re up to.’
He turns around in surprise and asks what she means.
‘Rasmus told me the day before yesterday,’ she says, feeling breathless from agitation. He told me about the trainers.
And now he understands what she means. The hand holding the knife cutting the lasagne stops and his face softens with fear, his eyes widen, startled fear shining from his pale face. But it is as if a more conscious part of him immediately takes up the baton, as if he hopes to avoid this threat clearly approaching him and he says: ‘What?’ As if he were puzzled, concerned and innocent; but that time is past the moment she sees him like that.
‘You know what I mean.’
He shrugs his shoulders as if he doesn’t understand, as if it is once again she who is the excessively suspicious, hysterical woman, and if she had a hammer and nails she would nail him onto his sanctimonious cross; he just manages to emit a snort, and the tiny patronising exhalation is what blows away any remaining love for him; a little breeze is all it takes, she doesn’t even have time to think before her arm is in the air and the palm of her hand strikes his face in a violent slap.
He looks at her, dumbfounded. Then his rage also wells forth and he sputters: ‘What the hell?’
Finally she isn’t alone in her anger; it is an unfortunate union. Hit me then, she thinks. She wouldn’t hesitate to hit back, again, harder – she is fitter than him. She feels a dark and overwhelming urge to hurt him, a desire to pull the kitchen knife out of the lasagne and stab him fast and hard in his soft, deceitful flesh.
‘Jane Smith,’ she says. ‘Is that her name?’
Then it is as if something completely snaps in her. ‘How could you do this to me?’ she screams. ‘How could you force Rasmus to keep quiet, how could you do something so awful to your own son! You’re abusing my child,’ she shouts, hitting him straight in the chest.
And it is as if this blow brings him to life: he shoves her to one side and stands there doggedly, listening quietly. ‘Who is she? Who is the woman who was here? How long has it been going on?’ She fires off the questions in rapid volleys. But she notices how he is paralysed and disappears off into the inaccessible niches where she can’t reach him. Say something, she thinks in despair. She hates him, but she wants him to say something, to explain, to confess, to beg for forgiveness – after all, they have a life together.
Through the intoxication of her fury, which is wonderful and alluring in its simple unrestrained power, the desperate realisation emerges that this is not a battle she will win by crushing him. Because this is her life, too. Making a tremendous effort, she stops herself.
They glare at each other.
The headache is swelling: like a sharpened point, the pain emerges from her skull and brings tears to her eyes.
‘Do you know what the worst thing is?’ she says. ‘The worst thing isn’t that you’re seeing someone else, but that you’re lying about it.’
Of course that isn’t true. But she can’t bear him standing there looking wounded. The words seem to have set something within him in motion, because he tilts his head to one side, looks at her with an expression that is both sad and scornful, and says:
‘No, the worst thing is that you never trust me.’
He is right, she thinks to herself. She doesn’t trust him, she will never trust him again. Now he is trying to push her off balance and blame her for his deceit, it is just another line of defence; she knows his slimy tactics. They reach rock bottom, a silence to which they have rarely sunk previously, where there is nothing between them but rage.
‘Do you love her?’
They are horrible words, but they jolt him exactly as she hopes. She has always been colder than him, and even now, part of her is retaining her composure and constantly trying to position itself advantageously. He shakes his head, as if unwilling to tolerate more.
‘Are you going to interrogate me again?’ he says maliciously.
‘I want to know what happened.’
He says nothing.
‘Rasmus told me what he saw,’ she says after a while. ‘And I believe him. He’s your son. How could you use your son like that? Haven’t you noticed the state he’s in?’
Now she is pushing on a pressure point, she throws herself at it with all her might, and notes he is reacting because he loves the boys to the bottom of his heart. He rubs his face, as if taking protection behind the palm of his hand, and stares. It happens startlingly quickly, but she manages to understand everything; she’s trained to read things like that.
‘It wasn’t meant to happen,’ he says angrily, because he doesn’t want to be a bad father. ‘I didn’t know what to do.’
‘You had a choice,’ she says. ‘You could have taken responsibility, but you chose to blackmail your own son.’
‘I didn’t blackmail him.’
‘You forced him to be silent.’
To that he has no answer.
And then it is as if Fredrik realises he has lost, that there is no point in fighting. He starts crying.
She has seen him cry so many times over the years they have been together, and these tears are the ones he usually uses to make himself vulnerable and to cast himself as the wronged party. She doesn’t feel sorry for him. She tells him to stop. Stop feeling sorry for yourself. But he continues crying. Perhaps these tears are real, perhaps he sees what he has done, what he is losing. And suddenly she is upset too. What has happened to us? she thinks.
They sit at the kitchen table. Fredrik stares at its white, shiny surface with a numbed expression.
He met her through work, he explains. It just happened. He organised an open workshop and during the break she came up to him and started talking. She remembers him mentioning a workshop around three weeks ago. She is called Jane Smith. And what happened then? They met. Where did they meet? She is leading an interrogation now, but he doesn’t notice. He says they met at her home. And in a hotel.
‘And here too,’ she points out.
He nods, ashamed. Yes, here too.
Then she asks him what she has been thinking all along. Was it her she met at the Swedish reception at the Hotel Metropole?
He nods.
For a short while she can’t maintain her resilient façade and looks away. She was right.
Now she remembers something else she had completely forgotten: when they were invited, Fredrik had suggested he could go alone. She didn’t like receptions like that, he had said. It was true. But she wanted to go, and was surprised that he had said that, and, she had to admit, she was suspicious. Why hadn’t she listened to that suspicion? He seemed pleased that she wanted to come with him.
Have they fought and struggled just to reach this point? Then she realises they are at the beginning of a drawn-out parting, and that makes her sad.
‘I trusted you,’ she says.
It is odd to talk about him in the past tense, but how could she do otherwise?
He says nothing.
‘You’re the only person I’ve trusted,’ she says.
What happens next nobody knows. They are standing at the precipice of a future where every word uttered will be of enormous consequence; she can sense it clearly. The question she cannot bring herself to say floats between them: Why did he do this? And it is as if he hears it; they have been together for so many years that he still understands what she is saying when she is silent.
‘I feel lonely with you, Bente,’ he says. ‘You’re distant, you aren’t with me. You only care about me when it suits your needs.’
‘That’s not true.’
He nods. It’s true.
‘You always want things your way.’
‘What do you mean?’ she s
ays.
‘Your work, everything. You’re always most important.’
‘You’ve always been allowed to do as you please,’ she bursts out.
She realises straight away that she has revealed herself. Yes, she wants to be in control. Perhaps she wants that too much. Even when she relinquishes it, it is still her who makes the decision to make an exception.
He says:
‘I don’t know what there is left between us any longer.’
‘So you go and sleep around.’
‘I’m not sleeping around.’
‘What the fuck do you call this, then? We live together, we have children together and you fall for the first bit of skirt to show you a little attention.’
‘She’s good to me,’ he barks.
‘So now you’re irresistibly in love?’
‘She wants me – unlike you.’
The words cut into her, because he means them. And he says that Jane is good to him in a way that no one has been for years, while she is shut off and self-absorbed and a neurotic control freak. She looks at him quietly. He is teary-eyed and she thinks: Oh, now it’s coming, his customary attack, where, through tears, he becomes the vulnerable, wounded one and then he accuses her of being insensitive and inconsiderate, and trying to twist everything to what it is really about, his catalogue of her defects, how she doesn’t understand who he is, what he needs, how they should develop together, how she is stopping him from being the person he is, all these passive-aggressive clichés. She is so sick of him. At the same time, part of her can’t help but be impressed by his natural gift for emotional manipulation of this kind. As expected, he starts talking about her need for control and hisses:
‘Dear God, you can’t even deal with the tins in the larder not being ordered the way you like them!’
This wasn’t what she wanted to talk about. She wants me: those words gnaw at her insides, undermining her desire to fight. There is a small fragment of truth in what he is saying, because she wants to be in control, she cares about her work and perhaps she gets too absorbed with it at times. But she also shows compassion, love, she has always trusted him. She loves him and the boys, he can’t deny that. No, she thinks. He mustn’t be allowed to twist everything to being about her. The deceit is his, not hers.
The Silent War Page 14