The Silent War

by Andreas Norman

  As if as an afterthought, a suitcase tips onto the floor. A bundle of papers slides out.

  It is as if she had unleashed a sequence of small accidents. Trembling, she puts the empty suitcase back in the place she thinks it was before and quickly gathers together the sheets of paper. Letters. She stops, because she recognises the pale blue logo on each page.

  It is the emblem of the British Embassy.

  15

  Jonathan’s new passport is lying on the dark dining table, along with a driving licence and ID card proving he works for the aid agency Syrian Assistance.

  George Bradswaithe, aid worker, tasked with bringing humanitarian assistance to those in need in northern Syria. A British citizen, born in the same year as he was, in the same part of London.

  He has played the role of good Samaritan before. Aid worker is his showpiece – he could give a lecture on humanitarian aid.

  It’s a good cover. People generally think the best of aid workers.

  It surprises him sometimes how willingly other people believe him. To him it is strange to simply trust what people say, or what a document says, what is visible in pictures. How do you know it is true? His first instinct is not to trust others. When colleagues gave their names, he knew that they rarely gave their real names. He had met so many people who said they worked as journalists, doctors, researchers, and knew that they actually performed a completely different role. Just like him. Everyone has a hidden life.

  He is going to travel from Brussels. If anyone wants to know, he will say he has been participating in a human rights course. But for that, he needs a certificate, he thinks – a document proving it. He roots through the papers. He is fretful; the slightest uncertainty disturbs his mood. Then he finds a thin piece of paper stuck to another. An attendance certificate from a fictional conference. Good.

  He thumbs through the passport and reminds himself to memorise the dates of the stamps. A lie lives its own life, and in order for it to survive, it must become its own truth. He must be able to provide a cohesive explanation, down to the finest details. He must be able to explain the lies as if they were vivid memories. Then words harden into shields, and stories become ramparts providing protection. Then everyone will believe him.

  One after the other, he picks up the documents and checks the details to make sure they agree. Careful planning has gone into these documents, but he wonders how much protection they will offer in reality. A false identity is useful if the Turkish border police arrest him. But in Syria it is worthless. There he is just another vulnerable body. What’s more, he is a British body, valued highly in the Syrian kidnapping market.

  He examines the plane tickets. A sense of worried expectation buzzes inside him. Arriving in Antakya just after one o’clock tomorrow.

  He has been kept in quarantine for more than forty-eight hours, but now it is time. He sits in front of the TV waiting for the video conference to begin. He can still say no, he thinks. Theoretically, he is quite free to open his mouth and say no. But what use is freedom of choice if every consequence is catastrophic? He has betrayed Robert, and is bound to a future he cannot control, let alone predict, but the alternative of going against Robert is worse.

  In front of him is the document OPLAN version 1.6. Why version 1.6? he thinks to himself nervously. He helped to write the first draft of this operational plan. Someone has apparently revised it. He dips in and out, wondering how many lethal misjudgements have been made it in.

  He detests Robert at that moment. He hates the dead analyst who stole the documents, and he hates the Swedes and everyone else ruining things for him – hates them with such intensity that his entire body is tense.

  The screen comes on. He looks at the time.

  ‘Can you hear me?’

  ‘Yes, I can hear you.’

  Grandma is visible on the screen now. ‘Stand by,’ she says harshly.

  Behind her is an empty conference room with a large table and office chairs filling the view. It is only a few miles away, but it might as well have been on the other side of the planet. The coordinator adjusts her glasses and aims a remote control at a point beyond his field of vision.

  ‘Say something.’

  ‘I don’t know what to say.’

  She looks up with a smirk. ‘Thank you.’ She asks whether the picture is okay. He says it is a little out of focus. Something happens: the picture changes, gets sharper.

  She asks him to stay there, the meeting will begin shortly. Then she leaves through a door and disappears from view.

  He waits in front of the screen with headphones over his ears. A buzz fills the headphones, like a myriad of voices. He is part of a machine, a node in the network centring on Vauxhall Cross. He leafs through the ring-bound plan, anxiously shuffling his documents.

  Now something is happening in the empty conference room on the screen. Robert and two men from Counter-Terrorism come through the door. Then Grandma, the operational coordinator, and behind her two men that he knows are Syria experts. Then a cluster of IS experts. Even the most secretive organisations are brimming with people.

  They turn their faces to him.

  He will be met in Antakya when he lands, the coordinator explains. A local agent will be waiting for him, all he has to do is walk into the arrivals hall. A photo of a young man with a round face and fluffy moustache appears on screen. His name is Hakan. He looks young, he thinks; perhaps a little too young.

  They go over the journey into Syria.

  A photo taken by a drone fills the screen. His route from Antakya runs like a red line across the Syrian hills and mountains to a point on the plains. The exact time he will cross the Syrian border has not yet been determined.

  ‘Why not?’ he asks.

  One of the analysts explains that it depends on the Turkish border guards. At the moment, the area where they are going to cross the border is sparsely patrolled. On average, four patrols per day pass that point. But the Turks make regular changes to their routines. The coordinator quickly adds that Hakan will have the latest information.

  ‘The rebels will meet you here.’

  He sees a cursor move across the yellow-brown surface. The picture zooms in – it is like falling vertically at a very great speed. He sees a house surrounded by a wall and a road leading to the building. The house is in a field at the foot of the hills. Perhaps it is an old holiday villa in northern Idlib.

  The picture vanishes and he can once again see the conference room.

  ‘I had hoped to meet the rebels at the border,’ he says.

  ‘You got the coordinates,’ says Robert. ‘The rebels are in charge.’

  Then they review the team. Four men will be with him throughout. They will provide him with protection and facilitate the infiltration. Once he has Pathfinder, he should call the number saved on his mobile, and the money will be deposited into the account provided by the rebels.

  The final details are checked. One of the men checks that he has received all the documents and that the air ticket has been issued in the right name.

  ‘Have you got any questions?’ asks Grandma.

  I don’t want to do it. He could say it. The moment in which it is still possible to say it is upon him. But how could he stop things now?

  He shakes his head. ‘No questions.’

  The coordinator nods and wishes him luck. The others agree. ‘Yes, good luck.’ Which means: ‘We don’t know what happens next. You’re on your own. You might die.’ That’s what he hears.

  ‘Robert,’ he says. ‘Can I have a word with you?’

  Robert waits while the others leave the room.

  ‘We said I was going to collect Pathfinder in Antakya. In Turkey. Not that I would be going to Syria.’

  ‘That’s true. But we also didn’t say that you were going to fuck my wife,’ says Robert.

  The screen goes
black.

  16

  Anne looks at the letter. It is without a doubt the British Em-bassy’s emblem. Bente sees that she is thinking the same thing as her. This is what every nightmare in the intelligence business centres on. Infiltration.

  Anne sits beside her and says that the apartment is owned by a British foundation, but Bente is barely listening.

  She opens the list of diplomats. They use it to record all foreign diplomats and EU civil servants, and an army of neat faces is now scrolling up the screen. There is Jonathan Green staring at her with his remarkably cold blue eyes. Trade Attaché. Underneath is the Section’s own comment: MI6 Station Chief, Brussels.

  She looks up Heather Ashford. Her fingers are trembling.

  A woman with dark hair and a barely visible, neutral smile. That’s her, the woman she saw with Fredrik at the Hotel Metropole. Assistant, Trade Delegation.

  A deep sense of futility pushes her into her office chair. They have been defeated.

  The woman reports directly to Jonathan Green. She probably isn’t even called Heather Ashford.

  She gets up and goes to the window. Her gaze is drawn across the city and its grey sky, the pigeons wheeling above the park hunting for scraps. Fredrik is only of interest to the Brits as her husband, as an easy way to get into their home. It isn’t even a relationship, just an infiltration aimed at her.

  The safe. They are looking for the documents that B54 gave her; what else would be worth taking a risk like that? They are monitoring her, they know the layout of the house, and they understand that the documents must be there in the safe.

  She turns to Anne.

  ‘Not a word about this to anyone. Talk, and you’re history. Do you understand?’

  Once she is alone, she rests her forehead on the pane of glass and tries to gather her thoughts.

  A dry fear is rattling through her. Perhaps this is how it all ends. Over the years she has sometimes suspected she was under surveillance, but now there is no doubt.

  With uncanny clarity, she sees what will happen next. A suffocating security check will penetrate her life. They will never trust her again. She looks at her mobile – the new one. Lying there on her desk, it looks like a shiny, unpleasant beetle. Of course it’s being bugged by Stockholm.

  She knows the procedures for when betrayal, deceit and infiltration are suspected. The organisation will isolate her. She will be discreetly removed from her post and all the people who have been a part of her life.

  She has always been good at breaking down big problems into smaller, manageable chunks, but she can’t do it right now. This is too big; it is as if her whole life were collapsing under its own weight. How could she believe him when he said he didn’t know how her mobile ended up in his coat pocket? How could she have missed that her husband was seeing another woman? How could she have been so blind? She is ashamed, because she has been gullible when two decades of professional suspicion should have taught her to identify treachery of this kind.

  Mikael knocks on the door and asks if she wants to come to lunch.

  ‘I’m in the middle of something,’ she says. ‘You go.’

  They’ll talk about her, she thinks as she closes the door. It won’t be long before the group of people that knows gets bigger, and they’ll talk about her. They’ll say she betrayed them.

  Then she catches sight of the photographs on the desk next to her screen. Fredrik, smiling. It looks like he is taunting her. She puts the photograph into a desk drawer. But then she changes her mind and gets it out again, removes the picture from the frame and tears it up in a wild movement.

  Fredrik is standing in the garden waiting for her, just as she asked. ‘Hello,’ he says flatly. He probably thinks that she doesn’t want him in the house because she hates him. It’s true, she does hate him, but the real reason is of a more operational nature. She doesn’t want to risk anyone else listening to them.

  Somehow, she feels sorry for him. A highly professional organisation has exploited him to get to her. If only he could see that he was a victim, an idiot taken advantage of, if he could grasp that degradation and see that she is the only one who will look out for him in all of this. Then, perhaps, she might begin to forgive him.

  ‘Fredrik,’ she says, ‘I need to tell you something about the woman you’ve been seeing. She’s not called Jane Smith.’

  He looks at her, tired and sarcastic. She knows what he is thinking, that this is just one of her paranoid fancies. She pulls out a copy of Heather’s photo and holds it out. ‘Is that her?’ He looks at the photo, his brow creased.

  ‘Yes, that’s her.’

  ‘She’s called Heather Ashford.’

  ‘I’m sure you know best,’ he says.

  ‘She doesn’t care one bit for you, Fredrik.’

  He glowers at her.

  ‘I realise that it’s difficult for you to understand,’ he says, ‘but there are people who are capable of showing more love than you.’

  She reflects that she has to look at the conversation as part of her job. See him as a threat, an enemy, but an enemy she knows well. Because Fredrik is acting on behalf of a foreign power and she has to try and manage this disaster so that it doesn’t get worse.

  ‘She told you to take my mobile, didn’t she?’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  He looks at her as if she were insane. Oddly enough, he really doesn’t seem to understand what she is talking about.

  But the agent has been in their home, it must be her who took the mobile, she thinks. Then she remembers the log in the satnav: Fredrik had come home on Friday, the same day as the reception in the evening.

  ‘She was here on Friday, wasn’t she?’

  When he says nothing, she repeats herself more sharply:

  ‘Wasn’t she?’

  He nods.

  ‘You brought her here two Fridays in a row.’

  It is as if the house were a silent accessory. Everything is soiled but, purely professionally, things are at least a little clearer. She can picture Heather and Fredrik coming into the hall together that Friday almost two weeks ago. They have sex in the bedroom. Then Rasmus comes home. She flees. She is close to failing in her mission, but manages to persuade Fredrik that they should meet again at his house. The next Friday she is lucky. She finds a mobile and realises who it belongs to. The plan is probably to gain access to a computer, but a mobile phone is a real find. In the evening, at the reception, she puts the mobile in his coat pocket in the cloakroom at the Hotel Metropole.

  ‘She works for MI6, Fredrik.’

  He looks at her in astonishment. Then he laughs, loudly and ostentatiously.

  Fredrik is obviously convinced that she just wants to ruin everything for him and control him. He will never believe her. It doesn’t surprise her but it makes her so angry.

  She gets out her phone.

  Gustav answers after three rings. Kempell?

  She is standing opposite Fredrik and looks him in the eyes while she briefly explains to Gustav that she is standing with Fredrik.

  ‘. . . In your home? Did he say that?’ Yes. On Friday. Gustav falls silent at the other end of the line. He is thinking, possibly testing different ways of handling her calling like this. She says she has the name of the woman and has been able to confirm a connection between her and Jonathan Green.

  ‘Is he still seeing her?’

  Bente holds the phone slightly away from her face.

  ‘Are you still seeing her?’

  Fredrik stares at her.

  ‘The Head of Counter-Espionage would like to know.’

  The frown between his eyes dissolves and his expression evens out.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I’m still seeing her.’

  ‘Is he there? Can I speak to him?’

  She hands the phone to Fredrik.

&n
bsp; ‘He wants to speak to you.’

  Fredrik takes the phone and holds it to his ear as if he were afraid acid will come out of it. She hears the calm intonation of Gustav’s voice as he speaks to Fredrik, who stands there silently staring into space.

  ‘I understand,’ he says then.

  He looks at her, and she can almost feel his gaze slightly tickling her face: the way she is transformed into someone else in his eyes while Stockholm is speaking to him. Now he believes her; she can see that. The fear is radiating from his eyes.

  Afterwards he looks completely empty.

  ‘Oh God,’ he says with dry despair.

  His world is also falling apart. They are united. But she doesn’t feel sorry for him, she feels no unity, just relief that he realises the extent of what he has done, that she no longer has to be the only one who knows and has to carry this burden.

  ‘Bente, I didn’t know . . .’

  ‘How could you?’

  ‘I was just lonely.’

  He was lonely? She doesn’t know what to say.

  He stares at her, but not at her as the woman he has betrayed, but as a representative of the agency that she is the embodiment of in his eyes, with all its power – its power to crush him. His face is drawn into a startled, humiliated grimace. Perhaps he finally realises how deceived he has been.

  A little while later Gustav calls. They are coming down to Brussels, he says. Him and a team.

  ‘We need to get hold of the agent,’ he says. ‘Fredrik will be our bait. Talk to him.’

  They sit on the veranda. A lingering rain patters onto the grass. It occurs to her that it is Friday evening. Just a week ago she was on the way up the stairs at the Hotel Metropole with the man she loved, blissfully ignorant. He has destroyed that love.

  She explains what will happen now. He is going to help them make contact with Heather.

  He nods lamely.

  ‘You are to stay in touch,’ she says.