Into a Raging Blaze (2 page)

She really ought to tidy up, she realized. It was one of the things she never prioritized. She had never been good at physical order. Deep down, she didn't quite understand what the point was of constantly tidying up—always gathering things into neat piles, putting them in drawers and boxes—when the order was there in her head all along. She was in full control. She prioritized. She was completely fulfilled by her work—what did it matter if there were a few papers here or an apple core there? Everyone knew that she had a fully equipped intellect, but no one believed her when she said she had a system in her office. People visiting her office would often stop short in the doorway as if confronted by a natural phenomenon. Johan Eriksson called her room “the Batcave.” The deputy Head of Department had started to drop small hints, so sooner or later she would have to tidy up. Why on earth couldn't she be left in peace in her room as it was? She was one of the best analysts in the department. She knew it, even if no one ever said so in as many words. Johan and others would constantly bombard her with various texts for her consideration, and she would usually take pity and quickly glance through their documents, dead calm and absorbed, before leaving a few comments. And the fact was that she was rarely wrong. Despite this, she knew that the office of a civil servant at the MFA shouldn't look like this.

The desk was a jumbled landscape of crusty coffee cups, fruit peelings, tubs of paper clips, reference works, handbooks, and an avalanche of papers that had slipped down toward the computer screen. Somewhere or other there ought to be a cactus, but she
didn't take care of it. The shelves along one wall were brimming with books, papers, and files. She contemplated the stacks of paper lying on the floor. The elegant, sheepskin-clad Lammhult armchair was beside the table. It actually belonged in the UNHCR desk officer's room, but she had discreetly carried it to her office the day he left on paternity leave and nobody could remember whose it actually was. It was comfy, but couldn't be sat in because towering off it was a stack of reports from all the past year's summit meetings at the EU. That pile was a problem—from time to time it extended to the floor. Sometimes she would find classifieds in it—which was not good. The security guards patrolling the building at night were always checking if there was any classified material lying around in offices. If you forgot to lock up classified material, you received a warning in the form of an angry red note on your chair in the morning. Three warnings and you would be called in to the department head.

The best way to keep a secret was never to divulge it, so they said. But in practice that was impossible. The greater part of the work at the MFA was done under cover of secrecy stamps. The House was bulging with secrets. They were collected, discussed; some built their entire careers on having access to the right classified material. The encrypted mail system delivered a flood of classified reports and analyses depicting reality in its true, complex and raw form. Everyone was careless with secrets. Classifieds were always lying around because no one could be bothered to adhere to the strict rules concerning the handling of secret material. But chucking classifieds on the floor was probably a little too nonchalant. She spotted a report from a NATO meeting in Kabul littering the floor, bent down, and picked it up. In all likelihood there were even more classified reports in the piles. She quickly shuffled through the armchair pile. She wouldn't forgive herself if she made the beginner's mistake of getting caught being careless about secrecy. She couldn't become a problem to the department, not now.

As EU coordinator, Carina had to work like a slave, but if she stuck it out for another year she would be within reach of a
promotion. Her predecessor had been a deputy director. Every EU coordinator before her had been. But not her, she was still a desk officer. It wasn't something that she dwelled on, but those were the facts, and a poisonous suspicion had begun to spread through her that she wasn't quite as good as the others. The department head seemed to like her. But she knew how it was: she hadn't taken the Ministry's Diplomat Program—she wasn't a “dipper”; she had come the long way around to become a diplomat, and that made all the difference.

Carina had started as a temp in the Press, Information, and Communication Department, the least prestigious place to work in the entire building, but had quickly demonstrated an aptitude for analysis and had gone on to short temporary roles at the Department for Eastern Europe and Central Asia and then the Americas Department. Finally, after six years, she got a permanent job at the Security Policy Department. Thank goodness. “Dippers” were guaranteed a permanent position; they were guaranteed a career. She and they were not the same Homo sapiens. She had to fight every week to show her worth. She had considered applying to the Diplomat Program but the thought of rejection had held her back. There were twelve hundred applicants every year and just a handful were accepted after written examinations, stress tests, intelligence tests, and ten interviews. Everyone at the department would know if she didn't make it and it would be proof that she was second-rate. So instead she had thrown herself into her work and now it was beginning to pay off. As of a few months ago, reports would appear in her pigeonhole every now and then with a Post-it saying,
Swedish options?
Or,
Carina, your views appreciated. Nils
. The department head had caught sight of her and begun to use her as a kind of informal sounding board. She would read through and quickly send her assessment. And now there was the rumor of her promotion. Small signs. You made your own luck. How she could be so sure, she didn't know, but all the same . . .

It had started as a rumor in the department. Johan Eriksson knew one of the unit heads at Human Resources and had heard that
her name had been discussed at a meeting. After that it had quickly become the accepted truth that Carina Dymek was going to become a deputy director next year. But no one really knew whether it was true, not even the department heads, because no one understood the Byzantine procedures in place at the Human Resources Department. Sometimes one could sense a deeper meaning, a pattern in the way posts were filled and who was promoted. But then those patterns would be broken by unfathomable placements that once again meant the MFA's personnel policies reverted to being the mystery that kept the entire diplomatic corps on tenterhooks and filled the House with rumor and speculation. Like when a deputy was recalled from Rome under suspicion of housing allowance abuse and suspended, only to turn up as the ambassador in Rabat a year later. Or when one of the country's most prominent political figures was left to wither away on a pointless inquiry, only to be brought back into the fold and made ambassador to Hong Kong. Unpredictable turns like that sent shock waves throughout the building and generated endless speculation. It enchanted and frightened in equal measure. One thing, however, was clear—loyalty paid off. If you stayed in the House, you made your career. The former Marshal of the Court was a warning to all. He had worked at the royal court for over ten years when he returned to the MFA from his leave of absence. He was promptly dispatched to Islamabad in the midst of the worst terror bombings for years. Everyone got the message: opt out of the Ministry and you can go to hell when you come back.

In reality, the career ladder was perfectly clear and straightforward. Administrative staff had zero career development; they remained assistants their whole lives and could only hope for postings to embassies in decent capital cities. Then there were the political appointments, those working around ministers: junior ministers, press secretaries, and senior advisers—the political experts. They came from the parties, had broken through the youth organizations and political meetings—they belonged to another world. There was deep mistrust between them and the civil servants. Carina felt it herself. As a civil servant she and her colleagues were loyal to the
House: it was
their
House; the politicos were just temporary visitors. The day after changes in government, moving boxes would be sitting outside the offices of junior ministers and political appointees, and then they were gone. But the civil servants stayed. They knew their House and they knew their government—they knew how to get a minister to see the light and grant approval to their proposals.

For the civil servants and diplomats, a career at the MFA was ostensibly simple. You started as a desk officer, then became a deputy director, then perhaps you became a director and, finally, maybe, an ambassador. The thing that had made her fight for a career at the Ministry was the chance of working in embassies, in the closed rooms of Brussels or Washington. This opportunity was available once a year in the autumn with the commencement of the so-called Grand Call. All vacant positions were published on an internal database, graded by rank, and anyone who wanted to could apply. The Grand Call was the cause of a storm of rumors and intrigue on an annual basis, with everyone trying to get on the good side of bosses and ambassadors in the hope of a good word, while horse-trading with the Human Resources Department. Diplomats had free reign to use the tactics they had been trained in to drive forward their own ambitions rather than to run Swedish politics. It was a time for hopes, dreams, alliances, and razor-sharp rivalries—but with a smile. The last day for applications was the beginning of a four-month game of negotiation in the arena of personnel administration that few saw, but, according to what Carina had heard, reached such a level of complexity that in the end no one was even able to guess who might get which job. Everything disappeared into the labyrinth that was the Human Resources Department. She had heard that the HR administrators would have huge, secret, marathon meetings to which no one else had access, and during which they would draw up lists that no one had ever seen but everyone had heard of, ranking personnel by means of an intricate system. Finally, applicants found out which position they were being offered, or not offered, whereupon an enormous logistical apparatus was set in motion. Hundreds of moves between capital cities and embassies, as well as between floors in the House back in Stockholm,
would take place. Next year she was going to apply to an outside position—an embassy. Beijing, perhaps. Or maybe something completely different—Nairobi. She shivered with anticipation.

Carina stepped out into the corridor and put the classifieds into a burn trolley—a large, locked wastepaper basket on wheels into which civil servants dumped sensitive papers through a small flap after they had been read. The trolleys were taken regularly to a location outside of Stockholm where everything was burned in a secure manner. Often the trolley in her corridor was overflowing by the middle of the week, with secrets sticking out of the flap.

She went into the bathroom and splashed water across her face, dried off, and looked critically at herself in the mirror. Four hours' sleep wasn't enough, but she didn't look as hollow-eyed as she felt. Her face, with its prominent chin, always became furrowed and wolflike when she hadn't slept well. But you could hide the dark rings under the eyes with a little makeup. Simply because she was so tired, she had dressed extra formally in a black suit, crimson top, and black shoes. She had glossy polished nails. It didn't do to wander around the Ministry yawning—no one here wanted to know about your weaknesses. It was important to appear sharp. She always wore a suit to work. In her private life, she never wore a suit, but at the MFA she was in the service of the state. The suit provided her with a steadiness of character—like a piece of armor. Casual clothes were not accepted, something which she had learned quickly the hard way when she had started eight years ago. On her first day, she had come to work in a stylish denim jacket. A man, who she later discovered was the Head of the Press Department, had stopped her in the corridor and said, “Oh, nonuniform day, is it?”

She hadn't understood what he meant and had said that they were her normal clothes.

“You won't come back from lunch in those clothes,” she had been told.

At lunch she had gone, with a lump in her throat, to the NK department store and returned with a navy blue suit, white blouse and black shoes. She had worn a suit ever since.

Her hair was pulled back tightly in a ponytail. It made her face look more open and alert. She was proud of her straight, dark-blond hair, and liked the freckles that populated the bridge of her nose and spilled on to her cheeks. An early boyfriend had lovingly said that she looked like Jodie Foster. She had a straight nose and gray-green eyes with a gaze that had wavered six or seven years ago but could now be directed at anybody without any sign of a tremor. She had learned; she had grown up. She had never been one of the best-looking girls at school; instead, she had been a member of the gray mass of quiet, clever pupils. But she was here. The hotties worked at 7-Eleven and she worked at the MFA. She adjusted her jacket. She was pleased about how fit she was. Swimming had kept her in shape; she liked the feeling of her shoulders filling the suit. She was thirty-two years old and never thought about what she ate; it was as if a fast-spinning machine inside her burned all the energy. She combed back a strand of hair that had fallen across her forehead. No one would believe that this was someone who preferred to wear hoodies and sneakers in her free time, who lived in a pokey one-bedroom apartment with all her clothes strewn everywhere, who left dishes and wine bottles for weeks, who liked to lie in until one on weekends, who liked to provoke people by using the word “cock” inappropriately, who loved Depeche Mode, and sometimes—when she hated her job—dreamed of becoming a computer-games programmer. Who knew that below this controlled exterior there lay an uncontrollable temper? She could have such outbursts of rage. Sometimes she was driven by a rage from some unknown place that made her throw glasses at the wall when she was drunk and scream in such a way that she frightened herself, and which only swimming, furious swimming, length after length, could calm down. None of this Carina Dymek was visible. She was a diplomat; she knew how to maintain her mask. You were sociable, but not intimate. You were happy and lively and clever—you were not a big mouth and didn't act out.