Into a Raging Blaze (5 page)

“I don't know . . .”

“Take it. You'll regret it otherwise.”

“Will you give it to anyone else?”

“I don't know. Perhaps.”

She fingered the little piece of black plastic. A secret report from the Commission. She knew that she shouldn't accept it. Everything would be simpler if she didn't. She put the USB in her inside pocket and slowly started to eat her salad. The man regarded her in silence. There was something a touch pathetic about him. He looked friendly enough. His brown eyes and soft face, the beard and the thin hair made her feel a little sorry for him.

“I don't even know your name.”

“You can call me Jean.”

“Jean. It doesn't make a difference.”

“True.” He smiled sheepishly and gulped down his coffee.

She didn't know him, she reminded herself. People could appear to be as pleasant as anything and actually be completely untrustworthy. She didn't know whether he was actually operating alone, as he claimed, or whether he had a taskmaster—the Commission, or someone else. She glanced at him and smiled when he met her gaze.

“Aren't you going to eat something?”

He shook his head. “I'm not hungry, I'm afraid. How's the salad?”

“Just fine,” she said and wondered what they would talk about now that he had persuaded her to take the document. When she looked up from her plate she saw that he was staring across the restaurant with a curious pursed grimace on his face, not taking any notice of her. She looked down at her salad, chasing one of the pieces of crispy bacon with her fork while trying to work out what
was wrong with him. He was frightened, it occurred to her. Scared, for real.

She speared a salad leaf with her fork. “I can't promise anything.”

“I know. But you will try, won't you?” The man looked at her quietly. Then he rose from the table, nodded furtively, and left her with a silent goodbye.

4

Stockholm, Friday, September 23

Four hundred and twenty pages. She waited by the printer in the mail room while the pages were spat out, one at a time. Back in her office, she sat down to look at the document. High up on the first page was a row of code designations, serial numbers, and stamps. She studied them for a while and noted that they were genuine. The report was in the second-highest top secret classification. She had never handled documents with the highest classification. The serial number said that it had been written by DG XI, the Directorate General for Home Affairs at the European Commission, just as she had thought. There were no sender details—no names. The title caught her attention:
Security Across Borders—A New European Intelligence Service
. They had always been ambitious at the Commission, had always had ideas about how the European Union should grow and become a superpower. But she hadn't heard of this initiative. On the other hand, there were probably lots of initiatives to reinforce cooperation between security services in the EU that she knew nothing of. The Swedish Armed Forces, Justice, or the Swedish Security Service took care of things like that, while diplomats were rarely let into the conversation. Everything ran on a strictly need-to-know basis and diplomats didn't really need to know anything about operational security work in order to do their jobs. Furthermore, MFA was seen to be a leaky bucket. There had been incidents when desk officers had opened their windows during the summer and whole piles of sensitive papers had been blown right out on cross-breezes, before fluttering to the ground all over
Fredsgatan outside. The mistrust toward people like her was dense. It was therefore not surprising that she wasn't familiar with this. Maybe she shouldn't even be reading the text. But the report had been given to her and she wasn't going to pass up the chance.

She turned the pages, quickly skimming the introductory paragraphs that primarily contained standard formulations about European security that she had heard many times before. She glanced through the table of contents and turned to a description of how a contact network would be established.

The phone rang. It was the desk officer at Finance.

“Did you get my proposal?”

“Yes, of course . . .”

She threw the report aside and brought up her inbox. She had no idea what proposal he was talking about, but she opened his e-mail and quickly read it while her colleague on the line cleared his dry throat impatiently as he waited.

“Can you reconcile it?” he said. “We might be able to get this signed off before twelve. We need it by then at the latest. Otherwise we won't have time to run through it with the junior minister, and then it won't fly.”

“Okay. Absolutely.” She looked at the clock: one hour.

She didn't have time to read the report now. It seemed to be interesting, but it wasn't her problem. All she could do was forward it to Justice. She pulled herself together and wrote a brief message describing how she had come by the report: she had been approached, she wrote, by a civil servant from the Commission and she believed the material should be dealt with by Justice. She was therefore attaching it, both for reference and so measures could be taken. Then she plugged in the memory stick, uploaded the report and entered the addresses of two people at the Ministry of Justice's unit for international cooperation. It occurred to her that she could also send it to Jamal—she added him to the list of recipients.

Jamal called just after lunch. He was stressed and hadn't had time to eat lunch. Yes, he had received the report that she had sent but he hadn't had time to read it. He was talking in his civil-servant voice.
She didn't know how to talk to him when he sounded so formal, as if she was just any old colleague. Maybe Jamal felt it too, because suddenly he said, in his normal voice, “Do you want to meet this evening?”

“Yes,” she said. “Definitely.” She wanted to say something big—something that could express what she felt for him—when Jamal disappeared from the receiver.

“I'm coming!” she heard him shout across the room, and the sober, stressed tone of voice was back. He had a meeting shortly.

At half past six, Johan Eriksson stood in her doorway and swore that she must either be insane or very close to a promotion to be working overtime for such a poor wage. He insisted that it was time for a drink at Pickwick's. Jamal had called again during the afternoon; he had to stay for a little longer, so she was in no rush. She quickly finished an e-mail to the desk officer at Finance while Johan shifted impatiently from foot to foot, then she gathered a few sensitive documents and threw them into the safe, locked it, switched on her phone's voicemail, got up, and yawned. Okay: one drink.

A lively murmur met them at the door to Pickwick's. Most of the Swedish civil service appeared to have found their way there already and were now stood in a dark gray mass of suits, drinking their Friday beers. It was at Pickwick's that servants of the government gathered. This was where they ate lunch, where they had a beer after work as they loosened their ties. At the bar there was a throng of assistants, deputy directors, ministers and junior ministers, investigators and experts; there were gatherings of experts in road taxation, fishing quotas, and the Middle East peace process, along with a few tourists. The pub was a copy of a Pickwick's in London and, like all perfect copies, it was more authentic than the original; there was a long dark wooden bar with small Guinness napkins, windows with crocheted curtains, wooden panels, and chairs with creaking, moss-green leather cushions, while colorful engravings depicting scenes of fox hunting adorned the walls. The same sandy-haired women were always behind the bar, accustomed to drawing
off draft beer for the employees of the civil service. The only thing that hinted at its Swedish address was the stuffed elk head gazing gloomily across the room from its spot just inside the door. She would always remember Pickwick's for this, and because it was where she first met Jamal.

They squeezed up to the bar between a dozen other civil servants from the Ministry of Defense. Johan managed to order a glass of white for her and a beer for himself.

“Seriously?”

“Yes—a guy from the Commission gave me a report and wanted me to leak it.”

“When was this?”

“Yesterday, after the meeting in Brussels.”

Johan listened with a smile while she told him how the man had sought her out, how they had gone to a café nearby, and how he had given her a USB stick.

“Sexy.”

She laughed. Sexy?

“It's objectively sexy to be approached,” said Johan. “It means that you are someone.
Une personne très importante
,” he said in his dreadful French, reaching for his beer glass. “Look at Hans Blix: he was big game before the Iraq invasion. It's a sure sign that you're about to be promoted.”

“Being approached? Or getting a bigger room?”

Johan laughed loudly. Exactly. People who got promoted often got to move into one of the larger, brighter offices on the boss's corridor that overlooked the street and Gustav Adolf Square. Everyone knew that was how it worked. The converse also applied: a better office was a sign that you were close to a promotion. If you kept an eye on the distribution of rooms, you knew who counted, whom the departmental management liked, and in whom they had no interest. When a colleague who had one of the better offices left the department, intense speculation would always arise about who would move in. The guessing game had already begun and many indications suggested that it would be Carina.

“Patrick is leaving in the New Year.”

Everyone already knew that the DPKO desk officer was going to Santiago, despite the job not having been formally advertised yet. This was Johan's favorite subject—who was going to be promoted and who was going to get which overseas posting. He was quite adept at gathering this kind of information.

“Have you heard anything more?”

She shook her head. “No, nothing.”

Johan leaned closer with a delighted smile. He knew a little, he said. He knew one of the unit heads at the Human Resources Department. They had lunch from time to time, and the most recent time this acquaintance happened to say that someone with a Polish name was on the list.

“Are you sure?”

“There's only one Dymek at the MFA, surely?”

She smiled. Nothing was certain until you got the phone call from the HR department. But it was lovely of him to say it. She wouldn't mind being promoted. They clinked glasses.

She leaned against the bar and looked across the noisy room. It felt good to have left the office, good to feel a little inebriated. She was in no hurry to get home to her quiet apartment, if Jamal would be working late.

“I'm thinking of applying for a transfer out,” she said after a while. It was a secret that she hadn't even told Jamal. But it felt right to tell Johan. The opportunity to talk about it with him made it seem more real.

“Oh?” Johan lit up. He loved this kind of information. “Which embassies will you apply to, then?”

“I'm thinking about Shanghai. Or Nairobi, or Bangkok.” She enjoyed saying those words. Each and every one contained a new life, which could soon be a reality for her. “I want to get away. You know, do something completely radical.”

“You go, girl,” said Johan cheerfully, adding, “And what does your man say about it?”

“I'm going to tell him. He shouldn't be too bothered by the idea.”

It would be wonderful to go to a posting, far, far away with Jamal. Just throw themselves into a new environment that they could discover together. At embassies, you got direct contact with ministers and politicians. You lived large—and for free—and, even if you had to work around the clock, the salary was still better than the twenty-eight thousand a month you got at home. In Stockholm, work was so regulated. Everyone was tied to all the deadlines, all the ministerial requirements, and other ministries. Out in the field, the work was more relaxed. You were probably forced to arrange St. 
Lucia's Day
events in mid-December, and advertise dismal glass art exhibitions, but that didn't matter. She just wanted to get out—it didn't matter where. You probably weren't supposed to think like that when applying for posts. Everyone at the Ministry was so strategic and careful—her colleagues in the Security Policy Department built their careers with almost ridiculous care. The ideal was a first posting at a small embassy so that you could learn the diplomatic crafts of issuing emergency passports, writing reports, and developing contacts in a host country. Then you were meant to do a few years in Brussels to get a feel for the EU, then some time at home to make sure the bosses in Stockholm weren't forgetting you, and then back out into the world for a bigger job at a larger embassy or the UN representation. That was how everyone methodically climbed up the career ladder, rung by rung. But she didn't want to think like that. She was happy; she felt stronger than she had been in years. She wanted to throw herself out into the world, thunder along in a jeep in the mountains north of Nairobi, wander through glittering Shanghai, look out across Bangkok in the misty morning from the thirtieth floor and say, “Here I am. Jamal and me. This is my life.”

“Don't apply to Nairobi.”

“Why not?”

“They can never get people for the embassies in Africa. If you write down Nairobi, they'll see nothing but that and just go on and on about Africa.” Johan leaned against the bar. “Apply for Shanghai and Bangkok. If the job in Nairobi is still available at Christmas, you can fire off an application for that too.”

“To Shanghai then.”

She raised her glass. Johan was probably right; he was good at these kinds of tactics. She would talk to Jamal about it this evening. He was probably still at work, she thought, with a pang of guilty conscience. He worked too much. He seemed to never say no—perhaps that was the problem. He was so thorough, in a way that surprised her and would probably irritate her someday. He never let anything go until he was completely satisfied. “It's just work, Jamal,” she had said to him. “You're wearing yourself out.” “Working at the Ministry of Justice isn't just a job,” he had said. “It's a responsibility.” She had laughed, until she realized that he meant it. He was a part of the legislative process. He created laws, and he was one of the people who had to ensure that laws were balanced and proportional—that they led to a better society. For him, it was personal. In Egypt, there hadn't been any proper laws—just a state of emergency and a corrupt judiciary—just power. There, the law was just a text—nothing but empty words. There, all that existed was Mubarak and the army. But in Sweden the system worked, he had said. There was a law and it applied to everyone, no matter who they were.

“Jesus, there're a lot of people,” Johan exclaimed contentedly, as if it was he who had invited everyone. “Look, there she is, the new junior minister.” He pointed at a group of people with his glass. “I don't understand how politicians work,” said Johan and shook his head as if it was a concern he had borne for a long time. The stupidity of politicians and their lack of basic competence was a subject Johan would return to, without fail, after a few beers. “Do you want another?” he asked.

Carina shook her head. She was already fairly tipsy; if she drank any more she would only get sleepy. Some colleagues from the Security Policy Department streamed in through the door, spotted her and Johan, and pushed their way toward them. People from the department filled the bar. One of the newly arrived colleagues offered to buy a round for everyone. “Okay,” she said, “one more drink.” They toasted the end of the week. She and her colleagues were currently dealing with the most important issues of foreign
policy, and they knew it. Everyone talked at one another about everything they had heard in the last twenty-four hours from Brussels. The noise enveloped her.