Into a Raging Blaze (8 page)

She went into her office. Everything looked as it should: the desk lamp was still on; her coffee mug where she had left it, still half full; her notepad, filled with scribbled notes; all the reports, papers, Post-it notes. It was her office, here was years of her work. She had been in a hurry earlier this morning; her coat was still cast across the back of the office chair. Just as she came in, the computer pinged—she must still be receiving e-mail; people were expecting her to be there to reply. Suddenly she had an impulse to sit down at the computer and just keep working, as if nothing had happened, but the guard reminded her of the reality. She tried to gather her thoughts and remember what she should do. But her skull was filled with a vast vacuum that could implode at any moment, pulling Drottninggatan and the ministries around her into a black hole. She saw herself standing there in her office on the fifth floor of the MFA building at Fredsgatan 6. The building enveloped her with its layers of corridors, offices, conference rooms, storerooms, mail rooms,
and elevators—all in the middle of a gray and autumnal Stockholm, that small, well-organized, cold city that hated her. She felt faint; she wanted to throw up.

“Come on; get your stuff,” said the guard.

She only had a minute. Every small action acquired a decisive significance and was simultaneously so meaningless. She began to gather together some papers at random, but didn't know where among the piles to begin. She took a script from the bookcase,
UNDP Human Development Report 2009
, weighing it in her hands. What did she need it for? She put it down.

“What should I do about the books?” Carina gestured vaguely at the bookcases that covered one of the walls. “All of these?”

The guard looked at the bookcases with uninterest. “I've not been told anything about that. You'll have to ask them to send them to you.”

She looked around the room. She remembered what she needed. At random, she selected Joseph Nye's
Understanding International Conflicts
and pretended to search through a bundle of papers, to gain time. She couldn't find it and swore through her teeth. When you needed something it was never there.

“That's enough. Let's go.” The guard was standing right beside her.

“I'm looking for my house keys, okay?” she said in such a sharp, authoritative tone that, for a second, the guard actually understood that she was really a diplomat, and backed away.

She had put it somewhere near the computer. It was there; she knew it must be. She groped frantically in the mess that was her desk. The guard wouldn't let her have more than another minute, then it would be too late. She no longer had her pass and she wouldn't be able to get back into the building: this was her only chance. Worst case, she could ask Johan to come in during the evening and look, but they would probably lock her office door. Where was it? She was sure she had left it near the computer, but that had been several days ago. She pushed aside the pile of reports, the writing pad.

There, next to the keyboard, was the memory stick.

She grabbed it and slipped it into her pocket. On one of the piles close by was a copy of the report. Wahlund, in spite of it all, had gotten so nervous that he hadn't taken the report from her immediately. She took it.

“What are you doing?” The guard was in the middle of the room. “Are you done?”

Yes, she was done.

Colleagues had stopped in the corridor and were now standing silently in a group, looking on with curiosity while the guard locked the door to her office. Why couldn't they just leave her alone? The whole situation was so absurd and degrading. She was an intruder. No one moved, no one left, everyone looked at her nervously as if she had a contagious disease.

“What's happened?” Johan Eriksson pushed forward and worriedly looked at her and then the guard. “What the hell are you doing?”

“Step aside,” hissed the guard.

“What's happened, Carina?”

She tried to smile, but her face was stiff. “I have to go,” she said.

“What do you mean?”

She didn't reply. The guard had put a hand on her arm and started to walk her toward the elevators. Johan followed them.

“I'll call you,” he shouted after her.

Something in his words made her snap. She needed to get out before she began to cry. They hurried down the stairs; she had enough presence of mind not to take the elevator, in order to avoid colleagues. The guard trotted behind her to the ground floor. It was all so absurd, like a pathetic comedy in which she hurried through the building followed by a security guard with rattling keys and a gun. At the entrance she carried on out of the doors without looking back. She passed the green-tinted window of the guard post, pushed past two desk officers from the Department for Asia and the Pacific Region whom she recognized, and came out into the blinding light on the street.

7

Brussels, Monday, September 26

Bente Jensen had left the office without telling anyone. In no rush, she had then driven to the northern end of the port.

She liked driving. She was good at it, she drove quickly and could read the traffic effortlessly—it came naturally. When she had started at Säpo many years ago, she had always been able to impress the guys in Dignitary Protection with how safe she was behind the wheel. She had been in the business for almost eighteen years. Eighteen years was a long time. But unlike many others, she rarely thought about it; she couldn't understand people who were nostalgic. The years passed by and would never come back, and then, sooner or later, death came and then life was over. She didn't see the point in brooding over things that couldn't be changed.

Nevertheless, there were occasions when even she reflected on the past. The meeting she was on the way to brought back memories of when she had been in the car on the way to an identical meeting, almost two years ago, with the same man. That time it had been about a request for Sweden's support in getting into a terrorist group with bases in the Sahelian region of western Chad, by infiltrating a Swedish-Norwegian network of al-Shabaab supporters. She hadn't seen him since then. There was no reason why she should have. Meeting face to face was a clumsy method that involved risk of discovery; she preferred to keep that kind of contact to a minimum. But the last time they had met, Green had chosen to meet her outdoors, not in a hotel or in a safe house, and it was the same this time. Presumably the result of a healthy mistrust of her. MI6 was
a professional partner; she didn't have to worry about contacting them. Their operations were well prepared. All meetings, even tiny working meetings like this, were arranged so that neither she nor they had to expose themselves to any unnecessary risks.

She turned off, toward the port, through an industrial area where the offices were still dark and silent, past a large warehouse with trucks lined up outside, quietly waiting to be filled before rolling away to their destinations. A gray sky covered Brussels. The morning was still young.

The white oil tanks in Neder-Over-Heembeek were visible from afar. Bente was on time. There was a genuine satisfaction to be had from being on time. It gave a sense of order, of peace, of being systematic. In her line of work, that kind of precision was crucial—in the worst situations, lives might depend on it. A colleague had told her that fighter pilots often took pride in getting into formation in the air at exactly the time stated. She liked the thought of it: she had done the same.

The car jolted when she rolled across the deserted plot beside the tanks. She parked next to a fence and turned off the engine. Not a soul was visible. She glanced in the rearview mirror and, for a moment, met her own eyes before turning away. She didn't like mirrors; she always got the impression that they were staring back at her. She had a factual relationship with her appearance and had never been one to look in the mirror for pleasure, mostly because she wasn't particularly coquettish and was suspicious of that kind of vanity. There was something pathetic about people who were obsessed by their own appearance. Personally, she had never cared what others thought about how she looked; she knew that her appearance was little more than a part of her personality, and furthermore it was the part that lapsed most quickly. She knew that she wasn't beautiful in the stereotypical sense that models were. She had a square and strong body that required a certain amount of exercise if it wasn't to accumulate body fat. It served her well; it was her fortress and she liked being in it. It had a density that commanded respect. She was strong—stronger than many men—and had never
heard the comments that women in her field often had to put up with. When she had started at the Security Service, she had spent her first five years at Counterespionage before moving to Counterterrorism, quickly becoming the deputy, then the liaison officer in Vienna, and now she was head of the new office in Brussels—the Section.

She couldn't remember when she had realized she was different from other people. That her face was different. Apparently it was unusually still—it lacked expression. It had been some time before she had understood what people meant, but gradually she had noticed that she didn't smile when others did, that she didn't make the expressions they did and that were expected in order to demonstrate that you were listening or liked something. She always listened attentively; it was odd that people didn't understand that without her having to grimace and posture. Naturally, she had understood the value of it in time. She could smile warmly and arrange her face in a number of ways that suited the context, but if it was up to her then she preferred to avoid that particular art and instead look on to the world with her normal, unmanipulated face. It had high cheekbones, clear eyebrows, and a small, round chin—a good-looking face, so she had been told, but she had no opinion on the matter. Two brown eyes looked straight and piercingly back at her in the rearview mirror. She was forty-four years old and knew who she was; she didn't need the approval of others. She pulled back her pageboy hair and took off her pearl earrings—a precaution; she didn't want to drop any jewelry—checked under the seat to ensure her service weapon was where it should be and reached for her coat.

It was a minute or two before half past six when she got out of the car and walked along the fence that ran around the tank area, down toward the quay. And there he was, on the quayside, approaching on foot, as if he had appeared from thin air.

“Good morning, Bentie,” he said in clipped, British English.

Jonathan Green: he looked ordinary. A normal Brit with a boyish appearance, strawberry-blond, short hair, glasses. MI6's chief
in Brussels had spent most of his life not being seen, and invisibility was now a part of his personality, his appearance. People didn't notice him. Even Bente, who was accustomed to memorizing faces, found it difficult to remember what he looked like—apart from his eyes; she remembered those. Completely clear blue eyes—neutral, almost glassy—a gaze that didn't do what the rest of his face did but continued to intently study her face and continuously make assessments as they talked.

Green was a rising star in the British spy world. A possible candidate for the top jobs back in London. Two daughters, married, his home was to the south of Brussels. She didn't know much more. The way he spoke gave away his background: an intonation that breathed Eton and Cambridge.

They wandered along the quay.

“It could be a mistake.”

“This is no mistake,” said Jonathan Green drily. “She's a clean skin. Someone is controlling her. I'm just saying that this leak is not a mistake.”

Bente shrugged her shoulders. “But the report has ended up at the Swedish MFA. It's not as if it's on the web.”

“But didn't you say that she—”

“Dymek.”

“Yes. That she had distributed the material?”

“To our Ministry of Justice, yes.”

She glanced at Green. He had an unmoving, inscrutable face. This was a man who took no risks. Presumably he was, right now, thinking through what effects the incident might have, which courses of action there were—what he would tell London.

“Jonathan, let's not make this bigger than it is. It's a storm in a teacup.”

“It's not a storm in a teacup. It's a leak. It's a crack in the system and if you don't take it seriously we'll be facing a fucking tsunami.” He looked straight at her. “Let me be completely honest. I don't trust Swedish diplomats. Okay? That girl has no business with that report. Yet she distributes it—all over the place, if I understand you
correctly, Bente. You have to take control of the situation, before it all goes to hell. We're not going to wait for some damn politician to get hold of the report and ruin everything. And, by the way, the report contains critical, operational data. Washington, and many others, would go through the roof if it came out. That report could do a lot of harm in the wrong hands.”

“Okay. I hear what you're saying.”

“Good.”

A barge moved slowly past in the channel. She looked at it while she gathered herself. She hated being lectured like this but she had no desire to irritate him any further. He was Her Majesty's Secret Service in Brussels. And he was right. If the Commission's report came out, the proposal that the Brits had spent years fighting for would be blown to smithereens.

“I've talked to Stockholm,” she lied. “We're looking into it.”

“Good.” He relaxed.

“So you don't think she was alone?”

“I don't think anything. I just want to be one hundred percent certain that she isn't leaking. That no one is leaking.”

“And if she's cooperating with someone?”

He looked across the channel. “Then we'll have to take care of it.”

Back at the office, Bente called Stockholm. It was a routine matter, but the Brits were worried and it was no good waiting. It rang twice before the receiver was picked up at the other end and a dry voice said, “Kempell.”

She outlined the conversation with Jonathan Green. There was silence at the other end for a while. Gustav Kempell never spoke cold, she remembered. He was quiet, a listening person, who could seem deferential to those who didn't know him. As the longest-serving Head of Counterespionage, he knew every methodological trick in the book, every technique for contact, recruitment, and assessment of sources. For two decades he had cultivated a widespread network of sources and he was intimately familiar with the temperament of every foreign security service out there. He was
one of the people who had recommended her for her current post as Head of the Section.

“We ought to take the Brits seriously,” Bente finished.

“Yes,” said Kempell, slowly.

“Or?”

“Yes, yes,” he said and tried to sound more enthusiastic. “Of course.” He had received a call from the Government Offices earlier that morning. The woman had been suspended until further notice. Until they knew more. He fell silent.

Bente knew how Kempell felt about the Brits. He was always unwilling to work too closely with other security services. As Head of Counterespionage it was his job to be skeptical, but sometimes Kempell and his people irritated her. They were so careful, suspicious at such a deep level. After all, it was the Brits they were talking about—close partners—not some Colombians, dumping people out of army helicopters. She told him that it was worth showing that they were taking them seriously. This Dymek, perhaps it was best to look into her.

Yes, that was probably worth it. Kempell would talk to the MFA and take a closer look at what had happened.

She promised to call him when she arrived at Stockholm Arlanda airport.

A smell of paint still lingered in the corridor. The Section for Special Intelligence, SSI, or just the Section, as it was called, was in newly refurbished premises in central Brussels. The Section had been installed discreetly, in line with the usual procedures, and to the rest of the world it was a small and seemingly unknown IT consultancy—an obscure company with stable finances and a global client base. The other nine stories of the building were home to a European children's fund, a Belgian accountancy practice, and a branch of Crédit Lyonnais. Every morning the foyer was filled with normal people who commuted in from the leafy suburbs of Brussels. None of them knew that, beyond the unmanned reception on the twelfth floor, behind gates made from frosted, armored glass, there was a whole office filled with technicians from the National
Defense Radio Establishment, FRA, along with source controllers and analysts from the Swedish Security Service, Säpo.

The Section was the secret branch of Sweden's presence in Brussels. An experiment, some said. Six months in, the cooperation between FRA and Säpo was working better than expected. They were all in the same line of business. Bente Jensen had recruited with care, along with her deputy, an officer from FRA. The job description comprised one sentence: to combine targeted signals intelligence with human intelligence gathering abroad.

Officially, Säpo wasn't allowed to operate outside of Sweden. According to Swedish law, the Security Service was not permitted to make use of signals intelligence. Everyone knew that was completely stupid. The modern world required targeted intelligence gathering, even abroad. Bente had hated the feeling that had spread throughout Counterterrorism in the years before the formation of the Section—that it was impossible to tell where the enemy was; that you were just waiting for the next catastrophe. The blindness had spread, they had lost focus, started to miss things. Enemies had moved around like gray shadows in the field of vision, but they hadn't been able to distinguish them. Wahhabi terrorists had been able to strike, undetected until the explosive was primed. They had been lucky. Abdulwahab's failed attack in a street filled with Christmas shoppers in Stockholm was the only disaster that had actually hit. But there had been more, things that the media and parliamentary populists never got to hear about, like the white-supremacy movement that was constantly growing and becoming better organized, or the extremist groups within the environmental movements planning attacks against storage sites for highly enriched uranium. They were out there, but the politicians refused to listen. Without signals intelligence it was impossible to track them. It was like slowly getting cataracts. Säpo had long been fumbling in the dark. She had been at Counterterrorism when the laws banning them from using material gathered by FRA had come into force, and it had been mere months before their grasp on reality had been lost. In the future, they would probably describe them
as the blind years. Several failed counterterrorism initiatives and the Abdulwahab fiasco had made people in the field begin to say that the Security Service should only be brought on board if you wanted to get shot in the leg. It was humiliating.