The Last Compromise (10 page)

Hoffmann
turned around again to face Hans. ‘I think that, if the man is operational and
has access, it would be the sort of thing he’d be expected to do.’

So
Hoffmann either didn’t know anything about any nuclear reports, or he wasn’t
telling. Again they sat in silence.

Either
way, Zayek was installed, apparently. He had gotten on the reserve list under
more or less dubious circumstances, and now he was there. Hans thought about
his own recruitment process. The long preparation, the preliminary exam that
weeded out ninety-five percent of applicants, then the assessment, then the long
wait. Finally the news that he was on the list, a mere electronic notification
that changed a whole life.

‘Maybe
the Russians simply didn’t know where in the Commission he would end up,’ Hans said.
‘With the fake Bulgarian identity they could make sure he got onto the reserve
list, but once you are on the list you have to apply for jobs in a normal way.
Maybe they had hoped he’d end up somewhere even more important?’

Tienhoven
turned his head and said, ‘What if he’s not even meant to do anything, but just
to sit there? To wait there to be exposed as a spy at the right moment?’

Hans
looked at his boss. ‘You mean the Russians would leak to the press that Zayek
is their spy?’

‘It
would be embarrassing for the Commission,’ Tienhoven replied. ‘Maybe more
embarrassing for us than for them. Everybody knows that countries spy on each
other. No offence, Mister Hoffmann. But say the European Union is negotiating a
trade deal with the Americans, or with China. Intelligence sharing about Iran’s
nuclear plans. A gas deal with someone other than Russia. Or say there are
elections, or a nomination of someone for an important post. And right before
the critical moment the papers tell the world that the European Commission is
infested with moles.’

Nobody
replied.

Tienhoven
sighed. ‘Let’s just stick to what we have, and see where the man’s reaction
gets us,’ he said, more to Hoffmann than to Hans. Hoffmann took the hint, and
motioned to get out of the car.

‘Wait,’
Hans said. ‘One more thing.’

Hoffmann
had opened the door a few centimetres. He stopped, opened it wider to have a
better swing, and pulled it back towards him to shut it firmly again. Then he
turned around and waited for Hans’s question.

‘What
about security?’, Hans asked. ‘We ask him are you a spy, he runs away. Or
attacks one of us. Or takes one of us hostage. What if there’s an escalation?’

‘I
don’t think he’ll attack anyone,’ Hoffmann said. ‘They almost never do. If he
takes one of you hostage, we’ll comply with his demands, give him safe passage
to Moscow or to the Russian embassy in Luxembourg. He’s gone anyway. If he runs
away, we’ll call the local police and catch him. It’s not like I’ll be alone on
the scene.’

‘There
will be more BND people around the building?’, Hans asked.

‘You
won’t see them. And if he doesn’t run away, we’ll call the local police anyway,
because we want him extradited to Germany. Unless he comes with us to German
territory himself. But that would mean he has accepted some kind of bargain, in
which case nobody calls any police. Clear?’

‘Do
you trust your defector in the consulate?’, Hans asked. It was the question he
hadn’t asked in Maastricht, because he’d thought the answer was obvious.

‘No,
I don’t,’ Hoffmann said. ‘Maybe he’s not a real defector, and this is just
their way of asking us to check on Zayek. Maybe they want to get rid of him.
Although they could have just given us a call then. Maybe the defector told us
what he had to say, and then used the opportunity to plant a bug or a computer
virus in the consulate’s system. Or to recruit someone on the inside. Maybe the
man in the consulate
is
a real defector, but one who’s been fed
bullshit, so now he’s exposing a man who isn’t a spy at all, but the Russians
nevertheless know the man in the consulate defected. Or the information is real,
and the Russians will try to blackmail him into coming out of the consulate
again. Either way, I don’t care about the man in the consulate, I care about
the man in Luxembourg. The one we’ll see very soon, if we leave sort of now.’

Nobody
replied.

‘Oh,
and one more thing from my side,’ Hoffmann said, in a friendlier voice. ‘May I
suggest talking to him outside his office. There’s a hotel with a nice open
lobby across the street from his building.’

‘How
do you know?’, Tienhoven asked.

‘Because
I’ve been there.’

‘Why
a hotel lobby?’, Hans asked.

‘Because
he’ll relax more if we talk over a cup of coffee in a public space,’ Hoffmann replied.
‘Instead of crowding him in his own office, with his colleagues listening in.
I’m sure you do your first-contact meetings in public places, too.’

We
do, Hans thought. Plus, Mister Hoffmann, you don’t have a badge to enter
Commission buildings, and you don’t want to be logged as a visitor or have the
security camera take pictures of your face.

Tienhoven
asked, ‘How do you suggest we get him from his office to the hotel, then?’

‘You
go in and ask him nicely,’ Hoffmann said.

‘We
could tell him that we’re investigating his boss,’ Hans proposed. ‘And then we
ask him to come over and have a chat.’

Hoffmann
nodded, and said, ‘I’ll wait for you at the hotel, then, and I’ll get us some
coffee.’

Tienhoven
said, ‘Like we agreed. I ask the first questions, then it’s your turn.’

‘I’ll
be the bad cop then,’ Hoffmann said. He smiled, nodded to Tienhoven and Hans, got
out of the car, closed the door behind him, walked over to his Audi, got in and
sped off. Hans got out and reclaimed his passenger’s seat in the front of his
boss’s Renault.

Tienhoven
nodded to Hans. ‘Well done.’

He
started the engine. It was another twenty minutes to the Luxembourgish border,
and within ten minutes from that point they would be in the capital city and
the seat of, among other things, some of the offices of the Commission’s atomic
energy department.

***

When
Tienhoven turned off the engine, the noise of the motorway they’d just left
became audible. The entrance to the Commission building was right in front of
them. They didn’t see Hoffmann’s Audi, he must have parked it around the
corner.

Not
that there were many corners in this place. It was a wide empty area on the
edge of Luxembourg city, right next to the motorway belt. A wind-swept business
park, essentially, with individual modern glass buildings planted into the
flat, treeless soil far apart from each other. There was the Commission
building in front of them, rather long than high, with white walls and black
windows, and with nothing much around it. The structure coming closest to
qualify as a neighbouring building was a similar but smaller office cube with a
newsagent’s shop on the ground floor. It was fifty metres away across the wide
street. The cube’s only neighbour, in turn, was a hotel a hundred metres further
down that street. It was a branch of an international chain, identical to
hundreds of other hotels across Europe that had been built on empty lots to the
same specifications. And the hotel didn’t have any directly adjacent
neighbouring buildings either. There was only yet another office building with a
façade of black reflecting glass facing the hotel across the street, on the
same side of the street that the Commission building was on.

Hans
remembered the city centre of Luxembourg as a dense grid of shopping streets
and squares and churches sitting precariously atop a plateau surrounded by steep
ravines. But this area here was mostly wind and space. No churches, no ravines.

Hans
looked around a second time. He noticed that he didn’t see any of the backup
Hoffmann had said would be around the building. Which meant that either the man
was more or less alone, or that they were sitting and waiting in parked cars,
or driving around in circles.

‘What’s
his boss’s name again?’, Tienhoven asked.

‘Zayek’s?
Stavros Theodorakis,’ Hans said. It was the person they were supposedly
investigating. Let’s see, what kind of charges could that possibly be?
Tienhoven could have said something mean now, but he didn’t. He’d never do.

‘Let’s
go,’ he simply said and got out. Hans followed him. Yes, let’s go. As they
walked towards the entrance, the car behind them made some noise to assure them
that it was locked.

***

Hans
and Tienhoven walked into the entrance hall through automatic doors. As was the
case in almost all Commission buildings, the hall sported an array of flags
near the window, the blue European one and one national flag for each of the
Union’s member countries. In the fifties a place like this would have displayed
the six flags of the original founding members. The dense battery of colours
now attested to the expansion of the Union’s reach and, at the same time, to
its appeal to ever more countries that at some point had wished to join. Some
of the members had acceded grudgingly, some with unbound enthusiasm and hope.
But no-one had been included by force. A historical first in a continent where
normally your next mortal enemy was never more than a three days’ march away.

Tienhoven
showed the security guard his badge, and Hans followed suit. These did not
specifically identify them as anti-fraud, they were just the generic plastic
cards that every Commission employee carried to gain access to buildings and
parking garages.

‘I
am looking for a Mister Boris Zayek, please,’ Tienhoven said.

The
guard checked a list. It was a printout, a few sheets stapled together. The man
ran down the lines with his finger. He wore the uniform of a private security
company. Hans knew they had recently changed contractors again, but were
thinking about internalising security completely and bring it within the remit
of a Commission department. The employees would remain the same, though. They
would swap uniforms in the same way they’d changed them when the new firm had
received the current contract.

‘Ground
floor, office 00E02. The first office in the corridor to your right.’

They
looked at each other. It could be that Zayek had seen them approach, Hans
thought. But then again the point was not to use the element of surprise, but,
quite to the contrary, to calmly and reassuringly persuade him to follow.

‘And
Mister Stavros Theodorakis?’, Hans asked.

The
guard had another look at his list and said, ‘Office 01E005, it’s the same
corridor, just one floor further up.’

Hans
nodded to Tienhoven. This meant the supposed target wasn’t sitting right next
door to the real target.

‘Thank
you,’ Tienhoven said to the guard and led the way to the mouth of the corridor on
the ground floor that the man had indicated first.

Hans
whispered, ‘What if the Russians have already alerted him, what if they know
about the defector, he’ll get suspicious right away.’

Tienhoven
whispered back, ‘Relax already. Remember, we know nothing about any spies or
defectors. We just want to talk. If he runs away he runs away, I’m not going to
run after him. Now shut up.’

Hans
and his boss reached Zayek’s office without encountering anyone. There were a
few more open office doors down the corridor. Through Zayek’s open door Hans
saw a man behind his computer. His side was turned to the door.

Tienhoven
said in a low, apologetically subdued voice, ‘Excuse me, do you work in the
unit of Mister Theodorakis?’

The
man turned around to face them. Hans recognised him from the personnel file
picture. The man in the office was around forty, and he was physically
unremarkable in every respect. He would have to wear a moustache to have at
least one characteristic feature, Hans thought. Zayek wasn’t even wearing
glasses, and his face was cleanly shaven.

‘Yes?’

‘I’m
sorry to disturb you, but I’m afraid it’s about your boss. You are Mister Za…’
Tienhoven struggled, clearly on purpose.

‘Zayek.
What about my boss?’, Zayek asked. It looked like he was half wary and half really
curious.

‘It’s
a really delicate situation. You see, I’m from anti-fraud,’ Tienhoven said and
showed him his anti-fraud identification. It had twelve European stars shining
in a hologram half overlapping the cardholder’s picture. Surely the man had
never seen such a card in his life, just like few people have ever seen a real
police identity card in their own country. ‘You and your colleagues might help
me before this turns into a big affair. Could we perhaps talk to you for just
five or ten minutes? I promise it won’t take any longer than that.’

Hans
saw Zayek hesitate.

‘Not
here, of course,’ Tienhoven hastened to add. ‘Let me invite you to a cup of
coffee in the hotel lobby across the street, okay? My name is Willem Tienhoven.’

He
extended his hand, Zayek took it, and since he had gotten up to shake hands, it
meant that he was already standing. Ready to go.

‘Please,
after you,’ Tienhoven said.