The Last Compromise (20 page)

‘The
research centre guesthouse. But don’t call to confirm. I’ll wait for the car,
and unless you call I’ll assume it’s coming. We don’t have much time.’

‘Okay.
And we’ll talk it all through when you’re back, yes? And Luxembourg police want
to talk to you, too, they keep calling and I’m not supposed to call them back.
It’s all a bit much right now.’

‘Goodbye
Willem.’

Hans
put the receiver down.

Luxembourg

Becker’s
lean limousine came to a stop in front of an unremarkable small office building,
in a business park right outside Luxembourg city. This was the other side of
the motorway belt, meaning that it was meant for firms that needed to be close
enough to clients but whose business didn’t depend on customers strolling in
spontaneously while shopping for clothes.

He
turned off the engine and made a point of not sighing before getting up.
Instead he sighed afterwards. He shouldn’t have bought the ridiculous watch, he
thought. He should have saved the money, and then some more money, and then he
should have sold the car and bought a new one with high seats. And then he’d just
use his private car for work, instead of playing the car fleet lottery every
day. Again all the big ones had been taken.

He
approached the entrance. There were six company logos attached to the right of
the door. One company name was more meaningless than the next; half of them
featured the word ‘Solutions’. Six names, Becker noted, even though the
building could have accommodated only four tenants. Two of the companies
probably existed only on paper, each owning fifty percent of the other. But
four of the companies looked real, in the sense that there were physical people
sitting in physical offices selling goods or services. Whether the goods and
services themselves were real was another question. Luxecur, the firm that was
supposed to keep the hotel’s security camera footage, in any event didn’t
always deliver what it sold.

Luxecur,
of course. Every other company in this country had the word ‘Lux’ in its name
somewhere. Luxdogs, Luxcats, Luxwindowcleaners.

The
front door of the building wasn’t locked. The offices of Luxecur were on the
ground floor to the left, opposite the offices of a firm called Analogue Solutions.
Becker tried to open the glass door to the office itself, but couldn’t. There
was a black box on the side, for people to hold their plastic badge against. Becker
knocked on the glass. A woman came to the door and stopped without opening it.

‘Becker,
police,’ Becker said, holding his police identification against the glass. ‘It’s
about the hotel camera.’

The
woman nodded and opened up. He stepped inside. The room was modest bordering on
the spartan. There were four workstations with computers, but only one of them
was turned on. No posters or logos on the walls. There weren’t even any bulky
computer servers he could see. As far as Becker could tell, the woman ran the
show alone, and out of an empty office.

He
looked at her more closely. It had been hard to tell her age at first, because
she was wearing oversized glasses with a plastic frame, which had a slightly
distortive effect. But her face was young. Such glasses had been fashionable in
the eighties, although young people probably didn’t know that, Becker thought.
Or maybe they did, and this was deliberately retro.

‘What
happened to the camera footage?’, Becker asked.

They
were still standing in the room, and the woman still hadn’t said anything. She
still didn’t open her mouth.

‘Okay,’
Becker said. ‘Let’s start again. My name is Didier Becker. What is your name?’
He frowned. ‘Do you even speak Luxembourgish?’

‘Yes,
I do,’ the woman said. ‘I cannot tell you much because our business is
sensitive.’

‘What
does that mean?’, Becker wondered.

‘It
means you have to threaten to lock me up or disrupt the business if I don’t
talk.’

Who
was this woman, and how old was she, really?

Becker
shrugged. ‘I’ll arrest you for obstructing a police investigation, and then a
whole squad of policemen will come and take evidence, and they’ll unplug all
your servers, and I’ll call the press and they will take pictures of policemen
carrying computer drives out of your office.’

The
woman nodded. ‘We’ve had a security breach. Someone hacked into the servers and
deleted the recordings. But only for the hotel in question, as far as we can
tell, and only for that day. You understand that, as a security company, we
don’t want to make this public. It could have affected anyone. Our server
security is better than it is at your police building. Our business depends on
it.’

Becker
ignored the part about the police servers. ‘Where are your servers?’

‘Not
here, obviously. There is one somewhere in this country, its backup is in
another European country, which has its own backup in a third country, which
has its own backup outside of Europe.’

‘Does
this mean you can breach it from outside Europe?’

‘You
can breach it from anywhere. The backups only make copies of each other, the
primary feed comes through here. But in order to breach it you have to be very
good.’

Becker
thought for a moment. ‘Can the police recover it?’

‘The
police can hire a contractor, and that will be a company like us,’ the woman
said. She still hadn’t mentioned her name. ‘Maybe it will be us, full stop. If
we can’t do it, practically no-one can. And we’ve been trying all night. My
colleagues have left now.’ She pointed at the empty desks. ‘It’s gone.’

‘Who
would be capable of erasing such a recording?’

‘For
a cyber-attack at such a level, for one that can’t be traced back to the
hacker, and to thoroughly overwrite erased memory so you can’t properly
reconstruct it, you’d need very advanced technology. Plus a lot of computing
power to find and breach the backup servers in the first place. All I can say
is that this wasn’t a lone guy sitting in his mother’s basement.’

‘I
will need your name,’ Becker said.

‘Clara
Weber.’

‘Thank
you. Please let me know if you find anything.’ Becker gave her his business
card, shook her hand, turned around and left.

Outside
he checked his watch. Maybe he was getting used to it after all. Anyway, if he
hurried now he could still catch the chief prosecutor at police headquarters.

He
opened the car door, pressed his back against the back rest of the driver’s seat,
and let his body glide down with as much friction as possible to slow him down
in the descent. Once his behind had touched down, he took out his mobile phone
and made the first of two calls.

‘This
is Becker, it’s about the lost camera footage from the hotel. You heard? Yes, I
need you guys to come to a local company named Luxecur. The contact is Clara
Weber. She says their computers have been hacked, I have no way of telling
whether it’s true. No, no uniforms for the moment, only some IT technicians.
Just take some van and come and check it out. Yes. Thanks.’

He
touched the screen and dialled the next number.

‘Becker
here, did the Commission guys call back? Yes, I thought so. Call me on this
phone if they do. Is Jacques still in the building? All right, I’m on my way.
Fifteen minutes.’

Becker
buckled up and started the engine.

Hans, Siim and
Clarissa sat down around the kitchen table. Now all of them were showered and
fully dressed. They had eaten pre-baked reheated rolls with butter and cheese
or jam. Each of them was now holding a coffee cup. The round black object was
lying in the middle of the table between them.

Siim
was the first to speak. ‘What did you get into, Hans?’

‘That’s
the point,’ Hans said. ‘It’s me. Not you guys.’

Hans
had no way of knowing precisely who had put the tracker on Siim’s car, but he
knew fairly well who it was
not
. It was not the Commission, because they
didn’t do such things. It was not the police, neither Luxembourg nor Belgium
nor the Netherlands, because they could have simply stopped the car. It was probably
not Hoffmann, because he’d had a perfect opportunity to ask or take whatever
he’d wanted to ask or take in the gloomy hotel corridor.

‘It’s
about something I have, or something I know,’ Hans continued. ‘Or what they
think I have, or what they think I know. In any case you stay here. A Dutch
police car will pick me up, I hope. Once I’m gone you should be able to
continue living your life as before, leave the compound, go into town, whatever.
When this is all over, we’ll have a beer in Brussels.’

Siim
offered, ‘What if it isn’t you, Hans, but me? I mean, I was joking about my
secret railway plans, but there are actually some big commercial interests at
stake there.’

Clarissa
asked, ‘Your railway plans are not written by just one person, I hope?’

‘You’d
be surprised,’ Siim grinned. ‘But no, you’re right.’

They
all took a sip of coffee.

‘So
what do we do with the GPS tracker?’, Siim asked. ‘In the movies we would now
glue it to some random car, to mislead the pursuers.’

Hans
thought about it. ‘I don’t think that’s necessary, or smart. They had all night
to come here. Maybe they’re sitting behind some dune outside the compound right
now. Maybe there is a drone hovering above Petten. Either way, the tracker is
where the car is, that’s not the problem. What’s important is that they should
see me leave.’

Hans
thought of something that he had. The box, and the code. He didn’t want to try
and open the box’s locks again, so he brought the serial number he’d copied in
the hotel lobby.

‘Does
this code look familiar to you?’, Hans asked Clarissa. She had a look at the
back side of the sheet and shook her head.

‘This
could be anything,’ Siim said, after having a look, too. ‘Where’s it from?’

‘From
the box that turned out not to be radioactive,’ Hans said. ‘Someone attacked me
in the hotel when it happened, he might have dropped it.’

He
might be looking for it.

‘What’s
inside the box?’, Clarissa asked.

‘Air,
the code, nothing else,’ Hans said.

‘There
could be fingerprints on the box,’ Siim offered.

Hans
shook his head. ‘A man who’s worried about his prints wears gloves.’

Although,
had the attacker been wearing gloves when he’d squeezed Hans’s fingers?

‘Maybe
particles of whatever had been inside the box,’ Clarissa suggested.

A
car sounded its horn outside on the yard. The three looked at each other and
got up. Hans led the way outside.

It
was still windy on the yard, and raindrops were falling on the compound and the
buildings and cars and people inside it.

In
the middle of the yard stood a big, dark blue van with iron grating welded to
the windows. A man was standing next to it. He had a muscular but compact body.
A policeman, not a bodybuilder. He was completely bald and wore dark blue
trousers with large pockets sewn onto the thighs, and a dark blue woollen
pullover with two pens sticking out of the breast pocket. There were epaulettes
with stripes sewn onto the shoulders. Water drops had formed on the man’s bald
head.

As
Hans approached him, the man asked, ‘What’s your name?’

‘Hans
Tamberg.’

‘Where
are you going?’

‘Rotterdam
police.’

The
man pointed at the door on the passenger’s side, mutely telling Hans to get in.
A professional routine, Hans thought. He’d had surgery in a hospital once, and
several nurses in a row had approached him and asked him more or less the same
questions. Not ‘ah you must be Hans’, but ‘state your name, state what surgery
you’re undergoing’.

Hans
turned to face Siim and Clarissa. He quickly hugged them, one after the other,
and turned back to the van. There were long words stencilled on the side of the
car.
Koninklijke Marechaussee
. Nothing else, no stripes, no crowns, no
lions. That had to be more than just police. It came across as some kind of a
military gendarmerie, which was exactly what Hans needed. Maybe the back of the
van was full of riot gear to beat up football hooligans with. Or racks with
automatic rifles. Hans got in, the bald gendarme started the diesel engine, switched
the windshield wipers inside the grating to interval, turned the van around and
drove towards the exit. Once they’d passed through the gate he turned right and
accelerated. At the next intersection Hans saw a patrol car waiting for them.
It was the same dark blue as the van, and it had a bar of flashing blue lights
on the roof. Perfect, Hans thought. It’s a convoy.

Luxembourg

When
the elevator doors opened on Becker’s floor, he saw the chief prosecutor come
out of his office. ‘Jacques,’ Becker said. ‘Good thing I didn’t miss you.’

‘I
just checked in your office, you weren’t there, but now I have to leave,’ the
chief prosecutor replied. ‘Follow me to the car, okay?’

They
shook hands. Jacques Majerus was not only chief prosecutor of Luxembourg, he
was also the older cousin of Becker’s ex-wife. During the divorce Becker had
expected that whatever family connection they’d had would be cut off, but it
had turned out differently. Becker got along fairly well with his ex-cousin-in-law.
They weren’t exactly friends in any classical sense, though; Becker always knew
that. It was absolutely clear that Jacques wasn’t just some relative but
someone older, and there had never been any doubt that he was several
hierarchical steps higher than Becker. Not just in the way an inspector is the
superior of a junior policeman, but in the way a man who was half politician
was superior to ordinary civil servants. His royal highness’s chief prosecutor
Jacques Majerus had constant meetings with the minister of justice, weekly
meetings with the minister of the interior, monthly meetings with the
prime-minister. Several times a year he’d join the wining and dining with the Grand
Duke himself. Becker had never toasted with the monarch. He’d last seen him, on
a national day parade ages ago, as his highness had waved to the crowd. Becker
had been standing in that crowd. That was as ennobled as it got. All this meant
that the chief prosecutor was still the chief prosecutor, except that Becker
could call him Jacques, turn to him to resolve thorny questions, and expect him
to return his calls within one or two days. Which was more than could be said of
other inspectors, who had less influential ex-cousins-in-law.

‘How’s
Pascal?’, Majerus asked as they entered the elevator to go back down to the
ground floor.

‘Your
nephew is considering job offers,’ Becker replied. ‘Either geological research,
or finding gas fields under the sea for the big British and Norwegian energy
companies. Actually it’s research in both cases, but one is academic and the
other is commercial.’

‘He
should do both.’

‘That’s
what I told him, too. First one, then the other.’

‘I
meant both at the same time,’ Majerus replied. ‘Dig oil and gas for the
companies, then write a doctoral thesis about it. You have to be pragmatic with
these things. Oh, happy birthday Didier.’

‘Thank
you.’

The
elevator doors opened and they stepped outside. A uniformed policeman was
waiting for Majerus, ready to take him to his car.

‘Just
come with me, we’ll talk in the car,’ Majerus said. ‘This dead man Zayek is
causing a lot of, shall we say, unease.’

They
walked together to a waiting black limousine. As always Becker noted that it
had a licence plate with a very short number. He had seen the delicate but dead
serious logic of the licence plates during the national day parade. First some
heavy black limousines had arrived, but they’d still had ordinary licence
plates. The next wave of black limousines had shown off their two-digit
combinations. In the end the Grand Duke’s car had arrived. No licence plates at
all on that one, just the royal colours.

They
reached the car, the engine was already running. Majerus got in the back,
sitting on the right. Becker sat next to him, to his left. The driver was
behind the steering wheel, and Majerus’s assistant had already been sitting in
the passenger’s seat. The uniformed policeman who’d brought them to the car
walked out onto the street and stopped the traffic, so that the driver could
get the car and his passengers smoothly on the road without having to wait for
a gap or, God forbid, crane his neck. The man turned the wheel right, and within
seconds they were on their way to the city centre. A giant freight plane
thundered above them and rose into the sky ahead of them. So they are lifting
off from left to right now, Becker thought.

‘So
what do we know, and what do you need,’ Majerus asked Becker. The assistant
turned around in his seat and was now sitting basically with his back to the
windshield. This wasn’t a man giving another man a lift. This was a work
meeting that happened to take place inside a moving car.

‘We
know three things,’ Becker said. ‘One is that two Commission people, plus one
outsider, were talking to Zayek in the lobby right before he died. The second
is that there’s been some kind of fistfight at the reception counter mere
moments before he died. And the third is that probably some hacker erased all
security camera recordings, but the IT people are checking on that right now.’

‘Have
you positively identified the body?’

‘Not
yet, I’ve ordered fingerprints, and we should get DNA samples from Germany
today, that’s where he lived.’

‘Assuming
it’s Zayek, who killed him?’

‘I
don’t know yet. That’s why I wanted to see you.’

‘What
do you need?’, Majerus asked.

‘I
have two identified witnesses, and I would like to talk to both of them.’

Majerus
waited. There was no need to ask whether there was a problem. Clearly there was.

‘One
is an American officer named James F. Lawrence,’ Becker continued. ‘He was
checking out of the hotel when it happened, and he was involved in the
fistfight. I can send you his exact details as soon as I’m back in the office.
Will this car take me back?’

‘Didier,
please. Who is the second witness?’

Did
that mean yes or no? The assistant started writing something down in a little
booklet.

Becker
continued. ‘The second is a man named Hans Tamberg, he was one of the
Commission people, and he was involved in the fistfight, too. He should be in
Brussels, but he doesn’t answer his phone. His boss can’t be reached either.
His secretary says he’ll call back.’

Majerus’s
assistant continued scribbling away.

Becker
said, ‘Now, I don’t know anything about the American, except that I want his
point of view. I definitely know that Hans Tamberg is either lying or at least
hiding something very big. And I need you in order to get to both of them.’

The
driver turned left at a salmon-coloured corner pub building and drove down a
steep slope into a gorge, crossed the rail tracks that led through it, and
drove up again, turning right onto a straight road lined with tall trees to
continue towards the city centre.

‘This
is not an easy one,’ Majerus finally said. ‘You know yourself how low the
statistical murder rate in our country is. A fraction of a corpse per one
hundred thousand people per year, it basically doesn’t happen. And it should
stay that way, because we’re the host country for a whole orchestra of
international agencies. We don’t want to make them nervous. The banks are
already nervous because they might lose their tax benefits, now we don’t want
the European institutions to start worrying, too.’

The
car descended into another valley along a cliff. In a moment it would cross the
Alzette river, climb back up and emerge on another plateau with another
residential area.

‘I
understand you don’t want to sit around all day trying to reach some Brussels
bureaucrat who doesn’t answer his phone,’ Majerus continued. ‘That’s why I’ll
make the request to the Commission directly. The victim was one of their
employees. They want this resolved, they help us do it. Now about your
American.’

The
car reached an intersection. The avenue to the left led towards the central
railway station and the two and a half streets that constituted the seedy part
of town. The avenue to the right crossed the wide Petrusse gorge via a tall
stone viaduct connecting this plateau to the inner city proper, with the boutiques
and the government ministries and the cafés and the non-seedy bars. And that
was where the car turned.