The Last Compromise (22 page)

It
was a large rectangular control room, like a control tower at an airport, with
a long row of screens and buttons and lights along the length of the large
windows. The windows even had windshield wipers. They were positioned
vertically, like on a ship, and they were working away to wipe the water off the
glass, and to keep open the view of an enormous cityscape of cranes, cargo
ships, oil drums and densely stacked containers. There were nine or ten people
sitting on chairs along the whole row of control panels, their backs turned to
them. They were all wearing white shirts.

Visser
took a step forward and started proclaiming something to everybody in loud
Dutch. Hans understood ‘politie’, ‘helpen’ and, again, ‘container’.

Everybody
turned around and stared at him; nobody moved.

So
there was no boss. Visser walked over to a young man, almost a teenager, and
put his hand on his shoulder. ‘You, what’s your name?’

‘Bas
van den…’

‘Ah,
my first name is also Bas!’ Visser turned back to Hans without removing his
hand from the guy’s shoulder, winked, and said to Hans, ‘That’s a short form of
Sebastiaan.’

Hans
approached the two, leaving the uniformed policeman behind, and they stuck with
English.

Visser
took his hand away from the controller’s shoulder and said, ‘The container was
sent here by A&C in Vienna.’

Young
Bas hesitated. ‘Can I see a paper or something?’

All
the other controllers had returned to their own work.

‘Do
you really need the paperwork?’, Visser asked. ‘Do you know what will happen if
we come to visit you every day, to check all your stinky containers from
Stinkystan one by one?’

‘Er,
yes, I do need the paperwork.’

Visser
grinned and showed him a printed certificate defining the ambit of the
Commission’s investigation and requesting the assistance of the Dutch police.
It had Tienhoven’s signature on it.

Hans
wasn’t sure this was enough to search premises or to take evidence. Actually he
knew it wasn’t enough. But maybe Bas junior just needed something sufficiently
persuasive in writing, so he was covered against his own boss.

Bas
turned to face the control panel and started typing away on his keyboard. A
list of entries appeared on one of the screens in front of him.

‘These
are the incoming shipments from A&C Vienna,’ Bas said. ‘They are not
sailing from Vienna, obviously. They come from different countries with a sea
port, as you can see here it’s mostly Australia. This is what arrived here in
the last six months.’

Hans’s
heart sank. The whole screen was filled with rows of letters and numbers, and
it was just the first screen of nine.

He
took a breath and asked Bas, ‘Can you show me the shipments that have been
cancelled in the past two years?’

Bas
looked up to him, then turned back to his panel and started typing again. The
screen showed only four entries. They all included the word Petten.

‘What
are those?’, Hans asked.

Visser
was still standing behind Bas’s other shoulder, looking at the screen, too.

‘The
code identifies it as cargo with ionising radiation. I’d have to search deeper
to find out what it was.’

‘No,
that’s okay, can you just tell me the dates?’

Hans
took the printout of Viktor’s list from his jacket pocket.

‘Here
they are,’ Bas said, pointing to a smaller screen to the right of the main one.

Hans
looked at the dates on the screen and compared them with the suspicious months
on his list. It was no match.

‘Okay,’
he said. ‘Just check the last month. Where did the containers intended for
Petten go?’

Bas
started typing. The large screen changed, then the small screen displayed a new
list.

‘They
were all put on lorries for road transport to Petten,’ Bas explained. ‘Except
one, which was loaded onto another cargo vessel.’

‘And
where did that vessel go?’

‘Wait.’
Bas made the destination port appear on the small screen, and said, ‘Through
the North Sea, around Denmark and into the Baltic Sea. The destination is Tallinn,
Estonia.’

Hans
paused. But not for long.

‘Can
you please check all the instances in the past two years when a shipment
intended for Petten was sent further to Tallinn?’

Bas
didn’t even look up anymore. He typed, and the large screen showed a new list
of four entries.

‘The
dates?’

They
appeared on the small screen. Hans compared them with his printed list. They
fit. Every time the reported use of uranium dropped Europe-wide in a
statistically unusual way, a container had been diverted from Petten to Tallinn
via Rotterdam. Hans remembered what Clarissa had said. Petten received the
uranium not just for itself, they also distributed some of it to other users
abroad. That’s why one diverted container had in the end affected four
different countries.

‘When
will this last container arrive in Tallinn?’

‘Tomorrow
morning, I guess.’

Hans
stood upright again and turned to Visser.

‘What
can we do about this?’

Visser
shrugged.

‘I
can feel that you want to follow that container, yes?’, he said, with a
half-suppressed grin that Hans found condescending. ‘But I will tell you how it
is. From our point of view nothing illegal happened here. Stuff arrives and
leaves, that’s normal, it’s a seaport. I assume that Petten hasn’t brought any
charges about being robbed. And now that ship is clearly outside Dutch
territorial waters anyway. If you think it’s an international criminal
operation, we’ll help, together with Austria and Estonia and the Commission and
whatever. I’m ready to contribute.’

It
was absolutely evident that Hans was in no position to mobilise international
police efforts of any kind. His own investigation was probably closed by now,
while he himself was still the subject of a Luxembourgish police investigation
that was very much open. That left Hans with two options. Prince Ivan on the
horse had to choose between three roads, Hans’s choice was much easier.

The
first option was to return to base, say hello to Tienhoven, do some more honest
explaining to the Luxembourgish police, be told nothing at all by the
director-general let alone the BND, add almost no information to a case that
was closed anyway, and continue going after aunts hiring their own nephews.
Whoever was tracking him would just catch up with him in Brussels. In the
meantime, a freighter would continue steaming through the seas of northern
Europe, carrying radioactive cargo to the capital city of his homeland. Hans
would one day open the newspaper, and read about what happened to it in the
end. If Russian-backed militias detonated a dirty bomb in Tallinn, with Russia
denying it had supplied the uranium by pointing at its Western origin; if the
militias went on to claim that they would feel much safer in a separate
Russian-speaking new border republic of Narva, rather than in a collapsing
Estonian state; if in fact they would feel even safer as part of Russia proper;
if Russia that way managed to carve out a chunk of Estonia without triggering a
NATO response… then Hans could shrug, fold the newspaper, and tell himself that
he had done everything he could.

All
that was the first option. The second was the option that Hans had already
chosen.

He
said to Bas, ‘Can you print out the details for this last container, the serial
number, the name of the ship and so on, please?’

Bas
pressed a few buttons.

Hans
turned back to Visser, ‘I need to go to Tallinn. Can I book a flight from one
of your computers at the police station?’

‘Sure
thing,’ Visser said. ‘Thanks Bas!’

He
slapped the young man on the shoulder. Hans nodded to Bas, in a much more
dignified way. ‘Thank you.’ He shook his hand.

‘This is Doctor Offerbrück,
I really believe you should come over to the autopsy room now.’

Becker
almost grinned, but he didn’t, because this meant either very good or very bad
news, and it called above all for concentration. He ignored the thunder of the
cargo plane lifting off from the airport outside his window.

‘I’m
coming.’ He hung up, left his office, hollering to the unit secretary next door
that he’d be at Kirchberg hospital, and took the elevator to the ground floor. ‘Over
to the autopsy room’ had in reality meant ‘over to my hospital’. The moderate
number of mysterious deaths in Luxembourg didn’t justify keeping a specialised
lab just for the police.

Becker
left the building and headed for the parking lot. Jackpot, a big fat black SUV
was standing right there. Becker hurried, dragging his wobbly body over to the
guard in his booth, to put his signature in the log and claim the car before
anybody else could.

He
got in very easily, thank you very much, buckled up, started the engine and
drove off. There wasn’t anyone to stop the traffic for him, so he waited for a
gap in the stream of cars on the street that ran parallel to the airport’s
runway. He turned right and took another right after a few hundred metres,
driving down into a narrow ravine. It was the typical urbanisation in the
valleys: a gap between two plateaus that offered just enough space for one road
and one row of houses on either side, their back gardens rising almost
vertically up the slope.

After
another few hundred metres he turned right again, and the SUV engine hummed
discreetly as it pulled the heavy car and its heavy driver up to the Kirchberg
plateau. Most of the European institutions were clustered at the plateau’s southwest
end. The northeast end, where Becker’s car now emerged, was the site of a large
hospital complex.

***

Doctor
Offerbrück was waiting for him behind the opaque glass doors at the end of a
long white corridor that looked like a brightly lit maintenance shaft inside a
windowless spaceship. They were three floors below street level. They shook
hands and Offerbrück led Becker to a table in the middle of the room. The
floor, the walls and even the ceiling were covered in white tiles. There were
other tables and cabinets and sinks along all the walls. A magnifying glass on
an extendable arm was suspended from the ceiling above the table in the middle.
The only object on that table was a metal tray. Becker mentally braced himself
to see what he expected to see. But the tray contained only a few clean and
bloodless splinters of metal.

Becker
was half relieved and half disappointed. He looked questioningly at Offerbrück.

‘These
are fragments that I recovered from the inside of parts of the skull,’ Offerbrück
explained. ‘Crime scene picked up everything that had been lying around in the
bathroom, but this here was buried in the bone and came here with the body.’

They
both leaned over the tray.

‘What
are they? Tooth fillings?’ Becker immediately regretted offering a theory,
because chances were that these were not fillings, and that Offerbrück would
immediately exploit this. But he didn’t.

‘They
are not fillings, but they also must have been inside his mouth when the charge
exploded,’ he said. ‘I believe that these are parts of the fuse, the trigger
mechanism.’

Doctor
Offerbrück took a sheet of paper from another table and handed it to Becker. ‘This
is the chemical analysis of the unexploded remnants of the material.’

Becker
had a look. The sheet contained twenty or thirty rows of figures and
abbreviations; some of them he recognised as chemical elements.

‘The
explosive charge is absolutely generic,’ Offerbrück explained. ‘The main
ingredient is a standard nitroamine, with paraffin wax to stabilise it. It’s
used in hand grenades in armies all over the world. Except here someone must
have disassembled a normal grenade, or built the charge from scratch with the
same ingredients, because the explosion was very small. It’s custom-made for a
human head, apparently, or mouth rather. And the fuse must have been
custom-made, too, which brings me to the fragments here. What I wanted to show
you is this.’

Offerbrück
took a forceps, squeezed it, and picked up one of the fragments from the tray.
With his other hand he pulled down the magnifying glass and turned on the
circle of lights around the glass. It lit up the optically enhanced splinter. Becker
looked through the glass, his cheek almost touching Offerbrück’s, and he immediately
saw what the man must have meant.

A
small symbol was engraved at the edge of the splinter. It was a circle and a bar,
connected to each other with a little line. Becker tilted his head. Depending
on how he looked at it, the symbol resembled a round street sign on a pole with
a broad base, or an upper-case O and an I with a dash between them.

Becker
asked, ‘What do you think this is?’

‘I
had no idea when I saw it. Then Doctor Senninger stopped by, to take tissue
samples from the body for the DNA matching. Senninger used to organise the
school exchanges with our Russian twin town. And he had a look and told me what
it could be.’

Offerbrück
was almost glowing, Becker had never seen him excited like that. Maybe it was
the fact that we was dealing with, it was safe to say, a bizarre homicide,
rather than with some car accident.

Offerbrück
revealed his discovery. ‘It’s the Russian letter Yu, as in Yuri Gagarin. The
marks to its right look like part of a next letter or number.’

Becker
looked at the splinter, then at Offerbrück. There had been nothing mean in what
the doctor had said so far. And the bizarre homicide was turning more and more
political, with a lobby full of mysterious Americans and secretive Commission
investigators, and with disappearing camera footage. And now this.

Becker
asked him, ‘What do you think this means?’

‘You’re
the investigator,’ Offerbrück said, again without any maliciousness in his
voice. ‘But it looks like it’s been manufactured with Russian spare parts.
Although perhaps other languages use that letter, too, like Bulgarian or
Serbian maybe.’

Zayek
had a Bulgarian passport, his boss at the Commission had mentioned that. But
Bulgaria wasn’t particularly known for its weapons industry. Becker nodded and
decided to share his first thoughts. ‘It can mean a lot of things, Doctor. It’s
manufactured in Russia and used by somebody who didn’t know that, or didn’t
care; or by someone who wanted to actually tell us it’s Russian; or by someone
who wanted us to believe it’s Russian even though it’s not. Or it’s a double
bluff, Russians deliberately planting Russian letters so we’ll think it can’t
be them. And so on. Or it’s not Russia but Bulgaria, or both, with a mafia or
oligarch or ex-KGB connection.’

The
more Becker’s mood darkened, the more Offerbrück lit up. Any moment the hair on
his head would catch fire, his ears radiated a light that was enough to read a
book under.

‘Please
tell me, Doctor,’ Becker said, returning to the more immediate questions of the
case at hand. ‘Why would anyone go to the trouble of using this custom-made
device instead of, say, shooting the man in the head?’

Offerbrück
tried to assume an earnest look again.

‘From
a technical or anatomical point of view, I’d say it doesn’t make much of a
difference, Inspector,’ he said slowly, but Becker felt nevertheless how eager
the man was to move on to the perspective in which it
would
make a
difference. ‘The net lethality is probably the same. There are a few percent of
gunshots to the head that aren’t lethal, because the bullet fails to cause the
necessary trauma to the brain or major arteries or the spinal cord. An
explosion would most certainly be lethal, but then the charge might
malfunction, especially if the victim chews or salivates on the fuse.’

Becker
waited for the next part, and he didn’t have to wait very long.

‘The
key is probably the logistics,’ Offerbrück continued, lowering his voice. ‘Concealment
and transportation. Whether it’s an assassination or a suicide, such a charge
is much easier to carry around than a gun. A charge won’t even look much like a
weapon. You can keep it in your pocket, in case you need it later. Modern
detectors at airports would pick up the explosive, but otherwise it looks
relatively harmless. A gun, on the other hand, is a completely different story.’

Becker
nodded. ‘What do you think about the head that’s missing as a result?’

‘It
might theoretically prevent the victim’s identification, but not here in Europe,
and especially if you already know who the victim probably is. Even without
fingerprints, DNA testing and matching of tissue to samples from people’s
apartments is not very complicated here. For Zayek you’ll have the result of
the quick DNA test later today, for example, which will allow you to tell
whether it’s
probably
him or definitely
not
him. If it’s probably
him, we’ll do the big test to be sure, and the final results will be ready
early next week. If that’s positive, too, as were the fingerprints, you can
pronounce him dead and inform any authority that needs to know.’

‘Okay,’
Becker said. ‘So coming back to the charge, it’s the logistics of the weapon
itself. Or maybe the powerful message that a big messy explosion sends.’

‘It
could be both. Yes, it could be both.’

Offerbrück’s
excitement had not diminished at all, if anything it had picked up again.

‘Thank
you for this, Doctor,’ Becker said. ‘I appreciate your help.’

‘You
are welcome,’ Offerbrück said. ‘And I heard it’s your birthday, all the best
wishes to you.’

They
shook hands. Becker wasn’t entirely sure what was going on. Maybe Offerbrück
was drunk. There surely were enough chemicals in this basement to survive a
nuclear winter without ever sobering up. But Becker decided to put aside the
sarcasm for now, and to be neutral the next time they’d talk. If Offerbrück
would show the same kindness, Becker would reciprocate.