Into a Raging Blaze (19 page)

Kempell said nothing. Hamrén pursed his lips. An uncomfortable silence fell over the table until Hamrén thanked everyone, quickly, to indicate that the discussion was over.

17

Stockholm, Saturday, October 1

The homey sound of clinking crockery and the hum of the espresso machine reached Carina as she lay in bed. She yawned. The espresso machine was the only machine in the well-equipped kitchen that Jamal actually used. She stretched to pull back the curtains; a sharp, white daylight pierced through the windows.

Jamal appeared naked in the doorway with a tray. “Good morning.”

She sat up in bed. “Hello.”

They drank lattes and ate toast and marmalade in bed. She wanted to say something, but she couldn't find the words. A tentative silence lay between them. It had been the first time they had quarreled seriously. But Jamal didn't seem to want to talk about what had happened at the restaurant the evening before, either. That was a relief; Carina was bad at sorting things out after the fact. It was usually better to look forward, she thought. Let what had already happened be. But their argument worried her. She just wanted everything to be good between them, for them to be close. She sought him out under the duvet. Jamal didn't seem to respond at first; he looked meditative and drank his coffee slowly.

“Do you want to go to Cairo?” He looked so serious that she pulled her hand back and sat up again.

“Yes, absolutely.”

They looked at each other.

“Are you sure?”

“Yes.” She embraced him, kissed him on the neck. “Quite sure.”

They carried on drinking their coffees.

“I'm sorry about yesterday,” she said after a while. “Sorry.”

He shook his head. She shouldn't apologize. He understood that it was a difficult situation for her. He was stupid; he knew nothing about things like that.

“I got worried,” he said. “I just don't want anything to happen to you.”

He really meant it. It struck her how long it had been since someone had cared so much about her. “I love you,” she whispered, or perhaps she only thought it.

Jamal's phone rang. It lay rattling on the bedside table. He kissed Carina and reached for his cell. She watched him as he sat on the edge of the bed, and noticed the change in his back, how tense he became when he saw the display.

“I have to take this,” he said curtly and walked out of the room.

She stayed in bed and heard him answer in Arabic before he disappeared into the bathroom. The mumble of the telephone conversation continued inside. It bothered her that he shut himself away like that, completely unnecessarily. If the conversation was so private that he didn't want her to hear what it was about, it hardly mattered that she was listening—she couldn't understand a word of it, anyway. It annoyed her; it felt as if he didn't like her hearing him speak Arabic. It had happened a couple of times, and afterward he was always resolute but never said who had called or what it had been about—nothing. It was often a long time before his tense, somewhat absent manner disappeared and he became himself. Something was bothering him.

The murmur carried on in the bathroom.

She got up, pulled on Jamal's dressing gown, made a second cup of coffee using his espresso machine and waited. Finally, he came out of the bathroom.

“Sorry that took a while,” he mumbled, putting down his cell. She chose to ask and say nothing. Curiosity had begun to turn into vague annoyance, which she knew she really had no right to feel. She kissed him fleetingly, swept past him into the bathroom and took a long shower.

When she came out, Jamal was sitting on the sofa with his computer on his lap. He had checked various travel agencies, he said.
She sat down next to him while he clicked around the web, comparing prices. Perhaps they could go as soon as the end of October? The weather was good then. There were tickets available that weren't too expensive. He would probably be able to take some time off. She nodded. She had all the time in the world, she thought gloomily. Quietly, she did the math; yes, she had enough money, she had savings. She would get by for six months, even if her salary from the Ministry stopped coming in.

As if Jamal had heard her thoughts, he said he would check with relatives to see if they could borrow somewhere to stay.

“My uncle has a house by the coast. I'll ask him. I'm sure he'll lend it to us.”

“It'll be nice to meet him.”

“You'll like him,” said Jamal, without full conviction. “He's a fine man. And one of the most important people in my life. It's time you met him. He'll like you. I know that.”

The thought of them together in Cairo finally broke into the slightly melancholic mood she had felt all morning. Finally she would get see something of where he had come from.

“So you do want to go, then?” he asked.

“
Yes
, I already said so.” She laughed.

He put his laptop to one side and looked steadily at her. “It means a lot to me,” he said. “You're the only person I've ever wanted to take a trip like this with.”

Jamal went to an airline website. She sat next to him and saw him completing the various booking fields: fly in to Cairo, out of Sharm el-Sheikh. First, a few days in the capital, then a week by the coast in his uncle's house. Ms. Dymek. Mr. Badawi. The last week in October: out on Friday evening and then back ten days later. Flexible tickets, because you never know, said Jamal with a tone of voice that made her wonder if, despite everything, he had changed his mind. The tickets cost 8,500 kroner, but at least some of their accommodation would be free, she thought, and pushed her money worries to one side. She stroked Jamal's hair. Cairo.

18

Stockholm, Saturday, October 1

Bente stepped into the Security Service guest apartment and took off her coat. The air inside the late-nineteenth-century two-room apartment was still. Staff from the Protection branch would regularly enter to sweep rooms for bugs—it was standard procedure—but no one had been into the apartment since she arrived in Stockholm.

She had woken up early and hadn't been able to fall back to sleep, so she had taken a brisk walk around the block and bought a few apples from a corner shop before returning to the apartment. She shut the door and locked it behind her, took an apple out of the bag and bit into it before calling the Section.

Mikael answered right away. Yes, he had received her text message. He had that slightly thick voice he always got when he was excited. “I think we've found something.”

“Okay?”

“You have to see for yourself. It's from a site for computer-game programmers, but they're discussing completely different things. I'll send you the link now. It's a discussion thread, almost at the bottom of the page. Number twenty three.”

She went to the page. It was indeed a site for programmers, with various forums for different technical discussions about things she didn't understand. Computer nerds. There was a link to an Internet Relay Chat channel. It was encrypted, but the Section had managed to force the algorithm with the help of the FRA's processors. She only needed to read a few lines to know that it was a hit.

She called Hamrén, who was in a meeting. No, she couldn't call him back; she needed to talk to him. Now.

When she told him what SSI had found, he fell silent and listened to her. Then he began to speak quickly, almost in a staccato. Wonderful. Very, very good. Send it to the Directed Surveillance unit and the analysts. He would be back in the office within half an hour.

She sent an e-mail to Hamrén's chief analyst with a link to the channel, copying in the technical unit head, and leaned back. Perhaps the Brits were right, in spite of everything.

Two hours later, they were gathered in a semicircle—Hamrén and the Head of Directed Surveillance, together with four analysts and technicians from Counterterrorism. Wilson was also there with his adjutants, Sarah and George, and four new faces—anonymous young analysts who must have flown in from London during the last twenty-four hours. Wilson was leaning back in his chair and raised a limp hand in greeting when Bente came through the door. The blinds were closed; the pearl-white light of the projector screen cast an artificial glow over the walls and the faces of all present.

Hamrén waited until it was exactly half past eight before getting up. He momentarily found himself bathed in the white quadrant of light—squinted, was blinded—and took a step to the side.

“Good morning, everyone,” he began. “You have all been sent the link. Magnus will go through the channel for us now. Okay, Magnus. Take it away.”

The Salafist analyst began his presentation by cautiously opening a window on the screen. A functional, somewhat ugly, yet striking website appeared. The majority of the page was filled with a list of discussion threads. What they were looking at was a website for developers, he explained. Programmers, hackers.

“It is a meeting place for a community of roughly five to six thousand people. The common denominator is that they develop various programs together in open source code. Completely normal, legal activities.” He clicked. “Here, for example: questions about graphical rendering in computer games, animation.”

He opened a tab for a new subpage. Around twenty thematic discussion threads appeared in a list. He opened a new thread and scrolled down a seemingly unending string of posts. “For our purposes, this is an uninteresting discussion about programming online games,” said the analyst, ending his guided tour. He clicked back to the homepage. “As you can see, nothing of interest to us. Except this.”

The projector fan whirred. He brought up the IRC channel. A concentrated silence lay across the room while everyone stared at the projector screen.

The posts shone before them. What they said was markedly different from the technical subjects of the other threads. The most recent post was just two hours old, written by the user, Sala82. It contained a YouTube clip: a shaky video of the arrest of a black man. The police were British, judging by their uniforms. Bente glanced at Wilson, but he merely looked sullen; barely a flicker crossed his face. Several further YouTube clips were from the riots in London in August. Beneath them was a long string of heated posts about the British police state, about Big Brother society.

Magnus broke the silence: “As you can see, this is a far more political discussion. Unusual for a site like this, but not in itself worrying. However, if we go to the beginning of the discussion, we find things that are far more interesting.”

He worked his way down the thread to an earlier post. The user, Redstripe, had posted it two days ago. It contained a photograph showing a man in a suit together with two younger colleagues. When Bente had first looked at the discussion thread, earlier that morning, it had taken her a second to recognize him: Stefano Manservisi, the Head of the EU Commission's Directorate General for Home Affairs—GD Home. The picture had been taken at some sort of conference venue with beige walls and gray stone floors—perhaps one of the rooms at the EU Commission in Brussels, with which she was vaguely familiar. Manservisi and his colleagues were smiling. Around them there were people standing and talking. The photo was poorly executed and amateurish, probably copied from
the Internet because the resolution was poor; she could see the pixels on the edge of Manservisi's suit.

Under the picture it said, in English,
Need to ID the people in the picture. Anyone?

Shortly afterward, on Thursday, September 29th, at 22:35, an answer had been logged from the user, Frontline:
Hi Red. What's up?

Several other users promptly appeared in the thread. A dialogue developed. Bente could count almost twenty participants. The analyst scrolled slowly down the page so that everyone had time to read.

Wilson was leaning back in his chair with his arms crossed—immobile, inscrutable. It was Bente's signals intelligence at SSI that had discovered the IRC channel, not the Brits, and it didn't surprise her. She had good people at the Section, but the British outfit at Government Communications Headquarters had incomparably greater resources. They should have seen the threat long before SSI. She looked at Wilson through the gloom. His bushy eyebrows were drawn together over his blue eyes. Around him were his British colleagues, their faces attentive, reading the text on the screen. Wilson wasn't reading. He was looking straight ahead, lost in his own thoughts. Then he felt her gaze. He turned his head quickly and looked straight at her, expressionlessly. For a moment she felt like Wilson could read her thoughts, that he was judging them, trying to make out whether she posed a threat or not. Then there was a lightning-quick change in his facial expression. He blinked at her. A cold smile flashed across his face. A loyal glance between colleagues. She smiled back and turned to the front again. Of course the Brits had seen the IRC channel; she knew it the moment Wilson had met her gaze. His reaction had given it away: the stony stare, the exaggerated smile. He hadn't been reading what it said on the screen because he already knew what it said. Naturally, British signals intelligence had picked up on the ongoing discussion: it was on the Internet, with nothing more than some light encryption to prevent curious amateurs from finding it. The technicians at the Section had only needed a few hours to force their way past the encryption.
The question wasn't whether the British knew, but why they hadn't chosen to share it before.

In the course of minutes, yet another ten users had logged in. And, throughout, it was right there: the mentioning of the EIS report. The reference number to the report was correct. It was odd to see it there, on a site like that. Everyone in the room read quietly. The atmosphere was close, concentrated. What was scrolling up before them
was a threat. The kind of threat they had spent their entire professional lives trying to eliminate. Magnus scrolled onward:

Underneath Storm's post was a grainy, enlarged picture of a face. The face belonged to a man who was visible in the background of the first picture. The picture was so well processed that the facial features were clearly visible. The analyst scrolled back quickly, hovered over the fuzzy face of the man in the background with the mouse, and zoomed in.

The man was in his fifties. Dark hair with streaks of gray. Set figure, a slightly round face, beard, dark-gray suit. One of many office employees to whom you wouldn't give a moment's notice if you were next to them on the subway.

After that message, the posts came closer together. The analyst scrolled slowly through the thread. A stream of comments. At first mostly exclamations, jokes, admiration for the user, Redstripe, for posting the link, rapid exchanges of this kind. They knew each other. A close-knit group. Further on in the thread the tone changed and became more serious. The discussion developed and became more objective. Magnus scrolled forward twelve hours in the thread and showed how the tone had become very much goal oriented. After twenty-four hours, he said, it was clearly visible that the group had started working as a structured and collaborative team. Led by Redstripe, users like Frontline, Darknite, and Steph911 had gotten
organized. The posts were short and matter of fact, written with an almost military tone.

The analyst scrolled onward through the thread to a post on the morning of October 1st. “This is where we are now: Saturday. What we can see is in real time. Six people are logged in. All understanding each other perfectly.”

The posts looked different, more like operational communications.

The analyst said, “You see, intensive communication, focused on gathering information about the report and the EIS and certain persons in that photo. We have counted twenty-eight different users active during the first two days, of which four are particularly active and leading the way.”

The posts between the four users continued for hours, a rapid exchange of information, increasingly technical details revolving around how to find more data about the people in the picture,
different ways of penetrating EU servers, EU networks, records, databases. Hundreds of posts—during certain periods, up to five or ten per minute. For hours, there had been an intense flow of chat between the four individuals. The closer they got to today's date, the more posts there were, the analyst noted. The reference number KOM(2011)790 was mentioned several times—the report that Dymek had leaked. The analyst pointed out a post that described, in detail, how to hack into the EU's document databases. Another listed all civil servants in section A3, the part of the EU Commission that worked on counterterrorism matters. This was where the photos, names and private addresses began to show up.

In silence, the analyst scrolled through the rows of posts. If they had missed this . . . Bente froze at the thought. But SSI had done its job, thank God. The system worked.