Into a Raging Blaze (29 page)

They sat in silence for a while.

“Why did he give it to you? You don't have the necessary clearance.”

He sighed. “He trusted me, I suppose. He said he couldn't keep it himself. I know that only a few people at the department knew of its existence. Apparently it wasn't going to be shown to the EU parliament, or any politicians. They were completely in the dark. I never got to read it, but Monsieur Bernier had read it, of course. He refused to accept it. One day, he came to me and said he was going away. He asked if I could look after it. He said I couldn't give it to the boss or anyone else. I didn't want to refuse. I liked him, and, to be quite honest, I think they treated him unfairly. So I took it.”

“You looked after the document. How long had he planned for you to do so?”

“He asked me to distribute it.” He sniffed.

“Distribute?”

“Yes. Send it to all EU embassies in Brussels if he didn't contact me before the summit.”

If he didn't get in touch. She stopped for a second. Mikael pulled a pack of tissues out of his jacket pocket and passed it over to the apprentice, who was sitting quietly, tears running down his cheeks.

“Does the name Carina Dymek mean anything to you?” Bente said after a while.

Klause turned his bloated face toward her and looked at her quizzically, shaking his head.

“A Swedish diplomat.”

“No. Nothing.”

“Are you sure?”

“I've never heard the name.” He blew his nose loudly, staring at her and then Mikael. The worry shone in his eyes.

She leaned forward, plucked the envelope from the table without any apparent urgency and gave it to Mikael. Without even stopping to reflect, she slid into her role.

“We'll have to report what's happened. But,” she added quickly when she saw the unhappy grimace that covered his face, “given the unusual circumstances and the fact that you contacted the police about this, and that you've helped us to establish the facts of the matter, you don't have to worry. We'll recommend that you remain in your post.”

“Thank you,” he said, dabbing his face. “Thank you. I'm so sorry about all of this. It's my first year at the Commission; I didn't know it would be like this. It won't happen again, I promise.” He looked at them, teary eyed.

She leaned forward and patted him on the shoulder.

“It'll be all right, Florian.”

One of the guys from the cell team was in the stairwell. He appeared to have been waiting outside the door. When he caught sight of them, he angled his head toward the microphone wire and called to them in a low voice.

“What is it?”

“We've got company.”

They began to run down the stairs, silently. On the first floor they paused, waited a few seconds until they heard an all-clear signal through his earpiece, and continued running all the way to the ground floor.

Bente was panting heavily; it was a long time since she had needed to move like this. They passed through a fire door into the basement, went down a narrow corridor, back up some stairs, and into a messy inner courtyard, filled with humming fans. Rodriguez was there.

“I called. Why didn't you answer?”

They had a problem. At least three people had followed them on the way to Klause's apartment. They hadn't managed to discover them in time. Presumably there were more of them nearby.

Another member of the cell team came out of the rusty fire door at the other end of the yard and waved. She and Mikael ran after Rodriguez, stumbling down some dark stairs into a boiler room and hurrying through a doorway into a small basement corridor that ended by a narrow stairway twisting up toward gray daylight. She caught a glimpse of yet another member of the cell team, his automatic weapon drawn, following them.

If they had been found . . .

The thought flashed through her head. She swore silently. All their security arrangements to hide the Section, protect the identities of operatives, the networks of sources and informants, to cover up the traces of their electronic intrusions and tracking, all of it was vulnerable. They were all in danger. Her stomach dropped when she thought about Fredrik and the kids.

They crossed yet another inner courtyard, continued through a wooden door and into another stairwell, where Rodriguez abruptly stopped, holding up his hand, signaling to them to stay by the wall. They waited, panting, while he listened in concentration with his index finger against his earpiece.

“Now.”

They hit the street at the same time as one of the Section's black BMW SUVs came out of a side street and slammed on its brakes in the middle of the road. The passenger side doors were flung open.

“Go! Go! Go!”

Rodriguez pushed them in front of him. They hurried across the pavement. Some passersby stopped in surprise and watched them. Bente narrowly avoided rushing straight into a woman pushing a stroller, before squeezing between the parked cars and into the SUV. With a hard jolt, the car made a flying start.

33

Brussels, Friday, October 7

The thick cloud cover opened up without warning just before they landed. Carina managed to catch sight of the gray Belgian suburbs spread out below like dark fields—industrial areas, tower blocks, villas—all sweeping by, and, for a moment, she saw the freeway to Brussels, like a scar across the landscape. At the scheduled time, a few minutes before ten, the Scandinavian Airlines morning flight descended into Zaventem.

When she had been in the early morning hustle and bustle at Arlanda, she had almost hoped that they would stop her at security, take her to one side, and that it would all be over. But no one had stopped her. She had checked in, the same as usual, handed over her bag, and the uniformed clerk had even wished her a pleasant trip. Then she had passed through security, along with all the other sleepy business travelers, and no one had reacted when they checked her passport and boarding pass, or when she was lining up at the gate. She knew almost nothing about how the police worked, and even less about how Säpo worked, but she knew enough to know that, if you were able to fly out of Arlanda without being stopped, then you weren't on a wanted list. Perhaps the woman who had called her from Säpo had actually meant it when she said she just wanted to talk. For a second, she regretted not going to the meeting at Säpo; perhaps it would have solved everything. But it wasn't that simple, she knew that.

A few minutes left until they landed. Everything was so familiar. How many times had she flown into Brussels? Hundreds, probably.
She watched the business travelers around her: two of them were talking cheerfully to each other across the aisle, a gray-haired man closed his laptop in preparation for landing. She hadn't had time to think about the MFA, but here, surrounded by the people who would have been her traveling companions on a normal trip to Brussels, it struck her how far away from the Ministry and her normal job she was. While the plane rushed toward the airport, she realized that she might never be able to return to her normal life. If it had been an ordinary working day, she would have been on the way to a council meeting by now. She would have been going through the Swedish positions and preparing for the usual race through the arrivals hall to get to a taxi first, to get to Justus Lipsius in time for the meeting. She pressed her forehead against the cold pane of glass in the small oval window. It vibrated against her temples. The ground was rapidly getting closer beneath her, taking shape and becoming more detailed.

“Are you all right, madame?” A stewardess leaned forward.

Carina nodded.

“Please return your seat to the upright position.” The stewardess gave her a friendly, professional smile and said in quite another tone, as if a friend, “Are you sure you're okay?”

“I'm fine.”

Once off the plane, she felt calm and safe again. The oblong arrivals gate was packed with people. She joined the flock of businessmen hurrying away with their briefcases and travel bags, and already felt better when she reached the baggage conveyor belt. She really knew this airport—she could find her way around it with more ease than she could central Stockholm—the air-conditioned halls, echoing announcements, advertisements; the well-known Brussels feeling of hurrying out through the arrivals gate.

Planes from Paris, Munich, and Moscow had arrived at the same time; out by the taxis, there was a long, snaking queue. She did what she usually did: went up one floor and caught a taxi before it headed down the ramp to join the taxi rank. The success of her old trick put her in a good mood. The rush-hour traffic, the chatter of the radio, and the driver's way of changing lanes on the freeway at the risk
of life and limb cheered her up. She was in Brussels. This was her hunting ground.

While in the taxi, she booked a room at the Radisson Blu on Rue d'Idalie. Maybe she ought to be careful and stay at a smaller bed and breakfast in case the police were looking for her. The thought flashed through her mind in a flutter of anxiety. She waved it to one side. Säpo, she reasoned, only operated on Swedish territory. For them to have contacted the Belgian police when they hadn't even put an alert out on her at Arlanda seemed unlikely. She concluded that she was in Brussels, one of thousands of morning travelers who had just arrived, one of the masses, and she had no reason to worry. The Radisson Blu was really a little too expensive, but she was only going to stay for a few days. She might as well do what she wanted, and the prospect of staying at the Radisson Blu lifted her spirits. She always stayed there when she went to Brussels with work. Some weeks she had spent as many nights there as she had at home in her apartment. It was part of her Brussels.

The hotel was as it always was: the same minimalist lobby with a restaurant and bar with subdued lighting just inside the entrance. She couldn't help but smile at the sensation that she was home.

At the reception, the same man always checked her in: an older, very proper gentleman of Indian appearance with a well-groomed, gray mustache. He was behind the counter and greeted her exuberantly when he caught sight of her, as if he had actually been waiting for just her to appear.

“
Voilà, madame.
”

In the hotel room, she threw off her coat and unpacked her small notebook. It was a good room, peaceful and quiet, with a large TV and a soft bed with extra pillows. She picked up her oilcloth notebook, the same one she always used at the MFA. The covers were black with a red border, and it was the right size to fit in a handbag or an inside jacket pocket. Everyone in the Ministry used them. Her notes from the last COSEC meeting were still there. But she wasn't representing Sweden now; she didn't represent anyone at all.

She ate lunch at the hotel. The restaurant was teeming with cheerful employees of a global audit firm. She had no idea what a controller did, but a sign in the lobby welcomed all senior controllers to a two-day conference at the hotel. She looked at them and felt downhearted. There was something ridiculous about adults with name badges, as if some guardian had put the badge on them in order to easily include them in a count of beef cattle. Her mood wasn't improved by the slow delivery of her Caesar salad. For some reason a silly little thing like the kitchen forgetting her salad made her question the entire idea of coming to Brussels. Somehow she had imagined that everything would sort itself, if only she came here, but now she had arrived, things were just as complicated as they had been in Stockholm.

After lunch, she wandered around the city. She was in the heart of central Brussels, among the EU offices, banks, and international organizations. She turned down Rue du Trône and began to walk toward Parc de Bruxelles. It was unusually mild weather. Clusters of civil servants with pass cards fluttering on lanyards around their necks passed her. The Swedish Brussels delegation was only a few blocks away. If everything had been as usual, she would have gone there to check her e-mail, say hello to some colleagues. But nothing was as usual and it would be a long time before it was again.

At Regentlaan, she went into a shop that sold cell phones. She needed a new one; the kind of handset she had lost was of course not available, but would also have been very expensive. She listened, stony faced, to the assistant who showed her different models. Finally, she chose the cheapest available phone on pay-as-you-go. She had promised herself not to be bothered by her lost cell, yet she was grieving for it and in an unusually bad mood when she approached the Royal Palace. She walked up along one of the gravel paths and ended up in the wake of guided tour. The tourists stepped on to the lawns and took photos of each other with the heavyset palace in the background, despite the small signs that strictly stated that walking on the grass was not permitted. The palace, with its expansive parks and pompous statues, had once been the center of
a great power, ruling over the heart of Africa. In annoyance, Carina pushed past the tourists taking photos of a statue of Leopold II on horseback; they were seemingly quite unaware that the king had devastated an entire continent.

She crossed the avenue and entered the larger park next to it. At its northern end, she found a bench that was set to one side. It felt restful to sit alone. She looked across the empty lawns and the dark green avenues of trees. In the middle of the park was a noisy stone fountain. A jogger ran past at a slow pace and there was a woman pushing a stroller along one of the gravel paths. Parc de Bruxelles at lunchtime on a Friday. She was left in peace.

She turned the pages of her notes. At the top of the first page, she had written,
Bernier
. Beneath that, a list of phone numbers.

There was no point in delaying things; she would just get more nervous. She got out her phone and gathered her thoughts for a second. Then she dialed the first number. She almost knew it by memory.

Hold music.

An operator broke in, in French. “
La Commission Européenne, bonjour
.”

“I'm looking for Jean Bernier,” she said with the professional tone she had spent years practicing while working at the Ministry, and which she could produce at a moment's notice.

After a few seconds, the operator said that Jean Bernier wasn't in the office.

“That's strange. I'm calling from the Swedish representation and had agreed a telephone meeting for now,” she said.

It was important to keep talking, not to seem crestfallen. She turned to the page in her notebook where she had written down a few names from the personnel list for GD Home, department A3.

“Perhaps you can connect me to one of his colleagues?”

She knew how it worked; if you sounded sure enough and could give a name that matched one in their phone database, you could get past the exchange. She was connected. For a second, the turgid hold music returned, then a woman answered.

“Bonjour, how can I help you?”

“I'd like to speak to Jean Bernier.”

“But you've called Mr. Steigl.” She had presumably been connected to a secretary. “Who is speaking?”

“Anna Svensson, at the Swedish delegation. I'm looking for Mr. Bernier—Jean Bernier. It's concerning a matter he's discussed with the delegation. I was connected here by the operator,” she said with a tone of certainty, as if she didn't have time for this kind of nonsense. Plausibility was important; she needed to sound reasonably stressed, but not obstinate. If she was lucky, the secretary would connect her internally within the department just to get rid of her.

“But Mr. Bernier isn't in,” said the secretary, already doubtful.

“Oh.” She maintained the stressed tone, implying that this was very inconvenient in her hectic working day. “That's strange—I was asked to call today.”

“What was it concerning?”

She said it was about a report from the directorate. A proposal that would be appearing under agenda item five at the summit the following week.

“Oh.” She could hear the secretary had become noticeably stressed. “Yes, I understand . . . I'm sorry; Mr. Steigl is in a meeting. I can ask him to call you back.” Carina said that wasn't necessary and asked to be reconnected to the exchange.

A new operator was connected. That was correct, Jean Bernier was not available. No, he hadn't left any message about his absence.

Carina thanked her and hung up.

Not available. That could mean anything—that he was just somewhere else in the building and would be back soon, or that he was away from work for a week—what did she know? She would have to try again later under a different name; she didn't dare use her own. There was always the risk that a warning had gone out about her name and that some alert individual would note her calls and send a message to Stockholm. Then the EU Commission would pull down the shutters—she couldn't let that happen.

The city spread out in all directions around her. She had never really thought of Brussels as a city. For her, Brussels was carpeted corridors, conference rooms, quick lunches, and long meetings about European security policy. The city itself was something she had mostly glimpsed from the back seat of a taxi on the way to or from the airport. Brussels was a place of work that you got home from on the seven-thirty flight. But now she was here in this city with millions of people, of which she was looking for just one. She needed to think through what she was going to do.

She navigated her way through the streets around the park and came out by the Grote Markt. The City Hall, with its jagged pinnacles, stretched into the clear sky.

After a few hours of brisk walking, she found herself somewhere in south Ixelles, where she stopped for a coffee. She was in one of those small local places with organic teas and a girl with Rasta dreads who made the coffee. There were FC Brussels scarves pinned above the bar and a large flat-screen TV was on the wall, showing Formula One cars racing soundlessly around a track somewhere in Europe. She ordered a double espresso and a small brandy and asked for a phone book.

Greger had said the name was one hundred percent right, that the guy who called himself Jean had the surname Bernier. But she wanted to be sure of the address. She turned to the page with surnames beginning with B and found the column of Berniers.

There were three Jean Berniers. One lived in a suburb, in Schaerbeek. That couldn't be right. The second was Professor Emeritus Jean Bernier and lived in the city center, near Grote Markt. That sounded wrong; the Jean Bernier she was looking for was unlikely to be a Professor Emeritus. But the third one . . . She smiled. Greger was right—the phonebook said that the third Bernier lived in the south of Brussels, in Waterloo.