Into a Raging Blaze (32 page)

“I know I can't ask questions. But this text . . .” he said. He was subdued. “There must be something I can do. I mean, if this becomes EU law . . .” He shook his head.

“No, Willem.” She looked him steadily in the eye. “There's nothing you can do. You have seen something that very few people have seen. I'm glad you were able to help me. But you should do nothing. Never mention this to anyone. You should forget we ever discussed it. Is that understood?”

He stared at her. Then he nodded, slowly. She put a hand on his knee and let it lie there for a second. They wouldn't see each other again. This was the last time. He couldn't be anymore involved than this; she had already taken a risk by showing him the annex, and things could quickly get worse if he betrayed her and their meeting. There was always a danger, with people like De Vries, that they might decide to use their academic freedom to write a long opinion piece about the subject. She didn't want him to end up like Jean Bernier; it would be so terribly unnecessary. She leaned forward and kissed him lightly on the mouth, got up quickly, and left him sitting on the sofa. She hurried out of the house, down the garden path and kept going.

Somewhere north of Antwerp, just ten minutes after she had crossed the Dutch-Belgian border, she spotted the other car—a silver Mercedes; a recent model—two hundred meters behind her in the other lane. When she increased her speed, she noticed how the other car softly followed, and probably had been doing so ever since she had left Leiden.

She raced along the freeway, junctions slipping past at a steady pace. The silver car remained behind her throughout.

She quickly began to approach Brussels. She now had two options. Either she could keep going and try to lose them by herself in the city center, or she could call the Section and notify them of the situation. She would get assistance. But, on the other hand, there was a risk that the Section would be exposed if the cell team carried out an operation to bring her home. Rodriguez would want to know what the hell she was doing out on the road when she herself had ordered all SSI staff to remain stationary and maintain radio silence.

She leaned forward and felt under the seat. Her Glock was where it should be.

There was more traffic. She was driving south, had just passed Mechelen and was on the way into Brussels from the north. She needed to get away from the freeway. She was rapidly approaching a bedroom community, around ten kilometers from the city perimeter, near Mechelen. She accelerated until she was doing one hundred and eighty kilometers an hour—before turning off on to the N211 at the last possible moment.

Fields raced by, a construction site passed by in just a few seconds. The rear wheels skidded. She came off the ramp and, as the road straightened out, she accelerated again. The other car had managed to exit at the junction as well and appeared a couple of hundred meters behind her. By leaving the freeway, she had avoided the jams that normally formed around the airport at this time of day, and instead she was heading at high speed toward the small suburban town of Machelen. She got stuck behind a truck for a few seconds at a traffic circle, before finding a gap and managing to overtake it, increasing her speed, crossing a railway line, and rushing through an avenue on the outskirts of the town in less than a minute. To the left were railway tracks, to the right, industrial units and low office buildings and workshops flickered by as the slanting sunshine streamed into the car. Finally, the avenue narrowed and became a local road. This provided opportunities to disappear, so long as she didn't end up in a cul-de-sac. The other car was still behind her.

Without any warning, she reached the town boundary. She almost drove into a field but, after braking heavily, she took a left, drove under a railway viaduct, and reached a residential area. People were in their gardens; she could sense heads turning, gazes watching her car. She couldn't draw too much attention to herself. She slowed down and drove as calmly as she could until she reached a thoroughfare. A sign said she was on the road to Vilvoorde. That wasn't good. She needed to shake the other car, but Vilvoorde was an old town, full of impassable, narrow streets where you could easily get stuck. At a crossroads with a larger avenue, she put her foot down, drove through a red light, and skidded into a left turn, just as the traffic in the other direction began to move. Drivers honked their horns. The car skidded hard. She passed a lamp post and regained control, and was through the crossroads. A glance in the rearview mirror confirmed what she had hoped: the other car had gotten stuck at the traffic lights. She increased her speed gradually and glided up to the next crossroads. No police nearby. She was on the way out of Machelen, away from these small towns. An industrial area opened up before her: large expanses, no people. She accelerated up to two hundred kilometers an hour on a straightaway and rushed between the low factory buildings and empty industrial plots, before stopping by a large, fenced area with a big windowless building, clearly the town's thermal power station; she turned off. Two enormous white chimneys rose out of the fields a few kilometers away.

She drove around the area until she found what she was looking for: a parking lot. There were around one hundred cars. Visibility was good. She parked in a space, turned off the engine, bent down, and pulled out her Glock. Clicking the safety off, she got out of the car, crouched next to the warm chassis, and waited.

A little while later, the silver Mercedes appeared. She saw it brake, before turning into the parking lot. She straightened the gun in her hands. If they discovered her, she would need to move quickly, before they had time to get out, and open fire on the driver. The car in pursuit was not armored—that was visible. Four or five
shots. She would incapacitate whoever it was that was following her. She saw the car glide along the rows of parked vehicles at a leisurely pace, around and around, for what seemed like an eternity. Then it accelerated rapidly, drove back onto the road, and vanished. She waited for over twenty minutes before finally, stiff legged, she crept back behind the wheel and started the engine. The other car was nowhere to be seen. When she got back to the southbound road, she lowered her speed and began to breathe easier. Darkness fell as she passed through the suburbs of Brussels.

Mikael came toward her in the corridor of the Section. The floor was in partial darkness, but a lot of staff were still at their screens as they flickered in the dark. The surveillance against Dymek demanded resources; an entire team of signals intelligence operatives from the FRA and parts of the cell team were now following her movements through the city. At the same time, a group of analysts was working through the British intelligence, comparing and checking details with data gathered from other sources. They were in a hurry; they needed a clear picture of the situation before any arrests in Stockholm could take place—they would need enough material by then.

“Where have you been?”

“Out. I had to check something.”

Mikael looked at her as if he was surprised that she hadn't said more, but merely nodded. He was so used to not asking questions that he let the subject go without another word.

“Has something happened? You look serious,” he continued while following her down the corridor toward the conference room.

She shook her head. She had decided not to say anything about what had just happened—better to keep it to herself. But it worried her. Whoever had followed her had wanted to frighten her, to show their presence, that they were watching her and SSI.

As if he had somehow heard her thoughts, Mikael said, “We've ID'd one of the people from outside Florian Klause's apartment—the apprentice, you remember.”

“Okay, good.”

Mikael pulled out three photographs from a folder and handed them over. They were pictures of the woman in the leather jacket who had been by the kiosk buying a newspaper.

“Who is she?”

“She's CIA.”

She stopped and looked at him. Was he serious? Sometimes security services watched the work of other security services, but the CIA? If the Americans were carrying out surveillance against them, it meant something was worrying them.

Mikael held out a piece of paper and interrupted her train of thought. “We ran a search using the images and got lucky. She was on a few diplomatic lists. We found an old piece of information stating she was a consular assistant at the US embassy in Indonesia in the early nineties. Then nothing. Vanished off the face of the earth.”

She nodded. That was how the Americans worked. The CIA often registered its agents as consular staff at the American embassies. If they then began to work in the operational part of the CIA, they were recalled to Washington, given a protected identity, and then disappeared.

So the CIA was interested in what the Section was up to as part of this case.

Her leadership team was waiting around the table in the conference room. She noticed that they were having a conversation that abruptly turned to silence as she entered the room. Things had probably happened while she had been gone. She knew that Rodriguez's group had worked all afternoon on the surveillance against Dymek. He looked tired but alert in the way she had seen many police look during ongoing operations. It had been an intensive day.

She opened the meeting without any ceremony. “Okay, friends. What's the situation?” She turned to Rodriguez.

For the last eight hours the cell team had been following Carina Dymek, ever since she arrived by taxi at her hotel at half past ten in the morning. She had gone to the same hotel that she had stayed at several times while traveling on business for the MFA, in central Brussels—they had established this after discreetly hacking into the
hotel customer database. After checking in under her own name, she had begun to move around the city, had made a few cash withdrawals, then bought a cell phone with a credit card.

“Do we have the number?”

“Yes, we're listening in on that phone,” said Rodriguez. “We've got Dymek in check.” He looked anxiously at her. It wasn't Dymek who was the problem. There had been others at the hotel. Other operatives. “It all went to hell.”

One of their technicians had gone in to install a bug on the phone and broadband connection in Dymek's room, Rodriguez explained. He discovered that there was already a bug there and raised the alarm. Parts of the cell team were already in the hotel, but had pulled out rapidly to avoid discovery. Once they understood that they weren't alone, they placed two men in the lobby.

“Continue.”

“We regrouped and waited. Olof went up to Dymek's room and there, outside her room, he spotted one of them, dressed as hotel staff.”

Olof was one of the more experienced spotters on the cell team; she knew she could rely on his judgment. He was one of those she had personally managed to recruit from Stockholm when SSI was founded. He had happened to come across the other operative, who was clearly keeping an eye on the floor. Nothing should have raised Olof's suspicions because the man was dressed in the hotel's uniform and had passed him calmly before disappearing into the elevator. But his shoes were too expensive: black hybrid shoes with soft, shock-absorbent soles—made for sprinting.

Then the man was gone. But one of Rodriguez's team had caught sight of him from a window as he had hurried away across a rear courtyard.

“Then we saw another one in the lobby. He turned up just as a large group of guests was checking in. Dressed like a businessman—suit, briefcase. Black guy; tall. Maybe it was because he looked too fit.”

This man had checked in and they had cornered the receptionist and coaxed out of her which room he was staying in; it transpired
he had checked into a room on the same floor as Dymek, two rooms down the hall. Two others had been spotted on the upper floors and one had been posted on the street by the entrance.

“Presumably there were more of them. I aborted—it was too risky to stay.”

An hour later, Rodriguez had gone in with a false warrant from the Belgian police and demanded the videotapes from the surveillance cameras in the lobby. The man in reception had been caught on camera.

Rodriguez opened a file on the computer: a grainy picture of a hotel lobby. Bente could see suitcases spread across a large, oriental carpet, people by the reception counter and in small groups around the room.

“There.” A tall man, dressed in a suit with a coat over his arm, stood by the reception counter, a little apart from the others. Only his back was visible, seen diagonally from above. When he turned around, his face was only visible for a second. Rodriguez froze the picture.

“We checked him out,” said Mikael. “The passport he showed to the hotel was fake: it's not in SIS or any Schengen systems. He probably has a protected identity. The receptionist said he spoke British English. I did a little fishing and it transpired the Germans recognize his face. They say he's ex–Special Air Service. According to the Germans, he was involved in an operation in Hamburg three years ago.”

“Hamburg?” She looked up. “That's Wilson's team.”

Five years earlier, Roger Wilson had led an operation in Hamburg against a group of individuals with connections to al-Qaida. The German Bundesverfassungsschutz and MI6 had, for several years, been tracking German targets—radical persons who moved in circles around the al-Quds mosque in Hamburg. The individuals had been part of an Islamist network for a long time; several of them had been connected to the apartment on Marienstrasse where Mohamed Atta, the pilot in the World Trade Center attack, had lived; names that had come up in interrogations of captured
al-Qaida members. For the operation in Hamburg, the British had sent an elite force from the SAS which stormed an apartment. All five individuals inside were killed. Another two people were later arrested, but found innocent. The operation was kept dark; relatives' silence was bought. The operation became notorious throughout the industry.