Into a Raging Blaze (44 page)

48

Brussels, Tuesday, October 11

Bente was woken by a muffled sound from downstairs. The surrounding bedroom was dark and motionless. Fredrik was asleep, curled up on his side of the bed, barely visible under the duvet. She lifted her head from the pillow and listened. There it was again: a ringing sound. Their private landline phone was ringing, on the hall table. She got up quickly and reached for her dressing gown, which was on a chair. Another quavering noise came from the hall before she managed to find her slippers and sneak out of the room. Fredrik stirred in his sleep, but didn't wake up.

Her body felt heavy. The last few weeks of work were beginning to take their toll, and she had drunk rather more wine than she was used to last night. But not all evenings were alike. The Brits had made a laughing stock out of them, and that angered her. It was as if, only now, when it was all over, was she able to let out that anger. She had tried to be in the moment with Fredrik and the boys, but her thoughts had kept running away, anger had made her distracted and sullen, and she had poured herself another glass of wine. She was quiet at dinner and for most of the evening; she had wished the boys a distant good night after Fredrik had put them to bed. When she and Fredrik were alone, they had watched the news and then a silly French comedy on TV. She had noticed that her husband was hoping they would have sex, but he hadn't made a fuss and had gone to bed alone. She had stayed up until he was asleep and the house was silent. Sitting at the kitchen table, she had leafed through old
magazines she hadn't had time to read, while her thoughts continued to grind away.

The phone kept ringing. She hurried through the house. The stairs creaked in the silence. She picked up the receiver just as it rang again.

“Hello?”

It was Mikael.

“Why are you calling this number?”

“Your cell is off.”

It was true; she had turned it off last night. She normally kept her cell on, but for once, after speaking to Hamrén, she had decided not to take anymore work calls. Mikael sounded wide awake, as if it was ten in the morning and he had just had his second espresso.

“You need to come in. Things are afoot.”

She didn't ask what, since they were on an open line. “I'll call from the car.”

She reached the freeway quickly. The road to Brussels was almost deserted at that time of morning. Mikael answered right away when she called and she asked what had happened. While she listened, she noticed how she rapidly became more alert.

“We need to call people in,” she said.

Mikael had called in a group of technicians; they were already conducting signals intelligence. They needed analysts too, she said. They briefly discussed a number of practical details. She would be there within quarter of an hour.

She gently increased her speed and swept along the empty highway. She smiled to herself. What Mikael had told her changed everything.

There were two hours left until dawn and the streets were desolate, like the abandoned architecture of lost civilizations. She let the car rush forth over roads on which she normally spent hours in traffic jams. A muted joy rippled through her. Maybe, it struck her, this was what they called schadenfreude. For the first time in many days, she felt strong and decisive, like the Head of SSI that she wanted to be.

A few minutes later, she reached the tunnel.

She slid along Rue du Trône. The streets were bathed in an inky blue darkness. Pedestrian lights changed without a soul crossing. It was as if the district had been evacuated.

She entered through the frosted doors of Integrated Systems, said good morning to the two men from the protection team sitting at reception (who were always ready to cheerfully answer the questions of anyone who had mistakenly ended up there, or answer fire in the case of an attack), passed through the perimeter security door lock arrangement, and entered the Section.

The command room was fully staffed. She stopped and looked at the screens on the wall for a second. TV images from news programs were running on several, and there, on the largest, was the
Guardian
's website. The news was the main headline on their site, unsurprisingly.

Mikael approached and handed her a coffee. “It's out now.”

“I can see that.”

The Brits had intercepted a conversation from an unknown Egyptian number yesterday afternoon, Swedish time, Mikael explained. MI6 had sent a flash to Stockholm and Counterterrorism, but Stockholm had forgotten to notify SSI.

Forgotten. She gave a crooked smile. She doubted that Hamrén had merely forgotten to tell her; after all, she had talked to him only twelve hours ago. But it didn't matter. What was now happening changed the situation entirely.

The conversation had been recorded by the British signals intelligence station in Cairo and also by the American systems. They had received a copy of the audio file, said Mikael. Bente nodded impatiently; they could deal with that later. She knew how it all worked. Within minutes, a transcription of the brief exchange was sent to Stockholm and London, the call was logged on British servers in Cheltenham, and the American signals intelligence center at Fort Gordon in Augusta, Georgia generated a flash to Langley before digital copies were forwarded to the NSA's servers in Utah and filed away as a microscopic particle among billions and billions of other pieces of data.

Carina's call had been to a certain Alexandra Gustavsson, a resident in the south of Stockholm.

“What exactly did she leak?”

“The Commission's EIS proposal and three memos from the Ministry of Justice—all green-stamped. Enough to uncover the lot.”

No one had guessed that the EIS material was hidden in Alexandra Gustavsson's apartment, Mikael continued. It was now under surveillance. The National Criminal Police were preparing an operation to bring Gustavsson in within the hour for interview.

“That girl is the least of their problems right now,” Bente said drily. That strange, gloomy joy made her smile. Mikael looked at her in surprise and then turned back to one of the screens where Bente was examining the
Guardian
's website.

“The story went up an hour ago.”

She nodded. It was a good story, a real scoop for a paper like the
Guardian
.
ILLEGAL
EU
SPY
ORGANIZATION
REVEALED
. It was a headline many editors would kill for, she thought quietly. The preamble told her that there was “a secret organization to fight terrorism established by the EU Commission and a number of EU member state governments.” According to “documents from the Commission and the Swedish government,” it said, “the organization would be kept secret from the EU parliament and elected politicians in member states.” She skimmed through the story, which included phrases like “death patrols” and “extrajudicial arrests.”

This news would spread like wildfire. There were probably already dozens of editors around the world preparing to splash the news, TV crews already on their way, right now, to lay siege to the homes of the politicians and civil servants responsible.

“Okay. What does Stockholm say?”

“The government will assemble for an extraordinary meeting. They're going into crisis mode now. The Junior Ministers' group meets at seven o'clock,” said Mikael. “It's all about damage limitation, of course. We've received a request from the Government Offices for crisis management. They've asked us to listen in on what's being said unofficially at the Commission and how other EU countries are
positioning themselves. They're providing the Prime Minister with updates every hour and need to be one step ahead. The justice minister also needs to be able to say the right things when she speaks to the media. She has a press conference at ten o'clock”—he looked at the time—“in precisely three hours and twenty minutes.”

That wasn't much time to find anything of value through signals intelligence, but it couldn't be helped. She beckoned to the Head of Signals Intelligence. “Göran, you have three hours, then we have to report to Stockholm.” She thought quickly. “Target key people in the Commission. Manservisi, and the heads of the various departments that handled the EIS proposal. Priebe, de Almeida. You know who I mean, Mikael.”

Mikael mumbled a yes. Göran, the Head of Signals Intelligence, also nodded, although he probably didn't have a clue. He had a better idea of who the various underlings in Hezbollah, Hamas, and al-Qaida in the Sahel were, rather than who all the political commissars in the EU bureaucracy were.

“Try to get into their cells and iPads; we need to know what they're talking about. Then I want to get into the Brits' system. Their permanent delegation is vulnerable, so start there. We need to know what their military attaché is saying. They probably have some assistant with a crap password you can use. Priority number two is the French and Spanish EU reps, and the same goes for them: everything being said about intelligence collaboration is of interest. If we have time, try the Americans too—Kennard and his deputy, White. If that's heavily encrypted then forget it; we can check them out later. Okay, I think that's everything. Are there any prominent EU parliamentarians we ought to keep an eye on?” She turned to Mikael.

“Maybe some of the characters involved in intelligence matters, like the delegates on the LIBE Committee.”

“Okay. Mikael has the names,” she said to Göran. “Report back to me in an hour.”

She went to one of the analysts and asked him to give her an overview of the media situation. The young man was new at the
Section, clever, had worked on open-source projects at MUST, the Swedish Military Intelligence and Security Service. He provided her with a situation report so quickly she couldn't help but smile. He was anxious to show her his abilities—she was his boss. Bente liked that.

The analyst brought up a number of windows on his screen and pointed. The news had, as they already knew, appeared on the
Guardian
's website at four forty-five, and they were probably preparing a larger spread for their print edition. The BBC had been the first to pick up on it on TV. It was included in the first news roundup of their morning show,
BBC Breakfast
, which was currently going out live. The angle had been British: the British government had tried to establish a secret European CIA without the approval of parliament. That some of the documents were Swedish was mostly mentioned only in passing. Some of the larger blogs had already brought up EIS and described it as an enormous scandal; several stated that the home secretary, and possibly others, would have to resign. Around ten British parliamentarians, both Tory and Labor, had already tweeted about it.

“They're calling EIS”—the analyst brought up another page—“a monster . . . a grotesque violation . . . an idea worthy of a dictatorship. And so on.”

Just a few minutes earlier, the British Home Office had released a statement to the press that emphasized the importance of increased cooperation with Europe in the fight against terror. He brought up the British website. Theresa May was to hold a press conference at twelve o'clock.

“She's a dead woman walking,” Bente interrupted him. “Carry on, what do the others say?”

After the
Guardian
, several other British dailies had published the news on their websites: the
Daily Mail
, the
Daily Telegraph
, the
Sun
. More and longer articles could be expected to appear during the day. France24 already had a report about the leak. Deutsche Welle and several German radio stations had mentioned EIS in their early bulletins.

“And the Swedish media?”

“The
Daily Echo
radio show had it in their five o'clock bulletin, in brief, and will probably expand it for their seven o'clock bulletin. It's on their website.” He showed her.
Secret spy network in Europe uncovered
. Out of the Swedish papers,
Expressen
had splashed the news first, surprisingly high up their homepage:
DEATH
PATROLS
HUNTING
TERRORISTS
IN
SWEDEN.
GOVERNMENT
HID
SECRET
PROGRAM.
PARLIAMENT
IN
THE
THE
DARK
. “This is unheard of,”
Peter Eriksson, chairman of the standing committee on the constitution was quoted as saying—apparently, they had managed to get hold of him. Bente glanced through the article. It was basically a rehashed version of the
Guardian
's story, but with a greater focus on the government giving the green light for foreign armies to fight terrorism in Sweden, while keeping parliament in the dark.

It was already a few minutes before seven. Everything was still in its infancy. But when the editorial and news teams sat down for their morning meetings at eight or nine European time, it would get going in earnest. In six hours' time, the American eastern seaboard would be waking up to a new day, and then the American news channels would also pick up the story. NBC, CBS, Fox, radio stations, political blogs. What was now a mere murmur would grow into an ear-deafening roar and spread around the globe as each continent began a new day. Perhaps the analyst had thought the same thing, because he brought up Al Jazeera. They had the story in their morning news bulletin and a short article was on their English-language website. CNN had also included a brief segment on
World Report
at six o'clock European time, and would probably develop the story for their eleven o'clock bulletin. Reuters, AP, and TT of Sweden had all had the story as their main headline for hours.

The government's website gave no indication of a crisis, apart from the dry press release about the Ministry of Justice press conference. However, the EIS leak was the fastest-spreading story of the day in the flood of Swedish tweets, said the analyst. Comments and links were beginning to gather under the hashtag #bigbrotherstate. The
Guardian
's article and the
Expressen
article were
spreading fast. It was worth noting that several Swedish MPs had already outlined their thoughts on the story in writing via their blogs. Bente read quickly, hanging over the analyst's shoulder while he brought up new pages. Several opposition politicians had commented on the leak, she saw. Someone demanded a vote of no confidence in the government; another wanted the resignation of the justice minister.