Into a Raging Blaze (9 page)

The solution had been found a year ago. It was so simple and elegant that it was surprising no one had thought of it before. After a period of dialogue between FRA and Säpo, SSI was created—a joint office with FRA personnel on indefinite secondment to the Security Service. Officially, a collocation, but in practice a joint effort to combine specialist intelligence gathering and signals intelligence, in the heart of Europe. The Section had been operational for nearly six months, and what had seemed like a house of cards was still standing. It had taken longer than the leadership team had hoped to produce usable information. But Bente was not worried. Targeting intelligence gathering so that they could really track the radical Muslim networks or right-wing extremists in Europe took time; they were forced to take each step carefully. Calibrating signals intelligence so that you really were listening to the right cell phones, actually intercepting the right e-mails and monitoring the right online forums—that all took time. She was still satisfied work had moved forward. Infiltration required patience; you couldn't force it. But the signals intelligence work was already delivering useful data. Recently, they had received several parallel orders from Counterterrorism and Counterespionage. They monitored thousands of websites, hundreds of phones and IP addresses, around the clock. They were supporting an American operation in northern Afghanistan. They were infiltrating discussions within a Swedish-Somali network, had the precise locations of fifteen Swedish al-Shabaab members, were monitoring a Chinese engineer at Ericsson, and carrying out joint surveillance with the Danish PET. They had regained their sight. The landscape was back in full focus.

SSI's deputy head, Mikael Reuterberg, looked up from the computer when Bente entered his office and shut the door. He was one of the young veterans from the National Defense Radio Establishment,
understood Arabic, and had a special ability to piece together fragments, to spot patterns—an intuition that surprised her. He understood things quicker than anyone else.

“I'm going to Stockholm for a few days,” Bente said.

Mikael nodded, as if it didn't surprise him in the least, and passed her the morning report.

Bente leafed through it. “Anything important?”

“No. A group of al-Awlaki supporters are on the move. Their number three passed through Damascus yesterday and landed in Frankfurt this morning. The Germans picked him up; he claimed that he was going to visit family. Nothing concrete. The new sources at the Commission that we contacted during the spring are ready for assignments.”

She glanced through the report: new al-Shabaab training camp traced via cell phone calls in Oslo; Islamist groups in Frankfurt; two Swedish-Moroccans gone to Karachi—converts, probably; a list of new websites under investigation. Under the heading
Counterespionage
there was nothing.

“We have an incident involving the EU Commission,” Bente said. “A report has leaked.”

“Oh?”

“A Swedish diplomat is mixed up in it.” She briefly outlined the information she had received during meeting with Green without explicitly mentioning his name.

Mikael's forehead creased slightly; he nodded. He promised to check it. “When are you going?”

“I'll take the lunchtime flight. You'll have to take over the command.”

She asked Mikael to contact people at the Commission and see if it was possible to find out more about the leak. They agreed to direct some surveillance against EU institutions and social media—trawl the traffic, see if they caught anything.

She stood by the window. From there she could see the city center, the Luxembourg station, the EU district, and the Commission rising above the surrounding roofs. The Belgian capital vanishing in the drizzle.

A Swedish leak. A diplomat. Presumably just a small mistake, negligence. But you never knew. Green was unusually worried, at least for Green. Normally he was as cool as a fish. Whatever had happened in Brussels was no coincidence. Leaks rarely were and, what was more, she didn't believe in coincidences. She wasn't religious, didn't believe in God or any other magical powers. Belief was for others. She saw facts. Facts were the only thing that held the world together, and the facts she worked with were about people—their behavior, their inner logic.

People were creatures of habit. Habit formed routines, patterns, and a history. The young diplomat was no exception. Everyone's behavior was driven by logic. It might be a crazy logic, developed from an extreme ideology or a sick mind. But there was always some form of order. It just meant you had to see the world through the target's eyes. If you understood how a person thought, you also knew whether he or she was to be considered a threat.

London was always prioritized. When it came to European security services, the British were the most important. The relationship with MI6's imposing headquarters on the banks of the Thames at Vauxhall was crucial. Bente could think of over a dozen operations in recent years that had gone ahead after signals had come from the British setup. The triad of the domestic security service, MI5, the foreign espionage service, MI6, and the home of signals intelligence at GCHQ—Government Communications Headquarters—comprised one of the strongest spy networks in the world, and Sweden was fortunate to be their partner. London was the source of the data that changed the game plan—that made operational decisions in Stockholm possible.

Surveillance, interception, arrest, prosecution.

Only the British crown had a global presence. British surveillance resources could reach all corners of the earth, they had agents on every continent and it was only natural to be dependent on them. Without the Brits, Säpo—as well as the Swedish Military and Intelligence Service—would have huge blind spots. It wasn't something that was expressed out loud; politicians didn't like to hear things like that.

Three summers ago Bente had been in Rabat for confidential talks with the American embassy and the Moroccan authorities, and at a small reception in the evening, organized by the Americans, she met an official from MI6's office. He was drunk, and had flirted with her. He had said that Sweden was so conscientious. It was probably true. Sweden was a conscientious little brother. London had faith in Stockholm, and faith was a rare and valuable resource in their business. The British supplied their conscientious partner in the North with data and intelligence. In return, Stockholm listened attentively to British wishes and desires. British projects were supported; Sweden was sensitive to their statements at the UN and within the EU. The new European security service was a project that had received support. The European Intelligence Service—a hopeless initiative. To get twenty-seven member nations to agree to something like that was complete madness. They couldn't even agree to bomb Libya. But the Brits weren't giving up. And now, against all the odds, the organization was close to realization. Bente would never have believed that they would succeed in forcing it through. She couldn't help but envy them sometimes. Their machinery. Their influence. They were competent; they had an ability to take control of situations, run operations across the world. Was it possible to admire machinery? Well, she did. Behind every British operative was an enormous resource, an apparatus that could shine through everything with a blinding, revealing light. The Brits had the means to sieve through a global flow of information for data; they had sufficient presence on the ground in the form of infiltrators and field personnel that they knew exactly what was being said in African governments, they knew what the Pakistani ISI was thinking, knew which orders were passed across crackly cell phone connections in the Yemeni branch of al-Qaida. Only the Americans could manage the same level of clarity. They knew their enemy.

The rain streamed across the car as she pulled out of the underground parking lot on to Rue de Luxembourg. Brussels was a gray and shadowy city, full of umbrellas and heavy façades. She coaxed
the car around Square de Meeûs. After just one hundred meters, she was in a stationary row of angry, red rear lights. Roadwork ahead had stopped the traffic. In one of the cars in front, a driver lost his patience and began to honk his horn—long and drawn out. Shortly after, a second horn chimed in, now more staccato, a furious exhortation.

The traffic had come to a complete standstill. Workers in bright yellow reflective vests were stood gesticulating and trying to redirect the traffic. On the radio they were playing a noisy rock song. She bent down and got out her personal cell. She had one for work and one for the rest of her life, the life that her friends and family, and everyone outside of the business, knew about. How simple it was for people who only lived one life! Bente was forced to live two: a normal one and, encapsulated into that like dark matter, a hidden life.

“Darling, I have to go away for a few days.”

Her husband didn't seem surprised. “Oh? Okay,” was all he said. He was at work. She had hoped he might sound more disappointed. They had invited a couple to dinner that evening—the Rothmans, who lived in the same block and with whom they had carefully begun to socialize after a local gathering. The Rothmans had two children the same age as her own sons, ten and twelve years old. Fredrik didn't ask where she was going, or when exactly she would be back, and she was grateful for that. Her husband wasn't to know where she was—couldn't know. No one could. That was work. It was a way of life.

She knew that Fredrik had been looking forward to dinner with the Rothmans. They had interesting jobs: he was a doctor and had worked in Asia several times, while she was a professor at the university in Bruges. They were chatty and lively—too talkative for her liking.

She was used to dividing up her existence, breaking it down into what was visible, and what others could never see. She rarely thought about it. Fredrik was also used to it. They had been married for almost thirteen years. They worked well together. Good parents.
A good team. She was careful and kept an eye on everything; he was careless but better at making contacts. She didn't understand how he could have such a messy wardrobe and yet be so well dressed when he left for work. On the other hand, he occasionally got tired of her attention to detail, she had noticed, her habit of doing things the way she thought was best. He worked in mergers and acquisitions of companies in the automotive industry; she was the head of a small IT consultancy—or so they said when they met others. She needed it to sound so boring that no one asked any more questions. They never talked about her real job—never. Fredrik knew—he was the only person who knew the truth—that she worked for the Security Service. Naturally, he couldn't know what she did with her days. They had a silent agreement that he wasn't to ask and she wasn't to tell. In the beginning he had refused to accept it; he wanted to know, had been curious. Counterterrorism! Couldn't she tell him something exciting? Was she hunting anyone in particular? He promised to keep quiet. He was jealous if she traveled. Who was she going to meet? Why couldn't she just answer her cell? But in time he had stopped asking questions. She almost missed them.

Starting at SSI was taking it another step. The post at the Section was a protected position and was surrounded by the highest level of secrecy. SSI was of such a nature that, outwardly, it did not exist. There were no operational reports and the budget was secret. No one, apart from a handful of people at the top of Sweden's intelligence operations, knew about them. She still remembered the March day when she had come home and told him that she had gotten the job; she could barely tell him anything about it—just that it was in Brussels, nothing else. But Fredrik was used to this. All he said was, “Good; then we'll move to Brussels.” More than that had never passed between them with regard to her job. The kids thought their mom worked in IT and her husband didn't even know that something by the name of SSI or the Section existed. If he wanted to reach her at work, he had to follow a specific procedure. Each morning she disappeared, before returning in the evening. Sometimes she could see him wondering, pondering an unspoken
thought. There was nothing unusual about that; he had a right to be curious. But there wasn't much to tell, either. It suited her down to the ground not to have to tell him what she had done during her day, like other couples; she liked being left alone. The silence around her was such that it deepened over the years, it became entrenched. The silence was their marriage covenant.

She crawled past the roadwork. The workers had dug a large hole in the road and were moving to and fro in the rain. She drove carefully past the row of hectically blinking yellow lights. Then the queue was gone. She turned on to Belliardstraat, passed the EU district and entered the Belliard Tunnel, sweeping onward into the Kortenberg tunnel. Soon she was on the freeway.

The flight from Zaventem was an hour late. She sat at the edge of the transit hall, at a comfortable distance from a family with children, as several businessmen circled around the rows of seats with cells glued to their ears. As usual, she couldn't help reading her environment. She noted that no one could see her screen. The security mindset never left her. It was an old habit, an occupational hazard. Fredrik would laugh at her and say that she was paranoid, but that wasn't true—she was never worried. She just couldn't help but interpret faces, body movements, which way gazes were looking and all the other small everyday situations that took place around her, reading them all, seeing threats and risks, seeing security. It was part of her vision; over time it had become just as natural as it was for others to distinguish colors. At airports she always noted the deficiencies in security, noted where the CCTV cameras were located, which angles weren't being covered, observed the behavior of passersby. She particularly paid attention to people who were different from the crowd; she always noticed if someone was watching her.

Sitting at the far end of the row of seats, close to the gate, with the enormous curved glass window looking out on to the runway, she was undisturbed. It felt good to be immersed in work. There was always a pleasant sensation of increased concentration when she was approaching a new case, a new task. A lot of human existence
appeared to be hopelessly messy and irrelevant, but when you got up close in order to distinguish threats, risks, then it all took on a new sharpness. The smallest detail might be the bearer of interesting meanings or implications. Chaos became meaningful, the complexity a part of the challenge. Discerning a threat and understanding its implications, its orientation and gravity, the underlying motives and, somewhere among all these parameters, spotting the outlines of individuals, actors, targets—that was to understand reality better.