The Swimmer (17 page)

‘I know you’ve got twenty-one minutes before your hearing begins. And I’ve taken the liberty of booking us a conference room.’

Gabriella played with her cell phone. Checked the time. Nineteen minutes until the hearing began. Sure, Joseph was prepared. He didn’t expect her for another fifteen minutes. Her legs twitched under the table. She played with her phone. Damnit, this was not the way it was supposed be.

At least Bronzelius didn’t waste any time. They’d barely entered the room before he threw two tabloids onto the white table between them. All of these rooms were white. Gabriella felt as if she spent more time in this kind of room than in her own white-walled apartment.

The headlines were almost identical. Different versions of swede wanted for murder in brussels.
Expressen
chose to add the word ‘terrorist’.
Aftonbladet
went for ‘elite soldier’. What a bunch of idiots at
Expressen,
thought Gabriella. ‘Elite soldier’ would sell much better than yet another terrorist story.

‘Have you heard about this?’ began Bronzelius.

‘Well, I read the papers,’ Gabriella said. ‘So yes, I’ve heard about it. But I’ve only seen the headlines online this morning. Nothing more.’

Bronzelius nodded calmly. There was something about this man. Something honest and sincere. Something safe and policelike. Gabriella felt calmer.

‘What I’m about to say needs to stay between us. It needs to be kept in complete secrecy. You’re a lawyer. You know what that means.’

‘Yes, I understand the concept of confidentiality.’

She smiled a little warily. Bronzelius looked serious.

‘The terrorist—or elite soldier, depending on which newspaper you read—is Mahmoud Shammosh,’ he said.

Brussels, Belgium

Klara leaned back in her chair and spun around from her desk to look out at the stunning view of Brussels from the window of her sixteenth-floor office. Away from her buzzing computer. Away from her notes from the meeting with Eva-Karin. The morning was ice-cold with clear blue skies. Smoke hovered, quiet and white, over the chimneys of houses. As if it had frozen on its way up toward all that blue. The sunshine was so intense, Klara had to turn her eyes back to her office.

She couldn’t stand looking at it. Couldn’t stand the reflections flashing off the European Union buildings; their contours were suddenly so sharp they made her eyes hurt. Today was one of those days when it felt like everything was happening for the first time. As if the earth had rotated a few degrees on its axis, as if the universe had expanded or contracted. As if she had woken up in a different body, filled with experiences she had no memories of. Her teenage years had been filled with days like that. Maybe everyone’s teens were filled with days like that. She closed her eyes and wiped what might have been a tear from the corner of her eye.

After she’d turned the frame over, she’d sat staring into Cyril’s stark white wall for a long time. Taking deep breaths. Thinking about what Grandpa used to say: ‘Rock and salt. That’s what we’re made of out here in the archipelago.’

Rock and salt.

Slowly, she’d lowered her gaze to look at the black-and-white photo.

They were beautiful. All three of them were beautiful. The little girl was probably three years old. She looked so happy on Cyril’s shoulders. Her long, thick hair mixed with his wavy, vacation-ruffled curls as she bent over him. Her large, dark eyes looked straight into the camera. Cyril was shirtless and leaning outward and upward to kiss her on the cheek. Beside him, with her long, smooth arm draped naturally around Cyril’s waist was a woman who looked so perfectly healthy and relaxed that Klara almost couldn’t breathe. With her tiny freckles, her pretty little nose, her salt-splashed hair, her casual shirtdress and her obviously tanned legs, she could have been a model. Maybe she was. A beach stretched out behind them, and beyond that waves and sea. It was the quintessential picture of a happy French family.

How long had she sat there with that picture, wrestling with the urge to throw it against the wall so hard the simple frame would crack and the glass would spread out across the parquet floor like mercury? Finally she calmly put it back into the drawer where she’d found it. Stood up and got dressed. Put her phone in her bag and went to work.

Rock and salt.

When the phone on her desk rang, she first considered not picking it up. She didn’t want to talk, couldn’t stand the thought of sucking up to Eva-Karin. But on the sixth ring, she decided that anything was better than what she was feeling right now.

‘Yes?’ she said into the phone.

‘A Mr Moody for you, Mademoiselle Walldéen,’ a receptionist said in French on the other end of the line.

Klara gasped. It was as if the composition of the air itself had suddenly changed, as if she had to work harder to get oxygen to her blood.

‘Klara,’ said a voice on the phone. ‘Are you there?’

His voice was shriller than she remembered it. Pinched—the words somehow compressed. She tried to breathe normally, but it was impossible.

‘Moody,’ she whispered.

Then nothing. It took several seconds for Klara to finally break the silence.

‘It’s been a long time.’

She could hear him breathing on the other end. It had been so long. Still, she knew something wasn’t right.

‘I have to see you,’ Mahmoud said.

His voice was tense, as if buzzing with electricity. Klara started to feel guilty. She hadn’t responded to his e-mail. Not because she didn’t want to, but because she didn’t know what to say.

‘Now?’ she said. ‘Do you want to meet now? Are you in Brussels?’

‘Can you leave the office?’

‘What is it, Moody? Has something happened?’

‘I can’t tell you now. Not like this. Can I see you?’

Klara thought it over for a moment. She got the distinct feeling that she was at an important crossroads.

‘Yes,’ she said at last. ‘No problem. Where should we meet?’

CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, USA

We’re all suspects; more than that. Guilty until proven innocent. We move like shadows through the hallways. Shadows that are the shadows of shadows. The daring ones exchange knowing glances over mounds of shredded documents, whirring computers. Talks at the watercooler are quiet, intense, full of disbelief and carefully calibrated. Those already under formal investigation wear their stress like a bell around their necks, like a yellow Star of David. In the canteen, they sit alone with their trays and their thoughts of retirement, their children’s college funds evaporating with each new interrogation, with each more or less explicit suspicion. Nobody is talking about it. Everybody is talking about it.

It’s only been a few weeks since they took Aldrich Ames. Vertefeuille and her stubborn task force of old ladies and retirees on the second floor. A mole in Langley. Our very own Philby. Is it worse to betray your country for money than for ideology? The prevailing view at the watercooler is yes.

And now the building is full of FBI. Uncomplicated policemen in dark suits. They might as well be uniformed here, where khakis and dress shirts are the rule. They know nothing about us, nothing about our work. It’s a joke. Lie detectors don’t work on someone who can’t tell the difference between truth and lies. They’re irrelevant to those of us who don’t even care which is which.

I’m not surprised when I hear the footsteps on the carpet outside my office, and I barely look up when they open my door without knocking. Their tactics are obvious, old-fashioned, as familiar as a pair of well-worn boots. A tired man around my age enters. He needs a haircut and to lose twenty-five pounds if he’s going to avoid the heart attack he probably already feels panting in his chest. A rookie with high cheekbones wearing a new suit, struggling to keep the testosterone inside his shirt collar, follows him in.

‘If you just tell us right away it’ll make it easier for everyone,’ says the rookie, fastening his just-out-of-the-academy eyes at me. ‘We already know most of it, so you just need to fill in the gaps for us.’

The older man sits down in one of the threadbare steel chairs in front of my desk and turns his eyes up toward the soundproof tiles in the ceiling. It’s the oldest trick in the book. Fire off an accusation, throw your object off balance, see how he reacts. It might work on a junkie in the Bronx, in a Wall Street office on some sweaty stockbroker already starting to get cold feet about that insider deal.

But that’s not going to work here. Not in Langley. Not on the people who invented that method, who are infinitely better at lying than at telling the truth. Not on those who, for once, have nothing to hide.

Fourteen hours later I’m sitting with electrodes attached to my body in front of a tired, old technician who seems all too aware of the futility of this task. It’s a charade. We play our roles the best we can.

We go through the formalities, the control questions. Where I live, where I was stationed, my divorce, how much I drink.

‘Is this the first time you’ve been under investigation?’ he says at last, and glances at the controls in front of him.

‘No,’ I reply. ‘I was under investigation between 1980 and 1981. Suspended one month, then released, but they kept me here at Langley until 1985.’

‘Do you know why you were under investigation?’

‘Yes, there were circumstances in my private life that compromised an operation when I was deep undercover abroad.’

‘What circumstances?’

He looks up and meets my gaze with his gray, hangdog eyes.

‘I don’t know if you have high enough clearance for me to tell you that,’ I say.

‘You can assume that I have clearance,’ he says.

‘Sorry, I don’t want to screw things up for either of us, but I can’t just assume anything. My superiors would have to declassify it, and until you have a document to that effect, I can’t say any more than that.’

I make an effort to sound friendly. He’s just an instrument, a speaker for the questions someone else has written.

‘What was the outcome of that investigation?’

‘I went back into service. I guess the reasons are in my dossier somewhere. I’ve never seen them.’

He’s satisfied by that and continues asking for names and dates. Friends and colleagues. I answer as best I can.

‘January fifteenth, 1985,’ he says at last. ‘Stockholm.’

‘Okay,’ I reply. ‘If you say so.’

‘You stayed at the Lord Nelson hotel and your plane flew back to Dulles via London in the afternoon’—he looks at his papers—‘at sixteen-fifteen. At eight-thirty you rented a Volvo under an alias and returned it to the airport at fourteen-thirty. Do you remember?’

‘I remember Stockholm. It was cold,’ I say.

‘You had six hours with the car,’ he says. ‘Approximately. Where did you go?’

I look at my watch.

‘That was almost ten years ago,’ I say. ‘I had some free time, so I rented a car. Where did I drive? I drove north along the coast, if I remember correctly. I’d had a mission and wanted some time to myself.’

‘You shook off your shadows,’ says the man, casting a glance at his controls.

‘That’s old habit. I shake off my shadows when I go to buy a pack of McNuggets.’

A brief smile dances across his lips. A dozen routine questions later we’re done. We shake hands, and we both know that this investigation is closed.

Later, I sit in my room. The pale spring sun shines through the thin leafless trees. The highway roars in the distance.

I close my eyes and remember Stockholm. I remember the stern of the ferry from the amusement park. I remember promises and death. I remember the hollowness and what we fill the hollowness with. I remember every word that the helpful, stressed-out woman at the embassy said. I remember the Volvo, how I shook off my shadows, how I rented the car in a third or fourth name, how I drove south not north, how I thought the sun would never rise. I remember weak coffee and dry buns at a deserted gas station. I remember that it was snowing, and the Volvo moved soundlessly through the snow, as if in a dream. I remember that I finally stopped in a little coastal village called Arkösund.

I remember that I left the car, walked past a boarded-up country store, past snowed-in, yellow, late-nineteenth-century villas. I remember the silence that was only broken by the crunch of my feet on the snow. I remember standing on the bridge, peering out over the ice, protecting my eyes from the falling snow. I remember that I said my daughter’s name. I remember that the tears froze on my cheek. I remember that I was as close as I could get. I remember that I whispered to the ice, to the sea, to the wind:

‘I’ll return.’

I remember that I didn’t mean it.

I remember that when I turned to go back to the Volvo the snow had already erased my footsteps, as if I’d been placed on that dock from above, as if my presence had no continuity, no context, no causality.

Later that evening. On my way home, I stop at the pool. I’ve forgotten my bathing suit, but I go inside anyway. It’s empty except for two elderly men crawling purposefully through the chlorine green water. I sit down on the cold tiles, my back against the wall. Outside heavy raindrops begin to fall onto the damp ground. When I close my eyes, I walk over an icy blanket of deep snow, so white it’s blinding. The wind stings my cheeks. Behind me my footsteps have left deep trenches, and no matter how hard I try, I can’t cover them.

Brussels, Belgium

‘Good job, soldier,’ Reiper said. ‘You’ve accomplished your mission with flying colors!’

With one arm around George’s shoulders, Reiper pushed him toward the English living room that George had left fewer than twelve hours ago.

Soldier.
That degrading tone. George wasn’t a soldier. He was a general, or at least an aide-de-camp, an adviser to generals. The effects of this morning’s cocaine had already worn off. If that hadn’t been the case, he would’ve told Reiper exactly how he felt about him, told him to take his fucking Digital Solutions and go straight to hell. A place they probably already knew quite well. But instead George just felt depressed and exhausted from missing a night of sleep and from this morning’s adrenaline rush. Terrified of Reiper and his gang, and the contacts and resources they obviously had access to, he said nothing, just nodded.