Into a Raging Blaze (28 page)

32

Brussels, Friday, October 7

Bente took the car to Arlanda on the gray and dreary autumn morning. She was leaving Sweden without telling anyone. On the plane, she allowed herself to relax. She had slept badly during the night. Thoughts about the investigation had floated around, uninterrupted, until, at three in the morning, she had realized that there was no point in trying to fall asleep and, instead, she had gotten up to read through the papers again. She had gone through all the documents one more time. The suspicion, the doubt she had felt during the evening, had at first seemed exaggerated, and that had calmed her down. Perhaps she was unnecessarily disbelieving of people; there was always that risk, in her line of work; disbelief became part of your vision and, in the end, you didn't believe anything, didn't trust anyone, and didn't know what was real. But the more she reread the material, the more convinced she was that she was right. She didn't want to be right. She didn't want to discover what she had discovered.

She woke up with a jolt as the plane landed.

Daylight streamed through the enormous windows in the gate area at Brussels airport. The runways gleamed following the early morning rainfall. She took a taxi home and dropped off her bags. She knew that Fredrik would be at work and the children at school. The rooms of the house were resting in the morning sunshine—all was quiet and familiar. It felt good to be home. She would have liked to lie down on the sofa and nap for an hour, but there was no
time for that. She wrote a note to say she was home and left it on the kitchen table before taking the taxi into the city center.

Mikael was standing by one of the steel tables outside a little café in Schaerbeek. He was smoking. Just this morning, that struck her as odd. During the year or so they had worked together, she had never seen him holding a cigarette. Presumably he smoked in his private life, but not at the office; she didn't know much about his life beyond SSI. At the Section, no one knew much about anyone at all; you left that life outside when you entered the office through the security doors. She was careful about involving herself in the private lives of her employees—work was stressful enough. Perhaps her number two had completely different habits when he wasn't at work, perhaps he was a completely different person compared to the tidy, efficient, sharp Mikael who turned up at the Section every weekday morning. The thought made her smile.

Mikael caught sight of her; he returned her smile, stretched, and stubbed out his cigarette. “Good morning.”

“Good morning.”

“Everything okay?”

She nodded: yes.

She ordered a double espresso from the waiter clearing the next table along. It was morning in Brussels. People had left the surrounding offices and shops to drink their coffee in the glorious weather at one of the many small bars and bistros in the area. It was rare that she visited this part of the city, but Schaerbeek was a pleasant area. She smiled, listening for a while to the lively hubbub around them. Then she reminded herself why they were there. They had to do this first. She couldn't tell Mikael yet, she decided. Not everything. She wanted to think things through first, needed to sure that her doubts were well founded.

“This . . . colleague. He lives here?”

“Yes. Around the corner. We agreed to meet at eleven o'clock. He wanted us to visit him at home.”

She drank her espresso. The strong, sugared coffee had an immediate impact: she felt more alert right away. It would be a day filled
with lots of coffee. Mikael looked at the time and lit another cigarette. He looked at her as if he really wanted to ask a lot of questions, but said nothing. This wasn't the right place for a discussion about what he was probably wondering—they both knew that. They chatted for a while. Mikael had found a new Taiwanese restaurant and told her about their fantastic noodle soups while she finished her coffee and paid. They had ten minutes left. Rodriguez, the head of the Section's cell team, and his people were already in place. They began to walk. A block from the café, they turned off the busy boulevard.

“So we have a problem?”

“Yes.” She hesitated. “I think so.”

Mikael nodded and looked calmly over his shoulder while they kept walking. A sparse flow of people moved around them but no one caught Bente's attention. A garbage truck thundered past them; shortly thereafter a sedan slowed down and pulled into an empty parking space about ten meters in front of them.

“I'm not sure what's going on,” she said. “Kempell was right. We're relying too much on the British.”

“The British?”

“They knew Bernier was dead. I don't understand why they didn't say.”

“Are you sure? London seems just as surprised as we are.”

She shrugged her shoulders. “I think they knew he was dead. And that worries me.”

They said nothing and carried on another two blocks along the boulevard until Mikael dropped his pace. They were getting close to the address, a modern residential building squeezed between two older brick buildings.

“The guy we're meeting is called Florian Klause. He works in the same department as Jean Bernier. He's a
stagiaire
.”

“An apprentice?”

Mikael shrugged his shoulders and passed her an ID card, dangling in a frame.

“You're Maria Lundvall. I'm Eric Smith. We're from the HR department at the EU Commission—that's all he knows. We're
carrying out an internal investigation following the death of Jean Bernier in order to close his personnel file, close his accounts, and make sure all personal possessions are retrieved on behalf of the estate. Routine procedure.”

The Section had found Florian Klause by chance. He had contacted the police and said he had something that belonged to Bernier. The Belgian police suspected no crime and provided his cell number when one of the Section's employees turned up and claimed to be from the EU Commission.

They had reached the main door. Mikael pressed a button beside the name
KLAUSE
. A moment later, the door buzzed.

A pale young man opened the door to the apartment on the fourteenth floor. He had a small, round, childish face with freckles on his nose, where there perched a pair of steel-rimmed spectacles. He was wearing a light blue shirt and chinos. According to the records of the EU Commission, he was twenty-eight years old, but the neatly buttoned shirt and his gentle face made him look much younger. He shook hands energetically. He was nervous; Bente could feel his hands sweating.

“Come in. Come in,” he said in English with a strong German accent.

They were admitted to a small attic apartment with a sloping ceiling and a window that had a panoramic view across all of Brussels. It looked like he had just moved in, which couldn't be the case; he was probably just one of those young civil servants who mainly ate, slept, and worked. The only furniture was a small bed, an ugly sofa, and an enormous flat-screen TV. Piles of books were stacked along a wall; lots of law and study books, she noted. Typical bachelor pad. In the tiny kitchen, clean dishes were still dripping. He must have been cleaning for their visit.

“Do you want something to drink? Water, tea . . . ?”

She shook her head. Mikael sat down on the sofa.

Their presence clearly made him nervous. He stared at them, cleared his throat and didn't seem to have a clue how to handle the
situation. He stood, rubbing his hands, as if trying to rub something off, before pulling a chair up to the coffee table and sitting down.

On the table there was a brown envelope. She recognized the type—for secret correspondence, with a black lining on the inside to prevent any transparency. She stopped an impulse to pick it up.

“It's great that you could meet with us,” said Mikael.

“Of course.” Florian Klause smiled stiffly and fell silent. Then he burst out, “I know that you must be wondering how this all happened. And, of course, I'll tell you. I just want to say that I'm terribly sorry about what has happened.”

The words came tumbling out of the young man, as if they had been stuck somewhere inside before gushing from his mouth in an irregular torrent. His face was very tense. He looked eagerly at Mikael, then at Bente. She adjusted her expression to a warm smile—the motherly smile. She didn't understand a word of his little outburst, but was careful not to show that. There was no point in pushing this boy; he was upset. A vein had begun to throb in his forehead underneath his blond locks.

“I know that I shouldn't have taken this.” He sighed and looked at the envelope.

“Is this what you wanted to give the police?”

“Yes,” he said. “It was so stupid of me. But I didn't know what to do. I should have given it to the Head of Department, or you. But when Jean died . . .”

“Yes?”

“I . . .” He shrugged his shoulders dejectedly. “It went wrong,” he mumbled.

Mikael glanced at her. He seemed just as unsure as she was about what the young man was actually talking about.

“You should have given this to your boss,” said Mikael.

“Yes.”

“But you didn't.”

“No. I didn't.” He sighed deeply.

“You took it home instead.”

“Yes.”

With a small movement he pulled off his glasses and hid his head in his hands. She could hear him whispering to himself:
“Mein Gott.”
Neither of them moved or said a word. Silence reigned in the apartment.

“I made a mistake,” he said, finally, with a thick voice.

They waited for him to pull himself together. Cumbersomely, he put his glasses back on. His eyes were red rimmed. He pointed at the envelope as if it was an enemy.

“I know it was completely crazy. These documents—they're top secret. I know it was wrong to take them home. It's completely against the rules. I would never normally have done something like this. I shouldn't have accepted them. I know it's a crime; you don't have to tell me. I understand if you'll need to take . . . certain measures.” He looked glumly at them.

“But why did you keep them?” she said. “Why didn't you give them to your boss?”

“Jean asked me not to.”

“He asked you?”

“Yes.”

“Why?”

Florian Klause sighed and stared into space. “He didn't trust anyone at the Directorate General. Everyone was against him, you know? But I worked with Jean”—he quickly corrected himself—“with Monsieur Bernier. I know what he was like. He was a good person.”

They said nothing.

Bente's cell rang. The sound made Florian Klause shudder. She swore, got out her phone, and quickly turned it to silent. It was Rodriguez calling.

Klause continued: “Monsieur Bernier was reviewing a proposal concerning a new organization within the EU—an intelligence organization.” He looked at them carefully. “I was helping him with research and so on. I really liked working for him. He used to give me legal texts or extracts from the EIS report and say things like, ‘Florian, read this and tell me what you think.' You could discuss
things with him. I mean, he was the sharpest lawyer in the department. But I know a lot of people didn't like him.”

“How do you mean?”

He paused to think. “There was a conflict with the primary authors of the proposal. They hated him, actually—couldn't stand him. But they were wrong.” He smiled.

“What do you mean—that he was right?”

“His criticism was justified. The proposal was poorly written.”

“So they were arguing about that. Him and your colleagues.”

He nodded.

“Then what happened, more precisely?”

“Things escalated, you might say. Some people at the department accused him of being biased, unprofessional, and wanting to destroy the work. They spread rumors, sent e-mails that said terrible things about him.”

“Like what?”

“Like that he was sick, that he had started to lose his sense of judgment because of illness. They claimed he posed a risk to security. Things like that.”

“Didn't he?”

“No!” He stared at them. “Never. It was all lies. They wanted to get rid of him. You have to understand this, Monsieur Bernier was quite well—and totally devoted to his work. All he cared about was the law.”

They nodded.

“After that, it was open war at the department. That was back in the spring. It was as if there were two teams: those who agreed with Bernier and those who thought he was ruining everything. Finally, the case was brought up with Manservisi, our director general. And apparently Bernier was a problem, in his eyes. I remember that some external people came in and had several chats with Bernier. I guess they were trying to make him change his mind. But he refused. Then they took him off the job.”

“Which external people—do you remember?”

He creased his forehead in concentration and thought. “They were from the British delegation to the EU.”

“The British?”

“Yes, the British were involved in the proposal from an early stage. We often received messages from them with drafts for parts of the report. They were the ones who brought the annex.”

She was a fraction of a second away from asking what annex he was talking about, but stopped herself at the last moment; she cleared her throat instead.

He pointed at the envelope. “They wrote the annex,” the apprentice continued. “They demanded that it be added to the report. That was the final straw for Bernier. He refused to approve it. He was furious. They were crazy, he said. Barbarians destroying the EU. Things like that.”

“And then he gave you this document?”

“Yes.” He fell silent; his gaze wavered.

Bente's cell rang again. It buzzed in her inside pocked. She got it out and glanced at it. Rodriguez again.

“It's a very secret document, I guess.”

Klause nodded. “Yes. Red level.” He blushed fiercely and looked down at his lap.