The Last Compromise

by Reevik, Carl

  Carl Reevik

  The Last Compromise

  A Novel

  The Last Compromise. Copyright © 2015 by Carl Reevik. All rights reserved. This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters and events are fictional; institutions and places are fictionalised. Feedback and queries may be addressed to carl.reevik@gmail.com. Cover design: Datawyse Maastricht. Cover image: VanBeekImages.com.

  To H., N. and D.

  1

  Pavel pushed against the heavy wooden door with the glass windows, and the cold dry air hit his face. The sun was blinding him. It was early April, the snow was already gone but the air was still cold. He crossed the little square outside the metro station, turned right and, without slowing down, immersed himself in the brightness and the smells and the sounds of the crowded street, the noise of the traffic, the sun in the clear blue sky, the fumes of the car engines. He now was one of the many dark-haired men in their thirties wearing a black leather jacket, except that he was looking a lot more focused than most.

  He continued down Chernyshevski Prospekt, a street typical of Saint Petersburg’s monumental city centre. It was lined with the heavy façades of eighteenth-century apartment buildings, their rendering painted yellow on the walls and white around the windows. All was covered by a grey layer of street dirt. Pavel’s lips were pressed firmly together as he walked in the stream of pedestrians, keeping pace with the crowd, passing people who were standing around smoking or handing out leaflets or playing with their mobile phones.

  The concentration in Pavel’s face was real. Four days ago the local police in a village in southern Romania had recovered human remains from the mud of the river Danube. It was the body of a man, initially spotted during routine excavation works along the stream banks. The body was almost completely decomposed. The head was missing. The hands had been cut off. But it was still an identifiable body; forensic technology had significantly improved in that part of Europe. Five years earlier, at the time of the man’s death, it wouldn’t have been a problem, yet now his identification was only a matter of time. Pavel had understood that the moment he’d received the news. It was now or never.

  He reached the intersection and turned right into a boulevard. The pavement was narrower but there were also fewer people. The façades to his right were still of the same type, though, with shop displays and cafés squeezed into low windows at leg level or into generous windows above people’s heads.

  He crossed a side street and looked up ahead without stopping. There it was, suspended from one of the next buildings on the right-hand side of the street. Strong colours, heavy fabric, a golden shield with a stern black eagle in the middle. Red beak, red claws. The flag marking the German consulate.

  Pavel kept on walking. These were the final one hundred metres. He was almost there.

  Brussels, Belgium

  ‘The statistical guy is here,’ Hans said, leaning into his boss’s office.

  ‘Coming,’ Tienhoven said. He looked into one corner of his computer screen, clicked on his mouse button and got up from behind his desk. He was a tall skinny Dutchman with short grey hair, maybe fifty years old. Hans had never asked him how old he was exactly. Tienhoven had been director already when Hans had got hired here three years ago, but never had the boss’s age come up. In fact barely anything had ever come up, except work. Of course Tienhoven had never asked Hans about his age either. He didn’t need to, because everything was in his file. His age was thirty-one. And his file had been checked before he got hired. It had been checked several times, presumably. Actually Hans knew it had been; he did part of the checking for new recruits himself these days.

  His boss’s office could be reached directly from the corridor, which is why Hans could lean into it. The secretary’s office was next door. At his hierarchical level, Tienhoven could have asked that this direct access be locked for good. Then visitors would have to come in through the secretary’s office, which would become an antechamber rather than the adjacent room it now was. But he hadn’t asked for it.

  He came out and together he and Hans walked down the corridor. Hans stayed half a pace behind his boss’s right. They walked past a number of closed doors, past the open door to Hans’s own office and past a few more open doors of other people’s offices until they reached the half-open door to a small meeting room. Tienhoven pushed it open and entered, with Hans following.

  The meeting room was the size of two merged standard offices, which was precisely how they’d built it. They’d left out one interior wall and voilà, here is your conference centre to receive visitors and take decisions in. There was an oval conference table filling almost the entire room. Nine chairs positioned around it, a blank flipchart squeezed into the corner. The Brussels traffic outside was muffled by the closed windows. It was early April, not rainy but overcast. Since they were on one of the top floors they could see the main building of the European Commission stand tall and broad and metallic in the distance. The steady noise outside and below was no longer commuter traffic, it was just normal late morning traffic.

  A man about Hans’s age got up as they entered the room. He had black hair and wore little round glasses. He was cleanly shaven, but he didn’t seem to need to shave a lot anyway. He wore beige trousers and a light blue shirt with no tie. None of them wore ties, just the usual smart-casual shirts. Tienhoven was the most formally dressed of the three because he was wearing his grey jacket over a white shirt.

  Tienhoven and the visitor shook hands.

  ‘Willem Tienhoven, pleased to meet you,’ Tienhoven said. The visitor smiled but didn’t say anything.

  The guy’s name was Viktor. Since Hans knew him anyway, and since he’d already said hello to him a minute ago, he just closed the door and sat down right away, on the far side of the table, with his back to the windows. The other two sat down as well. The three of them formed the points of a triangle across the table, each of them having two empty chairs on either side. Hans himself would probably have kept talking right now, just to compensate for the fact that Viktor still hadn’t opened his mouth. But his boss didn’t say anything either. He just sat there and waited.

  Hans broke the silence. ‘Viktor just told me the train from Luxembourg was on time,’ he said, half to Tienhoven, half to Viktor. ‘No Belgian railways strike today, and Luxembourgish railways never strike.’

  Viktor was sitting there, smiling. A black laptop was resting on the table in front of him. It was closed. Hans had met with Viktor a few times face to face in the course of their project. It had been mostly here in Brussels, and a few times in Luxembourg, the seat of the European Commission’s statistics department and of a few other offices. As a result of their cooperation Hans knew what Viktor was like in person. Otherwise all this might have unnerved him even more right now. But his boss was completely calm.

  ‘Tell me,’ Tienhoven said to Viktor. And Viktor started telling him.

  Luxembourg, Luxembourg

  Zayek was waiting in the queue at the newsagent’s shop across the street from his office to buy one pack of cigarettes. He had taken an early lunch break, he had come here specifically for this purpose, and he was already holding his wallet in his right hand. The shop occupied a small part of the ground floor of a glass cube that looked very much like his own office building. Two people were waiting in front of him, including the person who was already being served.

  Only one pack of cigarettes. Not more for the moment, Zayek thought, because he wasn’t going to smoke a lot. In fact he wasn’t a smoker at all, and never really had been. But he had thought about it thoroughly, and had decided that it was time to pick it up. He was nearly forty. And he figured that a man who was nearly forty, and who was in his situation, might as well smoke. He even shou
ld. Or at least carry a pack of cigarettes in his pocket. He wouldn’t pick up smoking like some teenager, who checked in a bathroom mirror how cool he looked with a cigarette in his mouth. No, Zayek would not look into any mirrors. He would be smoking because it was the appropriate thing to do. It would even give him a pleasant dizziness after the first draw of smoke every time he would light up, this much he remembered from previous times.

  All right, his turn. ‘Bonjour Monsieur,’ the shop assistant said to him, a friendly smile in her young face. Like most shop assistants in Luxembourg she would speak only French. Commuters from Belgium or France next door. Good luck trying German or English with these people. Zayek looked at her face, then at her breasts, then at his wallet, trying to remember the French phrase he had prepared back in the office.

  ‘Des cigarettes mentholées, s’il vous plaît’, he said, pointing at a green pack of menthol cigarettes behind the assistant’s back. ‘No, the other one. Yes, that one.’ He remembered that the ones with menthol tasted slightly less awful than the normal ones.

  ‘Ça sera tout?’ Yes, that would be all, thank you.

  He paid in euro coins, put his wallet into the left pocket of his jacket, picked up the green cigarette pack, put it into the right pocket, said au revoir, smiled, stepped aside and turned around. A queue of three people had formed behind him, and it was now shifting forward as he cleared the space in front of the counter.

  Zayek thought for a moment. Now the chewing gum. He had promised Anneli from the office to fetch some sugar-free chewing gum for her. Not for her, in fact, but for her children. He had asked whether he could get her anything, and he had smiled, and she had smiled back and had said, yes, in fact, chewing gum would be great. Then she’d added that she usually gave the kids chewing gum when she picked them up from school. She had said it with the same smile, in the same friendly voice. Clearly she would never have an affair with him. Zayek was sure about that. Anneli smiled a lot with him, but she was also a serious, organised woman. She was from Finland, married to a Frenchman, two kids, no nonsense. Civil servants at the European Commission were almost all in mixed marriages. It didn’t matter whether they worked in Brussels or here, at the outpost in Luxembourg. In his own unit there was only one Spanish guy married to a woman from Spain, and there was Zayek himself, who wasn’t married to anyone. But for the rest it was all cross-border coupling. Anneli often flirted with him in the office, at least Zayek thought she did. Married women, or at least some of them, would just love to have an affair to get out of their domestic lives, with a man like, for example, himself. At least he thought they would, at least some of them. But Anneli was all smiles, and flirts, and nothing else. Happily married. Earlier he had thought that, if he started smoking, the cigarette smell on him would repel her if she ever wanted to kiss him. But she would never want to kiss him, so he might as well smoke. He already got the cigarettes. Now he just needed to get back to the end of the queue, and buy some chewing gum for Anneli’s children. No, there would be no kiss, not even a hug, there never had been any of that. Just a smile: thank you Boris, that’s so sweet of you.

  Brussels

  ‘Hans and I are conducting a project in forensic statistics,’ Viktor explained, looking only at Tienhoven. He hadn’t stood up. He and Tienhoven and Hans were still sitting around the oval conference table that barely fit into the room.

  Viktor had a calm voice. Hans knew he was Hungarian, but he had no particular accent. Clearly English was not his native language, but his accent was impossible to pinpoint. Not Slavic, not Scandinavian, not Hungarian. A steady, generic, unobtrusive European voice. Viktor continued, ‘Forensic statistics means to run different types of analysis over sets of data to look for patterns, and for anomalies in the patterns, which can then reveal criminal activity.’

  He turned around in his seat to the flipchart behind him. It was close enough for him to draw on it without getting up.

  ‘For example, this is how we detected irregularities in the award of government contracts in three European countries.’ Viktor drew a vertical line to the left, and a horizontal line at the bottom of the sheet. Two axes waiting for a curve.

  ‘Say a city administration wants to build a bridge. It needs a contractor, and there are many companies that want that government contract. When the estimated value of the project is below five million euros, the mayor has a lot of freedom to choose the company he likes. But above five million he has to apply stricter European rules, so that qualified companies from other European countries have a chance to make a bid, too.’ Viktor drew a horizontal line running just above the horizontal axis, a flat curve. ‘Normally you would expect that the probability of a government contract having any particular estimated value is more or less evenly spread, except that there are more small contracts than there are big contracts. What we found, however, is a spike in probability just below five million euros.’ He drew a steep and narrow stalagmite with its base in the middle of the horizontal curve, pointing upwards into the sky. ‘It means that, unusually often, city authorities estimated the value of their contracts as just below the threshold. It turned out that they deliberately and systematically underestimated the value in order to avoid the application of stricter rules.’

  ‘So they could give the contracts to their friends,’ Hans added. ‘Which only becomes visible when you crunch the numbers. If you audit the files themselves, and go through the contracts one by one, you will not notice it. The files themselves are clean.’

  ‘You said that this was an example,’ Tienhoven said to Viktor. ‘From some other project I assume. But you came here to present something else. Something that is of direct interest to the European Commission’s anti-fraud department.’

  Hans looked at his boss. He was right, of course. Here at the Commission’s anti-fraud department they were dealing with irregularities within the Commission itself. Corruption or stretching of the rules at local level was something for the police of whatever country it was happening in, provided that they were misspending their own taxpayer money.

  ‘That is true,’ Viktor replied, without changing either the volume or the pitch or the speed of his presentation. He just went on, in his calm, generic voice. ‘This was an example. For the current project Hans and I applied similar methods to data concerning the use of nuclear material.’

  Luxembourg

  Boris Zayek was still queuing. For the second time, to be precise. He had the cigarettes, now he would buy the chewing gum.

  Boris. His real but almost forgotten name was a fine name, dignified, even noble in a way, he thought. And, above all, international. You could introduce yourself anywhere in the world, and no-one could pinpoint which country you were from. At least not until you started talking, your accent giving you away. You could be from Canada or Austria with such a name, you could blend right in. But instead they had given him the name Boris. What an absurd choice. They might as well have called him Ivan. Actually the name Boris Zayek was meant to be Bulgarian, not Russian. After Bulgaria had joined the European Union in 2007, he had entered the European Commission with a fake Bulgarian identity, as one of the new civil servants from a new member country. Still, who deliberately calls a Russian spy Boris?

  The guy at the front of the queue was leaving, now it was only two people in front of him. There was a lady with long black hair wearing a black business suit, then a guy with short hair wearing a grey jacket, and behind him Mister Boris Zayek, Russian agent.

  If he thought about it, he wasn’t exactly a Russian agent, though. First of all, he wasn’t Russian. He was German, born to German parents in a town in Germany. Not even East Germany, simply a West German town. He didn’t speak any Russian, let alone Bulgarian. At work he explained it by saying his father was Bulgarian, hence the name, but that he was otherwise basically German. So far no-one had ever asked him how a man from communist Bulgaria could have met a woman from West Germany in the middle of the Cold War. There, the black lady was gone, now it was only the
guy in front of him.

  Second of all, Zayek wasn’t sure that what he was doing now really counted as spying in any traditional sense of the word. But he cared less and less about it with every month, every year that passed. Basically he was Boris Zayek, a German civil servant at the European Commission in Luxembourg, only with a strange name which wasn’t real, and with the not entirely genuine passport of a country he had never been to. Surely a man his age, and in his situation, should be smoking. It would be odd if he didn’t.

  ‘Bonjour Madame,’ he said as the guy in front of him walked away. He stepped forward and looked only in the face of the shop assistant. ‘Avez-vous du chewing-gum sans sucre?’

  Brussels

  Tienhoven was waiting for the continuation of the presentation. Viktor was silent, he had already explained the statistics. Now it was the moment for Hans to take over for the central part. He cleared his throat and started.

  ‘National authorities have to report the use of nuclear material for peaceful purposes to the European Commission,’ he said. ‘This has been in the European treaties since the fifties.’

  Hans found it important to keep pointing out these details, basically to anyone he talked to. Too often the Germans or the French or the Italians were blaming the European Commission for this or that. Actually the countries simply didn’t trust each other, so they gave powers to the Commission, a neutral watchdog in Brussels, and told it to check on them all. And then they would all complain together about the watchdog for making their lives difficult. The monitoring of who had how much plutonium and uranium was no different. Let the Commission count it all. So they could all moan about the Commission, rather than about each other.