The Last Compromise

by Reevik, Carl

  The German had agreed to meeting with him here. It meant that the Germans needed the Commission more than the Commission needed them, Hans assured himself. He looked around him again. At the table next to his a group of university students were having an early beer. They were talking in fluent English, each with a different accent. Behind him people were squeezing through the narrow gap between the entrances of the cafés and the chairs and tables outside them. No-one was walking across the square, they all went through the gap.

  ‘I’m Frank Hoffmann, nice to meet you.’ The man looked at Hans as he came out of the gap, a smile on his face, a little lost, like he had forgotten everything else around him. Same age as Hans, perhaps a little older. Short fair hair, light grey jacket.

  Hans got up from his chair. ‘Hans Tamberg. Pleased to meet you.’ They shook hands, and they both sat down.

  ‘Officially I’m not even here,’ Hoffmann whispered leaning across the table, still smiling, in a fake conspirational voice. ‘My real name is not Hoffmann either, as you surely understand.’

  Hans smiled back at him, tentatively. ‘But it’s still your name, fake or not, right?’

  ‘They give us a new fake family name every five months,’ Hoffmann continued, like he could hardly believe himself how exciting it all was. ‘We get to keep our first name, though, otherwise we’d all go crazy.’

  ‘Is Frank your real name, then?’

  ‘Of course not, haha!’ Hoffmann was positively cheerful. Hans liked him already. Which, he realised, must have been precisely the point. Still, it felt good to start out on such a positive note.

  Hoffmann said, ‘So Hans, how can we help each other?’

  ‘I don’t know, you tell me.’

  ‘There is a man working for the European Commission, his name is Boris Zayek.’ Hoffmann had not hesitated for a moment before starting telling him. Clearly he knew exactly what he would and wouldn’t say. ‘We believe that he’s really working for the Russian intelligence services.’

  Hans stared at him, trying not to form any particular facial expression. ‘How do you know?’

  Hoffmann continued, again without pausing. ‘Because a Russian defector showed up at our consulate in Saint Petersburg. He says the man who works for the Commission is in fact a German citizen who is using a false identity. It looks like it’s true. I am instructed to expose him, us together with you.’

  Petten, the Netherlands

  The familiar hum filled the control room. Professor Koopmans saw his own reflection in the thick glass. His wrinkled face looked tired. He changed the focus of his gaze and looked right through the glass. Inside, two people were clumsily moving around in their enormous protection suits, like astronauts on a space station. Men or women, impossible to tell. Orange lights started flashing, both behind the glass and in the control room.

  ‘Two more seconds, like last time,’ the dark-haired woman at the panel said. Her name was Clarissa, she was here for two more months on a research grant. Everybody here was from somewhere else. This was the Joint Research Centre. Koopmans himself was Dutch, he had grown up on the North Sea, seventy kilometres down the coast, but that was mere coincidence. Just having the right passport or the right birthplace did not get you very far around here.

  The hum got lower and softer. The orange lights were no longer flashing. Clarissa turned around to face him, and said, ‘That was it, plus one more hour for the secondary cooling cycle. The computer will work the rest of the day and all night. And now we wait.’

  Koopmans kept looking at the astronauts inside, at the glass, at his own reflection. Yes, now we wait. He turned around, pushed against the heavy door, and stepped outside onto the steel platform, ten metres above the ground. A sharp cold wind was blowing from the sea. The wide sky above the sea and the dunes was grey. Tiny drops of cold water started covering his face.

  Down below he saw a man half his age stride through the wind towards the base of the platform. It was Kenneth, also here on a research grant. He reached the base of the stairs, raised his head, and shouted up to Koopmans, ‘They say they checked! They can’t deliver it, because it’s cancelled! All of it!’

  Koopmans breathed in the cold air. He squinted into the wind, then closed his eyes. He let the water drops chill his face, let them wet his eyelids. He looked down to Kenneth again, and started carefully walking down the steel stairs. Above and behind him was the door through which he had just come. It was set in the top floor of a large windowless concrete cube. Behind it was another, even larger concrete structure. Beyond it, dwarfing them both, rose the towering menace of the reactor dome.

  Maastricht

  The students at the neighbouring table cheered at a young woman who was cycling past, between the café tables and the square. She waved them hello, too.

  Hans forced himself to remember that he certainly was in the middle of a mind game. Hoffmann hadn’t mentioned the fact that Hans couldn’t be a very senior interlocutor, but maybe they were of more or less equal rank, both reporting to a boss who was waiting somewhere in the background. Maybe not. Either way, Hans was hardly prepared for the course their conversation had taken, yet he knew he’d have to ask a few questions because this was the reason he’d been sent here. He was a scout. But he didn’t want to feel pressured while thinking of questions to ask. So he decided to actually make this his reply.

  He said, ‘This concerns a Commission employee, and I’ll have to ask you a couple of things before we continue. Can I think for a few moments?’

  Hoffmann nodded and looked at the two cathedrals without making a point of waiting.

  ‘Why expose him?’, Hans asked the first of his questions. ‘Wouldn’t you want to monitor him, if he’s an agent?’

  ‘Absolutely, except at some point the Russians will find out that there’s been a defector. They will monitor us monitor Zayek. They’ll feed him misinformation from now on. Or pull him out right away, which is why we don’t have much time.’

  Hans nodded, content to have contributed something. His thought had been commented upon, not contradicted. Or at least Hoffmann had chosen to present it this way.

  The waitress arrived. Hans was curious what Hoffmann would order.

  He ordered apple juice.

  Not water, Hans thought, because apparently he wanted to come across somewhat jovial, not earnestly sober. And no beer either, that would have been an exaggerated display of self-assuredness. It wasn’t even dark yet. Depending on the rest of his character and behaviour it would then have signalled either lack of seriousness or, quite to the contrary, patronising dominance, especially if Hans wouldn’t have followed suit. Hoffmann seemed to prefer avoiding both. Apple juice seemed relaxed yet safely within the boundaries of professionalism.

  Hans ordered nothing, he still had some of his water left.

  Time to think about the next question to ask. Are you sure the defector’s telling the truth? No you’re not. Hans could answer this himself. Why do Russians defect these days? Money problems, political problems. Now Hans knew his next question, and decided to ask another one first.

  ‘Are there sometimes defections in the opposite direction? Our people going to them?’ Hans realised he’d said ‘our people’.

  ‘Not many,’ Hoffmann promptly replied. ‘Famous whistle-blowers about American cyber-snooping, of course, but that’s mostly because Russia’s a place other than America. Selling of secrets is going on. But hiding in each other’s embassies is basically Cold War stuff.’

  ‘So why did your customer come to your consulate then?’

  Hoffmann smiled. His apple juice arrived, and he waited as the waitress poured half of it from a little bottle into a glass. Since the bottle’s volume was the same as the glass’s, she could have just brought an already filled glass. But that was not what you paid the café prices for.

  As soon as the waitress had left, Hoffmann said to Hans, ‘Now do ask me the question you actually wanted to ask me.’ He took a big sip of juice and waited. The foc
us of his gaze didn’t leave Hans’s eyes.

  Hans took a sip of water himself, and obliged. ‘If you want to expose him, what do you need the Commission for?’

  Hoffmann nodded, and said, ‘I have asked myself all those questions as well, Hans. I don’t know why the defector came to us. So far he hasn’t said anything useful except that Zayek is a Russian agent. Which, like I said, could well be true. Zayek’s face matches the picture of a German citizen whose old army file we have, and who left his last job precisely when, according to the defector, Zayek got hired in Luxembourg. Why don’t we blow his cover alone? Alone would mean to directly ask the Luxembourgish police to arrest and extradite him to Germany on espionage charges.’

  ‘Why, is he spying on Germany?’

  ‘He’s harming the European Union, of which we are a member. By definition he harms German interests. And maybe that’s the reason my instructions are what they are.’

  Hans waited. Hoffmann smiled.

  ‘My instructions are to confront and expose Zayek,’ he said quietly. His smile was gone. ‘The normal arrest and extradition comes afterwards, we’ll call 112 and, if necessary, prevent his escape until the arrival of the Luxembourgish police. But first comes the confrontation. And that we have to do quickly, and together. The exposure has to be a joint operation with the European Commission itself. Now my question is: are you interested?’

  Saint Petersburg

  Werner Ott gently knocked on the door and slowly opened it. The room was completely dark and empty. Deserted.

  A woman from the visa division walked past, carrying two heavy files downstairs.

  ‘Excuse me, where did he go?’, he asked her in a soft voice.

  ‘He left, I think half an hour ago. I understood he was allowed to leave.’

  ‘Oh, yes he was,’ Ott said and slightly raised the corners of his mouth. ‘Please, allow me to carry one of the files for you.’

  He silently closed the door, and took over half the woman’s burden. She was happy to have been offered help in precisely the right measure.

  He followed her downstairs.

  Brussels

  Hans was back home at his Brussels apartment when his phone rang.

  He had delivered the borrowed service car to the underground garage at work and signed off. And he had reported to Tienhoven about the meeting with Hoffmann. Tienhoven had still been in the office. What did you tell him, he had asked. That it could be that we’re also interested in that person, or at least in that unit, but for other reasons. Did he want to know more? No, he was happy. Tienhoven had nodded approvingly, and had called Clarke right away. The director-general had still been in the office, too, three floors above theirs. Tomorrow there would be a meeting to decide about the cooperation with the Germans on this matter.

  But right now Hans was at home. He had taken the bus. He’d briefly considered but then rejected the idea of having a beer in the little café across the street. He knew he still had some beer in the fridge. Anyway, there was nothing he could do for the moment, and it was time to relax a little. He picked up the phone before it could ring for a second time.

  ‘Tere Hans, do you have a few minutes to chat?’

  ‘Hello dad,’ Hans said, and made himself comfortable on the sofa.

  Hans liked his parents. To be precise, he liked his father. His Danish acquaintance, through whom Siim had met his almost fiancée Clarissa, had once told Hans and Siim that you could like or dislike your father, whereas your mother was just your mother. Hans had found it a bit simple when he’d heard her theory. Theories like that were one of the reasons the young woman had stayed just an acquaintance, another reason being that Hans had been with Julia. It was possible that Siim hadn’t been very convinced either, he had chosen the flatmate over her after all.

  But maybe there was something to the theory, at least in Hans’s case. Or maybe Hans was simply very lucky to have a loving mother who was loved back and who was just there, and a father he actually liked.

  And he knew that his father liked him, too. Perhaps the man could relate well to his youngest son because he himself hadn’t been an oldest brother either. He’d been the second of four siblings. Hans’s grandfather had had children late in life, after he’d come back from the war and the camps, but the family tree had nevertheless kept gaining in breadth. Hence the current size of Hans’s clan.

  ‘Are you coming to Tartu for the Easter holidays?’, his father asked. ‘Just to get that question out of the way.’

  Hans also liked his two brothers, to be sure, but there it was less self-evident. In fact, he mainly liked Lennart, who was two years older. Margus, the oldest, had too much of an age distance to him. To Hans he was almost like a parent, or an uncle. His character didn’t help either. He was big, and he had a family of his own, and a beard, and he was deputy director of the Tartu water utility, and he made Hans feel juvenile.

  ‘I’m not sure yet,’ Hans replied. ‘I know I should have booked tickets by now. Is Lennart coming?’

  With Lennart it was different. Of course he, too, had a family. He was living with his girlfriend and two daughters in a village near Tallinn, even though he’d kept a registered address in Tartu. He, too, had sort of a beard sometimes. But the character was completely different. In engineering school Lennart had figured out a more efficient way to insulate electricity and phone cables on wooden lamp posts during the winter. The system could be fitted to existing lamp posts if maintenance was due anyway, otherwise it made no economic sense, but it nonetheless prolonged the cables’ lifespan somewhat and reduced the failure rate in winter considerably, as far as Hans had understood. Lennart had teamed up with a friend from business school, and had founded a company. Patents, certificates, everything. A Finnish municipality had recently awarded them a contract to fit half the lamp posts along their rural roads, and they had submitted a bid for similar government contracts in Estonia itself and in Sweden.

  ‘No, he won’t. He’ll be travelling for his business.’

  Pity. Lennart was an entirely different story, compared to Margus with his beard.

  ‘I’m not sure, dad. A big new case just arrived, it’s hard to tell how long it will take. Can I maybe just come after Easter, like on a normal weekend?’

  ‘What kind of a question is that? You come whenever you like.’

  Hans smiled. He put his feet on the coffee table.

  ‘So dad, how many new nephews and cousins do I have?’

  ‘It’s a little slow right now. But I’ll tell you something else.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘But don’t laugh. I want to build a house.’

  ‘Another one?’

  ‘I mean building it myself. On the old plot up the river. Something small and simple, from scratch. So you’ll have something to do every time you come to visit.’

  Hans couldn’t help smiling. The idea was absurd, obviously. His father didn’t need a house. But the mere idea of them all drinking beer together on a makeshift construction site lit a spark of enthusiasm. Dad, Lennart, him. Some random cousins maybe. Margus could bring in some utility employees to do the water connection. And Lennart could insulate the electricity cables. What’s not to like?

  After he had finished talking to his father, Hans got himself a cold beer from the fridge and returned to his sofa. The day was over, he felt good. Tomorrow would be an interesting day, too. He definitely didn’t feel like listening to Julia on the phone right now.

  7

  ‘This question concerns not only the appropriateness of such cooperation with the German BND,’ said Nathalie Bresson. She had a light accent, but she tried to speak in the style that she would also use in her native French, the style in which she would have spoken back at the ministry of justice in Paris. ‘It is also a question of legal competences.’

  The meeting had been scheduled as the first thing in the morning, except that director-general Geoffrey Clarke had been in even more urgent meetings all morning, so it was already pa
st noon. Tienhoven, Hans and Clarke were all looking at Bresson, hearing her out. At the Commission people almost never interrupted each other, Hans had noticed that a long while ago. The four of them were sitting around the same table at which Viktor and he had first presented their preliminary findings from the statistics project to Tienhoven. This time there were four people to nine chairs. Everybody had one empty chair between himself and his neighbour. Only Hans and Clarke had two between each other. The door to the corridor was closed. Outside the windows the sun shone as it had in Maastricht the day before.

  ‘This is about the principle of conferred powers,’ Bresson continued, sitting completely still in her chair. ‘If member countries want to start a counter-intelligence operation, they can do that themselves, using their own national authorities. If such action requires cross-border cooperation, these national authorities can cooperate with each other, without involving the Commission.’

  They were still listening to her.

  ‘The European institutions only have those powers that the member countries have given them. They did not give the Commission the authority to act as a counter-intelligence agency.’

  She looked over to Clarke, who was sitting next to her, only one empty chair between them.

  Clarke said, ‘I don’t know. You could argue that if the Commission has powers to conduct anti-fraud operations, it means that it also has powers to respond to foreign intelligence activities. If one is connected to the other. You know, the principle of implied powers.’

  ‘Yes, that is a line of reasoning that could be defended as well,’ Bresson replied, weighing every word she said. She recovered quickly. ‘It is a complex legal question, one that merits thorough consideration. We might order a research study, an expertise. For example, two renowned universities could be asked to write a report on the extent of the Commission’s powers in this arguably sensitive field.’