The Last Compromise

by Reevik, Carl

  Tienhoven nodded mutely. Oh, the compliment bordered on lavish praise, Hans thought. Please stop, I can’t hold back my tears.

  Tienhoven asked, ‘What about the Estonian harbour?’

  ‘It looks more and more suspicious, but it will still take a few weeks to have something solid for the next stage.’

  ‘Okay,’ Tienhoven said. ‘What about the road-building in Portugal?’

  ‘It’s basically ready,’ Hans said. ‘The main question is how we should approach the national authorities. Either it will be them assisting us, or us assisting them. I guess we need to make a recommendation to Clarke.’

  ‘Not at all, we’ll give him two options,’ Tienhoven said. ‘These questions are partly, in fact mostly political. Let the director-general decide. That’s what he’s paid for.’

  Hans nodded and looked out the window on his side of the car. They were already through his three most exciting files apart from the new case, and they had only just passed Namur. What on earth would they talk about for the rest of the ride? Hans wouldn’t have minded going to Luxembourg alone by train, except the Belgian railways were again on strike for the day, so the car had been the only feasible option anyway. He only wished he had a different companion for the ride. That instead of Tienhoven they’d assigned Caitlin from money-laundering, say. Or Siim. Or anybody, even Viktor.

  ***

  The hiss and roar of the passing cars had been diffuse enough to have a conversation outside, in the picnic area, but it had simply been a bit too chilly for that, so they had assembled in Tienhoven’s car. When Hans and Tienhoven had arrived, Hoffmann had already been waiting for them in a black Audi with German license plates. They had all gotten out, Hoffmann had shaken hands with Tienhoven, the two men introducing themselves, and with Hans. Now they were all sitting in the parked Renault. Tienhoven behind the wheel, Hoffmann to his right, Hans in the back, leaning forward.

  ‘Why did they put Zayek where he is now?’, Hans asked the two others, addressing mostly Hoffmann though, because if this was a joint operation they would need to tell each other at least a fair share of what they knew.

  ‘We cannot be sure,’ Hoffmann said, without seeming reluctant to talk. ‘As far as we can tell he’s not a scientist or former scientist. If he is who the defector says he is. He’s not a computer specialist, not an engineering specialist, not a weapons specialist. Not a former commando or even paratrooper. He served in the German army for a year as a conscript, during the compulsory service. They trained him on the standard-issue assault rifle, like all the others, and then he did paperwork for the rest of his time there.’

  ‘Here at the Commission he’s not in the equivalent of a commando unit either,’ Hans replied. He glanced at his boss, just to be sure. Tienhoven didn’t say anything and didn’t make any face. So he continued. ‘If the Russian link is correct, it could be that he only got onto the reserve list because the Russians had given him the fake identity of someone who had passed the job competition. That’s the first question we’re interested in from our side.’

  Tienhoven turned his head to his right. ‘It could be that there is a real Boris Zayek from Bulgaria somewhere, who passed the job competition, and whose identity got stolen before he received a job offer. In that case there could be a missing person case in Bulgaria.’

  Hans added, ‘And if a German took a stolen identity to get into the Commission, maybe now there is a missing person in Germany, too.’

  ‘There is a missing person with that name in Bulgaria,’ Hoffmann replied. ‘But we haven’t got any more details for the moment, maybe it’s somebody else. As to the German himself, no-one seems to be missing him, as far as we can tell for now. In Germany intelligence work and ordinary police work are separated more strictly than they are in other countries.’

  Hoffmann said it, and he did not elaborate. He neither justified it, nor did he roll his eyes to have them know what a nuisance this was for his work. Nazism had shown what a government, what a society was capable of, and the constraints on the security apparatus simply was something that applied to modern Germany. Hoffmann wasn’t going to apologise for it. Hans liked that.

  They sat in silence.

  ‘If all that is true, he’s in a position that gives him access to sensitive information,’ Hans said. ‘Since he works in the atomic energy department he might help cover up the theft of nuclear material.’

  Hoffman turned around to face him. Tienhoven again said nothing, so Hans carried on.

  ‘That’s the second reason there might be an independent interest in Zayek from our side,’ Hans continued. ‘It’s nothing definitive, but samples of Commission reports display anomalies whereby the cancellation of the use of nuclear material is made to disappear, as if it had never been planned.’

  Hoffmann turned around, facing the front again.

  Nobody said anything. Clearly Hoffmann had no intention of commenting on this piece of intelligence.

  ‘If it’s not that, then maybe he’s a sleeper?’, Tienhoven asked. He must have concluded that no reaction was forthcoming about the nuclear manipulation, but that Hoffmann might help develop other hypotheses.

  ‘What would he do when woken up, then?’, Hoffmann asked.

  ‘Maybe they expect him to transmit a vital piece of information at the right moment,’ Hans proposed. ‘Or he’s already doing what he was meant to do, at atomic energy.’ He now asked Hoffmann directly. Unlike his boss he wasn’t going to accept mere silence as an answer to his theories. ‘Mister Hoffmann, what do you think about the nuclear reports manipulation?’

  Hoffmann turned around again to face Hans. ‘I think that, if the man is operational and has access, it would be the sort of thing he’d be expected to do.’

  So Hoffmann either didn’t know anything about any nuclear reports, or he wasn’t telling. Again they sat in silence.

  Either way, Zayek was installed, apparently. He had gotten on the reserve list under more or less dubious circumstances, and now he was there. Hans thought about his own recruitment process. The long preparation, the preliminary exam that weeded out ninety-five percent of applicants, then the assessment, then the long wait. Finally the news that he was on the list, a mere electronic notification that changed a whole life.

  ‘Maybe the Russians simply didn’t know where in the Commission he would end up,’ Hans said. ‘With the fake Bulgarian identity they could make sure he got onto the reserve list, but once you are on the list you have to apply for jobs in a normal way. Maybe they had hoped he’d end up somewhere even more important?’

  Tienhoven turned his head and said, ‘What if he’s not even meant to do anything, but just to sit there? To wait there to be exposed as a spy at the right moment?’

  Hans looked at his boss. ‘You mean the Russians would leak to the press that Zayek is their spy?’

  ‘It would be embarrassing for the Commission,’ Tienhoven replied. ‘Maybe more embarrassing for us than for them. Everybody knows that countries spy on each other. No offence, Mister Hoffmann. But say the European Union is negotiating a trade deal with the Americans, or with China. Intelligence sharing about Iran’s nuclear plans. A gas deal with someone other than Russia. Or say there are elections, or a nomination of someone for an important post. And right before the critical moment the papers tell the world that the European Commission is infested with moles.’

  Nobody replied.

  Tienhoven sighed. ‘Let’s just stick to what we have, and see where the man’s reaction gets us,’ he said, more to Hoffmann than to Hans. Hoffmann took the hint, and motioned to get out of the car.

  ‘Wait,’ Hans said. ‘One more thing.’

  Hoffmann had opened the door a few centimetres. He stopped, opened it wider to have a better swing, and pulled it back towards him to shut it firmly again. Then he turned around and waited for Hans’s question.

  ‘What about security?’, Hans asked. ‘We ask him are you a spy, he runs away. Or attacks one of us. Or takes one of us hostage
. What if there’s an escalation?’

  ‘I don’t think he’ll attack anyone,’ Hoffmann said. ‘They almost never do. If he takes one of you hostage, we’ll comply with his demands, give him safe passage to Moscow or to the Russian embassy in Luxembourg. He’s gone anyway. If he runs away, we’ll call the local police and catch him. It’s not like I’ll be alone on the scene.’

  ‘There will be more BND people around the building?’, Hans asked.

  ‘You won’t see them. And if he doesn’t run away, we’ll call the local police anyway, because we want him extradited to Germany. Unless he comes with us to German territory himself. But that would mean he has accepted some kind of bargain, in which case nobody calls any police. Clear?’

  ‘Do you trust your defector in the consulate?’, Hans asked. It was the question he hadn’t asked in Maastricht, because he’d thought the answer was obvious.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ Hoffmann said. ‘Maybe he’s not a real defector, and this is just their way of asking us to check on Zayek. Maybe they want to get rid of him. Although they could have just given us a call then. Maybe the defector told us what he had to say, and then used the opportunity to plant a bug or a computer virus in the consulate’s system. Or to recruit someone on the inside. Maybe the man in the consulate is a real defector, but one who’s been fed bullshit, so now he’s exposing a man who isn’t a spy at all, but the Russians nevertheless know the man in the consulate defected. Or the information is real, and the Russians will try to blackmail him into coming out of the consulate again. Either way, I don’t care about the man in the consulate, I care about the man in Luxembourg. The one we’ll see very soon, if we leave sort of now.’

  Nobody replied.

  ‘Oh, and one more thing from my side,’ Hoffmann said, in a friendlier voice. ‘May I suggest talking to him outside his office. There’s a hotel with a nice open lobby across the street from his building.’

  ‘How do you know?’, Tienhoven asked.

  ‘Because I’ve been there.’

  ‘Why a hotel lobby?’, Hans asked.

  ‘Because he’ll relax more if we talk over a cup of coffee in a public space,’ Hoffmann replied. ‘Instead of crowding him in his own office, with his colleagues listening in. I’m sure you do your first-contact meetings in public places, too.’

  We do, Hans thought. Plus, Mister Hoffmann, you don’t have a badge to enter Commission buildings, and you don’t want to be logged as a visitor or have the security camera take pictures of your face.

  Tienhoven asked, ‘How do you suggest we get him from his office to the hotel, then?’

  ‘You go in and ask him nicely,’ Hoffmann said.

  ‘We could tell him that we’re investigating his boss,’ Hans proposed. ‘And then we ask him to come over and have a chat.’

  Hoffmann nodded, and said, ‘I’ll wait for you at the hotel, then, and I’ll get us some coffee.’

  Tienhoven said, ‘Like we agreed. I ask the first questions, then it’s your turn.’

  ‘I’ll be the bad cop then,’ Hoffmann said. He smiled, nodded to Tienhoven and Hans, got out of the car, closed the door behind him, walked over to his Audi, got in and sped off. Hans got out and reclaimed his passenger’s seat in the front of his boss’s Renault.

  Tienhoven nodded to Hans. ‘Well done.’

  He started the engine. It was another twenty minutes to the Luxembourgish border, and within ten minutes from that point they would be in the capital city and the seat of, among other things, some of the offices of the Commission’s atomic energy department.

  ***

  When Tienhoven turned off the engine, the noise of the motorway they’d just left became audible. The entrance to the Commission building was right in front of them. They didn’t see Hoffmann’s Audi, he must have parked it around the corner.

  Not that there were many corners in this place. It was a wide empty area on the edge of Luxembourg city, right next to the motorway belt. A wind-swept business park, essentially, with individual modern glass buildings planted into the flat, treeless soil far apart from each other. There was the Commission building in front of them, rather long than high, with white walls and black windows, and with nothing much around it. The structure coming closest to qualify as a neighbouring building was a similar but smaller office cube with a newsagent’s shop on the ground floor. It was fifty metres away across the wide street. The cube’s only neighbour, in turn, was a hotel a hundred metres further down that street. It was a branch of an international chain, identical to hundreds of other hotels across Europe that had been built on empty lots to the same specifications. And the hotel didn’t have any directly adjacent neighbouring buildings either. There was only yet another office building with a façade of black reflecting glass facing the hotel across the street, on the same side of the street that the Commission building was on.

  Hans remembered the city centre of Luxembourg as a dense grid of shopping streets and squares and churches sitting precariously atop a plateau surrounded by steep ravines. But this area here was mostly wind and space. No churches, no ravines.

  Hans looked around a second time. He noticed that he didn’t see any of the backup Hoffmann had said would be around the building. Which meant that either the man was more or less alone, or that they were sitting and waiting in parked cars, or driving around in circles.

  ‘What’s his boss’s name again?’, Tienhoven asked.

  ‘Zayek’s? Stavros Theodorakis,’ Hans said. It was the person they were supposedly investigating. Let’s see, what kind of charges could that possibly be? Tienhoven could have said something mean now, but he didn’t. He’d never do.

  ‘Let’s go,’ he simply said and got out. Hans followed him. Yes, let’s go. As they walked towards the entrance, the car behind them made some noise to assure them that it was locked.

  ***

  Hans and Tienhoven walked into the entrance hall through automatic doors. As was the case in almost all Commission buildings, the hall sported an array of flags near the window, the blue European one and one national flag for each of the Union’s member countries. In the fifties a place like this would have displayed the six flags of the original founding members. The dense battery of colours now attested to the expansion of the Union’s reach and, at the same time, to its appeal to ever more countries that at some point had wished to join. Some of the members had acceded grudgingly, some with unbound enthusiasm and hope. But no-one had been included by force. A historical first in a continent where normally your next mortal enemy was never more than a three days’ march away.

  Tienhoven showed the security guard his badge, and Hans followed suit. These did not specifically identify them as anti-fraud, they were just the generic plastic cards that every Commission employee carried to gain access to buildings and parking garages.

  ‘I am looking for a Mister Boris Zayek, please,’ Tienhoven said.

  The guard checked a list. It was a printout, a few sheets stapled together. The man ran down the lines with his finger. He wore the uniform of a private security company. Hans knew they had recently changed contractors again, but were thinking about internalising security completely and bring it within the remit of a Commission department. The employees would remain the same, though. They would swap uniforms in the same way they’d changed them when the new firm had received the current contract.

  ‘Ground floor, office 00E02. The first office in the corridor to your right.’

  They looked at each other. It could be that Zayek had seen them approach, Hans thought. But then again the point was not to use the element of surprise, but, quite to the contrary, to calmly and reassuringly persuade him to follow.

  ‘And Mister Stavros Theodorakis?’, Hans asked.

  The guard had another look at his list and said, ‘Office 01E005, it’s the same corridor, just one floor further up.’

  Hans nodded to Tienhoven. This meant the supposed target wasn’t sitting right next door to the real target.

  ‘Th
ank you,’ Tienhoven said to the guard and led the way to the mouth of the corridor on the ground floor that the man had indicated first.

  Hans whispered, ‘What if the Russians have already alerted him, what if they know about the defector, he’ll get suspicious right away.’

  Tienhoven whispered back, ‘Relax already. Remember, we know nothing about any spies or defectors. We just want to talk. If he runs away he runs away, I’m not going to run after him. Now shut up.’

  Hans and his boss reached Zayek’s office without encountering anyone. There were a few more open office doors down the corridor. Through Zayek’s open door Hans saw a man behind his computer. His side was turned to the door.

  Tienhoven said in a low, apologetically subdued voice, ‘Excuse me, do you work in the unit of Mister Theodorakis?’

  The man turned around to face them. Hans recognised him from the personnel file picture. The man in the office was around forty, and he was physically unremarkable in every respect. He would have to wear a moustache to have at least one characteristic feature, Hans thought. Zayek wasn’t even wearing glasses, and his face was cleanly shaven.

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, but I’m afraid it’s about your boss. You are Mister Za…’ Tienhoven struggled, clearly on purpose.

  ‘Zayek. What about my boss?’, Zayek asked. It looked like he was half wary and half really curious.

  ‘It’s a really delicate situation. You see, I’m from anti-fraud,’ Tienhoven said and showed him his anti-fraud identification. It had twelve European stars shining in a hologram half overlapping the cardholder’s picture. Surely the man had never seen such a card in his life, just like few people have ever seen a real police identity card in their own country. ‘You and your colleagues might help me before this turns into a big affair. Could we perhaps talk to you for just five or ten minutes? I promise it won’t take any longer than that.’

  Hans saw Zayek hesitate.