‘Come on!’ he cries. ‘We have to get out of here now!’
It’s like in a dream where everything is turned around without explanation or context. His friend is suddenly a monster, then a moment later he’s transformed into a friend again.
He hears movements and voices through the open window. His jailers are on their way into the cell.
‘Come on!’ Yassim cries.
After so long in the dark, Jacob has to squint under the yellow lights of the Christmas decorations hanging across the street outside the gate. His whole body hurts as he runs. And when the first gunshot cuts through the grey evening air he jumps. He hears Yassim shouting in his ear. ‘Faster! Faster!’
Then more shots, more deafening explosions ringing in his ears, as Yassim points to a small green Volkswagen Polo parked just down the street.
They jump into the car, and Yassim has it started before Jacob even has time to blink. He speeds off down the uneven street so fast, Jacob is pressed back against his seat.
The car sits low, almost directly on the road, and it jumps and bounces and somewhere another shot sounds, and cars honk all around them. Yassim is gripping the wheel with one hand, his left is resting on his knee, as if it were loose or powerless.
A red spot is spreading near the collar of his jacket.
His friend is pale, his eyes glassy, as he takes the curve with one hand and soon they’re out on a slightly bigger road.
‘You’ve been shot,’ Jacob begins. ‘Yassim, you got hit in the shoulder.’
Yassim doesn’t look away from the road, but he moves his right hand quickly back and forth between the wheel and gear stick.
‘Is anyone following us?’ he says.
He slows again but only enough to be able to take the next curve without flipping the car. Jacob turns around. He sees nothing at first but as they swing left, a black car appears at the corner they just rounded. They’re driving almost as fast and recklessly as them.
‘A BMW,’ Jacob says. ‘They seem to be after us.’
Yassim has already swung off the road, taking a ramp to an underground garage. He crosses between cars and finds an empty parking spot at the bottom of the stairwell.
‘Out!’ he says to Jacob.
He’s already halfway out of the car. The garage is damp and smells like urine, and they take the stairs two steps at a time. They’re on a landing and now it’s just two more floors, then they’ll be out on the streets of the city again.
Jacob can see the streetlights above. Somewhere in the distance he hears a siren. He takes the first two steps, but then stops when he hears Yassim panting behind him.
‘Wait!’ his friend wheezes. ‘Wait a second.’
Jacob turns around and sees Yassim leaning against the wall. His breathing is heavy and strained.
‘What?’ Jacob says. ‘They must be in the garage by now too.’
But there’s something in how Yassim leans, something in how he’s breathing, that makes Jacob understand it’s impossible.
‘Come here,’ Yassim says instead. ‘I have something in my pocket, but’ – he indicates his hanging arm – ‘but I can’t get to it.’
Jacob is at his side now, very close. Yassim’s familiar scent in the midst of the stench of the stairwell.
‘What’s happening?’ Jacob whispers.
But his friend doesn’t answer. Jacob thinks he can make out a motor in the garage, but he can’t be sure.
‘I’m sorry,’ Yassim says, turning to him. ‘We have so little time.’
He sinks against the wall, down onto the floor. Jacob leans over him and opens his jacket hesitantly to access the wound, but Yassim stops him. At the same time, in the garage, a car door is closing again, and there are footsteps on a concrete floor.
‘Fuck it,’ he says. ‘Nothing you can do about that.’
His voice is so weak now. He coughs and Jacob thinks he’s going to spit blood, but he doesn’t and that’s a relief, in the midst of all this unspeakable terror.
‘You have the chip, right?’ he asks. ‘Somewhere? It’s not still in Beirut?’
Jacob looks at him. How could he know that? Below them he hears the door of the stairwell opening. Several pairs of feet heading up the stairs.
‘Who are you?’ Jacob whispers as his panic grows. ‘First you helped them capture me then you helped me escape? I don’t understand anything. You’re hurt and I… I… I…’ He can’t talk any more. There’s too much he doesn’t know, too much he doesn’t understand.
‘You have to make sure that chip ends up with someone you can trust, someone independent, someone who’s not in intelligence or the police. Do you know anyone?’
Jacob nods. ‘I believe so.’
Yassim stretches out a trembling hand and caresses his cheek.
‘I knew I could count on you. In my pocket there’s a phone and a few hundred euros. Take them, you’ll need them. Now you have to go.’
‘What about you?’ Jacob says. ‘I can’t leave you.’
But he stretches down his hand and grabs the money and phone, puts them in his pocket. He already knows that he has no other alternative. ‘I can handle it,’ Yassim says. ‘I have nine lives.’
But he looks down the stairs, blinking. As if he can’t quite gather the energy for this one last lie. Jacob rises, he feels a lump in his throat that he can’t do anything about. ‘You have to make it,’ he says. ‘You can’t disappear now, we just met.’
Yassim smiles. ‘You remember the roof terrace?’
Jacob nods, feeling tears welling up in his eyes. ‘How could I ever forget?’
Yassim reaches behind him, to his lower back, and suddenly he’s holding a big, heavy gun in his hand. He grimaces and Jacob sees again how his left arm hangs uselessly at his side.
‘You have to go now,’ he whispers. ‘You have to trust me.’
Jacob swallows his tears and bends down and kisses him on the cheek. Then he turns around and heads up the stairs two steps at a time.
By the time the first shot rings out, he’s already on the street.
24 November
Brussels
Two hours left until Karl arrives for his meeting at the elevator outside the enormous courthouse, the Palais de Justice. Klara’s sitting with George at the Häagen-Dazs cafe at Place Louise, just a few hundred metres from the meeting place.
She stares through the big windows at the chaotic roundabout, where the traffic seems to be standing still. Men out shopping in dark cashmere overcoats and women with Chanel bags mingle with tourists and Romanian beggars at the metro stop just outside the window. If she raises her eyes, she can see the more or less constant construction site around the dome of the courthouse, a renovation that never seems to be completed.
She glances at George. Not even a day has passed since she came to Brussels. Since she had a panic attack, was followed, had sex with George and drugged a man. Now she’s waiting to meet a mysterious person Gabriella was supposed to meet.
‘What are you thinking about?’ George asks, catching her eyes.
She shrugs. ‘It’s been an eventful twenty-four hours.’
She points to George’s phone sitting in front of him on the table next to their coffee cups. ‘No news?’
It’s been half an hour since he sent the licence-plate number of the Russian’s car to Jean-Luc, a man George calls a fixer, who seems to be some kind of combination of private detective and administrative genius. The PR firm George is leaving apparently uses him to investigate various things within the jungles of Belgian bureaucracy.
‘I’m still technically employed there,’ George told her. ‘I’ll just have him bill it to the Philip Morris account. No one ever checks the details on that one anyway.’
Now George shakes his head. ‘Not yet.’
He glances at Klara, but she averts her gaze, looking back only when he’s no longer looking at her. She shouldn’t have room for such strong feelings. But something flutters inside her, knots up, when she allows her eyes to
follow the clean lines of George’s small, straight nose, clean-cut jaw and high cheekbones. Or the hair that’s curly and messy now. She remembers how he touched her, in the night, and at Café Belga yesterday, and she can hardly sit still. Is this all in her head? Or does he feel the same?
She doesn’t have time to explore her feelings any further before George’s phone starts to buzz on the table in front of them. With a quick movement, he unlocks it. ‘Now we’ll see,’ he murmurs.
Klara tries to wait a moment to let him read the message, but she can’t stand it. ‘What does it say?’ she asks.
George clears his throat. ‘Rental car.’
Klara sighs. ‘Should have known. So we don’t know anything.’
George looks at her with amusement. ‘I don’t think you really understand Jean-Luc,’ he says. ‘I wouldn’t call him a genius if that were as far as he got.’
‘Okay…’ Klara says. ‘This Jean-Luc can access the records of the car rental agency?’
George just smiles. ‘Here,’ he says. ‘Apparently, the car was rented by some guy named Phillippe Brouchard. That doesn’t tell us much.’
‘The guy you drugged definitely was not named Phillippe Brouchard,’ Klara says dejectedly. ‘Of that I can be sure.’
George nods. ‘Well, the interesting thing about Brouchard is that apparently he’s a Belgian citizen employed by… wait for it…’
‘For what?’
‘The Russian embassy.’
‘You’re kidding me,’ Klara shouts. She realizes she’s raised her voice so she leans over towards George and whispers instead. ‘That’s fucked up,’ she continues. ‘What in the hell are we mixed up in?’
George shakes his head dejectedly, but can’t hide a small, tired smile at the corner of his mouth. ‘Same shit you always end up in, Klara.’
‘What do you mean?’ she continues. ‘They’re spies? I thought this Karl guy was some sort of Snowden. What does that have to do with Russia? And Syria? And how did Gabi get pulled into this?’
George puts his hand on hers and looks into her eyes. ‘I think the only way to know is if we meet Karl,’ he says. ‘Right?’
Klara drinks the last of her cold coffee. She grimaces and turns to George. ‘He probably won’t come alone,’ she says.
George furrows his brow. ‘What do you mean?’
‘If they’re keeping an eye on me, the risk is large that they’ve got one on him too.’ She falls silent and closes her eyes while massaging her temples. ‘Karl contacted Gabriella, who was probably arrested by Swedish cops. Before that, she was being followed by the Russians, most likely.’
‘Was it the day before yesterday they arrested Gabriella?’ George asks.
Klara nods. ‘Tomorrow they’ll have to charge her if they want to keep her any longer. A court has to decide, and the decision will be public. Then we’ll find out why they’re holding her, if she has a lawyer, and so on.’
‘If it’s not classified,’ George says.
‘We surely have to find out something,’ she says, frustrated.
He turns towards her, waits for a moment before gently putting his hand on hers again. Klara feels calm spreading from his hand into hers. A calm that spreads out over her grandpa’s death, and Gabriella’s imprisonment, over all the grief and weirdness and terror. Cautiously, she squeezes it. It feels so unexpected to have him at her side. She leans her head onto his shoulder and turns her nose to his neck, gently taking in his scent.
‘What the hell should we do then?’ she whispers. ‘What if he’s also being followed? What happens then?’
George gently strokes her hair. ‘We’ll come up with something, Klara,’ he whispers. ‘We always do.’
We, Klara thinks.
What an unbelievably rare thing.
24 November
Brussels
Jacob has been sitting in a McDonald’s all morning. He uses a map app to figure out that he’s on Avenue Anspach and that the dirty, stately building with the big, wide staircases on the other side of the street is the old Stock Exchange. Twenty-one minutes on foot to the meeting place, according to the app.
At three-fifteen he stands up. Crumples his hamburger wrappers and throws them into the trashcan on his way to the door.
Then thrusts a hand into the pocket of his newly purchased jacket, fingering the hard plastic of the memory card. Slowly he pulls out the card and looks at it again. It looks so small and insignificant.
Alexa saved his life when she took him to her doctor in Shatila. Had him roll it up in a condom and swallow it like a drug mule, then he fished it out of a toilet in McDonald’s. He carefully puts the card back into his pocket again and walks out into the drizzle on unsteady legs.
He tries to keep up his pace, partly to keep warm and partly because he doesn’t trust the map – he doesn’t trust he’ll be on time. He can’t be late for this meeting.
Brussels is grey and gritty. Not exactly the type of city that impresses you right away. But all that grey is soon mingling with antique stores and chocolate shops, small cafes, a square full of restaurants and something that looks like it might soon turn into a Christmas market. Suddenly, a winding street opens up onto another small square and there on the other side of it sits the massive Palais de Justice, as solid as a fort, a tangible reminder of the consequences of the law.
Brussels seems to be under siege. He saw it in the subway yesterday and down in the city earlier today. Military vehicles parked on the side streets, police and soldiers patrolling everywhere. It makes him nervous, but probably it’s just related to what happened in Paris. He read about it before he flew here: all of Europe is on high alert.
But as he slows down and stares out over the small square, he freezes in his tracks. Two soldiers in red berets carrying heavy guns stand just outside the glass elevator, which connects the lower part of Brussels to the higher level where the court is located.
He checks the time. Fifteen minutes to go. He looks at the soldiers again. They’re chatting with each other, but he can sense their alertness. Should he simply walk by them?
He looks at the time again. Twelve minutes to go. If there are guards posted down here, what does it look like in front of the courthouse? Probably they’ve put extra resources everywhere.
‘They’re not looking for me,’ he whispers quietly to himself. ‘They don’t know who I am.’
Ten minutes to go. Had he arrived earlier, he might have been able to find an alternative route and avoid using the elevator, but now he has no choice. He hesitantly starts to move along the edge of the square towards the elevator, stress pounding his head.
The soldiers have moved to the centre of the square, and he pulls his hat down over his ears and turns.
Just as he reaches the platform where you climb on the elevator. Eight minutes. He quickly puts his phone back in his pocket and runs his fingers over the memory card, just to make sure it’s there.
Behind Jacob, the elevator dings, and he turns slowly. The elevator is empty save for a man standing with his back to him, staring out through the elevator’s glass wall. He’s blonde, his hair a bit tousled, and when he turns around Jacob can see he has tortoise-shell glasses and is about ten years his senior. Handsome, dressed simply in jeans and a dark-blue coat. On his wrist sits the most gigantic watch Jacob has ever seen.
The man quietly exits the elevator and stops when he catches sight of Jacob. For a moment, they look at each other. ‘Are you Karl?’ he asks in Swedish, breaking eye contact.
Jacob feels his hopes start to rise. He wants to throw himself around the neck of this man, whoever he is. ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘I’m Karl.’
The man seems to have barely heard him, but just walks by quickly. As he does, he whispers something in Swedish, so quietly that Jacob almost doesn’t catch it. ‘Follow me, twenty metres behind. Gabriella says hello.’
Jacob turns around only after the man has made his way across the square. Carefully, tentatively, he takes a few steps in the
man’s direction.
It seems like the man’s phone is ringing, and he takes it out of his pocket and stops. Something in his posture changes, Jacob can see that as he turns around. For a second, their eyes meet. The man seems to collect himself and then continues to cross the square, still with the phone to his ear.
Jacob looks around one last time and takes a deep breath. Then he starts to follow the man away from the elevator.
24 November
Brussels
Klara is grateful it’s just a quarter to four, so rush-hour traffic hasn’t started clogging the streets yet. She pulls George’s Audi out of its parking spot and manoeuvres it onto the Boulevard de Waterloo, then down the slope towards Rue Haute, where she and George have agreed to meet.
Just fifteen minutes to go, and she has to struggle to keep her breathing normal. She wishes she hadn’t let George go in her stead. She should be the one meeting Karl, like they’d planned from the beginning, since Karl was probably expecting a woman. But George insisted: if the Russians were in place, there was less risk he’d be recognized.
Slowly she turns up onto the narrow, one-way Rue Haute, past bakeries and dive bars, towards the antique district, which she often strolled through on weekends when she lived here. That really was another life.
Six minutes to go now.
What is the worst-case scenario? That Karl never shows up, but the Russians do? That Karl doesn’t know anything about what happened to Gabriella or why they’re being followed? What are they supposed to do then? They haven’t even discussed that.
Four minutes.
Klara’s almost at the square below the elevator now, and she allows the car to creep along the asphalt while she searches for somewhere to park. She can’t go all the way to the square without risking discovery, so the plan is for George to lead Karl here.
That’s when she sees it.
Just ten metres ahead of her, very close to the square, a black van with its engine idling. It has to be the Russians.
The lit clock on the dashboard says 4:00 as she takes out her phone and calls George.
The Friend Page 24
