Into a Raging Blaze

by Andreas Norman

  “Carina.”

  She looked up from her wine glass.

  “You’ve done nothing wrong.” Greger leaned forward and put a hand on her shoulder. No, she hadn’t done anything wrong. But the more time passed, the more her guilt would grow. She was the accused. Unless she could prove what had really happened, that a different chain of events had taken place, she would be guilty. He was right, but that was little consolation.

  “You have to fight back,” he said. “Otherwise they’ll find you guilty, even though you’re innocent.”

  “I don’t have a chance, Greger!” she burst out. She wanted to fight, but right now she couldn’t see how, or whether it was even possible. The ministry loomed above her like a massive, impenetrable fortress.

  “Yes, you do.”

  She looked out of the window.

  “Okay,” she said without any conviction.

  “You have to find him—the guy you met.”

  “But what do I do if I don’t find him?”

  “Start looking. Then we’ll see.”

  9

  Stockholm, Monday, September 26–Wednesday, September 28

  The apartment was dark when Carina woke up. She looked around drowsily but couldn’t understand where the fly was that was buzzing around the room.

  Her cell.

  She heard it somewhere in the apartment. For a second she had forgotten what had happened that day. The only thing she felt in that moment was the warm, dark apartment enveloping her, and the humming, buzzing sound. Her body was heavy; she pulled herself up, groped her way to the door, and finally found her cell in her handbag in the hallway. It had stopped vibrating before she reached it.

  It was Jamal. She looked at the time: almost midnight.

  They had stayed in the bar for several hours—she and Greger. She didn’t want to be alone and had needed to talk about what had happened, needed to feel that there was someone who cared about her. She was drunk when she got home and had fallen asleep on the sofa.

  “Hi, darling.”

  Jamal sounded worried, happy, and irritated, all at the same time, when she called him back. He had gotten her messages and had been trying to get hold of her all evening. He had called the office, had been close to looking up the number of her parents and calling them too. What had happened?

  She told it like it was. Telling Jamal about it felt unreal. Jamal became deadly silent at the other end. He didn’t try to comfort her, didn’t try to belittle her or say that everything would sort itself out, that it was just a mistake, and she was grateful for that. It was serious, and he understood that.

  “My God,” he said, finally.

  “I don’t know what to do,” she said. “But I think I have to find him, the man who gave me the report.”

  “I’m coming home.”

  “No, Jamal.”

  “Yes. I can catch a flight first thing tomorrow.”

  “You can’t just leave Vienna,” she protested, although what she wanted most of all was him there, beside her, with his arms around her, close—wanted it so much that tears formed in her eyes. “Stay in Vienna. You can’t just leave the negotiations.”

  “Screw the negotiations.”

  “My love, I’ll be fine.”

  She changed her mind almost right away after he had reluctantly given in. They would see each other on Thursday, in three days. It was for the best; she needed to sort this out for herself.

  Talking to Jamal calmed her down. She missed him. Just hearing his voice on the telephone made her feel that things were possible. He wanted to know everything they had said at the meeting, all the details. It was completely wrong, he said over and over. Finally, she no longer had the strength to talk about the MFA; she felt ill just thinking about it. How was Vienna? How were the negotiations? He told her about the Americans who wanted to cut the UN budget, about a lunch with a completely manic UN chief. He had just returned from dinner with people at the Swedish embassy and was going to bed shortly. He was staying in a small hotel with horrid rooms and good breakfasts, close to the UN building. She knew where it was, remembered the heavy brown wardrobes in front of the windows; she too had stayed there.

  Could they go out for a meal when he came back? He was longing to sit with her in a decent restaurant, just the two of them. Then they could talk everything through, together.

  “I’m beginning to hate the MFA,” he said. “How can they do this to you?”

  Jamal was so loyal, it surprised her. Men rarely supported her, and she didn’t expect it, either. She always thought that she, when it came down to it, was alone. But Jamal was on her side.

  She only slept for four hours that night and woke to a gray dawn outside her window. Thoughts of the report, the Ministry and Brussels all rushed through her head. She knew right away that she wouldn’t be able to fall back asleep and got up, took a shower, made breakfast—a more substantial breakfast than usual, with egg sandwiches, some fruit salad, and coffee—and ate on the living room sofa.

  Her body ached. The day before had left her bruised. It was barely a day since the terrible meeting with the unit head and a part of her still couldn’t quite understand what had happened. But some of her just wanted to give up and accept defeat, unconditionally. Deep inside her, a treacherous little voice whispered that it was probably all her own fault. She felt faint and shut her eyes. No, she thought.

  No.

  She was Carina Dymek, one of the best people at the Security Policy Department, and what she had done wasn’t wrong. They wouldn’t judge her; they wouldn’t get her to admit a mistake she hadn’t made. Never. She poured another cup of coffee. Slowly, the anxiety passed in a gloomy and stubborn train of thought.

  Greger was right. She was innocent. She would fight. But she needed facts—meat hooks to hang this shapeless reality on.

  It was half past six. She got out her laptop and, as it got light outside, she started to search the EU Commission’s website. If she assumed that Jean had told the truth, that he was from the Commission, then he was probably there.

  She had been in contact with the Commission hundreds of times, by e-mail and phone, with different civil servants in different parts of this widespread organization. But she had never before been in a situation where she needed to find a stranger she didn’t even know the name of but who had unexpectedly capsized her entire existence. She had to find Jean, but, as she sat in her apartment, she had no idea how. The organization was divided into eleven so-called directorates, expansive departments that handled a myriad of political matters that coursed through the European Union’s veins on a daily basis. The text on the memory stick had come from one of those departments. There, among thousands of officials, somewhere in the bowels of the Commission, the man who had contacted her had to exist. Given the contents of the report, it was most probable that it had come from GD Home, the Directorate General for Home Affairs, covering security of the interior, migration, and police matters. Directorate A handled terrorism, organized crime, migration and police matters in the EU. He would never have gotten hold of the report unless he was in Directorate A. That was where Jean had to be. The head of that department, she saw on the website, was Joaquim Nunes de Almeida.

  Just after nine, when she was sure people would be in their offices, she got out her cell and called the switchboard at the EU Commission in Brussels.

  “Bienvenue à la Commission européenne,” said a soft, automated voice, which informed her that her call was in a queue and asked for her patience.

  It took a few minutes.

  “La Commission européenne, bonjour?” said a very crisp and professional switchboard operator.

  “Bonjour,” began Carina and quickly explained that she was calling from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Stockholm for de Almeida.

  She was connected.

  Strings music filled her phone. The same exuberant music that reverberated through all EU telephone systems. After a pause of a second or so, which felt like an abyss, the music b
egan from the start again. She was about to hang up when there was a rattle. Someone picked up.

  A woman said abruptly, “Oui?”

  Carina quickly brought the phone back up to her ear and introduced herself, explaining that she needed to speak to de Almeida.

  “What does your call concern?”

  She had clearly come through to a secretary who wasn’t going to let just anyone talk to the boss.

  “It’s about a report. Registration number KOM(2011)790.”

  “Oh . . .” said the woman, sounding slightly more cooperative. “Monsieur de Almeida is away on official business. Can I take your name?”

  She shouldn’t have called. If de Almeida found out a Swedish diplomat had called and mentioned the report, he would naturally begin to wonder. The slightest suspicion that it had fallen into the wrong hands would lead him to contact Stockholm.

  “Hello?” said the woman impatiently.

  “I’m actually looking for someone called Jean.”

  “Jean who? Do you have a surname?”

  “No . . .” she said and strung the seconds out while she frantically thought about what to say. “It’s about the report I mentioned.”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t think I can help you,” said the woman with all the cordiality necessary to disguise her irritation. “Jean is a common name. Perhaps you should try your embassy; maybe they can help you.”

  Carina thanked her and hung up.

  There was no point in carrying on making calls if she didn’t know his name. The risk that someone would be suspicious and raise the alarm with Stockholm, or another capital, was far too high. She had moved too quickly. Stay calm, she thought. Focus.

  She made some new coffee and rewound her thoughts to the day in Brussels when the man had turned up. Jean. She remembered clearly what he had looked like. How he had sat opposite her and talked. His voice had rasped a little, probably because he smoked. Yes, he had been fingering a cigarette pack. She closed her eyes, squinted hard, and tried to remember—to truly see all the details. She did what they taught her at army headquarters on the intelligence courses, tried to see the details as a connected system of associations, without getting hung up on any of them. They were sitting in a restaurant. Dark wood; leather seats. She was sitting opposite him. He had a small, round face. Beard. Dark, natural curls. Gray hair at the temples; clear wrinkles around the eyes. He was probably around fifty years of age, maybe a little older. Close-set eyes filled with worry that searched their surroundings. She scoured her memory, trying to find even the smallest detail that could give her a clue.

  Several times he had glanced across her shoulder, toward the entrance to the restaurant. Toward the park outside. What was he looking for? She had noticed it even at the time, the way he was looking around. Perhaps he was being followed, or maybe he was just scared. That wasn’t unlikely. Leaking secrets like the ones he had was almost certainly a sure way to make enemies. Now she could see his frightened-but-determined face before her quite clearly. She saw the eyes, the furrows, the wrinkles, his little, stubborn mouth.

  Conscience, he had said. At least she had a conscience. She needed a picture of him—a photo. Something that tied him to reality, that connected him to a name, an address, something.

  She returned to the EU Commission’s website again. There were hundreds, if not thousands, of subpages—the website substructure vanished into an unfathomable deep. She began looking for photographs, first at random, then more systematically. Each time she found one she would stop and study it. Pictures of smiling people, people in discussion, young and old, in suits and jackets, advertising pictures of youths cooperating across national borders, all with smiling faces.

  The Commission works closely with the European Parliament and national governments to run the Union in the overall interests of its 455 million citizens . . .

  So many officials. They all looked so stunningly similar. Sometimes she would reach a page that required a password and she would have to retreat. For hours she trawled through the EU Commission’s website before beginning to search other websites, looking at French and American sites, stumbling across various politics blogs, news sites, sites on Google she had never heard of. It was like a never-ending excavation, where she dug deeper and deeper into the mass of information with the help of new search keywords and new combinations of those words. He was not allowed to hide; she would find him. She was working like one obsessed. He must have been caught in a picture somewhere. One picture—just one—that was all she needed. It would mean he was recorded, stored, visible, possible to reach. Outside the window, the day passed and turned into a blue twilight. A first small success came late in the afternoon. A website for journalists featured a list of the Commission’s staff. There were lots of Jeans here—but only names, no pictures. She noted the names and started searching for them, clicking her way from page to page. But there were several thousand people working for the EU called Jean; it was impossible to say which was the right one. On one occasion she was certain she had found him. She had found a picture of people at what looked like a reception, and she paused, examining a short man with a beard, but was forced to accept that it was just someone who looked like him. He had to be somewhere. Somewhere. She forced herself to think like that so she wouldn’t scream out loud. She couldn’t lose heart.

  Where are you Jean? Where, where?

  It was late in the evening when she called the Italian restaurant on the ground floor of the building next door, to order takeout. She had searched hundreds of websites and needed a break. She moved around the apartment, turning on the lights.

  Continuing to search without a plan wasn’t going to work. She couldn’t go through every possible webpage where there might possibly be a picture of Jean—it would be better to go to Brussels and stand outside the entrance to the Commission and hope he turned up sooner or later. She swore loudly. She needed to rethink.

  She spent the rest of the evening going through a photo service where she had found pictures of people from the EU at different conferences, summits, inaugurations—endlessly monotonous pictures. Thousands of pictures, thousands of faces, but no Jean.

  It was almost one o’clock when she decided to stop searching. Yet she remained sitting and staring at the pictures without getting anywhere. She stood up and went into the kitchen to pour a glass of wine. She had been sat at the computer for almost twenty hours and she was dead tired, but she knew she wouldn’t be able to fall asleep.

  There was a remake of a Japanese horror flick running on one of the cable channels. A man had just been found dead in an apartment, scared to death, his mouth grotesque and wide open, his face contorted. Everyone who watched a particular video died seven days later. In the film, everyone knew they were going to die and tried in vain to prevent it from happening. Death was a demon girl with lank, dripping hair that crept toward her victims out of the television. Carina could understand exactly why she wanted to kill everyone. They had done her wrong and now she wanted revenge.

  The morning after, she carried on searching the Internet. She felt a growing anger. The anger ran through her, scratching the inside of her gut. She should really stop roving around all these websites; it wasn’t working, she knew that. Yet she couldn’t help herself. She clicked from one page to another, searching restlessly for pictures, a name, anything that might provide her with a clue. Over and over she googled different search keywords, but she had already visited many of the hits the day before. It felt like she was going around in circles, and it pissed her off a lot. At lunchtime, she was close to throwing the computer to the floor in despair.

  It couldn’t carry on like this. She wouldn’t find him. Not like this.

  She needed to get out. She pulled on her coat, pushed her feet into her shoes, and took a brisk, furious walk down toward the city center. Everything irritated her. Everyone was in the way. When she crossed a road near Hötorget, she was inches from being run over. Startled by the car’s horn, she stuck a finge
r up at the driver, who grimaced at her in his rearview mirror. She marched into the PUB store. Department stores were full of things to look at and she needed distractions. She went up and down between the floors on the escalators, wandered around the clothing departments. Slowly, she regained her calm.

  She still had the report. If there was anywhere that she might find a clue about what had happened, something about Jean and their meeting, it was bound to be there, in amongst the hundreds of pages of the Commission’s report.

  Back at home, she made some sandwiches and ate them at the kitchen table. A dog was howling somewhere in the building. The sound—a muted complaint—penetrated into the stairwell and was audible through her front door.

  She sat down in an armchair with the report. The pile of paper rested heavily on her lap. An EU report. Four hundred and twenty pages of Brussels prose. It was because of this that she had lost her job. She had never thought that something like this would be of such significance to her. It was lucky she was quick-witted. If she hadn’t remembered the report and smuggled it out of her office she would never have gotten her hands on it again. She carefully turned to the first page.

  Security Across Borders—A New European Intelligence Service

  She settled down and began to read.

  The report was introduced by a sweeping description of the present-day situation. The text talked about the threat to our societies—terrorism, organized crime, floods of refugees—and how these threats were only growing in a globalized world. It was no longer possible to distinguish between civilian and military threats, said the report. And this required closer cooperation between military and civilian security services.