Into a Raging Blaze

by Andreas Norman

  There was a rustle—the man swore quietly—a rat.

  A low shout was heard from further away. After an unbearably long moment, the man turned around and left.

  The group lingered, talking for a long time. The man in the cap pointed. As if on cue, she heard the two motorbikes start up in unison and saw them leave, heading back toward the Place de Brouckère. The large man got back into the car, which turned on to another side street and vanished. Just as suddenly as they had arrived, they were gone, swallowed by the darkness.

  She lay there for half an hour, perhaps longer. It was an eternity before she dared to move, but finally she began to straighten up. Her joints were stiff; her hands and arms were ice cold when she crept out of the bush.

  She was forced to stop and lean forward; she broke into a cold sweat as she battled to bring down her pulse, gasping as she tried to pull air into her lungs. What had just happened? She was just an ordinary civil servant; why were they hunting her? Her heart pounded inside her ribcage. Best Western, it had said in the text message—she should go there. She would be safe there. She was on the verge of tears; she really wanted to believe it was true, but she couldn’t go there, they couldn’t fool her again, the bastards. She had to get away from here fast—now.

  39

  Brussels, Saturday, October 8

  Rodriguez and two members of the cell team were waiting in the hotel lobby, two men were on the same floor as room 513 and an operative was waiting in the room. But still no Dymek.

  The last contact with her had been just before she had left the tram. Since then, there had been no signs of life. The text message had reached her cell phone, but the question was whether she had seen it. She hadn’t answered when they had called ten minutes later. Bente stood completely still and looked across the command room. The other staff were sitting quietly and waiting, standing by for the next order. She was the Head of the Section, it was for her to make the operational decisions now, but for a moment she felt unable to do anything except stand there and feel their eyes searching her for a sign of what they should do. Dymek was gone. Contact had been broken, and they could only wait and hope that she would come to her senses and go to the hotel.

  Bente knew when a situation could no longer be influenced, although she hated the sense of powerlessness that came with that knowledge. They had taken a risk and intervened to give Dymek a chance to get away, but Dymek hadn’t taken it. With British operatives so close by, they could only hope she had been quick enough to get to safety on her own—sending Rodriguez’s people out into the city to look for her was far too risky. In a worst-case scenario, they might end up in an acute situation with the Brits. A firefight with Wilson’s team would result in casualties, maybe fatalities—and witnesses. There would be consequences that they couldn’t control. She wasn’t going to risk SSI, national security, and their entire partnership with the European intelligence community. No one was worth that much—not Dymek, not any one else.

  The rustling silence in her headset was broken by a crackling call sign. It was Rodriguez: “One, over. Nothing yet.”

  Bente looked at the clock on the wall. It had been twenty-one minutes. She turned to Mikael. “What do you think?”

  Mikael pursed his lips. “Perhaps she’s managed to hide.”

  Perhaps. There was certainly the possibility that Dymek had managed to hide somewhere in the area—if she was quick and smart. She might have taken shelter in a large group of people, maybe in the large shopping mall close to the Place de Brouckère. But Dymek wasn’t trained and she was on her own; Bente didn’t even want to contemplate how low the probability was of Dymek evading Wilson.

  Restlessness crept into her. Many a time it had been she who sat waiting in a hotel room—for hours, days—for a person or a phone call, a signal that, to other people, seemed insignificant but which, for the initiated, could be a matter of life and death. She hated it.

  Dymek was missing her chance, and Bente couldn’t do anything to prevent it. If only Dymek would get in touch. The Section had a car standing by in the hotel car park and a safe house in northern Brussels where they could keep Dymek for a day or two while they got the Brits to calm down. Then they could hand her back to Stockholm, interview her, and sort it all out. And presumably—hopefully—they would rule her out of the investigation and close the case.

  Thirty minutes now, she noted.

  “Shit,” she muttered to herself; Mikael, who was standing beside her, heard and nodded. She drank what was left in her water bottle with a few angry swigs before crushing it between her hands until white cracks appeared in the soft plastic.

  “Incoming call.”

  The low shout across the command room made her flinch. An assistant signed that the call was being connected to her headset. Finally. Dymek might still be in play; she had almost given up hope that she would call.

  “Good evening, Bentie.”

  For a moment, she was perilously close to saying, “Hello, Carina,” but she quickly swallowed those words. It was Jonathan Green. Green, she mouthed silently at Mikael and saw his face cloud with anxiety. She turned around and walked into an adjoining corridor; she didn’t want to have this conversation in front of the entire command room.

  “Jonathan,” she said, and quickly added, to disguise her surprise, “so good to hear from you.” She wanted to get a grip on him right away, put him off balance. “What’s going on?”

  “You know what’s going on,” he answered, irritated. “What the fuck are you playing at?”

  “What do you mean?” She knew where he was going; she needed to buy time.

  “Are we working for same thing, Bentie?”

  “I truly hope so.”

  “Best Western Hotel. Room 513. What the hell was that?”

  She closed her eyes and clenched her jaw. Of course the British had picked up the message to Dymek. She should have assumed they were monitoring Dymek’s cell.

  “We were trying to bring her in.”

  “Well”—Green laughed harshly—“it was a fucking clumsy attempt, if you’ll excuse my saying so. Keep your hands to yourself. Understood? We have an ongoing operation and it simply won’t do to have you walking in on it like this.”

  “We didn’t mean to disturb you.”

  “Okay.”

  She said nothing.

  “For a second, I thought you were trying to sabotage a live operation,” he continued in an odd, easygoing tone. He was still angry. “But I must have been mistaken.”

  “Yes, you must have been mistaken.”

  The silence said everything. He didn’t believe her.

  “We’re working toward the same objective, Jonathan,” she added.

  “I’m pleased to hear it.” Then, as if he wanted to break through the tense silence, to talk to her like one colleague to another, he said, wearily, “She’s a terrorist, Bente. She’s a threat to our most vital interests.”

  “So you say.”

  “I’m sorry?”

  “That she’s a terrorist. Is that really your assessment?”

  “Don’t be stupid. She’s a threat!” Green burst out. “She’s a threat and that’s that. I don’t have time for academic discussions, Bente. Terrorist or not, that’s not the main thing right now. She’s in the spectrum. The Arab and his uncle, the letter, the poem—all that stuff—it’s enough. I was just calling for some reassurance that we hadn’t . . . misunderstood one another.”

  She heard something in his voice, the slightly lighter note, which could turn into a shrill tone of voice. It was barely noticeable, but she heard it again—the lie. He was lying. There was no doubt about it any longer: the Brits were doing nothing more than packaging the case as terrorism. They had gotten Stockholm on board so that they could reach their final objective—the EIS. A sudden weariness overcame her.

  “So where is Dymek?” she asked.

  “Oh, you know, out and about in central Brussels.”

  “I want to know what you’ll do wit
h her.”

  “Naturally, we’ll keep you fully—”

  “I want to know.”

  “Of course,” he said, and added in an apologetic tone that wasn’t even meant to sound genuine, “I understand this is sensitive. Damn precarious situation for you. Swedish diplomat and all that.” Then, as if he had suddenly come up with a cheering idea: “Our American friends were kind enough to give us an hour on a Global Hawk that’s just taken off from Ramstein. They rerouted for our sake, a small diversion before it heads to Peshawar and the usual hunt for the Taliban. It’s in the air now. Providing remarkable pictures.” She could hear his smile. “I’ll send you a link—how about that?”

  In the command room she ordered one of the technicians to connect to the link and put the footage on the big screen. In the gloom, they saw a gray, shimmering film: a high-resolution aerial picture of Brussels. It was streaming live, she realized when she saw the little digital time display furiously counting away tenths of a second, seconds, minutes, hours.

  Mikael turned to her. “What’s this?”

  She looked at him. “They’ve got a Global Hawk over Brussels.”

  Streets, squares and the rooftops of skyscrapers and buildings formed a geometric pattern. The aircraft moved slowly across the city, the longitude and latitude numbers shifting incessantly. The city stood out clearly in gray-green digitally processed tones that gave Brussels-by-evening a surreal sharpness in its appearance; Congresplein, the Finance Tower, and Rue Royale—the area where Dymek had gotten off the tram. This was Brussels, as seen from one of the world’s most powerful reconnaissance aircraft. Global Hawk was the type of unmanned combat aircraft that the Americans had used as tactical support in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq; it had the capacity to distinguish moving targets from a distance of one hundred kilometers; its cameras had such strong resolution that they could identify objects as small as half a meter across within an area of ten square kilometers. It had night vision, infrared cameras, and built-in signals intelligence that processed everything into a collective situation overview, which was probably being streamed directly to a Californian airbase or the command center in Langley. Nothing escaped this hunting machine. She had seen footage from Global Hawks before, but she couldn’t help but shudder when she saw central Brussels, as cars moved away from a red light at a leisurely pace, trams passed one another on an avenue, and small figures moved almost hesitantly among the structures of the city. Normal people. Then the picture zoomed in. Abruptly, as if it was just one breathtaking stride, Brussels rushed toward them. The picture stopped just above the rooftops.

  “My God.”

  Congresplein filled the screen and the resolution was unbelievably sharp. The focus had been changed so that they could see the city from an altitude of just a few hundred meters. She could clearly see the fences around the dilapidated Congress building, and the rows of streetlights and bushes, could even discern the different patterns in the cracked concrete flagstones. And there, running across the open space, was a figure.

  “What do we do?” Mikael came up to her.

  “We do nothing.”

  “Nothing? But shouldn’t we try to bring her in?”

  “It’s too late.” She nodded at the screen. “Don’t you see?”

  Carina was running; she stumbled but immediately regained her footing and carried on across the square. For a second, the shimmering gray picture became a little grainy as the transmission jumped, then the surreal sharpness returned. By all indications, Dymek was moving in a southerly direction, toward central Brussels. She was visible as a soundless, dark shadow, bounding ahead of a handful of other, slower individuals. The camera, controlled by a US Air Force officer thousands of kilometers away, followed her calmly, smoothly, never letting her slip out of focus. Bente went to the screen and stood close to its shimmering surface and watched the small, person-like stain moving through the cityscape. Dymek had reached the very end of Congresplein and crossed a narrow street where the traffic was moving soundlessly; she was momentarily obscured by a truck before reappearing on the opposite pavement. According to the measurement instruments on the reconnaissance aircraft, Dymek was in block 0136, at coordinates latitude 50.849172 and longitude 4.363793, and was moving in a southwesterly direction at a speed of twelve kilometers per hour.

  40

  Brussels, Saturday, October 8

  Music rumbled across the park. A pulsing red glow flashed over the audience and turned into a stroboscopic flicker.

  It was a miracle they hadn’t caught her. She had stayed in the bushes by the Finance Tower for a long time before she had finally crawled out of her hiding place. Congresplein was a war zone in the heart of Brussels, a wide and abandoned expanse, surrounded by fences around buildings and dilapidated office buildings. She had stumbled on the way across the open space and fallen over, headlong, hard. The air had been beaten out of her and her left foot had gotten stuck in some debris littering the area, a piece of copper wiring, but at the time she had barely noticed the deep scratch on her face or the pain that was now beginning to throb in her ankle. She had kicked herself free and continued to run, blind to everything; she’d rushed out on to an adjacent street and immediately heard the scream of a truck’s horn as it brushed past her, just centimeters from her face.

  She had wanted to hide among other people, but the city was so deserted. The office district north of the central station in Brussels was full of Belgian civil servants and bankers during the day, but in the evening it was just an assortment of empty buildings with blank façades, closed parking lots, and dimly lit entrances that were watched over, suspiciously, by surveillance cameras. It was as if the narrow streets had been made for her to be discovered at a distance. There wasn’t a soul here; there was nothing here to hide her. She ran, like a hare across an open field.

  But they hadn’t stopped searching, as she had first thought. At a crossroads, the four-wheel drive had appeared, seemingly out of thin air, about one hundred meters away. She had thrown herself between some parked cars and seen the SUV dwell at the crossroads before calmly moving on. Then she had heard the fiery sound of the motorbikes echoing around the buildings. They were still looking. She had stayed hidden in the row of parked cars, curled up in a fetal position, until the noise had gone away.

  The central station was nearby, she knew that. If she could just make it there, the crowds would protect her. That was all she could think about: a human shield. If something happened, she could scream for help and someone would surely come to her assistance—as long as she was in a crowd.

  She had come into a small square, on the other side of which a cathedral towered above her, illuminated, with skeleton-like gothic spires reaching into the sky. It was then that she heard the music. Heavy, French hip-hop echoed around the area. On the far side of the cathedral was a grassy area where a large audience was standing in front of an outdoor stage. It was an answer to her prayers, better than she could ever have hoped for. Quickly, she forced her way into the warm, dancing mass of people.

  She stood in the middle of the crowd, surrounded by hundreds of people moving in time, with their arms in the air. For a short while, she thought she had managed to get away, that they would never find here, protected by thousands of sweaty, dancing people. But then she caught sight of their faces in the pulsing light, just for a second: two pale stains, bathed in red.

  If they hadn’t gone against the crowd by standing still when everyone else was swaying in time to the music, she would never have spotted them in time. One was tall, with a furrowed face, and the other was powerful like a body builder. For a brief second their gazes met, then the men were obscured. She had dug herself a long way into the sea of people, who were dancing away frenetically, completely unaware of her. The crowd was dense. She moved backward, bumping into someone who pushed her back hard. As soon as she could, she began to push through the tight rows of dancing people. People around her gave way unwillingly, without taking their eyes off the stage.r />
  Tous les quartiers défavorisés . . . LIBÉREZ . . . Tout ceux que l’on représente . . . LIBÉREZ . . .

  A loud bass pounded across the audience. The music was so strong she could feel the pressure in her stomach as she wriggled through the throbbing mass. She kept bumping into hard, dancing bodies, which squeezed her in between them. She fought with her arms, grabbed someone’s sweater and heaved her way forward through a tight passage that had momentarily opened up, before someone else’s wide back pushed her backward into a woman, who staggered and fell forward. The throng was so dense that she was almost lifted off the ground. Panic fluttered through her body. She tried to move to the right where there were fewer people, but was pressed forward, toward the stage.

  LIBÉREZ . . . LIBÉREZ . . .

  With a violent final push, she managed to force her way to the picket fence by the speakers to the left of the stage. The music was so loud that it transcended into an overwhelming din. She was dangerously close to being crushed against the battens of the fence when the audience around her began to dance, but she held on, heaved herself up on to unfamiliar shoulders and tumbled over the barrier. When she got back to her feet, the men were gone—lost to the undulating forest of outstretched arms.

  She found a grassy area by the stage. There were fewer audience members here, standing in small groups in the dark. She continued running down empty, unknown streets, until she began to recognize her surroundings. She had reached Arts-Loi and looked down across the Rue de la Loi. The EU district rose above the city like a series of dark sculptures.

  She couldn’t run anymore; her ankle hurt. At a pedestrian crossing, she stopped and massaged her foot. The ankle was sore and swollen, probably sprained. Around her was a scattering of people in the darkness, waiting to cross the avenue.

  The hotel, it struck her—it wasn’t far away; perhaps a kilometer or so from where she was. Maybe she could take a taxi there—she would be there in five minutes. Throw some things into her bag, maybe a quick shower before she left; it would take less than fifteen minutes. Just the thought of the hotel room brought her to the brink of tears, she so desperately wanted to lie down, even if only for a short while. Maybe there was no danger in going back and having a proper night’s sleep before flying home to Stockholm. No, no, for God’s sake. The thought was deceptively attractive, but she had to stop thinking about the hotel; she couldn’t go back there.