Into a Raging Blaze

by Andreas Norman

  She sobbed loudly, without trying to hold it back. The dark was like a cold and deep body of water, out of which a menacing shadow rose up and came toward her. The fear washed through her body. There was nothing around her except darkness, and she was part of it.

  They had led her down a corridor and down some steps before shoving her in here. A man and a woman in uniform had held her under the arms and dragged her. For the brief moment when they opened the door, and a wide angle of light from the corridor illuminated the room, she had seen a tiny, cold space, not bigger than a spacious wardrobe. When they closed the door behind her, the beam of light was ground down into a glimmer, and then it disappeared. She had crept to the door and hit it, screaming and hammering with her fists until her hands were sodden with blood.

  Finally, she had managed to calm down. She focused her hearing, but all she could discern was the heavy beating of her own heart and the blood rushing through her ears. She heard her own rasping breaths pressing the dark air into and out of her lungs, the small gurgles of her stomach, humming noises; all the sounds inside her were amplified and filled the room.

  She was too tired to sit up and instead lay down carefully on her side. Her neck twinged every time she moved; her body felt like a sack of water. The floor was inhospitable—covered in chipboard.

  The dark around her was just as dense as before when she opened her eyes after a long time and painfully sat up. She would never get out of here. The thought crept through her. She was imprisoned in an eternal darkness. Panic gnawed through her thoughts and she began to count out loud so as not to lose her grip completely. She tried to concentrate and count to sixty at about the same pace as the flow of seconds on a clock. “One, two,” she heard herself say in the dark. Her voice was hoarse and raspy. “That’s a minute,” she said to herself. Then she counted to sixty again, and then again. But, as soon as she stopped counting, she felt how time began to float around and lose its sense of direction. Every minute was the same minute; she couldn’t tell them apart any longer, however much she tried. She groped for the door and hammered furiously on the flat surface that lacked a keyhole, and she screamed. She didn’t want to die; she didn’t even want to go crazy. The whole room was suspended in swaying stagnation.

  Something told her it was nighttime. She had dropped off through sheer exhaustion and was woken up by a sudden pain in her neck that made her draw breath. She had dreamed that she had been at home in her apartment and that sunlight had been streaming through the windows, warming her skin—roasting her, in fact. She opened her eyes and, for a second, she saw nothing but dazzling darkness. For a vanishing moment, she forgot where she was and stretched out an arm toward Jamal, but all she found was a brick wall. She lay still and listened to the darkness. Perhaps it was morning out there. Maybe it was night. It felt like night, because a special kind of silence always accompanied it. Or perhaps she was just imagining it because she couldn’t hear anything—not a whisper; not the slightest vibration of people moving or doors being slammed.

  She could see nothing, so it was better to close her eyes—then the darkness was her own. She shut her eyes and touched her hands, her arms, her face—as if to check they were still there.

  She was thirsty. Her mouth and tongue were like dry leather. She fantasized about cool wine, clementines, fresh salad, salty bacon. She tried to get up, but felt dizzy and sank back against the wall. After a while, she managed to pull herself together enough to stand on all fours. She felt the floor under the palms of her hands: untreated, coarse chipboard. Carefully, she crawled forward until she hit the door on the other side. She groped upward, found the door handle and pressed her ear against the cool surface, tensing her muscles to make sure that not even the slightest sound would escape her. She longed to hear something, anything; even the sound of someone coming to beat her again would be a relief. Maybe they had left her here. She might as well have been buried alive.

  42

  Brussels, Saturday, October 8

  The Belliard Tunnel enveloped them. Bente leaned back. Mikael was sitting beside her in the back seat in silence, and that suited her; she didn’t feel like talking right now; she needed to gather her thoughts before the meeting. The evening traffic raced ahead of them and rows of red lights surrounded them. She couldn’t help but feel a certain pleasure when she was in the Section’s custom-built BMW. Rodriguez was a good driver. She liked how he drove: fast, calm, and safe, like everyone who worked in Dignitary Protection.

  The Section had received confirmation from MI6 two hours earlier. The Brits had accepted the Section’s request for an immediate meeting. Twenty-three hundred hours, Avenue Cicéron. It was barely six kilometers from SSI’s offices to Avenue Cicéron, but procedures to ensure they were not being followed meant the journey took a little longer. She looked at her watch; they had plenty of time.

  They came out of the tunnel and carried on along Avenue de Cortenbergh. Somewhere behind and in front of them were the cell team in their cars. She yawned loudly. She hadn’t slept for almost thirty-five hours and reclined in the comfortable leather seat in the velvety darkness; tiredness ebbed over her.

  “Fifteen minutes.”

  “We’ll make it.”

  The Evers branch of KBC Insurance claimed to administer insurance for exclusive corporate clients. They had a website and a switchboard that always picked up with a friendly greeting and the name of the company, if you called. Their head office in Brussels was a six-story office block on the edge of a business park, at a reasonable distance from the other complexes in the area. The building was surrounded by a wide lawn, had discreetly installed surveillance cameras and round-the-clock security. Behind its carefully constructed cover as a branch of a bank, lay MI6’s operational center in Brussels, home to around two hundred employees, led by Jonathan Green.

  The cover was, seemingly, successful; they had been working undisturbed for the last ten years without being discovered. Despite all her contact with the Brits, Bente had never previously visited their Brussels office.

  The car came to a halt outside the entrance. The building was dark, the rows of windows black and glistening. They were alone, but watched by a dozen small cameras recording their arrival.

  They were expected. Reception was manned: a woman in a suit sat behind the soberly lit counter and looked up from a magazine as they came in. She gave them her best customer-facing smile, as if their appearance, an hour before midnight, was a perfectly common occurrence at this bank.

  The woman pushed forward a lined box. They put their cells in it and were each given a badge to wear around their necks. A man in a dark suit came through the security barriers and approached them. If they would be so good as to follow him.

  They were escorted through the building, up two stories by elevator, then through dimly lit corridors. A dark, open-plan office lay behind glass partitions.

  Jonathan Green was waiting for them in a windowless conference room. He wasn’t alone; a man in a dark suit was also sat at the end of the conference table. When Bente and Mikael appeared, they fell silent, got up, and stood completely still beneath the pale fluorescent lights.

  Green came forward. “Good evening, Bentie.”

  He was on his guard, but friendly; he greeted Mikael listlessly. A real pleasure to see you. He was himself—the same boyish face, same inscrutable smile and the same blue eyes, which were now studying them with cool curiosity. The other man was an American. He greeted them without introducing himself and it took a second for her to realize who he was: Bill Sherman, the CIA’s Deputy Director for Counterterrorism—their coordinator for covert operations. She recognized him, but had never met him in person before. He was remarkably broad-shouldered, tall, and had a long face with a powerful chin. They sat down.

  “It’s rare that we get to see each other like this,” Green said. “So I want to take the opportunity to thank you. It hasn’t been easy, but I’m sure the situation is going to resolve itself now. Many thanks for your cooperat
ion.” He turned to her. “Together we have removed a threat against the heart of Europe. We can be proud of that.”

  He smiled straight at her. But that was expected. What really annoyed her was that he was talking to her like she was a clever school pupil who had been on her best behavior. But she wasn’t so stupid that she didn’t realize this was a conscious strategy to throw her off balance, to weaken her in comparison to them, to get her to say too much, to disrupt her ability to analyze the situation. Naturally, she wouldn’t fall for it. She nodded reservedly. She wasn’t just Bente now; she was Sweden’s representative, and Sweden needed these two men and their expansive organizations. As Kempell had said, there was an old friendship with the UK, as well as with the US, friendships that had lasted for decades and would last long after the end of this case.

  She looked at the American, who met her gaze without blinking. He was calm, she noted, calm for real—not like all the arrogant cocks she had met over the years who presented a cool façade in order to seem more stable than they were. This man knew exactly what he wanted and who he was. He looked tired, possibly after a long flight. This case was minor for him, one of thousands of ongoing operations that his organization was running in cooperation with partners around the world, and could now be logged as completed. Tomorrow he would probably be in a similar meeting somewhere else—in Berlin or Madrid, Riyadh, Nairobi, Kabul. He didn’t move an inch. He looked bored, but then opened his mouth and said, in an unexpectedly soft, deep voice, “Yes. You’ve done a great job. I think we can call this one a day now.”

  “Yes,” said Green. “Good work.”

  “So, there’s no terrorist threat any longer,” she said lightly.

  Green smiled. “No, thank God.”

  “It’s funny, all this talk of terrorist attacks. And then the threat is gone.”

  Green’s smile shifted in a barely noticeable manner. It hardened. He looked at her in surprise. What did she mean?

  “I’m just surprised at how quickly the terrorist threat disappeared.”

  “Everything suggested attack planning was underway.”

  “Oh, did it?” she said.

  Bill Sherman sat up slowly in his chair and looked at her with eyes that had awoken from their dazed sleepiness and caught sight of something that amused and annoyed him in equal measure: a little Swede. Her heart was beating hard. Just one remark of dissatisfaction from either of the two men would ripple through the Security Service like a shock wave and be followed by anxious managerial meetings, grim conversations, in which her future would be decided at the drop of a hat, then a new charm offensive against Washington and London to repair any damage to the friendship. She was close to the line.

  “When we last met, Jonathan,” she continued, “you didn’t mention anything about terrorist attacks.”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “The threat changed.”

  The threat hadn’t changed whatsoever; it had never existed. The lie was quite obvious; he was defensive. Quickly, before he gathered himself, she darted in as lightly as she could to say, “You talked about a leak. The leak worried you. Carina Dymek, you remember? I assume Jean Bernier worried you before that. You took care of him. But then Carina Dymek turned up . . . What a shame.”

  The Brit looked coolly at her. “What do you mean?”

  The conference room was completely silent. She looked at the American and then back at Green, focusing on his two, fish-like eyes. “Stop talking shit, Green. There is no terrorist threat. Is there?”

  Maybe she imagined it, but she got the impression that he shuddered—a minimal movement in his facial muscles, which immediately became impassive again.

  “Who claims that Europe doesn’t face a terrorist threat—your friend in Leiden?” he said as sharply as the lash of a whip. He looked at her in amusement. “You should be more careful making outings like that, Bente.”

  For a second, she could see the silver car turning around and heading toward Leiden, late at night, stopping outside the home of De Vries. It would have been a quick job, made to look like a break-in gone wrong. She pushed the picture to one side; it was precisely that kind of anxiety that Green wanted her to feel in order to gain the upper hand.

  “You created a terrorist threat.”

  Green snorted. “Bente, this is ridiculous.”

  He shook his head and looked at Sherman as if he wanted to say that he’d had enough of this silliness and it was the American’s turn to rebuke the Swede, but Sherman wasn’t playing along; he was sitting, lost in his thoughts. Good God—what theater! But she couldn’t laugh in their faces; they still represented two of the world’s largest intelligence services, so she waited for them.

  The American, who had been leaning back in his seat, motionless, for almost the entire meeting, heaved himself forward. “What the fuck is your problem?”

  “I—”

  “You know,” he interrupted her, “we like Sweden. We like you because you cooperate—which is a smart move for a little country like yours. You’ve done a good job: you tracked down that Arab and his terrorist network; you prevented an attack. And stopped a dangerous leak. That’s the truth. You should be proud. You’re fighting to protect a free, democratic society, Mrs. Jensen—together with us. And sometimes people make small mistakes. But let me tell you something: that’s completely okay, as long as our citizens can sleep at night. I thought you understood that.”

  “So was there a terrorist threat or not?” she said, after she and the American had stared at one another for several seconds.

  “So what? You still don’t get it?” He looked at her apologetically. “We save lives, Mrs. Jensen. The European Intelligence Service will provide the EU with the necessary tools to prevent another London, another Madrid. And we’ll be with you every step of the way. We’re saving lives here.”

  “And we fully support it,” she said and gave her broadest smile. She had scrutinized them. She hadn’t even criticized the EIS, just questioned if there had really been a threat, as the British had suggested, and, based on Sherman’s rhetorical whipped cream, it was clear there had been no threat at all. “So what is Wilson actually up to?”

  The American looked at her indifferently and turned to Green, who quickly interjected: “Wilson is doing his job.”

  “Yes, but is he really hunting for terrorists—or just civil servants in general?” She couldn’t help the sarcasm, but regretted it immediately; it was futile. She couldn’t go too far.

  Green sighed and placed his hands on the table with his fingers splayed. He nodded thoughtfully, as if he had finally made a substantial decision of principle. “Okay, Bente. I hear what you’re saying. We may not have been entirely honest with you.”

  She said nothing. Sherman sat quietly, studying his fingernails.

  “But it was necessary,” he continued. “We needed you to act.”

  “And Jean Bernier?”

  “Things like that happen . . . regrettably,” said Green quietly, lifting the palms of his hands in a gesture of resignation. “Bente, don’t overdo this. There are hoards of terrorist-loving politicians around Europe just waiting for an excuse to destroy everything we’ve built up over decades—naïve people, who don’t want to see reality. But when the bombs explode, they point the finger at us because we didn’t stop the massacre. We have to be one step ahead of the terrorists. Right? It’s them or us. And, naturally, we sometimes do things we don’t want to do. Personally, I didn’t like having to”—he searched for the word—“handle you. After all, we’re partners.”

  They said nothing. Handled us. That was exactly what it had been. London had handled Stockholm, had maneuvered individuals and organizations to achieve certain predefined objectives. They had gotten what they wanted. She had an answer and she had no desire left to pursue it further. She wasn’t even angry; she just felt a chilly admiration for the way the British had managed the whole thing.

  “Where’s the report now?” said Green mildly. “I mean, I assume all copie
s have been secured?”

  “That work is ongoing. Where is Carina Dymek?”

  The American looked calmly at her. “We’re taking care of her.”

  “What do you mean, ‘taking care of?’ She’s a Swedish diplomat.”

  The American shrugged his shoulders. “Not anymore.”

  “She’s a Swedish citizen.”

  “And?”

  She met their gazes. These two men in suits sat in front of her, so calm, waiting. They were so used to getting their way by controlling the weather when it suited them. Gods in their kingdoms. These men could change people’s lives forever by making a short call on their cell phone.

  “I want Carina Dymek.”

  “I can’t guarantee”—the American began.

  “If she disappears, you’ll run into problems.”

  “Is that a threat?”

  “It’s a prediction. Think about it—she’s a diplomat and a Swedish citizen. She can’t just disappear. People will notice.”

  The American raised his eyebrows and looked at her like she was a funny insect. “So you want her. What’s in it for us?”

  She met the American’s gaze.

  “Badawi is interesting,” Green interjected quietly.

  Badawi. Yes, he was still of interest—Bente realized that. His contacts with the Ahwa group were undeniable. If there was an Ahwa group. If he was innocent and the threat portrayed by the British didn’t exist, he would be acquitted. Sooner or later. A person with nothing to hide could be put through the justice system and come out the other end a free man or woman. She knew it didn’t really work like that, but it made no difference. She couldn’t save him. She couldn’t stop these two men and their enormous organizations from getting their way. Dymek or Badawi: one of them had to be singled out. Dymek was almost certainly innocent; it was possible to argue for her release. Badawi, on the other hand, was still of interest; there was the connection to a terrorist threat. Whether the threat really existed didn’t matter—there was a threat because the British said so and the CIA had confirmed MI6’s assessment of the matter. Stockholm would never question their truths. If she pushed away Sweden’s most important friends now, Stockholm would never forgive her—she knew that too. They would recall her and pull her to pieces, remove her from the Section and put her in quarantine in some financial department until everyone had forgotten she ever existed.