‘This is my colleague. He’ll verify that this is indeed the right computer,’ said Susan.
Gabriella’s throat constricted even farther.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘It’s encoded. We don’t even know what’s on it.’
She ran her hand through her hair nervously. Thinking she had to take control of this situation, of herself. They’d start to suspect something if she didn’t calm down.
‘Maybe so,’ said Susan. ‘That’s likely the case. But I’m afraid we have quite a bit more to discuss with you and your client. You’ve been subjected to things you shouldn’t have been subjected to. And even though it’s not your fault, it’s still a problem.’
The way Susan said it made it sound like a threat. Her eyes were glassy and coldly calculating. It was just like the American on the island had said. If you have nothing to bargain with, you’ll have nothing to protect you.
The man in the wrinkled suit threw a quick glance at Gabriella before opening the screen and pressing the power button. Gabriella closed her eyes. The stress was too intense. She heard the clacking of the man’s fingers flying over the keyboard. She leaned back in the couch. How could they have imagined this plan would work? When Gabriella opened her eyes cautiously, just a slit, as if she didn’t quite dare to see what was happening, the man’s forehead was furrowed. His eyes darted across the screen as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was seeing. After a few seconds he turned the screen in Susan’s direction and looked up at Gabriella.
‘Is this some kind of fucking joke?’ he said.
Gabriella sat up on the couch. She glanced toward the door she’d come through just a few minutes ago. Come on now!
‘How is it possible,’ Gabriella heard Susan say, ‘that after everything you’ve been through, you still don’t understand the seriousness of this situation? What in the hell do you hope to accomplish by this?’
Susan did not seem like the kind of woman who usually swore. She turned the screen so that Gabriella could see it too. Against a white background in thick, red letters, FUCK YOU FASCIST PIGS! was emblazoned across the screen. If the situation hadn’t been so horribly stressful, Gabriella would have laughed. Blitzie seemed to be exactly as Klara described her. Before Gabriella could say anything she heard the sound of a key card being swiped through the lock on the hotel door. The door was opened partway, and a guard stuck his head into the suite.
‘One of our Swedish contacts says he has a phone call for your guest.’
The man nodded in Gabriella’s direction. She couldn’t breathe. It was as if she’d forgotten how. Somehow she managed to open her mouth and squeeze out a few words.
‘If you want an explanation,’ she croaked, ‘it’s probably best that you let me take this call.’
She pointed awkwardly toward the door. She had hoped she’d be tougher in this situation. But she was overwhelmed; she had no choice but to let the current carry her.
Susan looked at her in confusion. It seemed as though her polished surface had been scratched.
‘A phone call?’ she said. ‘Are you kidding me?’
‘No,’ said Gabriella. ‘I’m not kidding. If you want that damn information, then you’ll have to let me take this call.’
Susan shook her head and gestured for the man in the wrinkled suit to leave. He got up and slunk through the door, back to the room he’d come from. She inspected Gabriella carefully, as if to signal that she was still in charge of this situation.
‘Okay,’ she said finally.
Gabriella stood up and walked toward the guard, who held her cell phone in his hand. With a quick glance over her shoulder at Susan she opened the door and stepped out into the windowless corridor.
Gabriella ignored the remaining guard at the suite door and started walking down the corridor toward the elevators. She fumbled nervously with the phone and finally pressed it against her ear. This was it.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘This is Gabriella.’
There was silence on the other end.
‘Hello?’ she tried again.
It took another second, before a thin metallic voice appeared in her ear.
‘It’s absolutely disgusting,’ said someone who could only be Blitzie, her voice channeled through some distortion device. ‘It’s fucking disgusting, what’s on this computer. Corpses and torture or whatever you wanna call it. Video and pictures. I haven’t had time to look through much of it yet, obviously. But it’s absolutely full of this shit, that’s for sure.’
‘So you got the password?’ said Gabriella.
It felt like she was floating away from herself. As if she could see everything from above, from outside. The suite with Susan in it and herself only a few yards away, holding the phone in the middle of this suffocating hotel corridor. It was surreal.
‘Yeah, yeah,’ said Blitzie. ‘Of course. When the correct password was entered into your computer it was automatically sent to me. I just typed it in here. Piece of cake. What do you want me to do now?’
‘How much stuff is there?’ said Gabriella.
‘I don’t know,’ Blitzie replied. ‘One, two, three… at least five of these films where they, you know, torture people, I guess. Maybe fifty photos. Corpses and disgusting things. There are a couple of Word documents as well but I guess—’
Suddenly Gabriella remembered what Mahmoud had said about Lindman, what Klara had said about the dying American: that there was something else, something more. Something impossible to deny. ‘Open the Word documents,’ she said.
‘Okay,’ Blitzie said. ‘Hold on.’
There was a moment of silence. Gabriella glanced over toward the guards by the door. They were immobile, their eyes firmly locked on her.
‘So,’ Blitzie said. ‘I don’t know. It’s just a list of Arabic names and birthdates.’
‘Maybe the prisoners,’ Gabriella mumbled. ‘Open the other one.’
‘Same thing,’ Blitzie said. ‘Just names and numbers.’
There had to be something else. Something that they couldn’t wash their hands of. Or had both the American and Lindman been wrong?
‘Is that it?’ Gabriella said. ‘You’re sure?’
‘Well, it’s all I can see here. Wait… There is a PDF document as well.’
She went quiet for a moment.
‘Fuck,’ Blitze said finally. ‘You need to see this. I’ll send it to your phone, okay? This shit is crazy.’
A wave of excitement and relief ran through Gabriella.
‘Okay,’ she said. ‘Don’t do anything with the information yet, okay?’
‘I’m not suicidal,’ replied Blitzie, and hung up.
When Gabriella returned to the suite it had gone almost completely dark outside the enormous window. It looked like it was snowing lightly. A beautiful Christmas eve was under way out there. The suite was dark too, the only lighting two dim lamps on a side table.
Susan was in the chair by the window, checking her phone. She looked up when Gabriella opened the door.
‘So,’ she started. ‘Would you like to tell me what is going on here?’
Gabriella sat down on the sofa and leaned back. The atmosphere in the room had changed considerably. She wondered if Susan understood just how fundamentally. Soon enough she would.
‘When your man punched in the password on the computer that I had with me, it was automatically sent to a friend of mine,’ Gabriella started. ‘The computer I gave to you was just a shell. The hard drive had been exchanged for the one on my friend’s computer. So all the data you’ve been chasing was in fact not on this computer anymore. Do you understand?’
‘All right…’ Susan said tentatively. ‘Go on.’
‘So when my friend received the password, we received access to all the information that is stored on the laptop.’
If Susan was shocked or the slightest bit upset she didn’t let on. She nodded calmly.
‘And what was it that was stored on the laptop?’ she said.
‘You do
n’t know?’ Gabriella said, incredulous. ‘You sent a gang of murderous thugs after us just as some sort of precaution?’
Susan shook her head calmly and leaned forward slightly in her chair.
‘Of course I know the general theme of what was on the computer,’ she said slowly, as if to a child. ‘But I don’t know the extent. I have understood that there were enhanced interrogations, that the company to which we had outsourced the managing of one of our facilities went rogue.’
Gabriella didn’t say anything. Enhanced interrogation. There was something in that bureaucratic euphemism that sounded even worse than torture.
‘It’s terrible,’ Susan continued. ‘It’s truly terrible. You must understand that this operation was never sanctioned. We hired this company to manage some of the prisoners and to carry out interrogations in accordance with our internal procedures. Unfortunately they took matters into their own hands. When we discovered it, we immediately took measures to shut them down. Then when we learned that some pictures of this horrible practice had leaked we made the mistake of letting the company convince us that they could put things back in their place. This put you and your friends at danger, for which I am truly sorry. In hindsight, maybe we should have just come clean right away? I mean, what happened was out of our hands. We do what we can to curtail this kind of operation, but unfortunately we can’t control every aspect of the intelligence machine, however much we would like to.’
Even now, in the face of what Susan certainly must recognize as defeat, she kept up the act. It was eerily impressive.
‘My friend died,’ Gabriella said, her voice cold and empty. ‘Your fucking decisions led to him being shot down in a fucking grocery store.’
‘And for that I am so, so sorry,’ Susan said.
A warmth at the core of her voice shone through the steeliness of her professionalism and made it sound as if she actually meant it.
‘Maybe you actually are sorry for that,’ Gabriella said. ‘But you are lying about everything else.’
Susan pulled back slightly, as if Gabriella had made a halfhearted attempt at slapping her in the face.
‘Now why would you say that?’ she said.
‘Because you are,’ Gabriella said. ‘Enhanced interrogation? Really? You really want to call it that? We have pictures and videos of prisoners being burned with cigarettes, butchered, electrocuted, tortured in every conceivable, medieval way you can dream up. And you still want to stick with this enhanced interrogation routine?’
‘But you must understand,’ Susan began, her voice all steel again. ‘This was never what we wanted, never what we had instructed or intended it to be. Things got out of hand.’
Gabriella just looked at her. Then she quietly slid her phone across the table to her. Susan did not move to take it but just let it lie there, its screen gleaming in the half-light.
‘What’s that?’ she said, nodding at the phone.
‘That’s a PDF document that we found on the hard drive together with the pictures and films,’ Gabriella said. ‘It contains two letters. One is from you to what I believe is the director of the CIA. It’s dated about a year ago. You might remember it? In the letter you outline the high success rates of an operation in Afghanistan managed by a company called Digital Solutions. You warn the director that their methods might go beyond the manuals. I think you might even use the word “brutal”?’
Susan had turned away from Gabriella and was looking out at the steady snowfall.
‘The second document,’ Gabriella continued, ‘is signed by the director of the CIA. It says that after having consulted with the White House, his decision is to continue the operation managed by Digital Solutions and to do everything to assist them, while keeping them gray. Whatever that means?’
Susan turned back toward Gabriella. There was sadness in her eyes now.
‘Gray,’ she said. ‘It refers to shadows, I guess. That’s what we call it when we maintain deniability. When we remove someone from our databases and accounting systems, erase them from our records, make it seem as if they never existed. And that’s what we did.’
She sighed and nodded at the phone.
‘Not even that letter is recorded anywhere. As you can see, it has no document number. Only a date. But Digital Solutions insisted on knowing that what they were doing was sanctioned.’
She shook her head slowly.
‘You understand the kind of chaos this will lead to?’ she began again. ‘For Afghanistan, of course. For us. For the entire Arab world. If those pictures are as terrible as your friend seems to think and with the letter making it seem like it was all done as part of an official strategy—how can they not hate us when they see all of that?’
She paused for a moment and seemed to think.
‘And it’ll cause chaos for you too. For you, but especially for Klara Walldéen and your friend there on the phone. I know it’s not your fault, that you’re just playing the game you were forced into. And maybe this was the best outcome you could hope for. You made it a little further. But when all of this comes out, there will be no one who can protect you. The interests involved are too powerful. We can’t tolerate this type of material being leaked without consequences. Do you understand that? You will be Assange or Snowden at best. Holed up in some embassy or godforsaken country that might accept you. You will be outlaws as soon as this material is out. You’re already outlaws.’
The American’s words on the island. As soon as you have nothing to trade, you have no rights. Don’t give them what they want.
‘If it comes out,’ said Gabriella quietly.
Susan leaned forward in her chair and looked her straight in the eye.
‘Excuse me?’ she said. ‘What did you say?’
‘I said, what you describe—the chaos, the consequences—would happen only if the material were to be made public, right?’
Susan nodded and looked at Gabriella, clearly puzzled.
‘Yes?’
‘But we we’re not going to make it public,’ said Gabriella. ‘Not now. We’re going to protect this information. Make sure that it’s copied far and wide so you’ll never be able to track it down. But if we find out that you’re coming after us, we’ll press the button and that information will go directly to the public. I won’t even look at the files. Nor will Klara. We don’t want to know. And we don’t want the chaos on our conscience. We want to survive. We want to leave this behind us.’
Gabriella swallowed hard, but the awful taste in her mouth remained. They had gone over it so many times with Klara already in the car down from Stockholm and again in the boat after the horrors on the island. It seemed like an incredible price: to not be able to avenge Mahmoud or to reveal those responsible for all of this. To just let them get away literally with murder. But as they saw it there was no alternative. It was probably true what Susan had said; if the information came out they would be lawless. And even worse, it would ignite Afghanistan and Iraq and who knows what else. There had been enough suffering, that was for sure. It was a staggering thought that a sixteen-year-old girl in Amsterdam was to be the guardian of information that could make half the world explode in uproar, and worse. Gabriella looked at Susan’s weary face and thought about all the thousands of secrets she must have to keep. Would she allow herself to relinquish control over this one?
‘Can you trust your friend?’ said Susan.
Gabriella shrugged.
‘I truly hope so.’
Susan nodded.
‘I don’t see that I have any choice,’ she said. ‘We don’t want this information to get out. Especially not now.’
She paused, seemed to be considering something.
‘What can I say?’ she said at last. ‘I guess we’ll have to hope your friend can be trusted. I think you’re aware of what would happen if you can’t trust her?’
She was silent. The shadow of a smile passed over her face.
‘The balance of terror,’ she said. ‘The threat of mutually as
sured destruction. I never expected to describe the relationship between the US and a couple of young Swedish lawyers in quite those words. But it seems times have changed.’
Susan stood up and extended her hand toward Gabriella, who hesitantly took it.
‘It really is a new era,’ said Susan.
‘We have one more condition,’ said Gabriella. ‘The American who came to the island yesterday. You have to tell Klara everything she wants to know about him.’
Susan gave her a defeated look. She suddenly looked human.
‘There’s always so much at stake,’ she said. ‘So much that we lose sight of the people. So much that they cease to have meaning.’
She took out a pen from her pocket and wrote something on a piece of paper, which she handed to Gabriella.
‘Tell her to contact me when she’s up to it. I’ll tell her. It’s the least I can do for her. It’s the least I can do for him.’
85
December 26, 2013
Stockholm, Sweden
George stood in the dark stairwell outside his father’s door on Rådmansgatan, hesitating. His reflection in the elevator’s mirror looked slightly less like a character in a horror movie but still far from his usual, polished self.
On the phone his old man had gone from annoyance to unexpectedly anxious concern when George called late on Christmas eve to tell him about the car accident that had prevented him from making it home for Christmas. To his surprise, George even had to convince him not to get on the next plane to Brussels to visit George in the hospital where he claimed to be recovering.
In reality, he’d been sitting in an apartment in Vasastan, barely a fifteen-minute walk from his family’s home. That’s where they’d taken them, first by helicopter from the archipelago and then under police escort, after Gabriella’s assurance that she’d managed to negotiate some kind of bizarre deal.
He’d realized he was never going to find out what all of this was really about. Klara and Gabriella had been careful about what they said. It involved a computer. Films. The US government. That was all he managed to piece together. Truth be told, he didn’t want to know. Some guy from Säpo had even apologized to him for what happened. A terrible mistake. Never tell anyone about what you’ve been through. He didn’t say what would happen if he actually did tell someone. A vague, unspoken threat.
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