Rasmus is asleep. She is sitting next to his bed, illuminated by a small night light, talking to him in a low voice, gently stroking his head until the medication drags him down into bottomless, dream-free sleep. She feels his fingers relax, and sees the tense expression on his face slacken. It scares her to see him disappear like that, but she knows she’s just imagining it – it isn’t death, just death’s brother, sleep.
Darkness covers the shiny windows in the small room he has been allocated. She looks at his face, framed from below by the large brace that he will wear until his neck has healed. When they examined him earlier, she saw the purple-black marks all over his ribcage and throat, and it took all her strength not to cry and frighten him any more. Her beloved boy. The self-reproach burns through her with astonishing force. She is his mother, but also a strange, silent being he doesn’t know; a danger. At that moment she wishes she could simply extract herself from the secret organisation to which she belongs and become one person among many.
‘Is he asleep?’
Gustav has come into the room. He carefully draws up a chair to the bed and sits down. He is tired, dead-tired, grey and dishevelled like an old crow.
He asks her for her phone and she passes it to him, watching as he picks out the battery and SIM card and then hands her a new, identical device.
‘Jesus Christ, Bente,’ he says in a low voice, looking at her with a grim expression of amazement, as if he can barely believe he has survived. ‘Fredrik and Daniel are in the safe house,’ he goes on. ‘The police are on guard. Don’t worry.’
They sit quietly beside each other, watching the sleeping boy.
‘You’ll need to tell people about what happened this evening,’ Gustav says. ‘What you should tell them is that three armed men broke into your house. You were at home and they were taken by surprise. You defended yourself and called the police. Rasmus was taken hostage. Nothing more.’
He has already spoken to Fredrik, but she will need to steer the boys on what they say.
‘And Jonathan Green?’
Gustav looks at her testily.
‘He is alive. Barely. He’s still in surgery.’
‘You underestimated him, Gustav.’
Gustav looks at her sharply.
But he knows that she is right. He was responsible for the wrong judgement call on Jonathan Green, not her. She should have trusted her instincts and not listened to Gustav; it’s a long time since he’d been her mentor. But she, too, wanted to catch the fish. And how were they to know that Green would attack with such murderous rage?
Rasmus is breathing deeply and calmly.
‘He really was prepared to kill us.’
‘Perhaps,’ says Gustav. ‘Perhaps he just wanted to threaten us to get the documents, and then it all went wrong.’
His judgement must have been impaired by his panic about the leak, she thinks to herself, and the disgrace to which his career in espionage was heading. But even if he had obtained the flash drive, he could never have been certain. His position could have been devastated at any moment by the click of a mouse.
‘Do you think Green was working on London’s orders?’
Gustav shakes his head.
‘I spoke to London a little while ago,’ he says. ‘To their new Assistant Head, Robert Davenport. He explained that the operations against us by Jonathan Green, the surveillance, the infiltration and this attack, were never signed off on by them.’
According to Davenport, Green was suspended following the leak a month earlier, Gustav had been told. Green had begun drinking, MI6’s new star had explained. London considered him a liability. Apparently, there was a history of violence stretching back to a posting in Damascus. Davenport had apologised for what had happened.
‘Do you believe him?’
Gustav shrugs his shoulders.
‘I think they need someone to blame everything on,’ he says. ‘Perhaps they tasked him with infiltrating us and, when that failed, making contact. Perhaps London needed a useful idiot to take the blame for the leak and infiltration and lots of other shit. He was recently in Syria – we don’t know what happened there.’
Green is alone, she thinks. When he wakes up after surgery, he will be out in the cold. The perfect scapegoat, because whatever he says, no one will believe him. No one believes a spy who has gone berserk.
‘I think he was working alone,’ she says.
‘We’ll never know what MI6 thinks, Bente. Regardless, our relationship is damaged. It will take a long time before London looks favourably upon us again.’
He falls silent. Then:
‘We’re going to have to close the Section.’
She can’t stop a small cry. No.
Then she is afraid she has woken Rasmus, and falls silent immediately. But the boy sleeps on, expressionless.
Gustav has already received notification from the powers that be. ‘They have been considering it for a long time,’ he explains, ‘and now that the Section is unable to work in secret . . . It’s simply impossible to continue with a vulnerability like that.’
‘It’s not fair.’
‘It’s in everyone’s best interests, Bente.’
She doesn’t want to believe it is true. She wants to say that she did nothing wrong when she accepted the British leak. It was an achievement, something everyone ought to thank her for. But she knows that what Gustav is saying is right, because they won’t be able to work in secret like before. Some secrets have such gravity that they tear everything apart that comes too close; she underestimated the risk when she agreed to meet the Brit on that rainy day an eternity ago. It really is over. She thinks about Mikael, about everyone who trusts her, everything she has fought for. She has failed, she thinks to herself. It was her responsibility to lead and protect the Section. But it is as if it no longer matters. She looks at Rasmus and is glad he is alive, and that she is alive to be there with him. She can’t understand how she had thought she could ever bear to lose him. She loves him, just like she loves Daniel. Compared with the relief of seeing her boy sleeping soundly, the Section doesn’t matter one little bit.
It is her fault that he is lying there. She has used him, they have both used their boys – she and Fredrik. She wonders what she has been up to all these years, and whether the boys will ever forgive her.
‘So what happens now?’
‘You’re going home, my dear.’
Home. That means Stockholm.
‘For good?’
‘For good.’
She strokes Rasmus’s hand. It is warm and doesn’t react to her touch. He has barely any memories of Sweden; to him it is a foreign country. A new life. She can barely imagine what it will mean for the boys. Daniel has been ill at ease, but has now found his feet here, and has a life with friends and a girlfriend. Will Rasmus cope with a move? It might exacerbate his anger and confusion. Or it will be okay? she thinks to herself. A new start for them all?
Gustav gets up. Then he remembers something. Is there anything in their home that he needs to take care of? She stops to think. She took the passports, but her computer is still there. He nods and says he will fetch it.
‘And the documents?’
She has forgotten. They are still in her pocket. She pulls out the flash drive, the black scarab, holding it between her thumb and forefinger. Such an ordinary thing. She never wants to see it again.
29
A grey, rain-filled sky looms above the fields around Waterloo, shaking the scrubland along the motorway. She is driving, and he is sitting quietly in the passenger seat. Fredrik has also learned the art of silence and is currently engaged in it. They have left the boys in the temporary apartment, just for a few hours, even though they were reluctant. She didn’t want to, at first: what if they die while they are gone? She is more affected by what has happened than she wants to let on. She has expe
rienced a level of violence that has dislodged and distorted normality. It has hit her in recent days, this sense of lassitude. She suspects that the chasm that she feels opening within her at times like this will close with time, and form scar tissue, a dark memory.
The house is the same as ever on the outside. An ordinary detached house in the leafy suburbs. The only thing that hints at anything different is the Belgian police tape fluttering over the gravel path.
The front door is still missing. Instead, there is a piece of chipboard covering the doorway. In front of it is a police officer in a thick coat. He gets up and approaches them as they reach the garden.
‘This is a restricted area,’ he says. ‘You can’t come in, there’s an investigation going on.’
She explains and he looks at them sadly, carefully examining their ID cards and nodding with approval. After a while, a police officer emerges from behind the chipboard. He is wearing rustling white protective overalls and a mask.
Standing outside on their own front step, they each pull on an overall, rubber gloves, forensic galoshes and masks. This is no longer a home; instead, it’s a place contaminated by violence.
Returning is almost unbearable. She sees the thick patch of blood caked onto the tiles in the hall. A technician in white overalls stands up and nods.
The living room is simultaneously strangely intact and destroyed: the books are still on the bookcase; the TV is untouched by the sofa. But the rug has absorbed a black stain the size of a tea tray. Chairs have been smashed to smithereens, but lie there untouched, carefully marked with small flags, frozen in the moment. Broken glass, splinters, wallpaper riddled with bullet holes; a war has taken place here. A billowing plastic sheet covers the large hole where the veranda door used to be. This violence is from her world, she thinks to herself.
She follows Fredrik upstairs. She stops in her tracks on the landing, astonished by the destruction. Walls and doors have been torn apart by bullets. Everything is tipped over and ruined, as if a raging wild animal had applied its claws to the walls and furniture. The floor in the hall and bedroom is smeared with blood.
We survived this, she thinks. Fredrik turns to face her, the eyes above his mask wide open.
The police watch as her latex-covered hands gather some of the boys’ clothes, games and books. Soon it will all be gone, she thinks. Someone will come and pack up their stuff and ship it off, and their lives will change completely. In the bedroom, a large patch of blood has dried onto the quilt. She rummages for blouses and trousers, skirts and tights and underwear. She isn’t thinking, and in a clumsy gesture she straightens the pillows at the head of the bed as the technician quickly asks her not to. Of course, it is no longer a bedroom. They silently leave the house.
The boys like the temporary apartment. After an evening with fingers clasping devices and remote controls, they go to bed, turning off the lights one after another and leaving the rooms in darkness. But they sleep restlessly. Daniel is awake. Rasmus is dreaming, whimpering in his sleep. She is woken by his cries in the small hours.
Fredrik disappears early. Whenever they happen to be in the apartment at the same time, they move in a painful dance through the rooms to carefully avoid each other.
In the mornings and evenings, the seams between waking and sleeping, she feels blurred grief that Fredrik’s presence is gone. It is like a memory in her body. Her body misses him. She doesn’t want him to be part of her life, but an equilibrium has been disturbed and everything is unfamiliar.
One morning she hears Rasmus shouting at his brother in the bathroom.
‘What are you arguing about?’
Daniel explains: Rasmus thinks their father is moving with them to Sweden, but that isn’t true.
‘Because he isn’t, is he?’
They quietly eat breakfast before she drives them to school. A shower of rain has passed over Brussels. The streets gleam black in the overcast weather. ‘Bye, Mum,’ they shout to her before hurrying across the playground, and she waves in despair, as if it were their final parting – she isn’t sure why. She just wants to call them back and tell them she loves them, and to ask them for forgiveness, for everything.
When she gets home, she sees him sitting on the sofa looking out of the window: his familiar neck, and the hair thinning on the crown of his head. If they stopped remembering, would they be able to rediscover each other? Because the strange thing is, that when she sees him like that, she misses Fredrik; not the man sitting there, but the person he used to be, before. She doesn’t want to remember.
They drink coffee, and talk in grown-up, sensible terms about relocating and separation, about moving companies and furniture. An existence turning into household goods. The words float above an unspoken chasm.
He says: ‘Bente.’ Then he starts crying. She strokes his shoulder. Perhaps he finally realises it is happening.
After he has left, she sits by a window and cries. It is as if an all-consuming cramp had finally loosened. She finds herself at the beginning of a new era, the days of a prolonged farewell.
If Fredrik disappears from her life, she will carry on living. But how? She has never been here, she doesn’t know which direction the future will take her. If she leaves him, she will become someone else, or perhaps herself, and the painful thought strikes her that he might feel better when he is no longer with her. It is as if he were now appearing clearly, that she can see him: the man she fell in love with, the face she has loved, the eyes that were so happy when they saw her. All that will disappear; she can’t understand how it is possible, how it can happen so easily. But one of the few people who knows her is leaving her, and she is leaving him. She wants to go, but at the same time is turning around and holding on to him.
If only time could pass. Then perhaps her exhaustion and despair and longing could be subdued. Then she thinks. A cold winter’s day might bring to mind a memory with melancholic clarity: his birthday. A year later, she might pause in a new kitchen in a different apartment and remember what it was like: Brussels, the house, their lives. The memories form a shooting pain that will eventually abate. She already knows that, with time, all these days, all these violent and confusing emotions, will become less important. Everything that is their shared life, and everything she wanted to say but that remained unsaid, will, over the years, lose significance and disappear.
But it doesn’t have to be like that. One day, months later, she might be sitting in her new office, sharp spring sunlight slanting through the window, reading a message from Fredrik. Short and hesitant. Do you want to meet? On a whim, she might say yes. Perhaps they will arrange to meet in a wine bar, and when she arrives she will realise it is the kind of wine bar they had planned to visit after the Swedish reception in Brussels long ago, in her former life, and she will be hit by the strong feeling that things would have been different then, without knowing why. She doesn’t have a clue what is going to happen. She wants it, and she doesn’t want it. She is close to the boundary where silence stops and something unknown takes hold.
Table of Contents
The Silent War
Also By
Title
Copyright
Contents
1
Three Weeks Later
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
The Silent War Page 26
