Into a Raging Blaze

Into a Raging Blaze

New York • London

© 2013 by Andreas Norman

Translation © 2014 by Ian Giles

Originally published in Swedish as
En Rasande Eld
by Albert Bonniers Förlag, Stockholm, Sweden

First published in the United States by Quercus in 2014

Published in the English language by arrangement with Bonnier Group Agency, Stockholm, Sweden.

Every attempt has been made to secure the license to print lyrics from “Liberez” by La Brigade, Universal Music Publishing Group Ltd. Any omissions should be notified to the publishers, who will be happy to make amendments to future editions.

Extract from Poem 18 “At the way stations stay” by Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi

Translation © 1995 by Michael A. Sells

Reprinted by permission of the Muhyiddin Ibn ‘Arabi Society.

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.

e-ISBN 978-1-62365-803-8

Cover design © Ghost

Cover photo © Ecceback

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, institutions, places, and events are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons—living or dead—events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

www.quercus.com

To Anna K.

1

Brussels, Friday, September 23

The man came out of the entrance to the EU Commission, went around the building, and started to walk down Archimedesstraat. Dark hair, gray suit, and a blue shirt. For a moment he disappeared out of sight. Team two radioed in a few seconds later—they were posted a hundred meters down the street and could see him clearly.

The target had been under surveillance for three months, and nothing suggested that he would change his plans today. He was regular in his habits: worked long days at the office but always finished at the same time, around seven, and would drive home in his car. Today he was leaving the office at five, since it was a Friday. As expected.

He and his wife had a weekend place they had rented for the last two years. The cottage was located by a lake in the Doornendijk nature reserve in the Flemish fenlands of Meetjesland, about ten kilometers north of Ghent—an area rich in birdlife and with excellent fishing waters.

The target got into his car—a metallic green Audi that was parked a hundred meters further along the street, close to the crossroads with Rue Stevin—started it and pulled away from the curb.

The traffic flowed along. The Audi was a few cars ahead and moved quickly through the city via Rue de la Loi, Kunstlaan, and Avenue Charles-Quint, heading northward. After fifteen minutes it was on the A10 freeway. Team two was three hundred meters further ahead, in the inside lane. The target maintained a high and steady speed and showed no signs of being conscious of their presence.
After forty kilometers he turned off at the junction for Merelbeke and joined the R4 going north. They remained in formation. At this speed, expected time of arrival was in thirty minutes.

But on the way toward Ghent's industrial quarter the target slowed and, instead of continuing along the R4, he turned off toward the port. Team two, which was ahead of the target, missed the turn and had to stop on the shoulder to wait. The Audi drove past the warehouses along the quay, rounded the docks for the cargo barges, and pulled over into a gas station. Team one stopped in a neighboring parking lot and observed the target.

He got out, filled up the car, paid, and then drove out of the port and back on to the northbound R4—the anticipated route.

Team two rejoined after a few minutes. They were preparing now: they took out the vials, loaded three hundred units of insulin, and made sure that the insulin pen and backup were both working. Three hundred units was ten times the daily dose that the target took for his diabetes—it was enough. The main thing was that nothing suspicious should be detected during the autopsy.

At the junction for Bruges, he joined the A11 and, a few kilometers later, as expected, he turned on to the N448. When everything was going smoothly it could seem like the target had been involved in the planning of the operation: everything happened as if by agreement. But, naturally, no such agreement existed. The target was unaware.

They passed through Assenede, which was the nearest town. Team two had taken the faster route, avoiding the center, and were already halfway to the cottage.

He was driving slowly now and would not leave their sight. He stopped at a tobacconist's, got out of the car, leaving the engine running, and hurried in, returning a moment later with a newspaper and what looked like a few packs of cigarettes, then drove on. They had prepared for a longer stop in the village, but he continued along a country road without stopping again.

There was no traffic here. Their vehicle and that of the target were the only cars to be seen in the avenue they had just turned into,
which stretched ahead for a kilometer. The cottage was secluded, on a wooded spit of land, accessible only by the bumpy road that ran through the woodland and ended by the house. The plot looked out on to one of the small lakes—a lawn ran all the way to the water's edge—and it was completely hidden from view, unless you stood on the opposite shore with binoculars. There was a small risk of birdwatchers, but it would all go so quickly. If anyone happened to see what was going on, they wouldn't understand what they had witnessed anyway.

They slowed down and let the target turn on to the road through the woods to the cottage. Once the Audi was out of sight, they slowly followed it, parked the car halfway up the road to the house, and got out.

They moved quickly on foot along the edge of the wood. It was densely wooded with low visibility. They had to be careful; the target wasn't more than ten or so meters away. There was the house: a vacation cottage with a low fence, gate, and bushes. The metallic green car was parked on the edge of the road. There was the target, standing in the living room of the cottage, still wearing his coat, with his back turned to them.

They rounded the corner just as he came down the front door steps on to the lawn. He was on his way to the water's edge but only managed two or three steps before something made him turn his head—perhaps the noise of their sneakers as they ran toward him. No visible signs of violence was the critical thing. He tensed up, but he didn't really understand what was happening; he was barely afraid when two of them pressed him down onto the grass and gripped his arms while number three stuck the insulin pen into the hairline on his neck. They quickly carried him down toward the water's edge and waited until his body had stopped fighting, checked his pulse, and then they left him.

2

Stockholm, Wednesday, September 21

It was just after eight in the morning and Carina Dymek had already managed two hours of work. The first of her colleagues were beginning to turn up now—she heard the clicking of ceiling lights being switched on, the low scramble of chairs being pulled toward desks, and then the familiar motif played by computers during start-up. Carina was not a morning person. She hated early mornings and wasn't really mentally with it before ten, but on this Wednesday morning she couldn't worry about that. She had been forced to come in early to have, even theoretically, a chance of getting through the threateningly long to-do list that filled a brightly colored Post-it note on the side of her computer screen.

There were 8,634 messages in her inbox. At the top of the screen there glowed seventy-five new, unread, blazing red e-mails. Many were just informational in nature—reports and newsletters—things that didn't require any action. Those could wait to be read, if she read them at all. But, mixed into the flood of messages like those, there were e-mails she couldn't afford to miss. Red-flagged e-mails, e-mails titled
Thanks in advance for quick response
, orders with short deadlines, questions from the department head that required immediate responses, or e-mails like the one she had just brought up, which bore an urgent subject line of
ORDER—Data for UM in Berlin, deadline 22nd Sep. 16:00
.

Even among the priority e-mails she was obliged to prioritize. The night before, she had lain in bed and gone through everything she had to do the next day. Anxious thoughts kept revolving
in a meaningless circle. After hours of unsuccessful attempts to fall asleep, she had come to the conclusion that everything was important: everything had to be prioritized. There was only one solution—the only solution that the MFA had taught her for these situations: to deny oneself a good night's sleep. She got up.

The windows were still dark, the corridors dim and silent when she arrived at the department, hours before everyone else.

As it got light, the government buildings in the district around Drottninggatan in central Stockholm were filled by approximately four thousand civil servants, all of whom sat down at their computers, just as she had, in well-lit, uniformly furnished office landscapes and started the day's work. They worked in the shadows of ministers, served the government, and were tasked with giving the nation's political leaders the best possible understanding of myriad issues that ministers needed to grasp in order to better rule the country and decide on its foreign policy. They were the government's support as it ruled. Some might say that they used a friendly but determined hand to control the government. They explained developments in unfamiliar countries; they gave ministers their view of the situation. They produced facts and gave opinions. They made assessments and took decisions that affected people and entire societies. Even decisions that had no effect whatsoever were taken—that happened every day. They gave advice and the politicians listened. The government ruled Sweden, but in the shadow of the government there were those who managed the levers and controls and the organization: the Government Offices of Sweden.

The Government Offices of Sweden was something of which normal people, without the right to be in its corridors, only had a vague understanding. Those who worked at the Government Offices obviously knew that it comprised the Prime Minister's own staff, called the Prime Minister's Office, and then the Office for Administrative Affairs, which managed all the resource issues that constantly flooded the organization: IT, security, salaries, and other administrative matters. Beneath this pair there were eleven departments. One of them was the Ministry of Foreign Affairs—the MFA.

Of all the ministries, the MFA was the largest and most secretive. With its two-and-a-half thousand staff, one hundred embassies, four hundred consulates, and permanent representations to the UN, EU, and delegations in other international organizations, it was a gargantuan machine, a leviathan greater than all the other ministries combined. Civil servants in the rest of Government Offices always regarded the MFA and its diplomats with envious admiration, a mixture of longing to be one of them and hatred because they never would be.

The Ministry's four buildings in the government district were closed addresses. Within their walls, the nation's foreign policy was formed. Internally, the Ministry was called the House and was divided into twenty-five departments. Out of all the departments, the Security Policy Department was the largest and quietly considered to be the most important, the one that had the foreign minister's ear. The Security Policy Department—or SP, as it was called—stretched across two stories of the office block at Fredsgatan 6. Down its long, winding corridors and past the rows of offices, close to the stairs between floors five and four, was room 1523. In its depths sat Carina Dymek at a height-adjustable desk, writing with speed and concentration on a computer.

She was satisfied. Soon she would be able to tick off the biggest order on her list—the foreign minister's file. The foreign minister was going to Ukraine the next day for a meeting with President Yanukovych, talks with the Enlargement Commissioner, Štefan Füle, and a swathe of other meetings. Yalta, Crimea. The EU's relations with the large, splintered post-Soviet nation were on the agenda. Central Asia. The Tymoshenko case, energy security. It was important to continue applying pressure to the leaders of Ukraine while at the same time intimating that the country had EU prospects if it chose to develop in a democratic direction—everything to avoid forcing it east into the arms of the Kremlin and Gazprom. The country's economy was in crisis and its politics were heading in an increasingly authoritarian direction. The EU's instrument, in the shape of the European Neighborhood Policy with its various development
and support programs, was the soft power that the Union could exercise. The foreign minister was committed to the issues. The Ukraine desk officer at the Department for Eastern Europe and Central Asia was currently working on some analyses of Ukrainian domestic policies and relationships with Russia, while Carina's focus was on the EU and security policy.

As always, it wasn't the formal, agenda-driven talks that were most interesting, it was those on the sidelines. The foreign minister's coordinator had already indicated that the minister wanted bilateral meetings with several of Ukraine's advisers and a meeting with Tony Blair, who for some reason was in the Crimea; the foreign minister also wanted to meet a security adviser at RAND who worked as a consultant for the Ukrainian defense ministry, as well as a handful of others. Carina needed to draft the outline of a short speech for the dinner in the evening. It was also to be expected that certain current and sensitive EU issues would come up, even if they didn't directly affect Ukraine.

The foreign minister's file was the collective result of the work of, on average, five to ten desk officers in at least two departments and a collection of embassies around the world. Before every trip a unique file was compiled with analyses and reports, Swedish messages and talking points for media contact, CVs of important people, and practical information about the trip. Ideally, the file was meant to reflect all political aspects and eventualities, and meet all requirements for facts that the minister might possibly have.

Carina took a deep breath and glanced through what she had written. The key messages were good, cogent. She knew the Swedish positions and didn't need to shuffle through old strategic documents to know what a foreign minister should and shouldn't say. Just two or three more talking points—in bullet points—then she would choose a bunch of analyses before going to see her new unit head, Anders Wahlund, to check the texts with him: she had fifteen minutes after lunch to go through the most sensitive parts of the material with him. Hopefully the file would then be done, barring a few minor changes. She would send over her contribution to the
Ukraine desk officer, who would have a secretary in the unit make three copies of everything before running over to the minister's office, so that the minister would have the file in the car the next morning, allowing him to look through it on the way to the airport.

The foreign minister had a photographic memory. Everyone knew that he preferred statistics to reasoning, data rather than a desk officer's fumbling analyses. He often liked incredibly technical details about nuclear power plants, Russian combat vehicles, and other things that a foreign minister apparently had a use for. According to those who worked closest to him, he read everything. The Foreign Service produced hundreds of reports every day. Apparently he read all embassy reports, all major news, blogs, research—everything. Carina couldn't understand how it was possible, but that was what they said. Orders from the foreign minister's office often came with a slightly condescending reminder to the desk officer not to include “the normal” embassy reports, just facts and “the most relevant things.”

In her eight years at the Ministry, she had sat eye to eye with the foreign minister on four occasions. He was unquestionably brilliant, but basically uninterested in people who weren't foreign ministers.

It occurred to her that the minister might not even be in Stockholm. If not, she would be forced to send the whole file as an encrypted e-mail to Kiev, call them, and get someone to drive it down to the Crimea to hand it over personally.

She dug out her phone from under the papers and called the minister's press secretary, but that diverted to a cell-phone voicemail. She pulled up the electronic phone directory and found the extension for one of the assistants.

Call forwarded. Then some scraping noises and a whispering voice that answered: “Marianne.”

Carina introduced herself. She explained briefly that she was preparing the minister's file for Ukraine. Was the foreign minister in Stockholm today?

“I don't actually know.”

“Okay.”

“He's going to the Congo later this week—for the Dag Hammarskjöld ceremony. But I don't know anything about Ukraine. Can I get back to you? Or maybe try Elisabeth?” the assistant whispered in a stressed tone.

Carina hung up.

Assistant number two didn't answer. The foreign minister's adviser, some young upstart straight out of the Young Conservatives, did pick up his cell. Wasn't the minister in New York? He clearly had no idea. Carina ended the call quickly, leaned back in the chair, and thought through the options. He would be in Yalta within eighteen hours if he wasn't there already. Then Africa, then New York and the UN.

She really did need to know where the foreign minister was. Then the obvious solution occurred to her: check his blog. She went to the site and, naturally, he had already had time to blog in the morning. He was in parliament today—so still in Stockholm for at least another five hours.

She wrote for half an hour uninterrupted. Her fingers rattled across the keyboard in a series of rapid movements. Points for a possible press conference: The Eastern partnership was of key importance to relations between the EU and Ukraine, she wrote, before adding a few sentences about the importance of a long-term relationship and about the country as part of Europe. General formulations. The EU had trading relations and aid as its two greatest weapons but it was the Russians who had true geopolitical power—they controlled access to oil and gas. It was vital that the message about the rule of law and human rights was clear, while not punching the Ukrainians in the nose and hurting their pride, which would make Yanukovych turn to Moscow. The Kremlin was already talking about discounted oil prices. In a few months it would be winter in Kiev and then political loyalty would be counted in dollars per barrel. She read through what she'd written, rapidly making additions and amendments until she had a decent draft. It was a quarter past nine.

As the Security Policy Department's EU coordinator, it was she who had to get the department's seventy-five diplomats to sing from the same song sheet on everything to do with EU security policy. She was the one who had to keep up with EU procedures, put together negotiation instructions for Brussels and make sure that ministers and junior ministers had the right information. She was the one who sent out stern reminders to colleagues about keeping to deadlines and she was responsible for ensuring that everyone affected was informed and ready to react.

The last few months had been hectic. The Arab Spring and the Libyan campaign, Kosovo, the Horn of Africa, and more generally the EU's more or less fulfilled ambition of becoming a military security policy operator meant, in practice, a myriad of meetings and decisions, informal contacts, and thousands of papers with proposals flitting between the capitals of Europe. All this went through the encrypted European communication system, Coreu. There was a database where all member states and the Council of Europe secretariat could post messages—a never-ending noticeboard where thousands of messages, agendas, and minutes were published every day. It was Carina's responsibility to keep track of this flow of information and make sure that the department didn't drop any balls. There were those who hated Coreu. When Sweden had joined the EU and connected to the information system, the volume of mail and messages had increased by fifty percent overnight. Carina liked the tempo. She enjoyed having direct contact with other European foreign ministries and the feeling of being a part of real politics. Fifty or sixty hours a week were a prerequisite to do the job, but that was generally okay. This morning, however, the sheer volume of new messages on Coreu made her draw breath. Dealing with the stream of Coreu data was sometimes like playing an unending tennis match against an inexhaustible Agassi.

She stood up and stretched her arms. Her back creaked. Tiredness washed across her like an anesthetic and made her stagger. She needed coffee.

Carina looked around. Her room was narrow, a little smaller than the others on the corridor. There had been a possibility that she might get the office next door to the Head of Department, at the top end of the corridor—a light room with a view toward Strömmen. It had been the last EU coordinator's office. But, instead of Carina, the DPKO desk officer, responsible for contact with New York about Swedish contributions to UN troop activities, had gotten the room. He was of a higher rank. But he was going to Santiago soon, and then perhaps it would be her turn.