The Last Compromise (2 page)

‘You
said that this was an example,’ Tienhoven said to Viktor. ‘From some other
project I assume. But you came here to present something else. Something that
is of direct interest to the European Commission’s anti-fraud department.’

Hans
looked at his boss. He was right, of course. Here at the Commission’s
anti-fraud department they were dealing with irregularities within the
Commission itself. Corruption or stretching of the rules at local level was
something for the police of whatever country it was happening in, provided that
they were misspending their own taxpayer money.

‘That
is true,’ Viktor replied, without changing either the volume or the pitch or
the speed of his presentation. He just went on, in his calm, generic voice. ‘This
was an example. For the current project Hans and I applied similar methods to
data concerning the use of nuclear material.’

Luxembourg

Boris
Zayek was still queuing. For the second time, to be precise. He had the
cigarettes, now he would buy the chewing gum.

Boris.
His real but almost forgotten name was a fine name, dignified, even noble in a
way, he thought. And, above all, international. You could introduce yourself anywhere
in the world, and no-one could pinpoint which country you were from. At least
not until you started talking, your accent giving you away. You could be from
Canada or Austria with such a name, you could blend right in. But instead they
had given him the name Boris. What an absurd choice. They might as well have
called him Ivan. Actually the name Boris Zayek was meant to be Bulgarian, not
Russian. After Bulgaria had joined the European Union in 2007, he had entered
the European Commission with a fake Bulgarian identity, as one of the new civil
servants from a new member country. Still, who deliberately calls a Russian spy
Boris?

The
guy at the front of the queue was leaving, now it was only two people in front
of him. There was a lady with long black hair wearing a black business suit, then
a guy with short hair wearing a grey jacket, and behind him Mister Boris Zayek,
Russian agent.

If
he thought about it, he wasn’t exactly a Russian agent, though. First of all,
he wasn’t Russian. He was German, born to German parents in a town in Germany.
Not even East Germany, simply a West German town. He didn’t speak any Russian,
let alone Bulgarian. At work he explained it by saying his father was
Bulgarian, hence the name, but that he was otherwise basically German. So far
no-one had ever asked him how a man from communist Bulgaria could have met a
woman from West Germany in the middle of the Cold War. There, the black lady
was gone, now it was only the guy in front of him.

Second
of all, Zayek wasn’t sure that what he was doing now really counted as spying
in any traditional sense of the word. But he cared less and less about it with
every month, every year that passed. Basically he was Boris Zayek, a German
civil servant at the European Commission in Luxembourg, only with a strange
name which wasn’t real, and with the not entirely genuine passport of a country
he had never been to. Surely a man his age, and in his situation, should be
smoking. It would be odd if he didn’t.

‘Bonjour
Madame,’ he said as the guy in front of him walked away. He stepped forward and
looked only in the face of the shop assistant. ‘Avez-vous du chewing-gum sans
sucre?’

Brussels

Tienhoven
was waiting for the continuation of the presentation. Viktor was silent, he had
already explained the statistics. Now it was the moment for Hans to take over
for the central part. He cleared his throat and started.

‘National
authorities have to report the use of nuclear material for peaceful purposes to
the European Commission,’ he said. ‘This has been in the European treaties
since the fifties.’

Hans
found it important to keep pointing out these details, basically to anyone he
talked to. Too often the Germans or the French or the Italians were blaming the
European Commission for this or that. Actually the countries simply didn’t
trust each other, so they gave powers to the Commission, a neutral watchdog in
Brussels, and told it to check on them all. And then they would all complain together
about the watchdog for making their lives difficult. The monitoring of who had
how much plutonium and uranium was no different. Let the Commission count it
all. So they could all moan about the Commission, rather than about each other.

‘The
Commission, specifically the atomic energy department, records the type and
amount of nuclear material, and their people go there and check whether the
figures are correct and whether the material is really there,’ Hans continued. ‘Sometimes
they come unannounced. This concerns nuclear power plants obviously, but also
hospitals with radiology departments, universities, and private research
companies that use small quantities of radioactive material.’

Tienhoven
heard him out, then he turned to Viktor. ‘And?’

‘It
looks like we detected an anomaly in the pattern,’ Viktor said. He was very kind.
During their project Hans had only asked the right questions at the right
moments. He was not a scientist, he was a lawyer. After law school, and before
passing the Commission’s entrance exam, he had worked at his country’s chief
prosecutor’s office. During the project it had been Viktor who had done all the
statistics, all the math.

Viktor
carried on. ‘Over the last twenty-four months there have been four sudden drops
in the reported amounts of radioactive material. Not just smaller amounts from
one month to the next, but sudden deviations from the statistical pattern.’ He
opened the laptop. The screen lit up and was reflected in Viktor’s glasses. He
turned the laptop around so that it faced Tienhoven.

Tienhoven
looked at the screen; Hans could see it, too. There was a vertical axis to the
left, a horizontal axis at the bottom, providing half a frame to a whole crowd
of zigzagging curves running from left to right. Some of the curves had
prominent ravines, spikes pointing downward. Four drops, at uneven intervals.
They were fat and obvious, because their edges were formed by several curves
dropping at the same moment.

‘Again,’
Hans said. ‘To see this you have to crunch the numbers, as we did. As Viktor
did. It could be that nuclear material has gone missing in four European
countries, simultaneously on four specific occasions, within the last two years.’

‘These
are deep drops,’ Tienhoven noted.

‘The
drops in actual numbers are not significant,’ Viktor explained. ‘What is
significant is the drop in proportion to the amounts that would be expected
statistically. The deviation from the normal deviation. And that’s what these
curves show. In addition, here we have isolated the figures for just one specific
type of nuclear material: low-enriched uranium in the form of fission targets,
the final form in which it is delivered to reactors. In the total of all
nuclear materials used every year in Europe, these dips would not be detectable
at all.’

Hans
kept a straight face as Viktor was explaining it. In truth he’d had to look up
what fission targets were, for at least Hans had never heard the term before.
Apparently enrichment meant making the uranium more usable for reactors; targets
were the finished product, pieces of metal that were then subjected to a hail
of whatever particles they bombarded them with.

Tienhoven
waited for a moment, then he turned to Hans. ‘Why did you choose to look at
nuclear material reports, and not something else?’

‘It
was a test run,’ Hans said. ‘To see whether the method would generate results
in a case where the information consists of large sets of numbers. It could’ve
been something different.’

‘Why
low-enriched uranium?’

‘We
did several materials. This was the only one where there was an anomaly like
you see it on the screen.’

‘Where
is the direct relevance to anti-fraud?’

‘The
relevance to anti-fraud, I think, lies in the records of our own atomic energy
department,’ Hans said. He’d known this question would come. ‘If their records
are clean, if everything is accounted for as far as they are concerned, we can
hand this over to the national authorities of the four countries in question.
Let them deal with it. Or let the atomic energy people start a probe of their
own. But if the records are
not
clean, if there really is something, and
Commission staff knew or should have known about it but they didn’t tell
anyone,’ Hans looked over to Viktor, pausing for a moment. ‘Well, then there
could be grounds to start an anti-fraud investigation.’

Viktor
and Hans both looked at Tienhoven. Viktor did because he had been looking at
him all the time anyway. Hans did because he needed his opinion. His decision.
And some praise perhaps.

‘Thank
you,’ Tienhoven said finally, getting up from his chair. Hans and Viktor also
got up. ‘You and Hans will work on this together I suppose,’ Tienhoven said. ‘Hans
is still project manager. But this is not an official investigation. It’s still
experimental research. Have a safe trip back to Luxembourg.’ He shook hands
with Viktor, nodded to Hans, and left the room, leaving the door open.

Well,
so much for the praise. But it was fair enough, objective completed. Hans
looked at Viktor, his black hair, his small glasses, his shaven chin, his mute grin.
The guy was on loan from the statistics department, temporarily attached to
anti-fraud to help build statistical analysis capacity to search for illegal
activity within the Commission. He might stay here for good once the project
would be over. Viktor would keep doing all the math, Hans would cover the
investigative side of the project. And for now Viktor was still based in
Luxembourg, and the offices of the Commission’s atomic energy department were partly
in Luxembourg as well. It all made sense.

‘Are
you all right with this?’, Hans asked Viktor. Viktor just smiled at him, saying
nothing. ‘So, let’s. When’s your train leaving?’

‘In
four hours.’

‘All
right, we can get coffee from the machine and have a look at the atomic energy staff,
and at their work. A lot of information is accessible from here.’ Hans was a
project manager now, or so the boss had just said, so it was time to start
managing the project. ‘Apart from that we need to check the actual content of those
nuclear reports, see where exactly the irregularities are. Maybe it’s nothing
at all, or it’s something harmless. But maybe somebody is stealing uranium all
over Europe. As you just heard, we have the official green light to spend some more
time on this now.’

‘We
already have the Commission reports, we had used them for the first analysis,’ Viktor
said. ‘Now we need the raw data from the national authorities, in the form in
which it arrived at the Commission in the first place. I suppose they are Excel
sheets with lists of figures and some text. If you can get the raw data within
three and a half hours, I can save it on my laptop and work on it on the train.’

Hans
nodded and encouraged Viktor to follow him out into the corridor and towards
the coffee machine at its end. A little celebration coffee was in order. They
were still at an early stage, but things were definitely looking up.

Luxembourg

‘I
don’t know,’ Hoffmann said while getting comfortable in the passenger seat of
the car parked fifty metres down the street from the newsagent’s shop. A black
Audi, it would normally have looked very neat and shiny, but compared with the
tank-like luxury cars that were cruising on the streets of Luxembourg it looked
unremarkable. ‘This is either not an operative at all, or he’s playing some
kind of game.’

‘Tell
me,’ the man in the driver’s seat said as he started the engine, checking the
mirror to enter the stream of cars heading towards the motorway belt around
Luxembourg. It was around noon, traffic wasn’t very heavy. Hoffmann and the man
at the wheel both spoke neutral standard German, no particular regional accent.
The car had a fast acceleration, and the man at the wheel used it.

‘He
draws attention,’ Hoffmann explained. ‘He goes in to buy cigarettes and chewing
gum. He waits in the queue for two minutes, holding his wallet all that time like
an idiot. Then he buys cigarettes, but not the standard type from a standard
brand. He buys the menthol type. Then he forgets the chewing gum and gets into
the queue for a second time. Makes a second purchase within five minutes
without leaving the shop. Now the saleslady will remember him for an hour.’

Hoffmann
had been standing three spots behind Zayek in the queue, watching him. Then,
when Zayek had returned to the end of the queue, Hoffmann had found himself standing
directly in front of him. Hoffmann had short fair hair and he wore a grey
jacket. Him the saleslady would not remember.

‘Where
were you standing?’, the man at the wheel asked, driving straight ahead towards
the cloverleaf.

‘Behind
him in the queue, then in front of him.’

‘He
noticed you,’ the man said, turning onto the motorway heading east and
accelerating towards the German border which was less than half an hour away. ‘He
didn’t want to behave like an operative. Or he wanted to have a closer look at
you, so he got back in the queue behind you. Maybe both.’