The Last Compromise (27 page)

Saar
finished his call, hung up and nodded to Hans.

‘You
know, all this takes us very far, you and me,’ Saar said. ‘There are no
suffocating refugees, or you would have said so right away. I will apologise to
the coast guard, of course, and say that I got an anonymous tipoff, that’s all.
But I’m afraid that there is nothing more that I can do for you.’

‘There
is, don’t worry,’ Hans said. He got up and looked out the window. Somewhere
from the far left of the port area a coast guard vessel sped up, following the Karelia
which had become a red dot in the blue sea. ‘It’s a big favour you owe me. Now
we find out about the Russian ship, the Bogatyr.’

Hans
sat back down again.

‘What
about it?’, Saar asked. Either he genuinely wanted to know, or he was getting
cheeky with him again.

‘What
did it have on board when it came here?’

Saar
waited for a moment, then typed on his keyboard, read the text on his screen
for a while, and then said to Hans, ‘Various containers, including one with uranium.
The inspectorate was informed.’

‘Who’s
the owner?’

‘Of
the ship or of the cargo?’

‘Of
the cargo.’ Hans thought he was being very patient.

‘A
Russian company called Yadrotech, registered in Moscow. It says here the cargo
was put on the Karelia.’

Hans
breathed out. His hair was still a little wet from the sweating.

‘So
now we wait for news from the coast guard, yes?’, Hans said, trying to relax in
his chair. ‘And please ask your secretary to get me some coffee.’

Saar
got a little irritated again. ‘Look, I’m not a hotel. I have meetings, she
already cancelled two because of you.’

Hans
got up and shoved a pile of papers from Saar’s desk down onto the floor. Most
of the stack fell down like a bent brick, some individual sheets took off and
sailed away in the air before settling two metres from Hans’s feet. Saar hadn’t
expected that, his mouth was open, showing the ends of his teeth.

‘If
you have meetings then go,’ Hans said. ‘I’ll pick up your phone if they call.
If they don’t call and you’re not back in time I’ll press redial and call them
myself. Get me a coffee. I’m staying right here.’

***

Hans
had just finished his coffee when Saar came back in. The man really had left
his office to meet someone somewhere else. The papers were still lying on the
floor.

Saar
left the door to the antechamber open, sat down in his chair and started going
through the stack of thin files his secretary had placed there. He did it without
looking at Hans. The files contained miscellaneous documents Saar had to sign.
The secretary hadn’t picked up the papers from the floor when she’d come in,
either.

While
Saar silently did what he was paid to do, Hans continued the train of thoughts
he’d started. Amid the running and the searching, this was the quietest and
most fruitful moment for reflection he’s had since sitting next to the bald
Dutch gendarme for one and a half hours.

It
came down to only two options, and both implied a diversion of cargo from one
destination to another. Hans already knew, or was fairly certain, that a
container with uranium intended for the Petten reactor had been diverted right
after its arrival from Rotterdam, and that it had been loaded onto the Karelia
and brought to Tallinn. The continuation now depended on whether the container
had changed ships here in Tallinn or not.

Hypothesis
number one was that it had. It would mean that someone must have very quickly lifted
the Petten container off the ship and put it onto the Russian freighter Bogatyr,
which by now was probably approaching Kronstadt, the historical island fortress
and Russian navy base guarding the approaches to Saint Petersburg. That meant
Western uranium had been illegally transferred to Russia, right under the noses
of the authorities of at least two European countries.

Hans
thought about what Clarissa had said in Petten. There were thousands of nuclear
transports going on every day. There simply was no way they could check them
all.

For
the Karelia, which had continued from Tallinn over to Helsinki, and which had
hopefully gotten intercepted by the Estonian coast guard, this meant that it
was either sailing empty, as far as the crucial container was concerned, or
that it was indeed carrying whatever the Bogatyr had brought to Tallinn. Maybe
nuclear waste, maybe just waste.

In
any case it could have been a cargo swap, to get uranium into Russia. Zayek in
Luxembourg knew about it, covered it up, and had to die because his own cover
had been blown, if not by the defector in the German consulate then by Hans and
Viktor with their statistics. The attacker in the hotel had been the killer. Tienhoven
had a weak heart and had suffered a real heart attack. Hoffmann had been
helping the Commission to get to Zayek before stealing Hans’s phone for some
reason, maybe indeed to get the picture for a thorough analysis. Maybe it
really did work better if you had the phone itself. Anyway, at least for the
rest it all made a lot of sense.

Except
that it could well be that there hadn’t been any cargo swap in the first place.
Thus, hypothesis number two was that no-one had changed containers, like Saar
had said. The old man was sitting quietly at his desk, reading and signing one
document after another.

The
no-swap scenario would mean that the Bogatyr had arrived with whatever uranium
it had been carrying, and that it had left again without unloading its cargo
either. A trip from Russia to Estonia and back, undertaken for no reason except
to make it appear as if the Petten container was being shipped to Russia. The
real Petten container, though, would be right where it had been: on board the Karelia,
sailing to Finland.

Hans
considered what this would mean for whatever had happened in Luxembourg. It
could be that scenario one had been the Russians’ plan, and that someone had
upset it. The diversion starts in Rotterdam; the Petten research is cancelled,
the uranium goes to Tallinn and should continue to Russia, except someone had
sent the Bogatyr back empty and diverted the cargo to Finland instead. Someone
on the inside or from the outside stole the cargo. Instead of a swap there had
been an intercept. Zayek had to die, either because he’d known of the original
plan, or because he’d found out about the diversion to Finland. The killer in
the hotel had protected either the theft to Russia or the theft to Helsinki. Or
both.

The
alternative was that Helsinki was just another navigation point in the
container’s journey, and that this had been the plan all along. Rotterdam, then
Tallinn, then Helsinki, then Russia. But why would anyone bounce the cargo up
and down the Gulf of Finland, instead of just shipping it straight to Saint
Petersburg? Besides, in that case it would have made no sense to lie about the
Bogatyr, saying it had the Petten uranium even though it was empty, only to put
the real uranium on the next ship or train from Finland to Russia.

No,
Hans thought. It would be either a direct transfer to Russia with a cargo swap,
or someone had intercepted the cargo and was diverting it to Helsinki instead.

Saar’s
phone rang. The man saw the number on the display and looked at Hans in a way
that made it clear that this was a call that was of mutual interest to them
both.

Okay,
Hans thought. Now we’ll find out.

Saar
picked up the phone.

‘Yes.
Yes, thank you for calling me back.’ There was a long pause. Saar started
massaging his eye with his index finger as he listened. ‘I see. I’m very sorry,
I thought it was a worrying… Yes, I know. Still. The nuclear container... I
see. Thank you. Yes, goodbye.’

Saar
hung up, and no further explanation was necessary. It was option two. The
intercept.

‘That
was the coast guard,’ Saar quietly explained, leaning back in his chair. ‘They told
me not to worry, not to hesitate to call them in the future if anything’s
suspicious. But there hadn’t been anything suspicious on the Karelia. They
stopped the ship, boarded it, checked it with scanners and dogs and I don’t
know what. No people, no drugs, no weapons, no nothing.’

‘What
about the nuclear container?’, Hans asked.

‘The
only nuclear container on board contained nuclear material, as far as they
could tell without opening it. According to the manifest, it had been brought
from Russia and was intended for Helsinki. Which, by the way, is exactly what
the port records say. The Karelia arrived from Rotterdam, unloaded, picked up
Russian cargo and sailed to Finland.’

‘Except
you said it didn’t actually unload. Someone swapped the designation of the
container but not the container itself.’

Hans
and Saar looked at each other. Hans felt they had reached the end of the
fruitful part of their cooperation.

‘One
last thing,’ Hans said. ‘Please print out the details for both the Karelia and
the Bogatyr. I don’t want to copy it by hand.’

The
key word had been ‘last thing’, undoubtedly this was what made Saar comply
promptly. He clicked on an icon and printed out a sheet with the shipment
details of one ship, and then did the same thing for the other. He took out
both sheets from the printer next to his desk.

‘The
cargo of the Karelia is intended for the University of Helsinki. The recipient
is a Professor Mäkinen.’ Saar said. ‘But just so that we are clear about this,’
he added, still holding the sheets in his hand. ‘I give you this, and the
matter that we talked about will disappear.’

‘You
will never see me again, Mister Saar.’

Saar
smiled, flashing his long teeth. Hans smiled as well as he took the sheets, folded
them in half, got up and shook hands with him. The handshake signified relief
and mutual gratitude.

Hans
left the office, leaving the door open behind him and saying goodbye to the
secretary. She didn’t respond.

Maybe
I will make it go away, Hans thought as he walked down the corridor to the
elevator. He had already compromised the Commission’s investigation into the
contract fraud anyway, just by being there and by saying the things he had
said. And Saar had been very helpful, he had to grant him that. But then again he
might just as well return to his Brussels office, take all the evidence he had compiled
about this harbour business, and send it anonymously by mail to the Estonian
chief prosecutor’s office. It would become a purely national investigation,
without any Commission involvement. His former colleagues would be just
delighted. They might even take out the champagne from the office fridge for
the occasion. But that he could still decide later.

Hans sat in the
cafeteria of the passenger ferry from Tallinn to Helsinki, finishing his
sandwich and drinking coffee. He’d gotten a seat at a window, at a small table
for two. All the other tables at the windows were occupied, too, and so were
some of the larger tables in the middle of the room.

Buying
a ticket had been no problem. Evading drunks had been more of a challenge. The
ferry was a pleasure boat for Finns crossing the sea to Estonia to get as much
cheap alcohol in one return trip as was physically possible. This meant
carrying as much beer on their person as was legally allowed, and drinking the
rest right there. But not all of them got completely wasted on the way home.
Some of the older folk had gone straight downstairs to the dance bar, to do the
rumba and the cha-cha. The Finns loved it. The sea outside was more grey than
blue, but the swell wasn’t very strong. With this many Nordic passengers having
a good time, it was a good thing the waves weren’t any rougher.

Hans
didn’t particularly like the sea itself. When it came to open waters, he still
preferred Lake Peipus, which was so large that the other shore wasn’t visible
on the horizon. It had very still waters, and long sandy beaches in places.
And, as was typical for an Estonian coastline, the pine forest reached right up
to the beach. The painting in Saar’s office may have been an awful piece of
kitsch, but that was only because of the fake peasants in their costumes. The
landscape itself had been depicted quite correctly, and quite beautifully. Hans
had spent many summers sitting in the shade of the trees, only to occasionally
dip into the water and then to return; first to the beach to dry off in the
sun, then to the shade to cool down.

As
he’d grown older, other pleasures had come to accompany the bathing. There had
been some tentative smoking on the beach. There had been some tentative kissing
under the trees. That was before he’d discovered the part which went far beyond
kissing, but that had come much later. Above all there had been a lot of beer-drinking,
singing and card-playing with friends. One time he and his brother Lennart had
borrowed dad’s car and driven the forty kilometres from Tartu out to the lake
in the middle of the night, together with four more friends, to see the sun
rise above the water. They had taken turns who would lie in the boot of the
car. They’d returned with a pleasantly shared feeling of guilt, even though
they hadn’t done anything. They hadn’t wrecked the car, hadn’t gotten drunk, nothing
had happened. They had all just sat there and watched as the sky above the
water had turned from black to grey to pink and blue.

Hans
held his half-empty cup of warm coffee to his mouth.

When
he put it back, a man was sitting in the chair across the small table. Black
leather jacket, dark hair, blue eyes, tight lips.

‘Give
it back to me, please,’ the man said in accent-free Russian.

Give
it back.

So
Hans wasn’t a witness, it wasn’t about something he knew or had seen. It was
about something in his possession. That was a good start, he thought. Objects
you actually can give back. Knowledge you can make disappear by being thrown
off a ship.

‘I
no longer have the phone,’ Hans said, in worse but acceptable Russian. ‘The
German took it.’

Would
he know whom he meant? Would he tell? Would he reveal something?

‘The
box,’ the Russian said.

No
he wouldn’t.

‘I
no longer have that, either.’

‘Really?’,
the man said, almost genuine curiosity in his eyes under his raised eyebrows. ‘When
did you get rid of it?’

Before
Hans could say anything, the man took a phone from his breast pocket, tapped on
the screen and showed it to Hans. ‘Was it here?’

The
picture showed a woman with short blonde hair. The skin of her face tightly enveloped
her cheekbones. She was sitting in a chair that had been put in the middle of a
hallway. There were children’s toys lying on the floor.

‘You
know her?’, the Russian asked. ‘This is the wife of Viktor Takacs in Luxembourg.
Viktor with the red car. She and I, we tried to reach him on his phone, to ask
him to turn around and bring you back. But his phone was dead. At least she
knew where you were going.’

Her
skinny face was glowing red, there were tears in her face. There was fear in
her eyes.

‘Or
was it here?’ He put the phone back in his pocket and took out a digital camera
from another pocket. He turned on the little screen on its back side and showed
it to Hans. The picture showed Hans and Siim getting out of Siim’s car inside
the Petten reactor compound. All the colours were green and grey. It had been
dark outside. Clarissa was shown approaching to meet them. The picture must
have been taken from outside the fence, with an extremely powerful telescopic
lens and night vision. Possibly from a remote-controlled mini-drone to take
pictures over the dunes.

‘Or
maybe it was here?’

He
pressed a button next to the screen. The new picture showed Siim and Clarissa
kissing, Hans standing aside.

‘Or
here?’

The
next picture showed a close-up of Clarissa’s face. The image was no longer
green. It had normal colours, and it had been taken from a position right in
front of her. A portrait in daylight. Clarissa’s dark eyes were wide open, there
was no smile on her face.

‘Or
here?’

The
next picture showed Clarissa completely naked. She was standing in an alley in
front of a brick wall, next to a rubbish container. She was covering herself
with her hands, her dark hair partly obscuring her face. Her eyes showed not so
much panic as an extreme degree of concentration.

The
next one showed her again in the same position, but this time her hair had been
smoothed back, it was no longer covering her face.

‘She’s
not a virgin,’ the man said.

Now
it was important for Hans to keep his shit together. He looked into the
Russian’s eyes. The man’s mouth was firmly shut, just like it had been in the
hotel lobby. Hans’s breathing rate increased, his heart was pounding. He forced
himself to think about something else. Something futile, something even more ridiculous,
even more depressing. The first thing that came to his mind was Prince Ivan on
the horse. The crossroads, the stone. The inscription. The prince dies, the
horse dies, both die in the end. Everybody dies. Where’s the problem? Hans felt
it was helping, but only a little. What’s wrong with your lips? The Russian’s
problem was not his lips, though. It was that during Hans’s overnight stay in
Petten he had been inside a secure location, and the Russian hadn’t been able
to get to him. And Hans had left the compound in a police convoy.

He
felt his control over his lot party return, even as the Russian was staring
into his eyes, the camera and the picture still held in his hand. Hans realised
that he had in fact been continuously either in transit or under police
protection. The hotel in Luxembourg had been full of policemen; then he’d left
in Viktor’s car; then he’d swapped cars in Brussels, with Siim driving him
straight to the reactor, with the exception of one lengthy stop at a petrol
station. That’s when the Russian may have very nearly gotten him. After Petten
it had been the special police van and Rotterdam police headquarters, with a
ride in a police car to the seaport and then, earlier this morning, the ride to
Amsterdam airport, also in a police car. Back in Petten the Russian had decided
to collect some means to pressure and intimidate Hans later, instead of
pursuing police convoys, so he’d gotten to Clarissa outside the compound. Then
he must have found out about Hans’s flight to Tallinn, either because someone
in Rotterdam had told him or because he’d had access to online booking
information. And now the poor Russian had finally caught up with him here on
the ferry.

Hans
almost felt sorry for the man, even though his heart was still pounding. Forget
the heart, he thought. Reduce the breath rate. Time to answer.

Hans
said, slowly and quietly, ‘You followed me all the way here, and now you are
showing me pictures of women I don’t know, and pictures of other people’s
girlfriends?’

‘I
know this is not your girlfriend, Hans Tamberg from Tartu,’ the man said. He
let it sink in, grinning. ‘She told me that herself. And she told me where
you’re from.’

Hans
held the man’s gaze. This wasn’t over yet. Keep your shit together. They all
die.

‘There
is someone older than you, a Margus Tamberg from Tartu,’ the man said. ‘At the
water utility. Is that your boyfriend?’

Christ.
But soon it would be over. Come on, what next?

‘Or
Lennart Tamberg? He also has an address in Tartu. Is it him? You want to see
him naked? Or their children, you like that sort of thing?’

Hans
wanted to scream. But what he wanted even more was to see this through.
Withstand. Keep the ability to offer a coherent reply afterwards.

‘Or
Mister and Misses Tamberg, of course. Hendrik and Lydia. She can’t be a virgin,
though, right Hans?’

Next?
A pause. Oddly, the mention of his parents hadn’t been very frightening because
he had anticipated it; it had been the next logical step after his brothers.
But would there be more? Okay, this was probably it for the moment.

Hans
asked, ‘Is it the fingerprints, or the crumbs of the explosive that was inside,
or the serial number inside the box?’

The
man was pressing his lips together even more tightly. His grin was gone. Hans
saw fury build up inside him. Why was Hans provoking him? Ah, but he knew why.
The man had shown him all the pictures he had, mentioned all the names he knew.
The same reason Saar had gotten cheeky again after a while. The old man had
half forgotten about the danger he’d been in, the danger that Hans had posed to
his precious contracts, to his career, to his regular life. Threats and
intimidation had a momentum which had to be sustained or it would be lost. Or
was there more to come?

Hans
didn’t want to take the risk, and said, ‘I posted the box to my Brussels office.’
He pronounced every single word as slowly and quietly as before. ‘Only I can pick
it up. If I want to have it, or if I want to get rid of it, I have to go back
to Brussels and do it.’

The
man was still holding the digital camera with the last picture in his hand. His
lips relaxed somewhat. His eyes did not.

‘So
we get off this ferry,’ the man replied. ‘And we will go back together, and
there you will do it.’

‘Frankly,
I prefer going alone,’ Hans said, without changing the speed of his speech or
the volume of his voice. ‘I will bring it to the Russian embassy in Brussels.
Is that okay for you?’

‘If
we get separated, yes. But I don’t think we should get separated.’

Hans
leaned forward, and said, ‘But I think we should.’

Hans
jerked forward and pressed with both palms against the man’s chest, nearly
pushing him off his chair, and started yelling at him in loud, vulgar Russian. ‘Ty
suka blyad ya te sha vyebanu!’ Hans rose from his chair and tried to hit the man
in the face with his fist. People started craning their necks, half annoyed by
the drunk Russian brawl, half curious about how it would end.

The
Russian rose to his feet and punched Hans in the side of his nose with the lower
edge of his palm. Hans stumbled backwards, sharp pain hitting the bones of his
skull near his nose and around his eye. Then the man used his left to clench a
fist and punched Hans in the stomach. Hans hadn’t had any time to tense his
stomach muscles. The strike burrowed into his gut. He felt immense pain and
nausea rising from the stomach to the throat as he bent over and fell on the floor,
his coffee cup falling onto his back. He felt warm coffee running on the back
of his neck and in his hair, he was retching from the sickness.

Voices
from some of the other guests at the cafeteria reached him through the fog, a
garbled mix of languages. ‘Lopeta! Stop! Da ostavte yevo v pokoye, leave him
alone.’

The
Russian knelt above him, jerked him over by the shoulder so he lay on his back,
and rammed his elbow vertically into his chest. Hans exhaled painfully and
couldn’t take any breath while the man quickly went through his pockets.

More
voices. ‘Call someone from the crew! What are you doing?’

The
Russian leaned over Hans’s ear and whispered, ‘Budu zhdat, no nedolgo.’

Hans
could finally breathe in, at least partly. He managed only a shallow breath.
The words had meant
I will wait, but not for long
. Reassuring, Hans
thought. It was the last thought he had before the Russian kicked him in the
face with his shoe. First he saw nothing at all. Then he saw the man leave the
cafeteria through an upside down fog of dizziness, nausea, pain in his stomach
and chest and face that was getting more agonising with every breath he took,
and through blood that was running from his nose across his cheeks and into his
eyes. He closed his eyes to protect them from the blood, then he carefully
turned his head to the side so the blood would flow onto the floor.

More
voices, but they were calm and low and distant. ‘You okay?’ He wanted to get
some rest. His grandmother would have been proud, not of the beating but of the
swearing. Almost without an accent. He would think of that later, though.
Thinking cost him too much energy now. The pain cost him too much energy. Hans was
alone on the floor. On the boat. On the sea. The voices in the distance weren’t
real. The pain wasn’t real. He felt he needed to finally rest. Just for a
little while.