The Last Compromise (9 page)

Belgium,
Motorway E411, direction Luxembourg

Tienhoven
and Hans were sitting in the boss’s private car, a spacious Renault, and Hans
felt a lot like chatting. They were heading southwest past Namur and towards
Arlon and the Luxembourgish border. They would meet with Hoffmann on an agreed
parking lot along the motorway, so they still had some time to kill.

The
plan was clear. Meet with Hoffmann, go to Luxembourg, talk to Zayek. Hans and
Tienhoven would ask Zayek about how he had gotten onto the reserve list without
speaking Bulgarian. Maybe there was a harmless explanation. If so, they would
then ask whether he knew anything about any falsified nuclear reports. Maybe
there was a harmless explanation for that, too. If not, they could still make
further checks, because the evidence wasn’t going to run away. All the files
were there. Whether Zayek would still be there himself was beyond their control
anyway. After the Commission, it would be Hoffmann’s turn to ask whatever
questions he had. Then it would be up to Hoffmann to decide whether he would
call the police or not, which would have been true in any case, with or without
them. At the end of the day, anti-fraud was neither a counter-intelligence
service nor a police. For any use of force they depended on local operational
assistance from the national authorities.

Hans
looked out the window. The road signs were showing the first exit into the city
of Namur, the next one would come two kilometres later. It meant that they had
covered almost a third of the distance to Luxembourg.

Now,
after all the initial excitement and before the real show would start, Hans would
have loved to talk about miscellaneous things. He had learned from Tienhoven
that the Dutch expression for this was ‘to talk about cows and calves’. The
problem was that Tienhoven himself was such a taciturn driver, no cows no
calves. Not that he was particularly chatty when not driving, apart from the
litany-length monologue earlier in his office. But in the confined space of a
car without any music on, and without any conversation being opened by the
hierarchical superior, Hans felt very acutely that the situation was not quite
as exhilarating as it could be.

Perhaps
he could ask Tienhoven about his old work back at Utrecht. Maybe Hans’s
unflattering memories of the brutalist concrete city were unjustified. He’d
been to Utrecht only once, together with Julia, and that had been an accident. It
had been just before Hans had learned that he’d passed the Commission’s job
competition, when they’d lived together in Estonia. They had decided to make a
trip over the weekend, and to have some fun in Amsterdam, in the way people
were supposed to have fun in Amsterdam. Hans hadn’t been sure about it, he’d
known nothing of the city, and Julia had seemed only lukewarm about the idea,
too. But somehow they’d persuaded each other that this was a thing that people
had to do at least once.

So
they’d booked a cheap flight to a small regional airport in Eindhoven, and
taken the bus to the train station in the inner city, and then the train to
Amsterdam. Normally it would have taken them a mere two and a half hours to get
there. Except their train had got stuck. It had been autumn, and leafs had
fallen on the tracks, making it dangerous for trains to roll on them. Hans had
wondered whether this had been the first time in the history of the Netherlands
that leafs had come off the trees in autumn. In fact this was precisely what
everybody around them in the train had said, too. Every autumn the damn leafs
fall on the damn rails, and every time the national railway company is
completely overwhelmed by the logistical challenge of this totally unexpected
freak event.

Their
train had crawled to Utrecht central station and released the passengers into
the hideous concrete jungle to survive on their own. Hans would even have found
it a little exciting to be stranded in an unknown city like that. Julia had
found it totally unexciting to be stranded in an unknown city like that. They’d
found a frighteningly cheap hotel for the night. The bed had been soft like
warm butter in the middle, worn out by generations of couples making love on
it, putting the centre of their weight on the exact centre of the mattress.
Hans would have loved to see whether the bed could handle some more repeated
downward pressure, but Julia hadn’t been in the mood for any of that. The
following day they’d spent mostly indoors because it had been raining. They
hadn’t felt like going to Amsterdam at all, and in the evening had returned to
Eindhoven airport. The trains had been running again. They’d slept on the
plane. Afterwards Hans would have preferred to have stayed in Estonia and gone
to Lake Peipus instead. It was a large lake, so large it was almost a sea. He’d
spent many pleasant evenings there growing up. There at least he would have
enjoyed the wide view over the calm water.

Hans
blinked a few times. So yes, his boss’s time in Utrecht was absolutely a
potential topic for discussion, for shared memories even. Maybe Tienhoven had
arrested someone in the very hotel Hans and Julia hadn’t had any sex in.

Or
he could ask about his daughter. So Willem, the young woman on the picture,
that’s your daughter, right? Or your niece? My brother Lennart has two
daughters, speaking of which, who’s the girl on the photo?

No.

Hans
glanced at the golden wedding band on his boss’s right hand. It had always been
there. Maybe another opening for a question.

Suddenly
the hand with the wedding band moved. Tienhoven checked the clock on his car’s
dashboard and took out a little plastic cylinder from his jacket, popped open the
lid with his right thumb while steering with his left hand, and pressed it
against his lips. Then he closed and pocketed the cylinder and took a sip of
water from the plastic bottle that had been fixed in a cup holder between his
and Hans’s seat.

A
sizeable minority among the colleagues at work believed that these were Ritalin
pills to keep his brain running at high performance levels. The majority
opinion held that it was heart medication. However that majority, in turn, was
split into three camps of roughly equal size. Two camps were favouring a
different type of medication each, while the third group didn’t know enough
about the subject and just stuck with ‘heart medication’ in general. Hans was
one of these agnostics, supporting the broader heart theory because he’d seen
his boss fall silent sometimes, as if he was listening to his own heartbeat. Tienhoven’s
secretary Gabriela had never said a word, even when some colleagues had asked
her more or less directly. She kept her mouth shut like a taciturn Estonian
grandfather. Or, as the Russians put it, she revealed nothing, like a captured
Soviet partisan during interrogation. Maybe now was a good moment to ask Tienhoven
about his heart. But maybe it was not.

Tienhoven
put the water bottle back into the holder and said to Hans, ‘Remind me about
your open cases, please.’

All
right, why not. Hans cleared his throat. ‘One is the director who probably
hired her nephew as a consultant. I meant to ask you, actually, to approve a request
of the birth certificates of the consultant’s parents. If it’s true we can
schedule a questioning.’

‘Please
explain to me why you want to see the birth certificates, instead of just
asking her if the consultant is her nephew.’

‘She’s
a director,’ Hans replied. ‘It wouldn’t seem appropriate to make allegations
without having the proof already. What if she denies it? Then we’d have to say
all right, we’ll check out whether what you say is true, and then we’ll get
back to you.’

Tienhoven
nodded mutely. Oh, the compliment bordered on lavish praise, Hans thought.
Please stop, I can’t hold back my tears.

Tienhoven
asked, ‘What about the Estonian harbour?’

‘It
looks more and more suspicious, but it will still take a few weeks to have
something solid for the next stage.’

‘Okay,’
Tienhoven said. ‘What about the road-building in Portugal?’

‘It’s
basically ready,’ Hans said. ‘The main question is how we should approach the national
authorities. Either it will be them assisting us, or us assisting them. I guess
we need to make a recommendation to Clarke.’

‘Not
at all, we’ll give him two options,’ Tienhoven said. ‘These questions are
partly, in fact mostly political. Let the director-general decide. That’s what
he’s paid for.’

Hans
nodded and looked out the window on his side of the car. They were already
through his three most exciting files apart from the new case, and they had
only just passed Namur. What on earth would they talk about for the rest of the
ride? Hans wouldn’t have minded going to Luxembourg alone by train, except the
Belgian railways were again on strike for the day, so the car had been the only
feasible option anyway. He only wished he had a different companion for the
ride. That instead of Tienhoven they’d assigned Caitlin from money-laundering,
say. Or Siim. Or anybody, even Viktor.

***

The
hiss and roar of the passing cars had been diffuse enough to have a
conversation outside, in the picnic area, but it had simply been a bit too
chilly for that, so they had assembled in Tienhoven’s car. When Hans and Tienhoven
had arrived, Hoffmann had already been waiting for them in a black Audi with
German license plates. They had all gotten out, Hoffmann had shaken hands with
Tienhoven, the two men introducing themselves, and with Hans. Now they were all
sitting in the parked Renault. Tienhoven behind the wheel, Hoffmann to his
right, Hans in the back, leaning forward.

‘Why
did they put Zayek where he is now?’, Hans asked the two others, addressing mostly
Hoffmann though, because if this was a joint operation they would need to tell
each other at least a fair share of what they knew.

‘We
cannot be sure,’ Hoffmann said, without seeming reluctant to talk. ‘As far as
we can tell he’s not a scientist or former scientist. If he is who the defector
says he is. He’s not a computer specialist, not an engineering specialist, not
a weapons specialist. Not a former commando or even paratrooper. He served in
the German army for a year as a conscript, during the compulsory service. They
trained him on the standard-issue assault rifle, like all the others, and then
he did paperwork for the rest of his time there.’

‘Here
at the Commission he’s not in the equivalent of a commando unit either,’ Hans replied.
He glanced at his boss, just to be sure. Tienhoven didn’t say anything and didn’t
make any face. So he continued. ‘If the Russian link is correct, it could be
that he only got onto the reserve list because the Russians had given him the
fake identity of someone who had passed the job competition. That’s the first
question we’re interested in from our side.’

Tienhoven
turned his head to his right. ‘It could be that there is a real Boris Zayek
from Bulgaria somewhere, who passed the job competition, and whose identity got
stolen before he received a job offer. In that case there could be a missing
person case in Bulgaria.’

Hans
added, ‘And if a German took a stolen identity to get into the Commission,
maybe now there is a missing person in Germany, too.’

‘There
is a missing person with that name in Bulgaria,’ Hoffmann replied. ‘But we haven’t
got any more details for the moment, maybe it’s somebody else. As to the German
himself, no-one seems to be missing him, as far as we can tell for now. In
Germany intelligence work and ordinary police work are separated more strictly than
they are in other countries.’

Hoffmann
said it, and he did not elaborate. He neither justified it, nor did he roll his
eyes to have them know what a nuisance this was for his work. Nazism had shown
what a government, what a society was capable of, and the constraints on the
security apparatus simply was something that applied to modern Germany. Hoffmann
wasn’t going to apologise for it. Hans liked that.

They
sat in silence.

‘If
all that is true, he’s in a position that gives him access to sensitive
information,’ Hans said. ‘Since he works in the atomic energy department he
might help cover up the theft of nuclear material.’

Hoffman
turned around to face him. Tienhoven again said nothing, so Hans carried on.

‘That’s
the second reason there might be an independent interest in Zayek from our side,’
Hans continued. ‘It’s nothing definitive, but samples of Commission reports
display anomalies whereby the cancellation of the use of nuclear material is
made to disappear, as if it had never been planned.’

Hoffmann
turned around, facing the front again.

Nobody
said anything. Clearly Hoffmann had no intention of commenting on this piece of
intelligence.

‘If
it’s not that, then maybe he’s a sleeper?’, Tienhoven asked. He must have concluded
that no reaction was forthcoming about the nuclear manipulation, but that
Hoffmann might help develop other hypotheses.

‘What
would he do when woken up, then?’, Hoffmann asked.

‘Maybe
they expect him to transmit a vital piece of information at the right moment,’ Hans
proposed. ‘Or he’s already doing what he was meant to do, at atomic energy.’ He
now asked Hoffmann directly. Unlike his boss he wasn’t going to accept mere
silence as an answer to his theories. ‘Mister Hoffmann, what do you think about
the nuclear reports manipulation?’