‘Uh, thanks,’ replied George.
‘Come in, come in. Reiper is waiting for you in the office.’
Josh glanced out the door toward George’s car.
‘Nice car. Leasing? They take good care of you at Merchant and Taylor.’
He didn’t wait for George to respond, just turned and slanted across the hall.
George nodded and slunk after him. He felt uncomfortable. He didn’t feel in charge of the situation. Not at all.
Josh opened an enormous oak door that led into a room resembling the library in an English country estate. The floor was covered by a worn red carpet, and the walls were covered with wall-mounted, empty bookshelves or dark wood paneling. Large French windows looked onto what George assumed was a garden at the back of the house. It was too dark outside to see properly. The room was completely unfurnished, apart from a brand-new sofa group that looked like it was from IKEA, and a huge table in the middle of the room. An impressive collection of computers, monitors, and other electronic equipment was spread out on the table. Reiper rose from his place in front of a black laptop.
‘Mr Lööw! Welcome to Digital Solutions. You’ll have to forgive us.’
He threw open his arms in what was supposed to resemble an apologetic gesture. He was wearing Gore-Tex trousers similar to Josh’s. A black T-shirt on top. He had a bad case of hat head; the slush gray wreath of hair was glued to his scalp.
‘We haven’t really settled in yet, and interior design isn’t my specialty.’
George nodded and looked around.
‘How many people work at Digital Solutions, anyway?’ he said.
‘Well, it’s a little hard to say exactly. Some of us work on a contract basis, more as freelancers.’
‘But how many of you are working in Brussels right now?’
George felt his irritation growing. His headache. All this fucking secrecy.
‘Right now, I guess we have five or six people in Brussels. That said, there are others who’re on the road, so to speak. Involved in other projects, and so on. Let’s have a seat. I have a couple of things I’d like to discuss with you.’
Josh quietly turned around and slipped out of the room, closing the door behind him. Reiper and George sat opposite each other on two hard, cream-colored sofas. Between them stood a worn, old coffee table. It had started raining again. Sleet pattered against the French doors. It was pitch-black outside.
‘First and foremost: thanks for the translation,’ Reiper said. ‘Quick and competent work.’
George shrugged, trying to smile through his headache. When would those damn pills kick in? Reiper straightened up, put his hands behind his head, and gazed into the darkness, deeply engrossed by the sleet outside the window.
‘Unnecessary, of course. But surely you understood that?’
George involuntarily shook his head, blinked.
‘Excuse me? What did you say was unnecessary?’
‘It doesn’t matter.’
Reiper waved his hand dismissively.
‘You’re not stupid. On the contrary. No genius, perhaps, but definitely above average. You realized the papers were classified, that handling them constituted some type of crime. Still that didn’t stop you. That’s interesting.’
‘I…’ George began again.
But he fell silent. His pulse began to race. It felt like he was sliding down a slippery rock. As if his feet were struggling for a foothold but continuing to slide.
Reiper rose with unexpected grace, walked over to the computer table, and lifted a thin yellow folder, which he began to flip through absently. After a few seconds, he turned to George and stared at him with blank eyes. In the dimly lit room they looked green. Luminous. Like a cat’s.
‘But if we’re going to continue working together, I have to be absolutely certain of your loyalty. One hundred per cent sure. So, I’ve taken out what you might call an insurance policy on you.’
He walked back to his couch and laid the yellow folder down gently in front of George.
Brussels, Belgium
The vibrating phone deep in Klara’s coat pocket cut through her fatigue like a laser. The week—full of reports, team meetings, endless hours in airless meeting rooms, lunches on her feet, and late nights at the computer—fell to the side. The only bright spot this week had been the hours spent today with Cyril in her apartment. She was still tingling.
This wasn’t the first time they’d stolen a couple of hours in the middle of the day and taken separate taxis to her place to have sex. No need to deny it. That’s how it was. And in the beginning, that had been the whole point. The forbidden. Sneaking off from her high-performance life, getting him to sneak off from his. A little shabby somehow, a little dirty, but still harmless. A game where no one got hurt. And it paid off to be cautious. Gossip was devastating in the European Parliament. A Swedish adviser and a French parliamentarian would be gossip gold.
Her heart racing, she grabbed hold of the phone in her pocket. Maybe his dinner ended early? Maybe he was on his way over? But her hopes died as soon as she saw the screen. jörgen apelbom. Shit. She’d completely forgotten about him.
‘Sorry, Jörgen!’ she answered.
Her voice was as sweet and sincere as she could make it. She held the phone in place against her shoulder while rooting through her bag for the keys to the front door of her building.
‘I’m so sorry. I had so much—’
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ interrupted Jörgen. ‘You had a lot to do. Blah blah blah. As usual. You canceled on Tuesday as well.’
He babbled on, trying to sound ironically hurt. But it was a bad show. Behind the irony, Klara glimpsed his real disappointment.
Sure, she’d let Jörgen get her to promise to have a drink with him in the press bar after work to talk over some report on Internet anonymity that the Swedish Pirate Party was evidently over the moon about. She owed it to him for all the help he gave her every time a question about the Internet or computer security popped up in the European Parliament. He undoubtedly wanted to convince the Social Democrats to vote with the Pirate Party on this issue. That was how it worked. A favor for a favor. They helped each other out as much as possible.
But recently Jörgen had started maneuvering their monthly meetings so they took place weekly and later in the day in more and more informal settings. Klara suspected Jörgen’s interest might not be purely professional. And now this whiny, feigned martyrdom.
‘Well, what do you want me to say?’ she interrupted him.
She was surprised by the irritation in her own voice as she pushed open the door to the narrow stairwell and took a deep breath.
‘Seriously, Jörgen, I forgot. It sucks, but it happens. It’s nine-thirty. Why didn’t you call before now, if it was so important?’
The staircase was dark. She hit the light switch. But nothing happened. The bulb in the stairs must have burned out. A gust of wind pulled the door shut behind her. She suddenly got the feeling that something wasn’t right.
‘I was in a meeting,’ Jorgen said in her ear.
A meeting with World of Warcraft, Klara thought, but said nothing. The stairs creaked under her as she began to walk up the four flights in the dark.
‘Here’s what we’re going to do,’ he continued. ‘Since you’ve canceled two times in a row, you have to buy me dinner next week.’
Somewhere above she heard the creak of a door gently opening. A lock clicked as it was cautiously closed again. Creaking wood, like echoes of her own footsteps. She stopped on the landing between the second and third floor. The footsteps were coming from farther above. The creaking sounds. She was the only one who lived on the fourth floor. Her brain was so slow, so unprepared for something like this. The door that had been closed. It could only have been her own.
She turned around, heart pounding, threw herself down the stairs, stumbling over the next landing in the dark. Spinning a half turn, taking the stairs two at a time, not even listening for footsteps behind her. It took a few seconds. It took an eternity. She twisted her ankle when her foot landed on the cracked mosaic tiles of the ground floor. Ignored it. Staggered to the front door, fiddled with the ancient lock. She heard only silence behind her now. Nothing. Somehow it scared her even more. She turned the lock and opened the door into the rain-soaked Brussels night.
And fell out into a completely ordinary world. The streetlights in front of the park, the young people dressed up and on their way to a bar or a late dinner, the light from the small Spanish tapas place next door. She ran over to the restaurant. The safety of the half-full wine glasses inside, the small plates of cured ham, tortillas, olives. The loosened ties and glittering earrings. She stopped in front of the window, let its yellow, warm light envelop her. She turned toward her door. Nothing.
‘Hey, Klara? Are you still there? What are you doing?’
Jörgen’s voice, coming distantly from the phone. She pressed it against her ear.
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘There…’
At the same time, she saw the door to her staircase being opened from inside.
‘I’ll call you later,’ she whispered breathlessly into the phone and turned it off.
She turned to face the bar’s window, as if she were reading the menu. Pulled up her coat collar to cover her cheeks. Glanced toward the door.
A young woman, maybe a few years older than herself. Blond ponytail and dark, serious running clothes. The reflective stripes on her pants and top glittered in the headlights of the cars rolling by on the street. Straight, confident posture. A backpack strapped to her back. She stretched a few times, looked around, apparently without paying attention to Klara. Then she jogged calmly toward and past Klara without seeming to notice her at all.
Klara waited until the woman rounded the corner of the block, until her own breathing calmed down. Then she picked up the phone again. There was a moment’s hesitation before she pressed Cyril’s number.
He answered after six rings. Whispering, an ounce of annoyance in his voice.
‘Klara, now is not a good time.’
‘Sorry,’ she said. ‘But something’s happened. I just wanted to check…’
She could feel his impatience through her phone.
‘Yes, what? What is it?’
‘Can I sleep at your place tonight?’
‘What?’
She could almost see him frowning, feel how tiresome he thought this was.
‘What’s happened?’
Klara took a deep breath. She felt stupid and childish. But also annoyed with Cyril. Did he have to ask? Couldn’t he just say: ‘Yes, of course, come.’
‘I think I’ve had a break-in.’
Cyril said something to someone else in French. Glasses clinked.
‘You think you’ve had a break-in? What? Have you called the police?’
‘Never mind,’ Klara said. ‘Forget I asked. I’ll figure it out myself.’
She heard him stifling a sigh.
‘No, no, of course you can spend the night at my place. Can you take a taxi there? We’re waiting for dessert. Give me an hour and a half, okay?’
Klara closed her eyes.
‘I don’t even know where you live.’
Brussels, Belgium
George swallowed and leaned over to open the yellow folder. Somehow he already knew what was hidden inside. It was impossible, but he knew it.
And as soon as he saw the Gottlieb law firm’s logo on the first page, he knew it was game over. He slowly took the document out of the folder. It was as if the room were vibrating and crackling around him.
What he held in his hand was a copy of a confidentiality agreement between himself and Mikael Persson, partner in the law firm of Gottlieb. There were only two copies. George had locked one of them in a safe-deposit box in Stockholm, and he had watched Persson lock the second one into a safe in his corner office at Norrmalmstorg. He glanced at it briefly through squinting eyes. Actually, he didn’t want to see it, didn’t want to read it, didn’t want to take in the fact that he was sitting with that very same agreement in his hand, in a poorly furnished living room in Brussels with a man who looked like Gene Hackman’s evil twin. But even if he had no doubts at this point, he still needed to check that it in fact was the right agreement.
It was, of course.
Everything was there. Every watertight paragraph. It was neither long nor detailed, just enough to specify that George and Persson would not disclose anything dealing with their possible relationship to the investment fund Oaktree Mutual. Even divulging the existence of the confidentiality agreement was a breach of contract. Which did seem to make it difficult to invoke it. But George had been in no position to suggest amendments on the day he signed it.
The agreement itself wasn’t particularly damning. But it was dizzying, agonizing, that Reiper had had access to it and was even able to make a copy of it. That was, of course, why Reiper had put it at the front of the folder.
George didn’t want to continue looking through the folder. He knew what he would find there.
Yet, he couldn’t help it.
And just as he’d suspected, there were roughly thirty-five pages of e-mail correspondence and bank statements. Together they proved beyond all reasonable doubt that George had leaked information to Oaktree Mutual about a big merger he was assisting Persson with in exchange for payment.
Oaktree had been one of the investment firms funding the merger. But they’d also, using front organizations, traded shares in both companies. Using the information from George, it’d been impossible for their investments to fail. They were playing high-risk poker with marked cards. George didn’t even want to think about how much money they must have made from his information. In comparison to that, they were only paying him a pittance, though it was big money for a freshly minted lawyer with expensive habits.
But George didn’t even receive any of the money before Persson started getting suspicious. He was an old fox when it came to high finance and quickly realized Oaktree Mutual was batting for both teams. It wasn’t his problem, as long as they weren’t using information that came from him. George never did understand how Persson figured it out. There had been at least ten associates and three partners working on that deal at Gottlieb. Maybe Persson had scanned all the e-mail correspondence going to and from people working on the deal. Maybe he’d had a hunch that it was George.