Whatever it was, one day George had been called into Persson’s office. Persson was sitting there with a puzzled look on his face. On the desk in front of him was basically the same folder that George was holding in his hands right now.
Persson had drily explained the fact that serious insider trading meant imprisonment for at least six months to four years. And fines on top of that. His legal career would go up in smoke. Not to mention his old man’s reaction. He was ruined, and he was only twenty-seven years old.
He’d actually thanked Persson when he told George to resign effective immediately and never breathe a word about the whole incident. Persson claimed that he’d wanted to go to the police. He’d wanted to see George pilloried in the Stockholm District Court. But the damage to Gottlieb would be far too great if it came to light that they were somehow involved with insider trading. A law firm of Gottlieb’s caliber couldn’t afford to be associated with that sort of thing. Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion, Persson had said.
George had signed the necessary papers, received his severance pay, and thanked his lucky stars. Until just a few minutes ago, he’d almost managed to repress the shame and the terrible fear of that day.
‘I’m sorry, George, but as I said, I really need your help, and I can’t afford to doubt your motivations.’
George winced. He hadn’t noticed Reiper creeping up behind the sofa he was sitting in.
He turned around.
Reiper didn’t look particularly sympathetic. Rather, he seemed to enjoy the fact that the formalities were over.
‘How?’ George’s voice was just a lonely croak.
He was suddenly having a hard time breathing, and he loosened his bright yellow Ralph Lauren tie.
‘How the hell did you get a hold of all this information?’
Reiper waved his rough hands dismissively.
‘That’s not important. We have our methods, as you’re probably becoming aware of. But now let’s focus on your future role.’
He looked at the clock.
‘You’ll have to excuse me, I’ve got a rough night ahead of me, so we’ll need to hurry this up a bit.’
George couldn’t manage to do more than nod. His throat was sore, his heart pounding. It felt like his immune system was about to collapse.
‘Here,’ Reiper said and tossed George a USB stick.
‘There’s a useful program on that little fella. It allows us to see exactly what’s happening on any computer on which it’s installed. What I want you to do is to take that to the European Parliament and install it on Klara Walldéen’s computer and laptop. If possible, be sure to install it on the rest of Madame Boman’s computers as well.’
‘But how?’
It was the only thing George could get out.
‘I’m sure you’ll figure something out. We have, as you’ve noticed, pretty impressive resources, but we’re never better than our agents on the ground. Now you’re our agent in the European Parliament. You have access there whenever you want in your capacity as a lobbyist. You glide through the halls like you own the place.’
This must be what Appleby was referring to during dinner, George thought. He couldn’t imagine Merchant & Taylor’s senior management sneaking around and breaking into stuff in their youth.
‘And here,’ Reiper said and set a couple of round plastic cylinders down on the table.
They looked like caps from plastic bottles.
‘Microphones. Under the desks in both Klara’s and Boman’s offices. And in their colleagues’ rooms if you get the opportunity. It has to be done early tomorrow morning. We’re pretty sure her computer is still at her office. And don’t worry about the technology. It’s a piece a cake.’
George closed his eyes and leaned back in the couch.
‘Sorry, George, no sleep for you just yet. Josh has a few technical things to show you to prep for tomorrow.’
George didn’t really know how he made it home. Just that he found himself sitting in his Audi outside of his apartment with the engine running sometime after half past twelve that night. He was completely exhausted. He could feel the USB stick in his pocket. Had it not been for the USB, he might have thought the night had all been a bad dream.
Brussels, Belgium
Mahmoud was lying in the hard hotel bed, wide awake. He was exhausted, so tired that he couldn’t sleep. And his brain was giving him no opportunity to recuperate. He hadn’t slept a wink since checking into a budget hotel just a stone’s throw from Avenue Anspach in central Brussels, late the night before. He turned his wrist. The green, luminous numbers on his watch showed 4:35.
He’d just put his head back down on the pillow to make a new, futile attempt at falling asleep, when he heard it. The crunching sound of rubber against asphalt, a car rolling forward slowly with its engine off. The crunching stopped outside his window, followed by the sound of doors opening and closing gently, almost silently.
Far too gently. Nobody closes a car door without slamming it unless they have an explicit purpose, Mahmoud thought. He sat up, his full concentration on his hearing. The poorly insulated window let in almost all the sounds from the street, even though he was on the fourth floor. What he heard sounded like boots and whispering, disciplined voices. Gore-Tex and automatic weapons. Memories from another time. An operation was being prepared.
Mahmoud threw on his clothes and cautiously pulled aside the curtain to peer out at the street, which was illuminated by streetlamps. He half expected to see police cars and roadblocks. But there stood just a single, black delivery van. He could just make out what seemed to be three men dressed in black, jogging around the corner toward the hotel’s entrance.
A fourth man was standing by the front bumper of the van, preoccupied by something near the lamppost. He had his back toward the hotel, so Mahmoud couldn’t see exactly what he was doing. But suddenly the lamp was extinguished, and the street went completely dark. Something green, like text on an ancient computer screen, gleamed for a second in the place where Mahmoud assumed the man’s head must be.
Night vision, thought Mahmoud and drew back the curtains with lightning speed. The man must have killed the lamp in order to keep an eye on Mahmoud’s window using night-vision equipment. This was definitely not the police.
When he pressed his ear against the thin door facing the hallway, he thought he heard steps coming up the stairs farther down in the building. Stealthy rubber soles on the stained carpet. But even these pros couldn’t hide the fact that the stairs creaked. Mahmoud realized he didn’t have much time. He was clenching his teeth so hard that his jaw ached. He’d probably be dead within five minutes. He couldn’t sit here and wait for his killers.
He quickly shoved his things into his pack and swung it onto his back before carefully opening the door to the hallway. It was still empty, but he could hear those efficient, stealthy steps closing in. They sounded like they were on the floor beneath him.
The emergency exit was just across the hall from Mahmoud’s room. The regular stairs were at the other end of the hallway. He decided to chance it. Ten quick steps on legs shaking with adrenaline. He pushed open the door to the emergency stairs. A puff of air, saturated with concrete and damp, washed over him.
The stairs were empty, quiet, and dark. He assumed whoever was coming after him would leave a guard at the front desk, or even at the door to the stairs, so he decided to climb up. As he began groping his way through the pitch darkness up the next flight of stairs, he sensed steps below him in the hallway. It sounded like several people. He heard them approaching, they couldn’t be more than ten yards away.
He climbed up to the next two landings as smoothly as could, two steps at a time. He swore quietly when he stumbled on the first landing and scraped his knees. It was pitch-black, and he didn’t dare turn on the light.
Through the thin walls he could hear someone kicking in what he assumed was his door, somewhere behind and below him. Wood splintering. Muted voices hissing staccato orders. Despite the chill in the stairwell, he could feel sweat on the nape of his neck. He continued upward. Halfway up to the hotel’s fifth and top floor, he heard a door open beneath him. A crack of light spread out a couple of floors down and a shadow fell on the stairs. Someone seemed to be standing in the doorway to the emergency stairs.
Mahmoud was at the top of the stairwell. Beneath him was a group of people who seemed determined to kill him. The only way forward was the door to the hallway on the fifth floor. If he opened it the killers would see the light and know that he was in the stairwell. He squatted down and tried not to breathe, not to move. Not to do anything that would reveal his presence.
Mahmoud groped along the wall in search of the door handle. His hands grazed a square, glossy box on the wall. He slowly turned toward it. Opened his eyes as wide as he could to see in the dark. A fire alarm. Inside his own head, he heard a voice from another time:
‘If the odds are against you, chaos is your friend.’
Chaos. Mahmoud fumbled in his pocket and snatched his hotel room key. Chaos. He stood up as quietly as he could. Took a deep breath. He raised his arm, key in hand, and slammed it as hard as he could against the glass of the fire alarm.
The stairwell exploded with a deafening, old-fashioned fire alarm. The volume shocked him, and he plugged his ears.
It took a few seconds. Then the figure beneath him started to move forward, upward. The lights came on, and the whole staircase was bathed in fluorescent light. Several pairs of feet rapidly started moving up the stairs. They’re coming after me, thought Mahmoud. It’s over now. It’s really over now. The alarm sang around him, inside him. Threatening to drive him crazy.
He pressed down on the handle to the hallway door, pushed it open, and hurled himself onto the fifth floor.
‘He’s up there! Let’s go!’ he heard a deep voice say somewhere beneath him.
Mahmoud staggered out into the hallway. Looked around desperately. At the far end of the corridor he saw a stairway that continued up. He had no idea where it led, but he ran toward it. When he reached it, he saw that it consisted of just a couple of steps leading to a padlocked door. Beside the door hung a large fire extinguisher. Mahmoud picked up the fire extinguisher and threw it with all his might against the padlock. He missed badly and dropped the extinguisher on the floor. He lifted it up again with trembling hands.
On the second attempt, he hit the padlock, and it flew off in a gratifying arc. The padlock fell and bounced off the carpet. Mahmoud depressed the handle of the door as he heard his pursuers coming through the door to the hallway behind him. When the door swung open, the icy cold hit him so hard it almost took his breath away.
Ahead of him lay a poorly maintained roof, half the size of a tennis court. He was in the corner of the hotel building, seven stories above the street. The two sides of the terrace that overlooked the street were fenced in by broken and rusty chicken wire. Below him he heard the distant sound of sirens. The firefighters were already on their way. He was getting his chaos.
Behind him, next to the door he’d just exited, there were a couple of pieces of rebar fastened to the building. Like a makeshift ladder. He didn’t have much choice. All he could do was to continue going upward. Somehow he managed to climb and crawl up the hotel’s sloping roof. The roof tiles seemed to move beneath him. There was no time to think about how high in the air he was.
He thanked God the roof didn’t slope more than it did. With his arms on one side of the roof ridge, and his body on the other, he started sliding in one direction. He had no idea where he was going. But a few meters farther along the roof, he discerned a square, black metal hatch that seemed to be open by a small gap. Maybe it was the outlet of a ventilation shaft or the door to an attic. Mahmoud started moving toward it. On the terrace, just below him, he heard his pursuers step out onto the roof.
‘So, what’s the status? The fire department is here. What a fucking circus.’ Mahmoud heard one of the men say in English.
Another man seemed to be running to the other side of the terrace. It sounded like he was shaking and bending the chicken wire.
‘There’s no one here. Unless he jumped,’ the man informed his colleagues after a few seconds.
‘He must have gone up.’
Mahmoud heard someone starting to climb the rungs he’d just come up. At that very moment he reached the hatch.
If he could just get it open, maybe he’d be able to climb in and hide there. Gently, he bent down, swaying in the increasingly cold wind. His hands were stiff, and the enamel was slippery. Adrenaline. His heart was pounding a hole in his chest.
On his third attempt, he was able to reach around the edges and start rocking the hatch to see if it could be opened. Just as he felt it giving way, he heard someone swing over the same roof’s edge.
‘Locked on target!’ a calm voice said.
Brussels, Belgium
Klara woke up to her phone beeping. She rubbed her eyes and stretched out her hand to read the message. Eva-Karin.
8:30 office ok? Her customary brevity. The keyboard was too small for Eva-Karin’s fingers. Something she refused to acknowledge, of course.
Klara ran her hands over her face, trying to wipe away the sleep. The phone showed it was just after seven. She vaguely remembered that Cyril had already tried to wake her up. That she’d fended off his attempts and fallen back asleep. He’d taken an early train back to Paris. Something about meetings, his constituency, whatever.
Eva-Karin probably wanted to give instructions for the rest of the day. Her plane back to Sweden was leaving before lunch. But, of course, she wanted to stop by Parliament and check her name off on the compensation list as well. Parliamentarians received per diem for every day they worked in Brussels. Many of them took an early flight on Friday, rather than the night before, to get an extra day’s compensation.
As if they weren’t already being paid enough, thought Klara. Stingy bastards.