Into a Raging Blaze

by Andreas Norman, Ian Giles

Genres: Spy Thrillers; Political Thrillers; Terrorism & Assassination Thrillers

Synopsis

Carina Dymek is on fast track for promotion at the Swedish Ministry of Foreign Affairs, when she is approached by a stranger and given a USB stick. Unwittingly, she delivers a time bomb of classified information. Bente Jensen is tasked with investigating how Dymek gained access to the confidential report but he begins to suspect she is a red herring caught in a far wider net: one in which civil rights are sacrificed to national security.

Release date: June 23, 2014

Publisher: Quercus Publishing

Print pages: 528

Sample

The man came out of the entrance to the EU Commission, went around the building and started to walk down Archimedesstraat. Dark hair, grey suit and a blue shirt. For a moment he disappeared out of sight. Team two radioed in a few seconds later – they were posted a hundred metres down the street and could see him clearly.

The target had been under surveillance for three months and nothing suggested that he would change his plans today. He was regular in his habits: worked long days at the office but always finished at the same time, around seven, and would drive home in his car. Today he was leaving the office at five, since it was a Friday. As expected.

He and his wife had a weekend place they had rented for the last two years. The cottage was located by a lake in the Doornendijk nature reserve in the Flemish fenlands of Meetjesland, about ten kilometres north of Ghent – an area rich in birdlife and with excellent fishing waters.

The target got into his car – a metallic green Audi that was parked a hundred metres further along the street, close to the crossroads with Rue Stevin – started it and pulled away from the kerb.

The traffic flowed along. The Audi was a few cars ahead and moved quickly through the city via Rue de la Loi, Kunstlaan, and Avenue Charles-Quint, heading northwards. After fifteen minutes it was on the A10 motorway. Team two were three hundred metres further ahead, in the inside lane. The target maintained a high and steady speed and showed no signs of being conscious of their presence. After forty kilometres he turned off at the junction for Merelbeke and joined the R4 going north. They remained in formation. At this speed, expected time of arrival was in thirty minutes.

But on the way towards Ghent’s industrial quarter the target slowed and, instead of continuing along the R4, he turned off towards the port. Team two, who were ahead of the target, missed the turning and had to stop in a lay-by to wait. The Audi drove past the warehouses along the quay, rounded the docks for the cargo barges, and pulled over into a petrol station. Team one stopped in a neighbouring car park and observed the target.

He got out, filled up the car, paid, and then drove out of the port and back on to the northbound R4 – the anticipated route.

Team two rejoined after a few minutes. They were preparing now: they took out the phials, loaded three hundred units of insulin, and made sure that the insulin pen and back-up were both working. Three hundred units was ten times the daily dose that the target took for his diabetes – it was enough. The main thing was that nothing suspicious should be detected during the autopsy.

At the junction for Bruges, he joined the A11 and, a few kilometres later, as expected, he turned on to the N448. When everything was going smoothly it could seem like the target had been involved in the planning of the operation: everything happened as if by agreement. But, naturally, no such agreement existed. The target was unaware.

They passed through Assenede, which was the nearest town. Team two had taken the faster route, avoiding the centre, and were already halfway to the cottage.

He was driving slowly now and would not leave their sight. He stopped at a tobacconist’s, got out of the car, leaving the engine running, and hurried in, returning a moment later with a newspaper and what looked like a few packets of cigarettes, then drove on. They had prepared for a longer stop in the village, but he continued along a country road without stopping again.

There was no traffic here. Their vehicle and that of the target were the only cars to be seen in the avenue they had just turned into, which stretched ahead for a kilometre. The cottage was secluded, on a wooded spit of land, accessible only by the bumpy road that ran through the woodland and ended by the house. The plot looked out on to one of the small lakes – a lawn ran all the way to the water’s edge – and it was completely hidden from view, unless you stood on the opposite shore with binoculars. There was a small risk of bird watchers, but it would all go so quickly. If anyone happened to see what was going on, they wouldn’t understand what they had witnessed anyway.

They slowed down and let the target turn on to the road through the woods to the cottage. Once the Audi was out of sight, they slowly followed it, parked the car halfway up the road to the house, and got out.

They moved quickly on foot along the edge of the wood. It was densely wooded with low visibility. They had to be careful; the target wasn’t more than ten or so metres away. There was the house: a holiday cottage with a low fence, gate and bushes. The metallic green car was parked on the verge of the road. There was the target, standing in the living room of the cottage, still wearing his coat, with his back turned to them.

They rounded the corner just as he came down the front door steps on to the lawn. He was on his way to the water’s edge but only managed two or three steps before something made him turn his head – perhaps the noise of their trainers as they ran towards him. No visible signs of violence was the critical thing. He tensed up but he didn’t really understand what was happening; he was barely afraid when two of them pressed him down on to the grass and gripped his arms while number three stuck the insulin pen into the hairline on his neck. They quickly carried him down towards the water’s edge and waited until his body had stopped fighting, checked his pulse, and then they left him.

It was just after eight in the morning and Carina Dymek had already managed two hours of work. The first of her colleagues were beginning to turn up now – she heard the clicking of ceiling lights being switched on, the low scramble of chairs being pulled towards desks, and then the familiar motif played by computers during start-up. Carina was not a morning person. She hated early mornings and wasn’t really mentally with it before ten, but on this Wednesday morning she couldn’t worry about that. She had been forced to come in early to have, even theoretically, a chance of getting through the threateningly long to-do list that filled a brightly coloured Post-it note on the side of her computer screen.

There were 8,634 messages in her inbox. At the top of the screen there glowed seventy-five new, unread, blazing red emails. Many were just informational in nature – reports and newsletters – things that didn’t require any action. Those could wait to be read, if she read them at all. But, mixed into the flood of messages like those, there were emails she couldn’t afford to miss. Red-flagged emails, emails titled Thanks in advance for quick response, orders with short deadlines, questions from the department head that required immediate responses, or emails like the one she had just brought up, which bore an urgent subject line of ORDER – Data for UM in Berlin, deadline 22nd Sep. 16:00.

Even among the priority emails she was obliged to prioritise. The night before, she had lain in bed and gone through everything she had to do the next day. Anxious thoughts kept revolving in a meaningless circle. After hours of unsuccessful attempts to fall asleep, she had come to the conclusion that everything was important: everything had to be prioritised. There was only one solution – the only solution that the MFA had taught her for these situations: to deny oneself a good night’s sleep. She got up.

The windows were still dark, the corridors dim and silent when she arrived at the department, hours before everyone else.

As it got light, the government buildings in the district around Drottninggatan in central Stockholm were filled by approximately four thousand civil servants, all of whom sat down at their computers, just as she had, in well-lit, uniformly furnished office landscapes and started the day’s work. They worked in the shadows of ministers, served the government, and were tasked with giving the nation’s political leaders the best possible understanding of myriad issues that ministers needed to grasp in order to better rule the country and decide on its foreign policy. They were the government’s support as it ruled. Some might say that they used a friendly but determined hand to control the government. They explained developments in unfamiliar countries; they gave ministers their view of the situation. They produced facts and gave opinions. They made assessments and took decisions that affected people and entire societies. Even decisions that had no effect whatsoever were taken – that happened every day. They gave advice and the politicians listened. The government ruled Sweden, but in the shadow of the government there were those who managed the levers and controls and the organisation: the Government Offices of Sweden.

The Government Offices of Sweden was something of which normal people, without the right to be in its corridors, only had a vague understanding. Those who worked at the Government Offices obviously knew that it comprised the Prime Minister’s own staff, called the Prime Minister’s Office, and then the Office for Administrative Affairs, which managed all the resource issues that constantly flooded the organisation: IT, security, salaries and other administrative matters. Beneath this pair there were eleven departments. One of them was the Ministry of Foreign Affairs – the MFA.

Of all the ministries, the MFA was the largest and most secretive. With its two-and-a-half thousand staff, one hundred embassies, four hundred consulates, and permanent representations to the UN, EU and delegations in other international organisations, it was a gargantuan machine, a leviathan greater than all the other ministries combined. Civil servants in the rest of Government Offices always regarded the MFA and its diplomats with envious admiration, a mixture of longing to be one of them and hatred because they never would be.

The Ministry’s four buildings in the government district were closed addresses. Within their walls, the nation’s foreign policy was formed. Internally, the Ministry was called the House and was divided into twenty-five departments. Out of all the departments, the Security Policy Department was the largest and quietly considered to be the most important, the one that had the foreign minister’s ear. The Security Policy Department – or SP, as it was called – stretched across two storeys of the office block at Fredsgatan 6. Down its long, winding corridors and past the rows of offices, close to the stairs between floors five and four, was room 1523. In its depths sat Carina Dymek at a height-adjustable desk, writing with speed and concentration on a computer.

She was satisfied. Soon she would be able to tick off the biggest order on her list – the foreign minister’s file. The foreign minister was going to Ukraine the next day for a meeting with President Yanukovych, talks with the Enlargement Commissioner, Štefan Füle, and a swathe of other meetings. Yalta, Crimea. The EU’s relations with the large, splintered post-soviet nation were on the agenda. Central Asia. The Tymoshenko case, energy security. It was important to continue applying pressure to the leaders of Ukraine while at the same time intimating that the country had EU prospects if it chose to develop in a democratic direction – everything to avoid forcing it east into the arms of the Kremlin and Gazprom. The country’s economy was in crisis and its politics were heading in an increasingly authoritarian direction. The EU’s instrument, in the shape of the European Neighbourhood Policy with its various development and support programmes, was the soft power that the Union could exercise. The foreign minister was committed to the issues. The Ukraine desk officer at the Department for Eastern Europe and Central Asia was currently working on some analyses of Ukrainian domestic policies and relationships with Russia, while Carina’s focus was on the EU and security policy.

As always, it wasn’t the formal, agenda-driven talks that were most interesting, it was those on the sidelines. The foreign minister’s coordinator had already indicated that the minister wanted bilateral meetings with several of Ukraine’s advisers and a meeting with Tony Blair, who for some reason was in the Crimea; the foreign minister also wanted to meet a security adviser at RAND who worked as a consultant for the Ukrainian defence ministry, as well as a handful of others. Carina needed to draft the outline of a short speech for the dinner in the evening. It was also to be expected that certain current and sensitive EU issues would come up, even if they didn’t directly affect Ukraine.

The foreign minister’s file was the collective result of the work of, on average, five to ten desk officers in at least two departments and a collection of embassies around the world. Before every trip a unique file was compiled with analyses and reports, Swedish messages and talking points for media contact, CVs of important people and practical information about the trip. Ideally, the file was meant to reflect all political aspects and eventualities, and meet all requirements for facts that the minister might possibly have.

Carina took a deep breath and glanced through what she had written. The key messages were good, cogent. She knew the Swedish positions and didn’t need to shuffle through old strategic documents to know what a foreign minister should and shouldn’t say. Just two or three more talking points – in bullet points – then she would choose a bunch of analyses before going to see her new unit head, Anders Wahlund, to check the texts with him: she had fifteen minutes after lunch to go through the most sensitive parts of the material with him. Hopefully the file would then be done, barring a few minor changes. She would send over her contribution to the Ukraine desk officer, who would have a secretary in the unit make three copies of everything before running over to the minister’s office, so that the minister would have the file in the car the next morning, allowing him to look through it on the way to the airport.

The foreign minister had a photographic memory. Everyone knew that he preferred statistics to reasoning, data rather than a desk officer’s fumbling analyses. He often liked incredibly technical details about nuclear power plants, Russian combat vehicles, and other things that a foreign minister apparently had a use for. According to those who worked closest to him, he read everything. The Foreign Service produced hundreds of reports every day. Apparently he read all embassy reports, all major news, blogs, research – everything. Carina couldn’t understand how it was possible, but that was what they said. Orders from the foreign minister’s office often came with a slightly condescending reminder to the desk officer not to include ‘the normal’ embassy reports, just facts and ‘the most relevant things’.

In her eight years at the Ministry, she had sat eye to eye with the foreign minister on four occasions. He was unquestionably brilliant, but basically uninterested in people who weren’t foreign ministers.

It occurred to her that the minister might not even be in Stockholm. If not, she would be forced to send the whole file as an encrypted email to Kiev, call them, and get someone to drive it down to the Crimea to hand it over personally.

She dug out her phone from under the papers and rang the minister’s press secretary, but that diverted to a mobile-phone voicemail. She pulled up the electronic phone directory and found the extension for one of the assistants.

Call forwarded. Then some scraping noises and a whispering voice that answered: ‘Marianne.’

Carina introduced herself. She explained briefly that she was preparing the minister’s file for Ukraine. Was the foreign minister in Stockholm today?

‘I don’t actually know.’

‘Okay.’

‘He’s going to the Congo later this week – for the Dag Hammarskjöld ceremony. But I don’t know anything about Ukraine. Can I get back to you? Or maybe try Elisabeth?’ the assistant whispered in a stressed tone.

Carina hung up.

Assistant number two didn’t answer. The foreign minister’s adviser, some young upstart straight out of the Young Conservatives, did pick up his mobile. Wasn’t the minister in New York? He clearly had no idea. Carina ended the call quickly, leaned back in the chair, and thought through the options. He would be in Yalta within eighteen hours if he wasn’t there already. Then Africa, then New York and the UN.

She really did need to know where the foreign minister was. Then the obvious solution occurred to her: check his blog. She went to the site and, naturally, he had already had time to blog in the morning. He was in parliament today – so still in Stockholm for at least another five hours.

She wrote for half an hour uninterrupted. Her fingers rattled across the keyboard in a series of rapid movements. Points for a possible press conference: The Eastern partnership was of key importance to relations between the EU and Ukraine, she wrote, before adding a few sentences about the importance of a long-term relationship and about the country as part of Europe. General formulations. The EU had trading relations and aid as its two greatest weapons but it was the Russians who had true geopolitical power – they controlled access to oil and gas. It was vital that the message about the rule of law and human rights was clear, while not punching the Ukrainians on the nose and hurting their pride, which would make Yanukovych turn to Moscow. The Kremlin was already talking about discounted oil prices. In a few months it would be winter in Kiev and then political loyalty would be counted in dollars per barrel. She read through what she’d written, rapidly making additions and amendments until she had a decent draft. It was a quarter past nine.

As the Security Policy Department’s EU coordinator, it was she who had to get the department’s seventy-five diplomats to sing from the same song sheet on everything to do with EU security policy. She was the one who had to keep up with EU procedures, put together negotiation instructions for Brussels and make sure that ministers and junior ministers had the right information. She was the one who sent out stern reminders to colleagues about keeping to deadlines and she was responsible for ensuring that everyone affected was informed and ready to react.

The last few months had been hectic. The Arab Spring and the Libyan campaign, Kosovo, the Horn of Africa, and more generally the EU’s more or less fulfilled ambition of becoming a military security policy operator meant, in practice, a myriad of meetings and decisions, informal contacts, and thousands of papers with proposals flitting between the capitals of Europe. All this went through the encrypted European communication system, Coreu. There was a database where all member states and the Council of Europe secretariat could post messages – a never-ending noticeboard where thousands of messages, agendas and minutes were published every day. It was Carina’s responsibility to keep track of this flow of information and make sure that the department didn’t drop any balls. There were those who hated Coreu. When Sweden had joined the EU and connected to the information system, the volume of mail and messages had increased by fifty per cent overnight. Carina liked the tempo. She enjoyed having direct contact with other European foreign ministries and the feeling of being a part of real politics. Fifty or sixty hours a week were a prerequisite to do the job, but that was generally okay. This morning, however, the sheer volume of new messages on Coreu made her draw breath. Dealing with the stream of Coreu data was sometimes like playing an unending tennis match against an inexhaustible Agassi.

She stood up and stretched her arms. Her back creaked. Tiredness washed across her like an anaesthetic and made her stagger. She needed coffee.

Carina looked around. Her room was narrow, a little smaller than the others on the corridor. There had been a possibility that she might get the office next door to the Head of Department, at the top end of the corridor – a light room with a view towards Strömmen. It had been the last EU coordinator’s office. But, instead of Carina, the DPKO desk officer, responsible for contact with New York about Swedish contributions to UN troop activities, had got the room. He was of a higher rank. But he was going to Santiago soon, and then perhaps it would be her turn.

She really ought to tidy up, she realised. It was one of the things she never prioritised. She had never been good at physical order. Deep down, she didn’t quite understand what the point of constantly tidying up was – always gathering things into neat piles, putting them in drawers and boxes – when the order was there in her head, all along. She was in full control. She prioritised. She was completely fulfilled by her work – what did it matter if there were a few papers here or an apple core there? Everyone knew that she had a fully equipped intellect, but no one believed her when she said she had a system in her office. People visiting her office would often stop short in the doorway as if confronted by a natural phenomenon. Johan Eriksson called her room ‘the Batcave’. The deputy Head of Department had started to drop small hints, so sooner or later she would have to tidy up. Why on earth couldn’t she be left in peace in her room as it was? She was one of the best analysts in the department. She knew it, even if no one ever said so in as many words. Johan and others would constantly bombard her with various texts for her consideration, and she would usually take pity and quickly glance through their documents, dead calm and absorbed, before leaving a few comments. And the fact was that she was rarely wrong. Despite this, she knew that the office of a civil servant at the MFA shouldn’t look like this.

The desk was a jumbled landscape of crusty coffee cups, fruit peel, tubs of paper clips, reference works, handbooks and an avalanche of papers that had slipped down towards the computer screen. Somewhere or other there ought to be a cactus, but she didn’t look after it. The shelves along one wall were brimming with books, papers, and files. She contemplated the stacks of paper lying on the floor. The elegant, sheepskin-clad Lammhult armchair was beside the table. It actually belonged in the UNHCR desk officer’s room, but she had discreetly carried it to her office the day he left on paternity leave and nobody could remember whose it actually was. It was comfy, but couldn’t be sat in because towering off it was a stack of reports from all the past year’s summit meetings at the EU. That pile was a problem – from time to time it extended to the floor. Sometimes she would find classifieds in it – which was not good. The security guards patrolling the building at night were always checking if there was any classified material lying around in offices. If you forgot to lock up classified material, you received a warning in the form of an angry red note on your chair in the morning. Three warnings and you would be called in to the department head.

The best way to keep a secret was never to divulge it, so they said. But in practice that was impossible. The greater part of the work at the MFA was done under cover of secrecy stamps. The House was bulging with secrets. They were collected, discussed; some built their entire careers on having access to the right classified material. The encrypted mail system delivered a flood of classified reports and analyses depicting reality in its true, complex and raw form. Everyone was careless with secrets. Classifieds were always lying around because no one could be bothered to adhere to the strict rules concerning the handling of secret material. But chucking classifieds on the floor was probably a little too nonchalant. She spotted a report from a NATO meeting in Kabul littering the floor, bent down and picked it up. In all likelihood there were even more classified reports in the piles. She quickly shuffled through the armchair pile. She wouldn’t forgive herself if she made the beginner’s mistake of getting caught being careless about secrecy. She couldn’t become a problem to the department, not now.

As EU coordinator, Carina had to work like a slave, but if she stuck it out for another year she would be within reach of a promotion. Her predecessor had been a deputy director. Every EU coordinator before her had been. But not her, she was still a desk officer. It wasn’t something that she dwelled on, but those were the facts, and a poisonous suspicion had begun to spread through her that she wasn’t quite as good as the others. The department head seemed to like her. But she knew how it was: she hadn’t taken the Ministry’s Diplomat Programme – she wasn’t a ‘dipper’; she had come the long way round to become a diplomat, and that made all the difference.

Carina had started as a temp in the Press, Information and Communication Department, the least prestigious place to work in the entire building, but had quickly demonstrated an aptitude for analysis and had gone on to short temporary roles at the Department for Eastern Europe and Central Asia and then the Americas Department. Finally, after six years, she got a permanent job at the Security Policy Department. Thank goodness. ‘Dippers’ were guaranteed a permanent position; they were guaranteed a career. She and they were not the same Homo sapiens. She had to fight every week to show her worth. She had considered applying to the Diplomat Programme but the thought of rejection had held her back. There were twelve hundred applicants every year and just a handful were accepted after written examinations, stress tests, intelligence tests and ten interviews. Everyone at the department would know if she didn’t make it and it would be proof that she was second-rate. So instead she had thrown herself into her work and now it was beginning to pay off. As of a few months ago, reports would appear in her pigeonhole every now and then with a Post-it saying, Swedish options? Or, Carina, your views appreciated. Nils. The department head had caught sight of her and begun to use her as a kind of informal sounding board. She would read through and quickly send her assessment. And now there was the rumour of her promotion. Small signs. You made your own luck. How she could be so sure, she didn’t know, but all the same …

It had started as a rumour in the department. Johan Eriksson knew one of the unit heads at Human Resources and had heard that her name had been discussed at a meeting. After that it had quickly become the accepted truth that Carina Dymek was going to become a deputy director next year. But no one really knew whether it was true, not even the department heads, because no one understood the Byzantine procedures in place at the Human Resources Department. Sometimes one could sense a deeper meaning, a pattern in the way posts were filled and who was promoted. But then those patterns would be broken by unfathomable placements that once again meant the MFA’s personnel policies reverted to being the mystery that kept the entire diplomatic corps on tenterhooks and filled the House with rumour and speculation. Like when a deputy was recalled from Rome under suspicion of housing allowance abuse and suspended, only to turn up as the ambassador in Rabat a year later. Or when one of the country’s most prominent political figures was left to wither away on a pointless enquiry, only to be brought back into the fold and made ambassador to Hong Kong. Unpredictable turns like that sent shock waves throughout the building and generated endless speculation. It enchanted and frightened in equal measure. One thing, however, was clear – loyalty paid off. If you stayed in the House, you made your career. The former Marshal of the Court was a warning to all. He had worked at the royal court for over ten years when he returned to the MFA from his leave of absence. He was promptly dispatched to Islamabad in the midst of the worst terrorist bombings for years. Everyone got the message: opt out of the Ministry and you can go to hell when you come back.

In reality, the career ladder was perfectly clear and straightforward. Administrative staff had zero career development; they remained assistants their whole lives and could only hope for postings to embassies in decent capital cities. Then there were the political appointments, those working around ministers: junior ministers, press secretaries, and senior advisers – the political experts. They came from the parties, had broken through the youth organisations and political meetings – they belonged to another world. There was deep mistrust between them and the civil servants. Carina felt it herself. As a civil servant she and her colleagues were loyal to the House: it was their House; the politicos were just temporary visitors. The day after changes in government, moving boxes would be sitting outside the offices of junior ministers and political appointees, and then they were gone. But the civil servants stayed. They knew their House and they knew their government – they knew how to get a minister to see the light and grant approval to their proposals.

For the civil servants and diplomats, a career at the MFA was ostensibly simple. You started as a desk officer, then became a deputy director, then perhaps you became a director and, finally, maybe, an ambassador. The thing that had made he