The Silent War

by Andreas Norman

Genres: Thrillers; Spy Thrillers

Synopsis

As the head of Swedish Intelligence in Brussels Bente Jensen has many enemies, even among those who ought to be her allies, like Jonathan Green of MI6. In a city heaving with competing espionage agencies he is the person she fears and distrusts most. She has good reason. They share a past. Green has been part of an MI6 conspiracy to hold, interrogate, torture and kill its political prisoners in a safe house in Syria. This explosive information has been leaked to Bente by a conscience-stricken British operative. When it is clear she can expose this operation MI6 uses its full arsenal of dirty tricks to shame her, disgrace her, destroy her relationships and remove her from active service. But Green's private life has more in common with Bente's than he acknowledges. He is far from fireproof himself. Both spies will find themselves targets of the UK establishment's precisely calculated revenge. Like its highly acclaimed predecessor Into A Raging Blaze Andreas Norman's new novel is a morally and politically complex international thriller. Its nail-biting plot and sympathetic characters show the tragic human consequences of private and public treachery.

Release date: September 5, 2019

Publisher: RiverRun

Print pages: 304

Sample

1

A cold November rain has drawn in over Brussels during the morning and is pattering onto streets and squares, thudding onto car roofs, splashing and rippling as if pounding out its command of the city. Bente Jensen has no umbrella but doesn’t care about the wet. She walks resolutely past a couple huddling together under an umbrella and an older man in a sodden jacket who is trying – in vain – to shelter from the rain by holding a newspaper over his head. She notes them and everyone else around them with small, rapid eye movements, glancing at reflections in windows to catch glimpses of what is happening beyond her field of vision. She assesses everything that passes her, looking for patterns and deviations, and she trusts nothing.

Her brisk walk is the final stage in a long sequence of planned movements that have been taking place on this rainy, grey morning. The man she is meeting has contacted her over the course of the last week in a series of brief, factual emails. He calls himself ‘B54’. A strange cover name, she thinks, as she weaves her way along the pavement. She and her technical staff have tried to trace the emails, but all they have come up with are impenetrably encrypted servers and digital dead ends. The man clearly knows how to cover his tracks. He is familiar with specific details of British intelligence work that imbue him with such a great degree of credibility that she has decided to meet him.

There is the gallery, renowned for its photography exhibitions. She can see the grey façade and the large windows facing the street.

She pulls open the narrow door and finally escapes the rain. Her clothes cling to her. She is standing in a large hall. The quiet is so absolute that she can hear tiny dripping sounds as water drops languidly off her onto the floor.

She has been wondering why B54 wanted to meet her somewhere like this. But now she understands. It is secluded and there are presumably multiple escape routes. It has been well chosen.

On the walls there are a number of large portraits of faces. Everyday, anonymous faces – like huge passport photos.

A man with curly grey hair and wearing a corduroy jacket appears in a doorway, and she catches sight of an office behind him. ‘Welcome,’ he says warmly, handing her a programme. Then he sits down behind a white table set slightly to one side.

She is alone in the hall. A woman who had been standing in front of one of the large photos a few moments ago has vanished into an adjacent room.

Yet she feels watched. She can’t escape the feeling that the photographs are observing her, reserved and dismissive, as if wondering what gives her the right to stand there staring at them. She has seen the expression before, on other faces: a hesi­tant defiance at being observed, documented and questioned. The flyer says the man responsible for the photos is world famous. She has never heard of him, but she seems to understand his pictures.

Then she spots a faint annotation in the programme margin: Top floor.

The man who handed it to her has disappeared.

She walks across the floor, taking deliberately leisurely paces, careful to adopt the plodding slow-motion gait of a gallery visitor. She walks around a screen and enters another large room. There are four people spread out around the area: a young couple in dark clothing, a single man in an anorak who might have been the person she was seeking if he hadn’t been one of her own operatives who had previously been stationed there as planned. And the woman now standing, engrossed, in front of a new portrait. She is dressed practically, in a raincoat and trainers, and is clasping a dripping umbrella in her hand. She too has just come in from the rain.

It is impossible to say whether the woman is a scout from a hostile intelligence agency, or whether she is cooperating with the man that Bente is about to meet, ready to raise the alarm should the meeting go south. Or perhaps she is just a woman in a gallery. Even after two decades on the job, determining whether a person behaving normally is hiding another, secret identity remains the hardest part.

Only at this point does she become aware of a low, pulsing sound that has been present in the room all along: a dark hum, almost mechanical in nature. The sound is coming from a staircase that disappears up to another level.

She wanders up the stairs, taking care not to appear too eager in her movements, and emerges into another large room. Silver-grey rays of daylight slant through the skylight above.

In the middle of the room is an enormous cube, like a room within the room.

The sound is coming from inside the cube. It is powerful, filling the entire space. She recognises the booming sound of a helicopter rotor. She looks back towards the stairs: no, the woman has not followed her.

She approaches the smooth surface of the cube and lifts the dark felt curtain covering its entrance.

Inside the cube, all is darkness and flickering shadows. A film is being projected onto a large screen – a forest by night, illuminated by a searchlight, as if from a helicopter. The circle of light sweeps across the treetops, which are swaying and shaking in the downdraught from the rotor blades. The sound of the helicopter fills the darkness.

‘Hello?’ she calls out quietly, although just loudly enough to be heard through the din.

When no one answers, she fumbles her way to a bench and sits down.

Someone is behind her. She can feel them as a close presence just behind her back, and she turns around.

‘Hello?’

Very close to her left ear she can now feel the light movement of someone’s breath.

‘Thank you for coming,’ a man whispers.

She attempts to distinguish the nuances of the voice through the blaring racket. Someone young, she thinks. Speaks British English with an educated tone: an academic. He is frightened.

She feels a hand rapidly pushing something into her jacket pocket.

‘Wait!’ she shouts.

The felt curtain across the entrance to the cube is pulled aside, and she just has time to catch a glimpse of a man with a pale, flabby face and dark hair.

She runs towards the stairs. Her footsteps thud as she hurries down. Her lookout is already in the outer hall, and he turns towards her and points. She rushes to the narrow door and gazes out at the façades beyond, dark with rain. He is gone.

In the car on the way back to the office she pulls the small object from her pocket. It’s a memory stick. It rests, like a dark scarab, in the palm of her hand.

Three Weeks Later

Bente Jensen can already hear the loud buzz of voices as she climbs the wide marble staircase at the Hotel Metropole. The Swedish Embassy’s reception started an hour or so ago. She hugs Fredrik’s arm and they smile at each other, engulfed by the lively noise as they emerge into the ballroom. Later on, she will reflect that this was one of the happiest moments for a long time.

They are late. The traffic on the way into Brussels this evening was terrible. She had stood in a hurry in front of the mirror, making a final check and re-applying her lipstick before ­hurry­ing down to the boys, who were watching a film in the living room. She was eager to get away, and rushed through telling them that there was food in the fridge and that if they needed anything they should just call, before giving each of them a hasty kiss and leaving them, safe in their home.

‘It’s good that I came along, isn’t it?’ she said in the taxi, and Fredrik smiled at her, teasingly waving the invitation in front of her as if she were a cat. She kissed him. He had initially offered to go alone. He knew that she disliked events like this, he had said. But of course she wanted to accompany him since he had been honoured with an invitation.

Nordic Business. In the darkness of the taxi, she fingered the thick, exclusive stationery with the embossed Swedish coat of arms. His Excellency the Ambassador, it said in a courtly style, is hereby delighted to invite . . . On the line below it said: Mr and Mrs Fredrik Jensen. For once, he was the most important member of their family.

In the ballroom, it is so noisy that they have shout to hear each other.

‘Do you want a glass of wine?’ Fredrik bellows, while pretending to knock back some imaginary wine and getting drunk. She laughs and sneaks her arm around his waist.

They are a couple in the midst of the throng, just like they used to be before she got a job so secret that she started declining invitations to dinners and events. It’s a long time since they have gone out, just the two of them. They ought to do it more often.

She is overwhelmed by the desire to kiss him again. But she hesitates. She has fallen out of the habit of pursuing impulses like that, uncertain how to pull him towards her and press her mouth against his, here, in front of other people.

Fredrik looks good in his suit. He is conservative when it comes to shirts, and always chooses white or pigeon-blue, which he usually orders online when he has nothing else to do. But this evening he is wearing a pale-pink shirt. It must be new, she thinks to herself. It suits him. It makes him look surprisingly glamorous.

She is wearing a cocktail dress that Fredrik gave her two years ago but which she hasn’t worn before tonight. There are rarely occasions in her life that call for her to wear a pearlescent creation in chiffon, with pleats, and she had hesitated for a long time. But as if responding to some internal form of civil disobedience, she eventually chose it precisely because part of her insisted on wearing something more discreet. Once she had overcome the sensation of being dressed up, rather than overdressed, she felt happy. Just before they left, she looked in the mirror and thought to herself: a woman’s body is her castle. She is filled with a happy feeling of insurrection. And love. Yes, love too. Because she has chosen the dress that Fredrik gave her as a present on their wedding anniversary.

It strikes her that she doesn’t have her phone with her. ‘Have you got your mobile on you?’ she shouts to Fredrik. He nods. Well that’s fine, the boys can call him if they need anything.

He is gazing around the room, looking for someone he knows, while she sips her wine and hopes it won’t take too long, because she feels a little sorry for him and she doesn’t want to feel like that. She is proud of Fredrik. She likes the fact that he is so handsome this evening, and is pleased for him that he has been invited to this embassy party. For herself, she is satisfied standing here with him; she doesn’t care about all the other people, but if he needs to feel validation, then she hopes it happens soon, before he gets into a bad mood.

Fredrik has caught sight of a colleague. She follows in his wake and is introduced to a tanned man with a booming voice, who shakes hands with them with vociferous cordiality – it is obvious he doesn’t know Fredrik more than superficially. It transpires that the man is a middle manager for one of Fredrik’s corporate clients. The men fall to discussing a merger. Listening to them talking about the joining of two companies is interesting because Fredrik hardly ever talks about his work. But after a while Bente realises she is not part of the conversation: the other man is completely ignoring her and Fredrik is so busy directing his full attention towards the middle manager that he barely notices when she leaves to fetch them each a new glass of wine.

She plots a course out of the room. She is halfway across when she glimpses a familiar face in the midst of the throng.

Jonathan Green.

Apart from Bente, few know who he really is: MI6’s man in Brussels. She hasn’t seen him in more than a year, but he looks the same as ever: the same boyish countenance, the same mop of red hair and the same unblinking blue eyes. He catches sight of her.

She quickly slips behind a group of suit-clad backs, retreating through the loudly talking guests. She most certainly does not want to meet Jonathan Green here. The Brits are close partners of Sweden, and Swedish resources regularly contribute to the work of the British foreign intelligence service – but since B54 contacted her, everything is much more complicated. She can’t be seen together with someone from MI6.

How odd to run into Jonathan Green here. Then it occurs to her that he is officially listed as the Senior Trade Attaché at the British Embassy. Of course, that isn’t accurate – he is a spy – but he is here this evening in his trade role. The chatty guests surrounding him have no idea what a skilled and ruthless man, with at least three false identities, hides behind that smiling façade.

To see him in this glittering, merry ballroom, when she knows what he is hiding, makes her feel ill at ease. Over the last three weeks, she and her colleagues have reviewed the material she was given at the art gallery, and what she has seen has changed everything. She has tried to explain to Stockholm that future cooperation with the Brits is out of the question after this, but they haven’t responded.

Jonathan Green is enormously capable but also something of a cold fish. She will always see him as the enemy. When she was the new Head in Brussels, he had managed to turn the head of Swedish Counter-Terrorism against her – he had turned everyone against her – and had made them demand that she submit to MI6. Green had the power to influence others. He had harmed her and, deep down, he had shaken her self-confidence.

It is precisely these random meetings that make her worry about ambassadors’ receptions and dinners. Fredrik doesn’t understand that she constantly has to be on her guard when surrounded by the observant, social animals that inhabit the world of diplomacy.

At the drinks table, she ends up next to two men engaged in an animated discussion about the other guests in French. Fortunately, they ignore her. Or rather, they don’t even notice she is standing there since she is not attractive or beautiful in any conventional sense, and because they don’t perceive her as an important person. It entertains her to listen to them, because they are so keenly aware of who amongst the guests is worth talking to, and who is a nobody. They are career diplomats at the French Embassy – probably graduates of the École Polytechnique or the École Normale – and have a bright future ahead of them in French state administration. These assured, skilled and exquisitely arrogant predators are so foolish, and simultaneously supremely slick. To them, she is invisible and that suits her down to the ground.

She knows many of the guests present, even if they don’t know her. If only they knew how many hours of their conversations she has listened in to over the last few years. In fact, if she is not mistaken, she has even listened to these Frenchmen.

She reaches for two glasses of white wine and hears that they have moved on to Syria. Everyone is trying to find the answers to the same questions: what will Assad do, which elements of the opposition will function as partners after the war, what do the Russians want and what on earth are the Americans actually up to? They talk about rebels and Islamists – she hears one of the Frenchmen mention Islamic State using the term ‘Daesh’, from the Arabic, to trample.

All these men and their embassies, she thinks to herself with a smile. They are scared to death of being infiltrated; yet for many their secret wish is for precisely that. He who is not being bugged is not worth listening to. And who doesn’t want to be heard? Who doesn’t want to be loved?

When she returns to where she left Fredrik, he is gone. As if by magic, he and the middle manager he was speaking to have vanished into thin air. She surveys the room of faces.

Perhaps he has gone to the men’s room. For the first few minutes, she sips her wine and amuses herself by watching nearby guests. But after five minutes, the wait is beginning to drag. She puts down the glasses of wine. Perhaps he has found someone else to talk to and become so absorbed that he has forgotten she went to fetch wine for them. It has happened before. After eight minutes, she has the feeling he won’t be coming back. Hesitantly, she leaves her spot on the floor and does a lap of the room. After fifteen minutes her absent-minded pondering has grown into perplexed irritation. A hollow absence flows between all the unfamiliar faces – all she can see is the absence of Fredrik. She ends up standing in the middle of the crowd like a spare part.

Where is he? She leaves the ballroom and quickly walks down a corridor until she reaches a door, but it is locked. She turns around and heads up the wide marble staircase to the next floor, but all she finds is an empty breakfast room.

She had hoped for a pleasant evening together with him, and now she has to wander around looking ridiculous as she searches for her worse half. The festive atmosphere which had been seeping into her just a little while ago has been subsumed by cool anger. She has already begun to formulate her righteous criticism, polishing up some of the wording she will direct at him, when she catches sight of some double doors one floor down that she hadn’t noticed previously.

Chilly evening air wafts in through the open doors. There are clusters of guests standing in the cobbled inner courtyard in the dark of the evening. So this is where the smokers have set up shop. She slowly walks the courtyard perimeter, shivering in her flimsy dress.

She catches sight of three men and a woman standing to one side, talking cheerfully. When one of the men leans forward she sees his face. It’s Fredrik, and then, in a moment of flat, confused denial, she wonders why he is standing there with that woman and the two men. He appears to be telling them something funny. The woman laughs enchantedly: they are in the midst of a lively conversation. It is clear they know Fredrik, but Bente has never seen them before. Perhaps they are colleagues.

She heads towards them and just catches sight of the woman leaning towards Fredrik for a farewell kiss on the cheek before quickly disappearing into the crowd.

Fredrik doesn’t notice Bente until she is standing right in front of him. He obviously hasn’t been looking for her; quite the opposite, in fact: he looks surprised, as if he has completely forgotten that they came here together. She feels embarrassed, ridiculous even, when he loses his thread in the middle of telling a lively anecdote to the other men. ‘Darling,’ he exclaims, giving her a slightly distracted look, before hastily introducing her to the men, who immediately seem to want to leave them alone. ‘Be in touch,’ they say to Fredrik, while smiling at Bente.

‘Where did you get to?’

He explains that he ran into some people from work and nods in the direction of the men. She says she has been searching for him for a long time.

‘I looked for you,’ he says evasively.

He reaches out a hand and touches her arm. ‘Darling . . .’

He shrugs his shoulders as if to excuse himself and says that surely no harm has been done. She holds her tongue and looks around the courtyard without actually seeing anything except shadows. A dull sadness runs through her veins when she hears him say, ‘I was only gone for a few minutes,’ in the tone of voice reserved for moments when he wants to appear sensitive and a little wounded in order to make her feel controlling, and to get the better of her by insinuating that she limits his so-called freedom – this is one of his favourite stratagems when they row. A tremor, almost imperceptible, runs through Bente; they are close to stepping over a line. Then she decides not to make a scene – he clearly isn’t planning on apologising. She takes his hand and notices how he immediately relaxes.

Jonathan Green is shaking the hand of the energetic, greying man in the chalk-stripe suit, whose name he has already forgotten, and repeating how pleasant it has been talking to him. This is not entirely true: he remembers nothing of what the ageing man has just said, except that he is a manager at Crédit Lyonnais.

When he thinks no one is looking, he allows his face to relax. The smile melts away. He looks around, but Bente Jensen has already disappeared into the crowd. He surveys the ballroom with the fatalistic feeling that a seemingly insignificant, but ultimately catastrophic mistake could happen. Has he been careless?

He looks at his watch.

He makes his way through the guests with a determined stride, without pausing to greet anyone, so that no one is tempted to stop him. Two hours of small talk with management consultants, financiers and bankers is more than enough. The effort of appearing interested has formed a grey cloud of exhaustion inside him. What’s more, it bothers him that Bente happened to see him, since she is the only person in the room who knows who he actually is. Ever since he took the post as Senior Trade Attaché, he has been exceedingly careful to wear the mask that the diplomatic role calls for – a lie that has to fit him like a universal truth. Knowing that the Swede is out there in the ballroom and can see through his charade makes him feel uneasy.

They are still working out how such a junior analyst could have gained access to so many sensitive documents. The thought that the Swede has them and is familiar with vast swathes of their work in Syria makes him feel out of sorts. Semper Occultus – always secret. Well, not so semper any longer, he thinks to himself bitterly. If he had his way, he would simply approach her and force her to give him everything, but that’s not how it works. He will resolve the problem by other means, and if everything goes according to plan, then the leak will soon be under control.

He is out of the scrum. The smile that has been frozen on his face for hours finally gives way to forbidding seriousness.

Fifteen minutes later he pulls up outside the British Embassy in his car. The building looms like a dark fortress above the sparse traffic on Rue de la Loi. He squints at the light of the coldly bright entrance, and holds up his pass – but the guard has already recognised him.

All is quiet on the fifth floor. He wanders down the deserted corridor, the air-conditioned peace calming him. This is where MI6 has its Brussels bureau.

He grew tired of Brussels long ago but still likes his office. He also has an official workspace, which is attached to the trade delegation. The ambassador likes to acerbically point out that the trade delegation is based on the third floor, and that if he is meant to be pretending to be the Senior Trade Attaché then he actually ought to play the role. To avoid unnecessarily irritating the ambassador, he makes the journey down two storeys once a week to his official office to reply to emails about business lunches and other pointless frivolities, before returning to MI6’s office.

He looks at the time.

Standing by the window in his office, he traces the glittering stream of traffic flowing around the roundabout at Pla. . .