The Last Compromise Read Free

Russian agent, though. First of all,
he wasn’t Russian. He was German, born to German parents in a town in Germany.
Not even East Germany, simply a West German town. He didn’t speak any Russian,
let alone Bulgarian. At work he explained it by saying his father was
Bulgarian, hence the name, but that he was otherwise basically German. So far
no-one had ever asked him how a man from communist Bulgaria could have met a
woman from West Germany in the middle of the Cold War. There, the black lady
was gone, now it was only the guy in front of him.
    Second
of all, Zayek wasn’t sure that what he was doing now really counted as spying
in any traditional sense of the word. But he cared less and less about it with
every month, every year that passed. Basically he was Boris Zayek, a German
civil servant at the European Commission in Luxembourg, only with a strange
name which wasn’t real, and with the not entirely genuine passport of a country
he had never been to. Surely a man his age, and in his situation, should be
smoking. It would be odd if he didn’t.
    ‘Bonjour
Madame,’ he said as the guy in front of him walked away. He stepped forward and
looked only in the face of the shop assistant. ‘Avez-vous du chewing-gum sans
sucre?’
     
    Brussels
     
    Tienhoven
was waiting for the continuation of the presentation. Viktor was silent, he had
already explained the statistics. Now it was the moment for Hans to take over
for the central part. He cleared his throat and started.
    ‘National
authorities have to report the use of nuclear material for peaceful purposes to
the European Commission,’ he said. ‘This has been in the European treaties
since the fifties.’
    Hans
found it important to keep pointing out these details, basically to anyone he
talked to. Too often the Germans or the French or the Italians were blaming the
European Commission for this or that. Actually the countries simply didn’t
trust each other, so they gave powers to the Commission, a neutral watchdog in
Brussels, and told it to check on them all. And then they would all complain together
about the watchdog for making their lives difficult. The monitoring of who had
how much plutonium and uranium was no different. Let the Commission count it
all. So they could all moan about the Commission, rather than about each other.
    ‘The
Commission, specifically the atomic energy department, records the type and
amount of nuclear material, and their people go there and check whether the
figures are correct and whether the material is really there,’ Hans continued. ‘Sometimes
they come unannounced. This concerns nuclear power plants obviously, but also
hospitals with radiology departments, universities, and private research
companies that use small quantities of radioactive material.’
    Tienhoven
heard him out, then he turned to Viktor. ‘And?’
    ‘It
looks like we detected an anomaly in the pattern,’ Viktor said. He was very kind.
During their project Hans had only asked the right questions at the right
moments. He was not a scientist, he was a lawyer. After law school, and before
passing the Commission’s entrance exam, he had worked at his country’s chief
prosecutor’s office. During the project it had been Viktor who had done all the
statistics, all the math.
    Viktor
carried on. ‘Over the last twenty-four months there have been four sudden drops
in the reported amounts of radioactive material. Not just smaller amounts from
one month to the next, but sudden deviations from the statistical pattern.’ He
opened the laptop. The screen lit up and was reflected in Viktor’s glasses. He
turned the laptop around so that it faced Tienhoven.
    Tienhoven
looked at the screen; Hans could see it, too. There was a vertical axis to the
left, a horizontal axis at the bottom, providing half a frame to a whole crowd
of zigzagging curves running from left to right. Some of the curves had
prominent ravines, spikes pointing downward. Four drops, at uneven