Dark Unions

Monday, late afternoon

In autumn, it simply doesn't rain in Brussels. Leaden clouds descend upon the town and turn the chilly air into mist that smells of damp refuse and makes the dark grey sky seem like an unforgivable crime.

It was around half past five in the afternoon, on a Monday in mid-November. The roundabout at Rond Point Schuman was choked with traffic, vehicles standing bumper-to-bumper waiting to turn off into the long Rue de la Loi, where their red tail lights melted into an endless, blood-coloured stream among the featureless office buildings.

Flanking the roundabout, the buildings of the Council and the Commission faced each other like colossal monsters. Compared to the simple, cube-like façade of the Council building, its opposite number resembled the body of a raptor about to pounce. Its long, curved, prison-like exterior seemed to engulf the rain-soaked square. Thick smog covered the top floors. The pillar supporting its western wing bore an inscription in pompous letters more befitting of a battleship: BERLAYMONT, and beneath: EUROPEAN COMMISSION in Dutch and French.

The officials streaming in and out through the bullet-proof glass gate generally paid no attention to the tourists admiring the imposing architecture. On this occasion, however, a man wearing a black coat and carrying a leather case stopped next to a group of Chinese tourists who were deep in conversation. He fondled the access badge hanging round his neck and stared at a girl with a red umbrella who was about to take a photo of her group. She was looking at the display screen on her smartphone and shouting instructions to her fellow tourists, making sure that everyone fit into the picture. Someone shouted something back and they all burst out laughing. The Chinese girl giggled with them. She took two steps back.

The man in the black coat suddenly looked up towards the mist surrounding the top floors. The Chinese girl pushed her red umbrella backwards, so that its edge would not spoil the picture, and this forced her, too, to look upwards. The giggle on her face turned into dread, but the scream only left her lips when a body impacted on the ground directly in front of her. At the very spot where she had been standing just a few seconds before, the slow rain mixed with blood and brain matter on the shattered remains of a man clad in a dark suit.

Mads Hansen, a Danish official working at the European Commission's Directorate of Security, rubbed his eyes and took off his earphones. He had been listening to Rammstein since the lunch break, and now, around six o'clock, had arrived at the point where not even the most epic guitar riffs could overcome his tiredness.

He leaned closer to the screen of his desktop computer. On his desk, the warm light of an old-fashioned brass lamp balanced the blueish glow emanating from the screen. The desk lamp was the only personal item in his office. There were no family or holiday photographs on his tidy desk, no motivational posters on the walls, no pictures of a spouse or drawings by children which could have alleviated the cold of the standard blue carpet and depressingly grey walls, as they did for his colleagues. Only a few of them had worked out that Ross' lamp was more or less an act of rebellion. He was probably the last person in the Berlaymont to use light bulbs instead of the mandatory LED lights.

Hansen had prepared ten of the slides for a presentation he was due to deliver the next day. He opened a new slide and thought hard about what to say without repeating himself. He had run out of ideas. Just for the sake of doing something, he changed the size of the title: HUMINT – A new approach to the Commission's HR policies involving military intelligence methods. He saw the reflection of his lean face on the screen and smiled a bitter smile to himself. What a pompous title for an issue as trivial as checking the background of cleaning staff, he thought.

But when he glanced at the official document he was supposed to reference, he gave himself a mental pat on the back. Had he directly cited from the original, his audience would almost certainly have fallen asleep after the first sentence: "In this Communication, the Commission sets out the elements that are critical to achieving free circulation of information between the law enforcement authorities of the Member States, in a more structured way than has been the case up till now, Obstacles to free circulation of information currently exist, which cause inter alia the Directorate of Security to dedicate the third round of mutual evaluations to examine the exchange of information and intelligence between Europol and the Member States and among the Member States respectively"