A Message From the King

[Nentsia]

The Liquor Store

Isabel Fuglsang slammed her laptop down on her desk, got up from her chair, and corrected her lipstick in the reflection of her telephone.
‘I’m grabbing a lunch,’ she grunted to a colleague.

She reached for her coat and headed out of the office, striding through the corridors of the Oslan Foreign Ministry in her high heels. Outside the building, Fuglsang walked around the bloc and double-checked a message in one of her mobile phones. A text message, sent the evening before, read ‘12.30 – 50 year old Baillieu’.

After a ten minute walk through the historic centre of Herlev, the Oslan capital, Fuglsang stood before a small liquor store. She took a deep breadth, checked her watch, adjusted her raincoat and entered the store. A characteristic bell announced that a customer had entered the store. The store seemed completely abandoned. Its dusty wooden ranks with bottles and liquor reached up to the ceiling. The only light came through the window, and the interior was made out of dark wood.

An older woman responded to the sound of the bell. She came out from the back of the store, looking through her dusty glasses to see who had entered.
‘Yes, hello. Can I help you?’
‘I believe a package has been delivered for me here,’ Fuglsang replied.
‘Package? What package?’
‘I’ve come to collect a very rare wine. A Baillieu, aged 50 years.’

The woman came closer to take a look at Fuglsang. She observed her for a while and then, as if she suddenly remembered, turned around. ‘Ah yes. I probably put that in our safe. Let me collect it for you.’

While the woman returned to the back of the store to look for the rare wine, Fuglsang walked slowly past all the bottles of liquor. Each one had a fancy design that would make the most repulsive drinks look tasty.

‘Do you need a bag with it?’ the woman shouted from the back end of the store.
‘Yes please,’ Fuglsang replied with a high-pitched voice.

Eventually the woman returned with a rare bottle of wine packed in a paper back with the store logo on it. ‘Your package will cost 600 Vrun,’ she mumbled as she checked in her computer. With a friendly smile she handed Fuglsang the package. Fuglsang had reached for an envelope in her bag and handed that to her.
‘My credit card is in there.’

The woman took it to the back again for ‘verification’, and returned a minute later. In reality the envelope had contained no money at all, but a micro SD card. Fuglsang put the emptied envelope back in her bag.

‘Enjoy! Have a lovely day.’

Fuglsang smiled back and left the store. Just as the envelope had not contained any money, so did her Baillieu wine bottle not contain any wine at all. Instead it contained a new SD card, a piece of paper, and some cash money.

Maybe an hour later, a short, chubby, balding man arrived at the liquor store. Again the bell rang, and the woman came out from the back again.

‘Ah its you mr. Arrighetti! How nice to see you!’ the woman exclaimed.
‘I always love to come and visit you, Alma,’ Arrighetti barked. ‘I hope you have some nice wines for me today!’

Alma, the woman, smiled. ‘Of course, dear. Something came in today, I’m sure your customers will love it.’

The woman went out to the back and came back with a crate full of wine bottles. One of the wine bottles was in fact empty, and only contained a micro SD card. Arrighetti smiled in his characteristic manner, paid Alma in cash, and walked out of the store with the wine bottles to his minivan. With the van he drove back to his Lomarran restaurant, Arrighetti’s.

That evening, Fuglsang did not drive directly home from work. She made a little detour passed an old industrial area of the city, where she parked her car near an abandoned factory. After having made sure she was alone, she got her ‘expensive wine’ from the trunk of her car, and in one smooth motion smashed the bottle to pieces on the ground.

Carefully, she quickly collected the banknotes, the piece of paper, and the SD card that were scattered among the glass shards. Fuglsang put the money and the SD card in her pocket, but she read the letter. It was a list of instructions. She took a few minutes to memorize the instructions and then destroyed the letter with a lighter. Then she got back into her car and drove home, to cook dinner for her family.

[Nentsia]

The Restaurant

The sun was going down early that evening. Francesco Arrighetti checked his watch as his restaurant was slowly filling up with guests. He stared into the restaurant from behind the counter, looking at how his cousin, Leo Grosso, was welcoming the guests and serving out wine. Sometimes, they briefly exchanged eye contact.

At around eight in the evening, Arrighetti’s waiting was finally over. A car was parked across the street. Grosso had recognized the number plate and nodded to Arrighetti. Four special guests had arrived. Two men emerged in the door opening of the restaurant, and were welcomed by Arrighetti’s wife, Emilia. Unlike Arrighetti, Emilia was an Oslan by birth, not Lomarran. They had met each other in Florinthus, even married there, but settled in Oslanburg to open up a restaurant.

Emilia welcomed the two men, dressed in an evening outfit, easily blending with the crowd of upper-middle class Herlev residents. The two respectable couples, of whom one elder in their late fifties, and two others in their early forties, were put at a specially reserved table for them. A table far from the windows, close to the hall leading to the toilets and kitchen. The men worked for the Nerysian embassy in Herlev, and as colleagues and friends they had brought their wives out to dinner.

The older man worked as deputy secretary of the Trade Representation, the other man as diplomatic courier for the Nerysian embassy. Of course these were only cover roles, a legal protection. Arrighetti knew.

As their table was being served, Arrighetti emerged from the kitchen with his typical big smile. ‘Welcome!’ and casually stood by their table for a bit of small talk. ‘Now, if you will excuse me, I have to go upstairs for some administrative matters. Enjoy your evening,’ Arrighetti eventually said and walked away.

Barely a minute later, the deputy secretary rose from his seat and told his wife he was going to the toilet. He got up, went through the corridor leading to the toilets and the kitchen, but walked past it and actually took the stairs, where Arrighetti had disappeared moments earlier.

Upstairs, in the dark, Arrighetti was waiting for him.

‘I hope this is damn urgent,’ Arrighetti mumbled with chagrin in his voice. Meeting with Nerysian intelligence officers from the Embassy was extremely dangerous and usually only happened if really necessary.

‘Don’t worry. We changed cars three times, driven around for 2 hours, went out of town and back again. No one followed us here.’

‘Spare me your heroic stories. These jokes can ruin us all.’

The two men entered a small chamber, with a heavy, locked door. Arrighetti checked the diplomat’s pockets if he wasn’t still accidentally carrying a cell phone. They went inside, and closed the door behind them. They had entered a secret Nerysian government office. TV screens on the wall, several computers and hard drives, servers, a safe, fake passports, photographs, a writing board, camera equipment, cash money – everything they needed was kept in that secret chamber above the Restaurant.

The two men said down besides a small table. Arrighetti offered his guest a glass of whiskey.

‘So tell me, what is going on in the Castle,’ Arrighetti sighed as he sat down and took a nip from his whiskey. The diplomat looked at him with a stern gaze.

‘Revolution.’
‘For whom?’
‘The Castle is sending us instructions to test the waters for a diplomatic revolution with the Oslans.’
‘So they’re using us as real diplomats now? Are we risking all this for a diplomatic job?’
‘The Castle is afraid to be given the cold shoulder and suffer public humiliation. We have to do the dirty work, the foreplay, as we always have done, and when there is a chance of success the diplomats and politicians take it over from us. Business as usual.’

Arrighetti assumed the Nerysian government had dug such a deep hole for itself that it now needed acrobatics to get out.

‘I have instructed my agents to create a setting in which we can begin to approach Oslan politicians,’ Arrighetti said after a while. Usually he would not say a word about his agents to the intelligence officers from the Embassy. Too damn dangerous.

‘If they succeed, and only if, I might be in a position to pass on Nerysian government proposals to Oslan politicians, without them ever knowing how these ended up finding them. Whether they take it seriously, depends on the contents of the proposals.’

The Diplomat nodded in agreement, sipping from the whiskey. ‘Socialist sentiment is rising among our unemployed youths. Decades of limited trade with the Western neighbours has come back to bite us. The continued stability of our country rests on the success of your agents, Mr. Arrighetti.’
‘The Castle will not judge lightly, should they fail. Should you fail.’

Arrighetti was unimpressed with such shallow threats directed at him. It only revealed the desperation at the Embassy and the Castle. If anyone in this room was in a position to make threats, it was Arrighetti himself. Some of the most cold-blooded criminal elements of Herlev were among his agents, ready to dispose of anyone who threatened to bring him down, for little more than small money, a few beers and a call girl.

Arrighetti checked his watch. ‘You are here now for ten minutes. My guests are starting to worry you might be having a stroke down there at the toilet.’

‘You’re right. I’m sending my courier upstairs in about half an hour to talk. He wants to arrange a dead-drop for the documents.’

The Diplomat went downstairs again and joined his dinner table.