The Last Compromise Read Online Free PDF Page B

Or which
person he was talking to. Or what the topic was. How did he have a wife, let
alone kids? But Hans didn’t care about that right now, because he knew Viktor
had something to tell. And it wasn’t like Hans himself had any wife, let alone
kids.
    ‘The
consolidated monthly reports are prepared by the atomic energy department, on
the basis of incoming reports from the national authorities,’ Viktor continued.
‘The incoming reports show the amounts of nuclear material used, and the
occasion of the use, for example a centrifuge running for so-and-so many
seconds, although most of the details are coded in numbers and abbreviations.
They also show the occasions when a planned event was cancelled, and usually
also the reason why. Technical malfunction, delayed delivery, and so on.’
    ‘And
the Commission’s reports?’
    ‘The
Commission’s reports only list the amounts actually used, and put the aborted
events in an annex. And here is the news. In the unusual month the annex to the
Commission’s report fails to mention some of the aborted events.’
    ‘But
the events that took place are still there?’
    ‘They
are, but some of the aborted ones are not. It’s as if they had never been
planned at all. They just disappear. But only in that month, never in the
control group.’
    Hans
said nothing, just breathed into his phone. Viktor didn’t say anything either.
    ‘So,’
Hans tried to follow up. ‘It could be that certain quantities of let’s say uranium
or whatever go missing, their planned use is reported to the Commission as
cancelled, but the Commission itself pretends that no-one had ever planned
using them to begin with.’
    ‘This
depends on the interpretation of the data. If this is true, then the following
month the aborted event is not repeated, because the finished low-enriched uranium
targets are already gone. And actual use is back to its normal level.’
    ‘And
no-one noticed?’
    ‘We
noticed,’ Viktor replied. Kind as ever. It was Viktor who’d noticed, not the
two of them. ‘But we only looked closely after running a forensic statistical
analysis. Remember, the raw data is spread over thousands of lines over dozens
of columns in hundreds of Excel sheets.’
    ‘And
you went through all that, during one afternoon and half a night?’
    ‘Not
through all of it. I took a sample. For one country at random, the Netherlands.
Not entirely random, I just thought of it because your boss is Dutch. So for
only one country out of four unusual ones, out of almost thirty member countries
in total. And only for three months out of twenty-four in the dataset.
Statisticians take samples. Like interviewing a number of people about their
work situation, to calculate the unemployment rate in a whole country.’
    Hans
frowned. ‘I thought unemployed people are registered, so the numbers are right
there?’
    ‘That
only gives you registered unemployment. But not everyone who’s registered is
really looking for a job, and not everyone who’s looking for a job is
registered. You have to ask people, but you cannot ask them all, so you take a
sample.’
    Hans
said nothing.
    ‘I
looked at a sample of the nuclear reports,’ Viktor continued in the same voice,
as if he had not digressed at all. ‘Deeper analysis on a larger dataset would
take more time, and I’m not sure I can do that in the coming days. There’s a
big conference coming up here.’
    ‘Okay,
but just on the basis of what we have now,’ Hans said. ‘Say it’s true. Who takes
cancelled events from national reports and makes them disappear?’
    ‘Someone
who’s in charge of consolidating national reports into a Commission report.’
    ‘The
atomic energy department.’
    Viktor
said nothing. Hans put the receiver into his left hand. With his right he moved
the mouse over his desktop to revive his computer screen. He opened the list of
staff at atomic energy. There were over a hundred names on the first page alone.
‘Who could it be