Europe in Winter

by Dave Hutchinson

  Okay. Rudi looked left and right. Across the farmyard, the main building was burning fiercely, as was the only other occupied cottage. From behind the buildings, he could hear the panicked noises of the animals in the children’s zoo.

  He searched through the woman’s webbing harness, came up with a small torch, switched it on. Checked the body quickly for ID and comms devices, came up empty. He took one of her pistols – something ludicrously light and ceramic – and got up and limped around to the back of the cottage.

  The bedroom window was shattered; flames were roaring out of the hole. The room itself was full of flame; even the walls appeared to be alight. Rudi swore and ran back to the front, went back inside, grabbed his jacket and cane, and turned to leave again. Halfway to the door, he stopped and turned back, scooped the package from the table.

  Near the junction of the track and the road, the beam of the torch caught something poking out from under a bush. When he looked closer he saw that it was a booted foot. He pushed the bush aside and saw that the foot belonged to a man’s body, sprawled bonelessly face-down. The man was dressed and equipped identically to the woman. The back of his head shone wetly in the torchlight.

  Rudi stood up and looked around him. The cottages were completely alight, the main house ablaze. He started to run as best he could.

  IT TOOK HIM almost two hours to hike to Pädaste, staying in the rough country off to one side of the road. By the time he got there the sky was starting to lighten and his leg was in agony. He dithered at the end of the lane leading to the Manor, trying to decide what to do, then he turned away and loped down to the shore a kilometre or so away. He remembered a boathouse from his last visit, part of the Manor’s facilities, but he had to walk along the shoreline for a little while before he found it.

  He’d thought he would have to break into the boathouse, which would have caused more complications, but there was a little fishing boat tied up to the jetty, not much more than a dinghy with an outboard motor. He checked the motor, found a full can of petrol in the bottom of the boat along with a pair of oars and a grubby waxed jacket. He put the jacket on over his own. There was a weird knitted cap in one of the pockets, along with half a pack of cigarettes and a battered old Zippo. He put the cap on, cast off, and rowed the boat away from the shore.

  Rudi rowed for about an hour before starting the engine. The boat was battered, but the engine, though an antique, was obviously well cared-for. He opened the throttle and put some distance between himself and Pädaste, going southwest along the coast. At the far southwest corner of the island, he struck out across the strait towards Saaremaa.

  A few hours later, he pulled the boat up onto a beach east of Nasva, filled the engine’s fuel tank from the petrol can, and set out again. Not far from Läbara, in the west of the big island, he beached the boat again. He dragged it up as far as he could from the waterline, broke branches off nearby trees to conceal it with, found some bushes a few hundred metres away, curled up in them and fell asleep, hoping that if anyone connected the theft of the boat with him they would assume he had headed east towards the Estonian mainland simply because that was the most rational thing to do.

  The next morning, just after dawn, he topped up the boat’s fuel tank one last time, briefly checked the GPS on his phone, and steered due south, the boat rocking and plunging alarmingly on the waves.

  It took several hours to cross the Irbe Väin Strait. The pain in his leg, from yesterday’s exertions and sleeping in a bush, was almost unbearable, and he hadn’t eaten since breakfast the previous day. He slumped in the back of the boat, vaguely seasick, one arm draped over the engine’s steering column, occasionally checking his phone to make sure he was still on course and not heading into the Gulf of Riga.

  He fell asleep again, was woken by a jolt through the hull of the boat, jerked his eyes open terrified that he had struck something. But when he sat up he saw that it was okay. He’d only struck Latvia.

  2.

  “WELL, WE’VE ANNOYED somebody,” Rupert said.

  “Mm,” said Rudi. “I hadn’t quite anticipated a reaction like this.”

  They were sitting in the garden of a guest house not far from Biarritz, the destination of Rudi’s month-long dustoff from Latvia, during which he had burned through six ready-made false identities and twenty or so disposable phones. Rudi had his leg, which was still giving him discomfort, up on a footstool. In response to his crash alert following his arrival in Latvia, Seth and Gwen had gone to ground somewhere outside Poland and Lev had packed up his computers and departed Sibir for points west.

  “So, are we any closer to knowing who?” asked Rupert.

  “No,” Rudi grumped. The fire at Soonda, and its aftermath, had been on Estonian news sites for about a week, more interesting for what was left out than what was mentioned. Initially it had been ascribed to faulty wiring, then vandalism, then ‘criminal activity’. Five people had died, according to the official account – the husband and wife who owned the farm and three guests, their bodies too burned for easy identification. Of the dead man and woman Rudi had found, not a word. Which was interesting. Eventually, the story had dropped down the news agenda and then disappeared altogether. His name was not mentioned once. “I hate being on the run,” he said.

  “Yes,” said Rupert, who had also spent time on the run.

  They sat for a while, side by side, in their deckchairs, looking out across the couple of hectares of garden. It was unseasonably warm and the high hedges surrounding the garden trapped the sun’s warmth. The world, and all its cares and problems, seemed far away, but they both knew better.

  “Do you at least have an idea what we did?” Rupert asked finally.

  “I’m not totally certain we did anything,” Rudi said after a moment’s thought. “I have the awful feeling that this was coming anyway.” He and Rupert looked at each other. “I don’t know.”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  Rudi smiled. “Well...”

  LATER, AFTER RUPERT had left, Rudi took himself back to his room and sat on the bed. It had been a long time since his first encounter with Les Coureurs, since his first Situation. He had, he thought, become quite adept at certain things in the interim, and now he thought about it, that had made him lazy, complacent. He’d learned that he could cope, and coping wasn’t enough.

  Someone, it seemed, had tried to kill him at Soonda. Either the dead couple he had found outside the cottage had been sent to stop the assassin, and had failed, or they themselves were the assassins and had been killed by another party. That was a picture he might not ever understand.

  Smith’s presence on the island was, of course, suggestive, as was the news that he was somehow connected to Mundt’s murder by the photograph the presumed killer had been carrying. Had someone tried to kill him in retaliation for that?

  Reaching under the bed, he took out the package Juhan had given him, his inheritance. Stripped of its brown paper, it had proven to be a chocolate box – an unfamiliar English brand. He lifted the lid and looked inside. There was an ancient external hard drive, almost as big as the box itself, a single gigabyte of storage, a couple of cables to plug it in to a computer, and a little plastic bag of adaptors which spoke of many years of computer evolution. Beneath this were his father’s two passports, and beneath those was a long envelope containing his father’s two birth certificates.

  He had found, taped to the inside of the lid of the box, a newer, smaller envelope containing two safety deposit keycards, a folded slip of paper with three names written on it in his father’s spidery, near-illegible hand – Roland Sarkisian, Jean-Yves Charpentier, François Tremblay – and a black and white photograph.

  He took out his phone and thumbed up the photograph Smith had given him in Suffolk. He held up the photograph he had found among his father’s effects, and looked from one to the other and back again. They were, so far as he could tell, identical.

  He closed the photo on his phone, called up a bro
wser, Googled the three names, hoping that at least this time the internet might offer up some kind of explanation, but there was still only a brief wiki entry about Roland Sarkisian, born in Alençon in 1894 – Le Parapluie, as he’d apparently been known. A mathematician of some charisma, it seemed, because he had managed to draw around him a group of like-minded young men who styled themselves the ‘Sarkisian Collective.’ A search for mentions of the Collective only turned up half a dozen hits, all of them footnotes to various arcane-looking mathematical treatises.

  He held up the photograph again and squinted at it. The background was crowded with people and it was hard to make out faces, but there was a little group of young men, eight of them, standing close together and staring solemnly towards the camera. They were all holding furled umbrellas.

  Rudi put the photo down on the bed and took his father’s birth certificates out of their envelope. He read the birthdates again, and he shook his head.

  “You old fucker,” he muttered.

  1.

  AFTERWARD, NO ONE was quite certain when Carey arrived in Szolnok. She claimed it was the end of September, but there was credible evidence that she’d been there since at least August. The country’s various border agencies, squabbling like rival shopkeepers, were unable to come up with a name, a date, or a frontier crossing at which she had entered Hungary; all anyone was able to be sure of was that at some point she had started quietly filing lifestyle pieces – fashion, music, food – to a little-known online magazine. She was American, travelling on a Texas passport, and she was serious about her work. Later, in interrogation rooms at Police Headquarters, dozens of people she had interviewed all over the city were debriefed. It was generally agreed that she had been utterly professional about maintaining her legend. More than one member of the Intelligence services expressed a degree of admiration for her, although they also expressed a greater degree of annoyance that she had been in the country at all.

  It was Carey’s first time in Hungary; her beat usually took in France and Spain and all the little nations thereof. She was a tall, cheerful woman of a certain age who spoke seven languages, four of them fluently, and could swear convincingly in three more. She seemed particularly interested in a number of Avar burials unearthed by workmen building a new ring-road outside the town. The Avars buried their dead with their horses, and these were particularly splendid examples.

  Carey made several visits to the site, talking to archaeologists from the University of Budapest who were excavating it, and it was later presumed that it was during one of these visits that she took receipt of the Package, although nobody could be entirely certain.

  She next popped up on the official radar at one of the border crossings over the River Dráva between Hungary and Croatia. It was a rainy afternoon in mid-October, and the light was already starting to fail when she pulled her car in to the border station and joined the queue of private vehicles waiting to be processed.

  The Hungarians had hardened their borders decades ago, even before the Xian Flu and the atomisation of the EU, against refugees fleeing the Middle East and North Africa, and the border station still bore the signs of hasty expansion; temporary buildings which had become permanent, piles of rubble and fencing material almost completely overgrown, a lorry park whose asphalt had cracked and sprouted weeds over the years here by the river.

  The Ufa explosion had caused a spike in terrorist alerts across Europe; border guards had become particularly bloody-minded, and today there was a long line of cars and vans waiting to cross into Croatia, as well as maybe thirty lorries and half a dozen coaches. A little bar on the other side of the waiting area was doing a roaring trade in burgers and bottled beer and soft drinks, and there was a line of people outside the toilet block.

  This much was normal, in fact comforting. This was a landscape Carey knew well, and nothing looked out of the ordinary. Border crossings, when you boiled off much of the local colour, were all pretty much the same. She put the car into Park, set the handbrake, and got out to stretch her legs. She’d done the trip from Szolnok in one go, and she felt a little stiff. The rain had tailed away to a fine mist of drizzle blowing in veils across the border station. From the direction of the road, she could hear cars and lorries going by on their way from Croatia.

  She saw them coming from all the way across the compound, three soldiers in the Lincoln green uniform of Hungary’s border guard. Two of them were women, in officers’ uniforms; the third was a youth with a rash of acne in a corner of his mouth and a cap which was half a size too small.

  “Madam,” one of the officers said as they neared the car. “May we see your documents, please?”

  This was far from unusual; you could never predict what border officers would do. Some were bored, some were preternaturally attentive, some hewed fetishistically to regulations, some were prepared to bend a little. Carey wasn’t worried; her papers were all good, there was no reason why anyone should suspect her. This was a milk run.

  She reached into the car and took her passport from the glove compartment, handed it over. The second officer waved the passport over her pad, looked at the displayed information, looked at Carey, looked at the information again. It suddenly occurred to Carey that the boy, who had a short assault rifle – something of German manufacture, she thought – slung over his shoulder, seemed unusually tense for what seemed on the face of it a perfectly routine document check. He caught her looking at him and made a spirited but ultimately rather poor attempt at staring defiantly back.

  The two officers consulted briefly in whispers, then the first said, “Madam, would you accompany us, please? Leave the key in the car.”

  And even this was not outside operational limits. She didn’t panic when she heard the car start up behind them. She turned and saw the second officer behind the wheel, reversing a little before she drove the car out of the queue and off towards a row of sheds on the other side of the compound. There were always spot checks.

  The officer, whose nametag read SZILI, led her to a small concrete building. The young soldier stationed himself outside the front door without having to be told. Inside was a short, brightly-lit corridor that smelled of damp carpeting. At the far end was a door opening on to a little room with a table and two chairs. Szili showed her inside and asked her to sit.

  “Your phone, please, madam,” she said.

  Carey turned over her phone – there was nothing operationally important on it – and Szili left the room. There was a quiet click of a lock, and then she was alone.

  Well.

  This was not the first time Carey had been detained at a border. There had been an occasion about five years ago, trying to get into one of the many short-lived little statelets which infested Greater Germany, when she had remained in a room not unlike this one for almost two days. When she was finally released, it was because the polity’s ad hoc government had collapsed and a new, temporary, administration had voted to rejoin the Bundesrepublik as soon as humanly possible. The borders had come down and her Package had simply walked out. She looked around the room. At least then there had been a bed. And a lavatory.

  Hours passed. At first they passed slowly. Then there was a point where she checked her watch and discovered that two hours had gone by without her consciously noticing.

  She got up and went over and banged on the door with her fist. “Hey!” she shouted. “Hey! I need the bathroom!” Nothing happened. She walked back into the middle of the room and started to look around where the ceiling met the walls. She was damned if she was going to start feeling her way around the place looking for stealthed cameras, but it didn’t hurt to look. “I need the bathroom!” she shouted again, with no more success.

  Almost an hour later, the door clicked and swung open, and there was Szili. Her uniform was crumpled, and there was an oil stain on her sleeve. Carey stopped pacing and looked at her. She said, “I want to speak with the Texan Ambassador. And I want the bathroom.”

  “The Texan Embassy is
in Budapest,” Szili told her. “And the toilet is this way. Please, madam.”

  Outside, night had long fallen. The border post, lit up by blue-white lamps on ten-metre poles, sat in the still, silent heart of a huge darkness. There were no vehicles anywhere to be seen, and that was what finally made Carey start to worry.

  Szili walked her across the compound to the toilet block, waited outside the cubicle, then marched her back outside and over to the sheds. The door of one had been rolled up, and inside was her car.

  At least, it was all the bits of her car. It was hard to see if any of them were missing because none of them were connected to each other any longer. They were arranged all over the cement floor of the shed in a sort of rough sketch of a car. A couple of mechanics in filthy overalls were standing near the back of the shed. One was smoking a pipe; the other was wiping his hands on a rag. They were both looking at her as if she had done them a terrible personal wrong.

  “Boys,” Carey said to them, “you have some explaining to do to Hertz.”

  “Madam,” Szili said, going over to a metal cupboard by one wall and opening one of its doors. “Can you please tell me what this is?” And she reached inside and turned back holding the Package. It was a little larger than a pack of playing cards.

  “I never saw that before in my life,” Carey said.

  SHE WAS GETTING too old for this shit. Certainly too old to spend all night in a windowless room somewhere on the far edge of Hungary. Definitely too old to sleep in her clothes on a really uncomfortable folding bed in a windowless room on the far edge of Hungary.

  They woke her before seven. Two soldiers she hadn’t seen before; one to carry a tray and put it on the table, the other to hold a rifle at the ready in case she suddenly tried to incapacitate the first with a weapon cunningly fashioned out of... well, there was actually fuck-all in here to fashion a weapon from, and they knew, from last night’s strip search, that she wasn’t carrying anything lethal or even remotely annoying.