Europe in Winter

by Dave Hutchinson

  Benedek walked beside her, not too close, not too far away, with an almost balletic grace that under other circumstances she might have found quite attractive. Right now, she just wanted to rabbit-punch him.

  They were standing at a pedestrian crossing, waiting for the light to turn green with a crowd of shoppers and office workers on their way home, when Benedek fell over. One moment he was standing there, hands at his side, looking alert and capable, the next Carey was aware of an absence at her side and when she looked down he was lying in a heap on the pavement, twitching. Some of the people around him moved away. The light changed and the crowd in front of her began to surge across the street.

  While she was trying to work out what had happened, someone put their arm around her waist and urged her forward. “Walk,” a woman’s voice said quietly in English, close to her side. “Walk. Don’t run, don’t look back.”

  Utterly confused, for a moment she resisted. Then she let herself be guided across the road. Behind her, she heard raised voices. Then she was across the road and walking at quite a smart pace, the woman beside her.

  “Don’t look back,” the woman said again. “Just keep going.”

  Carey turned her head and found herself looking at a brunette woman in her mid-thirties, well-dressed and with a pretty, intelligent face. “Who are you?”

  “My name’s Laura. I’m here to help.”

  “Who sent you?”

  “I’m local. There’s been an utter fuck-up, okay?”

  “You’re telling me there’s been an utter fuck-up. Do you know what happened?”

  “No talking now,” said Laura, letting go of Carey’s waist. “Walk. We’ll talk in a minute.”

  They walked on with the crowds for a few minutes. It was chilly now, and Carey imagined she could smell the Danube, just a few streets away, the border between Hungary and Slovakia. Years of experience seemed to be calving off her like icebergs; everything was confusing, nothing made sense. Every face in the crowd seemed to be turned accusingly towards her, every car that passed was an unmarked police vehicle. She fought to regain some kind of composure and professionalism, was only partly successful.

  Abruptly, Laura made a left turn through an archway between two shops, taking Carey with her. She stopped and turned just inside the archway.

  “Right,” she said calmly but urgently. “Here’s what I know. Your Situation was compromised; the mechanic you used to plant the Package in your car didn’t remove the car’s locator tag and the authorities hacked into it.”

  “I’d figured that out,” said Carey, but Laura raised a hand to silence her.

  “Just listen, please. I don’t know who gave you up to the authorities – it might have been the mechanic, it might not, I can’t find him to ask because he’s gone, his business is closed. The man you were with earlier is a mid-level thug; I’ve never had dealings with him but he doesn’t have a very good reputation and you need to stay out of his way as much as you need to stay out of the way of the authorities.” She took a phone from her pocket and held it out. “There’s a local ID and five grand Swiss on here,” she said. “I’m sorry it’s not more but it was all I could lay my hands on in a hurry.”

  Carey looked at the phone. “How did you know about this?”

  “An interpreter at the Ministry of Justice sat in on a call to the Texan Embassy yesterday morning and contacted me. I got out to Kaposvár in time to see you driving off with that bastard Balász and I knew he was bringing you here; Viktor’s an Esztergom boy and he loves doing his business in that fucking shop.”

  Somehow, all of this made as much sense as anything else that had happened to Carey. Still she didn’t take the phone.

  “I’m only a stringer,” Laura told her. “I don’t have the resources to find you a safe house or new papers or get you across the river; you’ll have to make a crash call and sort all that out for yourself.”

  Carey thought about it. She reached out, took the phone, slipped it into a pocket of her hoodie. “Thank you,” she said. She felt a little resentful that the Englishwoman wasn’t offering her sanctuary in her own home.

  “The phone’s clean, so it won’t leave a trail, but you should take out a chunk of cash as soon as you can and pay for everything with paper.” Laura looked back through the archway at the street. “I have to go,” she said. “Try to keep moving, don’t attract attention. Get out of this part of town, if you can. And good luck.” And with that she was gone.

  In spite of Laura’s warning, Carey stood where she was for a while after she’d gone, trying to regain her composure and fit everything together. Bits of it made sense, and bits didn’t, but that was life. She wished she’d had the wit to ask if anyone knew what had been in the Package.

  She walked down the alley, stopped at the end, glanced right and left down the street, took a breath, and stepped out onto the pavement.

  LAURA STOOD AT the window of a shoe shop and watched in the reflection as the American woman left the alleyway across the street and vanished into the crowds. She counted to fifty, then walked along to where a car was parked at the kerb. She got into the passenger seat and the young man at the wheel said, “That seemed to go all right.”

  “This is horrible,” said Gwen. “She’s terrified.”

  “She’s a pro, she’ll get her bearings soon,” Seth told her. “We just want her off-balance.”

  “I think we managed that okay.”

  “Are you all right?”

  To be honest, her heart was pounding in her chest almost hard enough to make the car shake. “Yes, I’m fine.”

  He grinned. “Your first Situation.”

  “Is it always like that?”

  “No,” he said, starting the engine and putting the car in gear. “No, sometimes it’s really crazy.”

  2.

  CAREY ONLY USED the phone once, and not to make an actual call.

  She stopped at a currency kiosk a couple of miles from where she and Laura had parted. She took out half the phone’s balance in forints, then she found a public callbox and dialled a number, and when the call was answered she said, “Hi, is my shopping ready for collection?” She listened to the instructions she was given.

  She walked for another mile or two – it was getting on for ten o’clock in the evening now and she kept an eye open for budget hotels – to another callbox and dialled another number. This time she said, “My Situation went tits-up; I need support.”

  “Are you in immediate danger?” asked the vaguely computer-generated voice at the other end.

  She looked out of the box. “No, but that could change at any moment.”

  “Who’s involved?”

  “State security, local mafia, Christ only knows who else. I’ve got no papers, no clothes, nothing.”

  “Do you have the Package with you?”

  “No; that’s really the whole problem.”

  “Find somewhere to go to ground. Call this number from there.” The voice recited a long international phone number. “You’ll be contacted. Stay off public transport.”

  She hung up and left the phone booth and walked back down the street to a fast food restaurant, where, suddenly a little startled by how hungry she was, she ate two burgers and a large portion of fries and drank a couple of Cokes, all the while keeping an eye on the big window onto the street. All of a sudden, it seemed, her feet hurt.

  A few doors down from the burger place was a run-down tourist hotel. The man behind the desk barely bothered to look at her as she checked in. The room was three floors up and it was small and grubby, but it had a bed and a bathroom and an entertainment set. She went back down to the lobby and used one of the public phones to dial the number she had been given. The call was answered, but no one spoke at the other end, and she hung up and returned to her room and sat on the bed.

  SOMEONE WAS KNOCKING on the door. Had probably been knocking on the door for a while. Carey opened her eyes slowly and became aware that, instead of going to bed last night,
she had simply slumped over on her side fully-clothed at some point. Her eyes were gritty and there was a terrible taste in her mouth and she ached all over and there was a tight feeling on the skin of her cheek which probably meant that she had been drooling at some point during the night.

  Never coming back here, she thought.

  With a groan, she levered herself into a sitting position and discovered a painful crick in her neck. Never ever. She launched herself off the bed and limped over to the door and put her eye to the viewer, was treated to a fish-eye image of a small, dapper, well-dressed man holding a bunch of white roses.

  Okay. Man with flowers. Carey looked around the room. The windows opened on short tethers so guests couldn’t hurl furniture or each other out into the street, and she was too high to jump anyway. She looked around the room again, looking for possible weapons. There was a rickety-looking chair by the desk in the corner, but it would probably fall to bits even before she hit anyone with it. She looked through the viewer. The little man knocked again. Not urgently, not in an official we-have-come-to-take-you-to-the-gulag kind of way, but in the manner of a gentleman visiting his lady friend with a nice bunch of roses.

  She came to a decision, opened the door as far as the chain would let it go, and said, “Yes?”

  The little man beamed at her. “Hello,” he said in English; English English – he had quite a posh accent. “I’m Bradley.”

  She looked him up and down. She hadn’t been able to see it through the door viewer, but there was a bulging canvas carryall on the floor by his feet. “Yes?”

  “There’s a small café in Budapest owned by a defrocked Church of England bishop,” Bradley said conversationally.

  “I hear their coffee’s terrible,” she answered.

  Bradley nodded happily. “Could I...?” he said.

  “Sure.” She closed the door, unlatched the chain, opened the door again. “Come on in.”

  He picked up the bag and stepped into the room, and Carey closed the door and stood with her back to it. “You’d better be the real thing, sunshine,” she told him. “Otherwise I’m going to completely spoil your day.”

  Bradley was looking around the room with a faint air of disappointment. He grinned at her and put the bag down by the bed and the flowers on the desk. He took out his phone, thumbed up an app, and started to walk around with it held out in front of him like a charm against some vague and not very awful evil.

  “Did you sleep well?” he asked distinctly, all the while keeping an eye on the screen of the phone.

  Carey shrugged. “I slept.”

  “Good, good.” Bradley ran the phone along the edge of the desk, crouched down and waved it underneath. “I thought we might take a turn around the Basilica later. It’s the biggest church in Hungary, you know.”

  “I didn’t know that.” She had no intention of going anywhere in daylight.

  Bradley was over by the windows now, holding the phone up high and pointing it at the curtain rod. He looked at the screen, seemed to ponder for a few moments, then held it up and started to move again.

  “The Primatial Basilica of the Blessed Virgin Mary Assumed into Heaven and Saint Adalbert,” he said in an amused voice. “And if you think that’s a mouthful you should hear it in Hungarian.” He headed across the room, opened the bathroom door, looked inside.

  Carey followed, unwilling to let the Englishman out of her sight. He was pointing the phone at the mirror over the sink, the light fitting, the little waste bin, the lavatory, the shower head. He looked at the screen of the phone, nodded to himself, turned it off, and pocketed it. Then he turned on the shower and the taps, closed the lid of the toilet, and sat.

  “How are you?” he asked genially, in a voice she could barely hear over the sound of running water.

  “I’ve been better,” she said. “Do you know what happened?”

  He shook his head. “Not yet, and that’s not important at the moment. Could you give me a quick rundown of what’s been going on since you arrived in Hungary, please. Just the bullet points; I’ll tell you if I need more detail.”

  Carey went through the Situation and its aftermath, as she understood them. Bradley stopped her a couple of times and asked her to expand on something. It took her almost an hour.

  “Could I see the phone this ‘Laura’ gave you, please?” he asked when she’d finished.

  “Sure.” The phone had fallen out of her pocket while she slept, and it was on the floor by the bed. She retrieved it and took it back into the bathroom, where Bradley turned it over in his hands. “She said she was a stringer,” she told him.

  “Hungary’s a strange old place,” he said, taking out his own phone and scanning hers. “There are Coureurs here, but they’re a bit of a law unto themselves. I’ve never met any of them. You said she was English.”

  “She sounded English.”

  He nodded and swiped through the phone’s screens and menus. “Well,” he said, handing it back, “it seems kosher. You should dispose of it, though.”

  “There’s still two and a half thousand Swiss francs on here,” she told him.

  “Someone’s emergency operational funds,” he said. “Actually, now I think, let me have it. I’ll see they get it back.”

  Carey gave the phone back and he dropped it in a pocket of his jacket and stood up. “I’m going to have a coffee, I think,” he said. “There are clothes and things in the bag. Get yourself cleaned up and changed and I’ll be back in, oh, say forty minutes and we’ll take it from there. Okay?”

  It occurred to Carey that she had not seen Bradley stop smiling once since she had looked at him through the door viewer. “How are you going to get me out of here?” she asked.

  “You let me take care of that,” he said, going to the door. “Lock up behind me, and I’ll see you in a little while.” And with that he was gone.

  She unzipped the bag and looked inside. A couple of pairs of jeans, some underwear, skirts, T-shirt, blouses, a warm jacket, sensible shoes, two fleeces, cosmetics, a tube of hair dye, a disposable battery-powered haircutting comb, and three pairs of spectacles with plain lenses. The clothes were all obviously bought by a man, but it was interesting that they were the right sizes.

  WHILE THE AMERICAN woman got ready, Bradley went along the street to a rather disreputable café. He bought an Americano and a small glass of brandy and took them both to a booth near the back. He made a couple of phone calls, then he took the phone the American had given him out of his pocket and looked it over. He scanned it again with his phone, went through its menus and settings. There were no numbers in its contacts folder, nor in its call history. He sat for a few moments, considering.

  He took the back off, removed its SIM and onboard memory cards, and snapped them in quarters. Then he used a penknife to lever out the phone’s battery and as much of its innards as would come out. He swept the bits of the phone into a little pile in the middle of the table and looked at his watch. He decided to give the woman another ten minutes, and sat back to drink his brandy.

  It was already too late; as he descended to the lobby in the lift, the phone had briefly woken itself up and scanned the immediate area for other communications devices. The only other device it found was Bradley’s phone, which was in the same pocket. The phone sent Bradley’s phone what appeared to be a text message. The message unpacked itself in a fraction of a second, took over Bradley’s phone, and then deleted itself. Every hour thereafter, his phone emitted a compressed and encrypted burst of data comprising GPS coordinates of everywhere it had been, everyone it had been connected to, and every conversation it had been privy to.

  “HERE,” SAID THE cobbler, holding out a hideous black and green sweater. “Put this on.”

  “You’re kidding, right?” Carey said.

  “You present yourself at the border wearing the same clothes as you’re wearing in your passport photograph, you’re asking for trouble,” the cobbler told her. “Just put it on over your shirt; you won’t
have to put up with it for long.”

  They were in a flat on the eastern side of the city, in a district that seemed to be made up mostly of small garages and workshops and light industrial units wedged in among decaying apartment blocks. The cobbler had been waiting for them, a big beefy man with the face of an unsuccessful boxer and an attaché case full of anonymous tech.

  She looked over at Bradley, who was sitting in a threadbare armchair near the window, and he nodded, so she pulled the sweater over her head. She’d opted for a skirt and a blouse over a plain black T-shirt. Smoothing the sweater down with one hand, she ran the other through her newly-cut and newly-auburn hair. She’d run the comb’s battery out cutting her hair down to about two inches in length; it was harder to do than it looked in the movies and it didn’t make her look all that different, if she was going to be honest, but with the dye job and a pair of spectacles she looked different enough not to attract second glances from anyone who might be looking for her.

  The cobbler posed her against the wall and took a couple of photos with his phone, then went back to doing cobbler stuff with the gear in his case. Carey took off the sweater and put her jacket back on and went over to stand beside Bradley.

  “Languages?” the cobbler asked, his back turned to them.

  “English and French,” Bradley said before Carey could speak up.

  “She doesn’t look French,” the cobbler grumbled.

  “Who does?” Bradley said cheerfully. Carey looked down at him, and he smiled at her.

  “I’m not going to make you English,” the cobbler said. “The English passport is an absolute bastard; it’d take me a week to make it convincing. How do you feel about being a New Zealander?”

  “I have an American accent,” Carey said.

  “Can you talk like a South African?” the cobbler said, still fiddling about with something in the case open on the table in front of him. “Sarf Iffrican? It’s like that.”