Europe in Winter

by Dave Hutchinson

  He said, “What went wrong?”

  “Nothing,” said Jean-Yves. “Nothing earth-shattering, anyway. We were prisoners, that’s all. Safe and content, but prisoners again nonetheless. Our social contacts were strictly limited and policed, the Community was stultifyingly dull. And the food was terrible. We just decided to leave, so one day we opened the border in Władysław and crossed into Prague. Roland had already contacted your father – I don’t know how – and he was waiting for us. And we went to ground. Until today.”

  “We’re here,” Forsyth said.

  THE COBBLER LOOKED about fourteen years old, a cocky, runty youth in a leather jacket and cowboy boots who carried his gear in an antique calfskin rucksack. From the window of the safe flat, Rudi could see the verdigrised rooftops of Jasna Góra, the monastery which housed the Czarna Madonna, a venerated icon ascribed with protecting Jasna Góra from the Swedish invasion in 1655. He didn’t like the view. Cz¸estochowa, its bustling streets, its crowds of pilgrims coming to visit the monastery, suddenly seemed dangerous. The whole world suddenly seemed dangerous, far beyond his ability to cope with it.

  “The photo you sent me was shit,” the cobbler said, handing over the fake passport. “But that’s good. Border guards get suspicious if your photo’s too good.”

  It occurred to Rudi that he had had just about enough of cobbler wisdom, which all seemed to boil down to you don’t want to look like your passport photo. He paid the cobbler and they went back down to the car.

  “Where now?” asked Forsyth as they stepped out into the courtyard behind the building, and Rudi felt strong hands grip his arms from behind. At his side, Forsyth and the Frenchman seemed to be struggling with invisible assailants. Rudi didn’t struggle. Forsyth was shouting, but no one came to investigate the disturbance. Several patches of air in front of them seemed to boil, and four figures wearing stealth suits appeared. They were all holding automatic rifles.

  An SUV with smoked windows drove into the courtyard and pulled up behind the armed men. Three men got out. Two of them were security-guard types in good suits. The third was shorter, slender. He had long auburn hair and he was wearing chinos and a blazer over a dark blue shirt. All of a sudden, Forsyth stopped struggling.

  “Hi, Snowy,” said the auburn-haired man. “’Sup?”

  Forsyth seemed to have been rendered utterly speechless, so the auburn-haired man walked over to Rudi and said, “Hi. Good to meet you. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I just want to take what belongs to me and then we’ll be gone. Okay?” He had an American accent.

  Charpentier began to walk, like someone performing a particularly excruciating mime, towards the SUV.

  “And you are...?” asked Rudi.

  The auburn-haired man smiled. Behind him, Charpentier seemed to bend himself over and levitate awkwardly into the back of the car. The door closed itself.

  “There,” said the American. “That didn’t hurt at all, did it.”

  Forsyth suddenly regained the power of speech. “You cunt,” he said. “I thought you were dead.”

  The American shook his head. “Nah, not me, Snowy,” he said. “Very hard to kill, that’s me.” He gave Rudi one last look, then he turned and walked back to the car. He and his bodyguards climbed in, the car reversed unhurriedly out of the courtyard, and they heard it drive away. The armed men seemed to shrug back into invisibility, and all of a sudden Rudi and Forsyth felt the unseen hands release them. Rudi thought he heard, very faintly, the sound of footsteps on the uneven paving stones of the courtyard. And then they were alone.

  4.

  SHE WAS SHOPPING in Freňstát when the call came through. It was probably the last free time she would have until the Spring; skiing season was beginning, up in the mountains, and with it the annual flood of tourists who came to try the pistes and the casinos and the spas and generally misbehave.

  She took out her phone, saw the ID, and sighed. “Yes?”

  “Had a flag go up, boss,” said Bruno. “Name of Laar. Estonian national.”

  She looked around the shop. She’d had a vague notion of buying some new clothes, but to be honest this year’s fashions seemed ridiculously young to her. She said, “When?”

  “Forty minutes ago. He came over the border with another man, Kenneth Paul March. The March passport’s an obvious fake; typical Coureur rush-job. The Laar documents seem authentic.”

  Yes, well, of course they would. “Where are they?”

  “The flag said detain at the border,” Bruno said. “They’re being held there.”

  The thing was, this was in no way even a surprise. His sidekick, the Englishman she rather fancied, had crossed into the Zone four days ago with a young woman travelling on an Australian passport. Facial recognition had spotted him, although to be fair he wasn’t hard to pick out of the crowds of guests; for all its pretence at moneyed cosmopolitanism, the Zone was still largely the playground of wealthy white Eurotrash, not young English people of colour. She’d decided to let the couple be and see what happened, but so far all that had happened was numerous long walks in the late autumn hills, followed by lengthy and openly romantic meals at various restaurants. Didn’t matter. The sidekick was a harbinger, his way of letting her know he was coming. Just like the stupid business with the Laar identity. It was his idea of professional courtesy; she thought he might even think it was cute.

  She was tempted to have him thrown into a cell and just leave him there for a couple of days, but she said, “Have them transferred to headquarters, put them in separate interview rooms. I’m on my way.”

  THE BESKID ECONOMIC Zone was not, technically, a polity. It was more of a theme park, rented from the Czech government by a consortium of corporations and granted a limited form of statehood. A string of resort hotels, most of them of adventurous design, ran along the mountains, and the skiing and the gambling attracted many hundreds of thousands of visitors every year.

  Unfortunately, the Zone’s general anything-goes reputation also attracted intelligence services from all over Europe, and despite Zone Security’s best efforts it only grew worse every year. It was getting like postwar Vienna or Munich; some days it seemed as if she was knee-deep in spies. She had begun to consider early retirement, maybe find herself a little cottage in Wales. She liked Wales. She wondered what she would do there.

  The Security building had been designed by a world-famous Chilean architect, who had come up with a structure resembling the lair of a Bond villain, clinging to the vertiginous side of a mountain gorge. The first time she’d seen it, on her first day as an intelligence officer, the view from some of its windows had made her dizzy. Now she hardly noticed.

  Her staff had moved the visitors to interview rooms on the third floor. “Has he said anything?” she asked Bruno as they walked down the corridor. “Claimed asylum? Demanded the use of Zone resources to go to war against the Community? Anything like that?”

  Bruno glanced at her. “He noticed we’d had the place redecorated.”

  That made her smile a little as they stopped outside the door. “Okay,” she said. “Wait here; I’ll do this myself.”

  “Okay, boss.” Bruno opened the door, let her step inside, and closed it behind her.

  He was sitting at the table in the middle of the room, smoking a small cigar, his cane propped up against his chair. It had been quite some time since they had last seen each other, and in the way of former lovers they each spent a few moments logging the grey hairs, the new wrinkles, remembering times past, visiting old regrets.

  Finally, he smiled bashfully. “Hello,” he said.

  “Hi,” she said, not unkindly.

  “I’m trying to stop a war,” he said. “And I need your help.”

  THEY HAD DINNER at a restaurant perched halfway up a sheer mountainside. The spectacular views from the terrace were reflected in the prices, but she had never paid for a meal since she became head of Zone Security. The restaurant was only accessible via a brightly-coloured funicular railway and a
carefully-camouflaged access road from the other side of the mountain. After dinner, they went back to the funicular station for the half-hour ride down to the car park. She put her arm through his as they walked. They had the car to themselves, but on the platform at the top she saw the English boy and the girl with the Australian passport among some passengers boarding a few cars back.

  She didn’t make a big thing of spotting them, but Rudi noticed anyway. He was good at things like that. He said, “Remember him?”

  “Who could forget?” She smiled. “Who’s the girl?”

  “Collateral damage.” He looked out of the window; dusk was falling and the valleys far below were filling with darkness. “Not mine, for once.”

  She walked to the other side of the car and perched herself on one of the window-seats as the train began to descend smoothly and unhurriedly. “I’ve been thinking about retiring,” she said.

  He smiled at her. “You won’t.”

  “I’ll have to, sooner or later.”

  “What would you do?”

  “I’ve given some thought to writing my memoirs.”

  That made him laugh. “Send me a copy.”

  “I’m not going to say anything about you, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

  He pouted theatrically. It made him look ridiculously young and vulnerable and she thought back, not for the first time this evening, to the first time they’d met, when he’d been hopelessly naive and useless. Not all changes can be codified by grey hairs and wrinkles.

  He put his hands in his pockets and leaned his forehead against the window, looking down into the valley. “I didn’t just lead them to Charpentier, I delivered him to them. I thought I’d become good at this, but I’d just become smug.”

  “You should stop feeling sorry for yourself and start worrying about what you’re going to do about it.”

  He turned from the window and looked at her. “My father,” he said. “He really was the fucking Devil.”

  “No he wasn’t,” she said. “He was just like us, just getting by the best he could. You can’t blame him for that.”

  “Oh, I can. He’s been dead eighteen months and he’s still leaving a trail of wreckage. You’d be surprised how much I can blame him.”

  She tipped her head to one side and looked at him.

  “And I’m not helping. I know.” He smiled ruefully. “Sorry.”

  “You’ve just spent two hours telling me the Community and the Sarkisian Collective’s patrons are at war,” she said. “You haven’t said a single word about how you think you’re going to stop it.”

  “I don’t know,” he told her. “Any ideas?” When she didn’t say anything, he put the heels of his hands to his eyes and rubbed gently. “Do you think,” he asked, “Crispin would listen to reason?”

  “‘Crispin’ doesn’t exist,” she reminded him. She’d used Zone Security’s resources to break into the Warsaw Metro’s personnel database, pull up Crispin’s files, and run a background check. It was so poorly backstopped as to be offensive; Crispin was a legend, a man of fog. “How are you going to find him?”

  He smiled ruefully. “I’ve located a man who can probably put me in touch; I’ve been running a data-scraping operation to find him.” He took his hands from his eyes and shrugged.

  “Okay. So this man puts you in contact with Crispin. What are you going to say?”

  Rudi looked out of the window again, trying to find a fault in his reasoning. His reflection looked exhausted. He was as certain as he could be, without someone actually showing him documentary evidence, that the Community had bombed the Line. Why was a mystery, but that didn’t matter right now. What mattered was that the builders of the Line had responded by transposing part of the Community onto Luxembourg, which meant they had access to the Sarkisian Collective’s research, which implied that they and the Sarkisians’ patrons were one and the same. The implications of that were too large to think about at the moment. He had no doubt that if he dug around a bit more he would find other examples of the Community and the Patrons poking and prodding each other like children in a school playground, a clandestine war of tit-for-tat which had only recently broken through into daylight.

  “One of them has to stop,” he said. “The Community’s nervous, they know how easily this could all spill over, but they won’t back down. The Patrons...” He shrugged. “I know it sounds utterly extraordinary, but I really think they’re running scenarios through the prediction engine in Dresden, over and over again, looking at the ones where they come out on top, manipulating events so that those scenarios come to pass. The world’s in the hands of fucking madmen.” He didn’t mention the growing suspicion that he was part of those scenarios; it seemed absurdly paranoid, even to him.

  She sighed. “And you’ve only just come to this conclusion?”

  He turned and looked across the car at her. “You think I shouldn’t get involved.”

  “You’re over twenty-one; you’re old enough to make your own decisions. I think you’re lucky you’ve not been killed already, for what it’s worth.”

  He thought about it. “Someone ought to try,” he said. “Otherwise what’s the point of anything?”

  LEV’S EXPLORATION OF the Patrons’ business interests had begun to resemble the exploration of North America. He had begun with a foothold in Dresden-Neustadt and had only slowly come to realise that beyond the trees was a continent which might as well be limitless. Though he had yet to positively identify a single person, he had uncovered many outposts and incursions, and the more he discovered, the more it alarmed Rudi. It was as if there was another structure underlying Europe; like the Community, but this time made of money and influence. Lev was beginning to turn up connections to serious organised crime and national governments. They also owned the Zone.

  This had momentarily put Marta – Rudi still thought of her as Marta, she’d never told him her real name and he’d respected that by never trying to find out – in something of a position, which she had resolved by the simple expedient of finding two members of her staff who resembled him and Forsyth and sending them over the border into the Czech Republic using the false passports he’d had made up. It was a fairly ramshackle piece of misdirection, but for the moment, if anyone asked, she could say quite truthfully that according to official records Tonu Laar and his friend were no longer in the Zone.

  She dropped him at the hotel – a modest place, by Zone standards, big enough for him and Forsyth to lose themselves among the other guests but not so big that he couldn’t scope out any unusual activity – and he went up to his room and locked the door and sat on the bed for a while, staring into space.

  He got up and went over to one of the fitted wardrobes and took out an attaché case about the size of an old-style pilots’ chart case. He carried it over to the bed and went through the nitpicking sequence of combinations and key-swipes to stop it incinerating its contents, then he opened it and emptied it on the duvet.

  Well.

  He arranged everything in what appeared to be chronological order, as best he could. Here was the photograph of the Sarkisian Collective at the Versailles peace conference, eight intense-looking young Frenchmen in formal suits, each of them with his umbrella. Rudi couldn’t tell which one was Charpentier.

  Next, his father’s birth certificates, ancient Soviet-era documents marked with official stamps in purple ink. It was by no means impossible to forge documents like this – depending on how picky you were, you could even do it with a printer/scanner and some image-processing software – but why would you forge someone’s birth certificate and make them forty years older than they actually were? Five years, maybe ten. But forty?

  The two passports. Identical birthdates, identical photos, different birthplaces. In the photos his father, wearing a shirt and tie, was contriving to look serious but only managing to look shifty. Rudi flicked through the little books, looking at the entry and exit stamps. There were, of course, no stamps for the most important b
order his father had crossed, over and over again. He must have spent quite a lot of time in the Community, off and on, for forty-odd years to have passed in Europe. Rudi supposed it all added up. The one thing it explained – and it was really of no earthly interest to anyone else – was his father’s stubborn refusal to give up Lahemaa. Although that made Rudi wonder why he had moved the family there when he did; had there been another operation going on? Infiltration and exfiltration from the Community?

  He presumed Juhan’s birth certificate had a similar birthdate on it, unless his source in the Community was wrong or someone else had been working with his father for the Directorate. Which begged the question of why Juhan had told him the story of the Frenchmen, and why he had handed over the chocolate box when he presumably had some inkling what it contained. Rudi didn’t want to think about it too much, because he’d only start breaking things. He laid the passports down beside the birth certificates.

  He stood looking down at the documents, turning the hard drive over in his hands. Lev had been quite impressed by the level of encryption used on the files it contained; it had taken him several days to crack them and access the first steps in the paper trail which had finally led Rudi to the quite fantastic sum of money Roland Sarkisian had stolen from his patrons, and then on to Charpentier. He’d also been impressed by how well Toomas had dispersed and hidden the money, although Rudi wasn’t remotely surprised; his father’s nature harboured depths of deviousness which would have startled a Borgia. What did surprise him was that Toomas hadn’t stolen the money from the Collective.

  Crispin hadn’t wanted the money. Even in these autumnal days a billion dollars was a significant amount, but Crispin hadn’t mentioned the money. All he had wanted was Charpentier, because Charpentier had something that was worth more than all the money in the world.

  The problem with the Community and the Patrons was that they weren’t children. The Patrons, whoever they were, were vastly powerful and wealthy, and the Community was a nuclear superpower which had already – albeit accidentally – released a flu pandemic in Europe. And now the Patrons had Charpentier, the last person left alive who could make sense of the Sarkisians’ research. The last person left alive who knew how to destroy the Community.