Europe in Autumn (40 page)

This of course brought him to his present situation. Was he once again part of a provocation? Was he being run against the Community, for reasons he would never know, by people he would never meet?

It was impossible to be sure. He could, of course, elect to do nothing for the moment, and see what happened. He could try to second-guess the situation and pick the least likely course of action, but he would never be certain it wasn’t the course of action he was
supposed
to take. He could throw himself into the sea and drown, but there was always the itching suspicion that someone, somewhere, would have taken that possibility into account. Unlike the espionage soaps, where there was always a way to drop a spanner into the works and somehow come out victorious, he was in the hands of planners who had seen every eventuality. They were the students of centuries of expertise, from the couriers of pre-Christian Pharaohs with secret messages tattooed on their scalps, through the agents of Francis Walsingham, through the gentleman adventurers of the Great Game, through MI6 and SOE and OSS and the Okhrana and NKVD and the CIA. They knew their stuff.

This was the basis of his epiphany on that street in London, a sense that it didn’t matter
what
he did because he was part of a Plan, a Plan designed to make it seem as though he had complete free will. And he may have been right; he hadn’t been arrested. Whoever They were, They wanted him to get away with the money from Smithson’s Chambers, and use it for whatever ends he decided.

Oddly enough, this did not bother him as much as it might have. It was oddly liberating, knowing that whatever he did had been planned for. And so he chose to default to himself. Rudi the Coureur. Rudi, who saw a phrase like
the most jealously guarded borders in Europe
, and saw, behind those borders, people who wanted to leave.

“It sounds,” he told Lev, “like a challenge.”

O
NE MORNING
R
UDI
told Lev that he was going away for a couple of days. “I really shouldn’t be more than forty-eight hours,” he said. “If I’m gone longer than that and you don’t hear from me, put everything in the burnbox and activate it. Then get out of here and drop the box in the sea.” He handed Lev a slip of paper on which were printed several strings of letters and numbers, encrypted codes for private bank accounts. “Can you memorise these?”

“Are you joking?” Lev snorted. Some of the strings ran to fifty characters.

“Ah well.” Rudi smiled. “You probably won’t have to use them.”

And he was right. For the first few hours, Lev kept coming back to the list of bank codes and wondering why he didn’t get out right now, access the accounts, transfer the money, and just keep running. He never did find an answer to that question; instead, he spent the time in the room reading decrypts, eating room service meals and working his way through the minibar, and forty-eight hours after he left, almost to the minute, Rudi was back, smiling and eager to have a look at what the cloth laptop had produced for them while he was gone.

A few days later – and he wasn’t fooling anyone, but Lev did appreciate the pretence of tradecraft, it was a nod from one professional to another – Rudi casually said, “I’ve got something for you,” and handed over a passport.

Lev turned the little card over in his fingers. It belonged, according to the Cyrillic on the front, to one Maksim Fedorovich Koniev, a citizen of Novosibirsk, in the Independent Republic of Sibir. His photograph had somehow found its way onto the card, alongside what he presumed was his thumbprint, and the card’s embedded chip presumably also contained other biometric data about him. He looked up.

“You don’t have to
live
there,” Rudi said, a little awkwardly.

“In the summer,” Lev informed him, “Sibir can be a most beautiful place.”

Rudi held out a shrinkwrapped disc. “There’s a legend, too. I left it vague, but there’s some documentary stuff in Novosibirsk and Norilsk to support it. You can leave it the way it is or do some backfilling, it’s up to you. Take the bank codes; all your money’s there.”

So this was how it ended. Lev looked at the card again. If his former life had taught him anything, it was that we only ever see a little part of the big picture. A few lines of communication from a codenamed agent here, a list of political targets there, an impenetrable economic dossier elsewhere. What were
their
stories? At least here was a new story, a new life all ready for him to live it. “Thank you,” he said, genuinely touched. The money alone would have been enough.

Rudi looked away and shrugged, and Lev thought the boy was actually embarrassed by his gratitude. “What will you do now?” he asked.

Rudi looked at him and grinned. “I’m going to shake the tree and see what falls out.”

1.

T
HE WAR BEGAN
on a Thursday.

Petr always remembered that because Thursday was his turn to deliver the kids to school and pick them up again, and he was sitting in the car waiting outside Tereza’s apartment in the morning when his phone rang.

“Boss?” said Jakub. “Put the radio on. There’s been an outrage.”

Jakub was a good, steady detective, but he was prone to exaggeration on occasion. Petr sighed and switched on the radio and discovered that this was not one of those occasions.

He looked out of the window and saw Tereza coming out of the building’s entrance with Eliška and Tomáš, all bundled up against the weather, schoolbags slung over their shoulders and Big Blue Cat lunchboxes clutched in their little gloved fists. His heart sank.

They crossed the road to the car and Petr lowered the window. “Sorry,” he said to Tereza. “Sorry,” he said to the children.

“I saw it on the news,” she said. “I’ll take them to school. Will you be able to collect them?”

“There’s no way to tell,” he said.

“I have that job interview this afternoon,” she said. “You know that. It’s been arranged for ages.”

“Go to your interview,” he told her. “I’ll pick them up.”

“Or you’ll organise someone else to do that.” She shook her head. “I’m so tired of this, Petr.”

“They’ll love it,” he said jovially. He looked down at the kids. “How about a ride in a police car with Uncle Jakub this afternoon?” They looked uncertainly pleased.

Tereza snorted. “Uncle Jakub.”

He started the engine and put the car in gear. “I’m sorry,” he said again, and drove away.

T
HERE WAS A
bar called TikTok, just off Karlovo námeští in the Old Town, that Petr and the department had been keeping their eyes on for several months. They had some vague intelligence that a Chechen warlord calling himself Abram, having been chased from Bremen by a combination of local police and home-grown brigands, had bought himself a controlling interest in TikTok and was shaping the place to use as a beach-head in Prague.

This was obviously not an optimum outcome for anybody, but hours of surveillance and intelligence gathering had failed to confirm the rumours. Ownership of TikTok was an impossible tangle of blind trusts and offshore funds and tax avoidance schemes so complex that they were practically sentient; if Abram was in there somewhere, he was well hidden. He had also not been observed to visit his supposed new acquisition; nor had any of his known lieutenants. Petr had sent a team into the bar on the onerous mission of becoming regulars, and they reported nothing out of the ordinary, as did the young woman detective who he had sent in to get a job as a waitress. TikTok, to all intents and purposes, was utterly blameless.

“What a fucking mess,” said Jakub.

For once, Petr reflected, his sergeant was erring on the side of understatement. The street was full of rubble and shattered glass and wrecked cars. Every shop window was broken, as were most of the apartment windows in the blocks above them. Huge bits of moulding and brickwork had fallen into the street.

The devastation grew worse as one looked down the street, until one’s eye was drawn to the centre, the heart of destruction, the smoking pile of collapsed brick and wood and metal which had once housed the bar known as TikTok. It was as if, Petr thought, the bar had explosively vomited its innards into the street and then slumped in on itself and taken everything above and around it down as well.

Both ends of the street were full of detectives and uniformed policemen and firemen and soldiers. Further down, an Army bomb team was still sending robots into the destroyed building to check for further devices. Until they were done there was no way to allow the fire brigade or police anywhere near it and until that happened there was no way to discover just how bad the loss of life was. Preliminary reports said fifteen dead, thirty injured, but Petr knew those figures were going to rise in a hurry. The bomb had gone off just as people were going to work.

“We’re presuming it was a bomb,” Jakub said.

“Yes,” Petr said. “Yes, we’re presuming it was a bomb.”

Jakub nodded. “ATG are on their way.”

Petr sighed. His department’s relationship with the Anti-Terrorist Group was fractious at best. “I’m surprised they aren’t here already,” he said, but it was a poor attempt at a joke. “Did something happen last night?”

Jakub shook his head. “Normal night, according to the boys.”

Petr swallowed and asked the question that had been hanging between them ever since he got there. “Milena?”

“She’s not answering her phones,” Jakub said soberly. “At home or her mobiles. She’d have been starting work about now.”

Petr scowled. The bombing was bad enough. Losing the young undercover detective he’d placed in the bar was a catastrophe. “Keep trying her phones,” he said. “Has anyone been to her apartment?”

Jakub nodded. “Nobody there.”

Petr felt sick. He took a deep breath. “All right. We can’t do anything here until the Army have finished sniffing around. I want everybody out shaking snitches. I want to know how this happened without us hearing anything about it, and I want to know who’s responsible.”

“Yes, boss.”

“And could you pick the kids up from school this afternoon?”

Jakub glanced at him, returned to looking at the wreckage of the street. “Yes, boss.”

Petr made his way to a lorry parked in a nearby street. The doors of the container on its loadbed were open. Petr went up the steps and stepped inside and looked at the rows of detectives and operatives manning the consoles of the mobile control room. At the far end of the container thirty or so paper flatscreens had been pasted to the wall; they were each showing a different view of the wrecked street.

“Brabec,” a voice behind him said.

Petr turned, saw Major Vĕtrovec, his opposite number at Anti-Terrorism, standing in the control room doorway. “Miloš,” he said.

“What do we have?” Vĕtrovec was a small, round, bald man in a tight suit

“We’re treating it as a bomb until told otherwise,” Petr said. “All utilities have been isolated, the street’s been closed off. The fire brigade can’t get near the seat of the explosion until the Army are sure there are no secondary devices, and we can’t go anywhere near it until the fire brigade tell us it’s safe to do so.”

Vĕtrovec looked at the screens at the end of the control room and shook his head. He turned and called through the open door. “Ismail, see if you can contact the Minister. The lazy bitch should be here anyway.”

“Ah, good,” Petr said. “You brought Ismail.”

“He’s my second in command,” Vĕtrovec said. “Of course he’s here.”

“He stays out of my way,” Petr warned. The last time he and Vĕtrovec’s dead-eyed assassin of a deputy had encountered each other professionally, they had almost wound up having a fist fight in the middle of an apartment where a terror suspect had been arrested.

“As you wish,” Vĕtrovec said as if he didn’t care much either way. “I understand this bar was of interest to you?”

Petr filled him in quickly on the supposed presence of Abram in Prague, the measures he’d taken to investigate. He thought he saw Vĕtrovec’s expression soften when he told him about Milena. Vĕtrovec was an unpleasant little bastard, but he was still a cop, of sorts, and every policeman feels the loss of one of their own.

When he’d finished, Vĕtrovec said, “The building was of interest to us as well.”

Petr smiled tightly. “Of course it was.”

“Not the bar,” Vĕtrovec said, “which is why you were not on the to-know list. One of the apartments on the fifth floor. A group of Saudi students.”

“Who were, in all likelihood, completely innocent.”

“Who had already met with a Bulgarian mafia group and were in the process of negotiating the purchase of seven kilos of Semtex.” Vĕtrovec looked at him. “We’re not amateurs, you know.”

Petr gestured at the screens. “Is anyone else interested in this place who I haven’t been told about? Hm? Immigration? Traffic wardens?” He was aware that he was raising his voice, but he didn’t care. “Because if someone had thought to put me on your ‘to-know’ list I wouldn’t have sent one of my detectives in there undercover!”