Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(101)

They drove a short distance from the Underground station, then the car pulled into a side street and everyone got out. The driver and the bodyguards went to the back of the car and took out a number of bags and suitcases and rucksacks, then they closed and locked the car and Crispin led the way up the street.

After a few metres, he turned in to a narrow path between two houses, and they all followed. The path started out as tarmac underfoot, but as it passed beyond the houses the surface changed and Rudi could feel trodden-down grass and earth beneath his feet. They were walking along a quite narrow strip of wild land – he felt the thorns of an overhanging bramble catch his sleeve and pull away. Through the trees to one side, he could see the lights of houses, and on the other, down what seemed to be quite a steep embankment, more house lights.

“I never met a deus ex machina before,” Rudi said.

Up ahead, Crispin had taken out a torch to light their way. He guffawed. “Deus ex Michigan, maybe.”

“Where are we going, by the way?”

“You’ll see,” Crispin told him. “Got a little surprise for you.”

Ahead of them, Rudi saw two figures standing on the path. They were holding little lanterns, the kind you take camping with you and hang up in your tent. Luggage was piled at their feet. He only recognised one of them, but he knew who the other was. It couldn’t, he realised, have been anyone else.

“Chief Superintendent,” he said.

Smith grinned. “Hello,” she said.

He looked at her. “I wish I could think of something cutting or wry to say to you, but I really think I’m all out of smart lines.”

“About f*cking time,” Crispin muttered as he fiddled with a rucksack.

“The people who died on Muhu, they were working for you?”

Smith shook her head. “No. That wasn’t supposed to happen,” she said. “It was a mess. I’m sorry your friend died.”

“What happened?”

“We don’t know what happened,” Crispin said. “We don’t know who the other guys were or who they worked for or what they wanted. All we were doing was watching you and waiting for you to lead us to Sarkisian and his boys, we weren’t prepared for a f*cking bloodbath. By the time the chaos died down, you were gone. So we had to go through that f*cking pantomime in Warsaw to smoke you out.”

Rudi didn’t know what was more disturbing, discovering that Crispin wasn’t omnicompetent after all, or discovering that there was yet another unknown player out there.

“For what it’s worth, I figure it was the Chinese,” Crispin said. “Or maybe just some guys who wanted the money.”

“Don’t you want the money?”

Crispin pulled a face and shrugged. “We’ve managed without it all these years. You keep it. Or give it to charity. Yeah, give it to charity, make some cats and dogs happy.”

“It’s almost a billion dollars,” Rudi protested mildly.

Crispin snorted. “You’re such a f*cking straight arrow,” he said. “Money’s not everything.”

“No, but you can buy everything with it.”

“That fiasco in Estonia wouldn’t have happened if it wasn’t for the money,” Crispin pointed out. “We knew your dad worked for the Community but we didn’t know he was mixed up with Sarkisian’s bunch until the old guy got in touch.”

“My father?”

“The other old guy. The rocker. He tried to sell us the bank codes to our own money, stupid bastard.”

Rudi sighed and turned to the other figure. “If you didn’t know my father was involved, why did you send me that photograph of the Sarkisians?”

Andrew Molson was tall and fair-haired and handsome in the lantern-light, in a raffish, disreputable sort of way. His handshake was firm. He said, “Nice to meet you finally.”

Rudi looked about him at Crispin’s little excursion. He looked at Molson, and words failed him. He shook his head.

“You mustn’t be too hard on yourself,” said Molson. “You weren’t to know.”

Rudi squinted against the light of the lantern in Molson’s hand. “Who do you work for, actually?”

“He works for me,” said Crispin, slinging the rucksack over his shoulder.

“No I don’t,” Molson said genially. “You work for me.” And Rudi had a dizzying moment when he felt that he was the fly looking at the intelligence which had made the clock.

“Ah, whatever,” Crispin said.

“We thought you might help us find the remaining members of the Collective, if we made it an interesting enough problem,” Molson told Rudi. “We didn’t anticipate that you’d be quite so... intimately involved.”

“Well thank Christ you’re fallible,” Rudi said. “Otherwise I’d be really angry about all this.”

“I’ve spent a long time trying to stop my people and your people destroying each other,” said Molson.

“Why?”

Molson looked a little surprised by the question. “The Presiding Authority really were going to use the flu virus to depopulate Europe and then come over the border and take over, but it got out before they were ready and your people managed to survive. They would have tried again, if you and I and our friend from the Campus and a lot of other people hadn’t stopped them.”