Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(18)
Covert.
She didn’t pick it up, not right away. She sat where she was on the bed, looking at it. Lucky, she thought, that the room had not been rebooked when she didn’t turn up yesterday. The piece of paper had fallen face-down, but she thought she could see the shadows of lettering from the other side. She had thought that her arrival in Luxembourg had been the first step, but it wasn’t. This was. This was the key that opened the mystery, something that had fallen, not from the pages of a Bible, but from the pages of an espionage novel. She felt a delicious thrill at putting off reading whatever was on the other side of the slip of paper. Once she looked at it there would no going back; she would have to keep moving forward. Drink me.
She reached forward and delicately took one edge of the piece of paper between thumb and forefinger, turned it over and laid it back on the bed. There, in tiny printing, was a date, an address, and a time, and the words Are you the guide? No, I’m an engineer.
Spy stuff. Her first reaction was a dizzying sense of relief; the date was today and the time two hours from now. She’d made it. Yesterday’s f*ckup didn’t matter any more; Lewis need never know. Her second reaction was a wave of excitement that felt almost exactly like fear.
Gwen sat back and took a deep breath. All right. So, tradecraft. At her final briefing, in a pub not far from Waterloo Station a couple of days ago, Lewis had drilled into her the importance of remaining covert. She had to assume that she was under some kind of surveillance, because that was just what national intelligence agencies did, it was axiomatic. The most common form of surveillance – because it was the least labour-intensive – was monitoring of communications and internet usage, algorithms ceaselessly winnowing a torrent of content for hotphrases and keywords. So, no Googling of the address. She read it again. She had crammed mercilessly with information about the city before leaving London, but the address only rang a faint bell. She read it one more time, closed her eyes, recited it under her breath, opened her eyes to make sure she had it right, then she picked up the slip of paper and put it in her mouth. It melted on her tongue. It tasted faintly of cinnamon.
Okay. She checked the clock on her phone. Enough time for a shower and a change of clothes. Wherever she was going, she hoped it had a café. She’d been too nervous to eat anything at Stansted and there had been no time on the flight. She was starving.
AT HER REQUEST, the concierge summoned a taxi to take her into town. She asked to be dropped off, as Lewis had instructed, at the Luxembourg headquarters of Deutsche Bank, a forty-storey wedge of glass and steel and carbon composites balanced improbably and alarmingly on its thin end. There was a piazza in front of the building, busy with street vendors’ carts and businessmen and tourists, all of whom appeared oblivious to the possibility of the bank toppling over on them. At one edge of the piazza was a row of public information kiosks. Gwen stooped into one and called up a tourist map of the city. She found the address almost at once, without even having to search the map. Park Dr?i Eechelen was in Clausen, a district about a kilometre from where she was standing. She left the kiosk and walked out into the piazza, bought a bunch of white roses at a florist’s cart, and set out for the rendezvous.
The walk took her through a district of modern office buildings, onto a busy road, then over a bridge which crossed high over a broad wooded river gorge. The sky was grey and cloudy and it was windy on the bridge; she had to hold the flowers close to her body to stop them blowing away. On the other side, she crossed the road into the Parc des Trois Glands. The footpaths and cycleways through the wooded park were signposted, and she headed for the Museum Dr?i Eechelen.
She came upon the museum suddenly, emerging from the trees and discovering herself standing beside a small mediaeval castle or fortification which seemed to have grown out of a much larger and much more modern glass and steel building.
Gwen wandered around to the front of the fortification, where an animated banner proclaimed an exhibition about Luxembourg’s history. A short bridge had been built across the structure’s moat, and in front of this were parked two police cars.
Her heart performed a single colossal thud in her chest. They couldn’t be here because of her. Could they? She forced himself to keep moving forward, because turning and running would only have looked suspicious.
As she approached the cars, four policemen emerged from the entrance to the fortification. Between them was a short man with a florid, anxious face. The short man took in Gwen and the bunch of roses in one glance, and for a moment their eyes met and Gwen knew.
All of a sudden, the short man stomped to a halt and began arguing loudly with the policeman nearest to him. The others stopped and turned to see what was going on, and Gwen walked past them, past the cars, and around the other side of the museum. She was out of sight of the little group when a wave of dizziness overtook her, and she realised that she had been holding her breath ever since she had seen the police cars. She stopped for a moment, breathed out shakily, and inhaled slowly. Her heart was racing and little black spots danced in front of her eyes. She simultaneously wanted to throw up and to curl up and lose consciousness until this mess went away.
The sound of engines startled her. She looked around as casually as she could manage, and saw the police cars coming towards her along the block-paved drive that circled the museum. Her heart seemed to pause for a moment, then the driver of the lead car waved her away and she stepped to one side to let them pass. As they went by, she saw the short man sitting in the back of the second car, his head bowed. Gwen watched them disappear around a curve in the driveway, then she turned off the drive and into the large glass building, which turned out to be a museum of modern art.