Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(24)
AFTER SETH HAD flown back to England and Rupert had taken off for the gods only knew where, the conversation kept coming back and nagging at him. He found it playing over and over again at the back of his mind through long days and nights at the restaurant. Unfinished business. Closure. Purpose.
Late at night, he found himself jotting things down – on paper, which was easier to destroy than notes on a pad. At first it was just scraps of ideas, half-remembered conversations, Situations, but at some point he realised that what he was doing was writing his own life, or at least the latter part of it, the part which had been taken over and used by Coureur Central and, quite probably, by others. He had no idea who these people were, or what they wanted. He had done what he had thought was right at the time, although to be honest now he looked back none of it seemed to have made any difference to anything. He’d jumped people out of the Community until the Presiding Authority opened the borders – really, in the great scheme of things he could only have been a minor irritation. He sat and thought about white whales again.
Which eventually brought him here, to this flat in one of the rougher parts of L?tzebuerg, using his phone to trawl some of the wilder chat rooms and bulletin boards and blogs for word of one Dieter Wilhelm Berg, last seen being marched towards a police car this morning. Yesterday morning, it being three a.m. now. The Englishwoman was snoring in the spare room. Rudi had done some discreet searches of her name, and found no mention of her. Which was interesting. The local police certainly knew her name – they’d raided her hotel – but they had chosen not to circulate a public bulletin, and there was nothing about her in the great undertow of rumour and hearsay which made up most of social media these days. Ditto for Berg, who had claimed to have information for Rudi and appeared to have been preparing to hand the same information to Gwen. Rudi felt a little disappointed with Berg for doing that.
Berg had found him, heard word that he was looking for something and made contact using a very old word-string on a microblogging site sometimes used by Coureurs. Rudi only saw it by chance, and was intrigued enough to set up a series of blinds and dummies and cut-outs via which to reply. And here he was. And Berg was... nowhere. Not a word of him anywhere, not even among the most paranoid discussion groups, who surprisingly often, and usually without realising it, stumbled across information that was actually of some use. Nothing.
Rudi shut down his phone and put it on the kitchen table in front of him and rubbed his eyes. Beyond his reflection, snow eddied in the light from the living room window. It had been snowing for a couple of hours, and the sound of the traffic in the street below had given way to a soft, snuggled silence.
He got up and went to the window. The snow turned the streetlights into great fuzzy spheres illuminating the occasional car or van picking its way carefully along a fat pair of tramlines cut into the pillowed white surface of the road. The shopfronts on the other side were blurry and indistinct. A couple of figures, bulky in cold-weather clothing, fought their way along the pavement, heads down against the wind.
Rudi turned and perched on the windowsill and looked around the flat. It was two years since anyone had tried to kill him. Something was wrong.
“IT WAS SUPPOSED to be safe,” Gwen said. “It wasn’t even supposed to be illegal.”
They were sitting at the dining table having breakfast. Rudi had made eggs Benedict, which Gwen had regarded with some initial suspicion.
“I don’t understand,” Rudi said. “If it wasn’t illegal, why go to the trouble of all the cloak-and-dagger?”
“Lewis,” Gwen answered, sitting back and picking up her cup of coffee. “Lewis thinks he’s living in a spy novel.”
“And you?” asked Rudi. “How do you feel about that?”
“It’s a bit stupid, isn’t it,” said Gwen, and Rudi saw a hint of embarrassment in her body language, as if she’d been caught enjoying a game meant for toddlers. “Lewis said it was better if a woman came for the meeting because nobody would suspect a woman.”
“If you’ll excuse me for saying so,” Rudi said, “Lewis sounds like a dick.”
“I was the only woman in the group,” she said. “The whole conspiracy scene’s mostly blokes. Blokes without lives of their own.”
“How did you get involved with them?” Rudi asked. “If it’s not a rude question.”
She shrugged. “Rob,” she said. “My ex. He was at university with Lewis. Lewis invited him to one of the meetings, he took me along. We split up, he stopped going to the meetings, I didn’t.”
“You found Community conspiracy theories interesting?”
She tipped her head to one side and looked at him. “I really hope that wasn’t a prelude to some sort of mysoginistic comment.”
He shook his head. “That never occurred to me, in all seriousness,” he said. “I’m just fascinated by the Community groups.”
“It wasn’t any weirder than the UFO nuts,” she pointed out. “And it turned out to be true.”
“Have you ever heard the name Delahunty?” he asked.
“No.”
“Rafe Delahunty? Or possibly Araminta?”
“No.”
Rudi shrugged. “A friend of mine knew them,” he said. “They claimed to have been in touch with a Community group in London, people who had maps of border crossings.”