Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(36)

Mr Pasquinel paused, just to make Rudi aware he had noted that his own question had been ignored. “I really don’t see why not.”

The encryption was bouncing the call between frequencies and anonymisers, but even so they had less than a minute before being connected long enough for someone to detect it. Rudi said, “Stay in touch. If you get the slightest sense that something’s wrong, let me know and I’ll jump you out of there. Okay?”

“Will do. Is everything all right with you?”

“Everything’s fine. Where are you?”

“In a restaurant. It’s snowing here again.” There was a moment of dead air at the other end of the connection. “You remember you asked something about Luxembourg?”

“Yes?”

“Someone said something, in a meeting a couple of days after I got back. A contractor, one of the security firms we employ to look after some of our outside interests. He said his company had taken a big new contract in Luxembourg, then he shut up about it.”

“That could have been anything,” Rudi said, relaxing again.

“It could have been, but he said it was connected to something he called the Realm.”

Rudi sat back and looked up at the ceiling. “Are you sure that’s what he said?”

“I was sitting right next to him. Tedious, self-important little man.”

“If there were no tedious, self-important little men, there would be no Intelligence,” Rudi told him. “What’s the name of the firm?”

“Arabesque. Arabesque Security. Dreadful name.”

Rudi made a note on the back of an old restaurant order slip. “Okay,” he said. “Thank you. You take care of yourself. I’ll be in touch.”

He hung up and looked out of the window. It was snowing in Kraków, too.





1.





ACCORDING TO HIS father, once upon a time winters had been so cold that the Suur Strait regularly froze and it had been possible to build an ice road from the mainland to Muhu. That only happened about one year in five these days, and Rudi had never seen it.

In fact, he had only been here once before, and that had been at the height of summer. The Manor at P?daste had had an international reputation for the quality of its cuisine since the early days of the century, legacy of a long line of quite extraordinary chefs who had passed through down the years. He’d come up here when he was working in the Turk’s kitchen in Riga, saved up what amounted to a month’s salary to stay for a couple of days and work his way through the menu. Back then, the chef had been a burly, taciturn Norwegian named Amund, and his food had been so good that Rudi had almost quit cooking on the spot because he realised he would never be half as talented.

“Oh, do f*ck off,” Amund told him one evening when service was finished and they were sitting in the Manor’s bar, one chef to another. “I knew a guy once. Simeon. Worked in a kitchen in Hamburg.” He shook his head in wonder at the memory. “I’m still trying to cook as well as he did.”

“Fucking hell,” Rudi said, trying to imagine that.

“He told me his mum did this fantastic salmon dish. He’d always wanted to try to replicate it, so he worked for months, trying out this and that, but he could never get it quite right, so finally he went to his mum and asked her what she did that made the dish so special, and she just said, ‘Oh, I don’t know, I buy it from the fishmonger.’”

They both laughed. It was an old story, one of those urban legends. Everyone ‘knew’ a chef that had happened to.

“There’s always someone better than you,” Amund said. “Sooner you get used to the idea, the better. Stop thinking about it, just try to do the best you can.”

Leaning on the rail of the ferry, Rudi watched the red and white buildings clustering about Kuivastu harbour draw closer. Even at this time of year, the ferry was packed with tourists and their cars heading for the other side of Muhu and the causeway leading to Saaremaa. Kids were running about on deck, enjoying the twenty-five minute crossing, their parents promenading more quietly. At least it wasn’t as busy as midsummer. Rudi remembered the last time he had done this trip; there had been a kilometre-long queue of cars waiting for the ferries at Virtsu.

His phone rang. “How are you?” asked Lev.

“I’m all right.”

“Are you? Really? I was talking to the Community Man. He told me what happened.” Lev refused point blank to call Rupert ‘Rupert of Hentzau’. He said it was the stupidest workname he’d ever heard.

“I’m fine, Lev. But thanks. Is there a problem?”

“I’ve been looking for commonalities in some of the data we’ve been working with,” Lev told him. “And I think I’ve found one.”

Rudi flicked his cigar butt into the breeze. “Anything interesting?”

“Well, if you think about it, it’s probably not that surprising, but most of the money to build Dresden-Neustadt came from some of the same places the money to build the Line came from.”

“You’ve found out where the Line’s money came from?” As far as most people were concerned, the Line had been funded by pots of gold found at the end of rainbows. Journalists and conspiracy theorists had been trying to identify the Trans-European Republic’s infamously shy founders for decades.