Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(44)
He’d thought he would have to break into the boathouse, which would have caused more complications, but there was a little fishing boat tied up to the jetty, not much more than a dinghy with an outboard motor. He checked the motor, found a full can of petrol in the bottom of the boat along with a pair of oars and a grubby waxed jacket. He put the jacket on over his own. There was a weird knitted cap in one of the pockets, along with half a pack of cigarettes and a battered old Zippo. He put the cap on, cast off, and rowed the boat away from the shore.
Rudi rowed for about an hour before starting the engine. The boat was battered, but the engine, though an antique, was obviously well cared-for. He opened the throttle and put some distance between himself and P?daste, going southwest along the coast. At the far southwest corner of the island, he struck out across the strait towards Saaremaa.
A few hours later, he pulled the boat up onto a beach east of Nasva, filled the engine’s fuel tank from the petrol can, and set out again. Not far from L?bara, in the west of the big island, he beached the boat again. He dragged it up as far as he could from the waterline, broke branches off nearby trees to conceal it with, found some bushes a few hundred metres away, curled up in them and fell asleep, hoping that if anyone connected the theft of the boat with him they would assume he had headed east towards the Estonian mainland simply because that was the most rational thing to do.
The next morning, just after dawn, he topped up the boat’s fuel tank one last time, briefly checked the GPS on his phone, and steered due south, the boat rocking and plunging alarmingly on the waves.
It took several hours to cross the Irbe V?in Strait. The pain in his leg, from yesterday’s exertions and sleeping in a bush, was almost unbearable, and he hadn’t eaten since breakfast the previous day. He slumped in the back of the boat, vaguely seasick, one arm draped over the engine’s steering column, occasionally checking his phone to make sure he was still on course and not heading into the Gulf of Riga.
He fell asleep again, was woken by a jolt through the hull of the boat, jerked his eyes open terrified that he had struck something. But when he sat up he saw that it was okay. He’d only struck Latvia.
2.
“WELL, WE’VE ANNOYED somebody,” Rupert said.
“Mm,” said Rudi. “I hadn’t quite anticipated a reaction like this.”
They were sitting in the garden of a guest house not far from Biarritz, the destination of Rudi’s month-long dustoff from Latvia, during which he had burned through six ready-made false identities and twenty or so disposable phones. Rudi had his leg, which was still giving him discomfort, up on a footstool. In response to his crash alert following his arrival in Latvia, Seth and Gwen had gone to ground somewhere outside Poland and Lev had packed up his computers and departed Sibir for points west.
“So, are we any closer to knowing who?” asked Rupert.
“No,” Rudi grumped. The fire at Soonda, and its aftermath, had been on Estonian news sites for about a week, more interesting for what was left out than what was mentioned. Initially it had been ascribed to faulty wiring, then vandalism, then ‘criminal activity’. Five people had died, according to the official account – the husband and wife who owned the farm and three guests, their bodies too burned for easy identification. Of the dead man and woman Rudi had found, not a word. Which was interesting. Eventually, the story had dropped down the news agenda and then disappeared altogether. His name was not mentioned once. “I hate being on the run,” he said.
“Yes,” said Rupert, who had also spent time on the run.
They sat for a while, side by side, in their deckchairs, looking out across the couple of hectares of garden. It was unseasonably warm and the high hedges surrounding the garden trapped the sun’s warmth. The world, and all its cares and problems, seemed far away, but they both knew better.
“Do you at least have an idea what we did?” Rupert asked finally.
“I’m not totally certain we did anything,” Rudi said after a moment’s thought. “I have the awful feeling that this was coming anyway.” He and Rupert looked at each other. “I don’t know.”
“What do you want me to do?”
Rudi smiled. “Well...”
LATER, AFTER RUPERT had left, Rudi took himself back to his room and sat on the bed. It had been a long time since his first encounter with Les Coureurs, since his first Situation. He had, he thought, become quite adept at certain things in the interim, and now he thought about it, that had made him lazy, complacent. He’d learned that he could cope, and coping wasn’t enough.
Someone, it seemed, had tried to kill him at Soonda. Either the dead couple he had found outside the cottage had been sent to stop the assassin, and had failed, or they themselves were the assassins and had been killed by another party. That was a picture he might not ever understand.
Smith’s presence on the island was, of course, suggestive, as was the news that he was somehow connected to Mundt’s murder by the photograph the presumed killer had been carrying. Had someone tried to kill him in retaliation for that?
Reaching under the bed, he took out the package Juhan had given him, his inheritance. Stripped of its brown paper, it had proven to be a chocolate box – an unfamiliar English brand. He lifted the lid and looked inside. There was an ancient external hard drive, almost as big as the box itself, a single gigabyte of storage, a couple of cables to plug it in to a computer, and a little plastic bag of adaptors which spoke of many years of computer evolution. Beneath this were his father’s two passports, and beneath those was a long envelope containing his father’s two birth certificates.