Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(45)
He had found, taped to the inside of the lid of the box, a newer, smaller envelope containing two safety deposit keycards, a folded slip of paper with three names written on it in his father’s spidery, near-illegible hand – Roland Sarkisian, Jean-Yves Charpentier, Fran?ois Tremblay – and a black and white photograph.
He took out his phone and thumbed up the photograph Smith had given him in Suffolk. He held up the photograph he had found among his father’s effects, and looked from one to the other and back again. They were, so far as he could tell, identical.
He closed the photo on his phone, called up a browser, Googled the three names, hoping that at least this time the internet might offer up some kind of explanation, but there was still only a brief wiki entry about Roland Sarkisian, born in Alen?on in 1894 – Le Parapluie, as he’d apparently been known. A mathematician of some charisma, it seemed, because he had managed to draw around him a group of like-minded young men who styled themselves the ‘Sarkisian Collective.’ A search for mentions of the Collective only turned up half a dozen hits, all of them footnotes to various arcane-looking mathematical treatises.
He held up the photograph again and squinted at it. The background was crowded with people and it was hard to make out faces, but there was a little group of young men, eight of them, standing close together and staring solemnly towards the camera. They were all holding furled umbrellas.
Rudi put the photo down on the bed and took his father’s birth certificates out of their envelope. He read the birthdates again, and he shook his head.
“You old f*cker,” he muttered.
1.
AFTERWARD, NO ONE was quite certain when Carey arrived in Szolnok. She claimed it was the end of September, but there was credible evidence that she’d been there since at least August. The country’s various border agencies, squabbling like rival shopkeepers, were unable to come up with a name, a date, or a frontier crossing at which she had entered Hungary; all anyone was able to be sure of was that at some point she had started quietly filing lifestyle pieces – fashion, music, food – to a little-known online magazine. She was American, travelling on a Texas passport, and she was serious about her work. Later, in interrogation rooms at Police Headquarters, dozens of people she had interviewed all over the city were debriefed. It was generally agreed that she had been utterly professional about maintaining her legend. More than one member of the Intelligence services expressed a degree of admiration for her, although they also expressed a greater degree of annoyance that she had been in the country at all.
It was Carey’s first time in Hungary; her beat usually took in France and Spain and all the little nations thereof. She was a tall, cheerful woman of a certain age who spoke seven languages, four of them fluently, and could swear convincingly in three more. She seemed particularly interested in a number of Avar burials unearthed by workmen building a new ring-road outside the town. The Avars buried their dead with their horses, and these were particularly splendid examples.
Carey made several visits to the site, talking to archaeologists from the University of Budapest who were excavating it, and it was later presumed that it was during one of these visits that she took receipt of the Package, although nobody could be entirely certain.
She next popped up on the official radar at one of the border crossings over the River Dráva between Hungary and Croatia. It was a rainy afternoon in mid-October, and the light was already starting to fail when she pulled her car in to the border station and joined the queue of private vehicles waiting to be processed.
The Hungarians had hardened their borders decades ago, even before the Xian Flu and the atomisation of the EU, against refugees fleeing the Middle East and North Africa, and the border station still bore the signs of hasty expansion; temporary buildings which had become permanent, piles of rubble and fencing material almost completely overgrown, a lorry park whose asphalt had cracked and sprouted weeds over the years here by the river.
The Ufa explosion had caused a spike in terrorist alerts across Europe; border guards had become particularly bloody-minded, and today there was a long line of cars and vans waiting to cross into Croatia, as well as maybe thirty lorries and half a dozen coaches. A little bar on the other side of the waiting area was doing a roaring trade in burgers and bottled beer and soft drinks, and there was a line of people outside the toilet block.
This much was normal, in fact comforting. This was a landscape Carey knew well, and nothing looked out of the ordinary. Border crossings, when you boiled off much of the local colour, were all pretty much the same. She put the car into Park, set the handbrake, and got out to stretch her legs. She’d done the trip from Szolnok in one go, and she felt a little stiff. The rain had tailed away to a fine mist of drizzle blowing in veils across the border station. From the direction of the road, she could hear cars and lorries going by on their way from Croatia.
She saw them coming from all the way across the compound, three soldiers in the Lincoln green uniform of Hungary’s border guard. Two of them were women, in officers’ uniforms; the third was a youth with a rash of acne in a corner of his mouth and a cap which was half a size too small.
“Madam,” one of the officers said as they neared the car. “May we see your documents, please?”
This was far from unusual; you could never predict what border officers would do. Some were bored, some were preternaturally attentive, some hewed fetishistically to regulations, some were prepared to bend a little. Carey wasn’t worried; her papers were all good, there was no reason why anyone should suspect her. This was a milk run.