Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(46)

She reached into the car and took her passport from the glove compartment, handed it over. The second officer waved the passport over her pad, looked at the displayed information, looked at Carey, looked at the information again. It suddenly occurred to Carey that the boy, who had a short assault rifle – something of German manufacture, she thought – slung over his shoulder, seemed unusually tense for what seemed on the face of it a perfectly routine document check. He caught her looking at him and made a spirited but ultimately rather poor attempt at staring defiantly back.

The two officers consulted briefly in whispers, then the first said, “Madam, would you accompany us, please? Leave the key in the car.”

And even this was not outside operational limits. She didn’t panic when she heard the car start up behind them. She turned and saw the second officer behind the wheel, reversing a little before she drove the car out of the queue and off towards a row of sheds on the other side of the compound. There were always spot checks.

The officer, whose nametag read SZILI, led her to a small concrete building. The young soldier stationed himself outside the front door without having to be told. Inside was a short, brightly-lit corridor that smelled of damp carpeting. At the far end was a door opening on to a little room with a table and two chairs. Szili showed her inside and asked her to sit.

“Your phone, please, madam,” she said.

Carey turned over her phone – there was nothing operationally important on it – and Szili left the room. There was a quiet click of a lock, and then she was alone.

Well.

This was not the first time Carey had been detained at a border. There had been an occasion about five years ago, trying to get into one of the many short-lived little statelets which infested Greater Germany, when she had remained in a room not unlike this one for almost two days. When she was finally released, it was because the polity’s ad hoc government had collapsed and a new, temporary, administration had voted to rejoin the Bundesrepublik as soon as humanly possible. The borders had come down and her Package had simply walked out. She looked around the room. At least then there had been a bed. And a lavatory.

Hours passed. At first they passed slowly. Then there was a point where she checked her watch and discovered that two hours had gone by without her consciously noticing.

She got up and went over and banged on the door with her fist. “Hey!” she shouted. “Hey! I need the bathroom!” Nothing happened. She walked back into the middle of the room and started to look around where the ceiling met the walls. She was damned if she was going to start feeling her way around the place looking for stealthed cameras, but it didn’t hurt to look. “I need the bathroom!” she shouted again, with no more success.

Almost an hour later, the door clicked and swung open, and there was Szili. Her uniform was crumpled, and there was an oil stain on her sleeve. Carey stopped pacing and looked at her. She said, “I want to speak with the Texan Ambassador. And I want the bathroom.”

“The Texan Embassy is in Budapest,” Szili told her. “And the toilet is this way. Please, madam.”

Outside, night had long fallen. The border post, lit up by blue-white lamps on ten-metre poles, sat in the still, silent heart of a huge darkness. There were no vehicles anywhere to be seen, and that was what finally made Carey start to worry.

Szili walked her across the compound to the toilet block, waited outside the cubicle, then marched her back outside and over to the sheds. The door of one had been rolled up, and inside was her car.

At least, it was all the bits of her car. It was hard to see if any of them were missing because none of them were connected to each other any longer. They were arranged all over the cement floor of the shed in a sort of rough sketch of a car. A couple of mechanics in filthy overalls were standing near the back of the shed. One was smoking a pipe; the other was wiping his hands on a rag. They were both looking at her as if she had done them a terrible personal wrong.

“Boys,” Carey said to them, “you have some explaining to do to Hertz.”

“Madam,” Szili said, going over to a metal cupboard by one wall and opening one of its doors. “Can you please tell me what this is?” And she reached inside and turned back holding the Package. It was a little larger than a pack of playing cards.

“I never saw that before in my life,” Carey said.





SHE WAS GETTING too old for this shit. Certainly too old to spend all night in a windowless room somewhere on the far edge of Hungary. Definitely too old to sleep in her clothes on a really uncomfortable folding bed in a windowless room on the far edge of Hungary.

They woke her before seven. Two soldiers she hadn’t seen before; one to carry a tray and put it on the table, the other to hold a rifle at the ready in case she suddenly tried to incapacitate the first with a weapon cunningly fashioned out of... well, there was actually f*ck-all in here to fashion a weapon from, and they knew, from last night’s strip search, that she wasn’t carrying anything lethal or even remotely annoying.

When the soldiers had left and the door was locked again, she got up stiffly from the bed and went over to the table. On the tray were a biodegradable Starbucks cup of unsweetened black coffee and a plate with a couple of small, sticky and slightly stale pastries. She wolfed the pastries down and drank the coffee in two swallows, and suddenly she really, really wanted a cigarette, even though she hadn’t smoked in almost a decade.