Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(53)

He took the back off, removed its SIM and onboard memory cards, and snapped them in quarters. Then he used a penknife to lever out the phone’s battery and as much of its innards as would come out. He swept the bits of the phone into a little pile in the middle of the table and looked at his watch. He decided to give the woman another ten minutes, and sat back to drink his brandy.

It was already too late; as he descended to the lobby in the lift, the phone had briefly woken itself up and scanned the immediate area for other communications devices. The only other device it found was Bradley’s phone, which was in the same pocket. The phone sent Bradley’s phone what appeared to be a text message. The message unpacked itself in a fraction of a second, took over Bradley’s phone, and then deleted itself. Every hour thereafter, his phone emitted a compressed and encrypted burst of data comprising GPS coordinates of everywhere it had been, everyone it had been connected to, and every conversation it had been privy to.





“HERE,” SAID THE cobbler, holding out a hideous black and green sweater. “Put this on.”

“You’re kidding, right?” Carey said.

“You present yourself at the border wearing the same clothes as you’re wearing in your passport photograph, you’re asking for trouble,” the cobbler told her. “Just put it on over your shirt; you won’t have to put up with it for long.”

They were in a flat on the eastern side of the city, in a district that seemed to be made up mostly of small garages and workshops and light industrial units wedged in among decaying apartment blocks. The cobbler had been waiting for them, a big beefy man with the face of an unsuccessful boxer and an attaché case full of anonymous tech.

She looked over at Bradley, who was sitting in a threadbare armchair near the window, and he nodded, so she pulled the sweater over her head. She’d opted for a skirt and a blouse over a plain black T-shirt. Smoothing the sweater down with one hand, she ran the other through her newly-cut and newly-auburn hair. She’d run the comb’s battery out cutting her hair down to about two inches in length; it was harder to do than it looked in the movies and it didn’t make her look all that different, if she was going to be honest, but with the dye job and a pair of spectacles she looked different enough not to attract second glances from anyone who might be looking for her.

The cobbler posed her against the wall and took a couple of photos with his phone, then went back to doing cobbler stuff with the gear in his case. Carey took off the sweater and put her jacket back on and went over to stand beside Bradley.

“Languages?” the cobbler asked, his back turned to them.

“English and French,” Bradley said before Carey could speak up.

“She doesn’t look French,” the cobbler grumbled.

“Who does?” Bradley said cheerfully. Carey looked down at him, and he smiled at her.

“I’m not going to make you English,” the cobbler said. “The English passport is an absolute bastard; it’d take me a week to make it convincing. How do you feel about being a New Zealander?”

“I have an American accent,” Carey said.

“Can you talk like a South African?” the cobbler said, still fiddling about with something in the case open on the table in front of him. “Sarf Iffrican? It’s like that.”

“No it isn’t,” Bradley murmured.

“Why don’t you just make me South African?” asked Carey.

“Do you speak Afrikaans?” said the cobbler. When there was no answer, he said, “Well, then.”

“This is silly,” Carey told Bradley.

“Just pretend to be English,” he said. “Nobody will be able to tell.”

The cobbler turned from the table with a passport in either hand. They were both plastic cards a little smaller than an old-style credit card and they both had her photo and some printing on them. One was blue, the other a pale salmon pink.

“One to get in, one to get out,” said the cobbler. He handed the cards to Carey; they were still warm. “Photos, biometric data, legends.” He gave her a couple of sheets of paper fresh out of the printer in his case. “These are your legends. Try to remember which goes with which passport.” And he burst out laughing, revealing a mouthful of broken teeth.





IN THE END it was ridiculously easy. Bradley simply drove her out to Komárom and put her on a coach and the coach took her across the bridge and the border guards on either side barely glanced at her New Zealand passport and then she was in Slovakia. Two days later, travelling on the French passport, she was getting off a flight in Houston. It was some time before she returned to Europe, and she never again set foot in Hungary.





1.





“THEY’RE LATE,” SAID Andreas.

Yngvar looked at his watch. “Only five minutes later than the last time you said that,” he said.

“Ah, f*ck it,” Andreas muttered. They’d been sitting here in the car, parked beside the road in ?stfold, a few kilometres from the border with Sweden, for almost two hours. It was cold outside, and Yngvar, who did not smoke, refused to let him roll down a window so he could have a cigarette. “Are you sure we’re in the right place?”

Yngvar sighed and pulled up the GPS on his phone and held it up so Andreas could see the screen. “Look,” he said. “Can you see the coordinates here? Can you? Hm? And don’t you dare ask if I’m sure we have the right day.”