Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(61)

He watched the solicitor leave the building and cross the street to a little café, then he went back to the desk and opened the red folder.

There were half a dozen sheets of paper in the folder, some of them clearly very old. They were all covered in columns of five-figure groups. The decryption key, which he was clearly expected to have to hand, had not been in the chocolate box, or any of the safety deposit boxes he had visited. Suspecting one final betrayal by either his father or Juhan, Rudi sighed and took out his phone and quickly photographed the sheets, then he dialled a number.

“You should have told me about Mundt,” Lev said.

“You didn’t need to know,” Rudi said. “And hello to you, too.”

“I have petabytes of data from the prediction engine, some of it involving a very exotic form of topology. The Community Man mentioned Mundt. You should have briefed me.”

“Professor Mundt is dead,” said Rudi. “He’s not going to be bothering us again.”

“Maybe not, but whoever has his research is going to be able to cause untold bother. Do you know what he was doing?”

“I know what people were afraid he could do.” Rudi looked down at the encrypted sheets of paper. “Can you make any sense of what he was up to?”

“It’s not my area of mathematics,” said Lev. “I can barely skim the surface; I don’t even know whether we have all of it. We need to show it to someone who understands this stuff.”

Rudi shook his head. “No. Not unless we absolutely have to. Listen, I’m going to send you some images; I need to know if you can decrypt what’s on them, okay?”

“Sure, I can do that.”

“Good. What about the other thing?” Lev was winnowing the mass of data which had been transmitted by Bradley’s phone over the three days before it had fallen silent. Presumably the Englishman had, for routine operational reasons, destroyed it and replaced it with a new one. There was a surprising amount of data, and a lot of it was deeply encrypted; Bradley was obviously a busy man.

“Nothing about the person you’re looking for yet, but I picked up a job request you might be interested in.”

“I’m a bit too busy to take on a Situation, Lev.”

“This one’s a request from a government.”

“Les Coureurs don’t work for governments.”

“I know, that’s why I’m telling you. It’s the Japanese.”

Rudi looked around the office, thinking. Japanese? Why not? “All right, send me what you’ve got. Let me know when you know something about the decrypts.”

He sent the images, then hung up and picked up the sheets of paper, trying to put all the pieces together in his head, the Ufa explosion, the Realm, the Community, his father’s involvement in a billion-dollar trust fund, Mundt’s murder. If none of it made sense, perhaps it was because none of it fitted together and he was chasing ghosts. Here he was, sitting in an office in a run-down little town in England, his hands on a quite colossal amount of money. He could just take that money and use it for... something. The problem was, it was already being used for something, something his father had been involved with for a very long time.

Rudi slipped the sheets of paper back into the folder and closed the flap. He went back to the window and looked down on the sparse traffic going along the street. On the other side of the road, the solicitor was just emerging from the café. For almost a century money had been trickling down from the trust fund and his firm had been administering the disbursements quietly, calmly, efficiently, with English discretion. The whole edifice ran like clockwork; there was no need for anyone to intervene. What it was for, what it was doing, Rudi had no idea.

His phone buzzed. He read the message Lev had sent him, details of the job the data-scraping operation had picked up, and he rubbed his eyes.





1.





IT WAS THE first Monday of the month again, and Forsyth went down to the post office to collect his parcel from home.

Leon wasn’t doing anything that morning, so they drove down in his van, possibly the only right-hand-drive Ford Transit in the city, certainly the only one with scenes from Battleship Potemkin airbrushed on the sides, the pram bouncing forever down the steps on the pavement side to give pedestrians a really good chance to become incensed at the scenes of Bolshevik victory.

The whole inside of the van was lined with fur. The Poles had never quite got the hang of the Western anti-fur movement, declaiming that it was all right for the inhabitants of countries whose Winter temperatures rarely dipped below minus ten to protest against fur coats, but let them get a taste of real cold and they’d soon change their tune. Fake fur was still a novelty in Warsaw, and Forsyth was never quite sure about the lining of Leon’s van. The interior looked as if he had simply skinned some huge creature and stuck its fur up whole, and there was a faint, disturbing animal smell you noticed when you got in but stopped noticing after a while. Especially when Leon was driving.

“Pedestrian,” Forsyth said.

“Where?” Leon tapped the accelerator and the van zipped through an intersection as the lights were changing.

“Somewhere back there.”

“Points?” Leon loved Death Race 2000.

“We were going too fast to see.”

“Bastard.” The van almost tipped over on two wheels as it took a corner.