Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(72)

There was a box mounted on one wall of the blockhouse at about head height. Forsyth checked the lock’s slot to make sure nobody had poured superglue into it, then swiped his key-card through it.

“High tech, man,” Crispin murmured. “Fucking love it.”

“Shut up, Crispin,” Forsyth said. The front of the box hinged down, exposing a keypad, half a dozen or so little black cubes and the grey rubber cup of a retinal reader. Forsyth typed his security code into the keypad and put his eye to the cup. There was the customary flash of blood-red light that left him blinking away afterimages. After a moment there was a snap of magnetic locks and a little door popped open low on the side of the blockhouse.

“Open sesame,” Crispin said triumphantly. “Fuckin’ A, Snowy.”

“I told you, don’t call me that.” He unplugged one of the little black memory modules and pocketed it. “Come on.”

They ducked through the doorway and Forsyth pulled the door shut behind them while Crispin took a heavy rubberised torch from the charging rack on the wall. “Down here,” he said, waving the beam of the torch towards the escalators.

“Just a second.” Forsyth popped the cover off the alarm box and switched the system off. “Okay.”

They walked down the escalators to the big drum-shaped concourse. The torchlight shone on bright white tile.

“Nice work,” Crispin said, looking about him. “Kwak-Kwak’s boys do this?”

Forsyth nodded. “Some of them. He lost a lot of them to the Denver Metro.”

Crispin snorted. “Yeah, well, at least that had a fifty-fifty chance of getting finished, didn’t it.”

“Why didn’t you go back for that one?”

“Ah.” Crispin, his face cast in planes of light and shadow by the torch, looked sad. “Persona non grata back home.”

“Oh.”

“Not that I’d want to go back. I mean, who wants to go to Colorado?” He gestured in the direction of the escalators grouped in the middle of the booking hall. “Down there. Eastbound platform.”

“I didn’t think you ever got this far into town,” Forsyth said as they went deeper into the station.

“I didn’t,” said Crispin. “I was two stations up the line, got in on one late shift and walked down the tunnel.”

Forsyth thought about it. “That’s, what, two kilometres?”

“Almost three. I figured if anybody ever found the stuff they’d never be able to connect it to me. Nobody would be crazy enough to walk that far just to stash something.”

“It’s a long walk,” Forsyth agreed. The tunnels were full of machinery and equipment and usually ankle-deep in water until the walls had been properly sealed. A six klick round-trip under those conditions would have taken most of the night.

“Well, a man’s gotta do, et cetera.” Crispin shone the torch on the white-tiled curve of the escalator shaft. “That really is a lovely shape,” he said. “Who got the design contract in the end?”

“No idea.”

“The Swedes got shafted, yeah?”

Forsyth nodded.

“I met one of their guys once, when they were surveying.” Crispin shook his head. “Fucking spooky, man. So f*cking clean, you know what I mean?”

“I never met any of them.”

“Wow.” Crispin’s eyes widened at the memory. “Everything was ironed. I never saw so many sharp edges on a man. It wasn’t natural.”

They were at the bottom of the escalators now. A series of low, arched tunnel entrances fanned out along a lovely curved wall of white tile. Forsyth gestured towards the one that led to the Eastbound platform and they walked through it.

He’d only been here a couple of times before, and he still hadn’t quite managed to work out how the unknown architects had achieved this little miracle here under the streets of Old Warsaw. All the foot tunnels leading off from the bottom of the escalators were exactly the same length. They led away from each other in absolutely straight lines, neither rising nor falling, at roughly thirty-degree intervals. And each one ended in a different Metro platform. Forsyth had seen the design drawings, and it still seemed to him that by rights all four foot tunnels should emerge on the same platform. He couldn’t work it out.

Sometimes, when he thought about it, he remembered the first time he ever went underground, digging the London Underground extension out to Reading, and that solid dread of working with hundreds of tonnes of earth between him and sunlight. The foot tunnels at Stare Miasto made him feel the same way, as if he was in an alien environment.

“Why did you up and leave like that, by the way?” he asked.

“Weird shit,” Crispin muttered, which was his shorthand for anything he didn’t like. “Really weird shit.”

“Oh.”

“I was out at Mokotów one shift and the place was full of cammo dudes.”

Forsyth stopped. “Beg pardon?”

“Cammo dudes,” Crispin said. More shorthand. He sighed. “Uniformed men with weapons,” he translated for Forsyth’s benefit.

“Oh, come on,” Forsyth said, suspecting a heavily chemically-promoted hallucination.

“I’m telling you. I saw these guys down in the tunnel at Mokotów and I thought the Poles had brought the Army in to clean the place up.”