Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(77)

“Careful with that,” Leon said.

“Do me a favour,” Forsyth muttered, screwing the top off another airline miniature of Wyborowa and emptying it into his glass.

Without taking his feet down off the mixing desk, Leon looked over his shoulder at the closed-circuit monitors along the opposite wall. They showed various surrealistically-tilted panes of grey-scaled urban landscape around the building, but no people.

“Show me,” he said.

Forsyth took the plastic envelope from his pocket and tossed it across. Leon caught it and made a face. “Is this blood here?”

“I think so.” Forsyth drained his glass and opened another miniature. The ride from Ursynów into the centre of town had totally unnerved him, on top of everything else that had unnerved him tonight. The one good thing that had happened to him in the last six hours was finding Leon still at the workshop and willing to let him in.

“Shit,” said Leon nervily, wiping his hand on the knee of his jeans. He held the envelope up to the light and shook it so the dark object inside jiggled about. “I thought Crispin dealt in drugs.”

“Me too.” Forsyth jerked his chin towards the envelope. “What is it?”

“I haven’t looked, but I’ve got an idea” Leon said. “You think he was killed for this?”

Forsyth rubbed his eyes. “I don’t know that he’s dead, Leon. I don’t know what the f*ck happened.”

“But?”

“But I think the Georgians tried to rip him off.”

Leon nodded. “Sounds about right. Well.” He pinched the edge of the envelope between the nails of his thumb and index finger and tore the plastic. “I should tell you to take this thing that belongs to Babykiller, and which the Georgians want but don’t want to pay for, and go away and never come back.” He tipped the envelope and the dark object fell out into his palm, a rectangle of black plastic a few millimetres thick and about half the size of a packet of cigarettes, featureless except for a narrow green stripe around one end and a line of tiny gold dots along one of the short edges. An external hard drive. “However,” Leon went on, “what kind of friend would that make me?”

“It would make you the kind of friend who didn’t care about the rent I owe you,” said Forsyth.

Leon smiled and looked at him. “Everybody in this f*cking country is a mercenary, my friend, you must have noticed. If I forget about the money you owe me, where else am I going to get it from?”

“I came here for help, Leon. Not to get involved in another money-making scheme.”

Leon was examining the drive, holding it delicately between his fingertips under an articulated desklamp. “No serial number, but that doesn’t mean anything. Just standard storage.”

“I’m going to take it to the police,” Forsyth said.

Leon’s fist closed gently around the drive. “Just a moment.”

“Give it back, Leon.”

“Think about it,” Leon said smoothly. “You went down into the Metro. Okay, you might be able to explain that because you represent tunnel workers, even though you chose an unusual time of the day to do it. But you took an unauthorised person down there with you.” He shook his fist gently. “An unauthorised person who was a known drugs dealer. And you took him down there so he could retrieve some kind of contraband.”

Forsyth closed his eyes and groaned.

“And that’s just the beginning,” Leon continued. “Let’s assume you explain all that away. Crispin has probably been murdered. Did you go straight to the police to report it? No, you came here. You behave like a criminal yourself, and go running to your old friend Leon.”

Forsyth put his hand to his face.

“And anyway, the chances are that if you go to the police this thing will wind up in the Georgians’ hands in a couple of hours and you’ll be lying in some basement with your throat cut and your nuts in your mouth. No.” Leon stood up. “Let’s not go to the police.”

Forsyth took his hand from his face and opened his eyes. “Can you find out what’s on that thing?”

Leon’s eyebrows went up in surprise. “Sure,” he said. “That’s not even difficult.” He flipped open a little door in the front of one of his computers, revealing a row of various-sized slots. He pushed the drive into one of them, tapped a couple of commands, and the monitor in front of him filled with a diagram of the Warsaw Metro.

There was a moment’s silence. Forsyth said, “So?”

“So what?”

“Is that it?”

Leon clicked his way through two or three menus, read the results. “That’s it,” he said. He blinked at Forsyth. “Can you think of a good suggestion why Crispin would want to hide this in the Metro? Or why somebody might want to kill him for it?”

“No.” Forsyth rolled his chair closer to the monitor. The diagram was just the standard one from the original design drawings, the one that was in all the brochures. It showed not just the Metro lines but every tunnel and underground space involved in the project. For that reason it was immensely complicated, and it had been stuck away on the inside back page of the brochures because investors tend to find very complicated diagrams rather dull.

“Okay,” said Leon. “So maybe there’s something encrypted within the picture.”