Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(79)

“Okay,” he heard Chudy say, “let’s see.”

Forsyth turned from the window and saw Leon hand over the hard drive, and it struck him how cosmologically stupid he was. He should never have gone to Leon. He should have got out of town, out of the country, and off of Continental Europe, as quickly as he could manage. He said, “I don’t think this is a very good idea.”

Leon and Chudy both looked at him as if surprised to find another person in the room with them. “Don’t you want to know what’s on this?” Leon asked.

Forsyth thought about it. “No,” he said after a moment or so. “I just want to be out of here.”

“So go.”

“Oh no, Leon. Not without that thing.” He nodded at the drive lying on Chudy’s plump palm. “You’re crazy if you think I’m leaving that with you.”

“Knowledge is power,” Chudy said, holding up the drive, and Forsyth instantly wanted to punch him. “This is just hardware; it’s what’s on it that’s important.” Leon was nodding agreement, and Forsyth wanted to punch him as well. Chudy said, “You can erase a drive like this, but if you know what’s on it you can’t erase it from your brain.”

Forsyth and Leon had both agreed not to mention Crispin or the Georgians or Babykiller, or even the possibly-mythical cammo dudes, but he still felt tempted to tell the kid that you could erase a person’s brain perfectly well with a hollow-point bullet. He leaned back against the windowsill and looked at the two Poles. A friend of mine was probably murdered last night, he told them silently, and all you two can do is behave like you’ve dropped into some bad cyberpunk miniseries. Well f*ck you.

He said, “All right. Let’s see what all this is about.”

Chudy grinned triumphantly and slid the drive into a slot in the computer. He typed a few commands and a monitor filled with the Metro diagram. Forsyth went over, feeling untold years of unwashed underwear under his feet, and looked at the screen.

“Well, there’s obviously something embedded in the picture,” Chudy said, seeing the look on his face.

“Oh,” Forsyth said, looking down at the kid. “Obviously.”

Chudy typed some more commands. Nothing happened. He said, “Hm, okay…” and typed some more. The diagram stayed on the screen. Chudy pulled down some menus, loaded some programs, did some more typing. More menus appeared, full of lines of code. Chudy squinted at them, began to hum tunelessly. Forsyth looked over at Leon, who shrugged.

Chudy worked on the file for two hours. Forsyth had no idea what he was doing, but the kid became gradually more and more frustrated, typing like a maniac, checking every few moments to see if the diagram had magically unfolded to reveal a secret message. The only thing that happened was that it changed colour at one point.

Finally he sat back in his chair and said, “There’s nothing there.”

“You’re sure?” asked Leon.

“It’s a vanilla image,” said Chudy. He looked exhausted. “There’s nothing else on the drive. There’s never been anything else on the drive. I tried everything.”

“Something new,” Leon suggested. “I heard the NSA have been –”

“I tried everything,” Chudy insisted. Forsyth thought the boy was close to tears.

“Okay,” Leon said calmly, going over and taking the drive from its slot. The monitor filled with warnings about not closing the media down properly, but Leon and Chudy ignored them. Leon popped the drive into a pocket of his combat jacket and said, “Well.”

“What about my stuff?” Chudy demanded, half-rising from his typing chair. “You promised.”

Leon was already halfway to the door, and Forsyth had only just started to follow. “You’ll get your chance, Chudy,” Leon said. “Bring your three favourite structures over to the workshop on Tuesday and you can watch me programming them in.”

“Hey.” The look of delight on Chudy’s face had clearly erased the puzzling hard drive from his mind. “That’s great. I’ll see you on Tuesday then.”

“I’ll look forward to it,” Leon said, but by then he and Forsyth were out of the bedroom and nodding goodbye to Chudy’s perfectly ordinary but slightly harassed-looking parents.





FORSYTH DIDN’T SAY anything for quite a while after they got back to the van and Leon began to drive, uncharacteristically carefully, back towards the centre of town.

Finally, he said, “Well?”

“It’s a puzzle,” Leon admitted.

Forsyth waited, but apparently no more information was forthcoming, so he said, “Leon, you may have overlooked this, but this whole thing is rather more than an academic exercise to me.”

“Oh, I know,” Leon said. “I know.”

“So what are we going to do?”

Leon looked out through the windscreen. “Let’s go home,” he said.

Home. Forsyth sagged back in his seat. “All right,” he said. “Why not?”





5.





PRAGA, ACROSS THE Vistula from the Old Town, had gone through something of a hipster revival in the early years of the century, but the hipsters had moved on to pastures new and it had returned to its former scruffy self, a run-down district of garages and battered housing blocks and little factories. It was grey and dirty and rubbish blew down the streets on the gritty breeze. It had also been, for many years now, the heartland of Warsaw’s mafia gangs, all of whom would be affiliated in some way to Babykiller and his organisation. Who knew, Babykiller himself might live there.