Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(92)

Finally, he smiled bashfully. “Hello,” he said.

“Hi,” she said, not unkindly.

“I’m trying to stop a war,” he said. “And I need your help.”





THEY HAD DINNER at a restaurant perched halfway up a sheer mountainside. The spectacular views from the terrace were reflected in the prices, but she had never paid for a meal since she became head of Zone Security. The restaurant was only accessible via a brightly-coloured funicular railway and a carefully-camouflaged access road from the other side of the mountain. After dinner, they went back to the funicular station for the half-hour ride down to the car park. She put her arm through his as they walked. They had the car to themselves, but on the platform at the top she saw the English boy and the girl with the Australian passport among some passengers boarding a few cars back.

She didn’t make a big thing of spotting them, but Rudi noticed anyway. He was good at things like that. He said, “Remember him?”

“Who could forget?” She smiled. “Who’s the girl?”

“Collateral damage.” He looked out of the window; dusk was falling and the valleys far below were filling with darkness. “Not mine, for once.”

She walked to the other side of the car and perched herself on one of the window-seats as the train began to descend smoothly and unhurriedly. “I’ve been thinking about retiring,” she said.

He smiled at her. “You won’t.”

“I’ll have to, sooner or later.”

“What would you do?”

“I’ve given some thought to writing my memoirs.”

That made him laugh. “Send me a copy.”

“I’m not going to say anything about you, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

He pouted theatrically. It made him look ridiculously young and vulnerable and she thought back, not for the first time this evening, to the first time they’d met, when he’d been hopelessly naive and useless. Not all changes can be codified by grey hairs and wrinkles.

He put his hands in his pockets and leaned his forehead against the window, looking down into the valley. “I didn’t just lead them to Charpentier, I delivered him to them. I thought I’d become good at this, but I’d just become smug.”

“You should stop feeling sorry for yourself and start worrying about what you’re going to do about it.”

He turned from the window and looked at her. “My father,” he said. “He really was the f*cking Devil.”

“No he wasn’t,” she said. “He was just like us, just getting by the best he could. You can’t blame him for that.”

“Oh, I can. He’s been dead eighteen months and he’s still leaving a trail of wreckage. You’d be surprised how much I can blame him.”

She tipped her head to one side and looked at him.

“And I’m not helping. I know.” He smiled ruefully. “Sorry.”

“You’ve just spent two hours telling me the Community and the Sarkisian Collective’s patrons are at war,” she said. “You haven’t said a single word about how you think you’re going to stop it.”

“I don’t know,” he told her. “Any ideas?” When she didn’t say anything, he put the heels of his hands to his eyes and rubbed gently. “Do you think,” he asked, “Crispin would listen to reason?”

“‘Crispin’ doesn’t exist,” she reminded him. She’d used Zone Security’s resources to break into the Warsaw Metro’s personnel database, pull up Crispin’s files, and run a background check. It was so poorly backstopped as to be offensive; Crispin was a legend, a man of fog. “How are you going to find him?”

He smiled ruefully. “I’ve located a man who can probably put me in touch; I’ve been running a data-scraping operation to find him.” He took his hands from his eyes and shrugged.

“Okay. So this man puts you in contact with Crispin. What are you going to say?”

Rudi looked out of the window again, trying to find a fault in his reasoning. His reflection looked exhausted. He was as certain as he could be, without someone actually showing him documentary evidence, that the Community had bombed the Line. Why was a mystery, but that didn’t matter right now. What mattered was that the builders of the Line had responded by transposing part of the Community onto Luxembourg, which meant they had access to the Sarkisian Collective’s research, which implied that they and the Sarkisians’ patrons were one and the same. The implications of that were too large to think about at the moment. He had no doubt that if he dug around a bit more he would find other examples of the Community and the Patrons poking and prodding each other like children in a school playground, a clandestine war of tit-for-tat which had only recently broken through into daylight.

“One of them has to stop,” he said. “The Community’s nervous, they know how easily this could all spill over, but they won’t back down. The Patrons...” He shrugged. “I know it sounds utterly extraordinary, but I really think they’re running scenarios through the prediction engine in Dresden, over and over again, looking at the ones where they come out on top, manipulating events so that those scenarios come to pass. The world’s in the hands of f*cking madmen.” He didn’t mention the growing suspicion that he was part of those scenarios; it seemed absurdly paranoid, even to him.