Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(93)
She sighed. “And you’ve only just come to this conclusion?”
He turned and looked across the car at her. “You think I shouldn’t get involved.”
“You’re over twenty-one; you’re old enough to make your own decisions. I think you’re lucky you’ve not been killed already, for what it’s worth.”
He thought about it. “Someone ought to try,” he said. “Otherwise what’s the point of anything?”
LEV’S EXPLORATION OF the Patrons’ business interests had begun to resemble the exploration of North America. He had begun with a foothold in Dresden-Neustadt and had only slowly come to realise that beyond the trees was a continent which might as well be limitless. Though he had yet to positively identify a single person, he had uncovered many outposts and incursions, and the more he discovered, the more it alarmed Rudi. It was as if there was another structure underlying Europe; like the Community, but this time made of money and influence. Lev was beginning to turn up connections to serious organised crime and national governments. They also owned the Zone.
This had momentarily put Marta – Rudi still thought of her as Marta, she’d never told him her real name and he’d respected that by never trying to find out – in something of a position, which she had resolved by the simple expedient of finding two members of her staff who resembled him and Forsyth and sending them over the border into the Czech Republic using the false passports he’d had made up. It was a fairly ramshackle piece of misdirection, but for the moment, if anyone asked, she could say quite truthfully that according to official records Tonu Laar and his friend were no longer in the Zone.
She dropped him at the hotel – a modest place, by Zone standards, big enough for him and Forsyth to lose themselves among the other guests but not so big that he couldn’t scope out any unusual activity – and he went up to his room and locked the door and sat on the bed for a while, staring into space.
He got up and went over to one of the fitted wardrobes and took out an attaché case about the size of an old-style pilots’ chart case. He carried it over to the bed and went through the nitpicking sequence of combinations and key-swipes to stop it incinerating its contents, then he opened it and emptied it on the duvet.
Well.
He arranged everything in what appeared to be chronological order, as best he could. Here was the photograph of the Sarkisian Collective at the Versailles peace conference, eight intense-looking young Frenchmen in formal suits, each of them with his umbrella. Rudi couldn’t tell which one was Charpentier.
Next, his father’s birth certificates, ancient Soviet-era documents marked with official stamps in purple ink. It was by no means impossible to forge documents like this – depending on how picky you were, you could even do it with a printer/scanner and some image-processing software – but why would you forge someone’s birth certificate and make them forty years older than they actually were? Five years, maybe ten. But forty?
The two passports. Identical birthdates, identical photos, different birthplaces. In the photos his father, wearing a shirt and tie, was contriving to look serious but only managing to look shifty. Rudi flicked through the little books, looking at the entry and exit stamps. There were, of course, no stamps for the most important border his father had crossed, over and over again. He must have spent quite a lot of time in the Community, off and on, for forty-odd years to have passed in Europe. Rudi supposed it all added up. The one thing it explained – and it was really of no earthly interest to anyone else – was his father’s stubborn refusal to give up Lahemaa. Although that made Rudi wonder why he had moved the family there when he did; had there been another operation going on? Infiltration and exfiltration from the Community?
He presumed Juhan’s birth certificate had a similar birthdate on it, unless his source in the Community was wrong or someone else had been working with his father for the Directorate. Which begged the question of why Juhan had told him the story of the Frenchmen, and why he had handed over the chocolate box when he presumably had some inkling what it contained. Rudi didn’t want to think about it too much, because he’d only start breaking things. He laid the passports down beside the birth certificates.
He stood looking down at the documents, turning the hard drive over in his hands. Lev had been quite impressed by the level of encryption used on the files it contained; it had taken him several days to crack them and access the first steps in the paper trail which had finally led Rudi to the quite fantastic sum of money Roland Sarkisian had stolen from his patrons, and then on to Charpentier. He’d also been impressed by how well Toomas had dispersed and hidden the money, although Rudi wasn’t remotely surprised; his father’s nature harboured depths of deviousness which would have startled a Borgia. What did surprise him was that Toomas hadn’t stolen the money from the Collective.
Crispin hadn’t wanted the money. Even in these autumnal days a billion dollars was a significant amount, but Crispin hadn’t mentioned the money. All he had wanted was Charpentier, because Charpentier had something that was worth more than all the money in the world.
The problem with the Community and the Patrons was that they weren’t children. The Patrons, whoever they were, were vastly powerful and wealthy, and the Community was a nuclear superpower which had already – albeit accidentally – released a flu pandemic in Europe. And now the Patrons had Charpentier, the last person left alive who could make sense of the Sarkisians’ research. The last person left alive who knew how to destroy the Community.