“I knew this would happen,” Jan said calmly, as if perversely happy to be proved right. “I kept saying this would happen.”
Rudi looked at his watch. It read 00:02. “At least they waited until midnight.”
Jan sighed. “Lock all the doors in here and close the hatch. I’ll go and call the police.” And he went out into the dining room. The last Rudi saw of him, he was wading through the melee towards the door.
Some of the waiting staff pushed into the kitchen before Rudi managed to get the door closed and bolted. They stood around in a little group listening to the sounds of things breaking and people screaming and fireworks being set off in the dining room. Then Rudi put his parka on, took his rucksack from its hiding place under one of the counters, and went out the back door to the loading bay.
It was a lovely night. The stars were bright and hard and unblinking, and down in the valley tiny little firework explosions burst over the towns. He watched them for a while, struck by how strange it was to see fireworks exploding from above. From the front of the hotel, he could hear shouting and the deep bass grumble of the engines of tracked police vehicles.
Behind him, a shoe scraped the cement beneath the loading bay’s thin layer of crusty slush.
Rudi looked round. A small, slight figure was standing a few metres away, a suitcase in one hand. The figure took another step forward into the loading bay’s lights, and Rudi saw it was a small middle-aged man, shivering in his inadequate overcoat, cheeks and nose nipped crimson by the cold. They stood and looked at each other.
“Are you the Coureur?” the little man asked finally.
Rudi sighed. Dariusz had told him it was usually pointless giving Packages word-code recognition strings. They never remembered them, he said, or forgot to use them in the excitement of the jump, or just thought they were stupid and childish, which was Rudi’s personal opinion as well.
But tradecraft was tradecraft. “I’m the kitchen porter,” Rudi said.
The little man’s face fell until something at the back of his excited, terrified mind recognised Rudi’s half of the recognition string. “Oh,” he said. “Right. Er, Are you with the Air Force?”
Embarrassing. Rudi rubbed his eyes.
“Hey!” another, cheerier voice boomed. “Hey! Are you cooking here now?”
Rudi took his hand from his eyes. Crunching through the snow towards them, looking like a blond Kodiak bear in a hugely-stuffed puffa suit, was the Hungarian who had spoken to him three years ago in Max’s restaurant, the one who had complimented him on his good fuck food.
“I’m washing dishes,” Rudi told him, trying to radiate calm on behalf of the Package.
“That’s a real shame,” the Hungarian said. “Obviously you’re wasted here.” He reached for the Package and soft-landed one huge gloved hand on the little man’s shoulder. “Stay,” he rumbled goodnaturedly.
The Package ignored the command, somehow managed to shrug his way out from under the weight of the Hungarian’s hand, and took off for the edge of the road, dropping his suitcase as he ran.
Rudi and the Hungarian looked at each other. Rudi wasn’t carrying a weapon, and wouldn’t have used one if he was. The Hungarian smiled at him.
The Package reached the edge of the service road and jumped, disappearing down the slope in a flurry of snow and flying coat-tails. There was a shout, a thump, then silence.
“Did Max fire you?” the Hungarian inquired.
“Your Polish has improved,” Rudi observed.
The Hungarian inclined his huge shaggy blond head. “I find that if you work hard and pay attention, you can learn almost anything.”
Two more huge blond men appeared at the side of the road, toiling up the slope with the Package dangling between them. They lifted him over the piles of snow at the edge of the road and dragged him over to the Hungarian. The three of them proceeded to have a very brief whispered conversation, during which the Hungarian never took his eyes off Rudi, then the other two started to drag the insensible Package away along the side of the hotel.
“Now then,” said the Hungarian when they had disappeared from view around the front of the hotel. “What are we going to do with you?”
“He’s ours,” said a voice from the back of the loading bay. Rudi scowled.
“Is that so?” asked the Hungarian.
“That’s so,” Marta said, coming to the edge of the loading bay and looking down at them. She was wearing jeans and a big chunky sweater and hiking boots and a down-stuffed jacket. For a moment, Rudi didn’t know her. Her hair was tied back, and she had removed the makeup she customarily wore. She looked at once wide-eyed and innocent and capable and businesslike. “The Package is yours. The dishwasher is a resident of the Zone.”
The Hungarian grinned and winked at Rudi to let him know what he thought of the dishwasher pantomime. “It seems you have an admirer.”
Rudi looked at Marta and considered the number of ways in which he had been stupid. There were, he thought, too many to count.
The Hungarian went over and picked up the Package’s suitcase. It looked like a toy dangling from his massive hand. “Maybe I’ll come to Restauracja Max sometime and we can have dinner.”
“Don’t hurry,” Rudi told him.
The Hungarian looked hurt. “Ah well,” he said. He saluted Rudi, bowed to Marta, and walked away into the night.
When he had turned the corner of the building, Marta walked down the loading bay steps and stood beside Rudi. “Time to go,” she said.
Rudi picked up his rucksack. All of a sudden, he felt very heavy and tired.
A SHORT WALK down the mountainside, slipping and sliding through deep powdery snow, brought them to a narrow forestry road. A car was waiting, part of Rudi’s dustoff. Somehow, Marta had come across a spare set of keys. She drove.
Rudi sat and watched the tunnel of snow-laden trees advance on him in the car’s headlights. The forestry road hadn’t been cleared, and there were ten or twelve centimetres of snow on it. The car was moving at about five kilometres an hour. It would be easy to open the door and tumble out into the deep snow at the side of the road and make his escape, but he couldn’t see the point.
“It could have worked, if it’s any consolation,” she said.
He looked across at her. “What?”
“It’s always chaos up there on New Year’s Eve,” she said, squinting out at the road. “You might have made it, but they were following your man all the way.”
“Who?”
She shrugged. “There’s no way to be sure. They bought a certain degree of cooperation from us for a certain period of time.” She glanced at him. “Don’t look like that. It was an interesting plan.”
He watched her for a minute or so, steering the car carefully down the gentle slope of the road. “Are you from Zone counterespionage?” he asked.
She laughed. “Now there’s a grand title.” She shook her head. “What I wonder is, was that a real fight, or did you start it?”
“I was in the kitchen the whole time,” Rudi said. “Jan will vouch for me.”
“Not you personally,” she said. “Agents provocateurs, hired for the occasion – what do you call them?”
“Stringers. As you very well know.”
“Stringers, yes. I love Coureur terminology. It’s so quaint. What I wonder is, did you hire some stringers to start that riot and cover your departure?”
“Like you said,” Rudi murmured. “There’s always chaos up there on New Year’s Eve.”
They drove for another ten or fifteen minutes in silence. The slope of the road rose and fell, and finally the trees withdrew gently from either side and they were driving along a two-lane road, cleared enough for Marta to accelerate to around twenty kilometres an hour.