“Ah well.” Rudi smiled. “You probably won’t have to use them.”
And he was right. For the first few hours, Lev kept coming back to the list of bank codes and wondering why he didn’t get out right now, access the accounts, transfer the money, and just keep running. He never did find an answer to that question; instead, he spent the time in the room reading decrypts, eating room service meals and working his way through the minibar, and forty-eight hours after he left, almost to the minute, Rudi was back, smiling and eager to have a look at what the cloth laptop had produced for them while he was gone.
A few days later – and he wasn’t fooling anyone, but Lev did appreciate the pretence of tradecraft, it was a nod from one professional to another – Rudi casually said, “I’ve got something for you,” and handed over a passport.
Lev turned the little card over in his fingers. It belonged, according to the Cyrillic on the front, to one Maksim Fedorovich Koniev, a citizen of Novosibirsk, in the Independent Republic of Sibir. His photograph had somehow found its way onto the card, alongside what he presumed was his thumbprint, and the card’s embedded chip presumably also contained other biometric data about him. He looked up.
“You don’t have to live there,” Rudi said, a little awkwardly.
“In the summer,” Lev informed him, “Sibir can be a most beautiful place.”
Rudi held out a shrinkwrapped disc. “There’s a legend, too. I left it vague, but there’s some documentary stuff in Novosibirsk and Norilsk to support it. You can leave it the way it is or do some backfilling, it’s up to you. Take the bank codes; all your money’s there.”
So this was how it ended. Lev looked at the card again. If his former life had taught him anything, it was that we only ever see a little part of the big picture. A few lines of communication from a codenamed agent here, a list of political targets there, an impenetrable economic dossier elsewhere. What were their stories? At least here was a new story, a new life all ready for him to live it. “Thank you,” he said, genuinely touched. The money alone would have been enough.
Rudi looked away and shrugged, and Lev thought the boy was actually embarrassed by his gratitude. “What will you do now?” he asked.
Rudi looked at him and grinned. “I’m going to shake the tree and see what falls out.”
THE THIRTY CASES
OF MAJOR ZEMAN
1.
THE WAR BEGAN on a Thursday.
Petr always remembered that because Thursday was his turn to deliver the kids to school and pick them up again, and he was sitting in the car waiting outside Tereza’s apartment in the morning when his phone rang.
“Boss?” said Jakub. “Put the radio on. There’s been an outrage.”
Jakub was a good, steady detective, but he was prone to exaggeration on occasion. Petr sighed and switched on the radio and discovered that this was not one of those occasions.
He looked out of the window and saw Tereza coming out of the building’s entrance with Eliška and Tomáš, all bundled up against the weather, schoolbags slung over their shoulders and Big Blue Cat lunchboxes clutched in their little gloved fists. His heart sank.
They crossed the road to the car and Petr lowered the window. “Sorry,” he said to Tereza. “Sorry,” he said to the children.
“I saw it on the news,” she said. “I’ll take them to school. Will you be able to collect them?”
“There’s no way to tell,” he said.
“I have that job interview this afternoon,” she said. “You know that. It’s been arranged for ages.”
“Go to your interview,” he told her. “I’ll pick them up.”
“Or you’ll organise someone else to do that.” She shook her head. “I’m so tired of this, Petr.”
“They’ll love it,” he said jovially. He looked down at the kids. “How about a ride in a police car with Uncle Jakub this afternoon?” They looked uncertainly pleased.
Tereza snorted. “Uncle Jakub.”
He started the engine and put the car in gear. “I’m sorry,” he said again, and drove away.
THERE WAS A bar called TikTok, just off Karlovo námeští in the Old Town, that Petr and the department had been keeping their eyes on for several months. They had some vague intelligence that a Chechen warlord calling himself Abram, having been chased from Bremen by a combination of local police and home-grown brigands, had bought himself a controlling interest in TikTok and was shaping the place to use as a beach-head in Prague.
This was obviously not an optimum outcome for anybody, but hours of surveillance and intelligence gathering had failed to confirm the rumours. Ownership of TikTok was an impossible tangle of blind trusts and offshore funds and tax avoidance schemes so complex that they were practically sentient; if Abram was in there somewhere, he was well hidden. He had also not been observed to visit his supposed new acquisition; nor had any of his known lieutenants. Petr had sent a team into the bar on the onerous mission of becoming regulars, and they reported nothing out of the ordinary, as did the young woman detective who he had sent in to get a job as a waitress. TikTok, to all intents and purposes, was utterly blameless.
“What a fucking mess,” said Jakub.
For once, Petr reflected, his sergeant was erring on the side of understatement. The street was full of rubble and shattered glass and wrecked cars. Every shop window was broken, as were most of the apartment windows in the blocks above them. Huge bits of moulding and brickwork had fallen into the street.
The devastation grew worse as one looked down the street, until one’s eye was drawn to the centre, the heart of destruction, the smoking pile of collapsed brick and wood and metal which had once housed the bar known as TikTok. It was as if, Petr thought, the bar had explosively vomited its innards into the street and then slumped in on itself and taken everything above and around it down as well.
Both ends of the street were full of detectives and uniformed policemen and firemen and soldiers. Further down, an Army bomb team was still sending robots into the destroyed building to check for further devices. Until they were done there was no way to allow the fire brigade or police anywhere near it and until that happened there was no way to discover just how bad the loss of life was. Preliminary reports said fifteen dead, thirty injured, but Petr knew those figures were going to rise in a hurry. The bomb had gone off just as people were going to work.
“We’re presuming it was a bomb,” Jakub said.
“Yes,” Petr said. “Yes, we’re presuming it was a bomb.”
Jakub nodded. “ATG are on their way.”
Petr sighed. His department’s relationship with the Anti-Terrorist Group was fractious at best. “I’m surprised they aren’t here already,” he said, but it was a poor attempt at a joke. “Did something happen last night?”
Jakub shook his head. “Normal night, according to the boys.”
Petr swallowed and asked the question that had been hanging between them ever since he got there. “Milena?”
“She’s not answering her phones,” Jakub said soberly. “At home or her mobiles. She’d have been starting work about now.”
Petr scowled. The bombing was bad enough. Losing the young undercover detective he’d placed in the bar was a catastrophe. “Keep trying her phones,” he said. “Has anyone been to her apartment?”
Jakub nodded. “Nobody there.”
Petr felt sick. He took a deep breath. “All right. We can’t do anything here until the Army have finished sniffing around. I want everybody out shaking snitches. I want to know how this happened without us hearing anything about it, and I want to know who’s responsible.”