The young man looked at the handcuff on his wrist. “And you are an ungrateful bastard, Major. That little bomb back there – and it was a little bomb, otherwise nobody would have got out of there alive – was meant to up the ante, make things personal between the police and organised crime. It was a provocation. And I saved your life.”
“You have a minute,” Petr said. “Talk quickly.”
“It’s going to take more than a minute,” the young man said. “And it’s easier if I show you.”
THEY WENT TO the end of the alleyway and down a connecting alley, and down another, and another, and across a street Petr didn’t recognise, and down another alleyway, and all the time the young man – who called himself ‘Rudi’ – was talking and talking and talking. Talking about Coureurs, heads in lockers, maps, parallel worlds. And suddenly Petr had no idea where they were and all the shops looked strange and the people they saw were dressed a little oddly, a little old-fashioned, and all the shop signs were in English and they emerged from one last alleyway into a magnificent town square, all lit up and cobbled and full of promenading men and women and Petr, who had lived in Prague all his life, had never seen it before.
“We’d better not go out there,” Rudi said. “We’ll stick out like sore thumbs. I know somewhere we can go.”
“What…?” Petr managed to say.
“Welcome to Władysław, Major,” Rudi said. “And you’d better take these handcuffs off. You’ll never find your way back without me, and I’m not going anywhere chained to you.”
A SHORT DISTANCE from the square, Rudi knocked on the door of a handsome-looking townhouse. The knock was answered by a tall, elderly gentleman who glanced from Rudi to Petr and back a couple of times before letting them in.
“I hope you don’t mind if I don’t tell you this gentleman’s real name,” Rudi said as they made their way down a hallway. “You can call him ‘John’, if you want. John will have a quick look at you, clean you up.”
‘John’ was some kind of physician, it seemed. One of the rooms on the first floor of the house was done out as a surgery. Petr sat on the examining table and let John clean and dress his wounds while Rudi kept on talking.
“Prague is the only city in Europe with paths that lead directly to the Community,” he said. “I don’t know why. It seemed to me, though, that existing so closely together there must have been some kind of accommodation between the two cities. I needed to see what that was, see how things fitted together here and in Prague.”
“So you started a war?”
“There’s a lot of distrust on both sides, it seems. I just gave it a nudge. Learned all kinds of useful things. What you told me about the Police Minister, for instance. That’s very interesting.”
“She’s involved?”
“Maybe not. Maybe someone just gave her the photo and told her to show it to various interested parties. But it implies someone quite high up in Prague is involved.” His leg was obviously giving him discomfort. He shifted in his chair while John pressed a cotton wool ball soaked in some alcohol solution against Petr’s head wound. “Anyway, while everyone’s attention has been wandering, I’ve been popping here and there, chatting to people. There’s quite a useful little dissident movement here. They’ve let me have some very nice maps, which will come in handy.”
“Who bombed TikTok?”
Rudi looked thoughtful. “The bar? The big bomb? Oh, that was them.” He nodded towards the street. “Community Intelligence.” He snorted. “Intelligence. They bombed the wrong bar. They were supposed to attack a bar in the next street owned by some shady Czech character. I don’t know why, exactly.”
“And the couple in Pankrác?”
Rudi nodded. “They planted the bomb. And were then killed – you’re going to enjoy this – by colleagues of the young Arab men who were living over the bar when they blew it up.” He looked thoughtful. “I suppose this means the Community is now part of GWOT. That’s going to make things interesting.”
“None of this helps me,” Petr said.
“No,” Rudi admitted. “And what I’m going to ask you to do next is not going to help you, either.”
2.
IT WAS MARCH and she was thinking about taking a holiday. March was when the snow started to get patchy and rotten but it was still too cold to hike or sunbathe unless you were of a sturdy constitution. Of course, espionage was no respecter of the seasons, but early spring seemed to be the time of year when Europe’s many intelligence services declared, if not a truce on the scale of the British and Germans playing football in No Man’s Land during World War I, at least an informal relaxation of activities. In all her years in counterespionage, nobody had ever made trouble for her in the spring, and she had a good capable team working for her in case anything did start while she was away. Once upon a time she had stayed at her post all year round, obsessed with the thought that the moment she left something terrible would erupt. But these days she had learned to let go a little. She could spare a few days with her feet up somewhere.
That just left the decision of where to go, what to do, so she’d spent the past couple of days surfing the internet looking for something interesting. She was currently quite taken with the idea of a paragliding holiday in Wales.
Her phone rang. She said, “Yes?”
“I just had a call from Immigration,” said Pavel. “They had a flag go up.”
She frowned and gestured back from the paragliding site to her desktop, where flag alerts usually popped up as little red Gremlins. “I don’t see anything.”
“It’s an old flag, from before the last system update. Immigration had it on their database but it didn’t get copied over when we upgraded.”
She sighed. “What’s the name?”
“Tonu Laara,” said Pavel. “Estonian national.”
She looked through the window on the other side of her office. Beyond the glass a wall of trees dropped obliquely into a mountain valley.
She looked at the view for so long that Pavel said, “Chief?”
She blinked. “Where is he?”
“He booked into the hotel at Pustevny.” He added, “The flag was tagged ‘observe, do not detain,’ so Immigration observed him and didn’t bother to let us know until now. He’s been here two days.”
Yes, well. She was long overdue for a quiet chat with Major Menzel, the head of the Immigration Service. But not today. “Do we have anyone up there right now?” she asked.
“Rikki and Colin.”
She rubbed her eyes. “All right. Tell them to stay in contact but not to approach. I’ll go up there.”
“Yes, Chief.”
“And Pavel?”
“Yes, Chief?”
“It’s pronounced Tonu,” she said, getting reluctantly to her feet and bidding a silent farewell to her holiday.
HE WAS SITTING in the hotel’s bar, nursing a beer and smoking a small cigar. He looked thinner than she remembered, a little more careworn. There was grey in his hair and a walking cane propped against the chair beside him, but he still looked ridiculously young. She walked right over to his table and sat down opposite him. And then they sat looking at each other. There is a peculiar intimacy between two people who have made love and then parted, only to be reunited many years later. Particularly if they spent the whole of their time together lying to each other.