‘Not see you is ages, Usherwood, man. Lose some weights, eh?’
He shrugged. She shrugged back. A half-smoked fag dangled from the corner of her mouth. Catching the eye of the barista, she took the cigarette from her lips, extinguished it, and put the unsmoked half behind her left ear.
‘No waste, no want.’
Ethan grimaced. Her English hadn’t got any better.
‘Take a seat, Lindita.’ He invited her to sit beside him. ‘What would you like?’
She asked for a caffè mocha with cream and a double slice of chocolate cake. He looked her over: size ten or twelve. How did she do it? He could believe she was some kind of supernatural being. In fact, he was counting on it, counting on her supernatural powers to find and rescue Sarah. And maybe, just maybe, she could explain to him why he was so intent on this, why saving Sarah had become more than a rung on the ladder back to self-preservation and professional integrity. Much more.
The barista brought her coffee and cake, and a second coffee for Ethan. Going back to the bar, he ejected a CD and put in another. Antony and the Johnsons burst into ripe song, charged with emotion and dread, the half-human vibrato rising and plunging through lyrics as dark as treacle.
Lindita dug her fork into the first slice of cake and popped a large tranche into her bright mouth. It disappeared and her eyes widened as her mouth moved in a slow grinding motion. Ethan waited for her to finish. Her tongue came out at last and licked her full, purple-lipsticked lips.
‘You not try arrest me, then?’ she asked, turning her big green eyes on him.
‘Have you been doing anything I should arrest you for?’
She grinned and drank deeply from her coffee cup. Her eyes were filled with defiance and mischief.
He explained what he wanted, the hunt and the means for his own escape.
She played at the laptop for several minutes, then sat back and finished the cake — both slices — and the coffee.
‘Thank you,’ she said, words he’d never heard from her lips before. ‘Now we goes my place, yes?’
From many other women it might have sounded like an invitation to romantic intrigue. From Lindita Cobaj, it could as easily have been a threat. He didn’t hesitate. He wasn’t in a position to go against her.
He drove her home to Barton, the dodgiest part of Gloucester, keeping a close watch in the mirror to make sure he wasn’t being trailed. He knew he’d recognise any car belonging to the local CID. Then it occurred to him that the police might not be the only ones looking for him. There were boys and young men in the street. Ethan recognised some of them, and he guessed they knew him too. He locked his car, then stood looking at it and the boys. Lindita walked over to the watchers, spoke quietly to them, and came back.
‘No need worry. Car very safe. More safe here than front police station.’
Her flat — she called it apartament im, my apartment, to give it the only cachet it was ever likely to get — was in the basement of a building whose peeling walls seemed to suffer from a notifiable skin disease. She ushered him inside, like a new lover introducing her beau to the outer chambers of hell.
Lindita was an Albanian, a Shqiptare, from Vlorë on the Adriatic coast, seventy miles from Brindisi and the Italian mainland. Like the city she hailed from, Lindita had more than one name, more than one face, more than one identity.
She belonged to the Solejmani crime syndicate operating out of Vlorë. The Solejmanis had started life smuggling illegal migrants out of Albania to the Puglia coast, then moved into heroin, sex slavery, and illegal gambling. The people-smuggling racket took them eventually to England, where Lindita put her startling abilities as a graphic designer to work, forging documents in every imaginable language. She’d moved from London to Gloucester, where she worked her wizardry with an Apple computer and half a dozen printers that chirruped away all day long, supplying IDs for gangsters and slaves like a machine that feeds Chupa Chups lollies to greedy children.
Along the way, she had learnt to use her computer for hacking. It had become a hobby and a source of extra income. She’d always been careful to limit her scams and to keep her tracks well covered. Once in a while, though, there’d been slips that had led to her being picked up for questioning, and more than once the questioning had led to conviction and short prison terms. Ethan had come to know her that way, and grown to admire her strength, a single woman among ruthless men.
She led him to the kitchen, where gleaming new appliances rubbed shoulders with damp patches on the walls and windows that looked as though they hadn’t been washed in twenty years. She made strong Turkish coffee in a long-handled metal pot, poured it into two small glasses, and added a generous splash of Albanian brandy from a slim green bottle labelled Konjak Gjergj Kastrioti Skenderbeu. She put the cork back in the bottle and set it down.
‘Skenderbeu,’ she said. ‘Great fucking Albanian hero man. Fight many fight, kill many Turk. Is big hero for Albanian. His flag, flag to Albania.’
She pointed to the winged eagle on the label and grinned. One of her teeth had fallen out. She took a pack of cigarettes from her pocket and lit up. Ethan recognised the brand: Priluky Osoblivi, made in the Ukraine and smuggled from Albania. She probably had cases out in the back.
He downed the contents of his glass in one gulp. Two seconds later, he regretted it. He coughed and spluttered. Lindita took a long drag on her cigarette, blew out a plume of smoke, and knocked back her cognac without blinking.
‘In Albania,’ she said, ‘you would not be man. Only child cough.’
He recovered his breath and set about explaining to her what he was trying to do in more detail. She fetched a pad and pen, and wrote down everything. He told her about Sarah, about himself, about Aehrenthal.
‘I think he may have taken her out of this country,’ he said. ‘Do you think that’s possible?’
She nodded and lit another cigarette.
‘Maybe. Yes, maybe possible.’
‘But if he has taken her somewhere, can you track him?’
She shrugged. Her mouth curved, not in a smile, not in a frown. A gesture of possibility. Ethan had no time for possibilities.
‘What this worth to you, Inspector of Detectives?’ she asked. ‘You got any money?’
They agreed a price for the hacking job, then a price for a passport. If he succeeded in tracking Sarah down, he’d have to leave the country at once.
She used her own computer — an iMac G5 with an 18-inch screen — to search through the records of a dozen Austrian flying organisations, and each time she narrowed the search down. She had moved plenty of people across the Alps from Italy into Austria, and her German was much better than Ethan’s GCSE version. As she hunched over the table, her tobacco-stained fingers flickered across the keyboard like seagulls darting over waves. Bit by bit, the facts started coming in.
Aehrenthal learnt to fly with Motorflug Union Wien, at their flight training centre in Vienna and at the little airfield at Bad Vöslau. He was a member of the Wiener Luftfahrer Verband club at Bad Vöslau, where he’d once kept a rare 1940 Bücker Bü 131 Jungmann. A further search revealed that he also belonged to the Punitz Flugbetrieb, a flying club operating out of a smaller airfield further south, Punitz Güssing. The only other landing site in the vicinity of Bernstein was a short grass strip at Pinkafeld. Lindita shook her head. She knew a lot about landing small planes in hidden locations. A grass strip might have been doable, but at some risk.
Selecting Bad Vöslau as the more likely destination, she hacked into a closed-access system, the Aeronautical Fixed Telecommunications Network, through which flight plan details are sent between air traffic control units. If Aehrenthal had logged flight plans from any UK airport, they would have gone to Eurocontrol in Brussels. Confirmation would have gone to the departure airport and the details forwarded to the area control centres. This gave several portals through which the information could be found. It took ten minutes from start to finish.