They held hands and dodged their way across the busy street, not daring to look behind. On the busy pavement, they ran.
A couple of hundred metres on, they slowed down to a trot. And then they stopped at a little cluster of market stalls.
‘Where are we?’ Petrie asked, his chest heaving. A red and white tram clattered past them, jammed with commuters.
She pointed. ‘There’s the castle. Let’s head for the Old Town.’
‘I’ve dried off. How about you?’
‘Yes, but I’d kill for a shower.’
General Kamensky sat with three telephones. Two of them were on the Colonel’s desk and the third was a mobile which he produced from a deep army pocket. For his first call he cleared the Colonel’s office. Boroviška and his Lieutenant stood in the outside corridor while tantalising snatches of phrase came through the door. Then the General was at the door and waving them in while he made a further call.
This second call was to the Chief of Police in Prague. The Czech Republic being an independent state, the call was in the nature of a request. Equally clearly, someone had made sure that this ‘request’ was backed up with all the necessary authority. A third call, identical in content, went to Bratislava.
At last he turned his attention to the officers facing him nervously across the desk. ‘Colonel, I won’t emphasise the magnitude of your failure as I’m sure you are already aware of it. The fact is that your task force had a special assignment, an unpleasant duty but a simple one. In fact, it could hardly have been simpler.’
‘Sir…’
Kamensky waved a hand dismissively. ‘I don’t want to hear it. I turn up here to supervise the — how can I put it? — the terminal arrangements, to find that you have lost two of your charges. Untrained civilians bottled up inside a castle surrounded by a brigade of regular troops!’
He helped himself to one of the Colonel’s cigars, he struck a match on the underside of the table and took a few puffs. Then he sighed. ‘The position is that for this operation to be successful, all the enemies of the state have to be removed. One survivor equals total failure.’
‘Sir…’
The General banged his hand on the table. ‘I told you I don’t want to hear your excuses! Now, thanks to your incompetence, we have to involve the regular police in the recapture of these people. Do you have any idea how much that complicates the operation, Boroviška?’
‘I do, General.’
Kamensky stared at him. ‘I hope you do, Colonel. You now have to liquidate these people out of the public eye, and before they talk to the police, but at the same time we need the police manpower if we are to have any chance of finding them. We may also have to operate in the territory of a neighbouring state.’
Boroviška finally got a word in. ‘They can’t have gone far. They had no transport. The only railway stations within reach are at Mikulas and Benadikova. I have posted men at both, in plain clothes. The hotels within a ten-kilometre radius of here are being checked now.’
‘And if you were fleeing for your life, would you put up in the nearest hotel?’
‘No, sir. It’s too stupid to be worth checking. Which is why I’m checking.’
Kamensky nodded approvingly. ‘We may indeed be dealing with a couple of clever foxes.’ He stood up and moved over to a map pinned on the wooden wall. ‘We are very close to the Polish border.’
‘Very close indeed.’
‘What are you doing about that?’
Boroviška pointed. ‘There are only two crossing points, here at Trstena and possibly over here at Cadca. I have informed the border police and faxed through photographs of the criminals.
‘There’s a rail crossing into Poland at Cadca.’
‘I expect the border police…’
‘You expect?’ The General rubbed his forehead in an anguished way. ‘Colonel, move some of that idle brigade at Smoleniçe, and have them waiting at Cadca before the first train arrives.’
‘Yes, sir.’
Kamensky’s eyes roamed over the map. ‘Border crossings, away from roads? What about Narodny Park here?’
‘At this time of year, General, without specialised equipment? Survival is impossible.’
‘Another of your impossibles, Boroviška. However, I agree. It can’t be done.’ Kamensky paused.
Boroviška picked up the cue. ‘I’ll speak to the Park Rangers.’
‘You will. You will also check the local hotels, and find out what transport has been leaving from them, and whether anyone fitting the descriptions of the targets has been seen in the area.’ Kamensky looked at a photograph. ‘The Størmer woman is strikingly beautiful. What wonderful blonde hair. So distinctive, would you not say?’
38
The Chess Player
Café Roland was pure 1920s’ kitsch, all palm fronds and Art Deco. Somewhere a husky-voiced chanteuse was half-singing a bittersweet lyric to a background of violin, cello and flute.
Near the front door a man was resting his arm on a red velvet cushion, which was as well because the clay pipe he held was about three feet long. He was dressed in a golden tunic lined with thick white fur, and he was wearing a hat which looked like a giant Liquorice Allsort. His free hand was hovering over a chessboard on a polished black cabinet.
The café was big on black: polished black granite floor, square black tables and chairs, a big black clock over the bar, shiny black panelling everywhere. But it was light and airy, with a high vaulted ceiling and tall windows, and delicate green marble pillars decorated with rustic scenes in colourful mosaic.
Freya sat dreaming about the daughter she might have one day.
She was the perfect baby. Toughened against a host of diseases, she had a likely life span of three hundred years. At age three, she had a two-thousand-word command of the English language. By five, she spoke Norwegian, English, German and French fluently, and had a good grasp of history, geography, mathematics, physics, chemistry, English and Russian literature, and biology. By six, Mozart was easy and by age nine, when her physiology allowed it, she had mastered Soradji’s Clavicembalisticum.
She got her doctorate in molecular biology at age sixteen. By then she was both sexually precocious and surprisingly mature. Having taken a ‘year out’, she started a small pharmaceutical company at age eighteen. Its expansion matched her own amazing rate of development and within a decade the young woman, incredibly beautiful by Western standards, was listed in Forbes as well as attracting, and rejecting, a long list of suitors.
A young man wearing a bow tie and waistcoat interrupted her dream. He was dressed in black. Freya ordered hot chocolates in German. Petrie watched the waiter anxiously as the man sauntered behind the bar, heard him give a curt order and then saw him disappear behind an enormous palm; in a moment cigarette smoke began to drift through the fronds and Petrie sighed briefly with relief.
The agreed plan was to split up, but being only flesh and bone, they were postponing the moment, desperate to stay in each other’s company for a few extra minutes. Freya’s fantastic Superbaby receded from her imagination, but the concept left her vaguely uneasy. She looked at the big clock, unconsciously biting her lower lip. ‘Five to ten.’
The chanteuse sang in melancholy vein: