On her third night in Den Burg, sitting in the hotel’s frankly excellent restaurant and eating dinner, Maksim came over to her table and sat down opposite her. “Hi,” he said. “What are you eating? It looks good.”

  “Lamb stew,” she said. “And yeah, it’s terrific.”

  He attracted a waitress by force of personality alone. “I’ll have the lamb stew,” he told her. “And a glass of Amstel. Brandy and coffee to follow.”

  “You want all that on the same bill?” the waitress asked, glancing at Carey’s meal.

  “I don’t see why not,” he said. He beamed at Carey. “My treat.”

  When the waitress had gone, he reached over and gave Carey’s hand a squeeze. “How’ve you been?”

  “Busy,” she said, squeezing back. “You?”

  “Non-stop,” he agreed, giving the menu a once-over and putting it back in its holder in the middle of the table. It was a month or so since they’d last seen each other, and it had been a bit of a slog for Carey.

  “I missed you,” she said.

  He beamed at her again. “Are we all set at this end?”

  “I guess,” she said, going back to her food.

  Maksim glanced around the restaurant. It was packed with young people wearing EU Festival lanyards and badges, all of them talking far too loudly. “I thought maybe we’d have a day at the beach tomorrow. How do you feel about that?”

  “Only the truly crazy would go to the beach in weather like this,” she told him.

  He laughed. “It’s bracing.”

  “It snowed this morning,” she said. “It’s April and it snowed.”

  “Some sea air will do you the world of good,” he said.

  “It’s all sea air here,” she said. “The bits of it that aren’t sleet.”

  He gave her that old Maksim grin. “Five bucks says the weather’s better tomorrow.”

  She looked at him. The problem was, she thought, she really liked him. “Make it Swiss francs and you’re on,” she said.

  Irritatingly, the next morning dawned bright and clear under a blue sky streaked with high cloud. “That’s five Swiss you owe me,” Maksim told her with a grin.

  The beach at De Koog was about twenty minutes from Den Burg on the bus. Pretty much everywhere on the island was twenty minutes from Den Burg by bus. The little town sat behind a pair of high embankments and a dry moat that stopped the North Sea from inundating the area. Walking from the bus-stop, Carey saw bars and restaurants and cafés and gift shops, most of them still shuttered until later in the season, and a couple of biggish hotels sheltering behind the inner embankment. There were a few people about, but not many. Carey recognised a few of the EU delegates.

  On the other side of the outer embankment was a promenade overlooking the beach. The sea was slate-grey and calm, but an offshore breeze was lifting white spray from the tops of waves. There was a signpost on the promenade with arms pointing to various places—Amsterdam, Berlin, Copenhagen. One arm pointing out to sea was marked Boston UK 175 sea miles.

  “Is a sea mile longer or shorter than a real mile?” Carey asked.

  “I don’t know,” Maksim said, hands in pockets, staring out to sea. “Let’s get something to eat.”

  A line of houses and apartment blocks had been built along the crest of the embankment, their patios and verandahs protected from the wind by tall perspex shields. There was a café with an outdoor seating area, similarly shielded with perspex. They sat at a table and ordered toasted cheese sandwiches and tea and looked at the horizon, beyond which lurked Boston UK. It was the closest Carey had been to England. She closed her eyes and tilted her head back and felt the miniscule warmth of the sun on her face.

  At one point, a woman walked past the café. She paused at the crest of the embankment and took out her phone and took some pictures of the sea. She was tall and she had short brown hair, and if you gave her a quick glance in low light you might reasonably mistake her for Carey. Carey suddenly realised she knew the woman, though. She’d been in Copenhagen for a gallery opening the previous year. The agency she was working for had booked her into a boutique hotel in the centre of town, and she’d wound up having her breakfasts at a McDonalds near the Tivoli. The tall woman had been at the opening, but then her hair had been long and blonde and she’d been wearing a long blue evening gown and she’d been on the arm of a much older man, the pair of them flanked by gigantic security men in excellent suits.

  “That’s Marthe Schiller,” Carey said as the woman set off again down towards the beach. It had never occurred to her—why should it have? She had short brown hair and she’d never worn an evening dress in her life—that they looked alike.

  Maksim pursed his lips.

  “What’s going on here?” she said.

  Maksim gave her a look. You don’t look in the Package.

  “If she’s doing what I think she’s doing, her husband’s going to want her back and he’s going to be coming after whoever jumped her out,” she told him.

  Maksim took a sip of tea and looked seriously at her. “We do not ask,” he said. “We do not question. We move the Package. She’s been at a retreat on Rømø; she snuck out and took a ferry to Sylt yesterday and came down the causeway from there on these papers.” He took a passport from his pocket and handed it over. It was Belgian, made out to someone called Sophie van Ost, whose photo was so poor it could have been of either of them. The photo in the passport Carey had travelled from Antwerp on was almost identical. “She’ll be going to the mainland this afternoon and you’ll be driving back up to Denmark.”

  “This is never going to work,” she said. “Someone will have missed her already. Henning Schiller will have people looking.”

  He shook his head. “It’s not that kind of retreat. Nobody knows she’s gone yet, but when they do they’ll be checking on ferry passengers and they’ll see Sophie van Ost among them, so she has to be seen to go back. That closes the loop. It’s foolproof, trust me. Sleight of hand.”

  She stared at him. “You can’t ever just do something simply, can you,” she said. “It’s always got to be bells and whistles and as complicated as possible.”

  He grinned. “Complicated,” he said, picking up the remains of his toastie, “is what fools people.”

  Back in Den Burg, the Euro-folk were packing up their show. The tents in the square were coming down and riggers were dismantling the temporary building. The next couple of ferries back to Den Helder were going to be busy; Marthe Schiller would just disappear in the crowd.

  Walking back to the hotel from the bus stop, Carey glanced to one side of the square, where the town’s little main street curved off in the distance. She thought she caught sight of a figure in a shabby suit and a beret emerging from one of the houses, but she couldn’t be certain.

  Back in their room, she packed. “Tell her not to go in the gift shop on the ferry,” she said. “I talked to some of the staff in there on the way out.” She gave him the plushie sheep. “And tell her to carry this.”

  Maksim gave the sheep a suspicious look. “Okay.” They stood looking at each other. “So, I’ll see you soon, then.”

  “Yeah, right.” She hugged him and gave him a kiss. “You mad bastard.”

  Marthe Schiller’s car, a hired hydrogen-cell Audi, was parked behind the hotel. Maksim had the keys. Carey put her bags in the boot, got in, and drove away from Den Burg.

  The sleight of hand relied on the uncertain administrative status of the Wadden Islands. At one end, they were in the Netherlands, at the other they were in Denmark, but for the moment at least there was no passport control and therefore no record of border crossings.

  The drive up the causeway to Wangerooge was uneventful, and she made the ferry to Sylt with time to spare. She ate dinner in one of the boat’s dining rooms, kept to herself, but made sure she was seen. She thought of Marthe Schiller, who was probably already in Belgium by now.

  From Sylt, it was a short ferry-hop to Rømø, and then a drive across the causeway to Skaerbaek on the Danish mainland. She checked into a motel for the night, and the following morning she returned the car to the hire company at the local station where it had originally been hired from, and she got on the express to Copenhagen.

  Around Odense, she made her way to the dining car and had a cheese and ham omelette and a beer for lunch. She felt grimy and travel-weary. Maybe once she was back in Madrid she’d log out for a while, concentrate on local journalism. She’d covered a lot of ground lately and it would be good to stay put for a few months.

  A young man sat down opposite her. He was wearing a plaid shirt over a black tee shirt, and a combat jacket over them both. He had fair hair and an old-fashioned hipster beard and a kind face. They sat looking at each other for a while.

  “I’m not going to ask where she is,” he said finally. “Even if you know, you wouldn’t tell me.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” she said. “Who are you?”

  He bowed his head slightly. “Peter Schiller.” Carey felt a wave of goose pimples go up her arms.

  “I still don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Peter smiled. He had a nice smile. “My stepmother thinks she’s sort of frail,” he told her. “But she’s not. My father’s a monster; frail people don’t survive long around him. Eventually, it got too much for her, and I don’t blame her for leaving.” He clasped his hands on the table between them. “I don’t know who you are, and I don’t want to know. But I wanted to thank you, on her behalf.” He took a card from one of the breast pockets of his jacket and put it on the table. “If you ever need anything, get in touch. I hope it won’t ever come to that, but just in case.”

  Carey looked down at the card. Europeans still favoured physical calling cards. This one just had a phone number on it, not even a name. She thought of Maksim saying, “It’s foolproof,” and was suddenly overcome with a powerful urge to find him and punch him in the face. She looked at Peter and said calmly, “I think you’ve got the wrong person.”

  He smiled again and got up. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Have a good journey.” And he walked off down the aisle and out of the carriage. A few minutes later, when the train stopped at Odense, she saw him walking down the platform, apparently without a care in the world, heir to one of Europe’s great criminal empires, if you believed what you saw on the news.

  3

  Krista was in a cab when the phone rang.

  “Turn around and go back and we’ll pretend this never happened,” Jakobson said.

  “If I’m not under arrest you have no right to hold me,” Krista told her. She saw the driver glance at her in the rear-view mirror, but that was all right. She wanted him to remember her.

  “This really doesn’t make things look good for you,” Jakobson said. “It makes you look guilty.”

  “You already think I’m mixed up in this, colonel. That’s why you put me under house arrest, not because you were worried about the papers catching up with me.”

  She heard Jakobson sigh. “You went out shopping today. Do you really think I’d have let you do that if I thought you were involved?”

  “I was under guard the whole time.”

  “Yes, well, I’ll be having a quiet face-to-face with Lieutenant Käsper about that in an hour or so.”

  “It wasn’t his fault,” Krista said. “I tricked him.”

  “He’s supposed to be better trained than that.”

  “You disabled the override on the door so I couldn’t get out,” Krista told her. “Does the key code in the phone only open the door during the daytime, when there’s someone available to babysit?” Silence, at the other end of the connection. “Fine. Well, this is me officially withdrawing my cooperation.”

  “Major,” said Jakobson. “Listen to reason.”

  Krista hung up. “Pull over here,” she told the driver, rummaging in her bag as if to put her phone back in it but in reality shoving it down the back of the rear passenger seat.

  She paid with cash she’d withdrawn at the mall earlier in the day, walked off slowly until the cab had vanished into the evening traffic, watched it carry her phone off into the distance, presumably to an appointment with Jakobson’s people when they finally tracked it down. It probably wouldn’t buy her a lot of time, but it was a breathing space.

  So, here she was. Night in Tallinn, snow on the ground and snow swirling in the light of the streetlamps, a fugitive from the police. What she’d done was enough to put a serious reprimand on her career, at the very least. It might very well have ended it. And she had no idea what to do next.

  One step at a time. She stopped at a kiosk and bought a cheap phone, slotted in the expansion card onto which she’d copied her old phone, and walked to the nearest bank cashpoint while it took over the new one. She withdrew four thousand euros in cash—almost everything she had in her current account at this point in the month—and took another cab to the other side of town. All these things were trackable, but it would take time and she planned to keep moving.

  In a run-down café, she wolfed down a sandwich and a cup of coffee and dithered over whether to call Markus. She decided against it. Things were already bad enough for him; making contact right now could only make them worse.

  There was, she thought, really only one place she could go, and she realised she had been trying not to think about it.

  The majority of people, if asked what the most important part of a surveillance state was, would probably say ‘cameras’, but that wasn’t quite true. The most important thing was forgetting that the cameras were there at all.

  If mass surveillance had arrived all of a sudden, fully-formed, a camera on every building and in every public vehicle, there would have been an outcry. But it hadn’t happened like that. It had happened gradually, a camera at a time, and people had got used to them to the point where they didn’t notice them any more. Down the years cameras had become smaller and the software behind them more sophisticated, but they were invisible, just another part of everyday street furniture. It was only when you thought about them that you noticed just how many there were.

  The trick, with surveillance, was to move quickly and to keep moving. There was no central control room monitoring all the cameras in Tallinn; the street cameras belonged to the traffic authority, every store had its own system, each of the four bus companies, and so on. The authorities could tap into these any time they wanted, but civil rights legislation meant they had to produce a warrant first unless there was a massive emergency, and that took time. At this time of night it would mean trying to find a judge who was home to sign the warrant, or failing that rousting one from a restaurant or a theatre. Krista figured she had maybe half an hour.

  She spent a few minutes of that half-hour buying two overcoats in a rundown little secondhand shop not far from where the taxi had dropped her. They were tatty and smelled peculiar, but they were warm and had hoods, and they altered her profile, which was important. Wearing one and with the other in a carrier bag, she left the shop and walked down the street.

  Next, she caught a tram. It was cold on the tram; half the passengers were wearing hats or had their hoods pulled up. She found a seat in the final carriage, and kept her head down while she typed inconspicuously on her phone. A review of any footage might fail to spot her among all the other people in cold-weather gear.

  The tram took her across the city. Surveillance was thinner on the ground the further you got from the centre of town, until the only cameras were on main roads and on streets patrolled by private security firms, which handily advertised their presence by means of warning signs bolted to lamp-posts.

  She made her way from the tram stop, down lanes and side streets. At one point, feeling reasonably comfortable that she wasn’t in range of a camera, she changed coats and stuffed the old one into some bushes. She found a pebble by the side of the road and dropped it inside her right boot, where it was just annoying enough to alter her gait. The trick was to walk differently enough to spoof the recognition algorithms, but not so much that you looked like someone deliberately walking with a stone in your shoe, which the algorithms were also written to look for. It was surprisingly tough to pull off.

  In a new coat and with a new walk, she made her way to a shabby-looking car hire firm which had come to her attention during the investigation into Tamburlaine. The team hadn’t so far been able to prove any connection, aside from rumour, but it was definitely a low-level criminal enterprise, and they had chosen to keep an eye on its affairs, just in case. When she walked into its offices at eight o’clock on the evening of the protest march, she found the owner, a middle-aged man wearing a shabby three-piece suit, sitting at a desk and pecking tentatively with two fingertips at the keyboard of a battered old laptop.

  Krista didn’t have time for small talk. She told the owner of the firm that she wanted to hire a car on the quiet, something without tracking devices, and she wanted to pay cash.

  He had no idea who she was, of course, so he had no idea that she knew a lot more about him than he would probably have felt comfortable with, from the details of his bank accounts to his browsing history. He was so relieved to make at least one hire tonight that he gladly agreed to do the transaction in cash and he didn’t look too closely at the ID she’d mocked up on her phone during the tram journey, which was good because it was paper-thin, not much more than a false name and address and an electricity bill she’d created using the phone’s text editor and a cut-and-pasted letterhead. He didn’t even bother to ask for her driving licence. She’d been reasonably sure she would get away with it—the firm was far from the centre of town, and it didn’t pay a lot of attention to annoying things like legality. All you had to do was appear confident, seem as if you knew what you were doing, and have the bare minimum of ID and a wallet full of kroons.