“Could I have your attention, please?” said a voice. Carey looked over and saw a young man wearing chinos and a blazer over a white shirt. He had long brown hair tied back in a ponytail and his skin was deeply tanned, and for a moment she thought he was from the First Nations, but he had that same not-quite West Country accent she’d heard before. When everyone was looking at him, he said, “Firstly, welcome. My name’s Eric and I suppose you could say I’m your host. We have a meal waiting for you all, but I’d like to tell you a couple of things first. You’re guests, not prisoners, and I hope you will all be returned to your homes as soon as possible. Meanwhile, feel free to have a look around the estate, but I have to ask you not to try to leave because you will get lost and I can’t promise we’ll be able to find you. There are wild animals in the forest, and they can be dangerous if you startle them. There are rooms for everyone and there’s plenty of hot water, so if you want to have a wash before dinner just ask one of the staff and they’ll show you to your room. If you’d prefer to have your meal served in your room, just say and we’ll arrange that.” He looked at Magda and Boksi and Romek and beamed. “And for our young friends, we’ve arranged a treasure hunt for tomorrow afternoon.” The kids looked at him as if he’d just fallen out of a tree.

  “Where are we?” said Lindmaa in the same confident voice with which she’d tried to arrest everybody. “Who are you?”

  “You all have questions, and I’m sure they’re all good ones,” Eric told them. “And I hope that you’ll have the majority of them answered soon. But first, please, settle in. Dinner in an hour. I’ll ring the gong to let you know.” And then he just turned and walked away and left them standing there wondering what to do next.

  Anatoly came over, eyebrow raised. “Well,” he said, “this was unexpected.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “Also faintly absurd.”

  “The whole world’s absurd,” she told him. “Didn’t you notice yet?” She saw Lindmaa coming towards them, radiating annoyance powerfully enough to char the panelling. “Go and see the kids are all right,” she said to Anatoly. “And try to stop your dad wandering off.” The general was giving every appearance of gearing himself up for some exploration.

  “I wish he would,” Anatoly muttered, but he went over to Magda and the others.

  “You’re way out of your jurisdiction,” Carey said when Lindmaa reached her.

  “We have a treaty with Poland,” Lindmaa said.

  “But not with Gliwice, which was technically an independent nation when you tried to arrest us.”

  Lindmaa scowled. “You’re very smug.”

  “I’m an International Woman of Mystery. Of course I’m smug. How did you get in the house? It’s got a state-of-the-art security system.”

  “It does. It’s Estonian. I called the manufacturers and they sent me the key-codes. It turns out nobody bothered to reset the factory defaults. I’ve been hiding in the basement for hours.”

  Carey scowled. Can’t think of everything. “Are you the one who was asking questions at the crematorium?”

  Lindmaa nodded. “You’re working with Maksim Petrauskas.”

  “I am not. I’m investigating his death. I have a Texas private eye’s licence to prove it.”

  Lindmaa snorted. “He isn’t dead.”

  “Oh, of course he’s not dead, colonel,” Carey said. “He came to Gliwice and he staged a spectacular. He’d want to stick around to admire his handiwork. What’s your interest?”

  Lindmaa considered for a moment. “We have evidence he was involved in a cyberattack on my country four years ago.”

  Carey glanced across at Anatoly’s father, who had opened one of the doors which lined the entrance hall and was looking into the room beyond. “Are you sure? Doesn’t sound like his style.”

  Lindmaa looked about her. “You see, when I say ‘we have evidence he was involved’, it means that we really do have evidence he was involved, whether it was his style or not.”

  Carey sighed. “What do you think, as a law enforcement officer? Does this qualify as an international incident?”

  “If the Community’s started kidnapping people and taking them across the border, I’d say so. You’re taking all this very calmly, you know.”

  “Yeah, well, I was shaking the tree to see what fell out. Didn’t expect the whole fucking tree to fall down, though.”

  The front door was still open, and Lindmaa walked towards it. “What do you think they want?”

  Carey went and stood beside her. The car was gone, and she could see a big patch of neatly raked gravel at the front of the house with a driveway curving off at either side. Beyond the gravel the ground seemed to drop away beyond the lights of the house, and beyond that there was only a great dark silence that seemed to encompass the entire world. “Something tells me we’re not in Kansas any more,” she said, half to herself.

  “Actually, I’m afraid you are,” said a voice behind them. “Sort of.”

  She turned to see who had spoken, and of course it was Robert Wareham.

  2

  It could have worked. It already had. They’d been running trucks across the border for almost a year, twenty women in each one, three thousand Swiss francs for each woman. Peter thought they could have made upwards of two million Swiss out of the operation, but Carey detected no note of envy in his voice.

  He finally tracked Marthe down to a shabby hotel in Biarritz and had her brought back to Denmark, and watching their covertly filmed conversations Carey couldn’t feel any anger towards her. Life with Peter’s father had been, at the end, a nightmare, but it had been a gilded one; she’d had an allowance—a golden handcuff, really—of ten thousand kronor a month, and she’d been cut off from that when she made a run for it. She’d taken a bunch of high-end jewellery and some cash she’d been able to put away with her, but that hadn’t lasted for ever, and then she was adrift in Europe. There were organisations—few and far between and badly-funded—that helped women in her position, but she was living under a false identity and she was afraid that if the authorities found out who she really was word would get back to her husband, who would already be looking for her, so she went on. She waitressed. She worked in department stores. She kept moving. She did that for years. Old man Schiller died a couple of years after she left, a series of minor strokes culminating in a single stroke of Biblical proportions, but Marthe knew revenge had a way of outliving the person seeking it and she kept going. Carey thought she might have made a halfway-decent Coureur; all she lacked was the training.

  She was working as a chambermaid at a guesthouse in Liege when the little man approached her. He’d arrived a couple of days previously, a pleasant, humble, quiet little man with the aspect of a minor commercial traveller. He kept himself to himself, didn’t drink, didn’t grope the staff, and his room was always in good order, which in Marthe’s experience made a pleasant change.

  Then, one morning, she’d gone to service his room and found him sitting there in the one rather run-down armchair. She apologised, saying she hadn’t realised he was still here, and made to leave, but he replied, “There’s no need to do that, Madame Schiller.”

  She’d been expecting a moment like this, of course, ever since she left Henning Schiller—only the circumstances took her by surprise—but she still froze. If they could find her here, flight was pointless. Nowhere was safe. She didn’t even try to convince him he was mistaken.

  The little man sensed all this. He told her she had nothing to worry about, that he had not been sent from her former life. Indeed, he was here to help her, to offer her a job.

  He had some friends, he told her. Businessmen. They were trying to set up a network of business locations around Europe, but circumstances demanded that they remain discreet, and they needed a public face, someone who could turn up and sign papers on their behalf. It was a job which would demand, at most, a few days of her time, and in return they were prepared to pay her a sum slightly higher than the one she had originally taken out of Denmark.

  Marthe wasn’t stupid, she knew this was a criminal enterprise—she assumed it was something to do with drugs—but her life over the past few years had worn her down and desperation was overtaking her, and she couldn’t see any other choice, so she agreed.

  She flew to Helsinki, and things turned out exactly as the little man had promised. She signed leases on business premises, and that was all. She was handsomely paid. A passport in a brand-new identity was delivered to the hotel where she was staying, and she understood that, whatever was going on, her part in it was over, and she had settled in France. She hadn’t heard about the subsequent events in Helsinki. Twenty illegal immigrants asphyxiated in the back of a truck in Finland was hardly major news in Western Europe.

  As far as Peter was able to discover from contacts within the Finnish government, the Russians knew all about the trafficking operation and had been waving the trucks through for the sake of mischief. On the Finnish side, the traffickers had suborned an entire border station somewhere out in the sticks. The border crossing was entirely straightforward; what they were worried about was spot-checks on the road between there and Helsinki, which the Finns were very keen on.

  The hidden compartments in the trucks were sealed and insulated so they couldn’t be spotted by infra-red or dogs. They had water and a chemical potty and the women were only supposed to be in there for a couple of hours. Three hours, tops. There were vents in the bottom of the trucks, for fresh air. They were disguised and baffled to spoof detectors. It was a foul night, wet snow, and the air flow under the truck drove slush up into the baffles. And even that wouldn’t have been such a problem if they’d kept moving, but the driver, who had no idea what he was carrying, stopped at a roadhouse. He’d been told to drive on through, but he stopped for a beer or something, and the slush froze and sealed the vents. Twenty people, in a sealed compartment the size of a small bathroom. They suffocated before they even got to Helsinki.

  In the end, only the driver went to jail. The trucking company didn’t exist, its only identified representative a woman who had vanished without trace. In all the time she stayed with Peter, Carey never mentioned Maksim, not once. There was no evidence that he’d been involved; a grainy photo of an old man in a beret didn’t prove Yegor had been in Helsinki, and even if it did, so what? She knew, though. The name of the company was a huge giveaway, as if he wanted her to know. He’d been trying to pull the same stunt he had when he jumped Marthe Schiller from her marriage, for reasons she couldn’t fathom. That crash Situation in Helsinki hadn’t been a coincidence; he’d wanted her there. Only the unexpected presence of Brookshire, who had seen the chance to finally get her to work for the Texan Foreign Intelligence Bureau, had derailed his plan.

  “What’s going to happen to Marthe now?” Carey asked.

  “I’ll take care of her,” said Peter. Coming from any other international gang boss, that would have sounded ominous, but Peter meant it. He arranged for a trust fund to be set up in Marthe’s name, and invited her to stay on at the family estate by the sea not far from Roskilde for as long as she wanted.

  He made Carey the same offer, although he did it more obliquely, but she couldn’t stay. Improbably, Brookshire had been true to his word and there seemed to be no alerts out for her anywhere in Europe, and angry though she was, she wanted to get back on the horse. If Marthe, with no training and no support, could go on somehow year after year, so could she.

  Maksim caught up with her in Madrid. There had been weeks of messages on boards and in drops, begging her to talk to him, and she had ignored them all, but one grey drizzly day, coming out of a restaurant on Calle de Velásquez, there he was, waiting on the pavement, hands in his pockets and that bashful schoolboy grin on his face.

  “Look,” he began.

  Her first punch rocked him back. The second broke his jaw. She stomped away through the gathering crowds, changed her address, burned through a couple of false identities, and she went on for a few more years, until she took a job in Hungary and everything fell apart. Maksim never tried to contact her again.

  She never really got to the bottom of Hungary. On the face of it, it had been a milk-run of a Situation carrying a Package the size of a packet of cigarettes over the wire into Croatia. She had wound up being arrested by Hungarian State Security, then being kidnapped by the local mafia, then being rescued by local Coureurs, then being jumped out of the country by a representative from Central. She’d had Situations go wrong before, everybody did—truth be told, more of them went wrong than went right—but she had found this experience profoundly dislocating. She’d thought, at first, that it was Maksim taking a childish form of revenge for that day on Calle de Velásquez, he was perfectly capable of something like that, but the more she thought about it the more she thought she sensed some kind of espionage going on. Theoretically, Central was apolitical, but in practice you never knew what was in the Package, which was different from proactively getting mixed up in spying. If Central was doing that, she was out.

  She returned to Texas feeling old and tired and bent out of shape by the events of the past couple of years. She had some money—quite a lot, actually, when she finally got a chance to gather her wits—and she had her eye on a plot of land just outside Austin with a derelict old ranch-house on it. She thought she might renovate the house, sit out there and do journalism. The geopolitical landscape in the United States was still fresh and evolving, and she thought she would be able to do a lot of good, valuable work without ever leaving North America again.

  But months went by and she remained in her rented apartment in the Texan capital. She ate in restaurants, went for walks, visited friends, went to the theatre, wrote European lifestyle pieces for the magazines for pocket money. Somehow, she never quite got round to contacting the realtor about that plot of land, and the longer she did nothing about it, the more obvious it became that she was never going to do anything about it.

  The situation with Brookshire had resolved itself in an unexpected manner. She’d sent him a few bits of low-level intelligence down the years, and he had always, she thought, been singularly ungrateful for them, always wanting something more meaty. He’d been furious that she’d returned to Texas, and wanted her back in Europe at the first possible opportunity.

  Then, one day, she got a message from someone who identified himself as her new case officer. Brookshire, it transpired, had been caught passing classified material to federal agents. He’d been tried in camera, found guilty, and taken out and shot.

  “I thought he was an asshole,” she told her new handler. “I never had him pegged as a traitor.”

  “They’re not mutually exclusive,” said the handler, who was just an electronically disguised voice on the other end of an encrypted phone link. “Anyway, all his assets are tainted so we’re quietly letting them drop, but you’re a rather special case.”

  “Yes,” she said tiredly. She had been Brookshire’s only asset in Europe; for all she knew, she had been the FIB’s only asset there. Texas wanted to be a grown-up country and that meant spying on other countries.

  “We were wondering how you’d feel about continuing to work for us,” said the voice.

  “Dude,” she told him patiently, “I never wanted to work for you in the first place.”

  “Hm,” he said. “Yeah, I kind of got that impression. I should tell you Brookshire had a bunch of blackmail material on you.”

  She sighed. She’d been expecting this ever since the call began. “You could at least try to be original.”

  “Oh,” he said. “No, I don’t plan on using it, he’d lodged it with his attorney with instructions to be released to us and EuPol if anything ever happened to him. I guess he was worried you’d try to whack him.”

  “I’m flattered.”

  “Anyway, when he had his little aberation his attorney turned everything over to us. Guy wants to stay on our good side, I guess, whatever the Bar Association feels about it. I wondered if you wanted to see it before I have it destroyed.”

  “Why would you do that?”

  “We can force you to work for us,” he said, “but let’s face it, where’s the percentage in that? You’ll just get resentful and send us chickenfeed and then we’ll get resentful and honestly, life’s too short.”

  She took the phone from her ear, looked at it, put it back against her head. “What’s your name?”

  There was a dry chuckle at the other end of the connection, rendered robotic by the voice-camouflage software. “Sorry, can’t tell you.”

  She thought about it. “Did any of it go anywhere else?”

  “Not so far as we can tell, no.”

  “Then just get rid of it,” she told him.

  “Nothing easier,” he said. “There’s also a note from the Ambassador in Budapest. Something about an arrest by Hungarian security services.”

  She snorted. “If you can get that useless bitch reassigned to the Damascus embassy I might think about working for you.”

  “We don’t have an embassy in Damascus,” he pointed out. “Nobody does.”

  “Well, she’s damn-all use where she is.”

  “I don’t suppose you’d consider telling me what that was all about?”

  “I don’t even know myself.”

  “Right. Okay, so, all that remains is for me to remind you that we never had this conversation. Good luck with whatever you decide to do, and if you ever change your mind, just get in touch and we’ll talk about it.” He paused, then said, “You know, a lot of us think what you guys do over there is pretty cool. At least it looks that way on the shows. Is it really like that?”

  “No,” she said. “Usually it’s really boring, and then something goes wrong.”