Rudi slipped out of the doorway, taking care to move evenly to give the suit’s mimetic systems time to adjust to their background. If anyone was watching carefully they might see his footprints appear in the snow along the base of the wall, but this was not the kind of night when people watched very carefully for anything.
He ghosted along the line of buildings for ten minutes, not hurrying. He ducked through the archway of an apartment building and stood in the shadows of the courtyard to yank down the zip of his suit. Hot air fountained out around his face. When he started to feel the cold he zipped the suit up again and stepped back out into the street.
Along the base of the wall again. Up ahead, in the middle of a huge intersection, windblown snow haloed a crown of lamps atop a twenty-metre pole rising from the centre of what used to be a big roundabout. The hedge of razor-wire marched into the lamps’ pool of blue-white light, straight up the slope of the traffic island in the middle, down the other side, and off into the howling darkness, cutting the roundabout in two. The wind made the wire sing eerily. Rudi sank gently down on one knee and eased the cooling mask that covered his face and ensured his breath wouldn’t give him away to infra-red. It was a new mask, and it pinched.
He clicked his teeth together twice and his helmet’s HUD came up, a faint blue grid and discreet columns of figures hanging in front of his eyes. He turned his head left and right, and the figures flicked up and down, giving him proximity readouts. He clicked his teeth again to call up the infra-red overlay and a number of bright patches appeared on the buildings on the other side of the border where boiler chimneys vented their hot gases or the insulation wasn’t as good as it might have been. One rooftop beyond the traffic island absolutely blazed. Rudi tut-tutted soundlessly at the inefficiency.
No moving heat sources, though. Not even a car. The foam bead in his ear was scanning New Potsdam’s security frequencies in thirty-second soundbites, and had played nothing more exciting all night than a crash between two drunk drivers somewhere over on the other side of the polity.
The mission clock up in the top right corner of the HUD read 01:03, just over forty minutes since he began his approach to the jumpoff. The Zulu clock, set to GMT, read 03:35, twenty-five to four in the morning local time. The fifteen-minute window of downtime he had been promised on the security cameras watching the intersection and its approaches should just have opened, but he had to take that on faith because there was just no way to tell. Rudi examined the big traffic island again, starting to feel uncomfortably warm.
In a lot of ways, this was a milk-run of a jump. All the groundwork had already been done by local stringers. All Rudi had to do was turn up, take receipt of the Package, and facilitate the dustoff. He could do this kind of thing in his sleep.
The Package was a few minutes late. This was not unusual; once, in Seville, Rudi had waited two hours, beyond all dictates of tradecraft, before reverting to the fallback location. The Package didn’t show that time. He never found out what happened. He’d stopped being curious about it. Sometimes they made it to the jumpoff, sometimes they didn’t. It wasn’t his problem.
And it wasn’t going to happen this time. A warm ruddy glow appeared on his helmet’s visor, a diffuse spot of radiant heat coming hesitantly round the slope of the traffic island. He clicked back to visible wavelengths and zoomed his camera. Snowy landscape and buildings rushed towards him, momentarily out of focus.
A bulky, white-clad figure was making its way painfully slowly around the curve of the roundabout, keeping the island’s bulk between itself and the nearest border post. It was carrying what appeared to be an attaché case, and from the way the figure was moving the case looked as if it was very heavy. Rudi edged closer, until he was standing just across the road from the roundabout.
The Package reached the wire, set the case down on the slope, and started to fiddle with the barrier. Rudi couldn’t make out what was happening, no matter how much zoom he put on his helmet’s camera, but the wire sagged abruptly as a strand parted. And again as another strand went.
This time he saw it. The stressed wire whipped back, catching the crouching figure on the shoulder. Rudi thought he actually heard the singing note change fractionally as the wire separated. The figure made no sign of having noticed, kept working. More strands parted and sprang aside. With every one, the Package picked up its case, shuffled forward a few centimetres, then set the case down again and resumed work.
03:47 Zulu. Three minutes until the cameras came back online. The white figure was entirely enclosed by the rolls of wire, deep inside the fence, picking its way onward strand by strand. Rudi could now see thickly-gloved hands attaching a little black box to each section of wire, checking to see which one carried an alarm circuit. Whoever it was out there on the traffic island – the bulky cold-weather clothing made it impossible even to tell whether they were male or female, let alone identify them – they seemed calm and unhurried. Check the wire, detach the box, move on to the next strand, check the wire, detach the box, move on. Box in one hand, a little ceramic wire-cutter in the other. Cut the wire, take a step, start all over again. It was unusual to find a Package who was quite so professional. Rudi approved.
While he waited, he clicked back into infra-red and scanned the area again. This time, four more heat sources appeared on his visor, some way beyond the traffic island, making their way down the street towards the roundabout. Shit. Sloppy, sloppy; he should have been paying attention rather than admiring the Package’s technique. Cursing himself, he stood, very slowly, and undid the velcroed flap on the front of his suit that hid his popgun.
The gun was flimsy, lightweight composite compounds and bracing wires. It had a pistol-grip and a magazine the size of a wheel of Stilton, and a five-year-old could have put their fist down the barrel. Rudi snapped the magazine into place, thumbed the selector and stood very still, watching the four heat signatures moving towards the escaping Package.
There was sudden chatter on New Potsdam’s security channel. Above the radio traffic Rudi heard shouts echoing off the surrounding buildings, whistles blowing on the freezing air, a pistol shot.
He angled the popgun at about forty-five degrees from his hip and squeezed the trigger twice. The gun ported its exhaust gases back and out in narrow jets from the propulsion chamber, supposedly countering recoil, but it hadn’t been calibrated quite right and it bucked like a barracuda in his hands, throwing his aim off. The first round landed on target, sending a geyser of snow and ice and frozen earth up from the far side of the island. The second hit a building on the New Potsdam side of the fence and blew a balcony off into the street.
Everything seemed to go wrong at once. More gunshots on the other side of the wire, more shouting. Sirens eerie and tenuous on the wind.
He changed the selector position and fired twice more. The magazine made a momentary chirping sound as it spun at close to supersonic speed, stopping on the selected rounds. Fountains of stinking fluorescent smoke shot up from where the charges landed, smeared almost parallel to the snow by the wind. Instead of giving proper cover, the smoke just sort of bannered and darted, springing up in unpredictable places. Rudi tried to assign possibilities, watched them being knocked down as fast as he could think them up. This was very very bad, and it was getting worse. The whole Situation was going sour before his eyes and there was nothing he could do to stop it.