The figure on the traffic island seemed not to have noticed the chaos going off all around it. It carried on unhurriedly cutting its way strand by strand through New Potsdam’s border, down the slope towards Old Potsdam.
Rudi popped another couple of smoke rounds over the wire, followed them with four white phosphorus flares that landed in a haphazard fashion on the roundabout and burned in the snow to confuse infra-red.
They didn’t seem to work. Warm figures came up over the crest of the island. Others were coming out of the buildings on the other side of the frontier, confused residents wondering what was going on. Rudi heard shouting, harsh Saxon accents barking orders. The Package paused a moment. It had reached the outer twirl of wire, and for a second or two Rudi willed it on. Just a couple more strands, then run like crazy. They could still do this. He selected an explosive round, raised the popgun to his shoulder, sighted down the barrel at a car parked on the other side of the wire, and waited.
The figure bent deliberately down and grasped the handle of the briefcase. Rudi watched the arm swing back, forward. Then there was a chatter of gunfire and the white figure pitched face-forwards into the razor-wire and lay still.
But the case was still moving. Rudi watched it slide on its side under the last layer of wire, gathering speed down the slope of the island. It bounced over the kerb at the bottom without losing very much speed and shot out across the crusty snow on the road like a big square hockey puck and into Old Potsdam. It bumped to a stop at the side of the road a metre or so away from where Rudi was hiding.
He checked the figure on the island again. It wasn’t moving, and border guards were picking their way through the severed wire towards it.
He dismantled the popgun, sealed it up under its flap and stepped over to the case. He picked it up, making sure that it was masked from sight by his body, and started to walk calmly away.
More shouting from the roundabout. One of the guards, his head bulbous with image-amps, was pointing. Some of the men in the wire pointed their weapons. Rudi started to run. Projectiles chewed masonry off the shopfronts and exploded windows in his wake.
AFTER AN HOUR or so of skulking from courtyard to courtyard, he seemed to have left the gunfire behind long enough to stop and collect his thoughts.
Rudi looked down. His HUD was still set to infra-red, and the briefcase was shining like a beacon.
Very slowly, he turned to put his back to the street, hiding the briefcase with his body. He removed a glove and put his bare hand against the side of the case. It was hot. Not red hot. Not drop-it-right-here-and-run-like-hell hot. But it was still hot. Which, in Rudi’s experience, was a first for a piece of hand luggage.
Well, okay. At least that explained how the security men had been able to shoot at him. They were wearing thermal amps, and he was carrying the infra-red equivalent of a two-hundred-watt lightbulb. That much was straightforward.
Rudi put his glove back on, reached behind him, and tore up the flap on the pocket in the small of the suit’s back. Inside was a fat package about the size of a pocket handkerchief. He found a corner and flapped it and the package opened out into a baggy white hooded poncho that started to take on the colouration of its surroundings the moment it was exposed. He wrapped the briefcase in the poncho and cradled it in his arms.
The poncho was made of the same smart material as his suit, with the same mimetic and insulating layers. He was going to have to unwrap the case periodically so it wouldn’t overheat, but it should give him the chance to get away from here. Of course, he didn’t know how long it would take the case to overheat…
He unwrapped a corner of the case and hot air billowed out of the poncho. He gave it a minute or so to cool a little, then wrapped it up again and started to move deliberately along the street.
ANOTHER COURTYARD. HE unwrapped the poncho and a blaze of radiant heat rose about him. The briefcase was very hot, but as he watched in infra-red its colour began to darken. He set it down and saw the snow around it start to melt and refreeze as ice. The case darkened further, dumping heat into the snow and the cold paving stones, but not enough to make him feel entirely comfortable about carrying it around.
The traffic on both New and Old Potsdam’s security frequencies continued unabated in his ear, too many voices to be able to follow more than a few words of a conversation. Some German voices, some Saxon, one an incongruous and comical-sounding Bavarian. Some of the voices were shouting. The Bavarian, for all his incongruity, was giving orders in a calm, controlled tone.
What it all added up to was that they’d lost him. They had begun a line-search outward from the border, hoping to flush him out ahead of them. Dogs, thermal scanners, ultra-violet lamps. The Old Potsdam polizei seemed to be cooperating with the New Potsdam security forces, which was unexpected; Rudi’s information was that the two groups existed in a state of barely-suppressed armed confrontation.
So much for that. They still didn’t know where he was. Rudi took stock. He’d managed to make his way, in little zigs and zags, about three kilometres from the border, which was good.
Normally, at this point, his procedure would have been to stash the stealth suit for collection later, and make his own jumpoff in civilian clothes. He had several dustoffs scoped out, from a Hertz car parked near the film studios at Babelsberg to an open ticket to London from Berlin-Tegel. Normally, with the local law in such confusion, it would have been a walk in the park.
On the other hand, he didn’t dare stash the briefcase. Quite apart from the fact that it had come as part of the Package and he was sworn to deliver it, one way or another, he wasn’t sure if it was safe to leave it anywhere. He presumed the people who were looking for him knew it was hot and, when they got themselves organised – which couldn’t be much longer now – would be wandering the city with thermal cameras, looking for somebody with warmer-than-usual luggage.
Well, this was what he was paid for, all part of the Coureur ethic. Get The Package Through. All he had to do was figure out how.
A FEW MINUTES after ten in the morning. Rudi sat in one of the little wooden shelters in the Neuer Friedhof, watching the snow veil down out of a dirty brownish-yellow sky. That was Central Europe for you: pollution wherever you went, even so long after the Fall of Communism. All that cheap Braunkohl, burned in industrial plants that had been a marvel of technology back in the 1950s. It was a wonder the snow itself wasn’t brown or black.
He had seen black snow once, in Bulgaria, up on the Danube, which was called the Dunarea by the locals. He and his Package had dusted-off on a coal barge travelling upriver towards Austria. It had been a good jump, textbook stuff. It was good when a Situation went like that. It was unusual, because in Rudi’s world everything could, and often did, go wrong, sometimes catastrophically. But when it didn’t, like that time in Bulgaria, it was almost like a holiday.
And then it started to snow these big fat black flakes.
Rudi and the Package and the skipper of the barge had all gone out on deck and stood, amazed, in the middle of the sooty fall.
What Rudi couldn’t figure out, for a moment, was why it was so cold and wet. It was like standing under a fall of burned paper; it should have been dry and hot. He caught a few black flakes on his palm and touched his tongue to them, tasted chemicals, and then it was obvious. Just another fucked-up legacy of the previous millennium, just industrial crap frozen out of the sky.