Rudi leaned forwards and reached under the seat. His hand found the side of the briefcase. Even through his glove he could feel the case’s warmth. He sighed, running the night’s fiasco over and over in his mind. He should have popped that car, given the Package the distraction they needed. He shouldn’t have hesitated.
He had only brought out half of what he had been sent to protect, and that jarred with him. The briefcase, whatever it contained, had clearly been the most important thing to the Package. Did that mean the Package had considered themselves expendable, and that Rudi should do the same? Rudi wasn’t sure he could do that for a briefcase. For a person, maybe, but for a briefcase?
Outside the shelter, the ivy-covered gravestones and modest little tombs of the graveyard were being given another dusting of snow. Stashing the suit in a situation like this would have been suicidal. He just had to get rid of it the best way he could. He’d dropped the suit’s electronics off a bridge into the Havel, and carried the suit itself with him to the graveyard. He’d dumped it under a bush, pulled the emergency tab, and waited for the enzymes to eat the material. It was always quicker than he expected, like a time-lapse effect from a bad horror film. And then he’d come here, to think. Tradecraft dictated that he get as far away as possible in as short a time as possible, but he needed to think, to compose himself, pull down the options.
Most of his dustoffs would have to be abandoned because they involved public transport. Too easily stopped and searched. Ditto the car in Babelsberg. Ditto his plan to just walk to Berlin. Ditto the plan to hitch into Holland. Ditto ditto.
Rudi rubbed his face and reached down to touch the case again. Without it, he was just another blameless anonymous figure in the crowd, hair cut neither too long nor so short as to arouse notice, clothes carefully bought at various shops in Berlin and Magdeburg in order to blend in. With the case, he might as well be carrying a big sign saying ARREST ME. All it would take would be a policeman wearing infra-red amplifiers and he’d stand out from the crowd like someone striking a match in a darkened room.
He put a hand in his pocket and took out a set of car keys, and thought of the car in Babelsberg. He sighed and put the keys away. Then he took them out again and looked at them.
THEY HAD SET up a roadblock at the eastern end of the Glienicker Brücke. A hurried, temporary thing, not much more than a couple of policemen waving the traffic to the side of the road while another couple of policemen did a cursory search. It was almost two o’clock in the afternoon and already the light was beginning to fail, and in spite of the heater frost was forming on the inside of the hire car’s windows. He drove normally, just another tourist, and when they stopped him he pulled over to the kerb and wound down the driver’s window.
“Papers,” said the policeman who leaned down to the open window.
Rudi took his passport and identity card from the glove compartment and handed them over. “What’s going on?”
The policeman’s face was scoured red with the cold and the fur collar of his jacket was turned up around his ears. “Routine,” he said. “Turn off your engine.”
Rudi obeyed, and the policeman took the documents over to his colleagues to confer. They huddled for a moment over a palmtop terminal, and Rudi imagined one of them cursing as he tried to enter code numbers with a gloved index finger that was too big for the palmtop’s tapboard.
All four of them came back. One of them had a thermal camera hanging from a lanyard around his neck. He lifted it to his eyes and scanned it over the front of the car. Another pointed a hand-scanner at the car’s registration plate to read the barcoded information.
“Hans Drucker,” said the first policeman, returning to the open window.
“Yes,” said Rudi. He nodded at the policeman with the camera. “What’s he doing?”
“What was your business in Potsdam?”
“Visiting my sister.” Rudi gave the address. There was a stringer there who would if necessary testify in court that she was his sister. There always seemed to be a stringer for every occasion. “I come here every weekend.”
The cop nodded. “The registration number of this vehicle, please?”
“I can’t remember,” Rudi said. “I only hired it yesterday morning.” He handed the Hertz documents out of the window, and the cop looked them over. Then he gave them to the cop with the scanner, who compared them with his read-out. One of the other policemen was running a mirror on a long angled rod under the car, tilting his head this way and that to look at the reflection.
“You visit your sister in a hired car?” asked the cop.
“My car broke down. Have I done anything wrong?”
“Why not take the train instead of hiring a car?” the policeman asked.
Rudi turned his own collar up against the cold surging in through the open window. “I used to until last year. I was robbed on the train going back to Berlin one night. Now I drive.” This was also true. Hans Drucker – or at any rate a stringer working to maintain the legend – had reported a mugging on a late-night train just outside Uhlandstrasse Station the previous year.
“The registration number of your own vehicle?” asked the cop.
Rudi reeled it off. A blue Simca, one of Coureur Central’s seemingly inexhaustible fleet of phantom vehicles, was registered to the Hans Drucker legend. The cop typed the number clumsily into his palmtop. Somebody in the queue of traffic on the bridge behind Rudi honked their horn, and the policeman straightened up and gave the driver a stare which silenced them.
“Open the bonnet, please,” he said, still looking back down the line of cars.
Rudi pulled the lever that released the bonnet catch, and one of the other policemen lifted the bonnet, blocking his view through the windscreen. “What’s happening?” he asked.
The cop at the window was reading the reply to his request about Drucker’s car. He said, “What make and colour is your car?”
“It’s a blue Simca.” He didn’t try to make any pally wisecracks about the car, didn’t try to establish a relationship with the cop. Just kept everything neutral, a little annoyed. He could do this. He knew he could. Just good old Hans from Berlin-Pankow, returning from a visit to his sister in Potsdam. That was all. Nothing out of the ordinary. He had nothing to fear. “Is there something wrong with this car?”
The cop gave him a bored look. “I just do as I’m told, mate.”
“Because if there is it’s Hertz’s fault. I was in a hurry, maybe I didn’t check it properly before I left.” A little note of panic now, a straight citizen worried he might have been caught driving an unsafe vehicle. German police were legendary for their adherence to the old EU laws on vehicle safety. They were like toys, wound up and left to run down after their owner had gone away on holiday. Nobody had ever come along with new vehicle regulations after Greater Germany left the Union.
“It looks fine to me, mate,” the cop assured him. “We won’t be much longer.” The tone of his voice told Rudi all he needed to know about Potsdam policemen being called out on a freezing afternoon to check cars. He presumed they hadn’t even been told precisely what they were looking for, which could only serve to heighten their resentment.
“The boot,” said the cop.
Rudi popped the boot, and another of the cops went around the back of the car to rummage.
“So what’s going on?” he asked, allowing a note of annoyance to enter his voice now he had been reassured that his car was not in breach of any regulation.