The Lure

37 Flight by Coach

Between Petrie and Freya, and the Austrians, were several rows of empty seats. This made it gratifyingly difficult to engage the strange, wet young ones in conversation, and in any case nobody seemed inclined to make the attempt. Such desultory chat as there was soon died out, and in the soporific warmth of the coach people dozed or stared morosely out of the window. The countryside was dark and mountainous, the hills barely lit by a crescent moon.

Petrie was too exhausted, too frightened and too wet to sleep, but Freya snuggled into him, shivering, and within minutes she was snoring slightly, her head on his shoulder.

He tried to think it through, but the freezing wetness of his clothes and the awful stress of the past few hours combined to keep him in a sort of stupor. He opened the breakfast box and found himself staring at a small bottle of mineral water, a hardboiled egg and a sandwich filled with some indeterminate gunge. He slid the lot under his seat.

All they could do now, he reckoned, was wait.

The coach took off, and trundled carefully down the narrow, ice-packed road, past the ski hotels, past the Demänovskà Cave. In the lights of the bus Petrie glimpsed a couple of soldiers, tucked away in front of a tourist shop and invisible from the steep footpath leading down from the cave. One of the soldiers, a red-faced farm boy from oxcart country, looked at the passing coach. He stared directly at Petrie, their eyes meeting momentarily; and then the image was gone and Petrie’s hands were clenched into fists and his mind was filled with a simple question: was I recognised?

Nobody stopped the coach. It took a left at a roundabout and picked up speed on a broad road. The snow had gone and there was a pale sliver of dawn to the east. No headlights were pursuing them in the dark. Petrie unclenched his fists. He saw the chemical works, all aluminium pipes and orange smoke stacks catching the dawn light. Freya’s wet hair tickled his nostrils. Suddenly, Petrie was overwhelmed with exhaustion.

Shortly, the bus slowed and turned on to a motorway, and then accelerated to a satisfyingly brisk speed. The countryside here was flat and bleak. In the distance, shortly, Petrie saw a forest of high-rise buildings, shimmering, floating on water and flamingo pink in the light of the rising sun.

He stared stupidly at the distant mirage, mumbled something about a socialist paradise, and flaked out.

‘Tom!’

Freya was poking his thigh.

Memory flooded back. Petrie looked out in sudden panic. They were in the suburbs of some big city. ‘Is this Bratislava?’

‘I think so. The bus is going to Austria.’

‘What? But the border!’

‘We must get off now.’

Now Petrie definitely recognised the city as Bratislava. They made their way to the front of the coach. Freya said something in German. The driver shook his head.

She turned to Petrie in alarm. ‘He’s not letting us off.’

‘We have to. It’s life or death.’

She spoke to the driver again, sharply this time, but the man simply gave a surly shake of the head. Petrie wondered about punching him.

‘I could start to take my clothes off,’ she suggested.

‘He’d just get the police.’ Petrie tapped Freya on the shoulder and they made their way to the back of the coach.

‘What now?’

‘Wait till it stops. Then we’ll get out of the emergency window.’

Down a broad street, every set of traffic lights turning green as the bus approached. Glorious congestion loomed ahead. Petrie recognised the area. The big Tesco store appeared on the left. The bus stopped. A blue tram pulled up a few feet behind the bus. They pulled open the window and clambered out, in front of the astonished tram driver. Freya’s boot caught Petrie on the cheek. The coach driver was shouting angrily.

They held hands and dodged their way across the busy street, not daring to look behind. On the busy pavement, they ran.

A couple of hundred metres on, they slowed down to a trot. And then they stopped at a little cluster of market stalls.

‘Where are we?’ Petrie asked, his chest heaving. A red and white tram clattered past them, jammed with commuters.

She pointed. ‘There’s the castle. Let’s head for the Old Town.’

‘I’ve dried off. How about you?’

‘Yes, but I’d kill for a shower.’

General Kamensky sat with three telephones. Two of them were on the Colonel’s desk and the third was a mobile which he produced from a deep army pocket. For his first call he cleared the Colonel’s office. Boroviška and his Lieutenant stood in the outside corridor while tantalising snatches of phrase came through the door. Then the General was at the door and waving them in while he made a further call.

This second call was to the Chief of Police in Prague. The Czech Republic being an independent state, the call was in the nature of a request. Equally clearly, someone had made sure that this ‘request’ was backed up with all the necessary authority. A third call, identical in content, went to Bratislava.

At last he turned his attention to the officers facing him nervously across the desk. ‘Colonel, I won’t emphasise the magnitude of your failure as I’m sure you are already aware of it. The fact is that your task force had a special assignment, an unpleasant duty but a simple one. In fact, it could hardly have been simpler.’

‘Sir…’

Kamensky waved a hand dismissively. ‘I don’t want to hear it. I turn up here to supervise the — how can I put it? — the terminal arrangements, to find that you have lost two of your charges. Untrained civilians bottled up inside a castle surrounded by a brigade of regular troops!’

He helped himself to one of the Colonel’s cigars, he struck a match on the underside of the table and took a few puffs. Then he sighed. ‘The position is that for this operation to be successful, all the enemies of the state have to be removed. One survivor equals total failure.’

‘Sir…’

The General banged his hand on the table. ‘I told you I don’t want to hear your excuses! Now, thanks to your incompetence, we have to involve the regular police in the recapture of these people. Do you have any idea how much that complicates the operation, Boroviška?’

‘I do, General.’

Kamensky stared at him. ‘I hope you do, Colonel. You now have to liquidate these people out of the public eye, and before they talk to the police, but at the same time we need the police manpower if we are to have any chance of finding them. We may also have to operate in the territory of a neighbouring state.’

Boroviška finally got a word in. ‘They can’t have gone far. They had no transport. The only railway stations within reach are at Mikulas and Benadikova. I have posted men at both, in plain clothes. The hotels within a ten-kilometre radius of here are being checked now.’

‘And if you were fleeing for your life, would you put up in the nearest hotel?’

‘No, sir. It’s too stupid to be worth checking. Which is why I’m checking.’

Kamensky nodded approvingly. ‘We may indeed be dealing with a couple of clever foxes.’ He stood up and moved over to a map pinned on the wooden wall. ‘We are very close to the Polish border.’

‘Very close indeed.’

‘What are you doing about that?’

Boroviška pointed. ‘There are only two crossing points, here at Trstena and possibly over here at Cadca. I have informed the border police and faxed through photographs of the criminals.

‘There’s a rail crossing into Poland at Cadca.’

‘I expect the border police…’

‘You expect?’ The General rubbed his forehead in an anguished way. ‘Colonel, move some of that idle brigade at Smoleniçe, and have them waiting at Cadca before the first train arrives.’

‘Yes, sir.’

Kamensky’s eyes roamed over the map. ‘Border crossings, away from roads? What about Narodny Park here?’

‘At this time of year, General, without specialised equipment? Survival is impossible.’

‘Another of your impossibles, Boroviška. However, I agree. It can’t be done.’ Kamensky paused.

Boroviška picked up the cue. ‘I’ll speak to the Park Rangers.’

‘You will. You will also check the local hotels, and find out what transport has been leaving from them, and whether anyone fitting the descriptions of the targets has been seen in the area.’ Kamensky looked at a photograph. ‘The Størmer woman is strikingly beautiful. What wonderful blonde hair. So distinctive, would you not say?’