The Lure

41 High Tatras

They were on a motorway. It was dark and the traffic was thin, but Callaghan was clearly taking no chances with the speed limit. The big estate car was warm and Alice slipped out of her fur coat. Soon Petrie recognised the road as the one which Freya and he had taken with the soldiers. Callaghan turned off at a sign for Zilina and they drove into a middle-sized, underlit town. Callaghan trickled the car round dark cobbled streets until he found a quiet café. They sat on rickety wooden chairs in a corner.

Petrie had forgotten when he had last eaten. The Czech for spaghetti turned out to be spagety and the proprietor, a small man with Turkish features and a filthy apron, served him a satisfyingly large plate. The Americans settled for coffee and cakes.

Petrie asked Callaghan what he did.

‘I’m a trade adviser. Been on the trans-Caucasian desk until now.’

‘You’re CIA, of course.’

‘I strenuously deny it.’

Alice said, ‘And I deny it too. I’m a freelance travel agent. I travel between Bratislava, Budapest and Prague, arranging package deals for regular tour companies.’

‘How do these cities compare?’ Petrie asked her, although he was too fraught to care.

‘Bratislava and Budapest are cities in transition. They’re exciting places to be. I’m not so fond of Prague these days. It’s still beautiful, still the Paris of the east, but it’s become too fashionable for me and there’s too much organised crime. You can’t walk alone at night and the Mafia control the taxis.’

Callaghan nodded his agreement. ‘Getting like LA.’ He was beginning to twitch restlessly and kept glancing towards the door. ‘We ought to move on, people. The less exposure the better.’

Beyond Zilina the road was poor. An ocean liner in the distance turned out to be the chemical works from his earlier trip and Petrie wondered if he was being taken back to the cavern for some reason. But Callaghan drove past the turnoff without comment, and presently they turned left.

They were heading north. From his memory of a map Petrie knew they were approaching the triple point between Slovakia, Poland and Russia. It was gratifyingly far from Bratislava.

‘The High Tatras,’ Alice said.

‘Real mountains,’ Callaghan added. ‘Not the toys you people have been under.’

The warmth of the car, and the events of the day, were driving Petrie towards sleep. He fought it.

A side road, and a long, winding climb. At just after 1 a.m. by the Merc’s clock, the headlights swept round a large white-painted building.

The stars were bright in a crystalline sky and the air was bitter. Callaghan was playing with a flashlight, and then he had turned a key and was pushing open a green-painted metal door.

Petrie found himself in a cavernous living room with a sloping, wood-lined ceiling. Wooden shutters took up the far end of the room; at the other end was a fireplace seemingly large enough to take small trees, and next to it a set of wooden steps went up to an unfenced balcony from which doors led off. The house was icy.

‘This is a safe house?’

‘I guess so,’ Callaghan said. ‘At least until I turn you over to the authorities. We don’t have much call for safe houses these days. It’s actually my holiday chalet. Come on up and I’ll show you to a guest room. Maybe I can rustle up a toothbrush.’

They left Alice pouring herself a remarkably large Martini.

‘This do?’

‘Fine, thanks.’

‘See you in the morning, then.’ The door was heavy ash and it closed with a satisfying clunk. There was a lock and Petrie turned it. More wooden shutters took up a wall but Petrie left them shut. He felt cocooned and safe after the exposure of the city streets, and he knew it was a dangerous illusion.

He emptied the contents of his pockets on to the bed.

A few notes and coins. Six credit cards. A Swiss army knife. Two compact disks which could change the world, and Vashislav’s mobile phone, which Freya had handed him in the coach.

He adjusted the mobile to be mute and put it under his pillow. There was a small bookcase and he slipped the disks into Wildlife of the High Tatras, somewhere between the Tatra marmot and the Ural owl. He told himself, as he slid into a dream, that Freya was safe and well somewhere in Europe and that the Americans would pluck them out of the cauldron and that in the land of the Burger King they would, like so many before them, find refuge from a hostile world.

Low sunlight was finding chinks in the solid wooden shutters. Petrie pulled them open and looked out over a panorama more Swiss than Slovakian. A French door led directly on to a wooden balcony and he stepped out.

As safe houses went, this one would be hard to fault. A scattering of chalets lined a hairpin road up through the mountains. Anyone approaching would be seen for maybe fifteen minutes. Here and there, in the distance, sunlight glinted metallically from mountain tops, pink in the morning sun, and he thought there might be radio antennae or military radars on the summits.

The early morning cold was breath-catching, and he was wearing only boxer shorts. Shivering, he turned back to dress.

He checked the mobile phone. A message!

Relief surged through Petrie’s body. He looked again at the snowy needles bristling all the way to the far horizon, topped with sun-pierced fluffy clouds like pink and yellow knickerbocker glory, and he thought it was the most beautiful sight on the planet. He re-read the message, bubbling with pleasure.

Freya! Still alive!

‘Who is he?’

General Kamensky was enjoying another of Boroviška’s cigars. There was a No Smoking sign in the police chief’s office but nobody, least of all the Chief of Police, was daring to point out the fact.

The screen showed a security camera’s view of a busy street. The time resolution was poor, and Petrie and the other man were shown as walking in a series of jerks.

‘Where’s his companion? The girl?’

‘We’re working on that.’

‘You mean you have no idea.’

The Assistant Chief of Police said, ‘Here it comes,’ froze a frame and zoomed in on Petrie’s companion until the face was a mosaic of little squares. ‘We’ve smoothed it out,’ he said, and the image sharpened.

‘Who is he?’ the General repeated in an irritated tone. So the little country was proud of its expanding IT, but Kamensky had less interest in this display of electronic virtuosity than he had in the results.

‘Our cameras tracked him as far as Hviezdoslavova Square.’

‘So?’ Kamensky thought, The fool can only spin out his moment of glory for so long.

Another picture came up on the screen. The Cossack hat was gone, and the man was grinning at some social function, but it was recognisably the same individual.

‘Hviezdoslavova Square houses the American Embassy. This man advises American businessmen on trade opportunities in our country. His name is Joseph Callaghan.’

There was a pause. Then Kamensky smiled, and the others round the screen smiled too.