Smarties from the case and gently popped them into my mouth. ‘We’ll do this whichever way you want. But promise me one thing: be open to the idea of getting involved. It feels just as scary to me.’
We held each other close. A wave of happiness washed over me. She murmured in my ear, ‘I’m glad you told me. I want to be with you.’ She kissed me on the cheek again. ‘And it doesn’t matter for how long.’
Bulgari was still there, on her neck, though much weaker than this morning. Or maybe it wasn’t there at all, and I just wanted it to be. Fuck it: it still felt comforting, reassuring and safe.
She was the one who pulled away. ‘We have to get back on the road, Nicholas. Let’s move, or we’ll never get to see those White Nights.’
She spun the wheel and we carried on heading south.
PART FOUR
1
Copenhagen Tuesday, 16 March
11.15 hrs
The Turkish Airlines Boeing 737 was on its final approach. The three-hour flight from Istanbul wasn’t full. Anna found herself a spare row of seats and slept all the way, cuddling her pack of 200 duty-free Camel. We were dressed in the same clothes we’d been wearing when we’d left the Cosmos yesterday morning and the Bulgari was a distant memory.
Less than two hours after I’d called him, Julian had come back to confirm that Lilian had obtained a visa under the name of Nemova and flown to Copenhagen ten days ago. She had booked the ticket in person at a travel agency on Nicolae Lorga Street in Chisinau. The Malev Hungarian flight was the cheapest available, departing Moldova at 05.45. It arrived in Copenhagen at 09.15 after a one-hour stopover at Ferihegy in Budapest.
Lilian had asked for a window seat. She hadn’t booked in conjunction with anyone else. Nor had she checked in with, or asked to sit next to, anyone else. She’d paid cash for the US$693 return fare.
The return was booked for one week later, but she’d never checked in. Her mobile hadn’t been used since the night before her departure and couldn’t be traced. It had disappeared off the face of the earth, just like her.
Shortly after Julian’s call, Anna heard back from her contact. The company in Moscow that Tarasov’s shipment was bound for specialized in radar technology. He didn’t yet know who the end-user was. For that last piece of the jigsaw puzzle, he would have to dig some more.
We’d arrived at the port in Odessa to discover that the ferry to Istanbul only sailed on Saturdays and Mondays, and took a couple of days. We’d rerouted ourselves in the direction of the airport and spent the rest of the night in the car. I dropped Lena’s pistol into a river and ditched the Beamer, then walked the last two K to the terminal.
We took the Aerosvit Airlines 07.00 flight to Istanbul, arriving at 08.35. We caught the connection to Copenhagen, leaving at 09.00, by the skin of our teeth. There wasn’t a problem with visas. Brits and Russians don’t need them, and Anna smoothed over the minor hiccup caused by the absence of both a Moldovan exit stamp and a Ukrainian entry stamp with a story about us taking the wrong road out of Transnistria and missing the border post. The immigration guy accepted the explanation, together with all the lei that Irina had exchanged for us. This was another former Soviet republic, after all.
While Anna slept, I’d thought about Lilian.
She’d bought herself a return ticket, but that might not be significant. She was bright enough to know she’d have problems at Danish Immigration if she couldn’t show an intention to leave. I bet Slobo had told her that.
Anna had told me that citizens of the Republic of Moldova can’t just rock up at the check-in desk and jump on the first plane to the EU. Pre-2007, they’d had to report in person to the Danish embassy in Bucharest, in neighbouring Romania, for a tourist visa. Post-2007, an EU Common Visa Application Centre had been set up in the Hungarian embassy in Chisinau to simplify travel to Greece, the Netherlands, Belgium and twelve other ‘Schengen treaty’ countries.
The Schengen visa was designed to make travelling between its fifteen European member states - which aren’t the same as the EU countries - much easier and less bureaucratic, but they’re still not issued on the spot. They take ten days to process.
Travelling on a Schengen visa means that the holder can travel to any or all member countries, avoiding the hassle and expense of obtaining a new one for each country. This might have been good for Lilian, but it could be a problem for us. She could have landed in Copenhagen, but then been moved on to Austria, Germany, Belgium, Finland, France, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, or the Netherlands.
There was something else Julian had got from the Hungarians: a scan of all three pages of Lilian’s Schengen-visa application form. Besides all the usual personal details, she had had to state the main purpose of the journey (she’d put tourism); duration of stay (up to thirty days); whether her fingerprints had been collected previously for the purpose of applying for a Schengen visa (no, they hadn’t); intended date of arrival in the Schengen area (3 March); intended date of departure from the Schengen area (10 March); and surname and first name of the inviting person(s) in the member state(s). If that wasn’t applicable, then the name of hotel(s) or temporary accommodation(s) in the member state(s), and the address and email address of the inviting person(s)/hotel (s)/temporary accommodation(s). She’d put Hotel d’Angleterre, 34 Kongens Nytorv. Was the cost of travelling and living during the applicant’s stay covered by the applicant himself/herself? Yes. Means of support? Credit card.
None of her responses meant very much. Plenty of people bluff in their visa applications and she’d had Slobo helping her on her way.
At the bottom of the form, she’d had to sign that she was aware of and consented to the collection of the data required by this application form, the taking of her photograph and, if applicable, of her fingerprints.
Julian had already checked. They hadn’t taken her fingerprints, but she had supplied a photograph; he sent it to my BlackBerry. She looked more or less the same as she had outside the factory. Her hair was a bit longer, that was all. Or it had been. It might be short again by now.
So all we knew was that she had landed in Copenhagen. Julian had been able to confirm she hadn’t taken an onward flight. But that also meant jack-shit. She could now be on a train or a car to anywhere in Europe. The only good thing about her being trafficked rather doing a runner was that someone, somewhere, knew where she was.
We didn’t have a choice. We had to find the next link in the trafficking chain, then follow whatever we could wring out of him.
2
The moment I saw the Hotel d’Angleterre I knew we weren’t going to be finding Lilian’s name anywhere on the register. A big, imposing building overlooking an elegant square in the heart of the city, it was clearly a five-star establishment with fuck-off rooms that would cost at least two thousand kroner (three hundred dollars) a night. When she’d seen she needed a name for her visa application, she must have done a quick Google and chosen the most distinguished. Maybe Slobo had told her it carried a lot more weight than a B-and-B in the hippie quarter.
I parked up.
Anna had gone to book us into an airport hotel while I got a serious wad of kroner from an ATM, organized
