Chapter 3

On Ruth's first night in Munich, it had snowed three feet. The bitterness of the overnight change had completely surprised her as had the ease with which the rest of the city adapted. Winter boots and coats came out, the streets were cleared before seven am and car owners changed to their winter tires that very morning. Driving over the Alpine passes from Zurich had prepared her for the possibility of snow later on in the winter, but she had still needed to go straight to the large department store on Marienplatz and buy a complete set of the warmest clothes she could find. Luckily money hadn't been much of a problem and for a country at the forefront of investment banking, Germany ran extremely well on cash. Ruth had been amazed at how little people seemed to use credit cards. Even ordering over the internet involved paying the courier in cash when they arrived to deliver your goods.

It was strange to see it from the other side – she had spent so many years hunting for people trying to disappear, following the banking trails across Europe only to see them run cold in this country. Now it was proving extremely useful as she wanted to avoid using her new identity as much as possible. A simple bank account with the facility to transfer electronic funds to her landlord was enough – the distracted professor who was being seconded to Australia for three years didn't need the name that she had opened the account in, just the ten digit BACS code. He had even included utilities in the rent, so all Ruth had to do was pretend to be Professor Isenbach to upgrade to a high-density ISDN internet connection. Within the first 2 weeks, Helene Peters, a nervous English post-graduate had registered with the local town hall to study for three years in Munich, unfortunately still in temporary student accommodation. A basic account at the Hyper-Verein bank was opened in the name of Katherine Shrett and Ruth felt confident that there was very little, if any, trail that led to her.

Ruth was surprised at how few possessions she needed. In comparison to her London home, the apartment was small and empty. Back there she'd kept drawers stuffed full of things that she could barely remember, never quite sure of how they'd accumulated. Now she could list the things she owned in a matter of seconds – a smart but unobtrusive pilot suitcase, the minimum of clothes and shoes, her documents, a small fortune in a mix of American dollars and Euros and a small but sleek black laptop. The documents consisted of her identity papers, a tiny silver key with the number of a Swiss safety deposit box engraved upon it and a six by four inch photograph of her and her father taken nearly thirty years ago. She kept them all wrapped in a black moleskin casing with an elastic, so that they resembled a notebook or a casual diary, and tucked this in a scuffed leather satchel bag that she carried with her wherever she went.

The laptop was of the highest specification that Ruth could find in a Taiwanese-run electronics shop just north-west of the city ring road. Wireless and generous on battery life, Ruth set about spending days in the Munich Technical University library network-hopping to find the fastest connection point to hack into. Once she'd found a perfect spot, ironically a set of desks in the little used corner of medieval history, she joined a couple of peer-to-peer communities and set about illegally but anonymously downloading some of the tools that she was going to need. If she was on her own from now on, she had to have some kind of contingency plan. Leaving London so quickly had only been possible with the support of Adam, Zaf and Malcolm. Running again would be much harder, if or when she had to. It was vital to concentrate on the life she had to make for herself in the future, but Ruth couldn't help her heart wrenching at the thought of her friends back on the Grid.

Each day she travelled home via the main Ostbahnhof where she had placed a portable hard drive in a public locker behind one of the more neglected train platforms. It took thirteen minutes to put the laptop in the locker and plug in the hard drive to automatically backup her day's worth of data. Whilst waiting, she'd lock the door and walk back to the concourse of the station to order a strong café latte.

By the beginning of December, Ruth had completed her preparation and did not need to visit the university so often. She could now redirect her home connection, bouncing off of a couple of corners of the world before opening a net-based archive that she had secretly compiled during her last two years on the Grid. The data was encoded – there was no way that she could have left it on the open internet otherwise. In fact, and this still made her smile, it was rather ingenious in its simplicity. She'd created a website on a free hosting site and filled it with Latin text. This was encoded though an alpha-numeric shift, the key being the first paragraph of her PhD thesis. As it remained unpublished and she knew the passage in question by heart, it was practically impossible to break. It would take time to translate, but time was something that Ruth had a lot of lately and the information hidden was vital. She'd archived every back door, password and computer code breaker that she'd used or come across at MI-5, enabling her to access both documents and programs from a number of free hosted download sites from anywhere in the world.

The only personal thing that she had allowed herself in this archive was a small video file that anyone else would consider completely inconsequential – a forty-five second clip of a man seated at a hotel bar, the camera viewing from above and the man unaware of being watched, is drinking scotch. No more. Nothing but a looping forty-five seconds of Harry downing glass upon glass in a rumpled white shirt and black suit.

However rewarding it had been to accomplish the first task she'd set for herself – to consolidate her position and prepare for any eventuality. It hadn't been long before the loneliness of her situation crept back in. It was subtle at first. She would hear groups of friends laughing as they met outside the train station, or glimpse at the warm cosiness of beer halls and coffee houses as she walked past on her way home. Christmas was getting nearer and when each little market place in the middle of the paved roundabouts and squares in the city became covered with wooden huts selling mulled wine and clockwork toys, Ruth had known that she couldn't spend the rest of her life preparing to be on the run again.

Looking back now to that cold December in her first few months after arriving in Germany, she could vividly remember standing in front of Schiller's bookstore, with a mug of hot wine warming the chill. Her eyes had flashed from the shop front to the newspaper advert she held in her hand. A shop assistant was required, preferably one with experience in antiquarian books or historical texts; English an advantage, restoration skills needed. They had hired her on the spot and Ruth found that she could lose herself in the delicate work of repairing bindings, or gently cleaning pages that had become stained and wrinkled over centuries. It was a highly specialised shop and their business was mostly international – couriering purchased volumes world-wide to historical scholars. Even after working there for two years now, Ruth still felt a small thrill at handling some of the truly rare volumes that they traded. It was a quiet life and she was beginning to get used to it.