Europe in Autumn

by Dave Hutchinson

  “Oops,” said Lewis.

  LEWIS’S BELIEF-SYSTEM WAS a complex territory of conspiracy theories. He trusted neither the government nor the police. He refused to believe anything he saw on the news networks. One boozy night, he told Seth that at least ten percent of the passengers travelling on scheduled British Airways flights never reached their destinations.

  “Documented fact,” he said, nodding sagely and levering the cap off another Budvar.

  “So where do they go?” asked Seth, only slightly less drunk.

  Lewis leaned forward and his voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “Madagascar. Colossal internment camp.”

  Seth thought about it. “Why?”

  Lewis sat up. “I don’t know,” he said. He waved his bottle of beer at Seth. “But you’d better watch yourself the next time you get on a BA flight, old son. Mark my words.”

  Unpacking after one of Lewis’s infrequent shopping expeditions was an adventure. Lewis had a theory that there was something secretly crafty about bar-codes, that They were tracking each bar-coded item and compiling vast lists for a purpose made even more sinister and terrifying by being entirely unknown.

  So trips to the supermarket inevitably ended with bags and packets piled on the kitchen table, Lewis bent over them with the scissors, cutting off bar-codes, to be burned later. When Seth first saw him doing this, he had inquired whether his flatmate needed regular medication, but it had turned out that Lewis was a relative rarity: a completely sane man whose world-view was almost entirely irrational. Sometimes, thinking about it, Seth wondered if Lewis might not actually be right. And then he usually wondered what Lewis would think if he knew what his flatmate really did for a living.

  IN HIS ABSENCE, their landlord, an immensely aged Malaysian whom Lewis had dubbed, for no good reason, The Grasping Bastard, had visited the flat and entrusted to Lewis the twice-yearly message of happiness and joy that was their rent increase. This in itself was not a problem. Seth was reasonably well-off, and Lewis made a truly colossal amount of money developing advertising campaigns for products from which he would one day be cutting bar-codes. However, the Grasping Bastard had been unable to predict with any great certainty when a replacement for their recently-deceased washing machine would be forthcoming.

  Which meant that, at around half past nine that evening, Seth was sitting on a padded bench in the neon-lit tropical heat of the local laundrette, watching his underwear doing flickflacks in the drier. Ah, the endless romance of the Coureur’s life...

  He’d had a busy couple of months, four or five Situations on the run that had involved him flying off to Warsaw, Bruges, Barcelona and Nicosia, picking up sealed pouches, and flying with them to Berlin, Chicago, Dublin and Copenhagen. The last Situation had subsequently involved a train, bus and taxi ride to Narvik, a clandestine pass in a department store, and a dustoff through Helsinki. The first three Situations had been straight corporate data-transfer, routine stuff. The Narvik thing smacked of industrial espionage. Or maybe even real espionage; Central usually frowned on real espionage, preferring to leave it to nations, but in practice, at street level, it was impossible to know who you were taking a delivery from, impossible to know what was in the pouch. You made the jump, took the money, told yourself you were keeping alive the spirit of Schengen, and forgot about it.

  The door opened, billowing cool air through the steamy laundrette. Seth looked up from his book. A middle-aged woman wearing biker boots, US Army desert camo trousers and a chunky black sweater was standing in the doorway, a big blue plastic carrier bag dangling from each hand. As the door closed behind her, she went over and started to walk down the line of washers, looking for a machine that wasn’t being used. Seth went back to his book.

  Central had its roots in the hundreds of little courier firms which had been operating in Europe before the turn of the century, moving various items of merchandise – printed material too valuable to be entrusted to the postal system, disc-encoded data too important or secret to be entrusted to the net, and so on. If Central had had a single stated objective, it would have been the eventual abolition of borders and free movement for all, and if Central had been a moderately-sized multinational, Seth would have been one of the boys in the post-room.

  This suited him, more or less. Central’s bread-and-butter business went on constantly, offered boundless opportunities for travel, and paid pretty well. There were strata above him in which the Packages moved by Central were people, the circumstances of their jumpoffs far more fraught and exciting, but for Seth those sorts of Situations seemed too much like hard work.

  “This fucking thing doesn’t work.”

  Seth looked up. The woman was standing by the detergent dispenser, a plastic cup in one hand and her washing-bags on the floor by her feet.

  “This fucking thing doesn’t work,” she said again, pointing at the dispenser.

  “You’ve got to buy a card,” said Seth, nodding at the box by the dispenser. “Ten pounds.”

  The woman stood looking at him for a few moments as if she was thinking very hard about what he had told her. “I only want some fucking soap powder,” she said finally.

  “The card works the machines as well.”

  She narrowed her eyes at that, and Seth sighed. The last time this had happened to him, it had been aboard the bus to Narvik, when a grossly overweight Latvian had squeezed himself into the seat beside him and proceeded to try and sell him a small cardboard box which he claimed contained the mummified penis of Joseph Stalin. He didn’t know why these things happened. Maybe he had the sort of bone structure which proclaimed to lunatics here I am, talk to me.

  “Look,” he said, getting up and going over to the card dispenser. “Why don’t I buy you a card, eh?”

  “Don’t you fucking patronise me, sunshine,” said the woman. “I’ve got washing in these bags older than you. I can buy my own fucking cards.”

  Seth spread his hands and stepped away from the dispenser, not quite being able to resist a half-bow at the last moment. The woman glared at him and put a £10 coin in the slot.

  Seth went back to his seat and his pirouetting smalls, but it was impossible to ignore the woman as she wrestled the contents of the plastic cup of detergent into one of the empty machines – through the door, mind, not into the hopper on top – and hurled her washing in after it. Then she came back and sat beside Seth, heaved a huge sigh of relief, took an impressively abused-looking old paperback from one of the thigh pockets of her combat trousers, a pair of spectacles from the other pocket, and started to read. Seth felt his heart sink.

  After they had been sitting side by side in silence for about ten minutes, Seth said, “I only just got back, you know.”

  The woman looked up from her book. “Beg pardon, lovely?”

  “I only just got home,” he said. “I’m shattered. I don’t want to go back out just yet.”

  She looked at him and raised an eyebrow.

  “The glasses,” he said. “They’re antiques.”

  “I could have inherited the frames from my granny,” she said.

  Seth tipped his head to one side.

  She sighed. “Okay.” She took the spectacles off and looked at them, a little abashed. “There’s always something, isn’t there? I thought this was bloody good camo, too.” She beamed at him. “Well spotted, mind.”

  He shrugged. I am a Coureur, witness my mad spectacle-identifying skillz. “What have you got for me?”

  “Oh, I dunno,” she said, recovering her cheerfulness. “I just deliver ’em. Nobody tells me anything. Here.” She passed him the book. “Have a read of that.”

  He took the book. Atlas Shrugged, the back cover and half the front torn off. It appeared to have spent quite a long time in a sauna as well; its pages had swollen up until it was almost twice its original thickness, which had already been considerable. “I’ve heard of it.”

  “It’s shit,” the stringer said, standing up. “Woman was barking mad.” She turne
d to leave.

  “What about your clothes?” Seth asked.

  She turned back to him. “What?”

  He nodded at the clothes in the washing machine.

  “Oh, they’re not mine,” she said happily. “They’re just props. Fuck ’em. ’Bye.”

  THE FLAT WAS on the top floor of a converted warehouse building on the edge of the confusing maze of little streets between Farringdon Road and the Grey’s Inn Road, just south of Clerkenwell Road. Back in the ’90s the whole area had experienced a spasm of conversion, but by the 2000s nobody could afford the rents so the converted blocks had been sold off, one by one, to housing associations. Artists and students and musicians moved into flats once occupied by young upwardly-mobile couples. Refugees and asylum-seekers from the newer states and polities of Europe and Africa arrived. Meetings of the Residents Association began to resemble sessions of the UN Security Council during an interpreters’ strike.

  Seth had come here six years ago and fallen in love with the area at first sight. He’d been a Coureur for a couple of years by then, and his life consisted of drifting across the Continent moving Packages from place to place, living in hotels and Travelodges which were all somehow identical to each other. It was a busy couple of years, but at some point he found himself sitting in an hotel room and looking about him and wondering where precisely he was. Padania? Ulster? Somewhere in the Basque country?

  He decided it was a bad sign, and logged-off for a couple of months to find himself a solid base, somewhere to call his own. He came back to London, visited his father and stepmother in Hampstead, spent some time with his sister and her family in Cornwall. He saw an ad in the online edition of Loot, and two days later he was introducing himself to Lewis.

  If Lewis had been better-off there would have been no way he would have consented to share the flat, but in spite of being rather well-paid for what he did, he was in danger of losing his lease if he didn’t find someone to help him with the rent. Seth later found himself feeling a glow of professional pride at the fact that, of all the applicants for the flatshare, Lewis had felt him to be the least suspect.

  Trying to look at himself objectively, Seth supposed that he represented the perfect flatmate. Neat, tidy, unobtrusive, forgiving. Away for extended periods on business. Willing to cook meals and wash up afterwards without complaint. But most important of all, pretty well-off. In this way, he convinced Lewis that he was not an Agent Of Them. Seth thought this was quite amusing, considering he really did work for what amounted to a global conspiracy.

  Lewis was out again when Seth got back with his washing. Seth had never found out what his flatmate did on his evenings out. Certainly pubs featured somewhere, but which ones, and with whom, he didn’t know. Sometimes he pictured upstairs rooms in dingy Fitzrovia taverns, a circle of conspiracy theorists perched anxiously on chairs arranged around the walls, pints of real ale clutched in their fists as they discussed in hushed voices the latest convoluted doings of Them. Them, of course, being a chimera of Science, the Military, the Government and anything to do with America. Lewis did have a girlfriend, a wispy presence named Angela who did makeup for advertising shoots and who sometimes drifted through the flat, naked but for a huge butterfly barrette in her hair, in search of toast and tea to take back to Lewis’s bedroom. Seth had never had a meaningful conversation of any kind with her beyond answering the question, “Where’s the marmalade?”

  This all rather suited him. Apart from that one time with the leg wound, he had never brought his work home with him; there had never been any need to. Home was where he went when he wasn’t being a Coureur, a solid hub about which to rotate a peripatetic lifestyle. He liked it here. He liked Lewis, and he even rather liked Angela, to the extent that she existed in his life at all. For all that he could never predict, from one week to the next, where work would take him, it was a settled life and he had it organised the way he liked it.

  For example, all his jobs were delivered to an anonymised email account which deleted and rewrote itself twenty-eight times every day on an all-but-forgotten secure server in a basement at the Ministry of Defence. He was used to this, used to the familiar little ping on his phone as some new Situation was delivered.

  He could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times a stringer had hand-delivered instructions to him.

  It was also some years – not since his entry-level days as a stringer himself, in fact – since he had been asked to create a legend for someone.

  He sat on the sofa and looked at the slip of paper he had extracted from between the pages of the brick-sized copy of Atlas Shrugged. Male. Caucasian. Light brown hair, hazel eyes. Height so and so, weight such and such. Name: Roger Curtis. And that was it. He was, in effect, being asked to build Mr Curtis from the pavement up.

  Which, while undeniably interesting in an academic sort of way, was a bit pedestrian and quite a distance outside his usual briefs these days. On the other hand, it was stuff he could do without having to leave London. And the note included a URL and a set of code strings which gave him access to an operational account and a line of credit running to a little over a million euros.

  That last gave him some pause. Operational funding was perfectly normal – one had to buy tickets, book hotels, sometimes hand out bribes – but the sum here was beyond his experience and it left him a little flatfooted. It was up to him who Mr Curtis was, but who wanted to be Mr Curtis for this fantastical amount of money?

  The note also included a link to an online dropbox which contained a single notepad file with the words ‘I used to date the Rokeby Venus.’ A recognition string by which the recipient of the legend – or at least a go-between come to collect it – would make themselves known to him. This at least was perfectly standard. Everything about the job was perfectly standard. Except the money. The money stood out from the perfect standardisation like a sore thumb, and he had to ponder why whoever was wrangling this job had allowed that to slip by. A message? This is important. Don’t screw up? Or just simple honest carelessness?

  Impossible to know. A job was a job. A quick check of his account confirmed that he had already been paid for it, and paid well.

  Fair enough. Seth took out his phone and created a couple of new contacts, then disguised the bank URL and code strings as phone numbers and web addresses. He memorised Mr Curtis’s physical attributes. Then he ate the slip of paper and opened the copy of Atlas Shrugged at the first page.

  After a dozen pages, he closed the book, got up, and dumped it in the kitchen bin. The stringer at the laundrette was right; it was terrible.

  MR CURTIS WAS a Scot. That was the first thing he decided. Scottish independence had not been the simple, pain-free process envisaged by generations of SNP politicians, and many municipal buildings – including the record offices of a number of towns – had been torched in the Separation Riots and their documents and servers destroyed. There was an enormous black hole in Scotland’s public data, and it was a simple matter to insert a nonexistent person into it. It was also a bit of a cliché, but just because something is a cliché doesn’t make it untrue. Hundreds of thousands of real people had had all their personal data destroyed during the Riots too. He checked through newspaper files of the Separation, noted which record offices had been destroyed, which schools.

  He took a train to Edinburgh – sat for an hour at the border post outside Berwick while Scottish customs officers searched the carriages for drugs and other contraband – and wandered the city for a couple of days, getting a feel for the place. He thought Scotland was having a bit of a rough time these days. The tail-end of North Sea Oil which the new state had inherited had become uneconomic to extract some years before, tourism hadn’t taken up the slack to the degree everyone had been banking on, and the big tech firms had fled Silicon Glen for more stable parts of Europe. The city, even its historic heart, was looking shabby and the locals looked grey and thin and unhappy. A debate had already begun at Westminster over whether to allow Scotl
and to rejoin England; the consensus seemed to be a resounding no at the moment. There were still English MPs with long enough memories to want to punish the Scots for leaving the United Kingdom in the first place.

  Back in London, he did the hacking himself. He wardrove around the City and the West End, latching on to corporate hotspots whose encryption hadn’t been kept up to date, sat in nearby libraries and coffee shops and calmly inserted Roger Curtis’s birth and education information into the databases in Edinburgh. He backstopped the data with fragmentary bits about Mr Curtis’s parents – both deceased now, sadly – supposedly retrieved from riot-damaged servers and seared filing cabinets. In hacking terms, it was shooting fish in a barrel. Desperate for funds, the Edinburgh government had offered the country as a private data haven, but hadn’t bothered to upgrade its public data security for almost a decade. He breezed through the databases, tweaking and adjusting, and it was as if he had never been there.

  University records were almost as easy. The United States was littered with the corpses of little failed colleges, particularly in the Midwest. Roger Curtis went to one of these, not far from Milwaukee. Of his classmates and tutors, a statistically-convincing number were now dead. Everyone else was scattered as far from Europe as possible, their trails becoming blurred and unreadable.

  He left Mr Curtis’s work history vague. A year as an itinerant citizen journalist in South America. Some volunteer work with charities in Guatemala and Chile. Then back to Britain and a succession of small temporary jobs in London with firms which had now gone bust and whose details were sparse to the point of transparency. Most recently, a flat in Balham. Seth went south of the river and rented the flat himself in Mr Curtis’s name, then set about the dull minutiae of accumulating utility bills, making a slight nuisance of himself with the letting agents, getting a parking ticket in Tooting, and so on and so forth. He left as much room as possible for customisation by whoever came along later to drive Mr Curtis.