Europe in Autumn

by Dave Hutchinson

  The whole thing took him about three weeks, and at the end of it he still had most of the operational funds left, which he felt professionally rather proud of. He gave the data one last tweak, left one last complaint about the drains with the letting agents, left a message in a Coureur dropbox that the legend was ready for handover, and headed to Padstow to spend the weekend with his sister.

  AT AROUND EIGHT o’clock on Sunday night a previously-unknown wing of an almost-overlooked homegrown terrorist organisation blew up a signal junction box just outside Swindon.

  The box, about the size of a shoebox, was a switch for about seventy optical cables carrying data from points and signals between London and Land’s End. The explosion, achieved by drilling a hole into the switch’s casing and then pouring in gunpowder obtained by opening up fireworks, was so discreet that it was only discovered the following morning when engineers located the cable break and went to repair it. At roughly the same time, a very vague and barely-literate press release claiming responsibility for the outrage began to make the rounds. Hardly anyone had ever heard of the culprits before, and no one ever heard of them again.

  The signal break didn’t stop trains altogether, but it caused delays for an hour or so until a workaround was sorted out, and that caused a knock-on effect which meant that the six forty-five from Padstow, due to arrive in Paddington at ten o’clock, did not actually get into Paddington until almost midnight. Seth, lugging his weekend bag down the platform with the rest of the disgruntled passengers, avoided the enormous scrum at the taxi rank, left the station altogether, and walked down to the big hotels near the bottom of the Edgware Road, where there were always taxis aplenty. He waved one cab down as it made to pull into the rank beside the Marriott, slung his bag inside, and settled back against the seat with his eyes closed.

  IT WAS VERY nearly one in the morning when Seth paid off the taxi outside his building in Farringdon and dragged his bag tiredly up the stairs. Kids from the local council estate had managed to bypass the street door’s lock again and they’d smashed all the lightbulbs on Seth’s landing. He could feel the glass crunch under his feet as he walked along by the dim light of his phone’s screen, and he made a note to tear a strip off the building’s security in the morning.

  Outside his door, there also seemed to be something sticky mixed up with the glass. Seth grumbled to himself and unlocked the front door and stepped inside and immediately fell over something lying on the floor in the hallway.

  Swearing at the top of his voice now, Seth got up and tried the hall light switch, but it didn’t seem to work so he took his phone out again and turned on its screen and by the light from that he saw Lewis lying on his back on the floor, his eyes open, a little black hole in his forehead and his face distorted as if it had been badly inflated. Under his head and shoulders was a big puddle of a dark liquid, which had run out under the door and onto the landing.

  Seth’s mind refused to process any of this.

  Nor would it process the hunched figure lying half in and half out of Lewis’s bedroom doorway, the barrette which had once been in its hair now tumbled against the skirting just outside the kitchen.

  He heard glass crunch, behind him.

  He turned and saw a dark figure detach itself from the shadows of the doorway opposite. By the light from his phone he saw that it was wearing tight-fitting dark clothing and carrying what appeared to be a pistol with a very long barrel. The figure raised the pistol and gestured with it and Seth raised his hands above his head. Another gesture, and Seth took a step back down the hallway as the gunman reached the doorway and raised the gun and pointed it at his head.

  There was a soft coughing noise, and the top third of the dark figure’s head fountained off in a pattering spray of droplets and bits of bone and tissue. For a fraction of a second, the body remained upright, then its knees unlocked and it crumpled to the floor.

  Seth stayed where he was, hands above his head, face spattered with gore.

  After a few moments, another figure moved into the doorway. This figure was also holding a gun.

  “Anyone else?” the figure asked.

  Seth shrugged.

  “I didn’t see anyone else about.” The figure stepped into the flat and nudged the gunman’s body with a toe. “Jesus Maria,” he said. “What a mess.” Now Seth could see him properly, he could see he was of medium height, quite unremarkable-looking. Unlike the gun he was holding, which looked like something knocked together in someone’s shed from bits and pieces of garden equipment, bits of hose and short lengths of two-centimetre copper piping.

  He looked at Seth. “Put your hands down,” he said, and he closed the door behind him. “Is there anything in here you absolutely can’t live without?”

  Seth shook his head and lowered his hands.

  “Okay. Get changed, wash your face and get a coat. And hurry.”

  Seth tipped his head to one side. “And you are...?”

  His unremarkable-looking saviour looked at him. He shrugged, and that weird improvised-looking gun seemed to disappear into the folds of his coat.

  “Call me Leo,” he said.

  THERE WAS A battered old Espace parked around the corner, and Leo had the key. Seth allowed himself to be put into the front passenger seat, watched himself do up the seat belt, watched through the windscreen as the early-morning streets began to unroll in front of him. He felt as if his life had suddenly become something he was watching from outside. He was faintly aware that he was trembling.

  “That shouldn’t have happened, and I’m sorry it did,” Leo said, navigating them around the tricky one-way system and late-night pavement-diving drunks of King’s Cross.

  Seth turned his head to look at the unassuming young man, found that he was quite unable to speak.

  Leo glanced at him, then had to perform an emergency stop as a cab launched itself from the kerb without signalling in front of them. He did not, though, hammer the flat of his hand on the middle of the steering wheel in order to sound the horn, as another driver might. He muttered a few words Seth didn’t recognise, and let the cab go.

  “One day,” he said to himself, “I’m going to come back here and revenge myself on the fucking drivers in this town.” His English was excellent, almost Received Pronunciation, but he had a faint accent Seth couldn’t place.

  Seth said, “I’m going to be sick.”

  Leo got the car stopped at the side of the road and helped Seth out and over to the mouth of an alleyway, where Seth threw up what felt like everything he had ever eaten and then knelt with his cheek pressed against the rough brickwork of a wall, sobbing while the world yawed and pitched around him.

  Then he was in the car again, without remembering getting back in, and unfamiliar streets were opening up ahead of him in the streetlights and the red lights of vehicles ahead of him stretched up into a terrible unknown distance and Leo was talking again.

  “I tried,” he was saying. “I tried to keep you all away from the flat, but I was having to improvise and it didn’t work. Your friends... I’m sorry. It didn’t work.”

  Seth opened his mouth to say something, but all that emerged was a hopeless exhalation. He wondered if he would ever stop shaking.

  “I owe you an explanation, at the very least,” Leo said, but then he seemed lost for words because he didn’t say anything for quite a long time. They reached a large traffic junction with a big pub in the middle of it and Seth realised they were at Archway. Leo navigated them around the junction and onto the Archway Road, up onto the long hill northward out of London towards Highgate.

  “I’ve become involved in something... complicated,” Leo said as they passed under the great iron bridge that carried Hornsey Road high above the Archway Road. “I don’t know what it is, and in order to make any sense at all of it I need to get back to mainland Europe. And I need a legend.”

  Seth turned his head and looked at Leo.

  Leo glanced at him ruefully. “I used to date the Rokeby Ven
us,” he said. When Seth just stared at him he said, “I’m afraid this whole thing is a bit off-piste.”

  The first words Seth managed to say since King’s Cross were, “‘A bit’?”

  “Nobody was supposed to die,” Leo said angrily. “It’s me they want; I didn’t think they’d involve bystanders.”

  “They?”

  Leo shook his head. “I don’t know. Someone told me Central wants me dead, but I don’t believe that. They also told me Greater German counterintelligence wants me dead, and I find that easier to believe but I have no idea why because I haven’t done anything to make them angry. I just don’t know. I need to get back to the mainland, talk to people, try and make sense of this catastrophe.”

  Seth made several attempts to parse all this, while they drove up through East Finchley and North Finchley, but none of the words seemed to fit together in his head. It was just noise.

  He said. “Lewis. Angela.”

  “Your friends? I’m genuinely sorry about that. If I could have stopped that, I would have.”

  Seth started to fumble in his pockets for his phone. “Someone should tell Lewis’s parents...”

  Leo reached out and took the phone from Seth’s hand, opened the driver’s side window, and dropped the phone out. Seth momentarily heard the faint sound of things breaking on the road, then it was gone.

  “Sorry,” he said over Seth’s gasp of surprise. “No phone calls.”

  Seth gaped at him for a few moments, and then he found himself hunched breathless against the passenger door, a pain in his jaw. There were scratches on Leo’s face, and a driver behind them angrily sounding his horn.

  “Please don’t do that again,” Leo said. “Or at least try to wait until I’m not driving.”

  “Who are you?” Seth yelled.

  “I’m a Coureur,” Leo replied. “And I’m in a Situation. I mean you no harm. I need your help. We need each other’s help, actually, because they’re coming for you now as well.”

  “Because of a legend?”

  “Because it was a legend for me. I don’t know; I don’t understand any of it. They’ve already killed my brother.”

  Another long silence in the car. They were in Barnet before Seth said, “The Germans.”

  “I don’t know for sure that it is the Germans. I was told it is, and I was involved in something... strange in Berlin a little while ago, so it’s at least credible. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

  Another long silence. The car drove through Barnet and Potters Bar and out into the Hertfordshire countryside.

  Seth said, “I’m going to be sick again.”

  Leo slowed the car, pulled over to the side of the road. Seth threw off his seatbelt, opened his door, and leapt out. He crashed straight through a hedge into the field beyond and kept going as fast as he could.

  “Don’t be stupid!” he heard Leo call behind him. “You need my help. You won’t last more than a few days on your own.”

  Seth caught his toe in a rut and fell full-length.

  “Hey!” Leo called. “Where are you?”

  “I’m here,” Seth called back. “I think I’ve broken my ankle.”

  “IT’S ONLY A sprain,” Leo said.

  “Well, that’s all right then,” said Seth. They were back in the car, way out in the sleeping unlit countryside now. He had no idea where they were, but he had a sense that they might have turned east at some point. “What happened to your brother?”

  For a moment he thought Leo wasn’t going to answer at all. “They tried to get to me through my family,” Leo said finally. “My father was seriously hurt. My brother got in the way.”

  “What about my family?”

  Leo didn’t say anything.

  “We have to help them,” Seth said.

  “I know.” Leo shook his head.

  “So?”

  “So we’ll help them. First we need somewhere to rest.” He glanced over. “Am I going to have to tie you up or something?”

  Seth thought about it. “Help my dad and my sister first. Then we’ll talk about it.”

  THEY WOUND UP in a Travelodge on the outskirts of Bishops Stortford. Leo booked them into a twin room, bought support strapping and painkillers for Seth’s ankle from the motel’s shop, and they carried their bags inside.

  With the door locked behind them, Leo took a little grey box not much larger than a book of matches from one of his tote-bags and stuck it on the jamb, near the top. Then he did the same with all the windows, even though they were on the fourth floor of the motel. Then he took his overcoat off and Seth finally got a clear look at the thing he had shot the gunman with. There was a little metal bottle strapped to his belt, and reinforced hoses running from it and down his arm to a bundle of copper tubes about six inches long, mounted on a sliding rail arrangement buckled around his forearm.

  Leo saw him looking at the contraption. “I was in a hurry,” he said. “I got a blacksmith to put it together for me.”

  In Coureur terminology, a blacksmith was an armourer. A mythological figure in Seth’s world. “What is it?”

  Leo unstrapped the thing and put it on the table and looked sadly at it. “Flechette gun. Powered by compressed air. Lovely piece of work, at such short notice.” He glanced at Seth. “Can I trust you not to fiddle about with it when my back’s turned? There wasn’t time to put in a safety catch.”

  Seth nodded.

  “All right.” Leo unzipped another of his bags and took out a laptop and a packet of disposable phones. “Let’s see what we can do about your family, then.”

  It took him over an hour of picking about on various websites and anonymised chatboards and making calls – one call per phone and then discarding it. Some of the calls sounded tense, others completely obscure. Seth used the room’s facilities to make them coffee and paced back and forth so much that Leo told him to sit down, which Seth answered with a heartfelt couple of expletives.

  Finally, Leo sat back and closed the laptop.

  “Is it okay?” Seth asked.

  “We’ll know in a little while. The great thing about Les Coureurs is that it’s a completely compartmentalised organisation. Everyone’s used to getting anonymous orders and carrying them out, and half the time nobody knows why they’re doing what they’re doing. You just have to hack into that structure and so long as you know who to talk to and you have the right recognition strings no one ever questions their instructions.”

  “Like me.”

  Leo rubbed his eyes. “You, the stringer who passed you the job order. Just doing what you were told, because why shouldn’t you?” He blinked blearily at Seth. “It was such a low-level job. I honestly thought it would go without a hitch. I’m sorry.” He sighed. “What a fucking mess.”

  “Why me?”

  “Sorry? Oh. Just the luck of the draw, really. I had a list of about half a dozen people who could have done it. I didn’t want to use stringers; I wanted someone with experience, someone who’d do it right.”

  “You should have split the job up into segments and given each one to a different person.”

  “Yes, more anonymous that way, I know. But the more people know about something, the more chance there is of it coming to light. I decided it was best to give it to just one person.” Leo checked his watch – a cheaply-printed thing that looked as if it had come as a free gift with a pair of printed shoes. “Get some sleep. Nothing’s going to happen for a couple of hours.”

  “You have to be kidding.”

  “You must be exhausted. I know I am.”

  “Not a chance. Tell me how my friends wound up dead and I wound up on the run. That’ll keep us both awake.”

  So Leo – Rudi, apparently – told him a mad story of chefs and restaurants and catastrophic jumps and hot briefcases and heads in lockers, a riot in a national park, a fake barristers’ chambers, a year of moving from place to place incognito. The story was interrupted a couple of times by calls to one or other of the disposable phones, which Ru
di answered tersely. Finally – it was daylight outside now – one call came through and Rudi held the phone out to him, and when he took it and put it to his ear he heard his father’s voice demanding to know what the hell was going on and why there was a strange person with a gun in his house.

  “Dad,” he said when he got a moment’s silence. “Dad, just go with them. They’re there to help you. They’re going to take you somewhere safe.”

  “Safe? Safe from what? Take us where?”

  “Just go with them, Dad, please. I’ll be in touch later.” Rudi was holding another phone out to him. “I’ve got another call. I’ll be in touch.” And he took the other phone and had a similar conversation with his sister.

  When he’d finished and put the phones down on the stack on the table, Rudi told him, “There was someone outside your sister’s house.”

  Seth stared at him.

  “I wanted them taken alive so I could find out who sent them, but there was... um.” Rudi shrugged. “Anyway, your family are on their way to safe houses right now. I’ll organise something more permanent for them in a day or so. Now will you get some sleep?”

  IT WAS MID-AFTERNOON before Seth woke up, still tired and headachey, on the bed. Rudi was nowhere to be seen, but his bags – and the custom-built flechette gun – were still there, so Seth had a quick shower, dressed in fresh clothes, and went for a wander.

  He found Rudi in the motel’s almost-deserted bar/restaurant, talking quietly on one of the disposable phones and staring at a sausage sandwich as if it had done him an unforgivable wrong. He ordered an Americano and a burger and sat down across from the young Coureur.

  “So,” he said when Rudi had finished his call.

  Rudi rubbed his face. “Well, Roger Curtis is unusable, I’m afraid. He’s wanted for the murder of your flatmate and his girlfriend.” He shook his head. “Which is actually quite elegant, if you think about it. Someone less sophisticated would have framed you or me.”