Europe in Autumn

by Dave Hutchinson

  “I can get you out,” Seth said.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “I might not be all high and mighty and important like you, but I’ve got some contacts. I can get you out. But it won’t be cheap.”

  “Nothing worth having ever is.” Rudi shrugged. “I’m sensing an ‘and’ hanging in the air between us.”

  “I’m going with you.”

  To his credit, Rudi didn’t even try to talk him out of it. He just nodded tiredly. “Yes, well, I’d taken that as a given, rather. Is it my imagination, or is there another ‘and’ here as well?”

  “We have to go to Scotland.”

  Rudi opened his mouth to say something. Closed it again.

  “IT’S ALL ABOUT jurisdiction,” Seth said. “And the Acts of Union.”

  Rudi shook his head. “I’ve spent almost a year on the run trying to get out of this fucking country. Why did nobody ever tell me about this?”

  “It’s nuance,” Seth told him. “Nitpicking stuff. Body language, really. There probably aren’t more than a dozen people in the whole country who appreciate it properly, and they don’t want the public to know about it because it looks bad.”

  They were driving across a rain-lashed landscape of moorland and forest in Northumberland. The B-road they were on was in a terrible state of repair, and the Espace’s suspension kept bottoming out in potholes and ruts in the tarmac. It was half past one in the afternoon, and already the light was taking on a dim, failing, underwater quality.

  “Are you trying to tell me,” Rudi said, “that the border isn’t there?”

  Seth sighed. “1603,” he said. “James VI of Scotland becomes James I of England. Most people think that’s when England and Scotland became one country, but actually, although there was one monarch, there were still two Crowns.”

  “Because joining two countries together is just as complicated as splitting one up,” Rudi said. He lit a small cigar, opened the driver’s window a crack to let the smoke out.

  “It used to be easier,” Seth said. “But that was when kings wore full armour and rode into battle on great fuck-off big horses and all you had to do was kill the other side’s king.” He took a bag from beside his feet, rummaged around in it, and came up with an apple. He took a bite. “Anyway, they actually had three goes at unification. First was under James I. He called himself ‘King of Great Britain,’ and he thought unification was a shoo-in, but the English Parliament was worried that it would mean some of the powers he had as King of Scotland being imposed on England. So. Close, but no cigar.

  “Second try was in 1654. Cromwell occupies Scotland during the Civil War, and afterwards he issues an edict creating a Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland. Scotland gets MPs at Westminster. This of course all disappears automatically when Charles II takes to the throne, and the Scottish MPs have to go home. He tries to get unification talks going again in 1669, but it all grinds to a halt.”

  “Do children in this country have to memorise this stuff?” Rudi asked.

  “This is just background,” Seth replied. “Anyway. 1707. Queen Anne. A Treaty of Unification is ratified. And ever since then the Scots have wanted to leave.”

  “Ungrateful bastards.”

  “The Scots started to call officially for devolution around the middle of the nineteenth century, I think,” Seth said. He shook his head. “After that it all just gets too fucking complicated. But the point is, when the Separation did take place twenty years ago, it happened in a hurry after a long and fractious history, and there was a lot of bad blood on both sides.”

  “And all of a sudden, after a little more than four hundred years, there was a border between the two countries.”

  “Well, there was always a border, but most of the time it was just marked with a couple of signs or some farm fencing. You drove back and forth or you got the train or you walked. Nobody stopped you. Half the time you didn’t even realise you’d crossed it. But yes. All of a sudden there was a border. Something that needed defending, patrolling, surveilling.”

  “Which costs money.”

  Seth grinned. “Oh, it’s much more complicated than that,” he said.

  THEY STOPPED AT a bed-and-breakfast place, a farm more or less out in the middle of nowhere. There had been no need to make a reservation; the place was so isolated and the weather was so bad that they were more or less the only vehicle to pass by that day. The owner, a tall, patrician-looking woman with a strong Scots accent, seemed overjoyed to see them and happily booked them into adjoining rooms.

  Later that evening – though notionally a bed-and-breakfast, there wasn’t anywhere within an hour’s drive to buy lunch or dinner – they sat in the farm’s little dining room, where Rudi seemed to thoroughly approve of the lamb stew and dumplings on offer, even going so far as to ask the landlady for the recipe.

  “Scotland waited too long for independence,” Seth said when the landlady had gone back into another part of the farmhouse to watch television with her husband. “The country was almost broke when the Separation happened, but there was no going back once it had started. There would have been a catastrophe.”

  “It was pretty violent anyway, from what I understand,” Rudi said.

  “It was in the cities, certainly. But there was no way to stop it. If the government had tried to row back there might have been civil war. It wasn’t a popular government to start with.” He shrugged. “And then, all of a sudden, they’re trying to kickstart an independent nation with the barest of mandates and no money in the Treasury to pay for... well, for anything, pretty much. There was a police force, but no army, navy or air force. The Westminster government was unwilling to provide any help, and the EU wouldn’t bail them out until Scotland became an EU member.”

  “Which can take a while.”

  “Which can take a while.” Seth drank some of the landlady’s husband’s excellent homebrew and looked around the empty dining room. “Anyway, Holyrood finally made a deal with the Chinese. Which pissed off Westminster and Washington and Brussels and just about everyone else, but really they had no choice. Prestwick Airport is now a Chinese airbase, the Scots got enough money to survive the transition to nationhood, and the Ayrshire Coast is targeted with enough megatonnage to make it glow at night for a million years.”

  “And the Anglo-Scottish border is one of the most heavily-defended on Earth.”

  “Yes. And no.”

  Rudi raised an eyebrow.

  “The Scottish Government has been on the edge of bankruptcy for almost the entire time the country’s been independent,” Seth said. “The border’s less than a hundred miles long – call it about a hundred and fifty kilometres, which isn’t very much – but the Scots can’t afford a border defence force. They’ve got a volunteer force of a couple of hundred people, and for most of its length the border runs through country like...” He gestured at the outdoors with his fork. “Wild, horrid country. Even the Romans hated it up here, and they were used to being out in all weathers.”

  “Whereas the English...?”

  “Everything. Garrisons just south of Berwick and Gretna, regular patrols, fences, sensors. Drone flights along the border – which the Scots tend to shoot down; the Chinese gave them some obsolete automated sentry guns. The thing is...” He smiled.

  “The thing is...?” asked Rudi.

  “The English are watching for stuff coming south. Not going in the opposite direction.”

  IT WAS STILL raining the next morning, and great gusts of wind and water were blowing in veils and sheets down the valley where the farm sat. Seth and Rudi came to breakfast – a very passable selection of sausage, bacon, black pudding, fried potatoes, grilled tomatoes, mushrooms, toast, fried bread, baked beans – to discover that in the night the bed-and-breakfast had acquired two more guests, a couple of young women named Annette and Lauren, who had taken shelter at the height of last night’s storm.

  “Couldn’t see more than a couple of feet past the end of the car,
” Lauren told them from the adjoining table. She had a Glaswegian accent. “Just a solid wall of water. Right, Nette?”

  “Right,” said Annette, who was small and taciturn and sounded – from the few words she said – as if she was from down in the West Country somewhere.

  “Thought we were going to have to pull over and sleep in the car, then Nette spotted a sign for this place. Right, Nette?”

  Annette was examining a triangle of fried bread as if the conjunction of frying pan and bread had never occurred to her before. She looked up and nodded. “Right.”

  “We’re off to Hawick, see my parents,” Lauren said. “How about you guys?”

  “Glasgow,” said Seth. “We’re opening a restaurant.”

  “Yeah? Whereabouts?”

  “Down by the river. Near the SEC.”

  “Ach, I wish you luck with that,” Lauren said.

  “Thank you,” said Rudi.

  Lauren looked at her watch. “How’s the rain?”

  Seth leaned back in his chair so he could see out of the window; the glass was running with water. “Still pouring down.”

  “Hm. What do you reckon?” she asked Annette. “Shall we chance it?”

  Annette put down her fried bread. “I can’t eat this,” she said. “What’s wrong with you people?”

  Lauren chuckled. “Nette’s not been feeling well,” she told them.

  “I feel all right,” Annette protested in a low voice. “How can you do this to bread? It’s a sin.”

  “Okay,” said Lauren, getting to her feet. “That’s us away, then. Nice to meet you, guys.” Annette stood up too, and looked around the dining room as if searching for more abused bread.

  “Drive carefully,” said Rudi.

  “Yeah, you too,” said Lauren. “Happy trails.”

  After the girls had gone, Seth looked at Rudi. “We ought to be getting on our way too, you know.”

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” Rudi told him.

  “I know what I’m doing,” Seth said.

  “Good.”

  “I’m going to Europe with you, we’re going to find out who ordered that bloke to kill Lewis and Angela, and I’m going to kill them.”

  Rudi sighed. He looked down at the remains of their breakfast. “She’s right, you know.”

  “Who?”

  “That girl. Fried bread. I’ll never understand what goes on in the heads of the English.”

  THE RAIN SEEMED to be easing up a little as they checked out and carried their luggage out to the car, but the moment they were on the road again it started bucketing down. The hills and moors and forests withdrew behind a pounding grey curtain and all the windscreen wipers did was divert the stream of water first one way, then the next.

  “This is a terrible place,” Rudi said from the passenger’s seat, having turned the driving over to Seth for a while. “I’m never coming here again.”

  “Northumberland,” Seth said, peering through the windscreen. “Part of the ancient kingdom of Bernicia.”

  “The fucking Bernicians are welcome to it. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Hm.” Rudi crossed his arms and stared out at the lashing rain.

  They drove through what seemed to be a huge area of forest, and skirted the edge of a big lake, its other shore completely lost in the rain, then out onto moorland and back into the forest again. At one point a colossal truck carrying logs emerged from the rain, lights blazing, and blew past them at such a speed that the car rocked in its wake and Seth swore and fought not to lose control of the wheel.

  A few minutes later they passed a car pulled up at the side of the road, its bonnet open and two sodden, wind-lashed figures standing looking at the engine. Seth drove past a hundred yards or so, then pulled in to the side and stopped the Espace. When he saw Rudi staring at him he said, “We’re Coureurs. We’re supposed to help people.”

  “It’s the two girls from the farm,” Rudi said, “and they’re part of the English security presence here.”

  “No they’re not,” Seth said, opening the driver’s door. “The farmer and his wife are.”

  They took their bags from the back of the car and trudged back along the roadside to where Lauren and Annette stood waiting.

  “I think it’s the electrics,” Lauren said, gesturing at the engine of her car.

  “We’re in a hurry,” said Seth.

  She looked at him. “Aye,” she said, nodding. “Aye, everyone’s always in a hurry. Get in.” She turned and dropped the bonnet, then she and Annette got into the front seats and Rudi and Seth in the back. Lauren drove. The engine started first time.

  “What about our car?” asked Rudi.

  “Someone’s following two miles behind us,” said Lauren. “They’ll pick it up and take it to Manchester or Newcastle and leave it with the keys in the ignition. It’ll be nicked in an hour, resprayed and replated in three.”

  “You’re not Coureurs,” Rudi said.

  “No,” Annette said, turning in the front seat and holding out two cloth bags. “We’re not. Put these over your heads.”

  “Why?”

  Seth put his hood on. “Nobody knows how they do this,” he said, his voice muffled. “They want to keep it that way.”

  Rudi shrugged and put the hood on.

  They drove for another ten minutes or so, then made an abrupt left turn onto a jolting, uneven road, then another series of right and left turns until Seth had no idea where they were. Then all of a sudden Lauren stopped the car.

  “You can take your hoodies off now, lads,” she said brightly. “Welcome to Scotland.”

  “I’m sorry?” Rudi said, removing his hood.

  Lauren said, “Welcome to Scotland,” again, and pointed through the windscreen at a narrow track running away through the forest. “If you walk down there about five miles, you’ll come to a road. You can get a bus into Hawick from there. After that, you can get a train anywhere you want.”

  “Is this some kind of joke?” Rudi asked.

  “No, it’s not,” said Seth. He took a fat envelope from his jacket pocket and handed it to Lauren, who opened it and rifled through its contents. “Come on,” he told Rudi.

  They got out of the car and stood in the rain while Lauren turned the vehicle around. She lowered the driver’s window and poked her head out. “Don’t try and follow us,” she told them. Then she rolled the window back up and drove off into the dripping, windy dimness between the trees, leaving Seth and Rudi standing in the middle of the track.

  “How much did you give them?” said Rudi as the car’s lights bounced away down the track.

  “The rest of the operational fund,” Seth said.

  “The rest of the operational fund,” Rudi repeated, looking around him. “Okay.”

  “I heard about them when I was in Edinburgh,” said Seth. “There’s a group running people and contraband back and forth across the border, and nobody knows how they do it.”

  “I hope those girls had very good bona fides,” Rudi said.

  Seth shouldered his bag. “Let’s find out.”

  IT TOOK THEM almost three hours to reach the end of the track. It opened out onto a rutted, damaged B-road. A hundred yards or so further down, a transparent plastic bus shelter almost covered in sprayed graffiti stood all alone by the side of the road. They stood in the shelter, shaking rain from their clothes and looking about them.

  “How did you get in touch with them?” Rudi wanted to know.

  “I didn’t. They contacted me.” Off in the distance through the rain, Seth could see the approaching headlights of a vehicle.

  “They contacted you.”

  “While I was in Edinburgh doing research for Roger Curtis. They wanted to know what I was up to.” Seth picked up his bag. “I was impressed; I was being pretty careful.”

  “And on that basis you just handed over a very large amount of money to two strangers, without any evidence of their claims
.”

  “Of course not,” said Seth. The vehicle was now close enough to be identified as a bus, bouncing and bumping along the appalling road. “I asked for a demonstration and they gave me a freebie. This is how I came back across the border.” The bus pulled to a stop at the shelter, its illuminated destination sign reading ‘HAWICK.’ “Shall we?”

  1.

  AT DAWN, THE Revisionists rocketed Building 2.

  They used RPGs and at least one aged TOW wire-guided anti-tank missile, but they must have bought the munitions at one of the anarchic car-boot sales on the outskirts of the city because most of them failed to detonate. The few that did caused little damage, and fire-suppression teams were able to cope.

  Still, it was a message that Xavier and his cohorts had not yet given up. They’d been quiet for almost a month until this morning, and some of the Kapitan’s advisers had begun to murmur that perhaps the opposition had seen the error of its ways. The Kapitan, who had found Xavier under a pile of rubbish behind the Anhalter station and raised him like a member of his own family, had known better.

  Kapitan Todt rarely slept these days, anyway, so the attack wasn’t a colossal surprise. He spent his nights moving from window to window, watching Building 4 through image-amplifying binoculars, and he’d caught the signs of movement, the figures flitting about in rooms across the Parade Ground, that presaged some kind of action. Xavier must want him to think he was getting sloppy. By the time the first rocket propelled grenade was fired, he had already brought the Grandsons – who had been on a state of red alert for over a year now anyway – to full readiness and there were no casualties and only minimal damage.

  In the fitful grey light of morning, once he had satisfied himself that the attack wasn’t a feint or the opening move of a full-scale assault, the Kapitan did a quick tour of the damaged areas, mostly in the centre of the building between the eighth and fifteenth floors. Broken windows. Rubble. Some fire and smoke damage. Emergency teams were already cleaning up the mess. The Kapitan nodded appreciatively, offered some quiet words of thanks and support, all smiles and calm.