Europe in Autumn

by Dave Hutchinson

  “I’m ashamed of myself,” he told Lev. “The map should have been the first thing I looked at. And me a Coureur.”

  Lev, who was sitting on the sofa reading the day’s product and drinking vodka, only grunted.

  Here was the Line, and if you had any reservations about its name, here was the proof. It really was just a line, a stitch that ran across Europe, a country thousands of kilometres long but only ten kilometres across at its broadest point. Here were the towns it ran through, the marshalling yards and embassies and consulates, branch lines, maintenance depots... branch lines...

  Rudi leaned down until his nose was a few centimetres from the surface of the map. The Line needed branches for shunting, and for repair crews, and to connect it to some embassies and consulates, as in Poznań, and to bring supplies in from the countries it passed through. In a lot of ways, it was less independent than it liked to pretend. Running his finger along the twin tracks of the main Line, Rudi could see dozens of branches curling off, to a depot here, a town there.

  And some of them seemed to curl off into nowhere.

  At the end of one branch, just before the border between Greater Germany and Poland, was a word he recognised: Stanhurst.

  Rudi got up and picked up the previous day’s decrypts. And there it was. Stanhurst, a beguiling county town, contains one of the greatest cathedrals in the Community.

  He grabbed the railway timetable and began to page through it, and within a minute there it was. Train times from Paddington to Stanhurst.

  Lev looked up from his reading. “What?”

  “Pack,” Rudi told him. “Pack quickly. We’re leaving. It’s not a novel. It’s a guidebook.”

  IT WAS A guidebook to a country which did not exist.

  With what Rudi later described as an act of kneejerk sarcasm, Lev instantly dubbed it The Baedeker. For want of any other name, its anonymous author became Baedeker.

  The Community stretched from the Iberian peninsula to a little east of Moscow, a country of some fifteen million souls back in 1918, when the notebook had been written. It had cities and towns and a railway system, but Rudi didn’t recognise any of the names of the towns and cities. It was as if Baedeker had, on a whim, invented a country, and then simply copied it onto Continental Europe. Or rather the Whitton-Whytes and their descendants, not being satisfied with creating their own English county, had simply rewritten Europe and then proceeded, very quietly, to conquer it. However they had achieved it, they had not lacked ambition. According to Baedeker, the Community had a university the size of an English county.

  “No,” Lev said, already more than a little annoyed at having to move for the fourth time. “No.”

  “What else could it be?” said Rudi.

  “An invisible country? Made up of bits and pieces of other countries? Created by a family of English magicians?” Lev snorted. “It could be anything else.”

  Rudi looked at the piles of decrypts. “There’s nothing here about them being magicians,” he said. “They talk about landscapes containing all possible landscapes. That doesn’t sound like magic to me.”

  “You’ve obviously had a more interesting life than I have, then,” Lev said sourly, pouring himself another drink. He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “Look at me. No, look at me. Look me in the eyes. Good. Now, say after me, ‘landscapes do not contain all possible landscapes.’” He sat back. “You’re not going to say it, are you,” he muttered sourly, and drained his glass.

  Rudi looked at the printout pages, the Baedeker, the railway timetable which said that back in 1912 you could have caught a train from Paddington Station to a nonexistent town somewhere to the west of London, the map of the Line that said you could still get to that same nonexistent town by going up a branch line in Germany. He tried to reassemble it in his head, but the pieces would only go together in one configuration.

  This was what Fabio had stolen from the Line’s consulate in Poznań. Three proofs of the existence of a parallel universe. And a map showing how to get into it.

  The Community was a topological freak, a nation existing in the same place as Europe but only accessible through certain points on the map. Its capital, Władysław, occupied more or less the same space as Prague, but the way Baedecker described it, it sounded more like a mixture of Kraków, Warsaw, Paris and Geneva. Fifteen million people, back when Baedeker wrote his guidebook. How many people were there in the Community by now? What were they all doing?

  Was that a secret worth protecting? Worth killing for? Rudi thought it probably was.

  ONE NIGHT, WHILE they were eating dinner – something quite inedible involving squid and aubergines and a sauce made from tinned tomatoes – Rudi looked across the room and saw Fabio’s burnbox sitting beside the coffee table. It occurred to him that this thing which Fabio had risked his life to safeguard had become so familiar that he hardly saw it now; it was just somewhere he stuffed the documents and decrypts and Lev’s computer when they changed hotels. He still set the locks, just in case, though he had no way of knowing if the device even worked after all this time.

  “What,” Lev said, watching him stand up.

  Rudi limped over to the burnbox and upended it over his bed. Pages and notebooks and flashcards cascaded onto the coverlet. “I just wanted to try something.”

  “Try what?”

  Righting the burnbox, he stuffed a printout copy of yesterday’s local newspaper inside, closed the lid, spun the combination, swiped the lock twice to arm the device. “I want to see what happens when this thing goes off,” he said. Then he twisted the latches and pressed them outward.

  What happened was Lev screaming, jumping up from the table, and diving behind the room’s monumentally-ugly sofa. A few moments later he bobbed up again, shaking his head.

  “Never let it be said that Lev Semyonovitch Laptev ever failed to over-react,” said Rudi, who hadn’t moved from beside the bed.

  “Sometimes,” Lev said, attempting to regain his composure without yelling, “a burnbox is designed to destroy its contents and the person who is trying to open it.”

  Rudi looked at the box. “Oh.” He put his hand on the side of the briefcase, and, yes, it was warm. Not hot, but definitely warm, the flash-heat inside leaking through the insulation.

  All of which made him think nostalgically of the briefcase he had taken delivery of in Old Potsdam. He’d worried that the act of smuggling it to Berlin might have destroyed it or what was inside, but what if the Package had triggered it before slinging it under the wire? What if it had been cooking its contents the whole time? What if it had contained maps?

  So why, in their last moments of life, had the Package slung the briefcase through the wire, if it was in the process of destroying its contents? In Rudi’s world there was only one reason to do that – to get people running, to make the people who wanted the case back believe it had been delivered. And Bradley had said that the contents had got through, so either he knew the case had destroyed whatever it contained, and had been lying, or he didn’t know and had been passing on a lie told to him by his superiors.

  He had other things to think about. There was the steady stream of decrypts, page by page building up a picture of the Community of the nineteenth century. There were the more mundane mechanics of getting himself and Lev from hotel to hotel, from island to island.

  And yet he couldn’t stop thinking about Potsdam, going around and around, picking away at it.

  Rudi sat for hours with the printout of the Baedeker, shuffling the pages, waiting for the movie moment, the moment when the hero claps his hand to his forehead and cries, of course! The moment when all becomes clear.

  It didn’t happen.

  This was a Big Secret, certainly. No doubt about that. Easily worth killing both Fabio and himself. But the geometry of what had happened to him over the past ten years or so eluded him. He was certain that Potsdam fitted into that geometry, somehow, but it was impossible to say precisely how.

 
; Taking the Baedeker as his guiding principle, his entire career as a Coureur took on a different aspect. There was one phrase in the book, The Community has the most jealously guarded borders in Europe, which altered everything. How many governments, intelligence services, espionage organisations and criminal groups knew about the Community and had tried, over the years, to gain entry? If he had learned anything from his years wandering around Europe, it was that people really hated to find places that they could not go. Thus, safecrackers broke into banks, MI6 officers passed through Checkpoint Charlie, CIA rezidents ran networks of stringers in Moscow and Bucharest. Oh yes, they were stealing the company payroll or gathering intelligence on the enemy. But, really, when it came down to it, they were going where others could not go. Rudi was aware of the sense of power, the sense of omnicompetence, one could derive from something like that

  And the Community had defeated them. They had not been able to gain access.

  Whoever they were – and he didn’t rule out a committee of apparatchiks representing Central and every intelligence community in Europe – these were subtle men and women. Rudi thought that much of his time as a Coureur had been devoted to provocations – not to breaking into the Community directly, but to flushing them out like a beater on a grouse moor. Who are they? Where are they? What are they doing? The eternal questions of the intelligence controller.

  It was possible that his first live Situation with Fabio had been a legitimate attempt to steal the map of entryways into the Community. Equally, it could have been an operation to flush out a Community operative in Poznań’s Line consulate, someone who could then have been identified, arrested, interrogated, turned and fed back into the Community to report back to their new masters. It might have been a success, or it might have been a failure. Or it might genuinely have been Fabio acting on his own initiative. He would never know.

  Similarly, the Situation in Potsdam (and perhaps even the one in the Zone, he had always thought there was something not quite right about that one) and the death of Leo had something of the stage about them, something with larger objectives than the individual players would ever be able to perceive.

  This of course brought him to his present situation. Was he once again part of a provocation? Was he being run against the Community, for reasons he would never know, by people he would never meet?

  It was impossible to be sure. He could, of course, elect to do nothing for the moment, and see what happened. He could try to second-guess the situation and pick the least likely course of action, but he would never be certain it wasn’t the course of action he was supposed to take. He could throw himself into the sea and drown, but there was always the itching suspicion that someone, somewhere, would have taken that possibility into account. Unlike the espionage soaps, where there was always a way to drop a spanner into the works and somehow come out victorious, he was in the hands of planners who had seen every eventuality. They were the students of centuries of expertise, from the couriers of pre-Christian Pharaohs with secret messages tattooed on their scalps, through the agents of Francis Walsingham, through the gentleman adventurers of the Great Game, through MI6 and SOE and OSS and the Okhrana and NKVD and the CIA. They knew their stuff.

  This was the basis of his epiphany on that street in London, a sense that it didn’t matter what he did because he was part of a Plan, a Plan designed to make it seem as though he had complete free will. And he may have been right; he hadn’t been arrested. Whoever They were, They wanted him to get away with the money from Smithson’s Chambers, and use it for whatever ends he decided.

  Oddly enough, this did not bother him as much as it might have. It was oddly liberating, knowing that whatever he did had been planned for. And so he chose to default to himself. Rudi the Coureur. Rudi, who saw a phrase like the most jealously guarded borders in Europe, and saw, behind those borders, people who wanted to leave.

  “It sounds,” he told Lev, “like a challenge.”

  ONE MORNING RUDI told Lev that he was going away for a couple of days. “I really shouldn’t be more than forty-eight hours,” he said. “If I’m gone longer than that and you don’t hear from me, put everything in the burnbox and activate it. Then get out of here and drop the box in the sea.” He handed Lev a slip of paper on which were printed several strings of letters and numbers, encrypted codes for private bank accounts. “Can you memorise these?”

  “Are you joking?” Lev snorted. Some of the strings ran to fifty characters.

  “Ah well.” Rudi smiled. “You probably won’t have to use them.”

  And he was right. For the first few hours, Lev kept coming back to the list of bank codes and wondering why he didn’t get out right now, access the accounts, transfer the money, and just keep running. He never did find an answer to that question; instead, he spent the time in the room reading decrypts, eating room service meals and working his way through the minibar, and forty-eight hours after he left, almost to the minute, Rudi was back, smiling and eager to have a look at what the cloth laptop had produced for them while he was gone.

  A few days later – and he wasn’t fooling anyone, but Lev did appreciate the pretence of tradecraft, it was a nod from one professional to another – Rudi casually said, “I’ve got something for you,” and handed over a passport.

  Lev turned the little card over in his fingers. It belonged, according to the Cyrillic on the front, to one Maksim Fedorovich Koniev, a citizen of Novosibirsk, in the Independent Republic of Sibir. His photograph had somehow found its way onto the card, alongside what he presumed was his thumbprint, and the card’s embedded chip presumably also contained other biometric data about him. He looked up.

  “You don’t have to live there,” Rudi said, a little awkwardly.

  “In the summer,” Lev informed him, “Sibir can be a most beautiful place.”

  Rudi held out a shrinkwrapped disc. “There’s a legend, too. I left it vague, but there’s some documentary stuff in Novosibirsk and Norilsk to support it. You can leave it the way it is or do some backfilling, it’s up to you. Take the bank codes; all your money’s there.”

  So this was how it ended. Lev looked at the card again. If his former life had taught him anything, it was that we only ever see a little part of the big picture. A few lines of communication from a codenamed agent here, a list of political targets there, an impenetrable economic dossier elsewhere. What were their stories? At least here was a new story, a new life all ready for him to live it. “Thank you,” he said, genuinely touched. The money alone would have been enough.

  Rudi looked away and shrugged, and Lev thought the boy was actually embarrassed by his gratitude. “What will you do now?” he asked.

  Rudi looked at him and grinned. “I’m going to shake the tree and see what falls out.”

  1.

  THE WAR BEGAN on a Thursday.

  Petr always remembered that because Thursday was his turn to deliver the kids to school and pick them up again, and he was sitting in the car waiting outside Tereza’s apartment in the morning when his phone rang.

  “Boss?” said Jakub. “Put the radio on. There’s been an outrage.”

  Jakub was a good, steady detective, but he was prone to exaggeration on occasion. Petr sighed and switched on the radio and discovered that this was not one of those occasions.

  He looked out of the window and saw Tereza coming out of the building’s entrance with Eliška and Tomáš, all bundled up against the weather, schoolbags slung over their shoulders and Big Blue Cat lunchboxes clutched in their little gloved fists. His heart sank.

  They crossed the road to the car and Petr lowered the window. “Sorry,” he said to Tereza. “Sorry,” he said to the children.

  “I saw it on the news,” she said. “I’ll take them to school. Will you be able to collect them?”

  “There’s no way to tell,” he said.

  “I have that job interview this afternoon,” she said. “You know that. It’s been arranged for ages.”

  “Go to
your interview,” he told her. “I’ll pick them up.”

  “Or you’ll organise someone else to do that.” She shook her head. “I’m so tired of this, Petr.”

  “They’ll love it,” he said jovially. He looked down at the kids. “How about a ride in a police car with Uncle Jakub this afternoon?” They looked uncertainly pleased.

  Tereza snorted. “Uncle Jakub.”

  He started the engine and put the car in gear. “I’m sorry,” he said again, and drove away.

  THERE WAS A bar called TikTok, just off Karlovo námeští in the Old Town, that Petr and the department had been keeping their eyes on for several months. They had some vague intelligence that a Chechen warlord calling himself Abram, having been chased from Bremen by a combination of local police and home-grown brigands, had bought himself a controlling interest in TikTok and was shaping the place to use as a beach-head in Prague.

  This was obviously not an optimum outcome for anybody, but hours of surveillance and intelligence gathering had failed to confirm the rumours. Ownership of TikTok was an impossible tangle of blind trusts and offshore funds and tax avoidance schemes so complex that they were practically sentient; if Abram was in there somewhere, he was well hidden. He had also not been observed to visit his supposed new acquisition; nor had any of his known lieutenants. Petr had sent a team into the bar on the onerous mission of becoming regulars, and they reported nothing out of the ordinary, as did the young woman detective who he had sent in to get a job as a waitress. TikTok, to all intents and purposes, was utterly blameless.

  “What a fucking mess,” said Jakub.

  For once, Petr reflected, his sergeant was erring on the side of understatement. The street was full of rubble and shattered glass and wrecked cars. Every shop window was broken, as were most of the apartment windows in the blocks above them. Huge bits of moulding and brickwork had fallen into the street.