The person with the light was all out of focus. He felt someone rummaging in his coat pocket, then the light flashed in his eyes again and he heard a man’s voice saying something and a distant corner of his mind found it quite remarkable that someone with such a broad West Country accent was speaking to him in an airport in Sibir, then the light flashed again and he realised he was late for his flight and he began to run.
1.
LEWIS WANTED HER to fly from Stansted. Lewis said that she’d be able to lose herself in the crowds at Stansted, particularly at this time of year and if she timed her flight properly. Lewis could fuck off. It was all very well if, like Lewis, you lived in Bishop’s Stortford, practically at the end of one of Stansted’s runways. It was another thing entirely if, like Gwen, you lived in Greenwich. Faced with a two-hour commute to Stansted and Lewis’s endless prattling about operational security, Gwen booked herself on the midmorning Luxair flight out of City Airport.
Which she ended up missing by fifteen minutes, due to one of those conjunctions of roadworks, Underground signal failures, double-decker buses hitting low bridges, bomb scares and street markets which only ever happens when you need to be in a certain place at a certain time.
“How was the trip?” Lewis asked that evening over the phone.
“It was fine,” Gwen said, desperately scrolling through last-minute tickets to Luxembourg on her pad. “Stansted was busy.”
“What’s the hotel like?”
Gwen glanced around her flat. “Pension,” she said. “It’s not a hotel, it’s a pension. An auberge maybe, at a pinch.” She wondered whether she’d turned off the location data option on her phone. She thought she had, but she couldn’t remember. Did it make a difference that Lewis had called her, rather than the other way round?
“What’s it like?” Lewis asked again patiently.
“It’s all right. It’s a chain. These places all look alike.”
“How’s the weather?”
How was the flight? What’s the hotel like? How’s the weather? Was Lewis just trying to make conversation, or did he suspect something? Fortunately, Gwen had had the foresight to open a cam window on her pad; at the moment it was showing the view from one of Lëtzebuerg’s many, many traffic cameras. “Raining,” she said. “Chucking it down.”
“Okay,” said Lewis. “Well, get some sleep. You’ve got a busy day tomorrow.”
You have no idea. “Yes, okay.”
“Let me know when it’s done.”
“Sure,” said Gwen, heart sinking as she saw the only flight tomorrow with any seats available. “Sure.”
THERE WERE THOSE, supposed to know about these things, who said that Luxembourg was the most stable nation in Europe. Roughly translated, the Grand Duchy’s national motto was, ‘We want to stay the way we are,’ and it had certainly shown no signs of breaking up into smaller and crazier polities like other Continental nations. It had the highest GDP per head of population of anywhere on Earth, and the Luxembourgers were not about to do anything to jeopardise that. Gwen’s first impression, staggering out of Arrivals at Luxembourg Findel at six o’clock in the morning having had hardly any sleep the previous night, was of a rank of taxis emerging from a drizzly sunrise which could have been anywhere in Northern Europe.
One of the taxis drove her the short distance to the pension. There was no telling where she was. It could have been Germany, it could have been France. It could, at a pinch, have been Wallonia. The streets were full of coffee chains and burger franchises, and the people making their way to work through the drizzle were mostly conservatively-dressed. Her flight had lasted barely an hour; it seemed ridiculous to feel jetlagged after such a short journey.
The pension was just outside town, beside what appeared to be a brand-new ring road. Gwen supposed that at one time the building might have sat in the middle of acres of landscaped grounds, maybe out in a forest. Now it looked as if the Luxembourgers were building an industrial park next door and were eyeing the land the pension occupied with some covetousness.
It turned out not to be part of a chain. Or if it was, it was a chain which held back demolishing modernity with fin de siècle furnishings, wood-panelled walls, and the horns of what must once have been a magnificent twelve-point stag adorning the wall above the fireplace in the lobby. At the front desk, Gwen filled in an actual registration card and then paid for her stay by waving her phone at a contactless reader set discreetly into the desktop. The concierge, a young woman in a smart black business suit, loaded the room’s key-code into the phone with a swipe of a stylus and summoned a liveried porter to carry Gwen’s overnight bag up the deeply-carpeted stairs to the second floor.
Alone in the room, Gwen went through the time-honoured routine of the international business traveller. She jumped up and down and found the floor to be solid. She rapped on the walls and found that they, too, were of more than satisfactory thickness. She’d stayed in hotels where her room had been separated from the adjoining one by not much more than a plywood partition and someone walking across the room above her had made the ceiling bow. She sat on the bed and bounced up and down, went to the window and looked out on the expectant scrubland of the nascent industrial park, looked in the bathroom and noted that the shower was free of mould and that there was a small selection of complimentary bathroom goods, examined the entertainment set and was disappointed to discover that it only had a touchscreen interface. The wardrobe disclosed a rack of wooden hangers and half a dozen mysterious objects comprising two small shaped wooden blocks connected by a length of springy metal. After ten minutes’ consideration, she still had no idea what the objects were, so she took a photo of one with her phone and image-searched it, and a few moments later was informed that it was a shoe-tree. She read the description, shrugged, and put the shoe-trees back in the wardrobe.
Less mysterious were the room’s refreshment facilities. Everything – kettle, cups, tea and coffee sachets, spoons, milk pods, packets of biscuits – was shrink-wrapped for her hygiene and convenience. In one corner there was a small ironing board with a disposable catalytic iron clipped to it, and beside that was a trouser press. There was always a trouser press, no matter where she stayed. She had never used one. She wondered if anyone had, ever.
A check of the drawers in the bedside tables revealed a Gideon Bible, a Qur’an, a Book of Mormon, and a leather-bound two-volume biography of L. Ron Hubbard. None of these books – actual books – appeared ever to have been opened, let alone read. She sat on the bed and riffled through the Bible. Then she held it upside down by the spine and shook it over the bed, and a leaf of tissue-thin paper no larger than a Rizla fluttered down from between the pages and settled on the duvet.
Covert.
She didn’t pick it up, not right away. She sat where she was on the bed, looking at it. Lucky, she thought, that the room had not been rebooked when she didn’t turn up yesterday. The piece of paper had fallen face-down, but she thought she could see the shadows of lettering from the other side. She had thought that her arrival in Luxembourg had been the first step, but it wasn’t. This was. This was the key that opened the mystery, something that had fallen, not from the pages of a Bible, but from the pages of an espionage novel. She felt a delicious thrill at putting off reading whatever was on the other side of the slip of paper. Once she looked at it there would no going back; she would have to keep moving forward. Drink me.
She reached forward and delicately took one edge of the piece of paper between thumb and forefinger, turned it over and laid it back on the bed. There, in tiny printing, was a date, an address, and a time, and the words Are you the guide? No, I’m an engineer.
Spy stuff. Her first reaction was a dizzying sense of relief; the date was today and the time two hours from now. She’d made it. Yesterday’s fuckup didn’t matter any more; Lewis need never know. Her second reaction was a wave of excitement that felt almost exactly like fear.
Gwen sat back and took a deep breath. All right. So, tradec
raft. At her final briefing, in a pub not far from Waterloo Station a couple of days ago, Lewis had drilled into her the importance of remaining covert. She had to assume that she was under some kind of surveillance, because that was just what national intelligence agencies did, it was axiomatic. The most common form of surveillance – because it was the least labour-intensive – was monitoring of communications and internet usage, algorithms ceaselessly winnowing a torrent of content for hotphrases and keywords. So, no Googling of the address. She read it again. She had crammed mercilessly with information about the city before leaving London, but the address only rang a faint bell. She read it one more time, closed her eyes, recited it under her breath, opened her eyes to make sure she had it right, then she picked up the slip of paper and put it in her mouth. It melted on her tongue. It tasted faintly of cinnamon.
Okay. She checked the clock on her phone. Enough time for a shower and a change of clothes. Wherever she was going, she hoped it had a café. She’d been too nervous to eat anything at Stansted and there had been no time on the flight. She was starving.
AT HER REQUEST, the concierge summoned a taxi to take her into town. She asked to be dropped off, as Lewis had instructed, at the Luxembourg headquarters of Deutsche Bank, a forty-storey wedge of glass and steel and carbon composites balanced improbably and alarmingly on its thin end. There was a piazza in front of the building, busy with street vendors’ carts and businessmen and tourists, all of whom appeared oblivious to the possibility of the bank toppling over on them. At one edge of the piazza was a row of public information kiosks. Gwen stooped into one and called up a tourist map of the city. She found the address almost at once, without even having to search the map. Park Dräi Eechelen was in Clausen, a district about a kilometre from where she was standing. She left the kiosk and walked out into the piazza, bought a bunch of white roses at a florist’s cart, and set out for the rendezvous.
The walk took her through a district of modern office buildings, onto a busy road, then over a bridge which crossed high over a broad wooded river gorge. The sky was grey and cloudy and it was windy on the bridge; she had to hold the flowers close to her body to stop them blowing away. On the other side, she crossed the road into the Parc des Trois Glands. The footpaths and cycleways through the wooded park were signposted, and she headed for the Museum Dräi Eechelen.
She came upon the museum suddenly, emerging from the trees and discovering herself standing beside a small mediaeval castle or fortification which seemed to have grown out of a much larger and much more modern glass and steel building.
Gwen wandered around to the front of the fortification, where an animated banner proclaimed an exhibition about Luxembourg’s history. A short bridge had been built across the structure’s moat, and in front of this were parked two police cars.
Her heart performed a single colossal thud in her chest. They couldn’t be here because of her. Could they? She forced himself to keep moving forward, because turning and running would only have looked suspicious.
As she approached the cars, four policemen emerged from the entrance to the fortification. Between them was a short man with a florid, anxious face. The short man took in Gwen and the bunch of roses in one glance, and for a moment their eyes met and Gwen knew.
All of a sudden, the short man stomped to a halt and began arguing loudly with the policeman nearest to him. The others stopped and turned to see what was going on, and Gwen walked past them, past the cars, and around the other side of the museum. She was out of sight of the little group when a wave of dizziness overtook her, and she realised that she had been holding her breath ever since she had seen the police cars. She stopped for a moment, breathed out shakily, and inhaled slowly. Her heart was racing and little black spots danced in front of her eyes. She simultaneously wanted to throw up and to curl up and lose consciousness until this mess went away.
The sound of engines startled her. She looked around as casually as she could manage, and saw the police cars coming towards her along the block-paved drive that circled the museum. Her heart seemed to pause for a moment, then the driver of the lead car waved her away and she stepped to one side to let them pass. As they went by, she saw the short man sitting in the back of the second car, his head bowed. Gwen watched them disappear around a curve in the driveway, then she turned off the drive and into the large glass building, which turned out to be a museum of modern art.
She walked straight through the building and out the other side, onto a bleak, windy plaza between tall buildings. On the other side of the plaza was a main road. She dumped the roses in a litter bin, walked to the side of the road, and hailed a taxi.
THERE WERE MORE police cars at the pension. A line of four of them, parked at the front of the building. Gwen had asked the taxi driver to drop her at a motel she’d noticed on the ring road this morning, and walked the rest of the way. From the embankment the road ran along, she could look down and see the police from a couple of hundred yards away. Again, she kept going as casually as she could. Just an ordinary pedestrian out for a stroll alongside a busy three-carriageway road. Yes, officer, I wanted to take a look at this building site where the industrial park’s going to be. What of it? The pension? Not me, officer. I am not the droid you’re looking for. Nobody raised an alarm, nobody chased her.
Half an hour later, she found a bar and went in and sat in the darkest corner staring at a glass of beer. After a while she took a long, shaky drink.
THIS WAS, ON the face of it, a rich season for conspiracists. On top of the hardy perennials like the death of Princess Di, and the Other Gunman, there was the explosion of the Line train in the Urals, and looming over everything else was the Union with the Community.
Although in truth, the Community had already had its fans, even before it had revealed its existence. Intensely paranoid groups of conspiracy theorists, shunning the internet and its inherent surveillance, meeting – if they met at all – in suburban front rooms and noisy pubs, fans of espionage fiction passing photocopied documents and theories via dead drops. They combed obscure texts in private libraries, parsing them for any mention of a lost land. They were so artless, so extemporaneous, that they had managed to keep their existence out of the eyes of the authorities for decades as they carried on a long distributed conversation about a fabled landscape which had been written over Continental Europe by a family of eighteenth century English landowners. The Community. Its name was spoken in hushed tones, as if its shy inhabitants might be listening. It was a place of wonders, accessible only if one had certain maps. Shangri-La, Utopia, Lyonesse. There were those who theorised that it was the location of Avalon, that Arthur lay sleeping there. Others believed it was the origin of flying saucers, that the Nazis had founded a Fourth Reich there, that Hendrix and Morrison and Elvis still lived there, hugely aged but still hale.
Imagine their disappointment, then, to discover that the Community was dull. The first travellers to return after certain border crossings were opened reported a single Europe-spanning nation which seemed to have been laid out by English landscape gardeners, its people stolid and polite, its society contentedly stalled in an approximation of the 1950s, as if an Ealing comedy had been set in an alternate world. No Hendrix, no Nazis, no flying saucers, no unicorns.
In the wake of what was being spoken of as the Emergence, several Community conspiracists had retooled themselves as media pundits. You saw them most days on the rolling news channels, giving their opinions – and they were, without exception, extremely opinionated – on the latest treaty or arrangement negotiated between the Community’s government and this or that European nation or polity or sovereign state.
Lewis, de facto leader of the little group of Community fans to which Gwen belonged – they shunned the term ‘conspiracist’ in much the same way as they shunned the term ‘nut’ – turned his nose up at these new media stars, the way he turned his nose up at the flood of Community commentators who had suddenly, as if out of nowhere, appeared on social media.
Most of them, he opined, were Johnny-come-latelies. The ones who had kept the faith during the long covert years and then suddenly emerged into the spotlight of the news cycle had, he said, betrayed the purity of the Cause.
Here, as on a number of other important points, Gwen’s opinion diverged quite sharply from Lewis’s. Gwen was delighted to discover that the Community really did exist, was reassured that it seemed to be so ordinary, and if somebody wanted to make themselves famous on the back of it, she was fine with that.
In the first heady days of the Emergence, when it seemed as if there was nothing else happening in the world but the discovery that there was a parallel universe and it had been settled by the English, the group had met several times and discussed what the repercussions would be for the world – although what they were really discussing, between the lines, was what the repercussions were for them. In the end, as more and more detail of the Community emerged, the group ceased to meet. There was nothing left to do.
People began to drift off, some no doubt to other conspiracies, others to more mundane concerns. This seemed to provoke a fury in Lewis which expressed itself as a deep and sarcastic politeness. For Gwen, it was simply a matter of work pressure. The Emergence had coincided with a general election in England and a change of government. The MP for whom she worked as a researcher found herself elevated to the post of Junior Minister at the Home Office, and all of a sudden she needed Gwen’s input at all hours of the day and night. It was hard enough to stay on top of the brief as it was, without worrying about parallel worlds, and Gwen had, ever so gently, uncoupled herself from Lewis and his dwindling band of followers.
It turned out that the Home Office was intensely concerned about the Community. The government was being forced to make up policy towards the vast new European neighbour on the hoof. Ironically, Gwen found herself doing more Community research than she had ever done on Lewis’s behalf. Most of it was crushingly dull, but there was the odd titbit of interest. Gwen was involved in organising a state visit of President Ruston and several Community officials, involving a banquet at Windsor Castle for the sake of the news organisations, and a number of quiet meetings with her Minister and others out of the public eye.
Europe in Winter Page 6