Europe in Winter

by Dave Hutchinson

  “No it isn’t,” Bradley murmured.

  “Why don’t you just make me South African?” asked Carey.

  “Do you speak Afrikaans?” said the cobbler. When there was no answer, he said, “Well, then.”

  “This is silly,” Carey told Bradley.

  “Just pretend to be English,” he said. “Nobody will be able to tell.”

  The cobbler turned from the table with a passport in either hand. They were both plastic cards a little smaller than an old-style credit card and they both had her photo and some printing on them. One was blue, the other a pale salmon pink.

  “One to get in, one to get out,” said the cobbler. He handed the cards to Carey; they were still warm. “Photos, biometric data, legends.” He gave her a couple of sheets of paper fresh out of the printer in his case. “These are your legends. Try to remember which goes with which passport.” And he burst out laughing, revealing a mouthful of broken teeth.

  IN THE END it was ridiculously easy. Bradley simply drove her out to Komárom and put her on a coach and the coach took her across the bridge and the border guards on either side barely glanced at her New Zealand passport and then she was in Slovakia. Two days later, travelling on the French passport, she was getting off a flight in Houston. It was some time before she returned to Europe, and she never again set foot in Hungary.

  1.

  “THEY’RE LATE,” SAID Andreas.

  Yngvar looked at his watch. “Only five minutes later than the last time you said that,” he said.

  “Ah, fuck it,” Andreas muttered. They’d been sitting here in the car, parked beside the road in Østfold, a few kilometres from the border with Sweden, for almost two hours. It was cold outside, and Yngvar, who did not smoke, refused to let him roll down a window so he could have a cigarette. “Are you sure we’re in the right place?”

  Yngvar sighed and pulled up the GPS on his phone and held it up so Andreas could see the screen. “Look,” he said. “Can you see the coordinates here? Can you? Hm? And don’t you dare ask if I’m sure we have the right day.”

  “This is fucking ridiculous,” Andreas muttered.

  No traffic passed them on the road. A few kilometres further back, the Norwegian authorities had closed it by the simple expedient of bringing in a maintenance crew to dig up the carriageways under the pretence of emergency repairs. On the other side of the border, the Swedes had opted for something more showy, staging a chemical tanker crash. Between these two pieces of pantomime, the road and the old Svinesund Bridge were empty.

  “I need a piss,” Andreas grumbled. He got out of the car and did up his coat, looked along the line of other cars parked along the side of the road. He waved to the nearest, got an answering wave from within, and walked into the trees.

  He found himself a spot, unzipped, and began to relieve himself against a tree, but he’d hardly started when he heard undergrowth crunching under a number of feet. He sighed. Typical. He finished hurriedly, zipped up, and made himself presentable just as eight soldiers in vaguely old-fashioned uniform stepped out of the forest. They were carrying modern European automatic rifles, and behind them were half a dozen men and women wearing formal clothes and carrying document cases, their breath pluming in the cold air.

  The soldiers reached him and stopped. One of them saluted.

  “You’re late,” Andreas told him.

  One of the diplomats, a tall man in late middle age, stepped forward. “You’ll have to speak English, I’m afraid,” he said affably. “None of us speaks Norwegian.”

  Andreas regarded him levelly. “Very well,” he said in English. He waved behind him, towards the road. “We make the exchange over here.”

  “Lead on then, please,” said the diplomat.

  They walked back to the road, where there was a sudden flurry of activity, people getting out of the cars. Yngvar shot Andreas a sour look as he went by, but Andreas just shrugged.

  Without having to be told, the civilians drew themselves up into two lines. From the cars there were diplomatic representatives of the largest European nations, as well as a bureaucrat from what still fancied itself to be the European Union. Facing them were the Community delegation. To one side, the soldiers and Andreas and the other members of Norwegian state security tried to make each other blink first.

  “Please accept our apologies for our late arrival,” the Community diplomat who had spoken to Andreas told the Europeans. He didn’t seem particularly apologetic. “We had some travelling difficulties; I’m sure you’ll understand.”

  The Europeans seemed jumpy, excited. Andreas had decided that their seniority among their respective nations’ diplomatic corps could not be very high; they were basically hostages, expendable. And more to the point, they were symbolic – their countries already had ambassadors in the Community. They stepped forward, a little hesitantly at first, and shook hands with their Community opposite numbers, and in a few moments the two groups had changed places.

  Yngvar came over and stood beside Andreas and they watched the Community delegation climb into the cars, along with four of their soldiers. The other soldiers, along with the Europeans and several of the Norwegian security officers, turned and walked back into the trees. In a few moments, they were gone.

  Andreas looked at his watch. Almost two and a half hours late. Yngvar made a brief phone call. Then they stood looking at each other.

  “Head Office says this is the last time we get ourselves involved in something like this,” Yngvar said.

  “No shit,” said Andreas.

  Yngvar walked around to the driver’s side of the car and opened the door. “They didn’t word it quite like that, of course. There was swearing.”

  ON THE FACE of it, the Union, the patchwork of treaties and agreements between the Community and the many nations of Europe, was a triumph. This was a shining new age of fraternity and mutual benefit. European firms opened offices in the Community, Community firms opened offices in Europe. There were university exchange programmes and film and television co-productions, fashion shows, cultural festivals and merchandising licences. Embassies and consulates popped up everywhere. Everyone was happy.

  On a more pragmatic level, it was a nightmare. The fact that the Community was a nuclear superpower was not widely known; even less widely known was that its previous ruling faction had contemplated using biological warfare against their European neighbours and had – however accidentally – gone on to release the Xian Flu. From Europe’s point of view, the Community was spectacularly dangerous. There was no way to defend against an enemy who could walk across invisible borders anywhere on your territory whenever they wanted, while you were quite unable to retaliate.

  It was also spectacularly rich, in natural resources and markets and plain old cash. It was, quite simply, irresistible. Better, on balance, to have it as a friend than an enemy, and – at the very highest, most secret levels of the four or five nations where these things were known – to set the Xian Flu aside in the name of the greater good. The secret would come out one day, because secrets always did, particularly secrets as monumental as this one, but the Europeans who entered into it calculated that History would at least understand what they had done, and they looked at their burgeoning bank balances and feathered nests and were comforted.

  For the Presiding Authority of the Community, Europe was full of nothing but win. They suddenly had access to all manner of technology which had previously been unknown – medical technology, in particular – and they looked at their burgeoning bank balances and feathered nests and they, too, were comforted.

  Even before its official launch, the Union had been impossibly complex; it had taken more than five years of secret negotiations to get as far as a public announcement. Five years further on, even more layers of complexity had settled upon it, much of it quietly and well out of sight.

  A lot of that complexity came from meetings like this one, off-the-books conferences attended not by heads of state or even their ministers b
ut by anonymous bureaucrats, meetings where hostages were politely exchanged for the duration and no official minutes were ever published.

  The Nasjonal sikkerhetsmyndighet, Norway’s National Security Authority, had become involved in this particular meeting because the Community delegation had chosen to enter Europe via a border crossing on Norwegian territory. Thus, it had fallen to the NSM to organise transport and the hostage exchange, and incidentally to stooge around in the cold waiting for the Community’s representatives to turn up.

  The little convoy of cars drove the short distance to the border between Norway and Sweden, which here ran along the Svinesund, a narrow strait that opened into the Skaggerak at one end and the Iddefjord at the other. Sweden had been a popular shopping destination for generations of Norwegians, and a large out-of-town shopping mall had gradually accreted at the far end of the Old Bridge. Today, however, it was empty, evacuated due to the ‘tanker accident’.

  There were more cars waiting for them on the Swedish side of the bridge. The convoy stopped and Yngvar and Andreas got out and walked over to their opposite numbers from Säpo, Sweden’s Security Service.

  “You’re late,” said Agathe when hands had been shaken.

  “Blame them,” Andreas told her, indicating the Norwegian cars. “Transport difficulties, they say.”

  Agathe snorted. She and Andreas knew each other from numerous joint security operations, but this one was a first for them both. “Did the handover go smoothly, at least?”

  “Yes.” Andreas lit a cigarette and looked around at the deserted buildings of the shopping mall. “This is good work,” he said appreciatively.

  “Yes, well it won’t last forever. We’re diverting traffic across the New Bridge but there’s about a thousand journalists just down the road shouting about their right to film the accident.”

  “You should just have brought someone in to dig the road up,” Yngvar said. “Nobody ever wants to film that.”

  Agathe chuckled. “Not so much fun, though. Shall we get our guests to their destination? Then we can have a drink.”

  “That sounds good,” Andreas agreed. “I could use a drink.”

  THE HOUSE CHOSEN for the conference was some kilometres from the bridge, a High Baroque country seat with salmon-pink walls sitting in the middle of an estate of many hectares of forest. A group of European dignitaries had gathered outside to greet the Community delegation, but it began to spit with rain as the convoy arrived, and the diplomatic niceties were curtailed. Andreas, Yngvar, Agathe and their colleagues followed the diplomats inside, and then all of a sudden their job was over. What happened after that, until it was time for the Community representatives to go home, was a mystery to them.

  For the visitors there were coffee and pastries and smalltalk in one of the house’s many splendid receiving rooms before being called into the ballroom, where a conference table had been set up. The doors were closed, electronic bafflers switched on, and the two groups settled down to try to avert a war.

  LUNCH WAS SERVED in the smaller of the house’s two dining rooms. The larger could accommodate banquets several hundred strong, which was deemed a little too grand for what was supposed to be a serious and intimate gathering. The Swedish hosts had provided a range of husmanskost, local dishes including pork, salmon and herring. For the adventurous there was Surströmming – fermented herring – and for those with delicate sensibilities there were sweet rolls and coffee, served by a small group of waiting staff provided by the independent contractors who were handling the house’s security for the duration.

  “Do people really eat Surströmming?” one of the Community delegation asked the waiter who was refilling his coffee cup. “It smells dreadful.”

  “I understand it’s an acquired taste, sir,” the waiter told him. “They have to open the tins outside. I haven’t tried it.”

  “That’s a shame. It seems... intriguing.” The Community delegate put his cup and saucer on a side table. “I wonder, could you direct me to the lavatory?”

  “Certainly, sir,” said the waiter. “If you’d like to follow me...”

  They left the dining room, the waiter putting his coffee flask and napkin on a table by the door. The Community delegate, whose name was Michael, nodded pleasantly to the security staff in the hallway and, instead of making for the downstairs bathrooms, turned for the main doors. The waiter followed, half a step behind.

  Outside, the drizzle had stopped, but there was a sharp chill in the air and the waiter, who was wearing a shirt and tie and waistcoat and an apron, felt it cut right through him. Michael seemed not to notice. He walked away from the house at a brisk pace, smiling to himself.

  When they had gone a few hundred metres, Michael said, “Well, this is a pleasant surprise.”

  “Hello,” said Rupert. “I’m armed.”

  “Well, of course you are.” Michael was languid almost to the point of feyness. He was wearing a three-piece suit that could only have come from Saville Row, the sharply-ironed points of a handkerchief protruding from the breast pocket. “All the waiting staff are. I presume you’re working for the firm providing security.”

  Rupert looked out across the lawn in front of the house. A couple of security men were patrolling. One had a large and dangerous-looking dog. The security men were wearing combat gear and windbreakers with Arabesque Security lettered across the shoulders in green.

  “The salary is pathetic, if you want to know,” he said.

  “That’s a pity,” Michael said. “It’s hard to make a decent living these days. It’s rather brave of you to come, you know. Lion’s den, and all that.”

  “Oh, do stop patronising me,” Rupert told him. “I had enough of that before.”

  Michael glanced at him. “I thought we were friends.”

  “I can’t imagine what gave you that idea,” said Rupert.

  Michael beamed. “There,” he said. “That’s better. Shall we walk?”

  “Won’t they miss you in there?”

  “I can’t think why. The Europeans will probably be glad to see the back of me; I have the impression I’m starting to annoy them. I know they’re starting to annoy me.”

  They walked away from the house. The gardens tipped steeply down towards a screen of trees, and Michael had to walk carefully because his leather-soled shoes kept slipping on the wet grass.

  “It’s good to see you, actually,” he said. “We’ve been trying to contact you, but you never answer.”

  “Is Molson here?”

  “Andrew goes wherever the wind blows him.” Michael looked at him. “Which I regret to say is not here, for the moment.” He almost lost his footing, recovered himself. “How are you enjoying Europe, by the way? The food’s wonderful, isn’t it?”

  They walked into the trees, and Michael stopped for a few moments as if trying to get his bearings before setting out again along a path between dense, bushy foliage. “How did you find out about this soiree?” he asked.

  “We’ve been keeping an eye on Arabesque,” said Rupert. “They have a security contract in Luxembourg which we’re quite interested in.”

  Michael nodded. “Yes. In fact, that’s one of the things we’ve been discussing today, Luxembourg. Very perplexing.”

  “They call it the Realm,” Rupert said. “The Europeans.”

  Michael laughed. “I know. Bless them. We’re actually very angry about it. But so are they. Nobody seems to know who’s responsible.”

  “Or nobody wants to admit it.”

  “All we want is the return of our citizens,” said Michael. “The Europeans want to give them back – I think they find the whole thing quite embarrassing, really – but they won’t do anything until they receive assurances that we won’t do it again. Which we can’t give them, because we didn’t do it in the first place. As I said, perplexing.”

  The path dipped down slightly and turned to follow a little stream through the trees. Michael strode across it and Rupert followed. On the other side, the
ground rose again, and all of a sudden they stepped out of the woodland and two Community soldiers with European rifles slung across their chests were standing there.

  Michael stopped and showed the soldiers some documents. “This gentleman will catch his death if he’s not careful,” he told them, indicating Rupert, and one of the soldiers took off his combat jacket and held it out. Rupert put it on and looked about him. The estate was gone, the house was gone, Sweden was gone, Europe was gone. There was just a bleak expanse of moorland rising gently towards a screen of hills. There was a road in the middle distance, and parked on it were a number of electric cars, guarded by more soldiers. Rupert sighed. He had sworn to himself that he would never come back here.

  2.

  THE WHITTON-WHYTES, THE creators of the Community, had started modestly. They had, bit by bit, built themselves a county just to the west of London. When this was successful, they had extended their creation until it occupied an expanse of territory from the Iberian Peninsula to a little east of Moscow, an invisible Continent. They, and their descendants, had then gone on to conquer it.

  At its most basic, the Community was a beautiful thing, an artifact like the gardens of an English country house. Its geography was roughly similar to that of Europe, but its landscape was not. A tributary of the River Trent had run through the Campus, Rupert’s lost home, but it had been ringed by mountains modelled on the Alps. The landscape Rupert could see through the windows of the car was not very like the landscape of southern Norway; it looked, he thought, more like the North York Moors, where he had spent a pleasant week or so two years before. The Whitton-Whytes, it occurred to him, had mapped England across the whole of Europe, with a few pleasing embellishments stolen from other countries.

  There was a wicker basket on the floor at the back of the car. It contained plates and cutlery and glasses and little jars of jam and tins of foie gras and caviar and packets of wafer biscuits and bars of expensive chocolate and small bottles of wine and champagne. Michael had a fondness for Fortnum & Mason picnic hampers. For less refined tastes there was a thermos of milky tea and a paper-wrapped package of ham sandwiches made with doorsteps of white bread. Rupert declined both.