“So,” Michael said. “Shall we clear the air a little first, or do you want to plunge right in?” When Rupert didn’t reply immediately, he asked, “How’s the girl, by the way? The one you took over the border with you?”
“She died,” said Rupert.
“And they couldn’t help her in Europe?” Michael sounded shocked.
Rupert thought of Patricia’s final days, in a private nursing home in Berne that had seemed more like a very expensive hotel than a clinic. None of it had done any good, in the end. They’d had a little over eighteen months; sometimes, in dark moments, he thought it had been the treatments that had killed her, not the cancer.
“How are things here?” he asked.
“Here?” Michael had lifted the lid of the hamper and was rummaging about inside. “Oh, we keep rubbing along, you know.” He sat up holding a bottle of red wine in one hand and a tin of paté in the other. “Are you sure you won’t...? No.” He put the bottle and tin on the floor, bent over again for a glass and a butterknife and a packet of biscuits. “We live in interesting times,” he said.
“Not least because someone stole part of the Community.”
Michael nodded. “Perplexing. Have you, perhaps, heard anything...?”
“It’s as much a mystery to us as it is to you. No one seems to have been hurt, if that’s any help.”
“Yes, the Europeans tell us that. It’s a village called Angworth, by the way. The whole village, all its people, just... transposed.”
“Which makes everyone nervous.”
“It’s certainly concentrated minds.” Michael sat up, closed the lid of the hamper, and began setting out his snack on top. “They sent us the Squire back,” he said, picking with his fingernails at the packaging around the biscuits. “As a token of their goodwill. He’s pretty cheesed off, as you can imagine.”
“Are you also,” Rupert asked, “discussing the Ufa explosion?”
Michael had managed to open the biscuits. He put a finger through the ring-pull of the tin and opened it with one smooth motion. “Why ever would we do that?” he asked.
“You see,” Rupert said, “from a certain point of view – and this is entirely hypothetical – it seems as if there’s tit-for-tat going on.”
Michael twisted the cap off the bottle, poured a little wine into the glass, held it to his nose, and inhaled. “This is excellent, you know,” he said. “Has it ever occurred to you to wonder why we don’t make wine as good as this?”
“No.”
“Well, for one thing it’s cultural, of course. We’re English. Beer drinkers to a man, none of that foreign muck. We don’t have much of a tradition of winemaking.” He poured more wine in his glass, set it on top of the hamper, took a biscuit out of the packet. “But there’s another reason. The soil’s wrong. Oh, we can grow grapes easily enough, and we can make a type of wine, but the soil’s not right. And it’s not right because the Whitton-Whytes didn’t think about that when they created the Community. They provided us with a cornucopia of other natural resources – coal, iron ore and so on – but it never occurred to them to set the right conditions for wine-making.” He trowelled a knifeload of paté onto a biscuit, picked up his glass, and sat back in his seat.
Rupert looked out of the window. The soldiers were patrolling slowly up and down the line of cars. “Who are you at war with?”
“Us?” Michael asked in surprise. “Nobody. We’re everybody’s friend.”
“Amanda and Kenneth Pennington,” said Rupert.
Michael thought about it, shook his head. “I don’t recognise the names.”
Rupert sighed. “Something is happening. In Europe. We don’t know what it is but we’d like it to stop.”
“We being you and him. The Coureur.” Michael took a bite of his biscuit and shook his head again.
“We know about Mundt,” said Rupert. “He was killed by a former English soldier. Whether the English were actually involved, we don’t know. There’s a process they call ‘brainwashing,’ like hypnosis with flashing lights and drugs. It looks as if he wasn’t aware of what he was doing. I don’t understand it, but that’s how it was explained to me.”
Michael sipped some wine. “I don’t recall you being this candid,” he said. “Where is he? This soldier?”
“The European police have him.”
“Hm. They didn’t tell us that. Thank you.” He popped the remains of his biscuit in his mouth, chewed, swallowed. “There was a joint decision, by ourselves and the Europeans, not to publicise the killing. There’s a lot of anti-Community sentiment in Europe at the moment – demonstrations, denunciations in some of the wilder little parliaments and assemblies – we didn’t want to inflame that.”
“What was he doing there?”
“Mundt?” Michael shrugged. “You spent time with him; you know what he was like. Civil engineering was a passion. The government of the polity invited a delegation to have a look around, and he decided he wanted to go.” He drank some more wine.
“And you had access to all his research by then and there was no reason not to let him go.”
“Oh, we were keeping a close eye on him. The trouble is, we were expecting him to try to run away, not to get himself killed.” Michael sighed at how wonderful the world would be, if only one could truly take into account all eventualities.
“And you have no idea who killed him.”
Michael shook his head. “We’ve been making our own inquiries, of course. Informally.”
“Our friend thinks you may believe he was involved somehow.”
Michael raised his eyebrows. “Why would he think that?”
“He thinks there’s evidence connecting him to the killer.”
Michael thought about that for a while. “That’s interesting, of course,” he said finally. “He really didn’t figure in our assessments, but that is interesting. I presume you’re here to intercede on his behalf, assure me that he wasn’t involved.”
“Did you try to have him killed?”
“Has someone tried to kill him?” Michael shook his head. “No, that wasn’t us. There have been times when I would have throttled him myself, but life’s too short. It would be impractical to kill everyone who ever annoyed me; one has to stop somewhere.”
There was silence in the car for some minutes. Michael ate a couple more biscuits. Rupert looked out of the window. It began to drizzle outside. The soldiers kept patrolling.
Finally, he said, “I think we can agree that anything which destabilises the relationship between Europe and the Community would not be a good thing.”
Michael nodded. “Not a good thing. For anyone. Nobody would want that.”
Rupert looked at the Head of the Directorate. He could count the number of times he and Michael had been honest with each other on the fingers of one hand, with some fingers left over. He said, “Do the Europeans know this border crossing exists?”
“Oh my word no,” Michael said. “Just as we don’t know that they have a couple of assault helicopters hanging around off the coast in case of emergencies.”
“You could,” Rupert said, “just try trusting each other.”
“Well, that would never do.” Michael brushed crumbs from the lapel of his jacket and chuckled. “It really was very brave of you to come here,” he said again, half to himself. “Now,” he said briskly. “Is there some pressing reason why I shouldn’t have you arrested?”
Rupert looked at him. “If you wanted to arrest me you could have done it right away and gone back to the conference,” he said wearily.
Michael beamed at him. “It’s been good to see you again. It really has.”
TWO OF THE soldiers followed them at a respectful distance. Michael put up an umbrella to keep off the drizzle. Rupert thought about a couple he had once known, who had lived in one of the fishing villages on the coast, just a few miles west of here. He remembered how he had played a part in betraying them, on behalf of the man walking beside him, in order to infiltrate
the Directorate on behalf of the English Security Services, which had in their turn been infiltrated by operatives of the Directorate. And so it went on, round and round and round.
“Do you think our friend could see his way clear to letting us have one of those invisibility suits he seems to have an inexhaustible supply of?” Michael asked.
“You’ll have to keep on making do with low cunning,” Rupert told him.
Michael laughed. “When you see him, tell him his sins haven’t been forgiven, but we didn’t try to kill him.”
“That’ll help him sleep at night,” Rupert said, turning the collar of his borrowed combat jacket up against the drizzle. He put his hands in the pockets, found a roll of mints in one and a chunky penknife in the other. He took them out, looked at them, put them back.
Michael glanced at him, stubbed his toe on a wet hummock of grass, and almost fell over. Rupert caught him by the elbow and stopped him crashing full-length to the ground. This brought the soldiers running towards them, weapons raised and shouting warnings. Michael regained his balance and waved them back.
“You see?” he said. “You see?” His face was flushed and angry; Rupert had never seen him lose his temper like this, not even during the brief counter-coup which had put him in the top job in the Directorate. “All it takes is one slip, one misstep, and people start shooting. Do you think I want that?”
“I don’t think anyone wants that,” Rupert said, letting go of his arm.
Michael’s composure returned. He sighed. “Was there anything else?”
“No,” Rupert said. “No, that’s it.”
“All right. You can go back across the border; nobody will stop you. But you’ll have to find your own way out of the conference security cordon. I want to finish my lunch.”
Then they just stood there awkwardly for a few moments. Handshakes did not seem remotely appropriate. Finally, fed up of standing in the rain, Rupert just stomped off across the moorland on his own. He had made his way back through the wood into Sweden before it occurred to him that he was still wearing the soldier’s combat jacket. He took it off and hung it on a tree and started to walk away. Then he stopped, turned back, took the penknife and the mints from the jacket, and set off toward the house. In a couple of hours the staff would be getting ready for dinner.
3.
THERE WAS A Starbucks on the Market Square in Władysław. It faced a Caffè Nero on the other side. They were both staffed by eager young baristas and they both looked as if they had been dropped here by a fleet of invading alien spacecraft. Which, Gwen thought, wasn’t too far from the truth.
Hal wanted to go to Starbucks, but there was a little restaurant Gwen liked just off the square, so they went there instead. It was the day after Market Day, and the restaurant was quiet. They took a table at the back and ordered a pot of tea and a plate of scones.
“This place is changing,” Hal said when the waitress had brought their order. “A lot of people don’t think it’s for the better, either.”
Gwen liked the Community. It was her third visit this year, the first time on her own – Rudi had come with her the previous two times. There was something calm and quiet about the place which appealed to her. The countryside around the capital was beautiful and everyone was polite. Of course, the sexism here was breathtaking – there wasn’t a single woman on the Presiding Authority – and the last time she was here she’d overheard a shopkeeper quite openly referring to a visiting group of South African agricultural engineers as ‘niggers’, so there was that.
“They’re a conservative people,” Rudi said when she told him about it. “The only African people they know about are in books.”
“They need their fucking heads banging together,” she said.
“Next time you’re in the countryside, stop and listen,” he told her. “No aeroplanes, no helicopters, no internal combustion. They still have steam trains. And they like it that way; it’s what they’ve been defending all these years.”
“So why open the borders?”
He shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“That’s what you get,” Gwen told Hal while she poured tea for them both. “You deal with the devil, you get burger franchises.”
He watched her. He was an unexceptional-looking man in his mid-fifties, with thinning hair and a neat grey beard. He wore a three-piece suit and a knitted tie. His shoes were beautifully hand-made. “I haven’t visited Europe,” he said.
“Well, you’re missing some stuff and not missing some other stuff,” she said. “I think you’d enjoy it.”
“Where are you from?”
“I’m from him,” she said. “And that’s all you need to know.”
He nodded. Gwen had no idea what Rudi’s relationship was with Hal; for operational reasons, she had no clear idea who Hal was. She had just been told to meet him on the steps of the Cathedral at a certain time and collect whatever he had for her. It was, Rudi had told her, a milk-run of a Situation, any stringer could handle it, although of course no stringer would ever be allowed near raw intelligence. She had a sneaking suspicion he wanted her out of Europe for the moment, while whatever was happening settled down, which was kind of annoying, but at least she was doing something useful instead of waitressing in that fucking restaurant, and it was kind of exciting, espionage stuff. As on her previous visits, she was in local mufti, a skirt and jacket in heavy scratchy tweedy material over a starched white blouse and thick stockings, and a ridiculous little hat perched on top of her head and secured with hair grips. On the way to the meet, she had stopped off at a little stationers, bought a postcard depicting a village green in Ernshire – like a location for an old Miss Marple film – written a cheery ‘wish you were here’ on the back, and posted it to Lewis. Then she had headed to the Cathedral with a lightness in her heart.
“How is he, by the way?” asked Hal.
“He’s just fine and dandy,” she said, taking a scone from the plate in the middle of the table and slicing it neatly through the middle. “He sends his regards.” Hal had approached her outside the Cathedral exactly at the appointed time and identified himself by asking for a cigarette, to which she had replied that she no longer smoked. Rudi had called this a contact string, and she thought it was a bit silly, but he’d assured her that it was not, it was deadly serious.
Hal took a scone for himself, cut it in half, buttered one of the halves, added jam and cream. He said, “I wasn’t able to photograph the documents; there was no time.”
“Well, that’s not very good, Hal,” she said amiably.
“I did manage to read them,” he said. “I can tell you what you want to know.”
“I’m supposed to have documentary evidence, Hal,” she said, smearing butter on half of her scone. “You telling me stuff, well, that’s just you telling me stuff, isn’t it. You could be making it all up, for all I know.” She was also not supposed to know what intelligence she was being given; in a worst-case scenario, it could allow the Directorate to identify Hal.
“I’ve never let him down yet,” Hal protested.
“I never said you had,” she told him. She lowered her voice. “Look, if you think I’m going to debrief you in a tea shop you’ve got another think coming, mate.” Although she had a device in her tiny ugly excuse for a handbag, disguised as a fountain pen, which Rudi had told her would scramble any bugs the Directorate might have planted in the restaurant as part of the Community’s patient, plodding mass surveillance on its own people. “I just came here for a handover.”
“You’ll have to leave here empty-handed, then,” he said. He looked utterly pathetic, sitting there with half a scone in his hand. “There’s no way I can photograph those records.”
“Hal,” she said, “we’re not at home to no way today, are we?”
“What?”
She sighed. “Never mind. Look, I’m not allowed to know what you’ve got, all right? Because if I know that and the Directorate arrest me and torture me and I tell them everyt
hing – because I will, I’m no hero – they’ll say, ‘Well, there’s only one chap who could have told her that, it’s our old mate Hal,’ and then you’ll be in a lot of trouble, won’t you.”
He stared at her. “It’s not possible,” he said.
Gwen thought about it. “Okay,” she said finally. “Just give me the bullet points.” Hal looked lost again. “The gist. As vague as possible. Yes?”
Hal, it occurred to her, had never been spoken to like this by a woman before, bless him. He needed a few moments to gather his thoughts. “There were two of them,” he said. “In the 1980s, in the place he told me to look for. They lived here for a while, but we sent them back.” He paused. “Is that vague enough?”
She shrugged. “Works for me.” She took a bite of scone, washed it down with a sip of tea, dabbed her lips with her napkin. “Okay,” she said. “I’m going to visit the ladies’, and while I’m gone I want you to leave. Go home, go back to work, I don’t care. Try not to attract attention. We’ll be in touch.”
He blinked at her. “What about my...”
“What? Oh. Sorry. Almost forgot.” She opened her handbag and took out a small brown envelope. She had no idea what it contained. She slid it across the table, slipped it under his plate. “There you go. Enjoy.” She got up and left the table without looking back.
One of the reasons she liked this restaurant was the corridor at the back which led to the lavatories. At the end of the corridor, past the doors to the toilets, was another door, which opened directly into an alleyway at the rear of the building. She opened the door, poked her head out, glanced quickly left and right, then stepped into the alley and walked confidently away from the restaurant.
Europe in Winter Page 18