“Bearing in mind we’re sitting in the back of a car with two large and presumably heavily-armed men, I think you can safely assume you have our complete attention,” Rudi said numbly. The bodyguard to his left sniggered quietly.
“This is where it all started, you know,” Crispin said, gesturing out through the windscreen. “Colnbrook, Datchett, Windsor. Ernshire. You know what the first error was? The first alteration the Whitton-Whytes made to the map?”
“Stanhurst,” said Rudi. “They wrote Stanhurst in.”
“No, it was a house.”
“Oh? And how do you know that?”
“Stanhurst Manor,” Crispin went on as if he hadn’t heard. “They started small. They created a patch of land, oh, six or seven acres, took a couple dozen workmen across the border, had them build a house. Then they had the workmen build some more houses and go live there. And once they had a foothold they just kept expanding it until they thought it was big enough.”
Rudi tried to imagine a pocket universe the size of a market garden. What must it have been like for the first settlers of the Community, watching day by day and year by year as a new landscape appeared before their eyes? The Whitton-Whytes must have wondered, in their private moments, if they hadn’t become gods; they wouldn’t have been human if it hadn’t at least crossed their minds.
“When did your... organisation become interested in what they were doing?” he asked.
Crispin seemed quite pleased by the question. “Quite early on,” he said. “We managed to sneak some people in, but they never came back. Went native, I guess.”
“Or got whacked,” Seth put in.
Crispin thought about it, as if the possibility had never been considered by him and his predecessors. “Nah,” he said finally. “The Whitton-Whytes were never into that.”
“So, you’ve been keeping an eye on the Community for, what, more than two hundred years?” Rudi asked.
“About that, yes.” Crispin nudged the driver gently and pointed, and the car slowed and made a left turn. In the distance between the houses, Rudi could see the outlying buildings and radar towers of Heathrow. “Mostly it was just a watching brief; we had our own stuff to worry about, and they weren’t threatening anybody. We managed to get somebody in in 1889, but they didn’t want to talk to us.”
“But a year later they wanted to talk to the English.”
Crispin nodded. “Summer of 1890, they started putting out feelers to the British government. Fall of 1891, the British started rolling up our operation here, very quietly.”
Rudi thought about this. “And the two of you have been at war ever since?”
Crispin put his head back and laughed. “No!” he guffawed. “You think we were worried about the loss of a few networks? Jesus. The Community have never understood us. They think we’re the Mafia, and we’re not. We’re Europe. We thought it was quaint.” He shook his head. “Nah, we tolerated each other, which was fine by us.”
“Until they figured out you were interfering with the Campus.”
Crispin sobered. “They can’t hurt us, not really.”
“If they can’t hurt you, don’t hurt them,” Rudi tried again.
“Oh, I’m not going to hurt them,” Crispin said goodnaturedly.
“You’re not?”
“Nah. I’m just going to send them a message.”
They drove for another few minutes in silence, then the car pulled to a stop and Crispin said, “Well, here we are.”
Rudi leaned around the passenger-seat headrest to look out through the windscreen. A few metres ahead, the road simply stopped. In front of the car, for as far as he could see, were fields and hedges and little stands of trees. In the distance, above the trees, a faint twirl of smoke from a chimney.
“This is new,” Seth said.
“This is not going to be one of those times when the criminal mastermind reveals his master plan and then the plucky heroes use the information to foil his schemes,” warned Crispin. “There’s nothing you could do, and even if there was, it’s way too late for you to do it.”
“To be honest, it’s unusual for me to have any information at all,” Rudi told him sourly. He opened the door and got out of the car and put his hands in his pockets. The road ended in a sharp, straight line, as if God had reached down with an enormous craft knife and severed it. God had then gone on to peel up everything on the other side of the line and replace it with a new landscape, as if he was laying carpet. On this side of the line were the houses of West London – and people were just starting to come out and stand looking in wonder at what had erupted into their lives. On the other side was...
“Impressive,” Rudi said to Crispin, who had got out of the car and come over to stand beside him.
“Where’s Heathrow gone?” said Seth, walking up to the edge of the new landscape, not quite daring to step over.
“I’m not going to tie up all the loose ends for you,” Crispin told Rudi. “You’ll have to do that for yourself. I don’t even know what all the loose ends are, and frankly I’ve run out of fucks to give.”
Rudi half-turned and looked at him.
“Ho Chi Minh attended the Versailles Peace Conference,” Crispin said. “Did you know that?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“He was there to ask the Great Powers to support an independent Vietnam,” Crispin went on. “He had an argument based on the US Declaration of Independence. Imagine that. Nobody paid him any attention. The world would have been a different place if someone had just had the courtesy to listen to him.”
Rudi waited.
“The creation of the Community was a family secret,” Crispin said. “It got handed down from generation to generation of Whitton-Whytes until about two hundred years ago. I don’t know what happened then because there’s no predicting what families will do – maybe someone just got fucked-off because they weren’t invited to a wedding or something – but at some point there was a failure to transmit information. The chain got broken and the family secret wound up leaving the Community and eventually Roland Sarkisian inherited it from his mother.”
“The treatise.”
Crispin nodded. “Sarkisian and his bunch of number crunchers were at Versailles, too,” he said. “You’ve seen the photo. They had a proposal for the Great Powers as well, but the difference was that people paid attention. They’d just come through the most terrible war the world had ever seen, and Sarkisian offered to build them a new world, one without nationalities or borders, and they jumped at it.”
“Why?” asked Rudi. “Why would the Collective do that?”
“Because Roland Sarkisian was one of the most venal men who ever lived. All he was interested in was money. The Americans didn’t want anything to do with it – they thought Sarkisian was crazy – but the Europeans already knew about the Community, so they ponied up an advance and Sarkisian and his boys cooked up a proof of concept for them.”
“The House By The Sea,” said Rudi. “Where time passes ever so slowly.”
“Yeah. That was Phase One. By the time Sarkisian and his guys took off with our money, it was already twice as large as the Community.”
“That was over a hundred years ago,” Rudi said.
“Yeah.” Crispin beamed. “Now it’s a whole planet.”
Rudi stared out over the fields, the enormity of what the Sarkisians and their patrons had done only now beginning to dawn on him.
“The Machine in Dresden tells us things,” Crispin said. “It’s been telling us a lot of stuff about the Community.”
“Have you ever,” Rudi asked, “read Billion Dollar Brain?”
Crispin snorted. “It cost a lot more than that.” He scratched his head. “They’ve done a deal with the devil,” he said. “I don’t know what they thought they were going to get out of it, but Europe and the Americans are just going to want more and more of their resources. Eventually the Community are going to put the brakes on, Europe’s going to retaliate somehow – prob
ably economically, at first – and what do you think’s going to happen then?”
Rudi thought he heard, in the far distance, the faint sound of a church bell.
“The Community’s trigger-happy,” Crispin went on. “This progressive faction that’s running things now is only hanging on by the skin of its teeth. They’ve got nuclear weapons and they’ve got the flu virus – which they’ve both used, if you’ll recall. They’ll just burst out of there like pus from a boil and there won’t be anything anyone can do to stop them but they’ll try anyway and things will get utterly fucked up.”
“This is the Community, isn’t it,” Rudi said, waving across the fields. “You’ve swapped them over, like you did with the Realm.”
Crispin looked at him. “You’re really quite smart, you know,” he said.
“If I was smart I wouldn’t have found Charpentier for you.”
Crispin beamed. “You knew exactly what you were doing. You figured out that thing in Warsaw, didn’t you.”
“Sort of,” Rudi admitted.
Crispin shook his head. “I’m genuinely sorry I fucked things up for Snowy like that, but I was in a hurry. He’s not in any trouble in Poland; I made sure of that.”
“Doesn’t matter; he’s safe now. It might be a good idea never to contact him again, though.”
“Hell,” said Crispin, “he’s never going to see me again. Nobody’s ever going to see me again.”
“What were you doing working in the Warsaw Metro in the first place?”
Crispin shrugged. “Keeping an eye on our investment. Staying busy. Keeps me off the streets, anyway.”
Rudi walked forward to the edge of the farmland, reached out, plucked a stem of long grass, twirled it between his fingers, marvelling that not so long ago it had been in another universe. He said, “This is...”
“Pretty cool, huh?” said Crispin, smiling and looking out over the new landscape. “Fuck me but I love it when stuff works.”
“And this is your message?”
Crispin nodded proudly. “Think we’ve got their attention?”
“You could have just sent an email,” said Rudi, and Crispin laughed.
“Who elected you King of the World?” Seth called from the edge of the farmland.
“I did,” said Crispin. “You have a problem with that?” He said to Rudi, “We’re going away. We’ve made ourselves a place and we’re going to see if we can make it work out.”
“Sarkisian World?” Rudi said. “Mafia World?”
Crispin took out a packet of cigarettes, lit one, stood with one hand in a pocket of his jeans, gazing out at his creation. “The EU never stood a chance,” he said, almost to himself. “Too many borders. We’ll do it better, but we want to be left alone. Or we’ll do more of...” He gestured out across the fields.
Rudi glanced about him. Quite an appreciable crowd was gathering here at the end of the road. Most of them were filming the scene with their phones. Others were calling friends, family, news outlets. Any moment now there would be police vehicles and army helicopters, but just now it was really quite peaceful. A paused breath at the dawn of the pax Crispin.
He said, “Have you run this particular scenario through the Neustadt? The one where you cause so much fuss that everyone calms down and has a good think about what they’re doing?”
Crispin grunted. “Do I look like I came down with the last fall of snow? Calm never lasts long. A century, maybe two, and Europe and the Community will be at war.”
“That’s quite a long time. A lot could happen.”
“One thing about time,” Crispin mused. “You think you have a lot of it, but it runs out real fast.”
“Where’s Heathrow gone?” Seth asked again, and when Rudi looked at him he saw that the catenary of lights in the sky had begun to break up. Silently and without any apparent fuss they were all beginning to rise into the sky again. The nearest set of lights, though, was continuing to descend, and now he could see the aircraft slung between them. He could just hear the sound of its engines, over the excited chatter of the people around him.
He said, “They weren’t after the train, were they. They were after the tunnel.”
Crispin sighed. “I said I wasn’t going to tie up all the loose ends for you.”
“Hey,” Rudi said. “I’m doing my share of the lifting.”
“They were really stupid,” said Crispin. “All the tunnels on the Line are border crossings. Blowing one of them up barely slowed us down.”
“Because of the Campus?”
Crispin pulled a sour face. “They blamed us for what happened to the Campus. We weren’t dicking around with viruses in there; that was all their own stupid fault. All we were doing was working with the Science Faculty.”
“In secret. Behind everyone’s backs.”
Crispin made a rude noise. “Sometimes that’s the only way to get stuff done. It was just the sort of fucking fit of pique you’d expect from them, and that’s one of the reasons why they’re dangerous. They’ve got really poor impulse control.”
“You didn’t try to negotiate? Try to explain?”
“We’re the European fucking Union,” Crispin said. “We don’t negotiate.” Then he chuckled.
The airliner was much closer now. It was huge, one of the new transcontinental jets, big enough to carry the fuselage of an old-style 747 in its belly. It was still descending, even though it must have been obvious to everyone on the flight deck that Heathrow was no longer there. Rudi wondered what was happening in the Community, the sudden eruption of all those hectares of concrete and buildings and gigantic passenger aircraft into the peace and quiet, and it suddenly occurred to him that Crispin’s organisation had just gifted the Community an air force, of sorts. Actually, not just an air force; Europe and the Community would be in the courts for decades, trying to establish who the cornucopia of technology and duty-free and bonded goods and gold bullion at Heathrow belonged to now. Maybe that would keep them too busy to invade each other, maybe it would bring hostilities closer. There was no way to know; if he’d been clairvoyant he wouldn’t have got involved in this mess in the first place.
The airliner dipped closer, the sound of its twelve engines drowning out the rising panic of the crowd at the end of the road. It really was colossal; it seemed so utterly unlikely to Rudi that it could stay in the air. He pictured the scene in the London Air Traffic control centre in Hampshire. He imagined there was shouting.
It was only a few hundred metres above the treetops when the note of its engines changed; there was a boom of thrust and for a moment it seemed to hang there, suspended in the air above two superimposed worlds. Then it started to climb again, at first imperceptibly, then more quickly. It passed deafeningly overhead and the crowd, almost as one, ducked. A stink of aviation fuel washed down out of the sky. Everyone turned and watched the immense aircraft rise slowly into the east. A small forest of arms went up as everyone lifted their phones to film it.
“That was pretty neat,” Crispin said. “You think that was autopilot or someone at the controls?”
“I have no idea,” said Rudi, hoping that his heart would one day stop tapdancing in his chest.
“Pretty neat,” Crispin said again. His phone rang; he took it out and held it to his ear. “Yeah? That’s good.” He hung up. “No casualties in the Community, either,” he said.
Rudi thought of the end-to-end takeoffs from Heathrow every day. Crispin’s timing must have been exquisite not to trap at least one jet in the air in the Community. He appreciated that kind of professionalism.
He said, “So, why have I just watched that?”
“You’re running things,” Crispin said.
“I am not running things.”
“You’re running the Coureurs, whether you meant to or not. And that means you’re running a big chunk of the action, one way or another. Of course, a lot of it’s our action, too, so maybe one day one of our representatives can have a quiet discussion with you about matte
rs of jurisdiction.” He shrugged. “Between you and me, you can hand all that stuff over to someone else, or use it to do something useful. Up to you.”
“So...?”
“Someone needs to deliver the message,” Crispin said. “Someone who can talk to people here and in the Community. People who will listen and not be dicks. Play nice, don’t try to find us. Do you think that’s too complicated to understand? It’s all words of one syllable.”
“You’re assuming that anyone will listen to me.”
“They’ll listen. We’ll probably have to do this one more time before they get the point, maybe two. But they’ll listen.”
Now the airliner was gone, some of the braver souls in the crowd had decided to step out into the fields. When they didn’t explode or disappear or fall down writhing in agony, others had followed them. Now maybe a hundred people were standing waist-deep in the wheat, chattering excitedly and filming each other and making phone calls. In the distance, Rudi could see figures with torches walking towards them from a line of trees in the growing dusk.
“And for my next trick,” Crispin said, half to himself, “I’m going to make a railroad disappear.”
From behind them, up the road, Rudi heard approaching sirens. He said, “We’d better make ourselves scarce. We don’t want to be here when the authorities arrive.”
Crispin seemed completely at ease. Having everything go to plan will have that effect on a person. He grinned and shook his head. “Nah,” he said. “Just innocent bystanders, that’s us.”
BY THE TIME they left the site of the event, the crowd was more than a thousand strong, at least a hundred of them baffled Community citizens. There were police vehicles and fire engines and ambulances and helicopters and journalists and cameramen and no one seemed to have the first idea what to do. It took Crispin’s driver almost an hour to back the car down the road to a place where he could turn round. As they drove back towards Central London, a fleet of trucks went by, their loadbeds stacked with fencing.
Crispin chuckled. “Gonna need a lot of that.”
Rudi found it more interesting that the English had managed to find that much fencing and so many trucks and get them loaded in such a short time, but he said nothing.
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