Europe in Autumn

by Dave Hutchinson

  “Travel where?”

  Gibbon looked nonplussed. “Well, London, of course.”

  “Where all answers will be forthcoming?”

  Gibbon shrugged as if to say, well, London, who knows? He zipped up the folder again. “You realise I’m telling you all this as a professional courtesy,” he said. “London tend to look down their noses at you Courier chaps, but out here we hold you in rather high regard.”

  “Not high enough to get our name right,” Rudi said, and felt cheap the moment the words were out of his mouth. Gibbon was at least treating him decently, even if everything he said was probably a lie.

  Gibbon raised an eyebrow. “Aye, well,” he said. “Anyway, you’ll be going to London. And perhaps all answers will be forthcoming there. I’m just sorry we had to meet under these circumstances. I’d have welcomed a chance to chat with you about operational matters.”

  “Except we’d have to kill each other afterwards,” said Rudi.

  Gibbon chuckled. “Yes, there is that.”

  “It’s really a very boring life.”

  “Yours doesn’t seem to be.”

  “That isn’t really my fault.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I was on holiday when your pet special forces men kidnapped me.”

  “Saved your life,” Gibbon corrected gently.

  “Allegedly.” Although a thought sent a pulse of goosepimples up his arms.

  Gibbon was either very good at reading faces, or he was telepathic. He nodded. “It would have been rather an opportune moment to bump you off, with all that chaos going on, wouldn’t it?”

  Rudi swallowed down a sense of fear, of forces beyond his comprehension. “It’s ridiculous. What am I supposed to have done?”

  Gibbon shrugged. “I’m only privy to the intelligence I just passed on to you, I’m afraid.”

  Rudi stared at the Englishman for a very long time, completely at a loss for words. Gibbon, for his part, sat serenely in his chair as if regarding a particularly restful countryside scene. No fuss, no hurry, not a thought in his head.

  Finally Rudi said, “When do I leave?”

  2.

  THE JUMP WAS utterly beyond belief.

  Rudi’s dealings with the intelligence services of governments had been fairly limited, down the years. They were, in his experience, mostly professional, if entirely without scruple.

  MI6, in contrast, appeared to be making everything up as it went along, using a joke book as its guide.

  At six o’clock on the morning after his interview with Gibbon, there was a brisk knock at his door and Major Ash, looking rather avuncular in tan chinos, blue blazer, blue shirt and red-and-blue striped tie, put his head into the room.

  “Ready to go, sir?” he asked cheerfully.

  Rudi was still in his pyjamas and dressing gown, sitting in front of the entertainment centre, his hands poised in mid-gesture as he read through the BBC News website. “Not really, no,” he said.

  Ash stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. He was carrying a black nylon travel bag, which he held out. “Flight’s in three hours,” he said. “You might want to get dressed.”

  The bag contained some fairly blameless casual clothing – jeans, sweatshirt, underwear, training shoes, another zip-up fleece to go over it all. Rudi looked at it, then looked at Ash, then went into the bathroom to dress.

  He had no luggage, so leaving was fairly straightforward. He actually felt a little pang when Ash led him out of the room. He’d rather liked it there.

  Ash led him down a thickly-carpeted corridor and into a lift, which deposited them in a basement garage. A lovely black BMW was waiting for them. They climbed in, and it accelerated up a ramp and into the pre-dawn darkness of Helsinki’s morning rush hour.

  Rudi didn’t know the city well enough to orient himself; he caught a glimpse of a large, imposing, official-looking building as they drove alongside the Embassy, but that was all he ever saw of its exterior, and to be honest it could have been any large, imposing, official-looking building. By the time he had some vague idea where he was, they were on the road to the airport.

  Where, utterly appalled, he found himself queuing to go through passport and security checks along with families, old people, teenagers and a large and extremely boisterous group of university students who, from their shouted conversations, appeared to be on their way to Madrid.

  In the car, Ash had provided him with an envelope containing a false passport and a printout of an eticket. The passport was the only thing Rudi could later identify as even faintly resembling tradecraft, and by then he could no longer hazard a guess what went on in the heads of the British Security Services.

  The eticket was for a seat on a scheduled budget airline flight. Rudi stared at it for so long that he almost forgot to hand it over at the desk.

  On the other side of the checks, Ash led him to a departure lounge Starbucks and there, mind reeling, Rudi sat for fifty minutes until their flight was called.

  At one point, Ash got up and said, “Just going for a wee. Back in a sec,” and walked off across the lounge in the direction of the toilets, leaving Rudi quite alone.

  Was he being watched? Was it a test? All thoughts of running off had entirely deserted Rudi when he found himself going through the passport and security checks. He sat where he was and drank his coffee, enthralled by the awfulness of it all.

  The flight itself was the kind of thing where you only got a seat and the attendants selling you overpriced coffee and perfumes and airline-themed knicknacks. Ash had had some sandwiches made up at the Embassy and handed one over. Rudi prised it open and saw a wafer-thin slice of meat and gelatine trapped between two doorsteps of heavily-buttered white bread. He closed it again with a pained look on his face.

  “Lunch tongue,” Ash said when he saw the look.

  “I’ll just have a coffee, please,” Rudi said, handing the sandwich back.

  “Well, if you don’t want it...” Ash said, tucking in.

  And a couple of hours later they were in England, landing at Stansted, queuing up at Passport and Immigration. When the passport officer asked him the purpose of his visit, he had to bite down an urge to say that he was starring in a very, very bad spy movie.

  To Rudi’s mind, the favoured way of getting a high-profile Package out of a country if you were a sovereign nation would be in a private jet under diplomatic cover, no security or customs officials at either end, car waiting on the tarmac on arrival to whisk him down the motorway to his destination. He was almost in a dream state as they took the train into London and then the Underground to Blackfriars and then walked along the Embankment of the Thames a short distance to a place Ash called ‘The Temple.’

  Which turned out not to be a temple at all, but a set of quiet, linked squares of tall terraced buildings and gardens that tilted down to the Embankment. Ash led Rudi to one of the buildings – as they entered Rudi saw a hand-lettered sign, at the top of which were the words ‘Smithson’s Chambers’ above a list of names – in the entryway of which waited an incredibly tall and imposing-looking American man who shook his hand firmly and said, “You call me ‘Red,’ okay?”

  And that was Rudi, stolen from Estonia by the SAS, babysat by MI6, and delivered into a Kafkaesque dream.

  3.

  AT WEEKENDS, THE area was deserted. You got some tourists wandering up and down Fleet Street, but it didn’t start to get busy until you were past the High Court and heading towards Trafalgar Square. On a Sunday, you could walk up out of the Mitre Court gateway onto Fleet Street, and for minutes on end you wouldn’t see another living soul.

  Weekdays were different. Then, Fleet Street was a main artery between Westminster and the City. A shockwave of commuters emerged from the stations at City Thameslink and Blackfriars and Farringdon and Temple and Chancery Lane between about eight and ten. Passengers on the top decks of passing buses, all bent in unison over their morning news or novel, seemed to lean forward in anticipati
on of the day’s work. And then in the evenings it all happened in reverse. The commuters were swallowed by their stations, the bus passengers regarded their Evening Standards or went back to the chapter of the novel they were reading that morning. Rudi had been watching it for almost seven weeks, and he thought he had life in London more or less summed up by now. It was tidal, like its river, a great flood of humanity washing in and out of the Capital. And at some point the tide had washed him in.

  “Hey, there,” Mr Bauer said cheerfully, passing through the living room on his way to the study. “How’s our boy today?”

  “I’m very well, thank you, Mr Bauer,” Rudi replied in English.

  Mr Bauer came to a stop in the middle of the worn Afghan rug and regarded Rudi with his hands on his hips. “Now how many times have I told you?” he asked. Rudi was about to say it must have been ten or fifteen times, but Mr Bauer went on without waiting. “It’s ‘Red,’ son. Nobody calls me ‘Mr’ Bauer.”

  “Mr Self does,” answered Rudi, and he watched Mr Bauer’s eyes disconnect slightly as he tried to process the answer.

  Mr Bauer was an American with the aspect of a mighty but ruined building. Well over two metres tall, and impressively broad-shouldered, he strode through the Temple like Ozymandias, his great mane of white hair blowing in the wind, dispensing hail-fellow-well-mets to his fellow barristers, whether he knew them or not. You had to get a little closer to Mr Bauer to see the pockets of his suit, which were ruined from carrying things which were never meant to be carried in the pockets of suits, to see the ruddy good-health on his cheeks resolve into spiders’-webs of broken veins, to see the scuffed and worn-down heels of his once-magnificent GJ Cleverley shoes.

  Mr Bauer’s eyes snapped back into focus. “But, hey,” he said, wagging a finger at Rudi. “You have to call me ‘Red,’ okay?”

  “Okay,” Rudi said, laying his book aside.

  Mr Bauer raised his impressive eyebrows. “We have a deal, now, don’t we?”

  Rudi nodded. “We have a deal,” he said dutifully from his chair on the other side of the room. “Red.”

  “That’s the spirit!” Mr Bauer proclaimed. “We have a deal. Yes. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to, um...” and he turned and left the way he had come in.

  Rudi sat where he was for a while. He looked at the book lying face-down on the table beside his armchair. William Shirer, The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich. Mr Bauer’s rooms were full of old paper books, some of them almost a century old. It was impossible, from examining the titles, to discern what Mr Bauer was actually interested in, unless he was interested in everything. History books rubbed shoulders with the manuals of computer operating systems long-forgotten except in certain parts of the Third World, where the obsolete discarded flotsam and jetsam of the Computer Age had come to rest in the name of Aid. Great stacks of film-star biographies, most of dispiriting thickness. Novels in such broken-spined and dog-eared profusion that it seemed impossible that one lifetime would be enough to read them all. Two cookbooks, one which seemed to be a first edition of the River Café Cookbook, and the other a bizarre little spiral-bound volume with a cartoon dog’s face grinning on the cover beneath the words Let’s Cook With Hari Vex! Hari Vex – if it was indeed he – appeared to be a Bernese Mountain Dog, and the recipes inside seemed to have been assembled by a chef on the verge of a catastrophic nervous breakdown.

  Fortunately, for matters culinary – and much else – Mr Bauer had Mrs Gabriel, brown-haired, pigeon-chested guardian of laundry and kitchen, keeper of the keys, and the only person in Smithson’s Chambers who actually knew where everything was, or could at least locate it while it was still needed or indeed vaguely relevant. She wore thick brown stockings and a hideous blue nylon housecoat over her street clothes, and flat shoes with soles composed of some substance which caused her to scuff up cracking little charges of static electricity, so that it was possible to hear her approaching across the Chambers’ worn carpets like a tiny electrical storm. Rudi had invested some time in wondering about her relationship to Mr Bauer. Wife? Daughter? Mistress? Nurse? And then it had all become clear; Mrs Gabriel was Mr Bauer’s housekeeper, and therefore transcended all those merely temporal descriptions. Without Mrs Gabriel, Mr Bauer would not only have been unable to function; he would have been unable to exist at all. Mrs Gabriel was a steady cook of the unadventurous English type, whose heavy food and nourishing gravies had sustained generations of public schoolboys all the way back to the days of the Great Game. It wasn’t that Rudi disliked her food, exactly, but when she brought her steak-and-kidney pies to the table, with their ritual accompaniment of boiled potatoes, boiled carrots and boiled peas, the Limoges gravy boat carrying its velvety cargo in their wake, he felt a dark wing of depression fold around him. He would have suggested other English dishes, perhaps á la Fergus Henderson, but he suspected the first mention of roasted marrow bones would galvanise Mrs Gabriel and her fellow housekeepers into a moonlight assault on Smithson’s Chambers with pitchforks and scythes and burning torches.

  Beneath Mr Bauer’s rooms, Smithson’s Chambers went on with their everyday work, giving hope and succour to the weak, the indigent, the hopeless and the frankly criminally insane. Mr Bauer had arrived from Harvard Law almost fifty years ago, clutching his newly-minted degree, independently wealthy due to his connections with some Boston Brahmin family and determined to carry out pro bono work of the most hopeless kind, defending clients no barrister in the history of the Inns of Court would have been crazy enough to defend. And for quite a long time – a very long time, actually – he had made a success of it. He had driven England’s most eminent judges to their knees in court, over and over again, leaving them bleeding and weeping for mercy while his clients walked free. He defended peers and petty thieves, blackmailers and perjurers, murderers and – once – a Traitor of the Realm, a Foreign Office clerk who had been caught passing confidential ministerial briefing papers to a contact in the Russian Embassy. He lost that one – some said deliberately, because loyalty to one’s country was of paramount importance to Mr Bauer. But he won enough cases to blaze a trail through the British legal system. There was even an old biopic of him, made during one of those blink-and-you’ll-miss-them windows when Hollywood was interested in courtroom dramas.

  That he was a decayed colossus these days was fairly well accepted. But he was still a colossus. And that was why, when he did his hail-fellow-well-mets around the Inns, people replied to him, because even if he didn’t know who they were, they knew who he was, once upon a time.

  Rudi thought he had been kidnapped and put in the hands of lunatics.

  As if the thought had summoned him, Mr Self passed through the room, probably looking for Mr Bauer. Mr Self was a cadaverous young man with sharp suits and even sharper sideburns and one of the most insincere smiles Rudi had ever seen. He deployed it the moment he saw Rudi sitting in the armchair.

  “Hey, Rudi,” he said, all golly-gosh bonhomie. “Got everything you need? Good. That’s the way, eh? Looking for Mr Bauer, actually. Great man passed through here recently?”

  “He’d prefer it if we called him ‘Red,’ actually,” Rudi said without stirring from the chair.

  “I know,” said Mr Self. “Silly old sod. Can’t do that.” His eyebrows went up. “See where he went, did you?”

  Rudi pointed, and Mr Self nodded thanks and left the room.

  The past seven weeks had been a genial and thoroughly civilised learning curve for Rudi. He had learned that the Temple was actually part of London’s legal heart, named after the Knights Templar, who had once had a house there. It housed two of the Capital’s Inns of Court, the professional legal associations so-named because once upon a time they really had been inns, places of residence for barristers. These days the Inns were mostly barristers’ offices, known as ‘Chambers,’ of which Smithson’s Chambers, a group of about a dozen barristers led by Mr Bauer, was one.

  All of this information was doled out in a laconic drawl by M
r Self, who was notionally Mr Bauer’s clerk but who seemed to have a busy and full life all of his own, to judge by the little time he actually spent in the Chambers.

  Rudi was mostly left to his own devices, which gave him many diverting hours in which to think back over the events of the past couple of months.

  Firstly, it was all bullshit. The whole thing. The jump from Palmse, as much as he remembered it, seemed relatively professional. Indeed, it had happened more or less the way he would have done it, using the cover of the riot. It reminded him of the abortive jump in the Zone. In fact it reminded him too much of the abortive jump in the Zone, and for that reason he found it suspicious. Gibbon seemed to have known about the recent problems with German counterintelligence, therefore Rudi had to assume Gibbon also knew something of his operational history, and if Rudi were going to jump another Coureur and wanted to gain their confidence, he might very well use a scam which had worked for the Coureur before, appeal to their professional vanity. It was too obvious.

  So that was that. Then there was Gibbon’s little speech at the Embassy. Rudi couldn’t guess which spy novels these people had been reading, but it was clearly not the better ones. No intelligence officer with any self-worth at all would have told him all those things, even if they were lies. Life was not like fiction. In real life, aged British espiocrats did not just suddenly emerge from the woodwork and tie up plot points for everyone.

  And he had no evidence that he had actually been at the British Embassy. He’d been unconscious when he arrived, and he had never left his suite until the final morning. The drive to the airport had been disorienting enough to confuse him. The only thing he was actually certain of was that he had been in Helsinki. Unless whoever was behind all this had gone to the trouble of mocking up an entire airport for his benefit.

  Secondly, when he finally arrived at his destination, no one showed the least professional interest in him. Not once in seven weeks had anyone tried to debrief, interrogate or even ask him an intelligent question. Mr Self appeared to be his liaison with whomever, but all Mr Self was interested in was whether Rudi found his lodgings to his satisfaction. No one seemed particularly bothered when Rudi went for walks in the Temple and sat for hours in the gardens, looking out at the Thames and the wall of buildings on the South Bank. No one seemed to care at all.