Europe in Autumn

by Dave Hutchinson

  Light came in through the windows from the lamps five floors below, picking out a room lined floor to ceiling with filing cabinets. There was a desk and a chair. A kickstool sat in a corner, for those hard-to-reach top drawers. Tiny illuminated numbers glowed on the front of all the cabinets, where combination lock keypads guarded the secrets within. No point bothering. Rudi opened the door, backed out into the corridor, locked the door again, moved on to the next one.

  Inside, another desk and chair, and on the desk a computer monitor running a screensaver of two kittens playing with the cardboard insert of a roll of kitchen paper. Rudi stood with his back to the door for quite a long time, watching the kittens playing.

  It occurred to him that what seemed, on the surface, to be many weeks of sitting around doing nothing had actually been a complex conversation between himself and Mr Self. And through Mr Self with the people who actually owned and ran Smithson’s Chambers. He wondered how long this computer monitor had been sitting here, running its cute screensaver, waiting for him to break into the room. As a piece of entrapment, it was so transparently obvious that there seemed no harm at all in going over to the desk, sitting down, and waving the kittens away.

  The computer’s menu was sparse to the point of comedy. Just the operating system and three spreadsheet files. The first sheet was a list of names and long numbers. Banks and account access codes. The second sheet was filled with random-looking five-figure groups, obviously encrypted. The third sheet was a mixture of encrypted groups and sets of figures in clear-text. A list of payments?

  Rudi looked at the screen. Smithson’s Chambers was a black bank, a deniable source of funds for covert operations. Want to infiltrate a trade union and need some cash to set up the op? Smithson’s Chambers was your one-stop shop. Need to finesse the demise (political, religious or physical) of a troublesome imam? Smithson’s Chambers would dole out the money you’d need.

  None of this was actually world-shaking. Intelligence – the real world of intelligence, not the stuff politicians were told about – ran on black money, reptile funds, cash that sloshed back and forth across continents in constant motion in case anyone happened upon it. The truly intriguing aspect of all of this was that he had been allowed to discover this fact, and discover it without being bundled off to his room. Here he was, sitting here quite comfortably, with the bank codes to access fourteen and a half million Swiss francs – as always Europe’s most copper-bottomed currency – literally beneath his fingertips. It was not, he found himself admitting sadly, the actions of a national intelligence service.

  On the other hand, he thought, it might, just might, be the actions of a national intelligence service faced with a situation so bizarre and outré that only a bizarre and outré response would suffice.

  He sat there looking at the pages of numbers for a long time. Much longer than he should have done, strictly speaking. It was such an obvious offer that it was almost comical, but it opened up an abyss of possibility. He wasn’t caught in an agony of indecision, so much as trying to think through the ramifications.

  Finally he dug around in his pockets until he found a leaflet which had been thrust into his hand by a Hare Krishna in Leicester Square the previous day. He sat for another moment or two, Biro in one hand and leaflet in the other, then he started to copy out the list of bank codes.

  THE NEXT COUPLE of days passed rather pleasantly. Rudi thought he detected a certain relaxation in the Chambers. Mr Self was less in evidence. Mrs Gabriel even smiled at him on several occasions. He sensed that they knew what he had done, and that they knew that he knew that they knew. Quite which direction the game had now taken, he couldn’t tell, but it was as if he had entered into a form of unspoken contract with these people and the people who controlled them, and it pleased them.

  He continued with his walks, the folded Krishna leaflet tucked inside his sock. Not wasting time but trying to gain momentum.

  One brisk spring midmorning he left the Chambers, not a thought in his head, and walked down the Strand and up into Covent Garden.

  The area was, as ever, crowded with tourists and workers on their lunch break. Rudi wandered among them, hands in pockets, casually scoping the place out, rather enjoying the hustle and bustle of being out among ordinary people.

  Crossing the Piazza, just outside the Royal Opera House, he found himself behind two young women, office workers from their clothes, walking side by side deep in conversation. One of the women was carrying a leather shoulder bag, unwisely left unzipped, and from the opening protruded what looked very much like the top half of a purse.

  Rudi lengthened his stride slightly, and as he passed the woman he watched his right hand reach out and take the purse from her bag. He thought of Mr Bauer and Mrs Gabriel and Mr Self and their invisible masters and he peeled away from the two young women as naturally as anything and wandered unhurriedly off at a tangent.

  He was at Cambridge Circus before he decided to snatch a look at the purse in his hand, and the moment he did so he realised his mistake. The purse was covered with thousands of tiny stiff plastic hairs, like the hard component of velcro, and the moment Rudi had it in his hand the little hairs had tasted his DNA, decided they didn’t recognise him, and the purse had armed itself.

  As security measures went, it was from the cheap end, something you’d pick up on a market stall. It was meant to deter only the opportunist thief – you could circumvent it easily enough just by wearing gloves. But Rudi hadn’t thought to wear gloves, and if he tried to look in the purse now it would detonate a dye capsule and he’d be left wandering around Central London with a fluorescent green face. Without breaking stride he palmed the purse into a rubbish bin and moved on.

  There was no way to stop now. He was in the most surveilled city in the most surveilled nation in Europe, and undoubtedly his theft of the purse had been recorded somewhere.

  He did have some small advantage, though. He knew the truth about surveillance. Ever since the dawn of GWOT the nations of the West – apart from the United States, where civil libertarians tended to carry rifles and use them on closed-circuit cameras as an expression of their freedoms – had put their faith in creating a paranoid state, one where every move of every citizen was recorded and logged and filmed and fuck you, if you’ve got nothing to hide you’ve got nothing to worry about.

  Whether this had had any great influence in the course of GWOT was a moot point, but there was one thing not generally appreciated about the paranoid state. It was incredibly labour-intensive.

  There were simply not enough people to monitor all the cameras. Every shop had one, every bus and train and theatre and public convenience, every street and road and alleyway. Computers with facial recognition and gait recognition and body language recognition could do some of the job, but they were relatively simple to fool, expensive, and times had been hard for decades. It was cheaper to get people to watch the screens. But no nation on Earth had a security service large enough, a police force big enough, to keep an eye on all those live feeds. So it was contracted out. To private security firms all trying to undercut each other. The big stores had their own security men, but they were only interested in people going in and out of the store, not someone just passing by. So instead of a single all-seeing eye London’s seemingly-impregnable surveillance map was actually a patchwork of little territories and jurisdictions, and while they all had, by law, to make their footage available to the forces of law and order, many of the control rooms were actually manned by bored, underpaid, undertrained and badly-motivated immigrants.

  The woman whose purse he had stolen – and who was now at least half a mile away – would discover it was missing soon, if she hadn’t already. After that... well, it was anyone’s guess. She’d either shrug it off as something you had to put up with when you lived in London – her cards would be firewalled and she probably didn’t carry much, if any, cash – or she’d contact the police. Around here that meant – if she didn’t walk up to a patrolling bo
bby and report the theft on the street – visiting West End Central at Charing Cross. Someone would have to take a statement, the statement would have to be processed, investigating officers would have to be assigned. Rudi thought that, if anyone at West End Central took the theft of a purse even remotely seriously – and he had to assume for argument’s sake that they did – he had an hour from stealing the purse to someone checking the cameras in the area where the theft had taken place. After that, a grab of his face would be posted on bulletin boards and its parameters circulated, and it was too much of a risk to assume that the people who had stolen him from Palmse weren’t monitoring such things.

  So. An hour. Actually, a little over forty-five minutes now. Rudi wandered unhurriedly along with the crowds and up onto Oxford Street, panicking inside.

  With thirty minutes to go, Rudi ducked into a pub. It was dark inside, the only illumination coming from gaming tables and the impressive bar. It was also packed to the rafters with lunchtime drinkers. It obviously didn’t have enough staff to adequately keep up with clearing the tables, and he snagged an abandoned half-glass of beer as camouflage and sidled through the crowds with it in his hand.

  It took him almost ten minutes to do a complete circuit of the pub. There was a little group of young business types sitting at a table near the back, mildly drunk and mildly rowdy, jackets hung on the backs of their chairs, ties loosened, sleeves rolled up. Rudi paused at the table next to them long enough to dip a hand into a jacket pocket and come up with a phone, then he moved on through the crowd until he was near the door.

  This was the tricky part; the phone was a new Nokia and its security measures included a little tag the owner wore on their clothing. If the phone went more than twenty metres from the tag, it would cook the bubble-memory of its SIM down to slag, rendering the handset useless. Rudi called up the phone’s browser, dug the leaflet out of his sock as discreetly as possible, and started to type strings of numbers.

  Five minutes later he left the phone under a chair and was out of the pub and moving again, having really gone past the point of no return. One of the strings of numbers had connected him to a secure anonymiser. Another had put him through to a bank in the Cayman Islands. Another had called up a certain account where, an itchy paranoia beginning to grow on him in recent months, he had started to bank his savings. Another string had set up a new account at the bank. And several more strings had transferred the entire contents of the black bank at Smithson’s Chambers into the new account. Alarm bells would be ringing in King’s Bench Walk and elsewhere.

  Just before leaving the pub he had Googled the nearest shop selling phones. It turned out to be a newsagent’s half a dozen doors along the street. He went in, gave the shopkeeper the code for the purchase he had made with the stolen phone in the pub, and the shopkeeper gave him a pack of ten disposable phones, each one prepaid with five hundred pounds of credit.

  He used the first phone in a cheap clothing store next door to the newsagent’s. Jeans, T-shirt, a new pair of trainers, a zip-up fleece, a nondescript dark blue canvas jacket. He dithered for a few moments over buying a hat, already deep into a game of doublethink with the people who would be looking for him. One of Fabio’s first rules for evading surveillance was to change your appearance, but the thing most people do is buy a hat to hide their face. Knowing this, the watchers keep a special lookout for people wearing hats. The idea right now was to look just different enough to get out of the shop, not so different that he attracted attention. On the other hand, the people who would be looking for him knew he was trained in this kind of thing, therefore a hat would be something they wouldn’t expect. On the other hand, they would know this and be on the lookout for someone coming out of the shop in a hat... Ah, fuck it. No hat. He added some underwear and socks, bought a canvas shoulder-bag, waved the phone at the till to pay for his purchases, and used the shop’s changing room to change into his new clothes.

  Back on Oxford Street, he walked for a few hundred yards and turned up a side-street, then down another one, then up another. On the corner of the next street was a camping supplies shop. He went in, bought a stout pair of hiking shoes, another fleece, and a heavy-duty waterproof jacket. He changed into the fleece and the shoes and the jacket in the shop, stuffed his previous purchases into the shoulder bag, and was out on the street again ten minutes later.

  No cabs – too easily stopped and the doors had central locking. Ditto for buses.

  And then something occurred to him, and he stopped there in the street, stock-still, while he thought about it. He thought about it for quite a while. So long that he turned and looked into the window of the nearest shop so he wouldn’t attract attention. The shop wasn’t actually a shop – it was the frontage of a little graphic design business – and he found himself engaged in a staring contest with the firm’s rather puzzled secretary. It crossed a distant corner of his mind to stand there and see how long it took the secretary to become alarmed by the strange man staring through her window and call the police.

  He looked around the street. No one looked especially suspicious. No more so than your average Londoner, anyway. No tells or little giveaways that someone might be less innocent than they were trying to appear. No signs that seemingly unrelated pedestrians might actually be working as a team. He felt a weight slowly lift off his shoulders. In truth, the thought of what had just occurred to him actually made him feel a little giddy. It was the final, unrecoverable step into the unknown, an act of faith in his own reasoning.

  He took a deep breath and stepped forward to the edge of the pavement.

  He hailed a cab, and was gone.

  1.

  THE ALBANIANS DOWNSTAIRS must have been out on one of their periodic shoplifting expeditions, because the bowel-rearranging concussions of one of the new Sri Lankan crush bands were shaking the furniture when the Coureur got back to the flat.

  The rest of the block’s inhabitants called the Albanians ‘gypsies,’ but the Coureur, who had spent some time among Europe’s Roma population, knew better. The people downstairs were the heirs of Enver Hoxha, heirs of catastrophically-failed pyramid-investment schemes. Their parents and grandparents had crossed the Adriatic on fishing boats loaded down with indigent cargo until waves slopped over the gunwales, had evaded Italian coastguard cutters, had landed at dead of night wearing their cheap leather jackets and bootleg Levis and Reeboks and scattered into the countryside in search of a better life.

  They were everywhere now, Albanian only insofar as their Polish or English or German was seasoned with a few Albanian words and phrases, their dreams with images of a lost homeland.

  They were not, as far as the Coureur could ascertain, Gypsies.

  He locked the door behind him and stood looking down the hallway. Coats and jackets dangled haphazardly from pegs on one wall. Halfway along, a pile of boots and training shoes was gently collapsing across the parquet. There was a smell of overcooked cabbage, burned chickpeas and cheap aerosol air-freshener. At the far end of the hall, the toilet door was wide open. The Coureur wrinkled his nose.

  A moment’s silence. Then a mighty concussion heralded the beginning of a new track downstairs. A tattered basketball boot rolled off the pile of footwear.

  The Coureur walked down the hall and into the kitchen. Pots and pans unsteadily piled in the sink. Several meals’ worth of crusted plates on the table. Cupboard doors left open. Empty milk cartons on the work-surfaces. A couple of dirty forks and a steak-knife on the lino beside the fridge. The Coureur considered looking in the fridge, but decided against it.

  In the living room, all the cushions had been removed from the sofa and armchairs and roughly arranged in a pile in the middle of the room, beside a miniature Stonehenge of Eisbrau bottles, the various entertainment deck handsets lined up on the floor close to hand.

  The Coureur extracted a cushion from the pile, dumped it on a chair, and flopped down, rubbing his eyes. Coming home was always the same. Lewis, his flatmate, seemed to lack th
e necessary genes for tidiness. The Coureur would leave for a Situation and no matter how serious or far away or downright complicated it was, when he got back exhausted, or bored, or wound-up (or, once, with a newly-stitched wound in his leg) the flat always looked as if it had been sub-let to a maniac.

  He got up and went to the window, looked down into the narrow street, then across at the balconies and curtained windows of the building opposite, then at the tilted topography of roofs and terraces and air-conditioning hoods and downlink dishes. Craning his neck slightly, he could see the Underground tracks running in their cutting parallel to Farringdon Road. A Metropolitan Line train, identifiable from this distance because the Metropolitan Company still hadn’t modernised its rolling stock, rattled and rolled along the cutting, from tunnel to tunnel, and was gone. A colossal amorphous murmuration of starlings surged and darted across the darkening topaz sky.

  The front door opened, banged shut. “That you, Seth?” called Lewis.

  The Coureur went to the living room doorway. Lewis was taking off his jacket, a great pile of yellow and white Europa Foods carrier bags slowly collapsing around his feet and allowing tins of beans and loose yams and okra to topple onto the floor. It was a sure sign that there was nothing to eat in the entire flat; Lewis refused to enter a supermarket unless the only alternative was starvation, and he would not phone out for meals because he believed They kept lists.

  “Good trip?” he asked, tossing his jacket in the general direction of the coathooks.

  “Not bad.”

  “Great.” Lewis bent down and started to lace his fingers through the tangle of shopping-bag handles. “I didn’t manage to do much cleaning up.”

  “I noticed,” said Seth.

  Lewis straightened up, lifting the carriers off the floor. The bottom split out of one and about a hundred apples rolled everywhere.