Europe in Autumn

by Dave Hutchinson

  And why not, if he was going to be honest with himself, do it now? Why go through the inevitable pleading and begging and promising with Mr Eugenides the taverna owner when the result was in no doubt? He looked around the bustling quayside and spotted a small anchor lying on the stones. He wondered if he could hang on to it long enough to do the job. He wondered whether anyone would bother trying to save him.

  He was actually in the process of standing to walk over to the anchor when a shadow fell across him.

  “Professor Laptev?” asked a voice in Russian. “Professor Lev Semyonovitch Laptev?”

  The speaker was a young man wearing jeans and a light cotton shirt, a hemp shoulder bag in one hand. He was leaning on a black cane, one of those things made of innumerable carbon leaves, thin as a little finger but capable of denting the roof of a car. He looked harmless, but Lev’s heart froze like a Siberian pond in winter.

  “Who are you?”

  The young man smiled. “My name’s Smith. I’m someone who would like to take you for a drink, perhaps even some meze.” His Russian was flawless, but Lev could detect a Baltic accent behind it. Smith indeed.

  “Oh?” said Lev.

  The Balt spread his hands. “No strings attached. I’d just like to ask your advice. I’m prepared to pay a consulting fee, if that would suit you.”

  Fear and desperation fought it out in Lev’s heart. Desperation forged an alliance with hunger and won a bare victory. “Very well,” he said.

  THEY WENT TO one of the smarter tavernas over on the new side of the harbour, and Lev immediately felt dirty and dishevelled and out of place. The Balt insisted on ordering a little bit of everything, and when a huge platter was deposited in the middle of their table he smiled broadly and insisted that Lev tuck in, but Lev held back even though he was ravenous.

  Had they finally caught up with him? Lev knew they used people like this, spetz operatives, young men with hard eyes and an outer layer of normality carefully shaped over a crystal core of ideology. But this one was different. He looked tired. No, actually, now Lev thought about it, that wasn’t quite right. He looked into the Balt’s eyes and saw a different kind of tired. It was not, he realised, the tired of someone who has stayed awake for a few days, travelled a few hundred kilometres, dealt with a few mildly complicated situations. It was the tired of someone who has gone right over the ragged edge of total exhaustion – physical, mental and emotional – and then somehow has found the space to begin to recover. Not completely yet, but enough to be functional for the moment, enough to do what needs to be done. Lev recognised that look. He had seen it, not all that long ago, in his own shaving mirror. And that was the only thing that made him relax, made him believe he could survive this. If Centre were to send an assassin to tidy up the tiny loose end represented by Lev Semyonovitch Laptev, they would not send someone who looked as though their entire world had been carved away. This boy was not an assassin; he was something else; something much rarer, much scarier.

  “Eat,” the boy said. “It looks good.”

  Lev looked at the platter. There was almost nothing on it that he would have chosen to eat unless he was, as he was now, utterly starving. “No it doesn’t.”

  The boy sighed. “No, it doesn’t, does it. Tourist food. I could do better than this.” He poured them both drinks and put the bottle back on the table and sat back and regarded Lev. “I need a pianist.”

  Lev shook his head and drained his glass. “I’m afraid you’ve come to the wrong person. You see, I’m tone-deaf.”

  The Balt smiled. “Not that kind of pianist, Professor Laptev. A pianist.”

  Oh, a pianist... “We used to call them telegraphers.” Lev shrugged. “Unimaginative, I know...”

  The Balt refilled Lev’s glass. “A telegrapher, then. A telegrapher who is an expert in codes.”

  Lev grunted. “There are no more experts in codes, Mister Smith. Why do you think I’m sitting here on this filthy island instead of shining like a star in Moscow? Today there is only Kolossal, and Kolossal is unbreakable.”

  “I’ll bet you tried, though.”

  Tried? Lev swallowed his drink. Oh, they’d tried all right. Kolossal was the code-world’s version of mutually-assured destruction. It had sprung, fully-formed, onto the Net about five years ago, a completely foolproof unbreakable encryption system. Even if you knew how it worked, it was impossible to break out a message encrypted using Kolossal unless it was meant for you. Rumour was that it had been developed by a group of cypher-nuts in Turin, who had then decided that everybody should have it and proceeded to post it into public domain. Now everybody used it. Moscow, Langley, London, the multinationals. Everybody.

  The Federal Security Service had run a supercomputer and thirty of Russia’s elite coders at Kolossal continuously for a year to discover its secrets, and they had been none the wiser. In desperation they had tried to kidnap one of the original Turin team, but they were nowhere to be found. Spirited away by the Mafia, the story went, for whom they were developing Son of Kolossal, which would not only encrypt messages but dance the gavotte while it did it.

  At the end of that year, Lev had found himself wandering naked along the banks of the Moskva with no idea who he was or what had happened to his clothes.

  “It’s a wonder we didn’t all go insane,” he said quietly.

  Smith was looking at him with an unreadable expression on his face. Lev hoped it wasn’t pity.

  “It’s not Kolossal,” said the Balt. “But it might be just as unbreakable.”

  Lev blinked at him. “Anything less than Kolossal,” he said, “is just not safe.”

  The Balt grinned suddenly and took a folded sheet of paper from an inside pocket of his jacket. He smoothed it out and handed it over, and Lev looked down at the number-groups printed on it and felt an almost sexual surge of nostalgia.

  “Which language is this in?” he asked.

  “Russian.”

  Lev snorted. “Do you have a pen?”

  The Balt didn’t. Finally they asked the waitress – who also didn’t have a pen, but did have a rather blunt eyebrow pencil, which she deigned to lend them, all in the spirit of fun, and Lev did a frequency count on the message, jotting his figures on a napkin. The Balt poured himself another drink and sat back to watch.

  TEN MINUTES LATER, Lev looked up and said, “Very funny.”

  The Balt smiled.

  The message was a basic poem-key encryption, the kind of thing that had been dangerously leaky during the Second World War. The plaintext consisted of a dozen names and addresses lifted from the Moscow telephone directory. The poem... Lev spent another ten minutes doing sums... well, it was certainly Russian – dark birch forests, a lost love, the looming threat of winter. Pasternak? Turgenev? Lev thought it was familiar, but really it could have been almost any Russian poem; it could almost have summed up the Russian soul. It certainly summed up his. All of a sudden he felt rather sad and ashamed.

  “I think you should ask someone else to do this thing for you,” he mumbled, starting to stand up.

  The Balt didn’t move. “The last person I showed that poem to told me he’d need at least two hours and access to all kinds of tables and reference books,” he said.

  Lev shrugged, hardly even surprised not to have been first choice. “Classicists,” he said.

  “You decrypted it in twenty minutes with a paper napkin and an eyebrow pencil. I think you’re exactly the person I’ve been looking for.” When Lev remained standing, the Balt said, “A hundred thousand Swiss francs, in any currency you choose, in any bank account you choose, anywhere in the world. Half now, half when you’re finished.”

  Lev sat down, eyes brimming with tears, knowing how close he was to doing it for the price of a couple of drinks. “It’s been...” He sniffed and rubbed his eyes. “It’s been a long time. I may not be able to help you.”

  “Perhaps a consulting fee, then,” said the Balt. “Paid daily. Perhaps that would be fairer.”

&nbs
p; Lev nodded. “I would prefer that.”

  “Before we begin, I should warn you that there may be some danger.”

  “Danger?”

  For the first time, the Balt looked fractionally uncomfortable. “I don’t know how, or why, but there may be some danger. But that’s my problem and I’ll do my best to protect you while you work, and afterward.” He blinked at Lev. “If you were to get up and leave right now, I wouldn’t hold it against you.”

  Lev did think about it. For almost a second. He waved a hand, inheritor of the Cheka, the NKVD, the KGB, child of Enigma and Kolossal. “I no longer have anything to be afraid of,” he said, and cringed inwardly. Such a Russian thing to say.

  The Balt looked sad. “Well, let’s hope this doesn’t turn out to be a learning experience for you. Is there anything you will need?”

  Lev looked at him, wondering how his life had suddenly taken such a turn. “I will need to retrieve my laptop from Mr Keoshgerian,” he said.

  LEV’S LAPTOP WAS made entirely of cloth. It looked like something from a fabric conditioner commercial. The tapboard resembled an alphanumeric embroidery sampler, and the printer/scanner/copier could have been mistaken for a brightly-coloured hand towel. All rolled up and stuffed into a small drawstring bag, it looked like one of those little cushions people buy to rest their heads on during long coach journeys. Rudi had never seen anything like it before.

  “We did magic, once upon a time,” Lev said with a ghost of pride. “And we never told anyone.”

  “How does it work?” Rudi asked, thinking about the patents involved.

  Lev shrugged. “Don’t know. You just plug one end into an electrical socket, the other end into an entertainment set, and it works. You can even wash it, but if the water’s too hot it destroys the memory and processor threads, and then all you’ve got is some bits of rug. We’ll need to buy cables for it. And an external hard drive. A big hard drive.”

  “Not a problem.”

  Lev ran his fingers over the woven surfaces. “I never could bear to sell it. Pawn it now and again, perhaps, but never sell it. I did think once I’d take it to one of the hardware houses, sell them the technology. But my former employers would have heard about it, and they would have sent someone to kill me. Someone like you.”

  Rudi looked at the little Russian. They would have sent someone to kill me. Lev didn’t sound sad or angry, just rather matter-of-fact, like a father who has just caught the weather forecast and discovered that the family picnic is going to be rained off. And what was that someone like you all about?

  “Do you need a drink?” he asked.

  Lev shook his head. “I need to work.”

  Rudi didn’t think that Lev needed to worry about his former employers. The last time he had been in Russia – European Russia, this was, what they were just beginning to call Rus back then – the local intelligence services hadn’t been anything to phone home about.

  RUDI HAD A room in one of the swanky hotels in the New Town, so Lev moved his few belongings – some books, an old iPod, a bag of clothes – in there, and after the formalities were over and he had some money in his pocket, Lev sat down and set up the cloth laptop. When it was ready he said, “Show me this thing that no one else can decrypt.”

  Rudi took from behind the sofa a heavy-looking attaché case and opened it by swiping a cardkey down its side and then typing in a long combination on the lockpad on top. He took out a rolled-up paper map and two old-looking books, one thick with battered cardboard covers, the other a thin leather-bound notebook.

  “In case you need some background,” he said, handing over the notebook, “the map’s of the Line. Standard stuff you can buy anywhere. This,” holding up the thick book, “is a 1912 railway timetable for the South of England. And I have no idea what any of it means.”

  Lev took the notebook and opened it. Tucked inside the cover were five sheets of paper covered with printed columns of numbers and letters. No, not printed... Lev ran his fingertip over the back of one of the sheets, felt the slight embossing of the typewriter. These sheets had been typed a very long time ago.

  He laid them aside and paged through the notebook. More columns of numbers and letters, closely written in ink, in a clear, careful hand. He checked inside the front and back covers and both endpapers, but there were no pencil jottings, no idle calculations that might give a clue to the cypher being used.

  “This may take a little while,” he said.

  Rudi shrugged and limped over to examine the room’s minibar. “If it takes a while, it takes a while, Professor. I know these things mustn’t be rushed.”

  Lev shrugged. He unrolled the laptop and scanner, plugged in the newly-purchased hard drive, and began the process of booting everything together.

  2.

  OF PARTICULAR INTEREST to cartographical students, Sheet 2000 – the so-called ‘Millennial Sheet’ – is the only surviving sheet produced by the ‘Alternative Survey’ begun by General H. Whitton-Whyte in 1770.

  THE ALTERNATIVE SURVEY

  Quite why General Whitton-Whyte undertook his own survey of the British Isles, when the same work was being carried out by the Ordnance Survey, is not known.

  Indeed, much of the history of the family is shrouded in mystery. Very little remains to us of the early history of the Whitton-Whytes. In Bryce’s Great Families Of The County Of Staffordshire (Angel and Pediment, 1887), the family merits only a footnote appended to an entry concerning the Bracewells of Leek. In the 1888 edition of the book this footnote mentions a rumour extant in the county over a century before that the Whitton-Whytes had ‘fallen upon hard times due to an illness’ which forced them to sell their house, Whetstones, to the Bracewell family, and move to London. The footnote is omitted from later editions of Bryce.

  In Seichais’ Cartographie Anglaises (Spurrier, 1901), Whitton-Whyte is included mainly because of his ‘eccentric system of numbering sheets,’ sheets apparently being given the first number which entered the General’s head on the day of publication. Some of these numbers ran to many digits (forty-seven in the case of the Birmingham sheet) and abridged numbers – so-called ‘Whyte Numbers’ – were later appended to the sheets for ease of cataloguing.

  Of the Survey itself, details are only available of the later stages. Apocryphal stories abound of Whitton-Whyte’s wild-haired figure tramping the Western Isles of Scotland or the Yorkshire Dales, theodolite in hand and – in the early days of the Survey at any rate – attended by a small army of helpers drawn from his lost estates in Staffordshire.

  Clearly, it would have been impossible for one man to undertake such a survey on his own, and there are records surviving in Cumbria, Peeblesshire and Kent which suggest that the General hired local men where it was possible, while keeping a firm hand on the overall control of the project.

  In many areas this contracting-out of the work may account for the friction reputed to have existed between Whitton-Whyte and the Ordnance Survey, which in a number of instances was surveying for its own maps at the same time as the General’s men were surveying for his. It’s said that on several occasions this friction erupted in violence.

  There is a story, retold in Grey’s Maps and Mapmakers Of The British Isles (Pitt & Sefton, 1892), relating to the theft of Ordnance Survey field drawings of Cornwall and noting – though there is no evidence that they were responsible – that Whitton-Whyte’s Survey was known to be in the same area at the same time as the Ordnance men.

  Comparison of publication dates, says Grey, reveals that Sheet 178923 of the Alternative Survey (Northern Cornwall) was published in less than half the time of the other sheets. However, it should be noted that, save for Sheet 2000, no records of publication dates have survived to the present day, and therefore it is impossible to authenticate Grey’s thinly-veiled accusation.

  In total, the Alternative Survey lasted one hundred and twenty years. In his scholarly work Mapa i Pamięc (Map And Memory) (Zakopane, 1920) Walerian Mazowiecki even blames the Surve
y for the eventual downfall of the Whitton-Whyte family.

  Only one full set of the Survey was ever collected, these stored in the ‘Map Room’ of the Whitton-Whytes’ townhouse in Islington. All but one version of Sheet 2000 – which was on loan to Mr S. J. Rolfe of the British Museum at the time – were destroyed, along with the rest of the collection, when the house burned down in July 1912, and our subsequent knowledge of its history has been gleaned from examination of surviving notes and field drawings.

  SURVEY

  As with so many of the other sheets of the Alternative Survey, the survey of Sheet 2000 is based on existing data. It used the Hounslow Heath baseline measured by General William Roy in 1784. Whitton-Whyte is said to have remeasured the baseline a month later, and pronounced it ‘adequate.’ Thereafter, this sheet, covering the area to the west of London, conforms in general to the triangulations which resulted in Ordnance Survey Sheet 7. Whether Whitton-Whyte actually made any measurements of his own beyond checking Roy’s baseline is a matter of conjecture.

  DRAWING AND ENGRAVING

  It is believed from contemporary accounts that twelve field drawings were prepared for draughtsmen in late August 1820, when proof copies of Ordnance Survey Sheet 7 were already circulating. Whether any of these proofs fell into the hands of the Whitton-Whyte Survey is not known.

  What is known is that Henry Hoskyns, who undertook the reduction of the field drawings to a form ready for engraving, made a flurry of revisions at the end of August, and was heard by his apprentice, James Summers, to exclaim that the detail of the drawings was ‘as inaccurate as it is possible to be.’