“The rest when I’ve checked out your story,” said Rudi. “I would hate to believe you think I’m an idiot.”
Fritz sighed and took a slip of paper from his pocket. He put it on the table in front of him and pushed it across towards Rudi. “GPS coordinates,” he said.
Rudi left the slip where it was. He leaned his elbows on the table and smiled. “So,” he said. “To recap, this mysterious – and apparently quite wealthy – client failed to budget for sufficient transport and asked your firm to make the delivery. And you were one of the drivers?”
Fritz nodded. “The whole transport staff. We’d been sitting around drinking coffee for weeks, and then all of a sudden all six of us loaded up the trucks and took the fencing out there.” He nodded at the slip of paper.
“And what did you find when you got to the coordinates?” Rudi asked.
“Soldiers,” said Fritz. “The entire fucking Army, looked like. In the middle of a forest. Trucks, helicopters, those modular office things they use as barracks. Fucking arseholes.”
“Trucks,” Rudi noted.
Fritz leaned forward and said quietly, “Sir, I have never seen so much fencing in one place. They must have run out of their own supply and had to get the rest wherever they could. It was piled everywhere.”
Rudi smiled again. “You must have developed quite an expert eye for fencing, during your career,” he said.
Fritz glared at him. “Listen, son,” he said, “I drive a fucking truck. It’s what I do so I don’t have to live in a hedge. It’s not a fucking career.”
Rudi tipped his head to one side.
“I don’t know if I saw all of it,” Fritz said. “What I did see, with the inventory we delivered, I reckon there was more than four kilometres of fencing.”
Rudi thought about it. “Did you see any sign of building work? Clearance work?”
Fritz shook his head.
Rudi reached out and took the slip of paper, read the figures written on it, put it in his pocket. “How did the soldiers seem?” he asked.
“Seem?”
He shrugged. “Were they agitated? Angry? Bored?”
Fritz gave this some consideration. “The officers seemed agitated,” he said finally. “But that lot always are, the pricks. That’s how you get to be an officer, right?”
Rudi nodded enthusiastically.
“The squaddies...” Fritz shrugged. “They were just doing as they were told.”
“Was...” and here Rudi sat back and looked up at the ceiling, as if casting about for the correct phrasing, before looking at Fritz again. “Was there anyone else there? Civilians, perhaps?”
Fritz’s little eyes narrowed so much they almost disappeared.
“I’m just trying to picture the scene,” Rudi told him. “I can imagine you and the soldiers and stacks of fencing lying around everywhere. It must have looked quite chaotic. I was just wondering if I have the picture right.”
“There were some suits there, as it happens,” Fritz said carefully. “Giving orders.”
“There,” Rudi said with a huge grin. “And that completes my picture.”
“Five of them,” Fritz said. “Older men. One was English.”
“Oh?” Rudi sounded surprised. “You spoke with him?”
“Nah, never got close to him. He was dressed like an Englishman out of a nineteen-fifties movie. You know what I mean? All buttoned up in old-fashioned clothes.”
“So you can’t be sure he was an Englishman, then,” Rudi pointed out. “He was just dressed that way.”
Fritz narrowed his eyes again as if he was suspected of being caught out in a lie. “Yes,” he said. “No.”
3.
BEING INVISIBLE – PROPERLY invisible, not just the everyday invisibility of being a woman – was something of a novelty for Gwen. Rudi had left the flat and returned some hours later with two duffel bags which turned out to contain what seemed, at first sight, to be masses of haphazardly sewn-together rags.
“Stealth suits,” Rudi told her. “For stealthing.”
They’d tried the suits on in the flat, to test the fit and allow Gwen to get used to the fact that, with the suit and its weird mutilated helmet on, Rudi was reduced to a transparent patch of barely-roiling air which only resolved into a recognisable figure when they were almost toe-to-toe.
“It’ll get warm,” Rudi warned. “The suit traps your body heat so it doesn’t show up on infrared. Don’t worry about it; just find somewhere inconspicuous and loosen the collar and wait until you cool down.”
“How warm?” Gwen asked.
“Quite warm.”
‘Quite warm’ turned out to be ‘uncomfortably hot’. In fact, there was a sense, as they crouched down behind this tree, that she was slowly cooking. She loosened the collar of her suit and a geyser of hot, slightly sweaty air fountained up around her face, condensing into a cloud of vapour which anyone nearby, if they were paying attention, could not fail to miss.
“Okay?” asked Rudi from a volume of thin air a couple of metres away.
“Quite warm,” Gwen said.
“Told you.”
“Yes. Yes, you did.” Gwen experimented again with the head-up display of her visor, zooming her view in and out until she felt a little queasy. She was familiar – or at least she’d thought she was – with the Coureurs from films and thrillers, but she’d never thought she’d actually be using some of their kit, or that it would turn out to be quite so uncomfortable.
They were in a forest somewhere to the east of a village called Pintsch, close to the GPS coordinates Fritz had given them. Pintsch’s tiny population had been swollen by a small temporary town of soldiers, many of them, judging by their associated equipment, combat engineering troops. Many of them also seemed to be leaving. She and Rudi had ventured as close to the village as Rudi thought prudent, and watched, invisible, from the side of the road as truck after truck passed by.
Rudi’s opinion was that the engineers had already accomplished their task and were returning to base. “I suppose we could always try talking to one of them at some point,” he said. “But you can never tell with the military. They have surprising attacks of patriotism.”
From Pintsch, they had worked their way from tree to tree through the forest until Gwen spotted, in the distance, the dull grey metal shine of woven metal fencing. And here Rudi had elected to pause, waiting for who knew what.
Periodically, armed soldiers passed by, patrolling outside the fence, their faces bulky with image-amps, and it took Gwen a while to realise that Rudi was timing them. One went by, his boots sucking in the mixture of slush and leaf litter trodden in a path around the fence. He went off into the distance. There was a pause. Then Gwen caught a whisper of motion out of the corner of her eye and a moment later a shower of snow suddenly drifted down out of the lower branches of a nearby tree.
“What are you doing?” she whispered; she still hadn’t got used to the subvocal mike which was part of the suit’s suite of equipment.
“I’m climbing this tree,” Rudi’s voice said in her ear. “It used to be easier for me.”
More snow fell out of the tree. As a covert move, Gwen thought, it left a lot to be desired.
“What did you do to your leg?”
“What?” Even subvocalising, Rudi sounded out of breath.
“Your leg. What happened?”
“Ballooning accident.” The fall of snow stopped; a branch high in the tree bent all on its own, steadied. “Years ago. Just a moment, please.”
Another soldier came along the fence. He was dressed in snow-cammo, mottled shades of white and grey, the hood of his combat suit pulled up. From inside the hood, the twin turrets of his image-amplifier protruded. He was carrying a short automatic rifle, and from his posture he would rather have been anywhere else than here, walking endlessly round and round a fence in a snowy forest. Gwen had tried to work out how many of them were on patrol, which might have allowed her to time them and get some idea how big t
he perimeter of the fence was, but they all looked alike.
He passed by, and a minute or two later there was a fall of snow, a creaking of branches, and a sudden thud to her right, accompanied by several muttered swearwords in her ear.
“You okay?” she asked.
“Yes,” Rudi said. “Absolutely excellent. Never better, thank you.”
BACK AT THE flat, Gwen showered to get rid of the sweaty feeling of the stealth suit, and when they were sitting at the kitchen table having coffee Rudi showed her what he had seen from the tree.
He’d managed to climb up far enough to look over the fence, and the video he’d taken with his phone showed... at first Gwen couldn’t quite work it out. The forest was in an area of steep little hills and valleys, quite wild, considering this was after all Luxembourg. On the other side of the fence, however, the land was perfectly flat. It was as if the forest had been cleared and the entire site had been levelled and then given over to a rather quaint-looking vista of fields and hedges and little copses of trees. Gwen thought she could see, above one stand of trees, a drift of smoke, and in other places as Rudi panned the phone’s camera she caught sight of solid-looking stone-built houses. In one shot, she could see in the distance the Luxembourg forest rising on the other side of the farmland, maybe a mile or so away.
There were people in there.
She couldn’t make out their faces or even what they were doing, even with the image zoomed to maximum, but she could see them moving about.
When they had watched the video half a dozen times, Rudi got up stiffly and limped over to the worktop to make more coffee.
“I don’t understand,” Gwen said. One of them had to.
Rudi didn’t say anything, just busied himself with the kettle and coffee grounds and the cafetière.
“Do you know what this is?” she asked.
He didn’t answer straight away. He stood watching the kettle as the water started to drum inside and steam emerged from the spout. He seemed to be playing a weird game of chess with the cafetière, the mugs and the sugar bowl.
Finally, he said, “Not for sure, no.”
“But you have an idea. Whatever it was, it happened all of a sudden. The authorities didn’t have enough fencing in stock, then they didn’t have enough trucks to transport it out there. It took them by surprise.”
“There are stories,” Rudi said, “and maybe your friend Lewis has heard them, of a holy grail, the Creation Myth of the Community.”
Gwen shook her head.
“No one knows how the Community was created,” he said. “It’s common knowledge now that an English family named Whitton-Whyte did it, or had it done for them, but what’s not so well-known is that they seem subsequently to have lost the knowledge of how to do it. Either it was lost, or stolen, or destroyed, no one knows, not here or in the Community. There are stories of a book of instructions, floating about somewhere, which tells how to map a new landscape over an old one.”
“I’ve never heard of that,” she said.
He shrugged. “People in the Community have been looking for it for a very long time. Maybe it exists, maybe it doesn’t. I don’t know.” The kettle stopped boiling. Rudi let it settle for a few moments, then poured water into the cafetière. “We still haven’t decided what to do with you,” he said.
“What?”
He put the lid on the cafetière and turned to look at her. “We still haven’t decided what to do with you.”
“If you think you’re just going to hide me away somewhere, you’d better think again,” she told him. “I want to know what’s going on.”
“I’m not certain what it is.”
“Then I want to know what you think it is. Otherwise I’m not going anywhere.”
Rudi rubbed his face. “All right,” he said. “I’ll tell you on the way.”
“On the way where?”
He turned back to the worktop, and pushed the cafetière’s plunger down. “Have you ever,” he asked, “visited Poland before?”
1.
CHRISTMAS HAD COME and gone before any of them got a break, and it was another two months before the emergency leave rota rolled around to Mr Pasquinel’s department, and even then he didn’t feel that he could put his workload on everyone else’s shoulders.
“There’s just too much to do,” he told his department head one day over lunch. “Too much we don’t know yet.”
His department head, an exhausted-looking Latvian named Grigorijs, sighed and looked at the remains of their meal. He said, “Don’t be noble, Donatien. Everyone else has taken leave.”
“You haven’t,” Mr Pasquinel pointed out.
“The captain is always last to leave the sinking ship,” Grigorijs said.
“Is the ship sinking?” asked Mr Pasquinel.
Grigorijs thought about it. “A poor metaphor,” he admitted after a few moments. “But you take my meaning.”
Mr Pasquinel wondered if it hadn’t been more of a Freudian slip, but he kept that to himself. He said, “I still have some live work to finish. I can’t go away yet.”
Grigorijs nodded. He knew the work Mr Pasquinel was talking about, a matter of some delicacy involving Greater Germany. “How is that coming along, by the way?” he asked, even though Mr Pasquinel had memoed him a progress report the previous day.
Mr Pasquinel shrugged. “Germans,” he said.
Grigorijs topped up their glasses. They’d left the Consulate compound and driven into Charleroi, to a little Belgian restaurant on the Avenue Paul Pastur. Grigorijs had ordered stoverij, and Mr Pasquinel had elected to try the entrecôte with Stoemp. They were both drinking a rough and robust house red. Grigorijs liked to take his senior staff out for lunch every couple of months, to discuss work and other things informally, but he’d had to suspend the custom while the Republic was in lockdown. It was only since January that he had been able to resume his unhurried expense-account exploration of the local Wallonian eateries.
He said, “Is it anything we should be worrying about?”
Mr Pasquinel picked his glass up and took a drink. “The past year or so,” he said, “has rather reset the boundaries of worry.”
“Quite,” Grigorijs said. He looked at the window of the restaurant. Outside, flakes of snow were blowing in gusts down the street. “Do you have a sense that they’ll come round to our way of thinking, then?”
Mr Pasquinel shook his head. “The best we can expect is a compromise. And they know that. They will make an offer, we will make a counter-offer, they will counter our counter-offer... And so on. They’re pragmatists, and so are we. All we’re really doing is exploring the parameters of the compromise.”
“That’s not so bad,” Grigorijs mused. There were places, further to the East, where the Republic was finding compromise a much harder proposition.
“It’s bad enough. I’d hoped to have this finished by the end of last year.”
Grigorijs shook his head. “It’s the times we live in. Once upon a time the only people we’d have had to negotiate with were the EU and the Russians.”
Mr Pasquinel, who was something of a student of the unhappy history of the EU, grimaced. “I don’t see how that would have been any better.”
The little towns and cities of the Sillon industriel, the former heavy-industrial heartland of the former Belgium, had been spreading towards each other along the Sambre-Meuse Valley for centuries; now Charleroi and Liége were the two ends of a ribbon metropolis which some people with satirical intent called the Dorsale Wallonne. It was some considerable time since the area had been an industrial backbone, or much of an industrial anything. The steelworks along the Meuse had gone to their knees in one or other of the economic crashes of the first half of the century, been retooled, gone to their knees again during the Xian Flu, been retooled once more, and finally went bust in a spectacular flurry of union riots and corruption trials which had heralded the referendum that eventually broke the country up.
As metropoli went, t
he Dorsale Wallonne wasn’t much to call home about, a belt of rusting industrial plants and shabby towns through which the Line passed as efficiently as possible, casting off a branch just outside Charleroi to connect the polity to what had been intended to be its Belgian Consulate. Unfortunately, a year after the branch line and Consulate were completed, Belgium split in two, and now they were just another bone of contention for the perpetually-squabbling Flemish and Walloons.
Officially, the Independent Trans-European Republic held no view on what happened to the various territories it ran through. As far as it was concerned, if a country broke up after an Embassy was established, that was too bad. Unofficially, that kind of thing caused all manner of problems for the diplomatic staff, but as Grigorijs was fond of saying, no one ever joined the Diplomatic Service expecting a quiet life. The Belgian Consulate had been tooled up to represent the Republic’s interests in the whole of Western Europe, and following the Incident it had fallen to the staff there to smooth feathers among the nations under its purview through which the Line passed.
“Do you have a view on how long it will take?” he asked.
Mr Pasquinel shrugged. “Are you trying to get rid of me?”
“Human Resources have noticed a single glaring exception to our programme of leave.”
“Oh.” Mr Pasquinel sighed. “I’m sorry. Have there been memos?”
Grigorijs shrugged.
“I would just like to mention for the record that there was no sign of HR’s presence a year ago, when we were all working eighteen and twenty hour days,” said Mr Pasquinel, becoming irritated. “One of my staff worked three straight days without sleep; it was a miracle she didn’t suffer some kind of breakdown. It’s a miracle we all didn’t. Human Resources. Pah.”
“Even so.”
Mr Pasquinel looked toward the windows again. “This is not efficient,” he said finally. “Sending people away when there’s still work to be done.”
“We will cope, Donatien,” Grigorijs said. “Go away. Have a rest. When you come back you’ll be more efficient.”
Europe in Winter Page 9
