Europe at Midnight

by Dave Hutchinson

  Jim looked at Shaw, but she didn’t react to the joke. He had been working with her for almost a year now, and he was still no nearer to getting close to her in the way he had grown close to Bevan. She was younger than he had first thought, in her late thirties perhaps, and sometimes she wore a perfume that smelled dry and brittle and delicate, maddeningly familiar but unidentifiable. She had once arrived at the office with what he believed was the very edge of a lovebite peeking from the buttoned-up collar of her blouse. And that was it. She was efficient and apparently entirely humourless. The thought that she might have a private life, or indeed a sex life, was at once repellent and weirdly erotic.

  “Are we taking seriously Araminta Delahunty’s theory that the Xian Flu originated in the Campus?” she asked.

  “We don’t know,” Bevan said. “There isn’t enough information. Araminta isn’t a healthcare professional; it’s just her opinion.”

  Bevan, Jim thought, was having a hard time coming to terms with the possibility that the people of the Community might actually have carried out a preemptive biological attack on Europe. In her heart of hearts, she had never really believed they might represent a threat.

  “Are we any closer to standing our man’s story up?” asked Shaw.

  “He was certainly at St Katherine’s,” Jim said, checking his notes again. “Or someone who looked very like him, anyway. This chap Murchison was arrested for shoplifting; he’s doing a fifteen-year sentence on Dartmoor.”

  “Fifteen years? For shoplifting?” Bevan shook her head. “Jesus.”

  “It was his third conviction,” Jim said. “He was lucky; the court could have given him life. Anyway, I went down to Devon and showed him a photo of Rupert, which he positively identified. ‘Rupert The In-U-It Chappie.’”

  “All right,” said Shaw, moving on down the agenda. “The burglary.”

  Jim called up more notes. “On the face of it, just a burglary. The kitchen window was forced, not terribly expertly. The usual electrical goods taken; jewellery too, probably.”

  “Did you look in the fridge?”

  “Why would I do that?”

  “Lots of people do that,” said Bevan. “Hide their valuables in the fridge. They think nobody will bother to look.”

  “Really?” he said.

  “You didn’t.”

  “Right.” Jim made a mental note to mention it to his wife, during their next window of communication. Then he mentally erased the note. “Anyway, I called in a team of cleaners to do the job properly and there’s no sign of a hard drive or a folder of notes. There’s no evidence that it was anything more than a casual burglary.”

  “The way there’s no evidence that the stabbing was anything more than the work of some sociopathic lowlife,” Bevan said.

  “Life is like that, Professor,” Shaw told her. “Sometimes, there really is no conspiracy.”

  Bevan narrowed her eyes.

  Shaw sighed. “We really are in some danger of losing ourselves here. Perhaps we should concentrate on the things we have evidence for.”

  “If we did that this committee wouldn’t exist,” Bevan grumped.

  “And some of us might be happier if it did not,” Shaw snapped. It was, Jim thought, the first honest human emotion he had seen her express, and from the look on her face she regretted it the moment the words were out of her mouth. She scowled and went back to scrolling through her notes. Jim saw Bevan start to formulate a comeback, but he caught her eye and shook his head and she backed down unwillingly.

  Someone’s phone rang. And kept ringing.

  “Oh, all right,” Bevan said after a while with a little grin. “It’s me.” She took out her phone and answered it. Jim sighed.

  Bevan hung up and beamed. “We’re in.” She looked at Shaw. “Will that be evidence enough?” she asked sweetly.

  4

  ALL THEY HAD was Rupert’s story, and some bits and pieces which might or might not have confirmed it, depending on how charitable you were feeling that day. The one irrefutable piece of evidence was the existence of the Campus itself, and of the route he had taken to escape.

  To this end, a group of researchers, in the guise of a National Trust river conservation team, had been attempting to find the tributary Rupert claimed led from the Campus into the River Trent. This had proven to be less straightforward than anyone had expected, although in retrospect Jim wondered how they could ever have thought otherwise.

  “It’s the damndest thing,” Lew Hines told them, leading them from the car and across a scruffy playing field towards the river. “It’s perfectly obvious once you’ve seen it the first time, but until you notice it you don’t see anything out of the ordinary.”

  “What does it look like?” asked Bevan, almost bounding along beside him.

  “It’s a channel, about three metres wide. You can’t see it from the riverbank at all, only from water level.”

  “That’s because it’s only there at water level,” Bevan murmured.

  They reached the collection of tents the team were using as a base, and Lew handed them both a life jacket. “Health and Safety,” he said apologetically. “You’re supposed to have some training as well, and sign something. But I’ll let you off.”

  “Thank you, Lew,” said Bevan. “Very kind of you.”

  “You can swim, though?”

  “Not a stroke,” Bevan said, shaking her head. “Where’s the boat?”

  The boat was moored just downriver from the team’s camp, a long, flat-bottomed punt-like craft with a small electro-catalytic outboard motor, just powerful enough to drive it against the strong slow currents of the Trent. No one was in any hurry to get anywhere; they had been carefully mapping and measuring and photographing both sides of this stretch of the river for months now, simultaneously wanting to find the route onto the Campus and trying not to do anything that might damage or destroy it.

  Lew helped the newly-lifejacketed Bevan into the boat. Jim stepped down from the bank to join them, and Lew switched on the engine and cast off.

  “We found it by accident,” he said as the turned the boat out into midstream and gave the engine maximum revs. “In a stretch of the bank we’d already surveyed. We just went right by it. I have no idea how.”

  “Where?” Bevan said, trying to look at both banks of the river at the same time. “Oh.”

  A little further ahead, another of the punts had been moored. Some figures were moving about on it, shifting equipment from one place to another, seeming to dress one of their number. As they got closer, Jim could see that the person who was being dressed was wearing a wetsuit, and the other two people on the punt were helping him into his rebreathing gear.

  “SAS bloke,” Lew said from the rear of the boat. “Name of Challis. Great chap; awfully good with automatic weapons.”

  “You’ve not been letting him take pot shots at the locals, have you?” Bevan asked.

  “Heavens no!” Lew was like an enthusiastic young archaeology don out on a particularly jolly and fascinating dig. “He can field-strip and reassemble an SR-365 blindfolded, by touch, in complete darkness, wearing gloves. Really impressive.”

  “It’s only really impressive if he can do it while you’re mortaring him,” said Bevan. “Can he do that?”

  “I have no idea,” said Lew. “Can you?”

  They all laughed, but only Jim was close enough to hear Bevan mutter, “Cheeky little fucker,” in an appreciative tone of voice. Then louder, “Ahoy! Captain Challis! We meet again!”

  On the other boat, Challis looked round and broke into a wide grin. “Prof!” he called. “They roped you into this thing as well, did they?”

  “I’m running it!”

  Jim spent a few moments wondering how Bevan and Challis shouting to each other across the river could possibly be construed as maintaining operational security. He decided to think about it some other time.

  “The Captain and I were involved in a thing,” Bevan confided loudly to Jim and Lew. “Year
before last, wasn’t it, Captain?” she called across the decreasing distance between the boats.

  “The Scotland thing? Three years!” he called back.

  “Really? Time flies.” Lew steered their punt beside the moored boat and brought to it a halt, so Bevan didn’t have to shout. She reached across and shook Challis’s hand. “Good to see you again, Neil.”

  “Likewise.” Challis didn’t look like a soldier. He looked like an accountant. A very, very fit and capable accountant. Who looked good in a wetsuit. “Anything I need to watch out for?”

  Bevan shook her head. “As far as we know, the tributary curves around and rejoins the river, but it’s a different river.” She smiled. “Don’t worry about it, Neil. You’ll come out in a secluded spot. Just take some photos, have a quick shufti, come back.”

  “Kind of job I like,” Challis grinned. Jim noticed he had a pistol strapped to each thigh. He made sure the rebreather rig was settled comfortably around his neck, popped in the mouthpiece, pulled his goggles over his eyes, and a moment later and with barely a ripple he was in the water and swimming away.

  “Scotland?” Jim asked.

  “Field trip,” said Bevan.

  “Hm.”

  The top of Challis’s head was just visible, swimming along beside the bank. Abruptly, he seemed to veer into the bank, and disappear. Jim tried to see where he had gone, but the angle was wrong. He looked at his watch, sat down on the seat in the back of the boat, and lit a cigarette.

  He’d barely had the chance to finish it when Lew said, “He’s coming back.”

  They all stood up in the boat, and sure enough there was Challis, stroking strongly out towards the middle of the river, letting the current carry him past the boats, and then swimming back into the bank. Where he just trod water.

  “Neil?” Bevan called.

  “It might be best if you all kept your distance,” Challis called back. “Lew, would you be so good as to put a crash call in to the nearest NBC containment team, please? And a doctor.”

  “What’s wrong?” Bevan called.

  Challis held up his hand, and Jim could see he was holding a little camera. “I got you some piccies, Prof. You can’t see them yet, though, because the camera’s probably radioactive.”

  “Radioactive?” Bevan shouted. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Remember all those films they used to make about what the world would be like after a global nuclear war?” he called. “It’s like that there.”

  5

  DURING HIS FIVE minutes or so in the Campus, Challis had managed to shoot thirty still photographs and about three minutes of video, and they all made chilling viewing.

  They showed an apocalyptic landscape of bare, blasted trees and snow, except it wasn’t snow, according to Challis. It was ash. Like volcanic ash. Soft and greyish white and still drifting down from a sky that looked like a special effect for a terrible science fiction horror film.

  “Nuclear winter,” said one of Bevan’s pet physicists, brought in and hurriedly briefed. “This is what happens when you detonate a number of nuclear devices in a universe two hundred miles across. Like starting a fire in a snow-globe. When can I go in?”

  He was quietly returned to academe, with what Shaw described as the industrial-strength version of the Official Secrets Act in his briefcase.

  “Well, this is a turn-up,” said Bevan. “They’re a nuclear power.”

  With the release of the first transcripts of Rupert’s debrief, the Perigee Committee had begun to swell discreetly. Where once it had just been Jim and Bevan and Shaw, now there were various scientists and researchers and other, less identifiable, participants. The Committee had adopted a strategy called ‘encapsulation,’ in which different aspects of the Tombola product were only released to those who were specialised in it. Today’s capsule included a man in RAF uniform, his chest covered in medal ribbons, and another man, to whom he deferred. Jim had no idea who any of these people were, and it made him uneasy, like seeing a quaint cottage industry move into a shiny new factory. It made him think of asset strippers and other, less worthy things.

  Beside him, Bevan sat gloomily poking at her tablet. He glanced over and saw that she was Googling radiation poisoning again. The consensus of opinion was that Captain Challis was going to survive his brief visit to the Campus, at least in the short term. He was going to have to be checked for cancer for the rest of his life.

  “How are we going to proceed now?” Shaw asked the committee.

  “The on-site team are working to establish what the radiation levels are on the other side of the tributary,” Jim said.

  “How long is that going to take?”

  “As long as it takes,” he told her. “They’re making things up as they go along.” Lew Hines’s latest bright idea was to fix radiation measuring gear on a petrol-driven replica of HMS Hood – a child’s toy bought at a local shop – and sail it up the tributary trailing a long piece of string to tow it back with. He thought it was ridiculous enough to work, if the boat could overcome the current.

  “So we can’t mount any more incursions until we know how safe it is,” Shaw said.

  Everyone looked down the table to where the scientists were sitting. The scientists looked at each other and shrugged.

  “Not enough data,” said one of them, a man named Merson. “The images suggest a massive event, but without more information we can’t make an accurate assessment. We’re running simulations on the effects of nudets in such a confined area, but the math is tricky. We’re having to use estimates.” Merson liked using words like ‘nudet’ – short for ‘nuclear detonation.’ Jim didn’t like Merson.

  “We’ve done a sweep of the area and there’s no increase in the local background radiation,” said another of the scientists, a woman Jim didn’t recognise. “Not even at the mouth of the tributary. Until the field team’s results come in, we won’t be able to make a judgement.”

  “Well you’re no fucking use, then,” Bevan muttered under her breath, just loud enough for Jim to hear.

  “Have we considered sending personnel in wearing NBC suits?” asked the RAF man.

  “Not safe,” said Merson. “Not till we have the radiation levels. Ideally, we’d wait for the fallout to settle as well. The detonations and resulting fires may have depleted oxygen levels over there. The atmosphere may be unbreathable.”

  One of the theories the committee had come up with was that the Trent tributary was not the only route in and out of the Campus. An early plan had been to infiltrate the pocket universe and look for other routes, which might possibly lead them into the Community. The prospect of trying to do that now, in that awful landscape, wearing nuclear/biological/chemical protection suits and breathing gear, was madness. Bevan had vetoed it the moment she and Jim had returned from Nottingham.

  Shaw scratched her head. “Delahunty told our source about another route, one that led to Ernshire.”

  Jim nodded. “The branch off the main railway line out of Paddington. We think it’s gone.”

  “Gone?”

  “Decommissioned. Possibly under Beeching. We’re looking for it.”

  Shaw looked at the committee. “We appear to be at a bit of an impasse, then, don’t we.”

  “Delahunty told him there had been contact between us and them,” Jim said.

  “If there was contact with us, it ended when the Whitton-Whytes died out,” Shaw pronounced crisply. Jim felt Bevan, beside him, stir and gaze balefully at the woman.

  “The presumed assassination attempt suggests they’re aware that the source escaped,” said someone down the table. “Could that be the reason for the bombs?”

  “That just went onto my Top Five Stupidest Things I Ever Heard list,” Bevan said, and there was a little commotion at the other end of the table until Shaw raised a hand.

  “Please,” she said. “Could we refrain from ad hominem remarks?” She turned to Jim and asked, “How is the investigation going, by the wa
y?”

  Jim glanced at Bevan, who was fuming silently. He said, “Still no sign of the attacker. The source believes it may have been an attack by an émigré group, but to be honest with you I can’t see how anyone would know he was here. Or indeed how anyone could know Delahunty was there.”

  “She used her phone,” someone else said.

  Everyone looked at the speaker, a casually-dressed young woman who had so far not said a single word.

  “It says in the briefing document that Delahunty used her phone several times, to convince the source and others that the Science Faculty had access to mobile phone technology,” she went on. “The final time, they used her phone to target a missile. The phone would have identified her.”

  Jim closed his eyes and sighed. Smoking gun, he thought.

  “So we’re theorising that the Science Faculty ID’d her phone, passed the information to someone in the Community, and they passed it on to an intelligence cell here, which used the information to identify Delahunty and turn her flat over?” said Shaw.

  Bevan chuckled, very quietly.

  Shaw looked around the table. She said, “Tenuous. Very tenuous. They could have been watching Delahunty’s flat because they already knew her brother was in the Campus.”

  “They’d have realised she’d gone missing then,” Jim said. “Why not break in and search the place at the first opportunity, rather than waiting until now?”

  “Is there really any evidence that it was done recently?” asked Shaw. “Really?”

  Jim had a sense of angels dancing on the heads of pins, the Committee overthinking itself.

  “We’re not really making any headway here, are we,” said Shaw, as if reading his mind. “Perhaps we should adjourn and reconvene tomorrow, when we all have fresher minds?”

  “Has anyone told the source yet?” asked the woman.

  IT WAS ALMOST eleven when he finally got home. The car dropped him outside his garden gate and drove off, but he didn’t go in immediately. All the lights were off, which meant his wife and stepson had already gone to bed. If she was feeling particularly forgiving, his wife would have left something for him to eat in the oven. But those occasions were becoming rarer and rarer. Most of the time, he ate at the subsidised canteen at Northumberland Avenue, or had a late lunch with Bevan in a restaurant somewhere, and if he still felt peckish he made himself a sandwich when he got home.