Europe at Midnight

by Dave Hutchinson

  I was closest, so I hit him. Fortunately, the pistol didn’t go off. It flew out of Koniev’s hand and splashed into the sewage. Unfortunately, Koniev didn’t follow it, so I hit him again, and a third time, and this time his knees gave way and he slumped face-first under the surface. I bent over and groped around until I found him, and as I did so my fingers brushed the metal surface of his pistol. I caught hold of the collar of his overalls and dragged him upright coughing and retching. He vomited convulsively.

  “Let go of him,” Eleanor said.

  “What?”

  She pointed the gun at me. “Let him go, Tommy.”

  I let go of Koniev’s collar and he splashed down into the sewage again. Eleanor came over and kicked him, and he vanished under the surface. Then she put her foot on him and held him down and she just stood there, smiling at us. There was some thrashing under the surface, but not as much as I might have expected. A few little bubbles rose up and popped, then a much larger one. The thrashing stopped.

  “Herr Professor Mundt,” she said calmly, “would you pass me the hard drive that you were going to give to our Coureur friend, please?”

  “What?” Mundt said.

  “Solid state hard drive,” she said, as if reciting something in a foreign language that she had learned off by heart. “Two hundred terabyte.”

  “No,” said Mundt. “No, I will not.”

  She raised the meat gun and pointed it at him, and I raised Koniev’s pistol and shot her in the head. She seemed to disappear straight down into the sewage, then bobbed up again, floating face-down. A moment later, Koniev’s body also popped up.

  There were several moments of silence, broken by the voice of Müller, who was still standing on the rubble slope. “What the fuck is going on here?”

  “Yes,” Leo said to me. “What the fuck is going on here?”

  “She’s already murdered two people,” I said. “At least two people. She was going to shoot him.” I gestured at Mundt, who seemed utterly baffled.

  “Fucking hell,” Leo said. “What a fucking god-awful mothercunting mess.”

  I said, “Professor, your letter was intercepted by the group she works for. Worked for. I don’t know what was in it, but it was important enough for them to send us here, and she was going to kill you whatever happened.”

  “It wasn’t meant for anyone else,” Mundt said, getting angry. “Who are you?”

  “You wouldn’t believe me. Now, either someone heard that shot, or we’ll eventually be missed. Either way, somebody will be coming to see what’s going on and we don’t have any time.” I looked at Leo. “Any ideas?”

  “You’re joking, of course,” he told me.

  “Is there another way out of here?” I asked Mundt. “Something that connects with the Dresden sewers?”

  “They’re all blocked off,” Müller called from up the slope. “There’s no way through, not without heavy cutting gear anyway.”

  “There is another way out,” Mundt said. We all looked at him, and he sighed. “It’s better if I demonstrate.” He looked at Leo. “It’s what I wanted to show you, anyway. Up here.”

  We waded past the roof collapse and down a branch tunnel. A hundred yards or so along, we came to a side-tunnel that was so low that we all had to stoop. At least this one seemed to be carrying only rainwater, and it was less than ankle-deep.

  “The biggest problem with servers is the waste heat,” Mundt told us. “You have to keep them cool. Most of the buildings here are just huge servers; it’s the biggest concentration of computing power on Earth, and it puts out a lot of heat. Which the Neustadters get rid of by water-cooling everything and dumping it into the sewers.”

  “What are they doing with all these computers?” asked Müller, who was either in shock or genuinely unmoved by seeing two people murdered in front of his eyes.

  “Good question,” Mundt said. “They’re only using a fraction of the capacity for data haven and banking purposes. I’ve been using some for my own research.”

  “And that’s what you wanted to tell us?” Leo said.

  “Oh, no. No. That’s just down here.”

  ‘Just down here’ was what seemed, at first glance, to be yet another roof collapse. A pile of rubble sloped up out of the water until it almost touched the roof of the tunnel. As we got closer and I could see it in the light of the lamps, I saw that it didn’t look like a natural collapse. It was smooth, as if someone had come in here and obsessively arranged every bit of brick and masonry. There was a curve on the slope which didn’t appear to stop at the tunnel walls, and a little ridge or crevice – I couldn’t be certain which – on its surface which in the dancing light of the torches seemed to go straight through the roof in a way that made the eye want to follow it to infinity.

  “Just squeeze past,” Mundt told us. “It’s perfectly safe.”

  There was a gap to one side of the slope just wide enough for us to pass through one at a time. On the other side, the branch tunnel seemed better-maintained. We duck-walked down it until it flared out into a high, vaulted chamber with sweet air blowing around us and a little rill of clear water running over our boots.

  “Gentlemen,” Mundt said. “Welcome to Vienna.”

  MUNDT DID SOMETHING in the side tunnel which he said would stop anyone following us, then came back to where we were standing in the main chamber.

  “It’s the end of borders,” he told us. “A quite simple trick of topology. It’s not magic.”

  Leo, who had made a short expedition to a nearby ladder which led up to a manhole, had confirmed that we were, indeed, no longer in Dresden-Neustadt, although he couldn’t confirm that we were actually in Vienna. He’d only had time for a quick glance before he had to drop the manhole cover and come back.

  Mundt opened one of the breast pockets of his coveralls and took out a little plastic bag containing a black rectangle. “You can’t ever be certain exactly where it will lead you, but I wanted Les Coureurs to have it.”

  I felt very, very tired. I lifted Koniev’s gun. “Give that to me, please.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake,” said Müller. “Not again.”

  Leo cocked an eyebrow at me.

  I said, “I’m sorry, but I have to take that with me.”

  “Take it where?” Leo said. “Back to your journalist friends?”

  “It’s what we were sent for,” I said. “To take that and to kill Professor Mundt so he couldn’t tell anyone else about it. I have to take it because I have to go back, and if I’m empty-handed they’ll kill me.”

  Leo tipped his head to one side. “Who are you?”

  “Does anyone have a pen and a piece of paper?”

  Mundt had a pen and a little notebook. I wrote down a telephone number, tore the page out, and offered it to Leo. “Call this number. You want to talk to a man named Baines. Tell him ‘Rupert of Hentzau.’ Then follow his instructions. You can trust Baines.”

  Leo took the sheet of paper and held it up to the lamplight. He looked at me. “Give me the thing, Professor,” he said.

  “It’s not complete,” Mundt said.

  “What?” said Leo.

  “The research on here. It’s incomplete; there’s just enough to convince your people that it works, nothing more. Am I crazy? Am I going to just hand my research over to strangers?”

  “She was going to kill you and take the hard drive, whether it was complete or not,” I told Mundt, gesturing back towards the tunnel we’d emerged from and trying very very hard to remain calm. “So yes, you are crazy. Now please, give the hard drive to Leo.”

  Mundt grudgingly handed the little bag over to Leo, and he and I stared at each other for a while. Then he held the bag out to me. Over Mundt’s protests, he said, “You gave it to Les Coureurs, Professor. And we chose to pass it on to Herr Potter, or whatever his name is. Does that not sound fair to you?”

  “No, actually, it doesn’t,” Mundt said. “You can’t trust this man with this.”

  “I can
,” Leo said. “And I think I shall.”

  I took the bag and put it in my pocket.

  “So what do we all do now?” said Müller. “I can’t stay in fucking Austria.”

  My turn to cock an eyebrow at Leo, who sighed. “This is all going to cost money, you know,” he said. “You don’t have any money, do you?”

  I shook my head.

  He snorted. “Okay. I have some contacts in Vienna. I’ll see what we can put together in a hurry.”

  “And you also have to come up with a convincing explanation for how you and I got out of Dresden and back to England.”

  “Yes, okay,” he said. “But maybe we can do that when we have some clean clothes on and nobody’s pointing a gun at me?”

  I lowered the gun, looked at it, then threw it as hard as I could across the chamber. I heard it clatter and splash away into the distance.

  “And then,” I said, “you all have to disappear.”

  1

  “IS THAT BAINES? I want to talk to Baines.”

  Jim checked the phone’s screen. The number was part of the crash-contact procedure he had given to Rupert, ‘Baines’ the workname he had told him. But it wasn’t Rupert’s voice on the other end of the connection.

  “Who is this?” he asked.

  “Never mind who I am,” said the voice, gruff and lightly-accented. German, Jim thought. “Rupert of Hentzau told me to call you.”

  “Just a moment, please.” Jim looked around the conference table, was struck again by the number of unfamiliar faces. “Would you excuse me, please?” he said. “I have to take this.” At the other end of the table, Bevan raised an eyebrow, but he kept his expression carefully neutral as he left the room, went down the stairs to the foyer, signed out, and stepped out onto Northumberland Avenue.

  He walked down as far as the Embankment before raising the phone to his ear again and saying, “Are you still there?”

  “Are you Baines?” asked the voice. “What the fuck are you playing at?”

  “I’m Baines. Who are you, please?”

  “You call me Leo. I have a message for you, if you’re Baines.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “I was with him in Dresden, then in Vienna. He says there has been a catastrophe and they will be relocating him soon, if they don’t kill him. He told me to tell you about Mundt.”

  “I don’t know anyone named Mundt.”

  “You’d better listen, then, hadn’t you?”

  And for the next half an hour, apart from the occasional request for clarification, Jim didn’t say a single word.

  THE MEETING HAD broken up by the time he got back. Bevan was waiting in the anteroom, sitting by the window reviewing something on her tablet. She looked up as he came in.

  “News?” she asked.

  “Let me buy you lunch,” he said.

  They went to a Polish restaurant on The Strand. Bevan ordered bigos, Jim kotlet schabowy with chips and a salad. When the waiter had taken their order, she said, “So?”

  He gave her the gist of what ‘Leo’ had told him. It took a little while, and their food arrived as he was doing it.

  When he was finished, she raised an eyebrow. “Mundt,” she said. “Never heard of him.”

  “I Googled him,” he said. “He seems kosher.”

  “It’s not exactly hard to produce a wiki page for somebody, you know.”

  “I know. It’s the backstopping that takes time.”

  “Could it be a scam?”

  Jim shrugged. “This Leo didn’t ask for any money. He just wanted to deliver a message.”

  Bevan looked past him at the other diners in the restaurant. “He’s having a fraught time, isn’t he,” she said.

  “Leo said it was a catastrophe.”

  “It sounds like it. And Rupert still went back to them?”

  “That seems to have been his plan, yes.”

  “He’s got balls,” she said. “I will give him that. They probably killed him the moment he showed up, you know.”

  “Let’s not be so hasty,” he told her. “He didn’t want to come back in. If they believe his story and they do decide to pull out, they’ll take him with them.”

  “Back to a place where he can’t possibly communicate with us. Also, there’s a lot of if there, Jim.” She sat back and looked at her meal. “What do you want to do?”

  “There’s nothing we can do, Adele. Other than wait for him to make contact again.”

  “How long do we wait? A week? A month?”

  “You’ve never run an intelligence operation before,” he said. “One has to be patient. Some of these things run for years. Decades. There’s no way to tell.”

  Bevan snorted and filled up her glass from the carafe of water on the table. Jim thought she looked worn out. SAS men in NBC suits had finally managed to establish a bridgehead in the Campus, using jet-skis to tow floating radiation-proof pressurised shelters up the Tributary on little pontoons. There was talk of sending vehicles in soon, and then of mounting an expedition to try and make contact with any survivors, although judging by some of the atmospheric analyses it was more likely they would find Elvis over there. Bevan had been running the liaison between the working group and the SAS, splitting her time between London, Nottingham, and extended briefings in Hereford. She’d managed to build up a detailed picture of the area for a square mile or so around the far end of the Tributary, but they knew little more of the Campus now than when Rupert had drawn his rough map for them over a year ago.

  “You need to take a break,” he said gently.

  She waved the suggestion away. “Sleep when I’m dead,” she said with a smile. “How’s your food?”

  “It’s fine. I’m worried about you, Adele.”

  “Too much to do,” she said, shaking her head. “Too much to do, too little product, too many people wanting it.”

  He nodded. “You noticed that too.”

  “And what are we going to tell them about this news from our boy?” she asked. “A topology professor who’s discovered how to make wormholes or interdimensional gateways or whatever the hell it is he’s done? Professor Mundt is about to become the most wanted man on the face of the planet.”

  “I think you and I need to concentrate on Rupert,” he said. “Mundt’s a side issue. Someone else can worry about him.”

  Bevan shrugged. “Write up a contact report, submit it, forget about Mundt.”

  “Yes.”

  She looked him in the eye and said, “Have you had a look at the reading list lately?”

  He nodded. When he had joined the working group, the reading list – the classified list of people cleared to receive Tombola, the group’s product – had consisted of no more than half a dozen names. Now, it ran to four pages, and many of the names seemed to defy encapsulation and appear in all of the Committee’s categories. “I’ve been meaning to ask Shaw about it.”

  “Don’t bother,” she said. “I tried; she just fobbed me off. I did some digging on my own. There are at least fourteen national intelligence agencies reading our product now, Jim, and a lot of what I can only guess are corporate interests.”

  Jim blinked. The national intelligence services were no great surprise – the Community was a threat, or at least a concern, to every nation in Europe. The corporations were a little harder to explain, but that was the world one lived in. The multinationals had been de facto nations themselves for years, lacking only their own armed forces.

  He said, “This is quite a thing, you know. It’s not a surprise that a lot of people want a piece of it.”

  “But even you’re surprised enough to want to ask who all those people are.”

  “One is curious, that’s true.”

  “It’s not even who they are, particularly,” she said. “It’s what they want. Perigee was tasked to assess the threat to national security posed by the Community, not to be on the lookout for commercial opportunities.” She pulled a sour face, the face of someone who has seen the purity of
her life’s work tainted by outside interests. “I don’t trust them. Not a one of them.”

  Jim tipped his head to one side.

  Bevan thought for a while. Then she looked at him, and when she spoke her voice was very quiet. “Suppose we don’t tell the Committee about our latest news,” she said. “Not right now. Suppose we keep it to ourselves for the moment.”

  He thought it was a sign of their friendship that she felt comfortable enough to even suggest it. He said, “And what?”

  “It gives Mundt a head start, for one thing.”

  “Adele,” he said carefully, “this could be construed – quite easily, in fact – as conspiracy to commit treason.”

  “Are you going to grass me up, Jim?”

  He shook his head. “No. No, I’m not. But we can’t withhold intelligence from the Committee.”

  “Jim, something’s changed. The whole thing isn’t ours any more. Any day now you and I are going to be sidelined and then we’ll be quietly put out to pasture. Someone else will be put in charge of running Rupert, some corporate clone with a natty suit and the morals of a stoat. Do you want that?”

  He thought about it.

  She added, “All right, I’m not an intelligence officer. But I’ve seen this happen to enough committees in academia. So long as you’re bumbling along doing stuff nobody wants, you’ve got a free rein. But the moment you start producing something of interest – commercial interest – the committee starts to fill up with people you’ve never met before, and shortly after that you find yourself standing outside in the rain wondering what happened.”

  He took a long time to answer. He thought about the long hours he and Bevan had spent together, trying to parse evidence for the Community’s existence from Rupert’s debrief and Victorian newspaper reports and old train timetables. It was an exercise, he thought, not unlike Second World War photoreconnaissance, looking at images of the same scene taken days apart and trying to spot troop movements or V2 launching sites.