“I’m doing all right,” I said.
“The Service would appreciate your appearing before them in person, you know,” he told me.
“They’ll have to make do,” I said. “I’m done.”
“Well,” he said, “you’re not really, are you.”
“Are they here?” I asked.
“Of course they’re not,” he said. “As you well know.” He looked about him. “Adele’s dead,” he said. “Professor Bevan. Suicide, officially.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I liked her.”
He nodded. “Yes, so did I. Sometimes I think she was the only sane person in this whole mess.”
“Was it?” I asked. “A mess?”
“They made fools of us,” he said. “They’ve been running the Service for... oh, at least seven years now. There’s no way to know how many more of them are in positions of authority, or how long they’ve been there. Adele went to see the Director-General to complain about something quite different, and she must have told her and Adele couldn’t take it. Her life’s work, just pointless really. Or perhaps they killed her to shut her up. They didn’t need to waste the effort with me, of course. They just left me in the rain. Doesn’t matter now, I suppose.” He turned with obvious difficulty and started to walk back towards the line of conifers beyond the edge of the cemetery. “They say the Campus discovered a cure for cancer,” he said. “Do you think that’s true?”
“I have no idea,” I told him. “We discovered a lot of things. Not all of them beneficial.”
He smiled and seemed to lose his footing for a moment. One of his crutches came down hard on the path and his smile turned into a grimace. I stepped forward to help him, but he shook his head and waved me away. “I’ll be all right,” he said. “I just need a moment. I get very tired.” He leaned on the crutches and looked about him. “They say no birds sing here, but I can hear them. Can you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“You were gone fifteen years.”
That had been a shock. To me, only seven years or so had passed in the Community. I didn’t know whether anyone understood how this could be so, but trying to speak to them would mean making contact with the Service again, so I was just going to have to live in ignorance. It was hardly a new sensation. “It was complicated.”
“I know.” He reached over and patted my arm. “I know.” He sighed. “Do you know where Professor Mundt is?”
“No. And if I did, I wouldn’t tell you.”
He chuckled. “No, of course not.” He seemed to gather some strength. “Would you like a cup of tea? They have a rather nice café.”
“I’d love one,” I said.
IT TOOK US about forty minutes to walk back to the visitor centre. In the café, the school children were eating packed lunches, goodnaturedly boisterous. We found a corner table and I went to buy tea and some biscuits. When I returned, he had taken off his jacket and rolled up one of his shirt sleeves and was pasting what looked like a large plaster on the inside of his forearm.
“Chemotherapy,” he explained as I put the tray down on the table and sat down opposite him. “Absorbs through the skin. I’m not sure how much good it’s doing, to be honest. I’m told it’ll give me an extra six months, but what’s the point?”
“You mustn’t think like that,” I said.
“No,” he said. “No, I suppose not.” He buttoned his cuff and struggled back into his jacket. “Would you pour?”
I picked up the little teapot and poured tea into the cups, added milk for him. The café couldn’t provide lemon, so I had mine black. Then we just sat looking at each other.
“Well,” he said finally, “if this is to be your only debriefing I suppose one ought to make the best of the opportunity.”
“I wish you all the luck in the world with that,” I said.
“They showed me the letter you sent in lieu of a debriefing,” he said, and he shook his head. “Very cheeky. It was heavily redacted, of course.”
“We made the virus,” I said. “The flu virus. Rafe Delahunty was making improvements to it.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Ah. Yes, that will have been one of the redacted parts. And now I’m party to a Secret easily large enough to get us both killed. Thank you for that.”
“You wanted a debriefing.”
He chuckled. “One should always be wary of getting what one wishes for.”
“I wouldn’t know,” I said. “I’ve never got anything I wished for.”
He smiled. “Can we trust them?”
“The Community?” I thought about it. “If Michael hadn’t intervened, Ruston and his colleagues would have been killed, a conservative faction would have used the deaths as a pretext to take over the Committee, and you and I would be having this conversation in the middle of a flu epidemic that would have made the last one look like a bit of a sniffle. Rafe’s flu epidemic.”
He made a rude noise and said, “Hm, Delahunty. We really should have kept an eye on that one.”
“Just because Ruston’s still in charge, it doesn’t mean you can trust them, though.”
He was silent for a while. “I wanted to apologise to you,” he said finally. “We didn’t treat you particularly well.”
“You did save my life,” I reminded him. “Twice.”
He snorted. “Twice. All you had to do was wait another year or so and you could have walked out.”
“It’s still not that easy. They’re controlling the people who visit; according to the news there’s only one train a day from Paddington to Stanhurst.”
He shook his head. “That will change.” He looked at my face for a long time, as if committing it to memory. “What’s it like? Over there?”
“The pictures have been on the news.”
“It’s not the same.”
I thought of Eleanor and Michael, and the shop on Poe Street, and Władysław, and the countryside around Hemingsley-under-the-Hill. “Some of it’s lovely,” I told him. “Whatever else they were, the Whitton-Whytes were artists. But apart from technologies, it’s not that different from here. People are still people.”
“What do they want?”
“Is this an official question? Because I answered it in my letter. They want what you want. Security. They want to run things.”
He shook his head. “Just curiosity. I saw President Ruston’s speech in Strasbourg on the news this morning, while I was getting ready to go out. ‘A new age for Europe and the Community.’ ‘Brothers and sisters finally reunited.’” He shook his head again.
“How are the Americans taking it?”
He shrugged. “I really don’t know much more than you see on the news. They’ve resisted the urge to launch a massive preemptive nuclear strike, which is a heartening start. It’s still early days; nobody knows how this is all going to work out.”
I said, “They did consider an invasion. Back in the 1970s. I saw the file. They decided it would have been a catastrophe.”
He chuckled. “Gods, yes. Millions of them suddenly erupting into Cold War Europe. The world would still be glowing at night.” He folded his hands in his lap and fell silent, looking at his teacup.
I said, “Listen, I made the mistake of thinking they were a bunch of dull bureaucrats living in some kind of fantasy England, and they’re not. They’re very dangerous. They killed everyone in the Campus to stop the flu spreading across the border. The people who are running things over there now are a bit more progressive than before, but they’re still dangerous. They want security and they think they can only get that by running everything.”
“So why this...?”
I said, “The opportunity is there. The Community could never have negotiated with the old European Union, not to their satisfaction. Now, the EU barely exists, the United States have withdrawn from NATO. The Community has to sign treaties with lots of countries and national entities, and that’s going to be a chore, but it will always be negotiating from a position of unity. It’s an ideal time, f
or them.”
He looked at me. “Is it a bad thing? Necessarily?”
I thought about it. “I don’t know.” I thought I should have that phrase printed on a little flag, I was using it so often.
“I’m sure the powers that be have thought very carefully about as many scenarios as they can imagine. All you and I can say is that the world is a very different place to the world we lived in four months ago. So far we’ve come through it without bloodshed and serious social disorder. We can only hope that continues. It’s not as if we’ve been invaded by Martians; the Community, for all its origins, is still just another country.”
“You don’t believe a single word of that.”
“Don’t I? No. No, perhaps I don’t. But it’s not fashionable at the moment to say otherwise. Not out loud, anyway.”
“They think differently,” I said. “They look like you, and they speak like you, mostly, but they are not like you. They might as well be Martians.”
He smiled. “I was talking to one of my former colleagues a month or so ago – she came to visit me in hospital. She said she couldn’t see what all the fuss was about. ‘They’re just English people, after all,’ she said.”
“Your colleague sounds remarkably stupid.”
“The Community is very attractive to a certain type of English person. I know Tory politicians who are delighted that there’s a version of Europe where we conquered the Continent.”
“They are not English.”
“No, I know. But to the media – parts of it, anyway – that’s how they look. Imagine a world where there are no French people.” He chuckled again. “As far as some of our news organisations are concerned, the Community is the Promised Land.”
“Don’t fall for all that brothers-and-sisters-reunited stuff,” I told him. “Your people are at the negotiating table with them because they can put a nuclear weapon on the back of a lorry and drive it across the border anywhere in Europe. There’s no way to defend against it. And they still have the flu virus.”
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, one does get that impression, rather.” He looked around the café. Some of the children were getting restless, chasing each other between the tables to the chagrin of their teachers. “What’s happening now, that might end well, it might not. We live in miraculous times. The inhabitants of a parallel universe walk among us, there’s a whole new Europe to explore.”
“They killed everyone I knew,” I told him.
He looked sadly at me, and there was another silence. We sat watching the children. Beyond the big picture windows of the café, the late afternoon sun came out from behind the clouds. From here, all you could see was trees and parkland. It all looked very peaceful and very pretty, until you remembered what was underneath.
“Not all the former members of the Committee were arrested,” I told him “Some of the people who are attending dinner parties in Brussels and Strasbourg and London right now were party to two acts of genocide. One against my people and one against yours, however accidental it was.”
“It’s out of our hands,” he said. “You and I, people like us, we’re blank spaces. We don’t really exist until someone colours us in. Here be monsters.” He folded his hands in his lap again and his head nodded forward until his chin almost touched his chest. I thought he had fallen asleep, but he said, “What will you do now?”
“I thought I’d travel. Perhaps see the United States. Australia.”
He raised his head, with some effort. “The Service won’t let you, you know.”
“The Service has to find me first.”
“You’ll not find it easy to get out of the country.”
“Maybe I’ll get the Coureurs to help.”
He chuckled, a genuine happy chuckle. “Bless them.” He sat up straight in his chair. “Would you help me back to the car? There’s a good chap.” He hadn’t touched his tea, or his biscuits.
THE SUN HAD gone in again and it was getting chilly. A breeze blew across the car park. He huddled up within his overcoat, handed one of his crutches to me, and took my arm, and I helped support his weight as we walked to his car.
“Adele once told me that the problem with people like us is that we only ever see parts of the story,” he said. “Or we see it from odd angles and perspectives. We very rarely see the whole picture. There’s a story – I don’t know whether it’s true or not – that during the Second World War Polish women used to collect old used cleaning rags from the German armoured regiments that had occupied their country. The rags were then sent off for analysis by the Polish resistance and the viscosity of the oil on them was tested. You see, you need different viscosities of oil for different weather conditions. The theory was that a sudden change would signal preparations for a German invasion of Russia. Could we just pause for a moment, please?”
We stopped and he leaned his weight on me while he got his breath.
“We’re like those old Polish women,” he went on. “Collecting rags, never knowing what the results of the analysis are.”
“You don’t have to apologise,” I told him. “You really don’t. You didn’t force me to go.”
“It all seems...” He looked around the car park and sighed heavily. “So pointless. Who’s your friend?”
He was looking at my car. I didn’t bother to ask how he knew it was mine. A figure was standing beside it, leaning on the roof, smoking. I said, “You have a minder, so do I.” I’d seen the large well-dressed gentleman sitting in the driver’s seat of the shiny black SUV as I’d walked towards the visitor centre. For people who were supposed to be trained in covert matters, they were surprisingly visible.
He looked at me,
I said, “It’s not you I don’t trust.”
He smiled sadly. “No. I suppose not.” He thought for a moment. “You know, you never told us what your real name is.”
That was true, and there seemed no harm in it now, so I told him.
“Thank you,” he said, genuinely pleased. “Thank you. Shall we carry on?”
We walked the rest of the way to the SUV. The driver was already out of the car and holding one of the rear doors open. He helped his passenger inside, then went back behind the wheel, started the engine, and drove off.
I stood watching them go for a minute or so, then I sighed and walked back to my car.
“They don’t know where Mundt is,” I said.
“They don’t or he doesn’t?” asked Rudi.
“He wouldn’t have asked me if they hadn’t told him to. They don’t know.”
Rudi finished his small cigar and ground the end out under his toe. “Personally, I hope Herr Professor Mundt just keeps on running.”
“It’s not safe. He knows how to open and close the border crossings. That’s why they wanted to kill him and take his research.”
He sighed. “I know.” He took his cane from where it was leaning against the side of the car and limped around to me. “There’s every chance in the world that they want you to find him for them,” he told me. “I know how they think. You find him, they find you, game over.”
“I told you to stay in the car,” I said. “That driver will have taken a photograph of you.”
“It doesn’t matter. Let them know we’re together. We’ll be in Scotland by tomorrow morning. After that, it’s a big Continent.” To his credit, he hadn’t tried to argue me out of this meeting. I had presented it to him this morning and he had simply factored it into his plans. He struck me as very self-contained, used to his life making sudden right-angled turns, as if he genuinely couldn’t be surprised any longer, but there was a hunger about him, a need for intelligence, and I had no idea what that was about. It wasn’t like a nation’s need for intelligence; it was more deeply personal. “Did he say anything about Molson?” Rudi was very interested in Andrew Molson.
I shook my head. “Someone told Bevan to expect me,” I said. “That’s why they moved so quickly when I claimed asylum; they were waiting. Somebody told them I was coming.�
��
“Molson.”
“I don’t see how. I didn’t know I was coming.” I shrugged. Waves ‘don’t know’ flag.
He said, “I’m working on a project. I was wondering whether you’d like to join in.”
“What kind of project?”
“I’m not sure what you’d call it. Research. Tying up loose ends. Trying to find the secret of the universe.”
That made me smile. “I wish you luck with that.” In my experience, the universe didn’t have any secret. It had a poor sense of humour, but that was no secret, if you thought about it.
Rudi started to walk back to his side of the car. “Let me cook dinner for you, and we’ll talk about it.”
I’M INDEBTED TO Caroline, for the presence of Mr Songer’s Wee in this story, and to Gem, for her musings about the nature of the Eurovision Song Contest in autumnal Europe. I’m also indebted to Liza and Cary, who beta-read the book. All mistakes are mine, not theirs.
∗hugs∗
NOMINATED FOR THE 2015 ARTHUR C. CLARKE AND JOHN W. CAMPBELL AWARDS
Rudi is a cook in a Kraków restaurant, but when his boss asks Rudi to help a cousin escape from the country he’s trapped in, a new career – part spy, part people-smuggler – begins. Following multiple economic crises and a devastating flu pandemic, Europe has fractured into countless tiny nations, duchies, polities and republics. Recruited by the shadowy organisation Les Coureurs des Bois, Rudi is schooled in espionage, but when a training mission to The Line, a sovereign nation consisting of a trans-Europe railway line, goes wrong, he is arrested and beaten, and Coureur Central must attempt a rescue.
With so many nations to work in, and identities to assume, Rudi is kept busy travelling across Europe. But when he is sent to smuggle someone out of Berlin and finds a severed head inside a locker instead, a conspiracy begins to wind itself around him. With kidnapping, double-crosses and a map that constantly re-draws itself, Europe in Autumn is a science fiction thriller like no other.
Europe at Midnight Page 32
