Dave Hutchinson - Europe in Autumn

But he supposed he had known, in his heart of hearts, that one day it would all have to end. Either the people who owned and ran Nation would suddenly decide to send her on a round the world cruise instead, or the ship would hit an iceberg and sink, or he would simply latch on to a woman who would take more than she gave. And so it had happened. Myrna, on her way to pastures new, glowing with memories of her Russian lover, while her Russian lover starved and was thrown out of his room and eventually just walked down to the harbour, picked up some very heavy object, and jumped into the water with it.

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.