Dave Hutchinson - Europe in Autumn

“Pack,” Rudi told him. “Pack quickly. We’re leaving. It’s not a novel. It’s a guidebook. ”

IT WAS A guidebook to a country which did not exist.

With what Rudi later described as an act of kneejerk sarcasm, Lev instantly dubbed it The Baedeker . For want of any other name, its anonymous author became Baedeker.

The Community stretched from the Iberian peninsula to a little east of Moscow, a country of some fifteen million souls back in 1918, when the notebook had been written. It had cities and towns and a railway system, but Rudi didn’t recognise any of the names of the towns and cities. It was as if Baedeker had, on a whim, invented a country, and then simply copied it onto Continental Europe. Or rather the Whitton-Whytes and their descendants, not being satisfied with creating their own English county, had simply rewritten Europe and then proceeded, very quietly, to conquer it. However they had achieved it, they had not lacked ambition. According to Baedeker, the Community had a university the size of an English county.

“No,” Lev said, already more than a little annoyed at having to move for the fourth time. “No.”

“What else could it be?” said Rudi.

“An invisible country? Made up of bits and pieces of other countries? Created by a family of English magicians?” Lev snorted. “It could be anything else.”

Rudi looked at the piles of decrypts. “There’s nothing here about them being magicians,” he said. “They talk about landscapes containing all possible landscapes. That doesn’t sound like magic to me.”

“You’ve obviously had a more interesting life than I have, then,” Lev said sourly, pouring himself another drink. He leaned forward and rested his elbows on his knees. “Look at me. No, look at me. Look me in the eyes. Good. Now, say after me, ‘landscapes do not contain all possible landscapes.’” He sat back. “You’re not going to say it, are you,” he muttered sourly, and drained his glass.

Rudi looked at the printout pages, the Baedeker, the railway timetable which said that back in 1912 you could have caught a train from Paddington Station to a nonexistent town somewhere to the west of London, the map of the Line that said you could still get to that same nonexistent town by going up a branch line in Germany. He tried to reassemble it in his head, but the pieces would only go together in one configuration.

This was what Fabio had stolen from the Line’s consulate in Poznań. Three proofs of the existence of a parallel universe. And a map showing how to get into it.

The Community was a topological freak, a nation existing in the same place as Europe but only accessible through certain points on the map. Its capital, Władysław, occupied more or less the same space as Prague, but the way Baedecker described it, it sounded more like a mixture of Kraków, Warsaw, Paris and Geneva. Fifteen million people, back when Baedeker wrote his guidebook. How many people were there in the Community by now? What were they all doing?

Was that a secret worth protecting? Worth killing for? Rudi thought it probably was.

ONE NIGHT, WHILE they were eating dinner – something quite inedible involving squid and aubergines and a sauce made from tinned tomatoes – Rudi looked across the room and saw Fabio’s burnbox sitting beside the coffee table. It occurred to him that this thing which Fabio had risked his life to safeguard had become so familiar that he hardly saw it now; it was just somewhere he stuffed the documents and decrypts and Lev’s computer when they changed hotels. He still set the locks, just in case, though he had no way of knowing if the device even worked after all this time.

“What,” Lev said, watching him stand up.

Rudi limped over to the burnbox and upended it over his bed. Pages and notebooks and flashcards cascaded onto the coverlet. “I just wanted to try something.”

“Try what?”

Righting the burnbox, he stuffed a printout copy of yesterday’s local newspaper inside, closed the lid, spun the combination, swiped the lock twice to arm the device. “I want to see what happens when this thing goes off,” he said. Then he twisted the latches and pressed them outward.

What happened was Lev screaming, jumping up from the table, and diving behind the room’s monumentally-ugly sofa. A few moments later he bobbed up again, shaking his head.

“Never let it be said that Lev Semyonovitch Laptev ever failed to over-react,” said Rudi, who hadn’t moved from beside the bed.

“Sometimes,” Lev said, attempting to regain his composure without yelling, “a burnbox is designed to destroy its contents and the person who is trying to open it.”

Rudi looked at the box. “Oh.” He put his hand on the side of the briefcase, and, yes, it was warm. Not hot, but definitely warm, the flash-heat inside leaking through the insulation.

All of which made him think nostalgically of the briefcase he had taken delivery of in Old Potsdam. He’d worried that the act of smuggling it to Berlin might have destroyed it or what was inside, but what if the Package had triggered it before slinging it under the wire? What if it had been cooking its contents the whole time? What if it had contained maps ?

So why, in their last moments of life, had the Package slung the briefcase through the wire, if it was in the process of destroying its contents? In Rudi’s world there was only one reason to do that – to get people running, to make the people who wanted the case back believe it had been delivered. And Bradley had said that the contents had got through, so either he knew the case had destroyed whatever it contained, and had been lying, or he didn’t know and had been passing on a lie told to him by his superiors.

He had other things to think about. There was the steady stream of decrypts, page by page building up a picture of the Community of the nineteenth century. There were the more mundane mechanics of getting himself and Lev from hotel to hotel, from island to island.

And yet he couldn’t stop thinking about Potsdam, going around and around, picking away at it.

Rudi sat for hours with the printout of the Baedeker, shuffling the pages, waiting for the movie moment , the moment when the hero claps his hand to his forehead and cries, of course! The moment when all becomes clear.

It didn’t happen.

This was a Big Secret, certainly. No doubt about that. Easily worth killing both Fabio and himself. But the geometry of what had happened to him over the past ten years or so eluded him. He was certain that Potsdam fitted into that geometry, somehow, but it was impossible to say precisely how .

Taking the Baedeker as his guiding principle, his entire career as a Coureur took on a different aspect. There was one phrase in the book, The Community has the most jealously guarded borders in Europe , which altered everything. How many governments, intelligence services, espionage organisations and criminal groups knew about the Community and had tried, over the years, to gain entry? If he had learned anything from his years wandering around Europe, it was that people really hated to find places that they could not go. Thus, safecrackers broke into banks, MI6 officers passed through Checkpoint Charlie, CIA rezidents ran networks of stringers in Moscow and Bucharest. Oh yes, they were stealing the company payroll or gathering intelligence on the enemy. But, really, when it came down to it, they were going where others could not go . Rudi was aware of the sense of power, the sense of omnicompetence , one could derive from something like that

And the Community had defeated them. They had not been able to gain access.