Dave Hutchinson - Europe in Autumn

Whoever they were – and he didn’t rule out a committee of apparatchiks representing Central and every intelligence community in Europe – these were subtle men and women. Rudi thought that much of his time as a Coureur had been devoted to provocations – not to breaking into the Community directly, but to flushing them out like a beater on a grouse moor. Who are they? Where are they? What are they doing? The eternal questions of the intelligence controller.

It was possible that his first live Situation with Fabio had been a legitimate attempt to steal the map of entryways into the Community. Equally, it could have been an operation to flush out a Community operative in Poznań’s Line consulate, someone who could then have been identified, arrested, interrogated, turned and fed back into the Community to report back to their new masters. It might have been a success, or it might have been a failure. Or it might genuinely have been Fabio acting on his own initiative. He would never know.

Similarly, the Situation in Potsdam (and perhaps even the one in the Zone, he had always thought there was something not quite right about that one) and the death of Leo had something of the stage about them, something with larger objectives than the individual players would ever be able to perceive.

This of course brought him to his present situation. Was he once again part of a provocation? Was he being run against the Community, for reasons he would never know, by people he would never meet?

It was impossible to be sure. He could, of course, elect to do nothing for the moment, and see what happened. He could try to second-guess the situation and pick the least likely course of action, but he would never be certain it wasn’t the course of action he was supposed to take. He could throw himself into the sea and drown, but there was always the itching suspicion that someone, somewhere, would have taken that possibility into account. Unlike the espionage soaps, where there was always a way to drop a spanner into the works and somehow come out victorious, he was in the hands of planners who had seen every eventuality. They were the students of centuries of expertise, from the couriers of pre-Christian Pharaohs with secret messages tattooed on their scalps, through the agents of Francis Walsingham, through the gentleman adventurers of the Great Game, through MI6 and SOE and OSS and the Okhrana and NKVD and the CIA. They knew their stuff.

This was the basis of his epiphany on that street in London, a sense that it didn’t matter what he did because he was part of a Plan, a Plan designed to make it seem as though he had complete free will. And he may have been right; he hadn’t been arrested. Whoever They were, They wanted him to get away with the money from Smithson’s Chambers, and use it for whatever ends he decided.

Oddly enough, this did not bother him as much as it might have. It was oddly liberating, knowing that whatever he did had been planned for. And so he chose to default to himself. Rudi the Coureur. Rudi, who saw a phrase like the most jealously guarded borders in Europe , and saw, behind those borders, people who wanted to leave.

“It sounds,” he told Lev, “like a challenge.”

ONE MORNING RUDI told Lev that he was going away for a couple of days. “I really shouldn’t be more than forty-eight hours,” he said. “If I’m gone longer than that and you don’t hear from me, put everything in the burnbox and activate it. Then get out of here and drop the box in the sea.” He handed Lev a slip of paper on which were printed several strings of letters and numbers, encrypted codes for private bank accounts. “Can you memorise these?”

“Are you joking?” Lev snorted. Some of the strings ran to fifty characters.

“Ah well.” Rudi smiled. “You probably won’t have to use them.”

And he was right. For the first few hours, Lev kept coming back to the list of bank codes and wondering why he didn’t get out right now, access the accounts, transfer the money, and just keep running. He never did find an answer to that question; instead, he spent the time in the room reading decrypts, eating room service meals and working his way through the minibar, and forty-eight hours after he left, almost to the minute, Rudi was back, smiling and eager to have a look at what the cloth laptop had produced for them while he was gone.

A few days later – and he wasn’t fooling anyone, but Lev did appreciate the pretence of tradecraft, it was a nod from one professional to another – Rudi casually said, “I’ve got something for you,” and handed over a passport.

Lev turned the little card over in his fingers. It belonged, according to the Cyrillic on the front, to one Maksim Fedorovich Koniev, a citizen of Novosibirsk, in the Independent Republic of Sibir. His photograph had somehow found its way onto the card, alongside what he presumed was his thumbprint, and the card’s embedded chip presumably also contained other biometric data about him. He looked up.

“You don’t have to live there,” Rudi said, a little awkwardly.

“In the summer,” Lev informed him, “Sibir can be a most beautiful place.”

Rudi held out a shrinkwrapped disc. “There’s a legend, too. I left it vague, but there’s some documentary stuff in Novosibirsk and Norilsk to support it. You can leave it the way it is or do some backfilling, it’s up to you. Take the bank codes; all your money’s there.”

So this was how it ended. Lev looked at the card again. If his former life had taught him anything, it was that we only ever see a little part of the big picture. A few lines of communication from a codenamed agent here, a list of political targets there, an impenetrable economic dossier elsewhere. What were their stories? At least here was a new story, a new life all ready for him to live it. “Thank you,” he said, genuinely touched. The money alone would have been enough.

Rudi looked away and shrugged, and Lev thought the boy was actually embarrassed by his gratitude. “What will you do now?” he asked.

Rudi looked at him and grinned. “I’m going to shake the tree and see what falls out.”

THE WAR BEGAN on a Thursday.

Petr always remembered that because Thursday was his turn to deliver the kids to school and pick them up again, and he was sitting in the car waiting outside Tereza’s apartment in the morning when his phone rang.

“Boss?” said Jakub. “Put the radio on. There’s been an outrage.”

Jakub was a good, steady detective, but he was prone to exaggeration on occasion. Petr sighed and switched on the radio and discovered that this was not one of those occasions.

He looked out of the window and saw Tereza coming out of the building’s entrance with Eliška and Tomáš, all bundled up against the weather, schoolbags slung over their shoulders and Big Blue Cat lunchboxes clutched in their little gloved fists. His heart sank.

They crossed the road to the car and Petr lowered the window. “Sorry,” he said to Tereza. “Sorry,” he said to the children.

“I saw it on the news,” she said. “I’ll take them to school. Will you be able to collect them?”

“There’s no way to tell,” he said.

“I have that job interview this afternoon,” she said. “You know that. It’s been arranged for ages.”

“Go to your interview,” he told her. “I’ll pick them up.”

“Or you’ll organise someone else to do that.” She shook her head. “I’m so tired of this, Petr.”

“They’ll love it,” he said jovially. He looked down at the kids. “How about a ride in a police car with Uncle Jakub this afternoon?” They looked uncertainly pleased.