Europe in Autumn

1.

THE ALBANIANS DOWNSTAIRS must have been out on one of their periodic shoplifting expeditions, because the bowel-rearranging concussions of one of the new Sri Lankan crush bands were shaking the furniture when the Coureur got back to the flat.

The rest of the block’s inhabitants called the Albanians ‘gypsies,’ but the Coureur, who had spent some time among Europe’s Roma population, knew better. The people downstairs were the heirs of Enver Hoxha, heirs of catastrophically-failed pyramid-investment schemes. Their parents and grandparents had crossed the Adriatic on fishing boats loaded down with indigent cargo until waves slopped over the gunwales, had evaded Italian coastguard cutters, had landed at dead of night wearing their cheap leather jackets and bootleg Levis and Reeboks and scattered into the countryside in search of a better life.

They were everywhere now, Albanian only insofar as their Polish or English or German was seasoned with a few Albanian words and phrases, their dreams with images of a lost homeland.

They were not, as far as the Coureur could ascertain, Gypsies.

He locked the door behind him and stood looking down the hallway. Coats and jackets dangled haphazardly from pegs on one wall. Halfway along, a pile of boots and training shoes was gently collapsing across the parquet. There was a smell of overcooked cabbage, burned chickpeas and cheap aerosol air-freshener. At the far end of the hall, the toilet door was wide open. The Coureur wrinkled his nose.

A moment’s silence. Then a mighty concussion heralded the beginning of a new track downstairs. A tattered basketball boot rolled off the pile of footwear.

The Coureur walked down the hall and into the kitchen. Pots and pans unsteadily piled in the sink. Several meals’ worth of crusted plates on the table. Cupboard doors left open. Empty milk cartons on the work-surfaces. A couple of dirty forks and a steak-knife on the lino beside the fridge. The Coureur considered looking in the fridge, but decided against it.

In the living room, all the cushions had been removed from the sofa and armchairs and roughly arranged in a pile in the middle of the room, beside a miniature Stonehenge of Eisbrau bottles, the various entertainment deck handsets lined up on the floor close to hand.

The Coureur extracted a cushion from the pile, dumped it on a chair, and flopped down, rubbing his eyes. Coming home was always the same. Lewis, his flatmate, seemed to lack the necessary genes for tidiness. The Coureur would leave for a Situation and no matter how serious or far away or downright complicated it was, when he got back exhausted, or bored, or wound-up (or, once, with a newly-stitched wound in his leg) the flat always looked as if it had been sub-let to a maniac.

He got up and went to the window, looked down into the narrow street, then across at the balconies and curtained windows of the building opposite, then at the tilted topography of roofs and terraces and air-conditioning hoods and downlink dishes. Craning his neck slightly, he could see the Underground tracks running in their cutting parallel to Farringdon Road. A Metropolitan Line train, identifiable from this distance because the Metropolitan Company still hadn’t modernised its rolling stock, rattled and rolled along the cutting, from tunnel to tunnel, and was gone. A colossal amorphous murmuration of starlings surged and darted across the darkening topaz sky.

The front door opened, banged shut. “That you, Seth?” called Lewis.

The Coureur went to the living room doorway. Lewis was taking off his jacket, a great pile of yellow and white Europa Foods carrier bags slowly collapsing around his feet and allowing tins of beans and loose yams and okra to topple onto the floor. It was a sure sign that there was nothing to eat in the entire flat; Lewis refused to enter a supermarket unless the only alternative was starvation, and he would not phone out for meals because he believed They kept lists.

“Good trip?” he asked, tossing his jacket in the general direction of the coathooks.

“Not bad.”

“Great.” Lewis bent down and started to lace his fingers through the tangle of shopping-bag handles. “I didn’t manage to do much cleaning up.”

“I noticed,” said Seth.

Lewis straightened up, lifting the carriers off the floor. The bottom split out of one and about a hundred apples rolled everywhere.

“Oops,” said Lewis.

LEWIS’S BELIEF-SYSTEM WAS a complex territory of conspiracy theories. He trusted neither the government nor the police. He refused to believe anything he saw on the news networks. One boozy night, he told Seth that at least ten percent of the passengers travelling on scheduled British Airways flights never reached their destinations.

“Documented fact,” he said, nodding sagely and levering the cap off another Budvar.

“So where do they go?” asked Seth, only slightly less drunk.

Lewis leaned forward and his voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper. “Madagascar. Colossal internment camp.”

Seth thought about it. “Why?”

Lewis sat up. “I don’t know,” he said. He waved his bottle of beer at Seth. “But you’d better watch yourself the next time you get on a BA flight, old son. Mark my words.”

Unpacking after one of Lewis’s infrequent shopping expeditions was an adventure. Lewis had a theory that there was something secretly crafty about bar-codes, that They were tracking each bar-coded item and compiling vast lists for a purpose made even more sinister and terrifying by being entirely unknown.

So trips to the supermarket inevitably ended with bags and packets piled on the kitchen table, Lewis bent over them with the scissors, cutting off bar-codes, to be burned later. When Seth first saw him doing this, he had inquired whether his flatmate needed regular medication, but it had turned out that Lewis was a relative rarity: a completely sane man whose world-view was almost entirely irrational. Sometimes, thinking about it, Seth wondered if Lewis might not actually be right. And then he usually wondered what Lewis would think if he knew what his flatmate really did for a living.

IN HIS ABSENCE, their landlord, an immensely aged Malaysian whom Lewis had dubbed, for no good reason, The Grasping Bastard, had visited the flat and entrusted to Lewis the twice-yearly message of happiness and joy that was their rent increase. This in itself was not a problem. Seth was reasonably well-off, and Lewis made a truly colossal amount of money developing advertising campaigns for products from which he would one day be cutting bar-codes. However, the Grasping Bastard had been unable to predict with any great certainty when a replacement for their recently-deceased washing machine would be forthcoming.

Which meant that, at around half past nine that evening, Seth was sitting on a padded bench in the neon-lit tropical heat of the local laundrette, watching his underwear doing flickflacks in the drier. Ah, the endless romance of the Coureur’s life…

He’d had a busy couple of months, four or five Situations on the run that had involved him flying off to Warsaw, Bruges, Barcelona and Nicosia, picking up sealed pouches, and flying with them to Berlin, Chicago, Dublin and Copenhagen. The last Situation had subsequently involved a train, bus and taxi ride to Narvik, a clandestine pass in a department store, and a dustoff through Helsinki. The first three Situations had been straight corporate data-transfer, routine stuff. The Narvik thing smacked of industrial espionage. Or maybe even real espionage; Central usually frowned on real espionage, preferring to leave it to nations, but in practice, at street level, it was impossible to know who you were taking a delivery from, impossible to know what was in the pouch. You made the jump, took the money, told yourself you were keeping alive the spirit of Schengen, and forgot about it.

The door opened, billowing cool air through the steamy laundrette. Seth looked up from his book. A middle-aged woman wearing biker boots, US Army desert camo trousers and a chunky black sweater was standing in the doorway, a big blue plastic carrier bag dangling from each hand. As the door closed behind her, she went over and started to walk down the line of washers, looking for a machine that wasn’t being used. Seth went back to his book.

Central had its roots in the hundreds of little courier firms which had been operating in Europe before the turn of the century, moving various items of merchandise – printed material too valuable to be entrusted to the postal system, disc-encoded data too important or secret to be entrusted to the net, and so on. If Central had had a single stated objective, it would have been the eventual abolition of borders and free movement for all, and if Central had been a moderately-sized multinational, Seth would have been one of the boys in the post-room.

This suited him, more or less. Central’s bread-and-butter business went on constantly, offered boundless opportunities for travel, and paid pretty well. There were strata above him in which the Packages moved by Central were people, the circumstances of their jumpoffs far more fraught and exciting, but for Seth those sorts of Situations seemed too much like hard work.

“This fucking thing doesn’t work.”

Seth looked up. The woman was standing by the detergent dispenser, a plastic cup in one hand and her washing-bags on the floor by her feet.

“This fucking thing doesn’t work,” she said again, pointing at the dispenser.

“You’ve got to buy a card,” said Seth, nodding at the box by the dispenser. “Ten pounds.”

The woman stood looking at him for a few moments as if she was thinking very hard about what he had told her. “I only want some fucking soap powder,” she said finally.

“The card works the machines as well.”

She narrowed her eyes at that, and Seth sighed. The last time this had happened to him, it had been aboard the bus to Narvik, when a grossly overweight Latvian had squeezed himself into the seat beside him and proceeded to try and sell him a small cardboard box which he claimed contained the mummified penis of Joseph Stalin. He didn’t know why these things happened. Maybe he had the sort of bone structure which proclaimed to lunatics here I am, talk to me.

“Look,” he said, getting up and going over to the card dispenser. “Why don’t I buy you a card, eh?”

“Don’t you fucking patronise me, sunshine,” said the woman. “I’ve got washing in these bags older than you. I can buy my own fucking cards.”

Seth spread his hands and stepped away from the dispenser, not quite being able to resist a half-bow at the last moment. The woman glared at him and put a £10 coin in the slot.

Seth went back to his seat and his pirouetting smalls, but it was impossible to ignore the woman as she wrestled the contents of the plastic cup of detergent into one of the empty machines – through the door, mind, not into the hopper on top – and hurled her washing in after it. Then she came back and sat beside Seth, heaved a huge sigh of relief, took an impressively abused-looking old paperback from one of the thigh pockets of her combat trousers, a pair of spectacles from the other pocket, and started to read. Seth felt his heart sink.

After they had been sitting side by side in silence for about ten minutes, Seth said, “I only just got back, you know.”

The woman looked up from her book. “Beg pardon, lovely?”

“I only just got home,” he said. “I’m shattered. I don’t want to go back out just yet.”

She looked at him and raised an eyebrow.

“The glasses,” he said. “They’re antiques.”

“I could have inherited the frames from my granny,” she said.

Seth tipped his head to one side.

She sighed. “Okay.” She took the spectacles off and looked at them, a little abashed. “There’s always something, isn’t there? I thought this was bloody good camo, too.” She beamed at him. “Well spotted, mind.”

He shrugged. I am a Coureur, witness my mad spectacle-identifying skillz. “What have you got for me?”

“Oh, I dunno,” she said, recovering her cheerfulness. “I just deliver ’em. Nobody tells me anything. Here.” She passed him the book. “Have a read of that.”

He took the book. Atlas Shrugged, the back cover and half the front torn off. It appeared to have spent quite a long time in a sauna as well; its pages had swollen up until it was almost twice its original thickness, which had already been considerable. “I’ve heard of it.”

“It’s shit,” the stringer said, standing up. “Woman was barking mad.” She turned to leave.

“What about your clothes?” Seth asked.

She turned back to him. “What?”

He nodded at the clothes in the washing machine.

“Oh, they’re not mine,” she said happily. “They’re just props. Fuck ’em. ’Bye.”

THE FLAT WAS on the top floor of a converted warehouse building on the edge of the confusing maze of little streets between Farringdon Road and the Grey’s Inn Road, just south of Clerkenwell Road. Back in the ’90s the whole area had experienced a spasm of conversion, but by the 2000s nobody could afford the rents so the converted blocks had been sold off, one by one, to housing associations. Artists and students and musicians moved into flats once occupied by young upwardly-mobile couples. Refugees and asylum-seekers from the newer states and polities of Europe and Africa arrived. Meetings of the Residents Association began to resemble sessions of the UN Security Council during an interpreters’ strike.

Seth had come here six years ago and fallen in love with the area at first sight. He’d been a Coureur for a couple of years by then, and his life consisted of drifting across the Continent moving Packages from place to place, living in hotels and Travelodges which were all somehow identical to each other. It was a busy couple of years, but at some point he found himself sitting in an hotel room and looking about him and wondering where precisely he was. Padania? Ulster? Somewhere in the Basque country?

He decided it was a bad sign, and logged-off for a couple of months to find himself a solid base, somewhere to call his own. He came back to London, visited his father and stepmother in Hampstead, spent some time with his sister and her family in Cornwall. He saw an ad in the online edition of Loot, and two days later he was introducing himself to Lewis.

If Lewis had been better-off there would have been no way he would have consented to share the flat, but in spite of being rather well-paid for what he did, he was in danger of losing his lease if he didn’t find someone to help him with the rent. Seth later found himself feeling a glow of professional pride at the fact that, of all the applicants for the flatshare, Lewis had felt him to be the least suspect.

Trying to look at himself objectively, Seth supposed that he represented the perfect flatmate. Neat, tidy, unobtrusive, forgiving. Away for extended periods on business. Willing to cook meals and wash up afterwards without complaint. But most important of all, pretty well-off. In this way, he convinced Lewis that he was not an Agent Of Them. Seth thought this was quite amusing, considering he really did work for what amounted to a global conspiracy.

Lewis was out again when Seth got back with his washing. Seth had never found out what his flatmate did on his evenings out. Certainly pubs featured somewhere, but which ones, and with whom, he didn’t know. Sometimes he pictured upstairs rooms in dingy Fitzrovia taverns, a circle of conspiracy theorists perched anxiously on chairs arranged around the walls, pints of real ale clutched in their fists as they discussed in hushed voices the latest convoluted doings of Them. Them, of course, being a chimera of Science, the Military, the Government and anything to do with America. Lewis did have a girlfriend, a wispy presence named Angela who did makeup for advertising shoots and who sometimes drifted through the flat, naked but for a huge butterfly barrette in her hair, in search of toast and tea to take back to Lewis’s bedroom. Seth had never had a meaningful conversation of any kind with her beyond answering the question, “Where’s the marmalade?”

This all rather suited him. Apart from that one time with the leg wound, he had never brought his work home with him; there had never been any need to. Home was where he went when he wasn’t being a Coureur, a solid hub about which to rotate a peripatetic lifestyle. He liked it here. He liked Lewis, and he even rather liked Angela, to the extent that she existed in his life at all. For all that he could never predict, from one week to the next, where work would take him, it was a settled life and he had it organised the way he liked it.

For example, all his jobs were delivered to an anonymised email account which deleted and rewrote itself twenty-eight times every day on an all-but-forgotten secure server in a basement at the Ministry of Defence. He was used to this, used to the familiar little ping on his phone as some new Situation was delivered.

He could count on the fingers of one hand the number of times a stringer had hand-delivered instructions to him.

It was also some years – not since his entry-level days as a stringer himself, in fact – since he had been asked to create a legend for someone.

He sat on the sofa and looked at the slip of paper he had extracted from between the pages of the brick-sized copy of Atlas Shrugged. Male. Caucasian. Light brown hair, hazel eyes. Height so and so, weight such and such. Name: Roger Curtis. And that was it. He was, in effect, being asked to build Mr Curtis from the pavement up.

Which, while undeniably interesting in an academic sort of way, was a bit pedestrian and quite a distance outside his usual briefs these days. On the other hand, it was stuff he could do without having to leave London. And the note included a URL and a set of code strings which gave him access to an operational account and a line of credit running to a little over a million euros.

That last gave him some pause. Operational funding was perfectly normal – one had to buy tickets, book hotels, sometimes hand out bribes – but the sum here was beyond his experience and it left him a little flatfooted. It was up to him who Mr Curtis was, but who wanted to be Mr Curtis for this fantastical amount of money?

The note also included a link to an online dropbox which contained a single notepad file with the words ‘I used to date the Rokeby Venus.’ A recognition string by which the recipient of the legend – or at least a go-between come to collect it – would make themselves known to him. This at least was perfectly standard. Everything about the job was perfectly standard. Except the money. The money stood out from the perfect standardisation like a sore thumb, and he had to ponder why whoever was wrangling this job had allowed that to slip by. A message? This is important. Don’t screw up? Or just simple honest carelessness?

Impossible to know. A job was a job. A quick check of his account confirmed that he had already been paid for it, and paid well.

Fair enough. Seth took out his phone and created a couple of new contacts, then disguised the bank URL and code strings as phone numbers and web addresses. He memorised Mr Curtis’s physical attributes. Then he ate the slip of paper and opened the copy of Atlas Shrugged at the first page.

After a dozen pages, he closed the book, got up, and dumped it in the kitchen bin. The stringer at the laundrette was right; it was terrible.

MR CURTIS WAS a Scot. That was the first thing he decided. Scottish independence had not been the simple, pain-free process envisaged by generations of SNP politicians, and many municipal buildings – including the record offices of a number of towns – had been torched in the Separation Riots and their documents and servers destroyed. There was an enormous black hole in Scotland’s public data, and it was a simple matter to insert a nonexistent person into it. It was also a bit of a cliché, but just because something is a cliché doesn’t make it untrue. Hundreds of thousands of real people had had all their personal data destroyed during the Riots too. He checked through newspaper files of the Separation, noted which record offices had been destroyed, which schools.

He took a train to Edinburgh – sat for an hour at the border post outside Berwick while Scottish customs officers searched the carriages for drugs and other contraband – and wandered the city for a couple of days, getting a feel for the place. He thought Scotland was having a bit of a rough time these days. The tail-end of North Sea Oil which the new state had inherited had become uneconomic to extract some years before, tourism hadn’t taken up the slack to the degree everyone had been banking on, and the big tech firms had fled Silicon Glen for more stable parts of Europe. The city, even its historic heart, was looking shabby and the locals looked grey and thin and unhappy. A debate had already begun at Westminster over whether to allow Scotland to rejoin England; the consensus seemed to be a resounding no at the moment. There were still English MPs with long enough memories to want to punish the Scots for leaving the United Kingdom in the first place.

Back in London, he did the hacking himself. He wardrove around the City and the West End, latching on to corporate hotspots whose encryption hadn’t been kept up to date, sat in nearby libraries and coffee shops and calmly inserted Roger Curtis’s birth and education information into the databases in Edinburgh. He backstopped the data with fragmentary bits about Mr Curtis’s parents – both deceased now, sadly – supposedly retrieved from riot-damaged servers and seared filing cabinets. In hacking terms, it was shooting fish in a barrel. Desperate for funds, the Edinburgh government had offered the country as a private data haven, but hadn’t bothered to upgrade its public data security for almost a decade. He breezed through the databases, tweaking and adjusting, and it was as if he had never been there.

University records were almost as easy. The United States was littered with the corpses of little failed colleges, particularly in the Midwest. Roger Curtis went to one of these, not far from Milwaukee. Of his classmates and tutors, a statistically-convincing number were now dead. Everyone else was scattered as far from Europe as possible, their trails becoming blurred and unreadable.

He left Mr Curtis’s work history vague. A year as an itinerant citizen journalist in South America. Some volunteer work with charities in Guatemala and Chile. Then back to Britain and a succession of small temporary jobs in London with firms which had now gone bust and whose details were sparse to the point of transparency. Most recently, a flat in Balham. Seth went south of the river and rented the flat himself in Mr Curtis’s name, then set about the dull minutiae of accumulating utility bills, making a slight nuisance of himself with the letting agents, getting a parking ticket in Tooting, and so on and so forth. He left as much room as possible for customisation by whoever came along later to drive Mr Curtis.

The whole thing took him about three weeks, and at the end of it he still had most of the operational funds left, which he felt professionally rather proud of. He gave the data one last tweak, left one last complaint about the drains with the letting agents, left a message in a Coureur dropbox that the legend was ready for handover, and headed to Padstow to spend the weekend with his sister.

AT AROUND EIGHT o’clock on Sunday night a previously-unknown wing of an almost-overlooked homegrown terrorist organisation blew up a signal junction box just outside Swindon.

The box, about the size of a shoebox, was a switch for about seventy optical cables carrying data from points and signals between London and Land’s End. The explosion, achieved by drilling a hole into the switch’s casing and then pouring in gunpowder obtained by opening up fireworks, was so discreet that it was only discovered the following morning when engineers located the cable break and went to repair it. At roughly the same time, a very vague and barely-literate press release claiming responsibility for the outrage began to make the rounds. Hardly anyone had ever heard of the culprits before, and no one ever heard of them again.

The signal break didn’t stop trains altogether, but it caused delays for an hour or so until a workaround was sorted out, and that caused a knock-on effect which meant that the six forty-five from Padstow, due to arrive in Paddington at ten o’clock, did not actually get into Paddington until almost midnight. Seth, lugging his weekend bag down the platform with the rest of the disgruntled passengers, avoided the enormous scrum at the taxi rank, left the station altogether, and walked down to the big hotels near the bottom of the Edgware Road, where there were always taxis aplenty. He waved one cab down as it made to pull into the rank beside the Marriott, slung his bag inside, and settled back against the seat with his eyes closed.

IT WAS VERY nearly one in the morning when Seth paid off the taxi outside his building in Farringdon and dragged his bag tiredly up the stairs. Kids from the local council estate had managed to bypass the street door’s lock again and they’d smashed all the lightbulbs on Seth’s landing. He could feel the glass crunch under his feet as he walked along by the dim light of his phone’s screen, and he made a note to tear a strip off the building’s security in the morning.

Outside his door, there also seemed to be something sticky mixed up with the glass. Seth grumbled to himself and unlocked the front door and stepped inside and immediately fell over something lying on the floor in the hallway.

Swearing at the top of his voice now, Seth got up and tried the hall light switch, but it didn’t seem to work so he took his phone out again and turned on its screen and by the light from that he saw Lewis lying on his back on the floor, his eyes open, a little black hole in his forehead and his face distorted as if it had been badly inflated. Under his head and shoulders was a big puddle of a dark liquid, which had run out under the door and onto the landing.

Seth’s mind refused to process any of this.

Nor would it process the hunched figure lying half in and half out of Lewis’s bedroom doorway, the barrette which had once been in its hair now tumbled against the skirting just outside the kitchen.

He heard glass crunch, behind him.

He turned and saw a dark figure detach itself from the shadows of the doorway opposite. By the light from his phone he saw that it was wearing tight-fitting dark clothing and carrying what appeared to be a pistol with a very long barrel. The figure raised the pistol and gestured with it and Seth raised his hands above his head. Another gesture, and Seth took a step back down the hallway as the gunman reached the doorway and raised the gun and pointed it at his head.

There was a soft coughing noise, and the top third of the dark figure’s head fountained off in a pattering spray of droplets and bits of bone and tissue. For a fraction of a second, the body remained upright, then its knees unlocked and it crumpled to the floor.

Seth stayed where he was, hands above his head, face spattered with gore.

After a few moments, another figure moved into the doorway. This figure was also holding a gun.

“Anyone else?” the figure asked.

Seth shrugged.

“I didn’t see anyone else about.” The figure stepped into the flat and nudged the gunman’s body with a toe. “Jesus Maria,” he said. “What a mess.” Now Seth could see him properly, he could see he was of medium height, quite unremarkable-looking. Unlike the gun he was holding, which looked like something knocked together in someone’s shed from bits and pieces of garden equipment, bits of hose and short lengths of two-centimetre copper piping.

He looked at Seth. “Put your hands down,” he said, and he closed the door behind him. “Is there anything in here you absolutely can’t live without?”

Seth shook his head and lowered his hands.

“Okay. Get changed, wash your face and get a coat. And hurry.”

Seth tipped his head to one side. “And you are…?”

His unremarkable-looking saviour looked at him. He shrugged, and that weird improvised-looking gun seemed to disappear into the folds of his coat.

“Call me Leo,” he said.

THERE WAS A battered old Espace parked around the corner, and Leo had the key. Seth allowed himself to be put into the front passenger seat, watched himself do up the seat belt, watched through the windscreen as the early-morning streets began to unroll in front of him. He felt as if his life had suddenly become something he was watching from outside. He was faintly aware that he was trembling.

“That shouldn’t have happened, and I’m sorry it did,” Leo said, navigating them around the tricky one-way system and late-night pavement-diving drunks of King’s Cross.

Seth turned his head to look at the unassuming young man, found that he was quite unable to speak.

Leo glanced at him, then had to perform an emergency stop as a cab launched itself from the kerb without signalling in front of them. He did not, though, hammer the flat of his hand on the middle of the steering wheel in order to sound the horn, as another driver might. He muttered a few words Seth didn’t recognise, and let the cab go.

“One day,” he said to himself, “I’m going to come back here and revenge myself on the fucking drivers in this town.” His English was excellent, almost Received Pronunciation, but he had a faint accent Seth couldn’t place.

Seth said, “I’m going to be sick.”

Leo got the car stopped at the side of the road and helped Seth out and over to the mouth of an alleyway, where Seth threw up what felt like everything he had ever eaten and then knelt with his cheek pressed against the rough brickwork of a wall, sobbing while the world yawed and pitched around him.

Then he was in the car again, without remembering getting back in, and unfamiliar streets were opening up ahead of him in the streetlights and the red lights of vehicles ahead of him stretched up into a terrible unknown distance and Leo was talking again.

“I tried,” he was saying. “I tried to keep you all away from the flat, but I was having to improvise and it didn’t work. Your friends… I’m sorry. It didn’t work.”

Seth opened his mouth to say something, but all that emerged was a hopeless exhalation. He wondered if he would ever stop shaking.

“I owe you an explanation, at the very least,” Leo said, but then he seemed lost for words because he didn’t say anything for quite a long time. They reached a large traffic junction with a big pub in the middle of it and Seth realised they were at Archway. Leo navigated them around the junction and onto the Archway Road, up onto the long hill northward out of London towards Highgate.

“I’ve become involved in something… complicated,” Leo said as they passed under the great iron bridge that carried Hornsey Road high above the Archway Road. “I don’t know what it is, and in order to make any sense at all of it I need to get back to mainland Europe. And I need a legend.”

Seth turned his head and looked at Leo.

Leo glanced at him ruefully. “I used to date the Rokeby Venus,” he said. When Seth just stared at him he said, “I’m afraid this whole thing is a bit off-piste.”

The first words Seth managed to say since King’s Cross were, “‘A bit’?”

“Nobody was supposed to die,” Leo said angrily. “It’s me they want; I didn’t think they’d involve bystanders.”

“They?”

Leo shook his head. “I don’t know. Someone told me Central wants me dead, but I don’t believe that. They also told me Greater German counterintelligence wants me dead, and I find that easier to believe but I have no idea why because I haven’t done anything to make them angry. I just don’t know. I need to get back to the mainland, talk to people, try and make sense of this catastrophe.”

Seth made several attempts to parse all this, while they drove up through East Finchley and North Finchley, but none of the words seemed to fit together in his head. It was just noise.

He said. “Lewis. Angela.”

“Your friends? I’m genuinely sorry about that. If I could have stopped that, I would have.”

Seth started to fumble in his pockets for his phone. “Someone should tell Lewis’s parents…”

Leo reached out and took the phone from Seth’s hand, opened the driver’s side window, and dropped the phone out. Seth momentarily heard the faint sound of things breaking on the road, then it was gone.

“Sorry,” he said over Seth’s gasp of surprise. “No phone calls.”

Seth gaped at him for a few moments, and then he found himself hunched breathless against the passenger door, a pain in his jaw. There were scratches on Leo’s face, and a driver behind them angrily sounding his horn.

“Please don’t do that again,” Leo said. “Or at least try to wait until I’m not driving.”

“Who are you?” Seth yelled.

“I’m a Coureur,” Leo replied. “And I’m in a Situation. I mean you no harm. I need your help. We need each other’s help, actually, because they’re coming for you now as well.”

“Because of a legend?”

“Because it was a legend for me. I don’t know; I don’t understand any of it. They’ve already killed my brother.”

Another long silence in the car. They were in Barnet before Seth said, “The Germans.”

“I don’t know for sure that it is the Germans. I was told it is, and I was involved in something… strange in Berlin a little while ago, so it’s at least credible. It just doesn’t make any sense.”

Another long silence. The car drove through Barnet and Potters Bar and out into the Hertfordshire countryside.

Seth said, “I’m going to be sick again.”

Leo slowed the car, pulled over to the side of the road. Seth threw off his seatbelt, opened his door, and leapt out. He crashed straight through a hedge into the field beyond and kept going as fast as he could.

“Don’t be stupid!” he heard Leo call behind him. “You need my help. You won’t last more than a few days on your own.”

Seth caught his toe in a rut and fell full-length.

“Hey!” Leo called. “Where are you?”

“I’m here,” Seth called back. “I think I’ve broken my ankle.”

“IT’S ONLY A sprain,” Leo said.

“Well, that’s all right then,” said Seth. They were back in the car, way out in the sleeping unlit countryside now. He had no idea where they were, but he had a sense that they might have turned east at some point. “What happened to your brother?”

For a moment he thought Leo wasn’t going to answer at all. “They tried to get to me through my family,” Leo said finally. “My father was seriously hurt. My brother got in the way.”

“What about my family?”

Leo didn’t say anything.

“We have to help them,” Seth said.

“I know.” Leo shook his head.

“So?”

“So we’ll help them. First we need somewhere to rest.” He glanced over. “Am I going to have to tie you up or something?”

Seth thought about it. “Help my dad and my sister first. Then we’ll talk about it.”

THEY WOUND UP in a Travelodge on the outskirts of Bishops Stortford. Leo booked them into a twin room, bought support strapping and painkillers for Seth’s ankle from the motel’s shop, and they carried their bags inside.

With the door locked behind them, Leo took a little grey box not much larger than a book of matches from one of his tote-bags and stuck it on the jamb, near the top. Then he did the same with all the windows, even though they were on the fourth floor of the motel. Then he took his overcoat off and Seth finally got a clear look at the thing he had shot the gunman with. There was a little metal bottle strapped to his belt, and reinforced hoses running from it and down his arm to a bundle of copper tubes about six inches long, mounted on a sliding rail arrangement buckled around his forearm.

Leo saw him looking at the contraption. “I was in a hurry,” he said. “I got a blacksmith to put it together for me.”

In Coureur terminology, a blacksmith was an armourer. A mythological figure in Seth’s world. “What is it?”

Leo unstrapped the thing and put it on the table and looked sadly at it. “Flechette gun. Powered by compressed air. Lovely piece of work, at such short notice.” He glanced at Seth. “Can I trust you not to fiddle about with it when my back’s turned? There wasn’t time to put in a safety catch.”

Seth nodded.

“All right.” Leo unzipped another of his bags and took out a laptop and a packet of disposable phones. “Let’s see what we can do about your family, then.”

It took him over an hour of picking about on various websites and anonymised chatboards and making calls – one call per phone and then discarding it. Some of the calls sounded tense, others completely obscure. Seth used the room’s facilities to make them coffee and paced back and forth so much that Leo told him to sit down, which Seth answered with a heartfelt couple of expletives.

Finally, Leo sat back and closed the laptop.

“Is it okay?” Seth asked.

“We’ll know in a little while. The great thing about Les Coureurs is that it’s a completely compartmentalised organisation. Everyone’s used to getting anonymous orders and carrying them out, and half the time nobody knows why they’re doing what they’re doing. You just have to hack into that structure and so long as you know who to talk to and you have the right recognition strings no one ever questions their instructions.”

“Like me.”

Leo rubbed his eyes. “You, the stringer who passed you the job order. Just doing what you were told, because why shouldn’t you?” He blinked blearily at Seth. “It was such a low-level job. I honestly thought it would go without a hitch. I’m sorry.” He sighed. “What a fucking mess.”

“Why me?”

“Sorry? Oh. Just the luck of the draw, really. I had a list of about half a dozen people who could have done it. I didn’t want to use stringers; I wanted someone with experience, someone who’d do it right.”

“You should have split the job up into segments and given each one to a different person.”

“Yes, more anonymous that way, I know. But the more people know about something, the more chance there is of it coming to light. I decided it was best to give it to just one person.” Leo checked his watch – a cheaply-printed thing that looked as if it had come as a free gift with a pair of printed shoes. “Get some sleep. Nothing’s going to happen for a couple of hours.”

“You have to be kidding.”

“You must be exhausted. I know I am.”

“Not a chance. Tell me how my friends wound up dead and I wound up on the run. That’ll keep us both awake.”

So Leo – Rudi, apparently – told him a mad story of chefs and restaurants and catastrophic jumps and hot briefcases and heads in lockers, a riot in a national park, a fake barristers’ chambers, a year of moving from place to place incognito. The story was interrupted a couple of times by calls to one or other of the disposable phones, which Rudi answered tersely. Finally – it was daylight outside now – one call came through and Rudi held the phone out to him, and when he took it and put it to his ear he heard his father’s voice demanding to know what the hell was going on and why there was a strange person with a gun in his house.

“Dad,” he said when he got a moment’s silence. “Dad, just go with them. They’re there to help you. They’re going to take you somewhere safe.”

“Safe? Safe from what? Take us where?”

“Just go with them, Dad, please. I’ll be in touch later.” Rudi was holding another phone out to him. “I’ve got another call. I’ll be in touch.” And he took the other phone and had a similar conversation with his sister.

When he’d finished and put the phones down on the stack on the table, Rudi told him, “There was someone outside your sister’s house.”

Seth stared at him.

“I wanted them taken alive so I could find out who sent them, but there was… um.” Rudi shrugged. “Anyway, your family are on their way to safe houses right now. I’ll organise something more permanent for them in a day or so. Now will you get some sleep?”

IT WAS MID-AFTERNOON before Seth woke up, still tired and headachey, on the bed. Rudi was nowhere to be seen, but his bags – and the custom-built flechette gun – were still there, so Seth had a quick shower, dressed in fresh clothes, and went for a wander.

He found Rudi in the motel’s almost-deserted bar/restaurant, talking quietly on one of the disposable phones and staring at a sausage sandwich as if it had done him an unforgivable wrong. He ordered an Americano and a burger and sat down across from the young Coureur.

“So,” he said when Rudi had finished his call.

Rudi rubbed his face. “Well, Roger Curtis is unusable, I’m afraid. He’s wanted for the murder of your flatmate and his girlfriend.” He shook his head. “Which is actually quite elegant, if you think about it. Someone less sophisticated would have framed you or me.”

“I can get you out,” Seth said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I might not be all high and mighty and important like you, but I’ve got some contacts. I can get you out. But it won’t be cheap.”

“Nothing worth having ever is.” Rudi shrugged. “I’m sensing an ‘and’ hanging in the air between us.”

“I’m going with you.”

To his credit, Rudi didn’t even try to talk him out of it. He just nodded tiredly. “Yes, well, I’d taken that as a given, rather. Is it my imagination, or is there another ‘and’ here as well?”

“We have to go to Scotland.”

Rudi opened his mouth to say something. Closed it again.

“IT’S ALL ABOUT jurisdiction,” Seth said. “And the Acts of Union.”

Rudi shook his head. “I’ve spent almost a year on the run trying to get out of this fucking country. Why did nobody ever tell me about this?”

“It’s nuance,” Seth told him. “Nitpicking stuff. Body language, really. There probably aren’t more than a dozen people in the whole country who appreciate it properly, and they don’t want the public to know about it because it looks bad.”

They were driving across a rain-lashed landscape of moorland and forest in Northumberland. The B-road they were on was in a terrible state of repair, and the Espace’s suspension kept bottoming out in potholes and ruts in the tarmac. It was half past one in the afternoon, and already the light was taking on a dim, failing, underwater quality.

“Are you trying to tell me,” Rudi said, “that the border isn’t there?”

Seth sighed. “1603,” he said. “James VI of Scotland becomes James I of England. Most people think that’s when England and Scotland became one country, but actually, although there was one monarch, there were still two Crowns.”

“Because joining two countries together is just as complicated as splitting one up,” Rudi said. He lit a small cigar, opened the driver’s window a crack to let the smoke out.

“It used to be easier,” Seth said. “But that was when kings wore full armour and rode into battle on great fuck-off big horses and all you had to do was kill the other side’s king.” He took a bag from beside his feet, rummaged around in it, and came up with an apple. He took a bite. “Anyway, they actually had three goes at unification. First was under James I. He called himself ‘King of Great Britain,’ and he thought unification was a shoo-in, but the English Parliament was worried that it would mean some of the powers he had as King of Scotland being imposed on England. So. Close, but no cigar.

“Second try was in 1654. Cromwell occupies Scotland during the Civil War, and afterwards he issues an edict creating a Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland. Scotland gets MPs at Westminster. This of course all disappears automatically when Charles II takes to the throne, and the Scottish MPs have to go home. He tries to get unification talks going again in 1669, but it all grinds to a halt.”

“Do children in this country have to memorise this stuff?” Rudi asked.

“This is just background,” Seth replied. “Anyway. 1707. Queen Anne. A Treaty of Unification is ratified. And ever since then the Scots have wanted to leave.”

“Ungrateful bastards.”

“The Scots started to call officially for devolution around the middle of the nineteenth century, I think,” Seth said. He shook his head. “After that it all just gets too fucking complicated. But the point is, when the Separation did take place twenty years ago, it happened in a hurry after a long and fractious history, and there was a lot of bad blood on both sides.”

“And all of a sudden, after a little more than four hundred years, there was a border between the two countries.”

“Well, there was always a border, but most of the time it was just marked with a couple of signs or some farm fencing. You drove back and forth or you got the train or you walked. Nobody stopped you. Half the time you didn’t even realise you’d crossed it. But yes. All of a sudden there was a border. Something that needed defending, patrolling, surveilling.”

“Which costs money.”

Seth grinned. “Oh, it’s much more complicated than that,” he said.

THEY STOPPED AT a bed-and-breakfast place, a farm more or less out in the middle of nowhere. There had been no need to make a reservation; the place was so isolated and the weather was so bad that they were more or less the only vehicle to pass by that day. The owner, a tall, patrician-looking woman with a strong Scots accent, seemed overjoyed to see them and happily booked them into adjoining rooms.

Later that evening – though notionally a bed-and-breakfast, there wasn’t anywhere within an hour’s drive to buy lunch or dinner – they sat in the farm’s little dining room, where Rudi seemed to thoroughly approve of the lamb stew and dumplings on offer, even going so far as to ask the landlady for the recipe.

“Scotland waited too long for independence,” Seth said when the landlady had gone back into another part of the farmhouse to watch television with her husband. “The country was almost broke when the Separation happened, but there was no going back once it had started. There would have been a catastrophe.”

“It was pretty violent anyway, from what I understand,” Rudi said.

“It was in the cities, certainly. But there was no way to stop it. If the government had tried to row back there might have been civil war. It wasn’t a popular government to start with.” He shrugged. “And then, all of a sudden, they’re trying to kickstart an independent nation with the barest of mandates and no money in the Treasury to pay for… well, for anything, pretty much. There was a police force, but no army, navy or air force. The Westminster government was unwilling to provide any help, and the EU wouldn’t bail them out until Scotland became an EU member.”

“Which can take a while.”

“Which can take a while.” Seth drank some of the landlady’s husband’s excellent homebrew and looked around the empty dining room. “Anyway, Holyrood finally made a deal with the Chinese. Which pissed off Westminster and Washington and Brussels and just about everyone else, but really they had no choice. Prestwick Airport is now a Chinese airbase, the Scots got enough money to survive the transition to nationhood, and the Ayrshire Coast is targeted with enough megatonnage to make it glow at night for a million years.”

“And the Anglo-Scottish border is one of the most heavily-defended on Earth.”

“Yes. And no.”

Rudi raised an eyebrow.

“The Scottish Government has been on the edge of bankruptcy for almost the entire time the country’s been independent,” Seth said. “The border’s less than a hundred miles long – call it about a hundred and fifty kilometres, which isn’t very much – but the Scots can’t afford a border defence force. They’ve got a volunteer force of a couple of hundred people, and for most of its length the border runs through country like…” He gestured at the outdoors with his fork. “Wild, horrid country. Even the Romans hated it up here, and they were used to being out in all weathers.”

“Whereas the English…?”

“Everything. Garrisons just south of Berwick and Gretna, regular patrols, fences, sensors. Drone flights along the border – which the Scots tend to shoot down; the Chinese gave them some obsolete automated sentry guns. The thing is…” He smiled.

“The thing is…?” asked Rudi.

“The English are watching for stuff coming south. Not going in the opposite direction.”

IT WAS STILL raining the next morning, and great gusts of wind and water were blowing in veils and sheets down the valley where the farm sat. Seth and Rudi came to breakfast – a very passable selection of sausage, bacon, black pudding, fried potatoes, grilled tomatoes, mushrooms, toast, fried bread, baked beans – to discover that in the night the bed-and-breakfast had acquired two more guests, a couple of young women named Annette and Lauren, who had taken shelter at the height of last night’s storm.

“Couldn’t see more than a couple of feet past the end of the car,” Lauren told them from the adjoining table. She had a Glaswegian accent. “Just a solid wall of water. Right, Nette?”

“Right,” said Annette, who was small and taciturn and sounded – from the few words she said – as if she was from down in the West Country somewhere.

“Thought we were going to have to pull over and sleep in the car, then Nette spotted a sign for this place. Right, Nette?”

Annette was examining a triangle of fried bread as if the conjunction of frying pan and bread had never occurred to her before. She looked up and nodded. “Right.”

“We’re off to Hawick, see my parents,” Lauren said. “How about you guys?”

“Glasgow,” said Seth. “We’re opening a restaurant.”

“Yeah? Whereabouts?”

“Down by the river. Near the SEC.”

“Ach, I wish you luck with that,” Lauren said.

“Thank you,” said Rudi.

Lauren looked at her watch. “How’s the rain?”

Seth leaned back in his chair so he could see out of the window; the glass was running with water. “Still pouring down.”

“Hm. What do you reckon?” she asked Annette. “Shall we chance it?”

Annette put down her fried bread. “I can’t eat this,” she said. “What’s wrong with you people?”

Lauren chuckled. “Nette’s not been feeling well,” she told them.

“I feel all right,” Annette protested in a low voice. “How can you do this to bread? It’s a sin.”

“Okay,” said Lauren, getting to her feet. “That’s us away, then. Nice to meet you, guys.” Annette stood up too, and looked around the dining room as if searching for more abused bread.

“Drive carefully,” said Rudi.

“Yeah, you too,” said Lauren. “Happy trails.”

After the girls had gone, Seth looked at Rudi. “We ought to be getting on our way too, you know.”

“I hope you know what you’re doing,” Rudi told him.

“I know what I’m doing,” Seth said.

“Good.”

“I’m going to Europe with you, we’re going to find out who ordered that bloke to kill Lewis and Angela, and I’m going to kill them.”

Rudi sighed. He looked down at the remains of their breakfast. “She’s right, you know.”

“Who?”

“That girl. Fried bread. I’ll never understand what goes on in the heads of the English.”

THE RAIN SEEMED to be easing up a little as they checked out and carried their luggage out to the car, but the moment they were on the road again it started bucketing down. The hills and moors and forests withdrew behind a pounding grey curtain and all the windscreen wipers did was divert the stream of water first one way, then the next.

“This is a terrible place,” Rudi said from the passenger’s seat, having turned the driving over to Seth for a while. “I’m never coming here again.”

“Northumberland,” Seth said, peering through the windscreen. “Part of the ancient kingdom of Bernicia.”

“The fucking Bernicians are welcome to it. Are you sure you know what you’re doing?”

“Yes, I am.”

“Hm.” Rudi crossed his arms and stared out at the lashing rain.

They drove through what seemed to be a huge area of forest, and skirted the edge of a big lake, its other shore completely lost in the rain, then out onto moorland and back into the forest again. At one point a colossal truck carrying logs emerged from the rain, lights blazing, and blew past them at such a speed that the car rocked in its wake and Seth swore and fought not to lose control of the wheel.

A few minutes later they passed a car pulled up at the side of the road, its bonnet open and two sodden, wind-lashed figures standing looking at the engine. Seth drove past a hundred yards or so, then pulled in to the side and stopped the Espace. When he saw Rudi staring at him he said, “We’re Coureurs. We’re supposed to help people.”

“It’s the two girls from the farm,” Rudi said, “and they’re part of the English security presence here.”

“No they’re not,” Seth said, opening the driver’s door. “The farmer and his wife are.”

They took their bags from the back of the car and trudged back along the roadside to where Lauren and Annette stood waiting.

“I think it’s the electrics,” Lauren said, gesturing at the engine of her car.

“We’re in a hurry,” said Seth.

She looked at him. “Aye,” she said, nodding. “Aye, everyone’s always in a hurry. Get in.” She turned and dropped the bonnet, then she and Annette got into the front seats and Rudi and Seth in the back. Lauren drove. The engine started first time.

“What about our car?” asked Rudi.

“Someone’s following two miles behind us,” said Lauren. “They’ll pick it up and take it to Manchester or Newcastle and leave it with the keys in the ignition. It’ll be nicked in an hour, resprayed and replated in three.”

“You’re not Coureurs,” Rudi said.

“No,” Annette said, turning in the front seat and holding out two cloth bags. “We’re not. Put these over your heads.”

“Why?”

Seth put his hood on. “Nobody knows how they do this,” he said, his voice muffled. “They want to keep it that way.”

Rudi shrugged and put the hood on.

They drove for another ten minutes or so, then made an abrupt left turn onto a jolting, uneven road, then another series of right and left turns until Seth had no idea where they were. Then all of a sudden Lauren stopped the car.

“You can take your hoodies off now, lads,” she said brightly. “Welcome to Scotland.”

“I’m sorry?” Rudi said, removing his hood.

Lauren said, “Welcome to Scotland,” again, and pointed through the windscreen at a narrow track running away through the forest. “If you walk down there about five miles, you’ll come to a road. You can get a bus into Hawick from there. After that, you can get a train anywhere you want.”

“Is this some kind of joke?” Rudi asked.

“No, it’s not,” said Seth. He took a fat envelope from his jacket pocket and handed it to Lauren, who opened it and rifled through its contents. “Come on,” he told Rudi.

They got out of the car and stood in the rain while Lauren turned the vehicle around. She lowered the driver’s window and poked her head out. “Don’t try and follow us,” she told them. Then she rolled the window back up and drove off into the dripping, windy dimness between the trees, leaving Seth and Rudi standing in the middle of the track.

“How much did you give them?” said Rudi as the car’s lights bounced away down the track.

“The rest of the operational fund,” Seth said.

“The rest of the operational fund,” Rudi repeated, looking around him. “Okay.”

“I heard about them when I was in Edinburgh,” said Seth. “There’s a group running people and contraband back and forth across the border, and nobody knows how they do it.”

“I hope those girls had very good bona fides,” Rudi said.

Seth shouldered his bag. “Let’s find out.”

IT TOOK THEM almost three hours to reach the end of the track. It opened out onto a rutted, damaged B-road. A hundred yards or so further down, a transparent plastic bus shelter almost covered in sprayed graffiti stood all alone by the side of the road. They stood in the shelter, shaking rain from their clothes and looking about them.

“How did you get in touch with them?” Rudi wanted to know.

“I didn’t. They contacted me.” Off in the distance through the rain, Seth could see the approaching headlights of a vehicle.

“They contacted you.”

“While I was in Edinburgh doing research for Roger Curtis. They wanted to know what I was up to.” Seth picked up his bag. “I was impressed; I was being pretty careful.”

“And on that basis you just handed over a very large amount of money to two strangers, without any evidence of their claims.”

“Of course not,” said Seth. The vehicle was now close enough to be identified as a bus, bouncing and bumping along the appalling road. “I asked for a demonstration and they gave me a freebie. This is how I came back across the border.” The bus pulled to a stop at the shelter, its illuminated destination sign reading ‘HAWICK.’ “Shall we?”

1.

AT DAWN, THE Revisionists rocketed Building 2.

They used RPGs and at least one aged TOW wire-guided anti-tank missile, but they must have bought the munitions at one of the anarchic car-boot sales on the outskirts of the city because most of them failed to detonate. The few that did caused little damage, and fire-suppression teams were able to cope.

Still, it was a message that Xavier and his cohorts had not yet given up. They’d been quiet for almost a month until this morning, and some of the Kapitan’s advisers had begun to murmur that perhaps the opposition had seen the error of its ways. The Kapitan, who had found Xavier under a pile of rubbish behind the Anhalter station and raised him like a member of his own family, had known better.

Kapitan Todt rarely slept these days, anyway, so the attack wasn’t a colossal surprise. He spent his nights moving from window to window, watching Building 4 through image-amplifying binoculars, and he’d caught the signs of movement, the figures flitting about in rooms across the Parade Ground, that presaged some kind of action. Xavier must want him to think he was getting sloppy. By the time the first rocket propelled grenade was fired, he had already brought the Grandsons – who had been on a state of red alert for over a year now anyway – to full readiness and there were no casualties and only minimal damage.

In the fitful grey light of morning, once he had satisfied himself that the attack wasn’t a feint or the opening move of a full-scale assault, the Kapitan did a quick tour of the damaged areas, mostly in the centre of the building between the eighth and fifteenth floors. Broken windows. Rubble. Some fire and smoke damage. Emergency teams were already cleaning up the mess. The Kapitan nodded appreciatively, offered some quiet words of thanks and support, all smiles and calm.

Inwardly, he was furious.

Later, when his intelligence chief answered the summons to his office, the Kapitan closed the door behind them and then grabbed the man by the front of his shirt and threw him across the room.

“Intelligence failure!” he shouted. “People could have been killed! For an intelligence failure!”

The intelligence chief, whose name was Hansi, picked himself up off the floor and wiped blood from a cut on his face. “None of our sources reported anything like this, Kapitan,” he said.

“I should dangle you out of this window by your cock and let Xavier and his friends take pot-shots at you,” the Kapitan snarled. The last intelligence failure had missed the Revisionists’ hiring of an expert sniper from Bremen. Eight people had died before an assassination squad broke into Building 1 and killed him. The Kapitan had made Hansi lead the squad himself, and had let him live when his mission was successful. Kapitan Todt did not feel quite as well-disposed towards Hansi today.

“I give you money,” he yelled. “I give you resources. And in return for that I expect to hear when they go out on a shopping spree and buy missiles!”

“Xavier himself went to buy them, Kapitan,” the man blustered. “On his own. He didn’t hand out the weapons until moments before the attack.”

“Oh, you know all about this now, do you?”

Hansi took half a step backward. “It’s… it’s the only way it could have happened, Kapitan.”

“And nobody noticed he was missing? Your spies? Your little sneaks on the other side of the Parade Ground?”

Hansi opened his mouth. Closed it again.

“Every time you come to me for money, you promise me that Xavier will not be able to take a shit without one of your rats reporting about it to you. And now apparently he can leave the Municipality at will and come back with a van stuffed with high explosives and nobody notices.” The Kapitan took a step towards Hansi and Hansi took another step back. “Find out how this happened, Hansi,” he said. “Find out where he got the rockets from, and then fucking get me some!”

After Hansi had left, the Kapitan’s second-in-command, Leutnant Brandt, emerged from one of the other rooms and said, “Dangerous man.”

“Incompetent man,” the Kapitan said.

“You should get rid of him, before he goes across the Parade Ground.”

Kapitan Todt snorted. “Xavier’s welcome to him. It would probably work out in our favour.” He looked out of the window – painted with one-way reflective paint ever since the sniper incident – and after a few moments he said, “You think he’s getting ready to defect?”

“That sort are only ever in the fight for the rewards,” said Brandt. “As soon as they start drying up they’re off looking for someone else to leech onto.”

“Well I’m not going to keep hurling resources at him if he gets things this badly wrong,” the Kapitan said mildly. “I’d have to be an idiot to do that.” He sighed. “He knows where too many bodies are buried to take the chance. Bury him with them.”

“Yes, Kapitan.”

“And Brandt?”

“Yes, Kapitan?”

“I’m constantly reviewing everybody’s loyalties.”

Brandt seemed to falter momentarily, searching for an answer. Finally he said “Yes, Kapitan.”

BEFORE BRANDT THERE had been Mundt, and before Mundt there had been Falkenberg, and before Falkenberg there had been Meyer, and before Meyer there had been Xavier.

Xavier. Xavier X, who encouraged people to call him ‘Twenty’ because of his initials and who wore under his shirt a necklace of ears reputedly cut from the heads of shopkeepers and businesspeople who had been shortsighted enough not to join in with his protection rackets.

Kapitan Todt had found the boy hiding from the Anhalter Bahnhof polizei one rainy night in March, ten years ago. The Grandsons – they had still not quite geared up to make the jump from football hooliganry and medium-level racism to running their own country – had attacked another gang of supporters in the station concourse. The private security police had broken the fight up and everyone had scattered, the Kapitan and his predecessor, Kolonel Aldo, finding themselves in a little-visited area of dumpsters and piles of refuse bags behind some of the station’s fast food franchises.

As they crouched, panting quietly, waiting to see whether anyone had followed them, Aldo heard something moving under a nearby pile of bags. The two young men threw the bags aside, and found a filthy boy crouching under them, the neck of a broken bottle clutched in one hand and a brand new Sony microtainment centre, still in its box and somehow smuggled out through the Sony franchise centre’s security procedures, at his side. What struck the Kapitan, even then, was that there was no fear at all in the boy’s eyes. He would have tried to kill them both if he had to.

“Crazy little fucker,” Aldo chuckled.

“We should keep him,” said the Kapitan, who in those days was still known as Florian.

Aldo raised an eyebrow. “I bet he’d be handy in a fight,” he allowed. “How about it, kid?” he asked the boy. “How’d you like to join the Grandsons of Gavrilo Princip?”

“Fuck off, granddad,” the boy spat scornfully. But when Aldo and Florian decided the coast was clear and made to move off, he followed them back to one of their clubhouses, where the frauen made a fuss of him and cleaned him up and it turned out he was on the run from a state orphanage and had nowhere else to go, and by then there was never any doubt about whether he would stay with them or not.

Not a single one of them could have said who Gavrilo Princip was without recourse to Google, and if it wasn’t for voice recognition software most of them wouldn’t even have been able to do that because the majority were illiterate. Like Twenty – he demanded to be called Twenty, it was only some months later that they discovered the name’s derivation – most of the Grandsons were either graduates of or runaways from Berlin’s notoriously tough orphanage system. Even the ones who had homes and families wouldn’t have called them conventional or loving. They came together out of a common love of football and a common hatred of opposing clubs and supporters. They fought with a finely-honed desperation against fans of other Berlin clubs, other German clubs, other European clubs. Italian Ultras were the best. Ultras literally refused to stop; they just kept coming, long after more rational opposition would have faded away. It was a privilege to fight Ultras.

Aldo was in Plötzensee now, eight years into a life stretch for torching a Somali community centre in Dahlem and killing fourteen people. The state had demanded the death penalty, but was contenting itself with periodically withdrawing Aldo’s segregated status in jail and waiting to see how long it took the Moslem inmates to try to kill him. So far, the longest he’d survived in the general population without being attacked was fifteen minutes. The Kapitan visited, when he could. Aldo knew the prison guards would intervene in any disturbance, but even so, eight years of it were starting to take their toll. His hair had gone completely white.

Aldo was almost forty, the oldest of the Grandsons, basically a Methuselah figure. A true visionary. While Xavier was fighting his way up through the ranks, Aldo was proving his visionary credentials by meeting with the leaders of other supporters’ groups, cutting deals, forging alliances. The Grandsons began to join with some of the other gangs, then to absorb them, then to overwhelm them. By the time Aldo was arrested the Grandsons of Gavrilo Princip were almost two thousand strong and they ruled their own country.

NOTWITHSTANDING TODAY’S OUTRAGE – to which he was already planning an apocalyptic response – mornings tended to be fairly quiet times. The Grandsons’ fondness for industrial quantities of beer and schnapps and, quite often, substances which had not yet been legalised for human consumption, meant that mornings were, for the most part, times of introspection rather than violence. The Kapitan ruled his half of the Municipality with a fist which aspired to be fair but which was still, when all was said and done, a fist. He had his followers divided into watches, and woe betide anyone who indulged in any kind of stimulant stronger than coffee less than twelve hours before their next watch.

So when the rocket attack began this morning, all of his people were alert and compos mentis and doing their jobs to the best of their abilities, which was only as it should be, and they were still doing their jobs now, calmly and methodically. Of course, as soon as their Watch was over they would do their best to get entirely off their faces…

Kapitan Todt considered himself to be a genuine military commander. Aldo had taught him discipline and its value, and those lessons were paying off now. When the war with the Revisionists was over and the Municipality was unified again, perhaps they could relax. But not yet.

Aldo had also taught him to trust his instincts, but Aldo’s advice was no help as he walked down the corridors of his kingdom with the strangest feeling that he was being followed. The small group of advisers and lieutenants walking with him seemed not to notice.

Aldo’s plan to unify or absorb or simply erase all the other football gangs in Berlin had reached its apotheosis when he decided his new army needed its own country, and he set his sights on the Municipality, an old housing development a few minutes’ drive from the swanky new blocks in East Kreuzberg.

The Municipality was four huge apartment blocks arranged in a square around a patch of ground the size of a football stadium. In the past, the open ground had been a park, a play area, a place for children to ride their BMX bikes and skateboards, but the development’s former residents had been moved out to newer estates around the city and it was almost empty. The few anarchists and Greens who were squatting there moved out in a hell of a hurry when Aldo led his people to the Promised Land. Like Moses, however, Aldo was fated not to live in the Promised Land. Within a day or so of the Grandsons taking over the blocks and fortifying them against the authorities – who had better things to do than worry about winkling a group of teenagers out of a couple of old blocks of flats – Aldo had been lifted off the street and advised by his lawyer that he would be on trial for his life.

In his place, the Kapitan – with Twenty at his side – had set about turning the Municipality into the nation Aldo had intended it to be. And for seven years all had been well. Under the Kapitan the Grandsons branched out from protection rackets into drugs and prostitution and illegal firearms. They made sure they got on well enough with the city authorities to keep police visits to a minimum, they made a good living, their numbers swelled.

And then the Swimmer had arrived, and the civil war had begun.

ALTHOUGH IN TRUTH it had only been a war for about a week, and the bloodshed had been awful. Xavier’s followers lost more than half their people, the Kapitan roughly the same. After that everything had settled down into an armed standoff punctuated by moments of extreme violence. After a few tense moments at the beginning, the authorities had decided to keep out of it for now and negotiate some kind of accommodation with whoever survived. It was less labour-intensive, they reasoned, to let the Grandsons thin out their own ranks.

Numerous skirmishes saw the Kapitan finally in control of Buildings 1 and 2, Xavier occupying 3 and 4 and the two groups facing each other across the desolate wasteland of rusting jungle gyms and roundabouts and concrete biking ramps and skateboarding pits, occasionally shooting at each other, occasionally running infiltrations into each other’s territory.

For the Kapitan, the war was nothing short of a catastrophe. He had a large and diversified criminal network to run, and for the last year or so he had had no one to run it with. Gangs from other cities, sensing opportunity, had started to move in to Berlin while the Grandsons’ attention was elsewhere. Already half the Kapitan’s protection rackets had fallen to Chechen incomers from Hamburg, and the drugs business had been entirely taken over by a patchwork of mafiye organisations from all over Greater Germany.

He sat behind his desk in his office and worked his phones and he watched the empire that Aldo had founded and he had worked so hard to consolidate drifting away like a fog, and there was nothing he could do to stop it. The Grandsons’ hold on Berlin’s underworld had been predicated on extreme violence and weight of numbers, and while they were locked in this face-off there was very little he could do to stop things falling apart. The moment he sent any significant numbers of people out to attend to business, Twenty and his people would over-run the Kapitan’s half of the Municipality and that would be the end of that story.

The tour over, he went down to the refectory and sat alone with a cup of coffee and stared into space. Years ago, when the Municipality was built, the architects had wanted each block to be a self-contained little microcosm of society – an arcology, almost – with shops and kindergartens and communal cafés. Much of that experiment had failed quietly. The cafés had gone out of business, the kindergartens had run out of funding, the shops had closed. Residents drifted away to the new ribbon developments out in the countryside, the blocks began to fall into disrepair and disorder.

The Grandsons had reversed that. They had reopened the kindergartens, turned the cafés into spartan but passable canteens. They had even taken down the shutters on some of the shops, mainly to use them as fronts for fencing stolen goods or marketing drugs. With a potential army of almost two thousand people ready to repel any action by the authorities, the polizei were reluctant to intervene and start a war, so the shops flourished. Outwardly, the Municipality had come back to life in rather sprightly fashion. You just had to ignore the all pervading air of criminality.

Hearing something behind him, the Kapitan turned in his seat and looked across the refectory, but could see no one. Just ranks of empty chairs and tables.

He finished his coffee and took the cup back to the counter – discipline in all things – and went down ten flights of stairs to the building’s foyer. The foyer was dimly lit by battery-powered lanterns – the great glass wall which had given a view out onto the central space of the development had been boarded up and barricaded and reinforced – and a team was stationed there at all times with a Gatling railgun in case the Revisionists tried a frontal assault. All the windows on the lower floors – up as high as the fifth floor – had been bricked up and the rooms sown with antipersonnel mines. The Kapitan presumed Twenty had ordered similar measures on the other side of the Parade Ground. He chatted with the railgun team, offered some words of encouragement, made sure they were being well-supplied with food and coffee, and moved on across the foyer to a set of stairs leading down to the basement.

The ground under the blocks was wormed with networks of utility tunnels and rooms. At one time they had all connected up, so one could move from block to block without ever seeing daylight. In the wake of the outbreak of hostilities, the Kapitan had ordered large amounts of builder’s rubble to be trucked in and piled up in the tunnels leading to the Revisionists’ blocks, and here too he had stationed railgun teams. As in the foyer, he spoke with each of the teams, hearing their reports – Twenty’s people periodically tried to clear a way through the piles of brick and earth and concrete filling the tunnels – and here too he had the itchy sensation that he was being followed.

Finally fed up with it, he went up to the twentieth floor of Building 1 and consulted with Doktor Rock.

“It’s hardly a surprise,” said Doktor Rock. “You barely sleep, you don’t eat properly, and your enemies are trying to kill you. A little paranoia’s to be expected.”

Kapitan Todt shifted uncomfortably on the chair in the doctor’s consulting room – a former hairdressing salon. “Can you give me something for it?”

“Almost certainly. You probably wouldn’t be able to function effectively for days afterward, though.”

“Fuck you.”

“And fuck you too, Kapitan.” Doktor Rock was sixteen years old, his face inflamed with acne. He took out a small joint and lit it – as the only doctor in the building he was exempted from the rules about on-duty substance abuse. It was the only way he could keep going. “Alternatively, I prescribe a holiday.”

The Kapitan snorted. “Malta?” The doctor was obsessed with Malta, for some reason.

The doctor inhaled on his spliff, held the smoke for longer than was probably medically advisable, and breathed out. “There are worse places.”

“I should hear your report, while I’m here.”

Doktor Rock sat back in his chair and put his feet up on his desk. “I’m short of everything. End of report.”

The Kapitan looked levelly at the doctor.

The doctor sighed. “Field dressings,” he said. “I have none left; we’re tearing up T-shirts and boiling them to make them sterile. Antibiotics. Hardly any. Surgical sutures – well, let’s just say that I’d rather no one needed surgery. Painkillers. Rationed. Anaesthetics. Ditto.”

“Noted. What about the general health of the population?”

The doctor looked at him. “When did we last have one of these little chats?”

“Last week.”

“Well, nothing much has changed since then, Kapitan.” He took his feet down off the desk and leaned forward. “I expect to start seeing scurvy quite soon. It’s a miracle we haven’t had typhus and cholera yet, but when they start they’ll go through the blocks like a fire through a dry eucalyptus forest. Pubic lice are at epidemic levels. I’m noticing a lot of nervous skin complaints, insomnia, short tempers, listlessness…” He sighed. “This has gone on too long. People are just falling ill from being cooped up in this place. Eventually we’ll have cases of rickets among the children, and then, dear Kapitan, I am off.”

Kapitan Todt regarded the doctor for a long while. Despite his youth, Doktor Rock was a more than competent medic. He and his team of ad hoc nurses worked tirelessly. “We need one last decisive strike,” he said.

The doctor looked exasperated. “I can’t treat the casualties from any kind of strike, Kapitan. Haven’t you been listening? We’ve reached a point where even something as straightforward as a burst appendix will be fatal because I just won’t be able to operate, or give even the basics of post-operative care. If you’re planning some kind of strike, better make sure none of our people gets hurt.” He stubbed the joint out in an old tobacco tin on the table. “And you’d better win.”

LUNCH WAS A solitary bratwurst, eaten at his desk, with another cup of coffee. Food was running low; it was days since he had been able to spare anyone for a foraging expedition. The sausage was of poor quality. One of the kitchen staff knew some English and joked with him that they were ‘down to the worst of the wurst.’ The Kapitan made a mental note to move the man to a work gang.

He finished his sausage, drank his coffee, then sat up straight behind the desk and said, “I know you’re there. Show yourself.” It was, if anything, an act of absurd faith.

But it was rewarded. A patch of shadow in one corner of the room rippled and shimmered, and all of a sudden a figure was standing there, apparently dressed in rags and an unusual-looking motorcycle helmet. It moved its hands and from the folds of the rags emerged the muzzle of a small semiautomatic rifle.

“Not a move,” said the figure quietly. “Not a sound.”

The Kapitan sat where he was and prepared to die.

“Florian Grüber,” the figure said. “Styling himself Kapitan Todt.”

“Yes,” said Kapitan Todt.

“I’ve been sent to help you escape from here.”

The Kapitan processed this statement. Apparently he wasn’t going to die just yet. He said, “If you’re the chef, you’re more than a year late.”

The figure removed its helmet, revealing the face of a young man, his brown hair tousled. “What?”

There had been a point, a day or so into the civil war, when he had believed that he was going to lose, and the Coureurs had become a real option. He had no qualms about this; he needed to survive, to recover and regroup, if he was to finally defeat Twenty.

The Swimmer had counselled patience. “Let me set it up for you, Florian,” he said. “I know how to do this kind of thing.”

And so the Swimmer had made connections and organised things, and Kapitan Todt had waited and waited, and the Coureurs didn’t come but some victories did. Now, he was in a position to make off from the Municipality himself, any time he wanted. He thought he might even be able to get across the Greater German border into Switzerland, where he had family. Thoughts of daring Coureur-aided escapes had faded from his mind. And now here was one of them, standing before him.

“The Swimmer wants to talk to you,” he said.

The Coureur raised his gun. “I want to know what’s going on.”

“The Swimmer will tell you. May I stand up?” When the Coureur made no response, the Kapitan said, “All I have to do is raise my voice and a dozen armed people will come in here and kill you.”

“Not if I kill you first, you scumbag.”

The Kapitan shrugged, but he stood up anyway. “You were supposed to be here more than a year ago. What happened?”

“I got sidetracked. Who’s the Swimmer?”

“I’ll take you to him. You might want to… disappear again first, though. I’d find it hard to explain you.”

The Coureur thought about it. Then he put his helmet back on, seemed to shrug, and vanished into the shadows once again. “I’ll be right behind you,” said his voice from the corner of the room.

“Good. Follow me, please.”

THERE WAS A room deep in the heart of Building 2. It had once been a community centre, a space big enough for parties and dances and the like. The Kapitan had ordered it reinforced to what some of his people privately regarded as a ridiculous degree. Deep courses of reinforced brickwork and breezeblocks had been laid inside the existing walls and on the floor. Thick plastic sheeting had been stapled over every flat surface and then sprayed with a thick, durable layer of white paint, and into this newly-white and well-nigh impregnable room they had installed the Swimmer.

He lay in the middle of the room in a glass-walled tank filled with a clear medicated gel. Almost every inch of his body was terribly burned, and the machines and devices and bottles of fluid and gas which kept him alive lined the walls, clear plastic tubes running everywhere across the floor. A bulky mask was strapped to his face, feeding some kind of oxygenated fluid into his ruined lungs.

Only Kapitan Todt and the doctor had keys to this reinforced room. The Kapitan let himself in, stepped inside to allow the invisible Coureur to enter, then closed and locked the door behind them.

“He finally turned up, Uncle,” he said.

Behind him, the Coureur shimmered into visibility again and took off his helmet. A few seconds later a synthesised voice from a pair of speakers beside the tank said, “Well, you took your time about it, cook.”

The Coureur stared at the tank. “Fabio?”

THE SWIMMER HAD come to the Municipality at an inauspicious time. The Kapitan had been watching Twenty closely for years, and he saw the signs. His lieutenant was schmoozing other members of the hierarchy, whispering in ears, making promises. Anschluss, the Kapitan’s late father would have called it. Tensions between the two men had been heightening for weeks. The Kapitan was starting to believe that the only way he could possibly survive this situation was to make a bold statement, drive Xavier into the ground like a tentpeg.

And then, late one night, a large van had turned up at Building 1, and inside, accompanied by several large, silent men, was the Swimmer, encased in a kind of gel-filled transparent body-bag, clearly close to death. He had a voice-synthesising computer which he somehow controlled by eye movement, and using this he was able to make his demands.

When the Kapitan called his senior officers together to tell them of the situation, Xavier was having none of it. The Kapitan over-ruled him and made arrangements to have the Swimmer installed in Building 2, and Xavier and his co-conspirators attempted a coup.

“Twenty didn’t want anything to do with this,” said the Kapitan. “He said it was espionage. He said it would bring down on us all kinds of unwanted attention. Really, though, all he wanted was an excuse to try and take over.”

The Coureur was sitting on an old kitchen stool in front of the tank, where the Swimmer could see him by using a mirror strung overhead. He seemed to be in the grip of several powerful emotions at the same time.

“What the hell happened to you?” he said.

There was a pause, while the Swimmer’s eyes picked out the words. Then the speakers said, “I was fired.” And then they made a horrible noise which the Kapitan had decided was laughter. When that died away, the Swimmer said, “I was made an example of. I wasn’t supposed to survive, of course, but I’m not without resources.”

The Coureur appeared to be at a loss for words.

“I won’t apologise for what happened to you in Poznań,” the Swimmer continued. “That would be an insult to your intelligence. There was something I needed at the Consulate, and you were a means to obtaining it.”

“You utter bastard,” said the Coureur. “They nearly killed me.”

“It was a chance I needed to take. It was nothing personal.”

“You set up this jump too, didn’t you. Off-piste. For him.” He gestured at the Kapitan.

“My sister’s boy. Little Florian. She married an Austrian. A bad lot. He gave me shelter when I was in need; it was the least I could do to try and help him. Tell me, why has it taken you fifteen months to get here? I taught you better than that.”

The Coureur stared at the burned man in the tank. He said, “I was in New Potsdam. I got a crash message for a new Situation. I was supposed to meet up with a partner. When I found him he’d been murdered. I went to ground and things have been going very wrong for me ever since. Is this all to do with you?”

“And it’s taken you this long to find out what the Situation was? I really am disappointed.”

“Fabio, you prick, I’ve been running all over Europe. I’ve been kidnapped. My brother’s been killed. My life has been destroyed. Is this all to do with you?”

“I took three proofs from the Consulate,” said the Swimmer. “Florian knows where they are. He’ll give you the key. Use them as you see fit. Powerful people want these things, want to know how to use them, want to stop them being used. I place them in your hands. Now go. Take Florian with you; he’s a criminal little shit with the morals of a slime mould but he’s still family.”

“No,” said the Coureur. “No. I’m not moving from this stool until you explain this to me.”

“No explanations,” said the Swimmer. “You wouldn’t believe me. You have to see it for yourself.”

“See what? What do I have to see? Who did this to you?”

“Central wanted the proofs. They wanted to stop them falling into the wrong hands. I wouldn’t tell them where they were.”

“Wrong hands? Whose?”

“Yours, for one. Now go.”

The Coureur glared at him, then tipped his head slightly to one side. His eyes unfocused and he seemed to be listening. Then he said, to no one in particular, “All right, we’re coming out.” He looked at the Kapitan. “Your little bum-boy’s decided to make a move in broad daylight.”

Despite himself, the Kapitan had to smile. “Fucker,” he murmured.

The Coureur stood up and started to fasten the front of his stealth-suit. “What about you?” he asked the Swimmer.

Again, that awful laughing noise. “I don’t have any future left. Word will get around if I turn up in any hospital in Europe and I’ll have an ‘accident.’ Florian’s people have done their best, but I’m on the edge of multiple organ failure. They can’t help me much longer. Go.”

The Coureur looked round the room and said, “Jesus Maria, Fabio.”

“Go,” said the synthesised voice. “Just go.”

The Coureur seemed to come to a decision. He grabbed the Kapitan and urged him over to the door. “You. I want this key he was talking about, and I want to know where these proofs are.”

“In my office.”

“Right. Let’s get them and get out of here.”

THEY STOPPED FOR a few moments in the Kapitan’s office, where he unlocked his safe and took out an envelope and handed it to the Coureur. The Coureur stowed it in a pocket of his suit and then they were out again, running down corridors full of people panicking at the Revisionist attack. The Kapitan shouted some orders, tried to calm things down as he passed, but it did no good. “He has a tank!” someone shouted as they went by.

Instead of going down, they went up. Up endless flights of stairs, ascending into quieter and quieter parts of the building. At one point there was an almighty bang and the whole building seemed to shake dust off itself and the Kapitan found himself on his hands and knees, the Coureur dragging him back to his feet and urging him on through the stinking dusty corridors.

And then they were at the top of one final flight of stairs and the Coureur was throwing open a door onto a patch of late afternoon sky and they were on the colossal flat roof of the building.

“Seth!” the Coureur shouted over the sound of small-arms fire from far below on the Parade Ground, and a patch of air alongside a pile of boxes and metal bottles shimmered and became another stealth-suited figure.

They ran over to the figure, who pulled back its hood to reveal the anxious face of a young black man. “These people are not normal,” he said.

“Football fans,” said the Coureur. “Don’t know why they couldn’t just have got themselves lives.” He grabbed the Kapitan and planted him front and centre. “Get this piece of shit out of here.”

The second Coureur began buckling nylon straps all over the Kapitan. Then he snapped a harness to the straps. “What are you going to do?” he asked.

“I’ll meet you as arranged,” said the first Coureur. “I have to collect something first.”

“Right.” The second Coureur opened one of the boxes on the roof at his feet and snapped several lengths of line to his stealth suit. Then he stepped right up to the Kapitan and fastened their harnesses together so that they were face to face just inches apart. He grinned. “I understand you’re a right-wing racist bastard.”

The building shook again, and a wall of smoke billowed up from the side closest to the Parade Ground. “You two will have plenty of time to get to know each other,” said the first Coureur. “But we ought to get out of here.”

“Okey dokey,” said the second Coureur, and he pulled a cord and three of the boxes exploded as the balloons inside them suddenly inflated. He looked into the Kapitan’s eyes and beamed. “Run, you fucker,” he said quietly. And together, awkwardly, the big balloons above them tugging them up on their toes, they ran sideways towards the far edge of the roof as the first Coureur was still strapping himself into a harness.

At the very last moment a gust caught the balloons and swept them up into the sky, and for a few seconds, before their combined weight took over and began to drag the balloons in a slow arc that would eventually deposit them on the other side of the Landwehrkanal and safety, the Kapitan could see into the Parade Ground. Hundreds of people were fighting there. Hundreds more were lying on the ground, very still. And yes, Xavier did have a tank. Clever boy.

IT WAS THE same locker.

Rudi paused and looked at the number printed on the key given to him by Fabio’s nephew. Thirty-eight. He tried to remember the number of the locker he had looked into the last time he was at Zoo Station, and found that he could not. But it was the same one. He knew it was. There were no coincidences any longer; he was in the hands of what was, basically, a malicious God.

You cheeky bastard, Fabio…

He was also attracting attention, standing here like an idiot. He put the card into its slot and opened the door.

He half-expected to see Leo’s head, mummified and shrunken but still with that surprised expression on its face, but instead there was only Fabio’s burnbox, a calfskin-covered attaché case which would incinerate its contents at the first sign of unauthorised tampering. He grabbed the handle, pulled it out of the locker, swung the door closed, and limped out across the concourse.

At every step he expected to be shot, or stabbed, or mugged, or arrested. None of those things happened.

He left the station, went down the steps to the U-Bahn, got on a train to the Hauptbahnhof, and there boarded a train for Hannover.

Twenty hours later, he was sitting in an hotel on the Channel coast, a few miles from Dieppe. He was a thousand years older. Looking at himself in the flyblown mirror in his room, he thought it was a miracle that his hair hadn’t turned white.

1.

THIS YEAR WHEN the season ended, Lev decided to kill himself.

He stood on the jetty and watched the last of the tourists being ferried back to their floating country and he put his hand in his pocket and felt the few drachmas and euros and dollars there and knew he couldn’t survive the winter. All of a sudden his legs felt watery. He sat down on a bollard and looked out over the bay and some of the younger fishermen laughed at him. The older ones, though, the ones who knew how quickly and completely a man’s life can fall apart, kept a grim and respectful silence.

The great white ship in the bay was simply called Nation. It was a country for tourists, a country of tourists, making a year-long tour of the Mediterranean and Aegean before wintering in dry-dock in Kiel. It was a nation of the aged and the wealthy from all over the world.

This year, the great vessel brought him Myrna, on a cruise to console herself over the death of her fifth husband. “Did it when Danny died as well,” she told him. “And George. And Charlie.” And she smiled, and Lev felt himself shrink inside. When she smiled, she reminded him of owls. Not the wise owls of legend, but the mouse-destroying birds of prey.

Myrna. Ripped and exercised to the point of mutation, barely an ounce of fat on her, like a woman made entirely of twigs and the tufts of hair left by sheep on barbed wire fences. No way to tell how old she was, but old. She had wined him and dined him and consented to let him pleasure her, but she had been unwilling to bestow any more lasting gifts upon him. Gifts, for instance, which he could sell to pay his rent.

Gods but it was hot, even though winter was howling its way along the Med. This place was no good for Russians. Too hot. Too alien. The food tasted wrong and the alcohol was terrible, although one was able to overlook that if one drank enough of it.

He had come here four years ago, island hopping until his funds ran out and he could no longer afford a ferry fare. In Greek, the island’s name meant something like ‘The Place Where We Forgot Where We Were,’ which seemed appropriate. Lev’s arrival had coincided with Nation dropping anchor in the bay and disgorging its population, including Penny. Penny from Pittsburgh, who had taken a shine to Lev to the extent that when she left he was able to sell all the things she had given him and rent a single filthy room over a taverna in the Old Town and survive, somehow, until the next boatload of tourists came in.

Nation’s next visit had brought Alice. Then Corinne. Between times, Lev scratched a living teaching English and Russian and proofreading guidebooks, although the material return for that was tiny. He began to regard Nation with the fervour of an eighteenth century cargo cultist.

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.

“I think you should ask someone else to do this thing for you,” he mumbled, starting to stand up.

The Balt didn’t move. “The last person I showed that poem to told me he’d need at least two hours and access to all kinds of tables and reference books,” he said.

Lev shrugged, hardly even surprised not to have been first choice. “Classicists,” he said.

“You decrypted it in twenty minutes with a paper napkin and an eyebrow pencil. I think you’re exactly the person I’ve been looking for.” When Lev remained standing, the Balt said, “A hundred thousand Swiss francs, in any currency you choose, in any bank account you choose, anywhere in the world. Half now, half when you’re finished.”

Lev sat down, eyes brimming with tears, knowing how close he was to doing it for the price of a couple of drinks. “It’s been…” He sniffed and rubbed his eyes. “It’s been a long time. I may not be able to help you.”

“Perhaps a consulting fee, then,” said the Balt. “Paid daily. Perhaps that would be fairer.”

Lev nodded. “I would prefer that.”

“Before we begin, I should warn you that there may be some danger.”

“Danger?”

For the first time, the Balt looked fractionally uncomfortable. “I don’t know how, or why, but there may be some danger. But that’s my problem and I’ll do my best to protect you while you work, and afterward.” He blinked at Lev. “If you were to get up and leave right now, I wouldn’t hold it against you.”

Lev did think about it. For almost a second. He waved a hand, inheritor of the Cheka, the NKVD, the KGB, child of Enigma and Kolossal. “I no longer have anything to be afraid of,” he said, and cringed inwardly. Such a Russian thing to say.

The Balt looked sad. “Well, let’s hope this doesn’t turn out to be a learning experience for you. Is there anything you will need?”

Lev looked at him, wondering how his life had suddenly taken such a turn. “I will need to retrieve my laptop from Mr Keoshgerian,” he said.

LEV’S LAPTOP WAS made entirely of cloth. It looked like something from a fabric conditioner commercial. The tapboard resembled an alphanumeric embroidery sampler, and the printer/scanner/copier could have been mistaken for a brightly-coloured hand towel. All rolled up and stuffed into a small drawstring bag, it looked like one of those little cushions people buy to rest their heads on during long coach journeys. Rudi had never seen anything like it before.

“We did magic, once upon a time,” Lev said with a ghost of pride. “And we never told anyone.”

“How does it work?” Rudi asked, thinking about the patents involved.

Lev shrugged. “Don’t know. You just plug one end into an electrical socket, the other end into an entertainment set, and it works. You can even wash it, but if the water’s too hot it destroys the memory and processor threads, and then all you’ve got is some bits of rug. We’ll need to buy cables for it. And an external hard drive. A big hard drive.”

“Not a problem.”

Lev ran his fingers over the woven surfaces. “I never could bear to sell it. Pawn it now and again, perhaps, but never sell it. I did think once I’d take it to one of the hardware houses, sell them the technology. But my former employers would have heard about it, and they would have sent someone to kill me. Someone like you.”

Rudi looked at the little Russian. They would have sent someone to kill me. Lev didn’t sound sad or angry, just rather matter-of-fact, like a father who has just caught the weather forecast and discovered that the family picnic is going to be rained off. And what was that someone like you all about?

“Do you need a drink?” he asked.

Lev shook his head. “I need to work.”

Rudi didn’t think that Lev needed to worry about his former employers. The last time he had been in Russia – European Russia, this was, what they were just beginning to call Rus back then – the local intelligence services hadn’t been anything to phone home about.

RUDI HAD A room in one of the swanky hotels in the New Town, so Lev moved his few belongings – some books, an old iPod, a bag of clothes – in there, and after the formalities were over and he had some money in his pocket, Lev sat down and set up the cloth laptop. When it was ready he said, “Show me this thing that no one else can decrypt.”

Rudi took from behind the sofa a heavy-looking attaché case and opened it by swiping a cardkey down its side and then typing in a long combination on the lockpad on top. He took out a rolled-up paper map and two old-looking books, one thick with battered cardboard covers, the other a thin leather-bound notebook.

“In case you need some background,” he said, handing over the notebook, “the map’s of the Line. Standard stuff you can buy anywhere. This,” holding up the thick book, “is a 1912 railway timetable for the South of England. And I have no idea what any of it means.”

Lev took the notebook and opened it. Tucked inside the cover were five sheets of paper covered with printed columns of numbers and letters. No, not printed… Lev ran his fingertip over the back of one of the sheets, felt the slight embossing of the typewriter. These sheets had been typed a very long time ago.

He laid them aside and paged through the notebook. More columns of numbers and letters, closely written in ink, in a clear, careful hand. He checked inside the front and back covers and both endpapers, but there were no pencil jottings, no idle calculations that might give a clue to the cypher being used.

“This may take a little while,” he said.

Rudi shrugged and limped over to examine the room’s minibar. “If it takes a while, it takes a while, Professor. I know these things mustn’t be rushed.”

Lev shrugged. He unrolled the laptop and scanner, plugged in the newly-purchased hard drive, and began the process of booting everything together.

2.

OF PARTICULAR INTEREST to cartographical students, Sheet 2000 – the so-called ‘Millennial Sheet’ – is the only surviving sheet produced by the ‘Alternative Survey’ begun by General H. Whitton-Whyte in 1770.

3.

“SOME KIND OF novel,” Lev hazarded. “A utopian fiction.”

Rudi sat with his hands clasped to the sides of his head, like a man with a horrible hangover. “This is insane,” he murmured, looking down at the decrypts of the loose typewritten sheets arranged on the coffee table in front of him.

According to Lev, the code was quite arcane, a variation of something which had been developed for commercial use in England in the late eighteenth century. The cloth laptop had taken three days to crack it, but now it was happily delivering pages of cleartext at a rate of two or three a day. They were already several pages into the handwritten parts of the notebook. Columns of digits and letters were scanned into the laptop, and out came descriptions of towns, villages, hamlets, ratings of pubs and restaurants and guest houses.

“Are you sure that thing is working properly?” Rudi asked, nodding at the laptop.

“If it wasn’t, you wouldn’t be able to read anything at all.”

Rudi picked up one of the pages of lists and looked helplessly at it. “This is…” He shook his head. “A Gazetteer of the Towns and Villages of Ernshire,” he read.

Lev shrugged. “A fiction.”

Rudi dropped the sheet of paper on the coffee table and stood up and limped over to the window.

“Do you want me to stay?” Lev asked.

Rudi looked round. “I’m sorry?”

“The laptop works itself. All you have to do is type in the groups. You don’t need me any more.”

Rudi shook his head. “Could this Gazetteer be a code itself?”

“Of course. Take such and such letters from each line and you get a message. The Komsomol flies at night.”

“Can the laptop scan for that kind of thing?”

“Yes, but it would be quicker if you had the key.”

“Which would be…?”

Lev picked up the old railway timetable and riffled its pages speculatively.

“I looked,” Rudi said. “There are no marks. Nothing to suggest any of those entries is any more significant than the others. And before you ask, I did the thing of letting it fall open on its own, too. Nothing. Nothing obvious, anyway.”

“Perhaps the key will turn up further on in the text itself,” Lev theorised. “Although that would be quite unsecure.” He added, “I don’t want you to think I’m milking this job.”

Rudi broke into a broad smile. “Why on Earth would I think that?”

Lev gestured at the decrypts.

Rudi shook his head. “Whatever is going on here, it’s not your fault, Lev. Stay around; let’s see if we can make any sense of this, okay?”

Lev nodded. “Okay.”

ALTHOUGH MAKING SENSE of it was easier said than done. The Gazetteer ended, and the notebook began to yield up a history and description of a country which did not exist.

Taking as its jumping-off point the typewritten fiction which Lev had first translated, the notebook’s unknown writer went on to speak of a nation he called The Community. The Community was the Whitton-Whytes’ greatest dream, a country mapped over the top of the whole of Europe and entirely populated by Englishmen. It sounded like the setting for an enormous Agatha Christie mystery, all county towns and vicarages and manor houses. Rudi thought it was a blessing that Fabio hadn’t lived to see just how worthless his great prize had been.

On the other hand…

Lev’s laptop delivered three pages of decrypts a day. After the twelfth day, Rudi began to feel a vague unease, and for no reason he could have articulated and against Lev’s loud protests, he booked them out of the hotel and moved them to another island.

A week later, he located the source of his unease.

One night, going through the contents of the burnbox, he took out the map of the Line again, rolled it out onto the floor of their room, weighted the corners down with ashtrays and beer bottles, and got down on hands and knees to examine it properly.

He had, he realised, been going about this the wrong way. Fabio had risked his life – had risked both their lives – to steal what appeared to be a perfectly standard map, one you could buy at most post offices in most countries. Fabio was eccentric and irresponsible, but he was not stupid. Therefore, it must not be a perfectly standard map. This much should have been obvious to him immediately, and probably would have been if the decrypts hadn’t captured so much of his attention.

“I’m ashamed of myself,” he told Lev. “The map should have been the first thing I looked at. And me a Coureur.”

Lev, who was sitting on the sofa reading the day’s product and drinking vodka, only grunted.

Here was the Line, and if you had any reservations about its name, here was the proof. It really was just a line, a stitch that ran across Europe, a country thousands of kilometres long but only ten kilometres across at its broadest point. Here were the towns it ran through, the marshalling yards and embassies and consulates, branch lines, maintenance depots… branch lines…

Rudi leaned down until his nose was a few centimetres from the surface of the map. The Line needed branches for shunting, and for repair crews, and to connect it to some embassies and consulates, as in Poznań, and to bring supplies in from the countries it passed through. In a lot of ways, it was less independent than it liked to pretend. Running his finger along the twin tracks of the main Line, Rudi could see dozens of branches curling off, to a depot here, a town there.

And some of them seemed to curl off into nowhere.

At the end of one branch, just before the border between Greater Germany and Poland, was a word he recognised: Stanhurst.

Rudi got up and picked up the previous day’s decrypts. And there it was. Stanhurst, a beguiling county town, contains one of the greatest cathedrals in the Community.

He grabbed the railway timetable and began to page through it, and within a minute there it was. Train times from Paddington to Stanhurst.

Lev looked up from his reading. “What?”

“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.

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.”

1.

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.

Tereza snorted. “Uncle Jakub.”

He started the engine and put the car in gear. “I’m sorry,” he said again, and drove away.

THERE WAS A bar called TikTok, just off Karlovo námeští in the Old Town, that Petr and the department had been keeping their eyes on for several months. They had some vague intelligence that a Chechen warlord calling himself Abram, having been chased from Bremen by a combination of local police and home-grown brigands, had bought himself a controlling interest in TikTok and was shaping the place to use as a beach-head in Prague.

This was obviously not an optimum outcome for anybody, but hours of surveillance and intelligence gathering had failed to confirm the rumours. Ownership of TikTok was an impossible tangle of blind trusts and offshore funds and tax avoidance schemes so complex that they were practically sentient; if Abram was in there somewhere, he was well hidden. He had also not been observed to visit his supposed new acquisition; nor had any of his known lieutenants. Petr had sent a team into the bar on the onerous mission of becoming regulars, and they reported nothing out of the ordinary, as did the young woman detective who he had sent in to get a job as a waitress. TikTok, to all intents and purposes, was utterly blameless.

“What a fucking mess,” said Jakub.

For once, Petr reflected, his sergeant was erring on the side of understatement. The street was full of rubble and shattered glass and wrecked cars. Every shop window was broken, as were most of the apartment windows in the blocks above them. Huge bits of moulding and brickwork had fallen into the street.

The devastation grew worse as one looked down the street, until one’s eye was drawn to the centre, the heart of destruction, the smoking pile of collapsed brick and wood and metal which had once housed the bar known as TikTok. It was as if, Petr thought, the bar had explosively vomited its innards into the street and then slumped in on itself and taken everything above and around it down as well.

Both ends of the street were full of detectives and uniformed policemen and firemen and soldiers. Further down, an Army bomb team was still sending robots into the destroyed building to check for further devices. Until they were done there was no way to allow the fire brigade or police anywhere near it and until that happened there was no way to discover just how bad the loss of life was. Preliminary reports said fifteen dead, thirty injured, but Petr knew those figures were going to rise in a hurry. The bomb had gone off just as people were going to work.

“We’re presuming it was a bomb,” Jakub said.

“Yes,” Petr said. “Yes, we’re presuming it was a bomb.”

Jakub nodded. “ATG are on their way.”

Petr sighed. His department’s relationship with the Anti-Terrorist Group was fractious at best. “I’m surprised they aren’t here already,” he said, but it was a poor attempt at a joke. “Did something happen last night?”

Jakub shook his head. “Normal night, according to the boys.”

Petr swallowed and asked the question that had been hanging between them ever since he got there. “Milena?”

“She’s not answering her phones,” Jakub said soberly. “At home or her mobiles. She’d have been starting work about now.”

Petr scowled. The bombing was bad enough. Losing the young undercover detective he’d placed in the bar was a catastrophe. “Keep trying her phones,” he said. “Has anyone been to her apartment?”

Jakub nodded. “Nobody there.”

Petr felt sick. He took a deep breath. “All right. We can’t do anything here until the Army have finished sniffing around. I want everybody out shaking snitches. I want to know how this happened without us hearing anything about it, and I want to know who’s responsible.”

“Yes, boss.”

“And could you pick the kids up from school this afternoon?”

Jakub glanced at him, returned to looking at the wreckage of the street. “Yes, boss.”

Petr made his way to a lorry parked in a nearby street. The doors of the container on its loadbed were open. Petr went up the steps and stepped inside and looked at the rows of detectives and operatives manning the consoles of the mobile control room. At the far end of the container thirty or so paper flatscreens had been pasted to the wall; they were each showing a different view of the wrecked street.

“Brabec,” a voice behind him said.

Petr turned, saw Major Vĕtrovec, his opposite number at Anti-Terrorism, standing in the control room doorway. “Miloš,” he said.

“What do we have?” Vĕtrovec was a small, round, bald man in a tight suit

“We’re treating it as a bomb until told otherwise,” Petr said. “All utilities have been isolated, the street’s been closed off. The fire brigade can’t get near the seat of the explosion until the Army are sure there are no secondary devices, and we can’t go anywhere near it until the fire brigade tell us it’s safe to do so.”

Vĕtrovec looked at the screens at the end of the control room and shook his head. He turned and called through the open door. “Ismail, see if you can contact the Minister. The lazy bitch should be here anyway.”

“Ah, good,” Petr said. “You brought Ismail.”

“He’s my second in command,” Vĕtrovec said. “Of course he’s here.”

“He stays out of my way,” Petr warned. The last time he and Vĕtrovec’s dead-eyed assassin of a deputy had encountered each other professionally, they had almost wound up having a fist fight in the middle of an apartment where a terror suspect had been arrested.

“As you wish,” Vĕtrovec said as if he didn’t care much either way. “I understand this bar was of interest to you?”

Petr filled him in quickly on the supposed presence of Abram in Prague, the measures he’d taken to investigate. He thought he saw Vĕtrovec’s expression soften when he told him about Milena. Vĕtrovec was an unpleasant little bastard, but he was still a cop, of sorts, and every policeman feels the loss of one of their own.

When he’d finished, Vĕtrovec said, “The building was of interest to us as well.”

Petr smiled tightly. “Of course it was.”

“Not the bar,” Vĕtrovec said, “which is why you were not on the to-know list. One of the apartments on the fifth floor. A group of Saudi students.”

“Who were, in all likelihood, completely innocent.”

“Who had already met with a Bulgarian mafia group and were in the process of negotiating the purchase of seven kilos of Semtex.” Vĕtrovec looked at him. “We’re not amateurs, you know.”

Petr gestured at the screens. “Is anyone else interested in this place who I haven’t been told about? Hm? Immigration? Traffic wardens?” He was aware that he was raising his voice, but he didn’t care. “Because if someone had thought to put me on your ‘to-know’ list I wouldn’t have sent one of my detectives in there undercover!”

“Brabec,” Vĕtrovec murmured, looking around the control room at the officers who were all trying very hard not to stare at Petr. “Calm down.”

“You killed her,” Petr said in a dangerous voice, poking Vĕtrovec in the chest with a forefinger. “Just as surely as if you’d blown her up yourself. Because you couldn’t be bothered to share what you were doing.”

“I didn’t order her to go in there,” Vĕtrovec said reasonably.

Petr snarled and pushed past the ATG man and stumbled down the steps and away from the truck, chest heaving. He leaned against a wall and tried to get his breath, tried to remain in control.

His phone rang. He took it out, looked at it, put it to his ear. “Can’t you deal with it?”

“I don’t know, boss,” said Jakub. “But you’ll want to see this.”

“WHO ARE THEY?”

“We don’t know, boss,” said Jakub. “Cleaner found them four hours ago. We’d have got the shout, but what with the…”

“We’ve been busy.” Petr sighed. “Yes.”

They were standing in a smartly-appointed apartment in Pankrác, not far from the prison. The apartment was in one of the two new blocks which the city had grudgingly, after many many years’ discussion about their impact on the skyline, finally given permission for. They had filled up with young professionals – graphic designers, IT entrepreneurs, media people. Several soap opera actors lived in this block, Petr knew.

Neither of the people lying side by side in the apartment’s living room was a soap opera actor. At least, he didn’t recall seeing them on television. A man and a woman, they were in their middle thirties, their clothes nondescript but a little old-fashioned. Both had had their throats cut. The floor and the furniture and the walls were awash with blood.

“There hasn’t been a full search yet, but so far, no ID,” Jakub said. “None of the neighbours knows who they were – although one of them thinks they might have been English.”

Petr groaned inwardly at the thought of having to deal with the English Embassy. “Go on.”

“Well, the really interesting stuff’s in here,” Jakub said, leading the way to a small bedroom off a hallway at the rear of the apartment. “Uniformed officer who responded to the call made sure life was extinct and then went to secure the apartment, but he says he thought he heard someone moving around in here. Turns out he was imagining things – you know how jumpy you can get at a scene like this – but he took a look, and, well…”

The bedroom had been converted into a small workroom by dismantling the bed and stacking the frame and mattress against one wall. In the middle of the floor stood a couple of small trestle tables, and on the tables were boxes and tools and rolls of wire. Without touching it, Petr looked into one of the boxes. “Are these detonators?” he said.

“Yes, boss. And those bigger boxes, that’s C4.”

Petr straightened up and looked around the room. “A lot of these C4 boxes appear to be empty.”

“Yes, boss.”

They returned to the main room and stood looking at the bodies. “Oh, there was one last thing,” said Jakub. He held up a little plastic evidence bag containing a cheap cigarette lighter. Printed on the side of the lighter were the words ‘TikTok.’

“That’s just too easy,” Petr said.

“Yes, boss.”

“That sort of thing only ever happens in films.”

“I know, boss.”

Petr sighed. “All right. When scenes-of-crime have finished and the bodies have been taken away, search this place properly for ID and anything else that looks interesting. Then, and only then, notify ATG.”

Jakub sucked his teeth. “They won’t like that.”

“They can sue me.”

“They probably will,” Jakub noted.

PRAGUE HAD, IN general, an enviably low crime rate. Pickpocketing had been a cottage industry for decades and there were always muggings and other forms of low-level trouble in and around Sherwood, the park around the railway station, but mostly the old city had escaped the wave of crime which had engulfed other European capitals.

Following the TikTok bombing, however, a wave of murders swept the city. Organised crime figures were assassinated in their cars and in their homes. Several drug pushers were found crucified against trees in Sherwood. The Government began to take notice, which was never a good sign in Petr’s world.

Two Scotland Yard detectives flew in to look at the bodies from Pankrác, failed to identify them, consented to being treated to a slap-up meal at a restaurant in the Old Town for their trouble, and flew out again without once mentioning why the job could not have been done just as easily by someone from the Embassy security staff. Petr drove them to the airport himself, watched them go through the security checks, waved bye-bye, and thought about that.

A Colonel from the Gangs Taskforce met with the heads of all of Prague’s organised crime groups – this entirely off the record and as far as possible from the Press and some of the less-understanding members of Parliament – and reported back that they were as in the dark as anyone else. They all blamed each other for the killings, but when pressed could not give a single good reason why they should have taken place.

“I told them to stop, and they just shrugged their shoulders,” the Colonel told Petr over a drink. “This is a territorial thing, plain and simple. You mark my words. They just won’t admit it.”

Except for those two bodies with their throats cut. That whole business had disappeared into the pockets of an angry Major Vĕtrovec, but in Petr’s mind’s eye they stood out from all the other killings. Somehow those two murders, that room full of plastic explosive, made sense of everything else. Except they didn’t.

The Press took up the story of the gang war, questions were asked in Parliament, and one day Petr found himself sitting in the Minister’s office, feeling small and overdressed in his one good suit. The Minister, a florid woman who favoured grey trouser suits and red shirts, kept him waiting while she read through something on her desktop.

“Your officers call you ‘Major Zeman,’” she said without looking at him.

Petr sighed. Major Zeman had been the lead character of an infamous long-running Communist-era television series, a propaganda exercise more than anything else.

“A joke, Minister,” he explained. “The star and I share a surname.”

The Minister looked at him.

“Squadroom humour,” he added.

The Minister said, “This is no laughing matter, Major.”

“No, Minister,” he agreed. “It is not.”

She consulted her desktop again. “Thirty-seven fatalities. Not including the TikTok bombing. Not a laughing matter at all.”

“Has someone complained that we were treating it as such?” he asked.

Another level stare. The Minister said, “The Press seems to think that the Prague police force is incompetent. Those criticisms tend to arrive on my desk, Major, not yours, and the President and Prime Minister expect me to answer to them.”

“Yes, Minister.”

“The Gangs Taskforce appear to believe this will burn itself out eventually.”

“Do they?”

“They have something they call…” she checked her desktop once again “…dynamic modelling. Are you familiar with it?”

Petr shook his head.

“Computer software,” she said. “From the United States. It constructs a model of the relationships between groups. Any kind of group. Model train enthusiasts, football supporters, the fans of the latest teen pop singer, criminal gangs. It’s supposed to predict the dynamics between those groups, locate periods of stability and chaos. What do you think of that?”

“I think it would probably have been more cost-effective to examine the entrails of a chicken, Minister.”

A smile quirked her lips. “Dynamic modelling says that these killings will run their course and stability will return.”

“Eventually we’ll run out of criminals,” Petr said. “Then stability will certainly return.”

The Minister sighed. “Meanwhile, the latest round of budget cuts mean savings will have to be made across the board.” She left unsaid the obvious, that departments which showed results would need to make the fewest savings. She took a single photo printout from a folder on her desk and showed it to him. “Do you recognise this man?”

The picture was a blurred blow-up, the face of a youngish man in half-profile. He had an ordinary-looking face, shortish brownish hair. An ish sort of a man, completely unremarkable. Petr shook his head.

“We believe this man is involved in the gang war somehow,” the Minister said.

“Oh?” Petr stopped himself asking who We were.

“He’s been in the country several weeks now.”

“This is new intelligence to me, Minster,” Petr said. “May I have that photograph?”

“No.” The Minister put the print back into its folder, put the folder in a desk drawer, and locked the drawer. Petr watched each of these steps with interest, wondering what exactly he was being told here. “I know you and your detectives – the whole force – are doing your best, but these killings have to stop, Major. We can’t wait to see if this dynamic modelling is accurate or not. They have to stop now.”

“I won’t insult your intelligence by telling you that my officers are working as hard as they can,” Petr said.

“And I won’t insult yours by telling you that it’s not good enough.” The Minister busied herself with her desktop again. “Keep me informed, Major.”

And that seemed to be the end of the interview. Petr stood. “Of course, Minister.”

AND OF COURSE the pep-talk, if that’s what it was, had no effect at all. The killings continued. Cars were bombed, relatives kidnapped, shops ransacked, and nothing the police did could stop it. All leave was cancelled, Army Intelligence – to the displeasure of the police – was called in. Nothing availed.

“Look on the bright side,” said Jakub, “sooner or later there’ll be no one left and we can live in peace.”

“I told the Minister something similar,” Petr said.

“How did she take that?”

“I thought she appreciated the joke.”

They were sitting in a booth at The Opera, a bar whose one saving grace was that no other policemen ever used it. Jakub drank some of his beer and chuckled. He said, “There’s one good–” and then the air was full of smoke and burning and Petr found he was sitting against a wall some distance from the booth and something was dripping into his eyes. He wiped it away and looked at his fingers and saw that they were slick with blood.

He looked across the bar and for a moment his brain refused to fit the images together. The interior of the Opera seemed to have shaken itself to pieces, and limping towards him through the destruction was a young man with a walking stick. He limped right up to where Petr was sitting, leaned down, and offered his hand.

“Come with me, if you want to live,” he said.

“I’VE ALWAYS WANTED to say that,” the young man said. “Also ‘Follow that car’ and ‘I’m getting too old for this shit.’”

They were in an alleyway around the corner from the Opera, Petr with one arm slung over the young man’s shoulders, his knees still sagging. He said, “I know you.”

“You really don’t,” said the young man. “But I’m afraid I am the author of all your woes, Major.”

“The Minister showed me a photograph of you.”

The young man looked towards the mouth of the alley. Police cars and fire engines and ambulances were howling past towards the bombed-out bar. “Your Minister? The Police Minister?”

“Yes.”

“What did she say about me?”

“That you’d been here a while and that you were involved in the war.”

“Well, those two things are true enough. How are you feeling?”

Petr stood up straight. “Better. Where’s Jakub?”

“Your colleague? He didn’t make it.”

Petr took a deep breath and sighed. He put his hand in his pocket, brought it out holding a pair of handcuffs, and in one move snapped one bracelet to the young man’s wrist and the other to his own. “You’re under arrest.”

The young man looked at the handcuff on his wrist. “And you are an ungrateful bastard, Major. That little bomb back there – and it was a little bomb, otherwise nobody would have got out of there alive – was meant to up the ante, make things personal between the police and organised crime. It was a provocation. And I saved your life.”

“You have a minute,” Petr said. “Talk quickly.”

“It’s going to take more than a minute,” the young man said. “And it’s easier if I show you.”

THEY WENT TO the end of the alleyway and down a connecting alley, and down another, and another, and across a street Petr didn’t recognise, and down another alleyway, and all the time the young man – who called himself ‘Rudi’ – was talking and talking and talking. Talking about Coureurs, heads in lockers, maps, parallel worlds. And suddenly Petr had no idea where they were and all the shops looked strange and the people they saw were dressed a little oddly, a little old-fashioned, and all the shop signs were in English and they emerged from one last alleyway into a magnificent town square, all lit up and cobbled and full of promenading men and women and Petr, who had lived in Prague all his life, had never seen it before.

“We’d better not go out there,” Rudi said. “We’ll stick out like sore thumbs. I know somewhere we can go.”

“What…?” Petr managed to say.

“Welcome to Władysław, Major,” Rudi said. “And you’d better take these handcuffs off. You’ll never find your way back without me, and I’m not going anywhere chained to you.”

A SHORT DISTANCE from the square, Rudi knocked on the door of a handsome-looking townhouse. The knock was answered by a tall, elderly gentleman who glanced from Rudi to Petr and back a couple of times before letting them in.

“I hope you don’t mind if I don’t tell you this gentleman’s real name,” Rudi said as they made their way down a hallway. “You can call him ‘John’, if you want. John will have a quick look at you, clean you up.”

‘John’ was some kind of physician, it seemed. One of the rooms on the first floor of the house was done out as a surgery. Petr sat on the examining table and let John clean and dress his wounds while Rudi kept on talking.

“Prague is the only city in Europe with paths that lead directly to the Community,” he said. “I don’t know why. It seemed to me, though, that existing so closely together there must have been some kind of accommodation between the two cities. I needed to see what that was, see how things fitted together here and in Prague.”

“So you started a war?”

“There’s a lot of distrust on both sides, it seems. I just gave it a nudge. Learned all kinds of useful things. What you told me about the Police Minister, for instance. That’s very interesting.”

“She’s involved?”

“Maybe not. Maybe someone just gave her the photo and told her to show it to various interested parties. But it implies someone quite high up in Prague is involved.” His leg was obviously giving him discomfort. He shifted in his chair while John pressed a cotton wool ball soaked in some alcohol solution against Petr’s head wound. “Anyway, while everyone’s attention has been wandering, I’ve been popping here and there, chatting to people. There’s quite a useful little dissident movement here. They’ve let me have some very nice maps, which will come in handy.”

“Who bombed TikTok?”

Rudi looked thoughtful. “The bar? The big bomb? Oh, that was them.” He nodded towards the street. “Community Intelligence.” He snorted. “Intelligence. They bombed the wrong bar. They were supposed to attack a bar in the next street owned by some shady Czech character. I don’t know why, exactly.”

“And the couple in Pankrác?”

Rudi nodded. “They planted the bomb. And were then killed – you’re going to enjoy this – by colleagues of the young Arab men who were living over the bar when they blew it up.” He looked thoughtful. “I suppose this means the Community is now part of GWOT. That’s going to make things interesting.”

“None of this helps me,” Petr said.

“No,” Rudi admitted. “And what I’m going to ask you to do next is not going to help you, either.”

2.

IT WAS MARCH and she was thinking about taking a holiday. March was when the snow started to get patchy and rotten but it was still too cold to hike or sunbathe unless you were of a sturdy constitution. Of course, espionage was no respecter of the seasons, but early spring seemed to be the time of year when Europe’s many intelligence services declared, if not a truce on the scale of the British and Germans playing football in No Man’s Land during World War I, at least an informal relaxation of activities. In all her years in counterespionage, nobody had ever made trouble for her in the spring, and she had a good capable team working for her in case anything did start while she was away. Once upon a time she had stayed at her post all year round, obsessed with the thought that the moment she left something terrible would erupt. But these days she had learned to let go a little. She could spare a few days with her feet up somewhere.

That just left the decision of where to go, what to do, so she’d spent the past couple of days surfing the internet looking for something interesting. She was currently quite taken with the idea of a paragliding holiday in Wales.

Her phone rang. She said, “Yes?”

“I just had a call from Immigration,” said Pavel. “They had a flag go up.”

She frowned and gestured back from the paragliding site to her desktop, where flag alerts usually popped up as little red Gremlins. “I don’t see anything.”

“It’s an old flag, from before the last system update. Immigration had it on their database but it didn’t get copied over when we upgraded.”

She sighed. “What’s the name?”

“Tonu Laara,” said Pavel. “Estonian national.”

She looked through the window on the other side of her office. Beyond the glass a wall of trees dropped obliquely into a mountain valley.

She looked at the view for so long that Pavel said, “Chief?”

She blinked. “Where is he?”

“He booked into the hotel at Pustevny.” He added, “The flag was tagged ‘observe, do not detain,’ so Immigration observed him and didn’t bother to let us know until now. He’s been here two days.”

Yes, well. She was long overdue for a quiet chat with Major Menzel, the head of the Immigration Service. But not today. “Do we have anyone up there right now?” she asked.

“Rikki and Colin.”

She rubbed her eyes. “All right. Tell them to stay in contact but not to approach. I’ll go up there.”

“Yes, Chief.”

“And Pavel?”

“Yes, Chief?”

“It’s pronounced Tonu,” she said, getting reluctantly to her feet and bidding a silent farewell to her holiday.

HE WAS SITTING in the hotel’s bar, nursing a beer and smoking a small cigar. He looked thinner than she remembered, a little more careworn. There was grey in his hair and a walking cane propped against the chair beside him, but he still looked ridiculously young. She walked right over to his table and sat down opposite him. And then they sat looking at each other. There is a peculiar intimacy between two people who have made love and then parted, only to be reunited many years later. Particularly if they spent the whole of their time together lying to each other.

“Short hair suits you,” Rudi said finally.

“And you’re doing what here, exactly?” she asked in what she hoped was a firm but not unkind tone of voice.

“Do you want a drink?” he asked.

“No thank you.”

“I have a story to tell you,” he said. “But first I want to claim political asylum.”

She watched him without saying anything.

“And then,” he said, picking up his beer, “I want to talk to the Hungarians.”

THE HUNGARIANS ARRIVED on Friday, five huge men in beautifully-designed casualwear driving up in a Peugeot hybrid 4X4 that looked as though it could tow ships up and down the Panama Canal all day. Discreet surveillance established that they were not carrying weapons beyond the odd Swiss Army knife. They checked into the hotel and headed immediately for the restaurant.

She had packed the place with her own people two hours before the meeting, but some bona fide guests had still wandered in and ordered meals, including a young black man she remembered seeing in the bar on the day Rudi made his reappearance. She walked over and sat down at his table.

“You know,” she said in her sexiest voice, “I think you’re really hot.”

He looked up from his menu and said, “Excuse me, miss?” in English.

“Oh, I love the English,” she said in English. She batted her eyelashes at him.

He sighed and laid his menu down. “Very good, miss,” he said. “And I’ve spotted your people too. Although it would be fairer to say that I’ve spotted the people who aren’t your people.”

She saw Rudi coming into the restaurant. “Come on,” she said. “You may as well sit in and listen to what the adults are talking about.”

If Rudi was surprised to see her coming across the restaurant with Seth, he made no sign. They all sat down at the Hungarians’ table and then everyone just looked at each other.

“So,” said Rudi. “I have a proposition.”

The leader, the one who had called himself Kerenyi, looked at him. “You’ve been through the mill. It shows on your face.”

“I’ve had some interesting times.”

“And not all in the kitchen.”

“No. Very few of them in the kitchen. I’m going to tell you a story now and I’d prefer it if you saved any questions, comments and jokes until I’m finished. Okay?”

Kerenyi nodded.

And so Rudi told the story again, of a family of English mapmakers and a parallel Europe where dissidence was subtly and totally suppressed and nobody could leave.

“Coureur Central seems to have mixed views about the whole business,” Rudi said. “On the one hand, they would love to get into the Community because it has no borders. You can walk from one end of it to the other and never see a border post or a customs man. Which makes it very handy. You could take a Package into the Community just outside Madrid, say, transport it all the way across Europe, and pop out again in, say, Helsinki, and nobody here would be any the wiser. Seth and I were smuggled across the border into Scotland like that. At least one dissident found her way out of the Community and set up her own little Coureur operation there.

“On the other hand, Central doesn’t want anyone else knowing how to do it, and they’re willing to kill to stop the secret getting out. And so, it seems, is everyone else who wants to know how to do it. The Line seems to be mixed up in all this somewhere, I’m not sure how yet. And in the background the Community is doing everything it can to keep its borders secure.” He looked around the table. “I have some evidence that they may have been responsible for the Xian Flu.”

“This is all bullshit,” Kerenyi said amiably. “You had a knock on the head or something.”

“They have a university. A very, very big university. It’s been doing a lot of biological research. Some years ago their intelligence service got very worried about… something. I think maybe it was the construction of the Line, maybe they were worried they couldn’t negotiate with the Line Company or something, I don’t know. And whoever runs the Community sanctioned the use of biological weapons against us to stop it. That’s what I’m told, anyway. And that’s murder on a completely unimaginable scale, right there. Someone needs to shake these people up.”

Everybody looked at everybody else. Finally Kerenyi said, “What do you want us for?”

“I’m short of manpower. I need help. I’ve got Seth here, and someone on the Prague police force I’ve managed to talk into helping, and I think our friend from the Zone might be minded to join in.”

“I’m still thinking about it,” she said.

He smiled. “But for what I have in mind I need more warm bodies, more backup.”

Kerenyi thought about it. “What’s in it for us?”

“A hundred thousand Swiss for you and each of your men, for as long as I need you,” said Rudi. “And another hundred thousand for artificing.”

Kerenyi betrayed no surprise. “You going to war?”

“Could be,” said Rudi.

Kerenyi thought about it. “Before I answer, I have two questions.”

“Sure.”

“Why us?”

Rudi smiled. “Because nobody in their right minds will be expecting it. What was your other question?”

Kerenyi grinned hugely. “What do you have in mind?”

1.

PAWEŁ WOKE BEFORE dawn and lay, as was his habit, in bed for several minutes, listening. He heard, far away in the depths of the forest, the snorting of a bison calling to its mate, and closer to a snuffling, sniffing noise he recognised as the old wild boar sow he had named Elżbieta, after his late wife. These were all familiar sounds, reassuring him that all was well, that it was safe to get out of bed and get on with the day.

He dressed slowly, muscles and joints stiff with the night’s cold. His idiot son who lived in Berlin had sent him an electric blanket last Christmas when, as usual, he had been too busy to come himself. He had forgotten that Paweł’s house had no electricity, which Paweł thought remarkable seeing as the boy had grown up there. Still, he thought cities could do that to a person. Cities made you stupid. His own father had told him that; his father’s grandfather had told him.

Paweł slept in a pair of thermal long-johns; Damarts, sent from England by his whore of a daughter. If either of his children had had the faintest scrap of sense they would have sent a generator or one of those fancy American fuel cells Nowak had told him about. An electric blanket and thermal underwear. Amazing.

Over the thermals, Paweł pulled on a pair of quilted trousers and a thick sweater. He dragged on his boots and shuffled through into the kitchen, his breath misting faintly from his lips.

The kitchen had an astonishing smell which Paweł had stopped noticing when he was around a year old. It came from the haunches of bison meat hanging from just below the low ceiling, from the hundreds of strings of dried wild mushrooms, from thick sweat-sodden socks hung to dry beside the two-ring burner, from decades of coffee and kasza and wet woollen clothing and candles of home-made tallow and at least a dozen dogs worn out one by one over the years.

His present dog was a huge white brute, a mountain-dog from the South. He had named it Halina, after his second wife, with whom it shared some personality traits.

As he came in from the bedroom, the dog stirred in its nest of rags and ancient newspapers in the corner. It weighed almost as much as he did, and its coat was matted and filthy; it lifted its massive head and watched him with lunatic eyes.

“Not yet, you bastard,” Paweł muttered, taking a crusted saucepan from the kitchen table and tossing it at the dog. “Wait, damn you.”

The dog snapped its head forward with unlikely speed and caught the pan’s handle in its mouth as it spun by. It dropped the pan and investigated it with a disgusting red tongue.

“Bastard,” Paweł said, and pulled open the front door. The door was as warped, as Nowak liked to point out every time he came to call, as a politician, and Paweł had to put his back into the task of dragging it open. As he did so, he detected several new aches.

The privy stood fifty metres away, by the edge of the forest. Its door had rotted off years before; he pulled down his trousers, opened the trapdoor in his thermals, and sat, looking back towards the house.

The little house still looked like the fairytale hunting lodge it had been built to resemble, back in the early years of the last century when Dukes and Princes had come here to hunt the żubr and the elk and the wild boar. It was still solid, though the years had not been kind to the fabric. All the windows on the upper storey were broken; most of those on the ground floor were broken too, and had been filled in with planking that had gone silver with the years. The verandah along the front – admittedly a later addition – was rotten and unsafe and piled with rubbish. It was… well, he couldn’t remember exactly when smoke had last emerged from the chimney; it seemed that all his life bottled gas had been preferable, and now the chimney must be choked solid with old birds’ nests and muck.

He had been meaning, these past four or five years, to reopen the upper storey. He had no use for the rooms up there, particularly, since the tourist trade dried up, but he thought that perhaps some of the hunters of years gone by might have left something valuable behind, and since his imbecile children couldn’t be bothered to help him out it might be time to go up the stairs and see if he could find something to sell in the village.

His bowels, like everything else, had slowed to a crawl over the years, but he didn’t mind that. Sometimes he sat here for an hour or more, looking at the house and thinking. The view never changed; there was just the view of the house. Sometimes he planned what he would do with the house; sometimes he thought about cutting back another metre or so of new growth around the clearing in which it stood. He rarely acted on these meditations, but he found them calming, and they took his mind off the increasingly wayward nature of his digestive system.

This morning, for example, he considered cleaning the chimney. The living room – into which he had not ventured for three years or so – had a hearth nearly three metres across, implanted with intricate and antique ironwork and still piled with ancient ashes. He knew the chimney was a job that was beyond him, and he had no money to pay for the work, but it soothed him to think about doing it, and now he did think about it he might be able to sell the antique grate somewhere, if he ever got around to prising it out of the fireplace.

Finishing, finally, he wiped himself with a torn sheet from an old copy of Gazeta Wyborcza, pulled up his lower garments, and stepped out of the privy.

The house was entirely surrounded by the forest. Beyond the privy marched endless dark avenues of oak and fir, spruce and beech and alder, populated by żubr and elk and the Tarpan and beaver and wild boar. The last dark corner of Europe, Nowak called it. It straddled the border between Poland and Lithuania, but it had shifted with the demands of history ever since the concept of frontiers had come into being. It had been Polish, Lithuanian, German, Russian. Secrets had been buried here, and the lawless post-Communist years, both in Poland and across the border, had brought countless bodies to the soil under the trees. Paweł had seen it all, and very little of it had impressed him.

Back in the kitchen, he lit the two burners and set a pan of water over one. Over the other he put his frying pan and let the solidified fat melt. When it was spitting, he cut some slices from a haunch of elk venison and put them in to fry. The dog Halina stirred and raised its head; thick cords of saliva dripped from its jowls as it smelled the cooking meat.

The water was boiling; Paweł spooned ground coffee into a metal jug and a plastic bowl, and poured water into both. He let them brew; Halina was a caffeine addict and was more than usually unbearable if its coffee wasn’t strong enough.

By the time the venison was cooked, the coffee was ready. He put the dog’s bowl down on the floor and the evil creature slurped at it. He poured his own coffee from the jug into a cracked ceramic mug advertising Vienna’s Tiergarten – another Christmas gift from his son the idiot – and stood eating the meat from the frying pan. He dropped a few scraps on the floor to satisfy the dog.

“What day is it, bastard?” he asked as he slurped coffee. The dog, as usual, had no sensible answer, only thick wet chewing sounds as it breakfasted. “I think it’s a day to go into the village.”

At the word ‘village,’ the dog stopped chewing and raised its head. When he was young, Paweł had attended school with a boy named Stanisław. Stanisław had liked to amuse himself by trapping insects and pulling off their wings and legs. He kept his crippled victims, as long as their tiny lives persisted, in a little cardboard box, and liked to show them to the girls.

Later, Stanisław had graduated to small animals, trapping and mutilating dogs and cats. By then, he had abandoned all attempts to impress the girls. Later still, the girls themselves had become his subjects. He had killed fifteen before he was arrested. Paweł had seen his eyes at the trial, and occasionally he saw something of Stanisław in Halina’s eyes.

It amazed him that the dog recognised the word ‘village’ and showed such interest. He had never taken it to the village; he didn’t dare, in case it decided to start chewing on a child. He shook his head and threw a dirty plate in the dog’s direction. The dog ignored it and continued to stare at him.

“I can’t take you, you bastard,” Paweł told the dog angrily. “Stupid useless creature.”

Halina watched him a moment longer, then seemed to perform a slight shrug and went back to its coffee, as if it had completely forgotten he was there.

PAWEŁ FOUND THAT he had forgotten quite how long it was since he had last visited the village. He thought it might have been in the late spring or early summer. On the other hand, he thought it could have been even earlier.

Whatever. Going to the shed, he found that his bicycle was almost useless. Both tyres were flat and there was rust on almost every metal surface. He couldn’t remember the chain breaking, but there it was, hanging uselessly. He stood, hands in the pockets of his thick jacket, staring up at the machine hanging from the ceiling of the shed. He stood there quite a long time, trying and failing to remember when he had last used the bike. Clearly it was a while.

Never mind. He went back to the caretaker’s cottage and found a stout pair of hiking boots, only faintly ghosted with mildew, under a pile of clothes. He laced them up and put on a coat and slung a rucksack over one shoulder and set off down the path that led to the track that led to the road that led to the village.

The village had about seventy inhabitants. It boasted a bar, a shop, and a garage, all of them run by the same man, and a post office run by a wan, nervous woman who had either come here or been banished here from Warsaw twenty years before. Paweł always expected her to leave, so he had never bothered to learn her name, but year after year, there she was, patiently collecting his post and waiting for him to come into the village for it.

“And how are we today, Mr Pawluk?” she prattled as he examined the pile of envelopes, parcels and packages which had accumulated at the back of the post office since he last came into the village – and he was beginning to think it had been a very long time since he was here last.

“We?” he muttered. “We? I’m fine, I have no idea about you. Nowak been about?”

“I saw Mr Nowak not ten minutes before you arrived,” said the woman. “Going into the, er…” She nodded at the bar.

“Here, put this in a bag,” he told her, thrusting an armful of his post at her. “I’ll be back for it later.” And he thumped down the steps of the post office and across the road and into the bar.

Inside, Nowak was sitting at a table, looking at a bottle of Wyborowa and two glasses. “Heard you were about,” he said. “Drink?”

Paweł pulled up a chair and sat and watched Nowak fill the two glasses with vodka. They drained their glasses in silence, and Nowak refilled them.

“So,” he said, taking an envelope from his jacket pocket, “a writer.”

“A writer.” Paweł took the envelope, inspected its contents, removed the money and pocketed it.

“He’s booked the Lodge for six weeks,” Nowak went on. “Says he needs the privacy or something to finish his latest novel, fuck him.”

“Fuck him,” Pawl agreed, and they both drained their glasses again, and once again Nowak refilled them.

“He’s paying full price though,” Nowak said. “The whole Lodge, not just the ground floor.”

“When does he arrive?” Paweł was not a lazy man, but he could foresee some busy days ahead getting the place tidied up. It had been a while since he had done any cleaning at all in the Lodge.

“Friday.”

“What’s today? Monday?”

“Wednesday.”

“Fuck.” Paweł emptied his glass again.

“He says he doesn’t want any special treatment,” said Nowak. “Says he’ll cook for himself.” And the two men had a laugh about that because the last person who had said they could cook for themselves at the Lodge had almost burned the place down.

Paweł was looking at the rental documents from the envelope – Nowak’s business renting out the Lodge was far too ramshackle to include ereaders and tablets and palmtops. “Don’t recognise the name,” he said.

“Writers,” Nowak said. “Fuck ’em.”

“Fuck ’em,” Paweł agreed, and they drank again. Paweł stood up and fastened his coat. “Better get the place ready for him, then.”

Nowak poured himself another drink. “Better had.”

Outside, Paweł drew himself up straight and marched across the street to the post office, where he barked orders at the woman behind the counter until she handed over his bag of post. Then he headed back into the woods, weaving only very slightly.

2.

THE TOURIST WAS very young. He had a beard, and a limp, and he affected the look of someone who had had a hard life, but Paweł, who had had a hard life, knew the difference. This tourist, this writer, was just a boy.

He arrived early in the morning, while Paweł was sitting in the privy. He heard the sound of boots crunching twigs and leaf-litter underfoot, and when he buttoned himself up and went outside there was the boy, dressed in jeans and a black padded ski-jacket, a big olive-green canvas kitbag slung over one shoulder, leaning on a walking cane and grinning.

“Hey,” said Paweł, walking towards him. “This is private property.”

“I know,” said the boy, smiling and holding out a hand to shake. “For the next few weeks it’s my private property.”

Paweł didn’t shake hands. He thought it was a habit for city people who didn’t trust each other not to be carrying weapons.

If this bothered the boy in the slightest he gave no sign. He kept smiling and stuck his hand back in his pocket and gestured with his cane at the lodge. “It’s in pretty good shape,” he commented.

“How did you hurt your leg?” Paweł asked.

The boy looked down at his leg, then at Paweł, and he grinned. “You know, you’re one of the very few people who’s ever asked me. Most folk assume I won’t want to talk about it. I had a ballooning accident.”

Paweł raised an eyebrow. “Ballooning.”

“Slight miscalculation in weight-to-lift ratios.” He leaned forward conspiratorially. “To be honest with you, I’m getting too old for all that stuff.”

Paweł shrugged.

“That’s when I started writing, anyway,” the boy went on, starting to walk around the Lodge with Paweł in tow. “While I was in hospital.” He turned and winked at Paweł. “Word to the wise, Mr Pawluk. Anyone who tells you those bone-knitting devices don’t hurt? They’re a liar. Here, have a watch.” And he cheerfully produced from his pocket a complicated plastic box-thing containing one of the ugliest watches Paweł had ever seen, a chunky garish thing with a fat plastic bracelet.

“Go on, try it on,” the boy urged, and Paweł put it on, and the boy smiled. “There,” he said in a satisfied voice. “Don’t take it off, though. Good luck charm.”

SO PAWEŁ WORE the watch during the days and weeks of the boy’s occupancy of the Lodge. He hated it and was determined to sell it the moment the boy left, but he made sure the boy knew he was wearing it.

Not that he saw much of him. Sometimes he saw the boy out for walks in the woods near the Lodge, but mostly he stayed indoors – writing, Paweł presumed. Once or twice he walked past one of the unboarded windows of the Lodge on his way to do some chore or other, and he caught sight of the boy inside, using one of those computers where you typed in the air instead of on a keyboard and your arms got sore after fifteen minutes. There seemed to be quite a lot of computer equipment in the room with the boy, actually. Lots of things with screens and lights and cables. A lot more than Paweł remembered him bringing with him.

On the other hand, Paweł told himself as he got ready for bed one night, they’d had guests who were much, much worse. He remembered a party of Belgian businessmen who… well, it had put him off ever visiting Belgium. And then the six Maltese who never said a word to him, and possibly even to each other. They were spooky beyond belief.

He was too old, too slow. As he tried to turn a pair of strong, beefy arms wrapped around his waist and lifted him off his feet, waltzed him around until he was facing in the opposite direction, then a shadow lunged out of nowhere and stuck a length of gaffer tape over his mouth and before he had time to do anything about it a huge hand had grabbed both his wrists, pinning them together while someone else wrapped more gaffer tape around them. Three. Were there three of them? Or only two? It couldn’t be just one person; there were too many hands. He hadn’t even had time to try to shout.

Two. There were at least two. One carried his upper body; the other one held his feet immobile, and in this way he was carried through the cottage, past the body of Halina, lying on the kitchen floor with her throat cut, and out into the moonlight.

Where the boy was already kneeling, his clothes torn and his face bloody, hands clasped behind his head. Paweł was dumped beside him, forced to his knees, and he felt the cold muzzle of a weapon brush the back of his neck. “Teach you to steal from us,” said a voice behind him.

The boy said something in a language Paweł did not recognise, and all of a sudden the clearing seemed to be full of bees and hot, sticky rain and the sounds of large things falling to the ground, and when it was over and he opened his eyes he saw five large black-clad men lying around the clearing, apparently chewed to death by something with millions of tiny teeth.

The boy turned to look at him, covered in blood, and unbelievably he was smiling. “You okay?” he asked cheerfully.

Paweł wiped blood off his own face and nodded mutely.

“Good.” The boy got to his feet and helped Paweł up, removed the tape around his wrists, and looked around the clearing. The wall of the Lodge nearest to them looked as if someone had attacked it with a huge cheese grater. “Better reload, just in case.” He limped up the steps into the Lodge, came back a few moments later with an aluminium stepladder and a couple of towels. He tossed one of the towels to Paweł, carried the ladder over to a tree at the edge of the clearing, and climbed awkwardly up as Paweł wiped gore off himself.

“Magic,” said the boy, reaching up into the branches of the tree to pluck something… invisible… “Magic guns.”

The sentry guns were matt spheres the size of grapefruit, and until the boy started to take them down from the trees they were completely invisible. Where his fingers touched them, irregular patches of mottled flesh-pink spread until, by the time he had finished reloading and resetting them, they were the colour of his hands.

There were more than forty of them, spread in a ragged ring around the Lodge, and the boy visited them all. As he replaced each one it began to disappear again, taking on the colours of its surroundings.

“I’m glad you wore your watch,” he told Paweł as he replaced the final device. “The guns are programmed to fire on my command at anyone who isn’t wearing one, but you could still have caught a couple of rounds if you hadn’t stayed still.”

Paweł said nothing.

The boy led the way back to the Lodge. In the dining room every piece of computer equipment had been smashed beyond repair. The boy stood in the doorway looking at it all.

“You’d better go,” Paweł told him. “Those five will have friends. They’ll be looking for you.”

The boy shook his head. “I’m not worried about that.”

“Well, don’t you think you ought to be?”

“They’re just hired muscle. I’ll be long gone before any backup arrives.” He sighed. “On the other hand, you’re right. Their friends will want revenge, just to save face. You should go, too.”

“Me?” Paweł laughed. “I’m not going anywhere.”

The boy tipped his head to one side.

“There’s most of an SS rifle division out there,” Paweł told him, gesturing beyond the windows to the forest. “Came here in 1942 looking for Jewish resistance fighters. Only three of them ever came out, and my father said they were all insane. No one ever found the bodies. You think I’m afraid of the mafia?”

The boy smiled. “I’ll leave you the guns, just in case.” He looked around the room. “You can have all the other stuff as well. Even the broken things can be sold for spares.”

“They said you’d stolen something from them.”

“Not true. I found something that someone else wanted. I’m going to do something with it. They hired the mafia to stop me. Or maybe not. Maybe it was someone else. I’m still filling in the blanks.”

“Who is this ‘they’?”

“Well, that’s the thing. I don’t know for certain. There are a number of possibilities. Lots of people, apparently. And possibly some people are in the background, helping me. I don’t know.” He beamed at Paweł. “Exciting, no?”

“Was it valuable, this thing you found?”

The boy thought about it. “You couldn’t go into a bank or a moneychanger’s or a pawnshop and get money for it.”

Not worth anything, then. Paweł lost interest in the subject. “You should go now,” he said, thinking of the components in the smashed computers. He could get them to Nowak by this evening, and be back here the next morning with a big wad of cash. Maybe he could buy himself a new sleeping bag.

THEY TOOK SHOVELS from the Lodge’s outhouse and went back into the clearing to bury the bodies. The boy searched the dead men, removed shredded wallets and lacerated phones, dropped them all in a plastic bag. They buried Halina too. It was slow, dirty, backbreaking labour but the boy did more than his share of the work, despite the obvious discomfort from his leg. It was almost dawn before they’d finished. Paweł leaned on his shovel and looked around the clearing, which looked exactly like someone had buried a number of bodies in it.

“There’s a phrase the Stasi used to use,” the boy said. “Something about washing a bear.”

“Washing the bear without getting wet,” Paweł said. Then he scowled.

The boy grinned. “Why, Mr Pawluk. Who would ever have guessed you’d be familiar with a Stasi saying?”

Paweł had a sudden sense that the boy knew everything about him, including the time he’d spent in Berlin in his youth, a couple of years before the Fall. “It means to carry out a dangerous task without exposing one’s self to risk,” he said. He said it without shame. He had done nothing to feel ashamed about during those last heady days of the Berlin Wall; he’d told himself that often enough to accept it as fact.

The boy nodded. “Indeed it does.”

Paweł looked about the clearing. “But you seem to be exposing yourself to a certain amount of risk.”

The boy leaned down until their faces were just inches apart and looked him in the eye. In that moment, Paweł thought he saw a high triumphant gleam of madness on the boy’s face. “This,” he said, “is not really risk at all. This is just a bunch of hired thugs. The particular bear I’m trying to wash entails a whole different order of risk.”

Paweł raised an eyebrow. “Is it worth it?”

The boy smiled. “Shall we see?” he said.

Paweł was about to reply when he heard voices coming from the track that led deeper into the forest. Looking in that direction, he saw dim lights bobbing along. For a moment he thought the thugs’ friends had arrived, but as the voices came closer he heard their accents and relaxed. It was just the English.

“Well,” said the boy, brushing dirt and twigs and leaf-litter off his clothes. “We’re hardly in a state to receive guests, but I don’t think they’ll mind too much, considering. Would you like to meet them?”

There were four of them, three men and a woman. They were carrying torches and they had rucksacks on their backs and hiking boots on their feet. The men were all in their late fifties or early sixties; the woman was younger, perhaps forty. They were all dressed in that irritatingly old-fashioned way the English dressed; tweeds, shirts and ties. The woman was wearing tweed trousers and jacket over a big chunky fishing sweater. They all looked terrified.

“It’s all right,” the boy told them in English. “You’re out now; you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

One of the men stepped forward hesitantly and put out his hand. “You have no idea how long we’ve waited for this,” he said in that English accent Paweł’s son had once described as ‘mummerset,’ a kind of ham actor’s version of a West Country accent. It just sounded like English to Paweł.

“I know,” said the boy.

All of a sudden a patch of forest seemed to shimmer into life, like the monster in that Schwarzenegger movie Paweł had seen once, and a figure wearing a sort of all-over suit of grey rags stepped into the clearing. It pulled back the hood of its suit, revealing the face of a young black man. Just behind him two more figures phased into existence, huge blond men carrying automatic weapons.

“Problems?” asked the young man, looking at the churned-up earth where Paweł and the boy had buried the thugs.

“Nothing we didn’t expect,” the boy told him. “You?”

The young man shook his head while looking suspiciously at Paweł. “The map’s accurate; they were waiting for me at the dustoff. All we had to do was walk back.”

The boy nodded and Paweł thought he saw a huge weight lift off his shoulders. “All right, then. Take everyone inside and get them cleaned up. There’s a change of clothes for everybody. Excuse the mess.”

“Is this going to happen every time we do this?” asked the young man.

“No,” said the boy. “Sometimes it might be really dangerous.”

The young man snorted and went to chivvy the English, who were standing huddled nervously together, into the lodge. One of the big blond men said, “This is a lot of bloodshed for what was supposed to be a routine job.”

The boy shrugged. “I think we’ve flushed out another player.” He tossed the big man the bag containing the wallets and phones. “They’ll have transport somewhere nearby; search it and then get rid of it. Then see if you can find out who they were and who they were working for.”

The big man held up the plastic bag and squinted at the contents. “Shouldn’t be hard; if they were carrying ID they weren’t professionals.”

The boy nodded. “That’s what I thought. Anyway, I want to be out of here in half an hour. Send someone out to sweep for backup and I’ll meet you all back at the rendezvous point in two days.”

“Okay.” And the two men pulled up their hoods and disappeared again. For such large men, they moved almost soundlessly across the forest floor; Paweł could barely hear them leave.

When they’d gone, the boy said, “So, how long have you known about them?”

“The English?” said Paweł. He shrugged. “All my life.”

“Do you know where they’ve come from?”

Paweł shrugged again. “I’m a gamekeeper.”

“Apart from the Berlin Years.”

“I’m a gamekeeper,” he said again. “My father was a gamekeeper, and his father. We go where we want to in the forest. Sometimes we meet English gamekeepers.”

The boy looked into the woods. “Well, it’s forest on both sides of the border,” he said, half to himself. “I suppose sometimes it can be hard to know which side you’re on.” He looked at Paweł.

For quite a long time, they stood looking at each other. There seemed, Paweł thought, no point in denying it. “They say you can have these,” he said finally, nodding at the Lodge. “Try and take any more out, and you’ll be stopped.”

“And this message is from…?”

“Does it matter?”

“From the same people who sent the mafia boys?”

“No. That was someone else. I don’t know who and I don’t know why.” Paweł watched the boy thinking about this. “You seem to have many more enemies than friends.”

“That is hard to argue with,” the boy agreed. He looked at Paweł and said, “How old are you, by the way?”

Which was such an unusual question, considering the situation, that Paweł didn’t even think of lying. “I’m almost ninety,” he said.

“You’re ninety-eight,” said the boy. “And you don’t look a day over sixty. Life in the forest seems to agree with you.”

Paweł scowled.

“You know,” the boy went on, “about eighteen months ago I met a man who swore blind that time passes more slowly on the other side of the border. I thought that was bullshit. How can time pass more slowly in one place than in another? But maybe he was right. Maybe you’ve spent quite a lot of time over there. Hm?”

Paweł glared at him.

The boy nodded. “Thought so. Now that would be a secret worth killing to protect.” He rubbed his face. “Okay, Mr Pawluk. We’ll be leaving soon and you can go back to keeping an eye on the paths. The next time you see whoever it is you work for, tell them this isn’t over.”

“You will be stopped,” warned Paweł. “Come on; you got four out. That’s a victory in itself. Isn’t that enough?”

“Enough?” said the boy. “Mr Pawluk, in the past ten years I have been chased around Europe, kidnapped, beaten up, shot at and lied to by virtually everyone I’ve trusted.” He turned, picked up his shovel and started to carry it back towards the Lodge. Paweł thought he suddenly looked exhausted. “A lot of people have died,” he went on without looking round. “Including my brother. All because someone, somewhere, wants to stop these people going where they want.” He paused and gestured at the Lodge with the shovel. “Or because someone else wants to know how to get into the Community. Or because someone else wants to stop people finding out about the Community. I honestly don’t know any more and I’m sick of it. I’m sick of being ridden around like an old pony.” He looked at the shovel for a moment as if only now realising it was in his hand, then he threw it into the undergrowth and went tiredly up the steps to the front door of the Lodge.

“Tell your friends I haven’t even started yet,” he said, and he went inside.