Europe at Midnight (29 page)

1

“I
S THAT
B
AINES
? I want to talk to Baines.”

Jim checked the phone’s screen. The number was part of the crash-contact procedure he had given to Rupert, ‘Baines’ the workname he had told him. But it wasn’t Rupert’s voice on the other end of the connection.

“Who is this?” he asked.

“Never mind who I am,” said the voice, gruff and lightly-accented. German, Jim thought. “Rupert of Hentzau told me to call you.”

“Just a moment, please.” Jim looked around the conference table, was struck again by the number of unfamiliar faces. “Would you excuse me, please?” he said. “I have to take this.” At the other end of the table, Bevan raised an eyebrow, but he kept his expression carefully neutral as he left the room, went down the stairs to the foyer, signed out, and stepped out onto Northumberland Avenue.

He walked down as far as the Embankment before raising the phone to his ear again and saying, “Are you still there?”

“Are you Baines?” asked the voice. “What the fuck are you playing at?”

“I’m Baines. Who are you, please?”

“You call me Leo. I have a message for you, if you’re Baines.”

“I’m listening.”

“I was with him in Dresden, then in Vienna. He says there has been a catastrophe and they will be relocating him soon, if they don’t kill him. He told me to tell you about Mundt.”

“I don’t know anyone named Mundt.”

“You’d better listen, then, hadn’t you?”

And for the next half an hour, apart from the occasional request for clarification, Jim didn’t say a single word.

T
HE MEETING HAD
broken up by the time he got back. Bevan was waiting in the anteroom, sitting by the window reviewing something on her tablet. She looked up as he came in.

“News?” she asked.

“Let me buy you lunch,” he said.

They went to a Polish restaurant on The Strand. Bevan ordered
bigos
, Jim
kotlet schabowy
with chips and a salad. When the waiter had taken their order, she said, “So?”

He gave her the gist of what ‘Leo’ had told him. It took a little while, and their food arrived as he was doing it.

When he was finished, she raised an eyebrow. “Mundt,” she said. “Never heard of him.”

“I Googled him,” he said. “He seems kosher.”

“It’s not exactly hard to produce a wiki page for somebody, you know.”

“I know. It’s the backstopping that takes time.”

“Could it be a scam?”

Jim shrugged. “This Leo didn’t ask for any money. He just wanted to deliver a message.”

Bevan looked past him at the other diners in the restaurant. “He’s having a fraught time, isn’t he,” she said.

“Leo said it was a catastrophe.”

“It sounds like it. And Rupert still went back to them?”

“That seems to have been his plan, yes.”

“He’s got balls,” she said. “I will give him that. They probably killed him the moment he showed up, you know.”

“Let’s not be so hasty,” he told her. “He didn’t want to come back in. If they believe his story and they do decide to pull out, they’ll take him with them.”

“Back to a place where he can’t possibly communicate with us. Also, there’s a lot of
if
there, Jim.” She sat back and looked at her meal. “What do you want to do?”

“There’s nothing we
can
do, Adele. Other than wait for him to make contact again.”

“How long do we wait? A week? A month?”

“You’ve never run an intelligence operation before,” he said. “One has to be patient. Some of these things run for years. Decades. There’s no way to tell.”

Bevan snorted and filled up her glass from the carafe of water on the table. Jim thought she looked worn out. SAS men in NBC suits had finally managed to establish a bridgehead in the Campus, using jet-skis to tow floating radiation-proof pressurised shelters up the Tributary on little pontoons. There was talk of sending vehicles in soon, and then of mounting an expedition to try and make contact with any survivors, although judging by some of the atmospheric analyses it was more likely they would find Elvis over there. Bevan had been running the liaison between the working group and the SAS, splitting her time between London, Nottingham, and extended briefings in Hereford. She’d managed to build up a detailed picture of the area for a square mile or so around the far end of the Tributary, but they knew little more of the Campus now than when Rupert had drawn his rough map for them over a year ago.

“You need to take a break,” he said gently.

She waved the suggestion away. “Sleep when I’m dead,” she said with a smile. “How’s your food?”

“It’s fine. I’m worried about you, Adele.”

“Too much to do,” she said, shaking her head. “Too much to do, too little product, too many people wanting it.”

He nodded. “You noticed that too.”

“And what are we going to tell them about this news from our boy?” she asked. “A topology professor who’s discovered how to make wormholes or interdimensional gateways or whatever the hell it is he’s done? Professor Mundt is about to become the most wanted man on the face of the planet.”

“I think you and I need to concentrate on Rupert,” he said. “Mundt’s a side issue. Someone else can worry about him.”

Bevan shrugged. “Write up a contact report, submit it, forget about Mundt.”

“Yes.”

She looked him in the eye and said, “Have you had a look at the reading list lately?”

He nodded. When he had joined the working group, the reading list – the classified list of people cleared to receive
Tombola
, the group’s product – had consisted of no more than half a dozen names. Now, it ran to four pages, and many of the names seemed to defy
encapsulation
and appear in all of the Committee’s categories. “I’ve been meaning to ask Shaw about it.”

“Don’t bother,” she said. “I tried; she just fobbed me off. I did some digging on my own. There are at least fourteen national intelligence agencies reading our product now, Jim, and a
lot
of what I can only guess are corporate interests.”

Jim blinked. The national intelligence services were no great surprise – the Community was a threat, or at least a concern, to every nation in Europe. The corporations were a little harder to explain, but that was the world one lived in. The multinationals had been
de facto
nations themselves for years, lacking only their own armed forces.

He said, “This is quite a thing, you know. It’s not a surprise that a lot of people want a piece of it.”

“But even you’re surprised enough to want to ask who all those people are.”

“One is curious, that’s true.”

“It’s not even who they are, particularly,” she said. “It’s what they
want
. Perigee was tasked to assess the threat to national security posed by the Community, not to be on the lookout for commercial opportunities.” She pulled a sour face, the face of someone who has seen the purity of her life’s work tainted by outside interests. “I don’t trust them. Not a one of them.”

Jim tipped his head to one side.

Bevan thought for a while. Then she looked at him, and when she spoke her voice was very quiet. “Suppose we don’t tell the Committee about our latest news,” she said. “Not right now. Suppose we keep it to ourselves for the moment.”

He thought it was a sign of their friendship that she felt comfortable enough to even suggest it. He said, “And what?”

“It gives Mundt a head start, for one thing.”

“Adele,” he said carefully, “this could be construed – quite easily, in fact – as conspiracy to commit treason.”

“Are you going to grass me up, Jim?”

He shook his head. “No. No, I’m not. But we can’t withhold intelligence from the Committee.”

“Jim, something’s
changed
. The whole thing isn’t
ours
any more. Any day now you and I are going to be sidelined and then we’ll be quietly put out to pasture. Someone else will be put in charge of running Rupert, some corporate clone with a natty suit and the morals of a stoat. Do you want that?”

He thought about it.

She added, “All right, I’m not an intelligence officer. But I’ve seen this happen to enough committees in academia. So long as you’re bumbling along doing stuff nobody wants, you’ve got a free rein. But the moment you start producing something of interest –
commercial
interest – the committee starts to fill up with people you’ve never met before, and shortly after that you find yourself standing outside in the rain wondering what happened.”

He took a long time to answer. He thought about the long hours he and Bevan had spent together, trying to parse evidence for the Community’s existence from Rupert’s debrief and Victorian newspaper reports and old train timetables. It was an exercise, he thought, not unlike Second World War photoreconnaissance, looking at images of the same scene taken days apart and trying to spot troop movements or V2 launching sites.

He said, “I have to submit this new intelligence.” When Bevan started to protest, he added. “But I’ll make some inquiries of my own – discreetly, I promise – about our new colleagues.”

Bevan looked ashamed. “Thank you, Jim,” she said.

He smiled. “But you have to promise to get some rest.”

She shook her head. “I’m off to Windsor tomorrow.”

“I can do that.” He reached out and took her hand. “Get some rest, Adele. I’ll sort things out.”

She sighed, and he saw that she wasn’t just tired. She was exhausted, overwrought. What had, for years and years, been a niche interest laboured over in the wee small hours was now a fully-functioning intelligence operation. It was as if she had spent months building a kit-car or something, only to have it taken away from her by people who wanted to race it. Not for the first time, he felt a presentiment of some colossal disaster.

T
HOSE WHO STUDIED
these things spoke with some passion about Dr Richard Beeching’s 1963 report
The Reshaping of British Railways
, citing the 5,000 miles of line and almost two and a half thousand stations it earmarked for closure. The truth was that though the Beeching recommendations had represented the largest gutting of the British railway network, they were not an isolated case. Growing competition from road transport and a need to cut costs had led to 1,300 miles of line being decommissioned between 1923 and 1939, and another 5,300 miles or so under the auspices of the Branch Lines Committee of the Transport Commission between 1948 and 1962.

What happened to these lost thousands of miles of line varied, from place to place. Track was lifted and the land was built on, or later incorporated into cycleways and footpaths, or in some cases reopened as branch lines.

According to Rupert, Araminta had said a branch line off the main West Country route from Paddington had once led into Ernshire. There were only a couple of existing branches which fitted the bill, and these had been mapped and examined in painstaking detail early on, without success. Research had identified another seven which had been closed since the end of the First World War. Jim thought it was a long shot, but Bevan wanted every t crossed and i dotted.

Which brought Jim, on this sunny breezy day, his agent still missing somewhere in Europe or even further away, to a woodland not far from Windsor, where a group of men and women wearing hard hats and hi-vis jackets with the words GREAT WEST RAIL on the back were crashing about with laser theodolites and GPS and other, less standard, measuring equipment.

“Professor not coming today, then?” asked Johnny Pugh, the phlegmatic little Welshman who was in overall charge of the mapping operation.

“She thought it was time I got my feet dirty,” Jim replied.

Johnny laughed. “Do you good.”

“She thought so.”

It was still possible, if you knew what you were looking at, to see where the branch line had run here until 1930. A steep-sided little valley cut through the woodland, its sides and floor now thickly overgrown. A couple of workmen with industrial strimmers were methodically clearing away the undergrowth, and a line of people behind them was raking up the cuttings and piling them neatly to the sides. The operation had been sold to the local news organisations as an exercise in industrial archaeology, which Jim thought wasn’t so very far from the truth.

“Who are they?” Jim asked, nodding in the direction of a group of four young men and women in business suits, hard hats and wellington boots, who were standing a little way further along the valley and consulting a paper map.

“They say they’re from your Committee,” Johnny said.

“I’ve never seen then before.”

“They had all the right ID.”

“Oh, well, that’s all right then.”

Johnny looked at him. “You okay?”

“Get Security to escort them off-site,” Jim said.

“You sure?”

“I’m sure.”

“Okay.” Johnny put his fingers in his mouth and whistled. He pointed at one of the half-dozen or so people who turned round to see what the noise was about, then pointed at the suits, and a few moments later the suits were being gently but firmly walked away from the operation. One of them, a tall man in his twenties, glared at Jim as they passed by.

“I really hope you haven’t got yourself in trouble,” Johnny said when they had gone.

“From now on, nobody you don’t recognise gets onto the site,” Jim told him. “I don’t care how good their ID is.”

“You’ll let me have that in writing, will you?”

“I’ll have it couriered over to you this afternoon.”

Johnny nodded. “Okey dokey,” he said.

“Thank you. Are we making any headway at all?”

Johnny shook his head. “Two of the branches have been built on since they closed. Several times. One’s a line of housing estates, the other’s an out-of-town shopping centre. We’ve done another three. That leaves this one and another near Datchett.”

“Anything at all out of the ordinary?”

“Not a thing.”

“Nothing’s ever easy, is it, Mr Pugh?”

“Never,” said Johnny. “Everything okay, Terry?” This to the Security man, returning after escorting the suits out of the way.