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Authors: Dave Hutchinson

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Europe at Midnight (7 page)

BOOK: Europe at Midnight
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“Sir?”

I turned and looked down the corridor. He finally had the door unlocked. I walked back down to him and he opened it for me. Then he saluted as I stepped through, and I felt myself cringe. He closed the door behind me, and I heard the locks being clicked shut again.

There was a table in the middle of the room. I went over to it, pulled up a chair and sat down. I put my folders and my mug down in front of me. On the other side of the table was a small stack of books. I reached over and picked up the top one.
The Prince
.

He didn’t turn from the window.

I put the book back on the pile. “I’d have thought you’d know it by heart by now.”

He didn’t answer. He had his back to me and his shoulders were so straight they looked as if they had been set using a spirit-level. We were above the level of the mist, and the window seemed to look out over a huge vaporous lake, from which the towers and spires and cubes of Science City rose like the skyline of a mythical metropolis, the seven-hundred-foot spire of the Architects’ Tower at its heart catching the morning sunlight on its thousands of windows.

“Nice view,” I said.

“Professor,” he said without turning round. He always used my predecessor’s rank when he spoke to me.

I opened one of my folders and took out half a dozen sheets of paper and sorted through them.

He looked over his shoulder at me and smiled. “Good morning.”

I looked up from the documents. “Good morning, Colonel.”

“Have you read Machiavelli?” he asked.

“No.”

He smiled again.

When he took over from the Old Colonel, he had been twenty years old. Now he was nearly seventy, and he looked as hard as an old tree. His white hair was combed straight back from his forehead, and his face was pink and freshly-shaved. The room wasn’t cold – there was a little heater in the corner – but he was wearing a heavy blue greatcoat and a grey scarf. I sipped some tea and consulted the documents again.

“Do you intend to be entertaining today?” he asked without moving from the window. “Or will this be another of those visits where you just sit and stare at me?”

I continued to read through the documents. They had nothing to do with my visit; they were just camouflage. I made a pencil notation on a report about lightbulb production and wondered distantly why it had arrived on my desk.

“I see,” said the Colonel. He turned to look out of the window again.

I read for another minute or so. It was childish and silly, I knew, but I needed the time to gather my thoughts. He scared the living daylights out of me.

Finally I said, “Any complaints?”

It was his turn to remain silent.

I said, “Runway Four.”

He said nothing.

I said, “Don’t you think it’s remarkable that people would try escape attempts so close to Admin? I mean, I can cycle from my office down to the river in an hour or so. It’s hardly out of the way.”

“I don’t think it’s remarkable at all,” he said.

“No?”

“No.”

“I’m not even going to bother telling you about the bodies we found,” I said. “We have more than enough evidence against you and your people.”

No reaction.

I got up from the table and banged on the door. The guard opened it and I said, “Go downstairs and get four men.” He looked at me for a moment or two, confused, then closed the door again. I heard him running off down the corridor.

I stood by the door waiting. The Colonel turned from the window and raised an eyebrow.

A minute or so later, I heard booted feet running towards us along the battered floorboards of the corridor. The door opened and the Sergeant of the Guard stepped into the room, followed by three of his men.

“Handcuff him and take him outside,” I said to the Sergeant, nodding at the Colonel.

He didn’t resist as he was handcuffed and marched bodily out of the room, down the corridor and down the stairs. Araminta came out of the Porter’s Lodge as we swept by towards the doors, and she fell in behind us as we went outside.

“I’ve had enough,” I told the Colonel as we walked.

“Really?” he asked, looking about him. It was months since he had been out of his room, and he was making the most of the change of scenery.

“I’ve had enough of wasting time and resources on you.”

“You’re welcome to stop,” he said. “Any time you feel strong enough.”

“Yes,” I said, coming to a halt. “Stop,” I told the guards. “Make him kneel”

The guards looked uncertainly at each other and then forced the Colonel to his knees. I heard Araminta say, “Rupe...?”

I took a pistol from my jacket pocket, cocked it, and put the muzzle to the back of the Colonel’s head.


Rupe!
” said Araminta.

I pulled the trigger.

There was a moment’s shocked silence, then the Colonel began to laugh.

 

 

S
HE WAS VERY
quiet for a few days. She seemed to spend most of her time teaching, or working in the Library. When she was at home, she spent a lot of time in her room.

One evening, while I was working through a pile of routine intelligence reports, she came and stood on the other side of my desk and said, “Rupe, we have to talk about what happened the other day.”

I sat back and looked at her. She was wearing a pair of my cords and one of my shirts and she had her hair tied back. There were dark smudges under her eyes and her nose looked red, as if she’d been crying.

“He did much worse to others, Araminta. I wanted to shake him up.”

“What you did was barbaric, Rupe,” she said. “I don’t care what that man did to you, you had no right to start behaving like him. I thought the Revolution was supposed to put an end to all that.”

There was, of course, no answer to that. She was right, I was wrong. I spread my hands and shrugged.

“I thought you were better than that,” she said sadly, and she turned away and went back to her room and closed the door.

 

 

N
OT LONG AFTER
that, she came to my office and announced that she was taking a Sabbatical.

“A what?” I said.

“I’m going home for a while,” she told me. “I want to get my head together.”

“Your head looks all right to me,” I said, but she had stopped finding me amusing.

“I want to decide whether you’re worth the trouble,” she said.

 

1

 

T
HE CALL CAME
through as Jim was preparing to leave the office. He had tickets for the anniversary revival of
Shrek: The Musical
at The Theatre Royal, a birthday surprise for his stepson. He very nearly left the expert system to pick up the call, but in the end a vague sense of duty won out and he answered and listened to the voice at the other end of the connection.

The caller rang off, and Jim phoned home, made excuses into a frosty silence. By the time he got downstairs there was a car waiting for him.

Settling into the back seat, he felt his phone buzz. The office distrusted electronic communications on principle, considering them inherently impossible to secure. For the most confidential missives, paper was the only acceptable medium. But the situation was still developing and there was no time to print up documents, so someone – an intern, judging by the number of typos – had been tasked to text him a briefing.

He scrolled down through it as the police driver accelerated the car smoothly into the West End’s evening traffic. Not much more than the phone call had told him, really. And there was that phrase again.
Claims to have seen a map
.

So, Jim, in the back of an anonymous saloon car, the underlighting of the phone’s screen making him look older than his years. Untidy fair hair, a dimpled chin. Gawky. A former girlfriend once told him he looked like one of those awkward wading birds. But she also told him he had the cold, dead eyes of a shark, so there was that. Bright lad, Cambridge-educated, good record. Steady worker rather than a superstar. Good eye for detail. Prosaic.

The Whitehall and Charing Cross bombings had resulted in the previous century’s Ring Of Steel being retooled as the Maze Of Steel, a patchwork of blocked-off streets and security checkpoints which still bewildered all but the most experienced of cabbies, so it was some while before he realised that the car had not, in fact, travelled all that far. He found himself being conveyed through the thirty-foot-high sliding gates at the back of the new Camden Town police station, a forbidding fortified compound which would not have looked out of place in Belfast in the 1980s. The brief campaign of car- and truck-bombings had forced a hurried rethink of police security across the country. Most existing police stations – the ones which hadn’t been closed down by the cuts in the 2010s, at any rate – had made do with barriers and exclusion zones. Newly-built stations such as Camden had been purpose-designed to take into account the Global War On Terror. Which was all very well, but...

“Excuse me, what are we doing here?” Jim asked.

“Ordered to bring you here first, then drive you on to Potters Bar, sir,” replied the driver.

“What am I supposed to do here?”

“I only drive the car, sir.”

While the driver parked among the armoured vans and fast interceptor cars in the compound, Jim essayed a text. The reply came almost immediately.
Full, repeat full, report on incident
.

“Do not pass go,” Jim murmured. “Do not collect two hundred pounds.”

“Pardon me, sir?” asked the driver.

“Nothing.” Jim opened the door. “Go and see if the canteen will give you a mug of tea and a bacon sandwich or something. I might be here a while.”

“Sir.”

A tall man in a suit was walking across the yard towards the car. Jim met him halfway and they shook hands. “Superintendent Spicer,” said the man. “Could I see your identification, please, sir?”

Jim showed him a card which bore neither his real name nor the name of the organisation for which he worked, but which nonetheless required members of the police, fire, ambulance and coast guard services – and perhaps the RSPCA and the AA as well, he’d never had occasion to explore all the possibilities – to do his bidding without question.

Spicer glanced at the card. He said, “I don’t expect you to answer this, sir, but for form’s sake I’m going to ask what your interest in this matter is.”

“Oh, I don’t mind telling you, Superintendent,” Jim said brightly. “There may be a terrorist aspect to tonight’s events. Something we’re working on.”

Spicer blinked, caught by encountering such a vein of candour so early. “We’ve already interviewed most of the passengers,” he said, starting to lead Jim back across the yard to the main building. “I’ll make sure you have copies.”

“Thank you, Superintendent.”

Spicer jabbed his forefinger at a keypad mounted on the wall and leaned his weight against the door beside it. The door opened and he held it while Jim stepped inside, then followed him.

“Your request came too late for us to detain the majority of the passengers,” he said as he led Jim down corridors and up flights of stairs.

“It’s not necessary to detain them, Superintendent,” Jim said. “A sight of their interviews will be more than sufficient. You can send the remaining passengers home when you’ve spoken with them to your satisfaction.”

“I was told –”

Jim shook his head. “Just someone at the office trying to dot the i’s and cross the t’s. Better to be safe than sorry and all that. It’s really not necessary.”

Spicer’s voice took on a grumpy timbre as he stopped at a door and poked at another keypad. “Shall I recall the officers we sent out to bring the passengers back to the station then?”

Jim looked at the Superintendent. His job didn’t often bring him into contact with the police service, but other members of the organisation he worked for relied, at least in part, on a good relationship with them. And vice versa. The two bodies were constantly apologising to each other in a slow dance of almost Byzantine politeness, bumping along from diplomatic incident to diplomatic incident.

He said, “I do appreciate your efforts, Superintendent, and I apologise for the miscommunication which has taken place. I’ll make sure the person involved is reprimanded.”

Spicer wouldn’t let it go. “I already have a major incident on my hands, sir. I’ve had to take officers off that to go and collect the passengers. And I’ve turfed Barnet MPS out to take care of the ones up there.”

The Metropolitan Police Service’s many areas existed in a world of constantly renegotiated alliances and favours owed. Undoubtedly Spicer had called in some of those favours this evening.

“I can only apologise again,” Jim said. “I’ll mention in my report to my superiors that note be taken of your efforts, come the next Spending Review.”

“That’s not good enough, sir,” Spicer said. “With respect.”

Here it comes
. Jim mentally drew himself up to his full height and asked pleasantly, “What can I do for you, Superintendent?”

“A certain individual has become of interest to us,” Spicer said, picking his way through it as delicately as a ballet dancer. “It’s a wholly criminal matter – no Security involvement at all – but during our investigations we discovered that your people have had the individual under surveillance for some considerable time on another matter.”

BOOK: Europe at Midnight
5.12Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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