Europe at Midnight (40 page)

A gauzy wing of rain was passing over the city when I arrived, drenching the buildings of the campus in drizzle and making the trees whisper and drip. I limped, leaning heavily on the walking stick I had found among a thicket of umbrellas in a large pottery urn at The Steynes, through the tall doors of the English Literature Department, stopped off for a moment at the secretary’s office to ask where Doctor Bradley was teaching, then made my way up to the third floor.

I knocked and went in to the classroom the secretary had directed me to, and every head inside turned to look at me. As well they might. I was wearing camouflage fatigues over a white shirt and a knitted tie because the sleeve of my suit jacket had torn and the medic had had to cut my trousers off to treat my leg, I was walking with a stick, and I probably looked somewhat flustered. At the front of the room, she stood holding a book with one hand, her other hand pressed to her mouth.

“Come with me,” I said to her, holding out my hand. “Right now.”

Back in the car and heading out of the city, I gave her a quick précis of what had happened at The Steynes. I omitted any mention of flu viruses, the Campus, or a Community-European Unification; there would be enough time for that. I told her as much of my own history as I thought she could cope with. By this time, we were twenty or thirty miles from Władysław. It was a long story, even with the edits.

“So what are we going to do now?” she asked.

“We’re leaving,” I told her. “We’re going to try, anyway.”

“We’re going to London?”

“Eventually. The border crossing there is guarded now, as are all the other ones I know.” Michael had been merciful, but he hadn’t been minded to make things easy for me. Things might have been different if I had given him time to calm down. Or he might have decided to arrest me anyway.

We drove another forty miles or so in silence. Eventually Patricia rested her head on my shoulder and fell asleep. I sat awake and watched the countryside pass by. I didn’t know what was real any longer. The Campus was an artefact, and so was the Community, and Europe seemed like a fantasy from a novel, and both of them had been exploiting my people for almost as long as the Campus had existed. Had my ancestors been stolen from some sleepy distant English shire centuries ago and transported to the Campus, or had the Whitton-Whytes scoured the more obscure parts of the country looking for people who would leave their homes for a shilling? I thought of what my home had become, what generations of Committees and unknown Europeans had turned it into. That wasn’t real life. It was a joke, a parody of self-determination. I didn’t belong anywhere, and certainly not here, where everyone was polite and nice and prepared to use biological weapons and nuclear bombs at the drop of a hat.

Dusk was falling as we pulled in to a coaching inn somewhere deep in the countryside. I woke Patricia and we got out of the car, and Andrew Molson got out of the driving seat and helped us take our belongings from the boot. Two suitcases and two rucksacks. My suitcase held a change of clothes; I’d had to guess Patricia’s sizes when I asked Michael to provide hers.

“Here,” Molson said when we had unloaded. He handed me a bulky envelope. “Should get you a little way, but don’t go splurging it on luxuries.”

I peeked into the envelope. It was full of crown notes. “Thank you,” I said, putting it in my pocket.

He held out a folded sheet of paper. “There’s a man,” he said. “He’s been causing us some trouble. He’ll help you.”

“You could just have taken us to an unguarded border crossing,” I said, taking the paper and reading the names and instructions on it.

“Michael doesn’t want it done that way,” he said.

“He’s still playing me.”

Molson chuckled. “You know how Intelligence works. We play you, you play us. The stories never end.” He nodded at the piece of paper in my hand. “When you meet him, tell him to stop, would you? It’s very annoying. He’ll know what you mean. He won’t stop, it’s not in his nature, but it’d be nice if someone passed the message to him.”

I picked up my rucksack. “What were you doing on the Campus?”

“I was trying to find out who the Science Faculty were dealing with in Europe.”

“Did you?”

He shook his head. “The Campus was dealing with two groups. One was us, the Directorate. We were supplying a lot of your food and raw materials, but that stopped when you and your friends took over. We might have opened negotiations with you eventually, but events overtook us.

“The other group was someone in Europe, and they were dealing exclusively with the Science Faculty. That’s where a lot of their weapons and technology came from, and that’s where the bulk of their research went. We only ever saw a fraction of it; we still don’t know everything they were doing.”

“Genetic engineering,” I said, remembering a phrase Araminta had used.

“Yes, we know about that. That’s how they created the flu virus.”

“On people.”

Molson tipped his head to one side. He said, “Oh yes?”

“Things they’re not allowed to do in Europe.”

He thought about it. “I’d like to talk to you about that.”

“You’ll have to find me first.”

“One day, maybe.”

“No,” I said. “I’m done.”

He smiled gently. He looked like the ideal spy, confident and handsome and capable. He was a figure out of fiction. “I’m sorry this happened to you and your people, I really am,” he said. “I liked the Campus.”

“Yes,” I said sourly. “So did I.” My home and everyone I knew, gone. Tens of millions dead in Europe. I’d been wrong about the Community. They were not remotely harmless. And worse, they seemed to be playing some kind of game with someone else who was also not remotely harmless; we’d been caught in the middle for years, without knowing it.

“The flu was out of control,” he said quietly. “It would have killed everyone in the Campus, and it would have spread here. We had to stop it.”

I picked up my suitcase and Molson and I shook hands. He stepped in close and clapped me on the shoulder. “Remember me to Professor Bevan, would you?” he murmured, and then he stepped back and returned to the car and drove off.

I stood watching the car go for a very long time, long after I lost sight of its rear lights around a curve in the road. Then I turned and, with Patricia, went into the inn.

W
E TRAVELLED.
O
FFICIALLY,
we were on the run, but Michael had not put out a bulletin for us, because there were still things he wanted me to do for him and having us arrested would have defeated the whole object. So it was less a breathless escape than a pleasant Summer holiday. There were dates and times and names on the piece of paper Molson had given me, but they would not become current for some months.

So we saw something of the Community. It turned out that Patricia had not travelled very much in her life. People here tended not to; the fact that I had moved about so much while working for the paper made me rather exotic. I used the time to tell her the story of my life, and she told me hers. My leg healed and I stopped limping. Once, walking down the main street in a little town in the South, she held my hand.

Summer turned to Autumn and we in our turn began to move North again. One evening we arrived at a little local pub, to find a roaring fire in the grate against the seasonal chill and two bluff gentlemen in their sixties named Montagu and Rush sitting at a table beside it, drinking pints of bitter and eating pork pies and pickle. I knew their names because they were on the piece of paper Molson had given me.

Patricia and I went to the bar and bought four pints, and we took them on a tray to the older gentlemen’s table and sat down with them.

“Gentlemen,” I said, smiling, “my name is Rupert of Hentzau and I have some bad news and some good news for you. The bad news is that your operational security is a disgrace and the Directorate have known about your escape attempt for some time. The good news is that they are letting you go because they want me and Miss Bradley here to go with you. Would you like a drink?”

Montagu and Rush looked at each other. “Told you we shouldn’t have trusted that chap,” Rush grumbled.

“If it’s any consolation,” I said, “it was unlikely to be anyone you suspected; they’d have gone out of business years ago if their people were that obvious. But that’s not important any more. Have you made contact with the guide yet?”

They looked at each other again. Montagu said, “Why should we believe
you
?”

“No reason at all,” I told him cheerfully. “You can turn around and go home and nobody will ever bother you. But why should you?”

“What do you think, Monty?” asked Rush, who wore spectacles and magnificent muttonchop whiskers.

“I think we’re stumped, whatever we do,” said Montagu. “Might as well plough on.”

“I don’t have a home to go to anyway,” Rush told us. “I sold my house to pay for this.”

“Excellent,” I said. “So, I suggest we have a drink against the chill and then make our way.”

The two men were wonderful company. Montagu was a former teacher, a mathematician, whose wife had died the previous year and who quite fancied seeing Paris. Rush had owned a couple of furniture shops. Quite how they knew each other, we never found out, but they were cheerful and avuncular and when we set out later in the evening to walk up the path behind the pub and into the forest that loomed on the hills I felt happier than I had felt in a very long time.

The path wound up into the hills for some considerable distance. We had been walking for an hour or so when a heavily-accented voice to our left said, “Okay, you stop right there, actually. Hands where I can see them.”

We stopped. I found that I couldn’t stop smiling. I felt as if my heart was taking off like a helicopter.

Another voice, to our right and similarly-accented, said, “Why are there four of you?”

“My friend and I want to go with these two gentlemen,” I said. “I work for MI5.”

“Fuck you do,” said the first voice.

I took out the piece of paper Molson had given me and held it under the light of my torch, to make sure I got it right. “‘I used to date the Rokeby Venus’,” I read.

All of a sudden a big patch of air right in front of us seemed to shiver and a figure dressed in very strange clothes appeared out of nowhere. Patricia gave a little cry and started back, but I stood my ground as the figure removed its helmet and asked, “What did you say?”

I said it again.

The figure stared at me for a few moments, then he said to no one in particular, “I don’t know what this is about, but we’ll take them with us. Let him sort it all out. Stay sharp, though.”

“When did we ever not?” said the second voice.

The figure sighed. “All right,” he said. “Follow me.”

We walked for hours, up branching side-trails that split again and again. Our guide occasionally became invisible, and I presumed we were being followed by more invisible people.

Eventually, we came to a clearing in which stood a once-magnificent wooden building. A young man and an old man were standing by the building. They were covered in dirt and blood and they both looked exhausted.

“It’s all right,” the young man called. “You’re out now; you’ve got nothing to worry about.”

Rush stepped forward and put out a hand. “You’ve no idea how long we’ve waited for this,” he said.

1

I
WAS STILL
a very uncertain driver and the M1 frankly scared the living daylights out of me, so I made my way up into Leicestershire on various A and B-roads. I only stalled a dozen times or so on the way.

For some reason, Leicestershire seemed to have attracted a number of National projects. The National Forest was here, which I found amusing, and the National Space Centre, which I found less amusing considering that Britain’s last contribution to any space effort at all was almost thirty years ago. Mind you, it was almost two decades since anyone anywhere had been able to afford to make much of an effort at space exploration, and that made me sad. Some nights I still looked up at the Moon and marvelled that people had actually stood there once. But not so often these days; I was starting to go native, and I didn’t know what to think about that.

The newest National project to appear in Leicestershire was outside Melton Mowbray, on the Grantham road. It was nice out there. Quiet, calm. The sign at the entrance said ‘National Cemetery,’ although only a fraction of the victims were buried here. I turned in through the gates, drove along a long straight road through neatly-cared-for parkland. I saw little lakes and stands of trees, benches everywhere for quiet contemplation of the most recent National Disaster.

I parked near the visitor centre and got out of the car. It was a weekday, and the enormous car park was two-thirds empty, although I knew it got full at weekends and on public holidays. The centre itself was an unassuming little building, as if the English thought that anything else would be disrespectful to the dead. Beside it was a slightly larger multifaith chapel/synagogue/mosque, the only one in the country. It had been intended as a reminder that the Xian Flu had not respected any religion, but I gathered it had become something of a bone of contention of late. God – religion of any kind – was still a difficult concept for me to process. I was still treating it like a nineteenth-century anthropologist visiting a lost tribe of South Sea Islanders. The best I was managing so far was a quietly horrified fascination.