Europe at Midnight (11 page)

“And the gentleman who was stabbed is...” Jim asked carefully.

“Bless him, he was telling us he has something to trade,” said Bevan.

“Thin stuff,” said Shaw, shaking her head. “The mutterings of an injured man.”

“He was establishing his bona fides, sending us a message. He knows we’re watching.”

“He can’t possibly know.”

“He was claiming asylum because he knew the authorities would take notice,” Bevan said. “He mentioned the map because he knew word would get back to people like us and we would know what to do.”

“Do we?” asked Jim, feeling slightly dizzy. “Know what to do?”

Bevan shook her head. “No. In that respect, our friend has completely overestimated us.” She added, “You did the right thing tonight, Jim. Keep him on ice, let whoever attacked him think he’s dead. We need time to talk to him, find out who he is and what he knows.”

“There was an advisory,” Jim said. “Last month. Special attention to be paid to claims of asylum. All claimants to be sequestered pending interview.”

“It’s entirely possible – probable – that this evening’s events have no bearing at all on the interests of this committee,” Shaw put in. “Professor Bevan, however, has convinced us to take them seriously for the moment.”

“Convinced your superiors,” said Bevan. “Some of them, anyway.”

“For the moment,” Shaw said to Jim, the very image of forbearance, “this committee’s purpose is to assess the existence, or otherwise, of what on the face of it seems to be a
pocket universe
.” She pronounced the last two words with distaste, perfectly aware of how crazy it sounded. “Should this committee establish the existence of this...
entity
, its next task is to assess the threat, if any, which it poses to national security. Those are our remits, and within them we have an
extremely
narrow degree of latitude.”

“Basically, we watch and we wait,” said Bevan. “We gather what intelligence we can. And now one of
them
may have fallen into our laps.”

“So,” Shaw said, “in that context, can we go back to the original question? What is your reading of tonight’s events?”

“There’s no way to know,” Jim answered, trying to catch up. “All we have is his claim of asylum and his mention of a map.”

“A map he says he’s
seen
,” she pointed out. “Not a map he
has
.”

“He had a copy of the
A To Z
,” Jim said. “Are we talking about that?”

“No,” said Bevan.

“He was carrying no ID at all,” Jim went on. “In fact, it seems that he’s been sleeping rough for several days at least.”

“And no indication of why he was going to North Finchley.”

“No.”

“If he is what we think he is,” Bevan said, “he got out somehow. He’ll know
that
route for sure. And that’s all we need. Just the one route and one of them to tell us about it.”

Shaw looked at Jim. “Until further notice, you’re excused all other duties. You’re on secondment to a working group called
Perigee
. Perigee’s product is known as
Tombola.
You are not to share this product with anyone outside the working group. Is that understood?”

Jim nodded. “Yes, ma’am.”

“You, and only you” – she raised a hand to stem a protest from Bevan – “will be the Perigee Committee’s contact with our asylum-seeker. You will report back only to the Perigee Committee. Is that understood?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“You are not to discuss the existence of our asylum-seeker, Perigee, or Tombola, with anyone outside the working group. Is that understood?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Professor Bevan will handle your indoctrination into Perigee.” She looked at her colleague, and when Bevan didn’t say anything she stood up. “Then I declare this meeting of the Perigee Committee suspended, until such time as we can speak to the asylum-seeker.”

Shaw left the room, but Bevan came over and shook Jim’s hand. “I’m sorry, but that was handled badly,” she said. “Can we start again?”

“I have no idea,” Jim said.

“I’m the whacko, Shaw is the cynic set to watch over me. This is a hell of an idea to try to sell to the Security Service. What’s he like?”

“Excuse me?”

“Our boy. Does he have horns and a barbed tail?”

“He looks just like... I’m sorry, this is all a little... sudden.”

She beamed. “Sudden, but fun, no?”

He shrugged.

“Actually, this isn’t
sudden
at all. It only looks that way from where
you’re
standing. From my point of view, this is long overdue. Would you like to be indoctrinated over a cup of coffee?”

Jim blinked. “Sorry? Yes.”

“The coffee here’s some of the ugliest stuff I’ve ever drunk,” she said, starting to bustle away across the room. “And I’ve drunk some ugly coffee. But I’m not allowed to talk to you about this thing in Starbucks.”

Jim followed her. “About what thing?”

“About the invasion,” she said over her shoulder.

T
HE COFFEE WAS
about as bad as Bevan had promised, and it was served in another hideously flock-wallpapered room, this one smaller and seemingly furnished from a closing-down sale at a large provincial department store, The coffee machine was the first piece of even vaguely electronic equipment Jim had seen since passing through Security – he checked his watch – three hours ago. He felt tired and wound up both at the same time, caught between wanting to fall asleep and needing to look over the edge of whatever he had found himself on the edge of.

“You’re tired,” Bevan said as if reading his mind, “but it’s best we do this now.”

“Yes,” said Jim.

They sat in matching armchairs which appeared to have been upholstered by some long-ago Ministry of Works artisan. Jim noticed that the room smelled of damp digestive biscuits.

“So,” said Bevan, beaming at him intensely enough to make him burst into flames. “Our newest recruit. Bless you, young Jim, good to have you on board.”

“Could you perhaps,” Jim asked, “tell me what’s going on? What ‘invasion’?”

“Well, that may have been exaggerating it just a
little
bit,” she said. “But we have reason to believe they’re here and have been for some considerable time.”

“Evidence?”

Bevan held her hand out and tipped it from side to side. “Signs and portents. Also, plain common sense. It’s what
we
would do.” She sipped her coffee and winced. Blinked at Jim. “This all starts – or at least, the bit we know about starts – with a family called Whitton-Whyte. English landowning gentry in the Midlands. It used to be the fashion for the English landowning gentry to build follies, but the Whitton-Whytes decided to go into mapmaking instead. Except they were charlatans, bless their cotton socks. They stole almost every map they ever published. They copied existing Ordnance Survey maps, stole data, bribed surveyors. The only reason they didn’t wind up in court is because there was no evidence, and there was no evidence because they bought all the witnesses.

“In October 1822, the Whitton-Whytes publish the first edition of Sheet 2000, a map of the area to the West of London. It contains a number of... errors. It includes a village called ‘Stanhurst,’ where no such village exists. Over the next seventy years or so, they publish a number of revisions which not only compound the error, but add to it, until the final revision shows a completely imaginary county, called ‘Ernshire,’ in great detail. The family seem obsessed with Ernshire and the map. It ruins them; an Act of Parliament is passed banning them from ever making another map.

“And there, if this was all neat and tidy, the story would end,” Bevan said. “Except life is never neat and tidy, because there’s an unsubstantiated account that the last surviving member of the family was visited by someone from Ernshire. Someone who claimed to be a relative. Also, in the Summer of 1890, there was a wave of hoaxes related to Ernshire. Someone wrote to Queen Victoria and invited her to visit. This is important, Jim. Something was happening. Someone in Ernshire wanted to reach out, join the real world. And then they stopped.”

“Why?”

Bevan shrugged. “We don’t know, of course. My theory is that there was a change of regime. There was a moment when they almost established contact with us, then someone else took over and the borders were closed.”

“And where you have tightly-defended borders you also have people who range beyond those borders to try and determine their neighbours’ intentions,” Jim said.

Bevan nodded. “We’ve all read your final year position paper, the one you wrote in training about the intelligence implications of Scottish and Welsh independence. I liked it. Elegantly-written.”

“Thank you.”

“In some ways, that was why you were assigned the job tonight, why we’ve decided to induct you into our little club of crazy people. I’ve convinced some people in the Service that the thing the Whitton-Whytes created represents the same intelligence problem as Scotland and Wales. You’ve shown some understanding of that.”

“How did you manage to convince them? You must have
some
proof.”

“Oh, we have proof. And a very tangled and sad story that is, too.”

Jim looked at his watch. Looked at the curtained windows. It would be getting light soon, but all of a sudden he didn’t feel tired any more.

Bevan said, “Sometimes things are just so
magnificently
impossible that they must be possible.” She smiled at him. “And now I’m going to tell you something that makes it worth your signing the Official Secrets Act, Jim, all by itself.”

“Oh?”

“They didn’t stop at a county.”

S
OMETIMES THINGS ARE
just so
magnificently
impossible that they must be possible...

He got the driver to drop him off a couple of streets away from his home, and walked the rest of the way through the crisp early-morning quiet. In an hour or so, people would be starting to head off to work, taking their children to school, but just now everything was still, the streets deserted. He didn’t want to go home just yet, for a number of reasons.

There was a little park not far from his house – not much more than a deep grass verge with a couple of graffiti-scored benches mounted on a square of concrete. He sat down on one of the benches, lit a cigarette, and looked about him, feeling all of a sudden that the fabric of the world was very thin.

“We’ve spoken to people who’ve encountered them,”
Bevan was saying.
“Just a few. A handful. It’s a
country
, Jim. A nation. It goes from Portugal to Moscow and they call it the
Community.
Millions of people, Jim, we don’t know how many. It’s not a risk we can ignore. They’re here, doing things, spying on us, just as we would on them, and we need to get a handle on them. We need to find a way in, and even if we can’t do that, we need to be ready because if they do decide to cross the borders we can’t possibly defend against them.”

Jim leaned back on the bench and drew on his cigarette. An entire country, written on top of or underneath or to one side of Europe. A huge Continental nation. And in a room in a house in Potters Bar, a man who, until a short time ago, may have been living there.

“It’s a topological freak,”
said Bevan
. “It’s not magic. I’ve spoken with some really quite out-there mathematicians and they concede that it’s not impossible, although they couldn’t give me the first idea of how it might work.”

Jim looked down the street, where, dead on time, front doors were opening and parents were ushering schoolchildren out to the family SUV or people-mover. He wondered, idly, how humanity had ever coped without personal vehicles the size of moving-vans.

“We have the very very vaguest idea what the Community is like, and we need more information,”
said Bevan.
“We have to open channels of communication with them, start some kind of dialogue. But whatever else we do, we absolutely have to improve our intelligence-gathering. We have to assess whether your asylum-seeker is the real thing. And if he is, we’re going to have to make a hard decision.”

He was starting to get some odd looks from the departing school run parents. Lone man, sitting on a bench in a street full of children. Even people who knew him looked surprised to see him there. He got up and dropped the cigarette, ground it out with his toe against the concrete. This time yesterday, he had been a middle-ranking member of the Security Service. Now he appeared to be one of the point-men in the opening moves of an intelligence war.

He wondered if his wife had forgiven him yet.

1

M
Y REPORT ON
Mass Grave 42, along with its accompanying documentation and interview transcripts, was almost four inches thick, and I had to clear some less incendiary stuff out of my office safe just to make room for the original and its carbon copies. It was basically the death warrant for every surviving member of the Medical Faculty, including the students who had been helping Harry Pool. I closed the door of the safe on it, spun the combination dial, and felt enormously tired.