Europe at Midnight (28 page)

“Excellent,” said Koniev. “Shall we...?”

“S
HOCKING,
”
THE ARCHAEOLOGIST
said to me after we had been wading ankle-deep towards the main sewer for a few minutes.

“Beg pardon?”

“The bureaucratic mind,” he said, nodding at Koniev, who was wading along ahead of us with Leo and Müller. “Deadlines.”

“Oh. Well, that’s the world all over.”

“You’re from London?” the archaeologist asked.

“Nottingham.”

He beamed. “Robin Hood!” he declared, loudly enough for Koniev to look over his shoulder at us. “Maid Marian!” His English was good, but heavily accented.

“Yes,” I said.

“I should very much like to go there one day.”

I thought of my three days on the streets in Nottingham. “It’s very nice,” I said, not entirely convincingly.

“I’m sure it is.”

I looked back to where Steiff and Friesler were trudging along behind us trying to ignore the smell. “I don’t think we’re supposed to be talking to each other, Mr...”

“Mundt,” said the archaeologist. “Heinz Mundt.” We shook hands while we walked. “I’m only really here because I’m interested in the topology of underground structures. I don’t get to come down here every day.”

“Me neither,” I said. “I’m more of a theoretician.”

Mundt guffawed at that, and slapped me on the back.

We reached the main sewer. The branch opened into it like the flaring bell of a trumpet. We walked down the slope and were suddenly thigh-deep in sewage. It was a lot warmer in here than I had expected, and even though we were all wearing nose-plugs the smell really was quite spectacular. Buch had suddenly fallen behind us, and Freisler was starting to lag as well.

Mundt, however, seemed not to notice. “Most people are only interested in what lies on the surface. The shops, the transport system, cafés – the collection of rubbish, for example. Do you know that most people don’t ever see the people who remove their rubbish? What do they think happens? That the kobolds come along and take it away? That it vanishes of its own accord? And yet there is an intricate system to remove the rubbish.” Mundt shook his head. He looked back. Buch and Friesler were nowhere to be seen. Mundt smiled.

Steiff had also made a strategic withdrawal by the time we reached the collapse, and Koniev’s face had gone a curious lime-green colour in the torchlight and he kept swallowing convulsively and pressing his hand to his mouth.

It was obvious that a catastrophic collapse had taken place here. The sewer was filled armpit-deep in places. A slope of rubble rose out of the sewage and joined the roof. Leo shone his torch on the roof, and I saw roots twisting down out of bare earth.

“Dangerous,” Mundt said. “Six workers dead here yesterday.”

“Herr Schmidt,” Müller said from halfway up the slope. “Would this be a good place?”

“It’s the place I would choose,” said Mundt. There was a splashing noise, and Koniev turned and ran back down the tunnel, lifting his feet high and sending a wave of ordure ahead of him. “Oops, there goes our esteemed colleague.” He smiled benignly. “Did you know there are only seven hundred people in the whole of the Neustadt?” He looked at us. “No? The place is almost deserted. It’s just a huge server farm. Five hundred security staff and the rest just techs and administrators. There’s not a soul here who would have the first idea how to fix this.” He lowered his voice. “I didn’t expect so many Coureurs.”

“I’m a Coureur,” said Leo. “These two are journalists. They say they want to interview you.”

Mundt looked strangely at Eleanor and me. “I didn’t ask for
journalists
,” he said.

“They saw the letter you sent. Somehow.” Leo looked at Eleanor, who just stared back. “It was addressed to us,” he told her. “To one of our stringers. It doesn’t seem to have reached him.”

Eleanor nodded and put her hand in a pocket of her overalls and took it out again holding the meat gun. I hadn’t seen her take it out of its case. Leo tensed up but didn’t move from where he was standing. Mundt just looked puzzled about why Eleanor appeared to be pointing a fat pork chop at us.

“Everyone seems so tense!” a voice back down the tunnel called cheerfully. A splashing noise announced the return of Koniev, mysteriously recovered from his nausea and also holding a pistol. “All this whispering and conspiracy. Now then, who shall I shoot first?”

I was closest, so I hit him. Fortunately, the pistol didn’t go off. It flew out of Koniev’s hand and splashed into the sewage. Unfortunately, Koniev didn’t follow it, so I hit him again, and a third time, and this time his knees gave way and he slumped face-first under the surface. I bent over and groped around until I found him, and as I did so my fingers brushed the metal surface of his pistol. I caught hold of the collar of his overalls and dragged him upright coughing and retching. He vomited convulsively.

“Let go of him,” Eleanor said.

“What?”

She pointed the gun at me. “Let him go, Tommy.”

I let go of Koniev’s collar and he splashed down into the sewage again. Eleanor came over and kicked him, and he vanished under the surface. Then she put her foot on him and held him down and she just stood there, smiling at us. There was some thrashing under the surface, but not as much as I might have expected. A few little bubbles rose up and popped, then a much larger one. The thrashing stopped.

“Herr Professor Mundt,” she said calmly, “would you pass me the hard drive that you were going to give to our Coureur friend, please?”

“What?” Mundt said.

“Solid state hard drive,” she said, as if reciting something in a foreign language that she had learned off by heart. “Two hundred terabyte.”

“No,” said Mundt. “No, I will not.”

She raised the meat gun and pointed it at him, and I raised Koniev’s pistol and shot her in the head. She seemed to disappear straight down into the sewage, then bobbed up again, floating face-down. A moment later, Koniev’s body also popped up.

There were several moments of silence, broken by the voice of Müller, who was still standing on the rubble slope. “What the
fuck
is going on here?”

“Yes,” Leo said to me. “What the fuck
is
going on here?”

“She’s already murdered two people,” I said. “At least two people. She was going to shoot him.” I gestured at Mundt, who seemed utterly baffled.

“Fucking hell,” Leo said. “What a fucking god-awful mothercunting mess.”

I said, “Professor, your letter was intercepted by the group she works for. Worked for. I don’t know what was in it, but it was important enough for them to send us here, and she was going to kill you whatever happened.”

“It wasn’t
meant
for anyone else,” Mundt said, getting angry. “Who are you?”

“You wouldn’t believe me. Now, either someone heard that shot, or we’ll eventually be missed. Either way, somebody will be coming to see what’s going on and we don’t have any time.” I looked at Leo. “Any ideas?”

“You’re joking, of course,” he told me.

“Is there another way out of here?” I asked Mundt. “Something that connects with the Dresden sewers?”

“They’re all blocked off,” Müller called from up the slope. “There’s no way through, not without heavy cutting gear anyway.”

“There is another way out,” Mundt said. We all looked at him, and he sighed. “It’s better if I demonstrate.” He looked at Leo. “It’s what I wanted to show you, anyway. Up here.”

We waded past the roof collapse and down a branch tunnel. A hundred yards or so along, we came to a side-tunnel that was so low that we all had to stoop. At least this one seemed to be carrying only rainwater, and it was less than ankle-deep.

“The biggest problem with servers is the waste heat,” Mundt told us. “You have to keep them cool. Most of the buildings here are just huge servers; it’s the biggest concentration of computing power on Earth, and it puts out a
lot
of heat. Which the Neustadters get rid of by water-cooling everything and dumping it into the sewers.”

“What are they doing with all these computers?” asked Müller, who was either in shock or genuinely unmoved by seeing two people murdered in front of his eyes.

“Good question,” Mundt said. “They’re only using a fraction of the capacity for data haven and banking purposes. I’ve been using some for my own research.”

“And that’s what you wanted to tell us?” Leo said.

“Oh, no. No. That’s just down here.”

‘Just down here’ was what seemed, at first glance, to be yet another roof collapse. A pile of rubble sloped up out of the water until it almost touched the roof of the tunnel. As we got closer and I could see it in the light of the lamps, I saw that it didn’t look like a natural collapse. It was smooth, as if someone had come in here and obsessively arranged every bit of brick and masonry. There was a curve on the slope which didn’t appear to stop at the tunnel walls, and a little ridge or crevice – I couldn’t be certain which – on its surface which in the dancing light of the torches seemed to go straight through the roof in a way that made the eye want to follow it to infinity.

“Just squeeze past,” Mundt told us. “It’s perfectly safe.”

There was a gap to one side of the slope just wide enough for us to pass through one at a time. On the other side, the branch tunnel seemed better-maintained. We duck-walked down it until it flared out into a high, vaulted chamber with sweet air blowing around us and a little rill of clear water running over our boots.

“Gentlemen,” Mundt said. “Welcome to Vienna.”

M
UNDT DID SOMETHING
in the side tunnel which he said would stop anyone following us, then came back to where we were standing in the main chamber.

“It’s the end of borders,” he told us. “A quite simple trick of topology. It’s not magic.”

Leo, who had made a short expedition to a nearby ladder which led up to a manhole, had confirmed that we were, indeed, no longer in Dresden-Neustadt, although he couldn’t confirm that we were actually in Vienna. He’d only had time for a quick glance before he had to drop the manhole cover and come back.

Mundt opened one of the breast pockets of his coveralls and took out a little plastic bag containing a black rectangle. “You can’t ever be certain exactly where it will lead you, but I wanted
Les Coureurs
to have it.”

I felt very, very tired. I lifted Koniev’s gun. “Give that to me, please.”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake,” said Müller. “Not again.”

Leo cocked an eyebrow at me.

I said, “I’m sorry, but I have to take that with me.”

“Take it where?” Leo said. “Back to your
journalist
friends?”

“It’s what we were sent for,” I said. “To take that and to kill Professor Mundt so he couldn’t tell anyone else about it. I have to take it because I have to go back, and if I’m empty-handed they’ll kill me.”

Leo tipped his head to one side. “Who
are
you?”

“Does anyone have a pen and a piece of paper?”

Mundt had a pen and a little notebook. I wrote down a telephone number, tore the page out, and offered it to Leo. “Call this number. You want to talk to a man named Baines. Tell him ‘Rupert of Hentzau.’ Then follow his instructions. You can trust Baines.”

Leo took the sheet of paper and held it up to the lamplight. He looked at me. “Give me the thing, Professor,” he said.

“It’s not complete,” Mundt said.

“What?” said Leo.

“The research on here. It’s incomplete; there’s just enough to convince your people that it works, nothing more. Am I crazy? Am I going to just hand my research over to strangers?”

“
She
was going to kill you and take the hard drive, whether it was complete or not,” I told Mundt, gesturing back towards the tunnel we’d emerged from and trying very very hard to remain calm. “So yes, you are crazy. Now please, give the hard drive to Leo.”

Mundt grudgingly handed the little bag over to Leo, and he and I stared at each other for a while. Then he held the bag out to me. Over Mundt’s protests, he said, “You gave it to
Les Coureurs
, Professor. And we chose to pass it on to Herr Potter, or whatever his name is. Does that not sound fair to you?”

“No, actually, it doesn’t,” Mundt said. “You can’t trust this man with this.”

“I can,” Leo said. “And I think I shall.”

I took the bag and put it in my pocket.

“So what do we all do now?” said Müller. “I can’t stay in fucking Austria.”

My turn to cock an eyebrow at Leo, who sighed. “This is all going to cost money, you know,” he said. “You don’t have any money, do you?”

I shook my head.

He snorted. “Okay. I have some contacts in Vienna. I’ll see what we can put together in a hurry.”

“And you also have to come up with a convincing explanation for how you and I got out of Dresden and back to England.”

“Yes, okay,” he said. “But maybe we can do that when we have some clean clothes on and nobody’s pointing a gun at me?”

I lowered the gun, looked at it, then threw it as hard as I could across the chamber. I heard it clatter and splash away into the distance.

“And then,” I said, “you all have to disappear.”