It was a long time since Rudi had last visited Berlin, and the place didn’t seem to have improved very much in his absence. The business heart of the city, built after reunification along the no-man’s-land where the Wall had been, towered over the rest of Berlin in a shining clean ribbon of modern office buildings and hotels, but everything else seemed to be falling into decay and disrepair.
The streets around Berlin-Zoo S-Bahn were lined with beggars, wrapped up in layer after layer of rags and blankets and sheets of
Berliner Zeitung
. Most of them were shivering with the cold. A few had stopped shivering and just sat there, frost on their eyelashes, waiting for the evening police patrols to pick them up and take them to the morgue. They shared the pavements with whores and pushers and pickpockets and muggers and tourists and business people, all shuffling along through the filthy slush.
Inside the station was almost as bad, despite the efforts of a trio of uniformed Polizei to move the various undesirables back out into the cold. Rudi went across the concourse to the left-luggage lockers, found the door that corresponded to the number on the key, swiped the card through the lock, and opened it.
Inside, looking out at him with a surprised expression on its face, was the severed head of a bearded man.
E
VERYONE IMAGINED
C
OUREUR
Central differently. In some movies it was a clean, efficient but anonymous modern office building in some neutral Western European city. Brussels, perhaps, or London, or Strasbourg. In some novels it was hidden away under a ruined hotel block or tenement in the East, access only granted to those who knew the correct code words. In at least one network series Central was housed in one of those elegant chateaux that line the Loire, and Coureur operational decisions were taken in a tense atmosphere offset by Louis Quinze furniture and ormolu clocks.
The common misconception that everyone suffered was to take the word
Central
literally. That, and the fact that the organisation chose to call itself
Les Coureurs de Bois
, led most of the European populace to believe that Central was somewhere in France.
The truth was that Coureur Central no more needed a central headquarters than any other multinational organisation. Modern communications made it possible for a company’s boardroom to be in London, its personnel department in Bonn, its PR office in Prague and its computer centre in St Lucia. In the case of Coureur Central, it was somewhat more spread-out than that.
So when the crash signal came in, it had been automatically switched between four different telephone numbers before being received by a communications centre in Padua, which rerouted it still in its encrypted state to another ground station in Dubrovnik, which bounced it off two Bell-Telecommunications European comsats and through an automated switching system on the roof of the old NatWest Tower in London before reaching an attic room in – as it happened – Paris. All of this took roughly four-fifths of a second.
Madame Lebec, the occupant of the once-elegant house in the Sixteenth Arrondissement, had only heard the discreet chime of the equipment in the attic twice before. Both those times, she did what she did now.
She calmly climbed the stairs to the attic room and locked the door behind her so that the maid, Ysabelle, would not come barging in and break her concentration.
Seating herself at one of the consoles installed around the room, she typed a short string of commands and watched the encrypted message come up on the screen. She typed another string, even shorter, and the message decrypted itself.
If Coureur Central had had a central location and organisation, Madame Lebec would have been a middle-ranking executive whose security rating stopped five or six levels below the top. Central paid her a monthly stipend for the rent of her attic and the very very occasional demand on her time. Madame Lebec thought it all rather an adventure; her great-great grandmother had been with the Resistance during the Second World War, and her diaries spoke of manning a clandestine radio transmitter, with which she sometimes communicated with London.
Madame Lebec’s job wasn’t nearly so hazardous, no matter how much she was inclined to romanticise it. She was breaking no law and threatening no government. All she was required to do was receive messages, decrypt them, and evaluate them.
The other two times, the messages had fallen outside her remit, and she had simply typed a code-string and passed them on to someone else and forgotten all about them. But this time she did not. She sat and calmly read the two lines of text again, identified by a number of codes as being a voice message from a public telephone.
Perhaps her heart beat a little more quickly as her mind went back to the days of the War, her great-great grandmother crouched in an attic somewhere with a pair of headphones pressed to her ears, straining to make out the faint, desperate communication of an agent in trouble somewhere out there in Occupied Europe. She read the message again, trying to decide.
She typed a line of plaintext, pressed the encryption key, and pressed another key to transmit a message that would be heard on the receiver at the other end as a disinterested man’s voice, giving the Coureur a communication string instructing him to be waiting at a certain public phone in twenty minutes. Then she moved to the dedicated console on the other side of the room and made her report to her superiors.
The reply came more quickly than she had expected; within a minute or so, text began to roll across the screen. She read it, and on two occasions felt it necessary to raise an eyebrow, which was about as close as she got these days, after six children, two dead husbands and the loss of four fortunes, to expressing surprise.
2.
M
ADAME
L
EBEC’S LOVER
arrived shortly before Christmas.
He was a short, handsome gentleman in his middle years, very well-dressed, and his spoken French was excellent, although those who spoke to him believed they could detect a faint English accent.
This dapper little man could be seen most often in the mornings, when he left Madame’s house and went down the street, immaculately turned-out, for his daily constitutional. He left at the same time every day, and returned an hour later, usually with Madame’s string shopping bag bulging with groceries.
Those few neighbours who were on speaking terms with the legendarily foul-tempered Ysabelle reported that the gentleman had turned up on the doorstep at a little after eleven o’clock one night, after Madame had instructed the maid to lock and bolt the door, and that Madame had greeted him with a hesitant but forceful hug – and Madame had never been observed to hug
anyone
, not even the occasional member of her family who visited – as if he was a long-lost but fondly-remembered
amour
.
Most of the neighbours just shrugged. If the old lady, in her autumn years, chose to take herself a lover, then good luck to her. Others were a little more nosy.
Dubois the barber, for instance, had the gentleman in his chair not two days after he arrived, for the full treatment. Haircut, shave and a trim of that already-neat goatee. Dubois was able to report – having caught a glimpse of the label while removing the napkin from around the gentleman’s neck – that he wore shirts from Jermyn Street in London, and left a healthy tip.
The girl on the checkout at the supermarket told her sister that the gentleman bought instant coffee, while Madame had previously only countenanced ground. He also bought wholegrain bread, which Madame had never done – in fact, the girl told her sister, she remembered Ysabelle once telling her that Madame wouldn’t have wholegrain in the house because the grains somehow always worked their way under the top plate of her false teeth. Last, but not least, the gentleman’s arrival coincided with a change in the dietary requirements at
chez
Lebec from butter to salt-free margarine.
Gossip had still not subsided over the gentleman when the gentleman’s nephew turned up – although the neighbourhood cynics refused to believe he was a nephew because there was no family resemblance at all. Where the gentleman was short and dark and dapper, the nephew was tall and fair and untidy. He didn’t go out much, but those who saw him said he always looked tired and hunted, so he was dubbed ‘the Fugitive’ in neighbourhood parlance.
The Fugitive could be seen, ever so occasionally, wandering cautiously down the street, as if he wanted to keep running into doorways to hide. He came back with piles of newspapers and magazine printouts under his arm. Ysabelle confided to the girl from the supermarket that almost all these publications were German, most of them from Berlin news services.
O
NE MORNING,
B
RADLEY
knocked on the door of Rudi’s room and called, “A minute of your time, old son?”
By the time Rudi was dressed, Bradley was down in the drawing room raiding Madame’s brandy. Bradley seemed to drink almost continually without ever becoming drunk, but Rudi had never seen him eat.
“Come in, come in,” Bradley said, recapping the decanter and turning from the side-table. “How are we feeling?”
“I’m fine,” Rudi said from the door. “How are you?”
Bradley flashed his brief little grin. Bradley was one of the most charming people Rudi had ever met, but he could never recall having seen the man actually smile. Just quick grins here and there, and body language absolutely loaded with bonhomie.
“Shut the door and sit down, old chap. Got something to tell you.”
Rudi closed the door and turned the key in the lock and trusted to Madame to keep the poisonous old shrew of a maid from listening outside. The maid bothered him. She ate with them in the dining room and sat there looking at him all the way through the meals. He sat in one of the overstuffed fabric-covered armchairs by the window. Bradley sipped his brandy.
“How are you feeling?” Bradley asked again. “Really. No need to cover up for me. Think of me as a doctor. Or a priest, if that suits. You can tell me anything. I won’t pass it on.”
Rudi sighed. The days of his debriefing, closeted with Bradley for eight hours at a time, had passed very slowly. He had gone over and over the details of the fiasco in Potsdam. He had told Bradley about finding the head in the locker at Zoo Station. He had not glossed over the fact that he had lost his mind for a while after that, before he had recovered his senses enough to call in a priority signal. He had gone over every minute of his weeks-long dustoff from Berlin, via Hamburg, Gothenburg, Helsinki and St Petersburg, looking over his shoulder every few steps. He had been as honest as he could possibly manage with the little man from Central, and Bradley had never once come close to telling him what the fucking hell was going on.
“I’m quite sick of you asking me how I’m feeling, actually,” he said. They were speaking English, almost certainly Bradley’s mother-tongue, though with some people it was impossible to tell.
Bradley glanced into his glass and went to sit in the other armchair. “Coureur Leo,” he said nostalgically. “Dear old Leo. He was in it almost from the beginning, you know. Not quite a Founding Father, but not too far removed either.”
He was talking about the head in the locker, the Coureur who had been assigned as Rudi’s partner in the crash Situation. Rudi didn’t want to think about Dear Old Leo, about his family or his real-life job or his real-life home.
“As I mentioned before, we were fortunate that you had the presence of mind to close the locker before you left,” Bradley said. “When we received your message we were able to get a team of cleaners in.”
“I wondered why there was nothing about it in the papers.”
Bradley inclined his head, as if the praise was entirely due to him. “We’ve covered your dustoff from Berlin.” He looked into his drink again, as if deciding whether or not to take another sip. He decided not to. “Textbook stuff. Very good. Can’t fault it.”
Rudi realised that his fingertips were digging into the arms of his chair.
“You’ll appreciate,” Bradley went on, “that Leo was a statistical spike. This kind of thing almost never happens.”
Rudi stared at the Englishman. His gradual ascent in the Coureur hierarchy had brought with it a gradual increase in the risk associated with each Situation. In Rudi’s mind it had also become associated with the contacts he had with Central. Dariusz, who had once seemed mysterious and a little scary, now seemed to have been little more than a stringer, a local talent-spotter. Bradley, in comparison, was the real thing, a direct line to Central, a case officer. It was the first time Rudi had had this sort of contact with his employers, which only seemed to underline just how catastrophic the Potsdam and Berlin Situations had been.
“Most Coureurs spend their entire careers delivering the post,” Bradley went on. He weakened and moistened his lips with brandy. “Just moving packages from Here to There. No danger. No illegality, really. Not even any discomfort, much of the time.”
“Unless you’re Dear Old Leo,” said Rudi. All the bonhomie went out of Bradley’s body language for a moment; it was astonishing to watch. For a fraction of a second, he looked about ten years older. “Could I have a drink?”
Bradley reached for the decanter and held it out. Rudi got up and poured himself a brandy. He took his glass over to the window and looked through the net curtains into the street.
“Central’s an apolitical organisation,” Bradley said. “That’s the only way it can exist. No sides, no favourites. If it threatens governments or security, it threatens them all equally. That’s the whole point. Nothing we do is against the law, strictly speaking.”
“Ah,” Rudi said to the street. “The law. Now that’s a very grey area, Bradley, from place to place.”
Bradley sat down in the chair Rudi had just vacated. He looked into the fire, thinking. He said, “What happened to Leo, that’s not what Central is about. We call ourselves Coureurs because that’s all we are, really. Just glorified postmen. Sometimes we facilitate the departure of someone from one place or another. What happened to Leo was a clumsy warning.”