She didn’t reply, other than with her usual pleasantries, but an hour later a response arrived, in the serene, pudgy, septuagenarian shape of a gentleman who introduced himself as Gibbon and who settled himself into one of the armchairs in Rudi’s suite, unzipped one of those old-fashioned leather document folders, extracted an antique fountain pen, and blinked at him.
“I want to leave,” Rudi told him when the preparations were complete.
Gibbon shook his head sadly. “I’m afraid we have information that your life is in danger,” he said regretfully.
“From whom?”
Gibbon consulted the documents in the folder. “Certain factions within Greater German counterintelligence,” he said, running the butt of his pen down the list. “The Estonian government. Coureur Central.”
“I beg your pardon?” said Rudi, feeling a chill down his back despite knowing that this was almost certainly part of a provocation.
Gibbon raised his eyebrows and returned the butt of the pen to its previous position. “Yes.” He looked calmly at Rudi. “We have rather good intelligence that your own people want to kill you. I’m afraid we don’t know why.”
“That’s impossible,” Rudi said, trying and failing to imagine something so heinous that Central would want to kill one of their own.
“It
is
rather good intelligence,” Gibbon told him again.
“Where does it come from?”
Gibbon sighed and scratched his head. “Yes, well, we
always
give our sources away to complete strangers,” he said with some sarcasm. He clipped his pen to the documents in the case and folded his hands across his ample belly. “The fact is, there are very few safe places for you right now, and one of them is with us.”
Rudi looked at him for a few moments. “Is business so slow these days that English Intelligence is carrying out individual rescues?” he asked.
Gibbon laughed as though he found this genuinely funny. “Oh, goodness gracious me no,” he said, shaking his head. “Although it’s a good thought, it really is.”
“So, assuming we accept this fantasy story you’ve just told me, you obviously want something from me.”
“Presumably,” agreed Gibbon, still chuckling at the idea of MI6 riding around the globe like a knight on a white charger.
“‘Presumably?’”
Gibbon shifted in his chair. “May I be frank with you?”
“It would make a pleasant change, yes.”
“My station was tasked with facilitating the insertion of Major Ash’s team into Estonia and their extraction of yourself. We were tasked with looking after you until you’d recovered sufficiently to travel.”
“Travel where?”
Gibbon looked nonplussed. “Well, London, of course.”
“Where all answers will be forthcoming?”
Gibbon shrugged as if to say,
well, London, who knows?
He zipped up the folder again. “You realise I’m telling you all this as a professional courtesy,” he said. “London tend to look down their noses at you Courier chaps, but out here we hold you in rather high regard.”
“Not high enough to get our name right,” Rudi said, and felt cheap the moment the words were out of his mouth. Gibbon was at least treating him decently, even if everything he said was probably a lie.
Gibbon raised an eyebrow. “Aye, well,” he said. “Anyway, you’ll be going to London. And perhaps all answers
will
be forthcoming there. I’m just sorry we had to meet under these circumstances. I’d have welcomed a chance to chat with you about operational matters.”
“Except we’d have to kill each other afterwards,” said Rudi.
Gibbon chuckled. “Yes, there is that.”
“It’s really a very boring life.”
“
Yours
doesn’t seem to be.”
“That isn’t really my fault.”
“Are you sure?”
“I was on holiday when your pet special forces men kidnapped me.”
“Saved your life,” Gibbon corrected gently.
“Allegedly.” Although a thought sent a pulse of goosepimples up his arms.
Gibbon was either very good at reading faces, or he was telepathic. He nodded. “It would have been rather an opportune moment to bump you off, with all that chaos going on, wouldn’t it?”
Rudi swallowed down a sense of fear, of forces beyond his comprehension. “It’s ridiculous. What am I supposed to have done?”
Gibbon shrugged. “I’m only privy to the intelligence I just passed on to you, I’m afraid.”
Rudi stared at the Englishman for a very long time, completely at a loss for words. Gibbon, for his part, sat serenely in his chair as if regarding a particularly restful countryside scene. No fuss, no hurry, not a thought in his head.
Finally Rudi said, “When do I leave?”
2.
T
HE JUMP WAS
utterly beyond belief.
Rudi’s dealings with the intelligence services of governments had been fairly limited, down the years. They were, in his experience, mostly professional, if entirely without scruple.
MI6, in contrast, appeared to be making everything up as it went along, using a joke book as its guide.
At six o’clock on the morning after his interview with Gibbon, there was a brisk knock at his door and Major Ash, looking rather avuncular in tan chinos, blue blazer, blue shirt and red-and-blue striped tie, put his head into the room.
“Ready to go, sir?” he asked cheerfully.
Rudi was still in his pyjamas and dressing gown, sitting in front of the entertainment centre, his hands poised in mid-gesture as he read through the BBC News website. “Not really, no,” he said.
Ash stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. He was carrying a black nylon travel bag, which he held out. “Flight’s in three hours,” he said. “You might want to get dressed.”
The bag contained some fairly blameless casual clothing – jeans, sweatshirt, underwear, training shoes, another zip-up fleece to go over it all. Rudi looked at it, then looked at Ash, then went into the bathroom to dress.
He had no luggage, so leaving was fairly straightforward. He actually felt a little pang when Ash led him out of the room. He’d rather liked it there.
Ash led him down a thickly-carpeted corridor and into a lift, which deposited them in a basement garage. A lovely black BMW was waiting for them. They climbed in, and it accelerated up a ramp and into the pre-dawn darkness of Helsinki’s morning rush hour.
Rudi didn’t know the city well enough to orient himself; he caught a glimpse of a large, imposing, official-looking building as they drove alongside the Embassy, but that was all he ever saw of its exterior, and to be honest it could have been
any
large, imposing, official-looking building. By the time he had some vague idea where he was, they were on the road to the airport.
Where, utterly appalled, he found himself queuing to go through passport and security checks along with families, old people, teenagers and a large and extremely boisterous group of university students who, from their shouted conversations, appeared to be on their way to Madrid.
In the car, Ash had provided him with an envelope containing a false passport and a printout of an eticket. The passport was the only thing Rudi could later identify as even faintly resembling tradecraft, and by then he could no longer hazard a guess what went on in the heads of the British Security Services.
The eticket was for a seat on a scheduled budget airline flight. Rudi stared at it for so long that he almost forgot to hand it over at the desk.
On the other side of the checks, Ash led him to a departure lounge Starbucks and there, mind reeling, Rudi sat for fifty minutes until their flight was called.
At one point, Ash got up and said, “Just going for a wee. Back in a sec,” and walked off across the lounge in the direction of the toilets, leaving Rudi quite alone.
Was he being watched? Was it a test? All thoughts of running off had entirely deserted Rudi when he found himself going through the passport and security checks. He sat where he was and drank his coffee, enthralled by the awfulness of it all.
The flight itself was the kind of thing where you only got a seat and the attendants selling you overpriced coffee and perfumes and airline-themed knicknacks. Ash had had some sandwiches made up at the Embassy and handed one over. Rudi prised it open and saw a wafer-thin slice of meat and gelatine trapped between two doorsteps of heavily-buttered white bread. He closed it again with a pained look on his face.
“Lunch tongue,” Ash said when he saw the look.
“I’ll just have a coffee, please,” Rudi said, handing the sandwich back.
“Well, if
you
don’t want it...” Ash said, tucking in.
And a couple of hours later they were in England, landing at Stansted,
queuing up at Passport and Immigration
. When the passport officer asked him the purpose of his visit, he had to bite down an urge to say that he was starring in a very, very bad spy movie.
To Rudi’s mind, the favoured way of getting a high-profile Package out of a country if you were a sovereign nation would be in a private jet under diplomatic cover, no security or customs officials at either end, car waiting on the tarmac on arrival to whisk him down the motorway to his destination. He was almost in a dream state as they took the
train
into London and then the
Underground
to Blackfriars and then
walked
along the Embankment of the Thames a short distance to a place Ash called ‘The Temple.’
Which turned out not to be a temple at all, but a set of quiet, linked squares of tall terraced buildings and gardens that tilted down to the Embankment. Ash led Rudi to one of the buildings – as they entered Rudi saw a hand-lettered sign, at the top of which were the words ‘Smithson’s Chambers’ above a list of names – in the entryway of which waited an incredibly tall and imposing-looking American man who shook his hand firmly and said, “You call me ‘Red,’ okay?”
And that was Rudi, stolen from Estonia by the SAS, babysat by MI6, and delivered into a Kafkaesque dream.
3.
A
T WEEKENDS, THE
area was deserted. You got some tourists wandering up and down Fleet Street, but it didn’t start to get busy until you were past the High Court and heading towards Trafalgar Square. On a Sunday, you could walk up out of the Mitre Court gateway onto Fleet Street, and for minutes on end you wouldn’t see another living soul.
Weekdays were different. Then, Fleet Street was a main artery between Westminster and the City. A shockwave of commuters emerged from the stations at City Thameslink and Blackfriars and Farringdon and Temple and Chancery Lane between about eight and ten. Passengers on the top decks of passing buses, all bent in unison over their morning news or novel, seemed to lean forward in anticipation of the day’s work. And then in the evenings it all happened in reverse. The commuters were swallowed by their stations, the bus passengers regarded their
Evening Standard
s or went back to the chapter of the novel they were reading that morning. Rudi had been watching it for almost seven weeks, and he thought he had life in London more or less summed up by now. It was
tidal
, like its river, a great flood of humanity washing in and out of the Capital. And at some point the tide had washed him in.
“Hey, there,” Mr Bauer said cheerfully, passing through the living room on his way to the study. “How’s our boy today?”
“I’m very well, thank you, Mr Bauer,” Rudi replied in English.
Mr Bauer came to a stop in the middle of the worn Afghan rug and regarded Rudi with his hands on his hips. “Now how many times have I told you?” he asked. Rudi was about to say it must have been ten or fifteen times, but Mr Bauer went on without waiting. “It’s ‘Red,’ son. Nobody calls me ‘Mr’ Bauer.”
“Mr Self does,” answered Rudi, and he watched Mr Bauer’s eyes disconnect slightly as he tried to process the answer.
Mr Bauer was an American with the aspect of a mighty but ruined building. Well over two metres tall, and impressively broad-shouldered, he strode through the Temple like Ozymandias, his great mane of white hair blowing in the wind, dispensing hail-fellow-well-mets to his fellow barristers, whether he knew them or not. You had to get a little closer to Mr Bauer to see the pockets of his suit, which were ruined from carrying things which were never meant to be carried in the pockets of suits, to see the ruddy good-health on his cheeks resolve into spiders’-webs of broken veins, to see the scuffed and worn-down heels of his once-magnificent GJ Cleverley shoes.
Mr Bauer’s eyes snapped back into focus. “But, hey,” he said, wagging a finger at Rudi. “You have to call me ‘Red,’ okay?”
“Okay,” Rudi said, laying his book aside.
Mr Bauer raised his impressive eyebrows. “We have a deal, now, don’t we?”
Rudi nodded. “We have a deal,” he said dutifully from his chair on the other side of the room. “Red.”
“
That’s
the spirit!” Mr Bauer proclaimed. “We have a deal. Yes. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to, um...” and he turned and left the way he had come in.
Rudi sat where he was for a while. He looked at the book lying face-down on the table beside his armchair. William Shirer,
The Rise And Fall Of The Third Reich
. Mr Bauer’s rooms were full of old paper books, some of them almost a century old. It was impossible, from examining the titles, to discern what Mr Bauer was actually interested in, unless he was interested in
everything
. History books rubbed shoulders with the manuals of computer operating systems long-forgotten except in certain parts of the Third World, where the obsolete discarded flotsam and jetsam of the Computer Age had come to rest in the name of Aid. Great stacks of film-star biographies, most of dispiriting thickness. Novels in such broken-spined and dog-eared profusion that it seemed impossible that one lifetime would be enough to read them all. Two cookbooks, one which seemed to be a first edition of the
River Café Cookbook
, and the other a bizarre little spiral-bound volume with a cartoon dog’s face grinning on the cover beneath the words
Let’s Cook With Hari Vex!
Hari Vex – if it was indeed he – appeared to be a Bernese Mountain Dog, and the recipes inside seemed to have been assembled by a chef on the verge of a catastrophic nervous breakdown.