Seth opened his mouth to say something, but all that emerged was a hopeless exhalation. He wondered if he would ever stop shaking.
“I owe you an explanation, at the very least,” Leo said, but then he seemed lost for words because he didn’t say anything for quite a long time. They reached a large traffic junction with a big pub in the middle of it and Seth realised they were at Archway. Leo navigated them around the junction and onto the Archway Road, up onto the long hill northward out of London towards Highgate.
“I’ve become involved in something... complicated,” Leo said as they passed under the great iron bridge that carried Hornsey Road high above the Archway Road. “I don’t know what it is, and in order to make any sense at all of it I need to get back to mainland Europe. And I need a legend.”
Seth turned his head and looked at Leo.
Leo glanced at him ruefully. “I used to date the Rokeby Venus,” he said. When Seth just stared at him he said, “I’m afraid this whole thing is a bit off-piste.”
The first words Seth managed to say since King’s Cross were, “‘A
bit
’?”
“Nobody was supposed to die,” Leo said angrily. “It’s me they want; I didn’t think they’d involve bystanders.”
“
They?
”
Leo shook his head. “I don’t know. Someone told me Central wants me dead, but I don’t believe that. They also told me Greater German counterintelligence wants me dead, and I find that easier to believe but I have no idea why because I haven’t done anything to make them angry. I just don’t
know
. I need to get back to the mainland, talk to people, try and make sense of this catastrophe.”
Seth made several attempts to parse all this, while they drove up through East Finchley and North Finchley, but none of the words seemed to fit together in his head. It was just noise.
He said. “Lewis. Angela.”
“Your friends? I’m genuinely sorry about that. If I could have stopped that, I would have.”
Seth started to fumble in his pockets for his phone. “Someone should tell Lewis’s parents...”
Leo reached out and took the phone from Seth’s hand, opened the driver’s side window, and dropped the phone out. Seth momentarily heard the faint sound of things breaking on the road, then it was gone.
“Sorry,” he said over Seth’s gasp of surprise. “No phone calls.”
Seth gaped at him for a few moments, and then he found himself hunched breathless against the passenger door, a pain in his jaw. There were scratches on Leo’s face, and a driver behind them angrily sounding his horn.
“Please don’t do that again,” Leo said. “Or at least try to wait until I’m not driving.”
“Who
are
you?” Seth yelled.
“I’m a Coureur,” Leo replied. “And I’m in a Situation. I mean you no harm. I need your help. We need each other’s help, actually, because they’re coming for you now as well.”
“Because of a
legend
?”
“Because it was a legend for me. I don’t know; I don’t understand any of it. They’ve already killed my brother.”
Another long silence in the car. They were in Barnet before Seth said, “The Germans.”
“I don’t know for sure that it
is
the Germans. I was told it is, and I was involved in something... strange in Berlin a little while ago, so it’s at least credible. It just doesn’t make any sense.”
Another long silence. The car drove through Barnet and Potters Bar and out into the Hertfordshire countryside.
Seth said, “I’m going to be sick again.”
Leo slowed the car, pulled over to the side of the road. Seth threw off his seatbelt, opened his door, and leapt out. He crashed straight through a hedge into the field beyond and kept going as fast as he could.
“Don’t be stupid!” he heard Leo call behind him. “You need my help. You won’t last more than a few days on your own.”
Seth caught his toe in a rut and fell full-length.
“Hey!” Leo called. “Where are you?”
“I’m here,” Seth called back. “I think I’ve broken my ankle.”
“I
T’S ONLY A
sprain,” Leo said.
“Well,
that’s
all right then,” said Seth. They were back in the car, way out in the sleeping unlit countryside now. He had no idea where they were, but he had a sense that they might have turned east at some point. “What happened to your brother?”
For a moment he thought Leo wasn’t going to answer at all. “They tried to get to me through my family,” Leo said finally. “My father was seriously hurt. My brother got in the way.”
“What about
my
family?”
Leo didn’t say anything.
“We have to help them,” Seth said.
“I know.” Leo shook his head.
“So?”
“So we’ll help them. First we need somewhere to rest.” He glanced over. “Am I going to have to tie you up or something?”
Seth thought about it. “Help my dad and my sister first. Then we’ll talk about it.”
T
HEY WOUND UP
in a Travelodge on the outskirts of Bishops Stortford. Leo booked them into a twin room, bought support strapping and painkillers for Seth’s ankle from the motel’s shop, and they carried their bags inside.
With the door locked behind them, Leo took a little grey box not much larger than a book of matches from one of his tote-bags and stuck it on the jamb, near the top. Then he did the same with all the windows, even though they were on the fourth floor of the motel. Then he took his overcoat off and Seth finally got a clear look at the thing he had shot the gunman with. There was a little metal bottle strapped to his belt, and reinforced hoses running from it and down his arm to a bundle of copper tubes about six inches long, mounted on a sliding rail arrangement buckled around his forearm.
Leo saw him looking at the contraption. “I was in a hurry,” he said. “I got a blacksmith to put it together for me.”
In Coureur terminology, a blacksmith was an armourer. A mythological figure in Seth’s world. “What is it?”
Leo unstrapped the thing and put it on the table and looked sadly at it. “Flechette gun. Powered by compressed air. Lovely piece of work, at such short notice.” He glanced at Seth. “Can I trust you not to fiddle about with it when my back’s turned? There wasn’t time to put in a safety catch.”
Seth nodded.
“All right.” Leo unzipped another of his bags and took out a laptop and a packet of disposable phones. “Let’s see what we can do about your family, then.”
It took him over an hour of picking about on various websites and anonymised chatboards and making calls – one call per phone and then discarding it. Some of the calls sounded tense, others completely obscure. Seth used the room’s facilities to make them coffee and paced back and forth so much that Leo told him to sit down, which Seth answered with a heartfelt couple of expletives.
Finally, Leo sat back and closed the laptop.
“Is it okay?” Seth asked.
“We’ll know in a little while. The great thing about
Les Coureurs
is that it’s a completely compartmentalised organisation. Everyone’s used to getting anonymous orders and carrying them out, and half the time nobody knows why they’re doing what they’re doing. You just have to hack into that structure and so long as you know who to talk to and you have the right recognition strings no one ever questions their instructions.”
“Like me.”
Leo rubbed his eyes. “You, the stringer who passed you the job order. Just doing what you were told, because why shouldn’t you?” He blinked blearily at Seth. “It was such a low-level job. I honestly thought it would go without a hitch. I’m sorry.” He sighed. “What a fucking mess.”
“Why me?”
“Sorry? Oh. Just the luck of the draw, really. I had a list of about half a dozen people who could have done it. I didn’t want to use stringers; I wanted someone with experience, someone who’d do it right.”
“You should have split the job up into segments and given each one to a different person.”
“Yes, more anonymous that way, I know. But the more people know about something, the more chance there is of it coming to light. I decided it was best to give it to just one person.” Leo checked his watch – a cheaply-printed thing that looked as if it had come as a free gift with a pair of printed shoes. “Get some sleep. Nothing’s going to happen for a couple of hours.”
“You have to be kidding.”
“You must be exhausted. I know I am.”
“Not a chance. Tell me how my friends wound up dead and I wound up on the run. That’ll keep us both awake.”
So Leo –
Rudi
, apparently – told him a mad story of chefs and restaurants and catastrophic jumps and hot briefcases and heads in lockers, a riot in a national park, a fake barristers’ chambers, a year of moving from place to place incognito. The story was interrupted a couple of times by calls to one or other of the disposable phones, which Rudi answered tersely. Finally – it was daylight outside now – one call came through and Rudi held the phone out to him, and when he took it and put it to his ear he heard his father’s voice demanding to know what the hell was going on and why there was a strange person with a gun in his house.
“Dad,” he said when he got a moment’s silence. “Dad, just go with them. They’re there to help you. They’re going to take you somewhere safe.”
“Safe? Safe from what? Take us where?”
“Just go with them, Dad, please. I’ll be in touch later.” Rudi was holding another phone out to him. “I’ve got another call. I’ll be in touch.” And he took the other phone and had a similar conversation with his sister.
When he’d finished and put the phones down on the stack on the table, Rudi told him, “There was someone outside your sister’s house.”
Seth stared at him.
“I wanted them taken alive so I could find out who sent them, but there was... um.” Rudi shrugged. “Anyway, your family are on their way to safe houses right now. I’ll organise something more permanent for them in a day or so.
Now
will you get some sleep?”
I
T WAS MID-AFTERNOON
before Seth woke up, still tired and headachey, on the bed. Rudi was nowhere to be seen, but his bags – and the custom-built flechette gun – were still there, so Seth had a quick shower, dressed in fresh clothes, and went for a wander.
He found Rudi in the motel’s almost-deserted bar/restaurant, talking quietly on one of the disposable phones and staring at a sausage sandwich as if it had done him an unforgivable wrong. He ordered an Americano and a burger and sat down across from the young Coureur.
“So,” he said when Rudi had finished his call.
Rudi rubbed his face. “Well, Roger Curtis is unusable, I’m afraid. He’s wanted for the murder of your flatmate and his girlfriend.” He shook his head. “Which is actually quite elegant, if you think about it. Someone less sophisticated would have framed you or me.”
“I can get you out,” Seth said.
“I beg your pardon?”
“I might not be all high and mighty and important like you, but I’ve got some contacts. I can get you out. But it won’t be cheap.”
“Nothing worth having ever is.” Rudi shrugged. “I’m sensing an ‘and’ hanging in the air between us.”
“I’m going with you.”
To his credit, Rudi didn’t even try to talk him out of it. He just nodded tiredly. “Yes, well, I’d taken that as a given, rather. Is it my imagination, or is there
another
‘and’ here as well?”
“We have to go to Scotland.”
Rudi opened his mouth to say something. Closed it again.
“I
T’S ALL ABOUT
jurisdiction,” Seth said. “And the Acts of Union.”
Rudi shook his head. “I’ve spent almost a year on the run trying to get out of this fucking country. Why did nobody ever tell me about this?”
“It’s nuance,” Seth told him. “Nitpicking stuff. Body language, really. There probably aren’t more than a dozen people in the whole country who appreciate it properly, and they don’t want the public to know about it because it looks bad.”
They were driving across a rain-lashed landscape of moorland and forest in Northumberland. The B-road they were on was in a terrible state of repair, and the Espace’s suspension kept bottoming out in potholes and ruts in the tarmac. It was half past one in the afternoon, and already the light was taking on a dim, failing, underwater quality.
“Are you trying to tell me,” Rudi said, “that the border isn’t
there
?”
Seth sighed. “1603,” he said. “James VI of Scotland becomes James I of England. Most people think that’s when England and Scotland became one country, but actually, although there was one monarch, there were still two Crowns.”
“Because joining two countries together is just as complicated as splitting one up,” Rudi said. He lit a small cigar, opened the driver’s window a crack to let the smoke out.
“It used to be easier,” Seth said. “But that was when kings wore full armour and rode into battle on great fuck-off big horses and all you had to do was kill the other side’s king.” He took a bag from beside his feet, rummaged around in it, and came up with an apple. He took a bite. “Anyway, they actually had three goes at unification. First was under James I. He called himself ‘King of Great Britain,’ and he thought unification was a shoo-in, but the English Parliament was worried that it would mean some of the powers he had as King of Scotland being imposed on England. So. Close, but no cigar.
“Second try was in 1654. Cromwell occupies Scotland during the Civil War, and afterwards he issues an edict creating a Commonwealth of England, Scotland and Ireland. Scotland gets MPs at Westminster. This of course all disappears automatically when Charles II takes to the throne, and the Scottish MPs have to go home. He tries to get unification talks going again in 1669, but it all grinds to a halt.”
“Do children in this country have to memorise this stuff?” Rudi asked.
“This is just background,” Seth replied. “Anyway. 1707. Queen Anne. A Treaty of Unification is ratified. And ever since then the Scots have wanted to leave.”
“Ungrateful bastards.”
“The Scots started to call officially for devolution around the middle of the nineteenth century, I think,” Seth said. He shook his head. “After that it all just gets too fucking complicated. But the point is, when the Separation did take place twenty years ago, it happened in a hurry after a long and fractious history, and there was a lot of bad blood on both sides.”