“Wankers,” muttered Terry. “Wanted my name and ID and everything.”
“Which you didn’t give them.”
“Too fucking right.”
“That’s all right, then. I’ll want to have a conflab with you and your boys in a bit; some new instructions from on high. Meanwhile, don’t let anyone else onto the site. Okay?”
“Okay, Boss,” said Terry, and continued on his way.
“Good lad, is Terry,” Johnny said. “You seem a bit jumpy, if you don’t mind my saying.”
“Too much coffee,” Jim said. “Could I have a quick look at the work logs? Nobody here’s in any trouble or anything; I just want to get up to speed.”
“Sure.” Johnny took out his tablet, called up the relevant documents, and handed the device over to Jim. While Jim was reading, he went off to chat to some of the engineers.
The whole thing, Jim was fairly sure, was pretty pointless. Of the branches Johnny and his team had checked, none had seemed remotely unusual. The engineers had been primed to look out for what seemed to be minor optical illusions, paths which seemed to lead or arrive from nowhere, anything at all which did not belong. All they’d managed to turn up so far was assorted detritus and a cache of pornography on old-fashioned CD-ROMS, sealed in a dozen old plastic sandwich boxes and buried in the woods. Bevan had chuckled and shaken her head over the treasure trove, but had insisted on it being minutely checked by everything from cryptographers to a puzzled-looking semiotician hurriedly drafted in for the purpose.
Bevan’s latest theory was that the branch line into Ernshire had been deliberately destroyed. All the branches they were looking at had been closed at the behest of various governmental bodies, but that still left open the tantalising possibility that the request had come from
within
the Community. Someone from Ernshire had tried to contact the British Government during the reign of Queen Victoria. Had, on the face of it at least, intended to begin normalising relations. Suppose, Bevan said, that contact had actually lasted longer than it seemed. Suppose at some point negotiations had broken down, and it had been decided to seal off the branch? Jim accused her of trying to impose a narrative with little or no evidence to back it up. They’d been arguing more and more lately.
Johnny came back and said, “Everything in order?”
“Sorry?” Jim looked up from the tablet. “Oh. Yes, everything’s fine.” He handed it back, although he had done little more than skim the reports. “I’m sorry I lost my temper earlier, Johnny. I’ll make sure there’s no comeback on you and your people.”
Johnny put the tablet back in a pocket of his Barbour jacket. “I’ve got enough dirt under my fingernails to fight my own battles, if I have to.” He smiled. “I don’t want to speak out of turn, but is everything going all right with you and your committee?”
“All right?”
“I’m not privy to all that boardroom stuff, but sometimes you can see the weather from a distance, know what I mean? You or the Professor come here all cheerful and larky, I know things are going well. You come here like a badger with a broom handle up its bum, I have to guess something’s up.”
The Perigee Committee’s concerns were so highly classified that Johnny and his people had not been told
what
they were looking for, or
why
. They had just been given a list of things to watch out for. Quite what would happen if one or more of them found themselves wandering up a forgotten path into Ernshire had been the subject of another quite lengthy argument between Jim and Bevan. Jim couldn’t now remember what conclusion they had come to. He did know the presence of the unidentified people with the map had unnerved him.
He said, “It’s a committee. You know nothing ever works properly when you give it to a committee.”
Johnny guffawed. “That’ll be true.”
Jim’s phone chimed. He looked at it, saw a message from Shaw. It had been ten minutes since he had ordered the unknown group of people off the site.
“Just out of interest,” he asked, “has anyone else you don’t know turned up at any of the other sites?”
Johnny shook his head. “First time.”
Jim looked around the little wooded valley. The sound of the strimmers echoed dully under the trees; the air was full of dust and flying fragments of wood and leaves. He pictured the intruders again, with their paper map, and for some reason he flashed on an old film he’d seen, the police staking out the funeral of a murder victim in case the killer turned up. He turned and looked back down the valley, down the tunnel of trees and undergrowth to the bright sunlight at the far end, like light coming in from another world.
“I
T’S NOT PROOF,
Jim,” Bevan said.
“I should have arrested them instead of having them thrown off the site,” said Jim.
They were in another restaurant, this one in Chinatown. Dim sum, Tiger Beer, quiet women wheeling trolleys laden with bamboo steamers between the tables.
“It’s not proof,” she said again.
“They had a
map
,” he said. “A proper roll-up paper map.”
Bevan reached out and speared a dumpling with a chopstick, scraped it off onto her plate. “Doesn’t mean anything,” she said. “What did Shaw say to you?”
“Oh, they were members of the Committee, I should have let them stay, I was overstepping my authority.”
“I’ve known boy bands with fewer members than this Committee.” Bevan quartered the dumpling with her chopstick, swiped a portion through a bowl of plum sauce, and popped it in her mouth.
“Suppose,” he said. “Suppose the branch really was sealed off from this side, and now the Community doesn’t have a handy route into England. Or at least into the Southeast. Suppose even they’re not sure where it was any more, and looking for it would attract too much attention. Wouldn’t it make sense to let someone in authority do it for them?”
Bevan took a sip of beer. “You’re
imposing a narrative
,” she pointed out.
“Well I learned that from a master,” he said.
Bevan poked him in the upper arm with her chopstick, leaving a smear of sauce on his sleeve. “Peevish boy.”
“Have you any idea how much dry cleaning costs these days?” he asked, dabbing at the mark with his napkin.
“You know how this plays out, Jim. There is no smoking gun,” she told him. “I don’t like the way the Committee’s been expanded because it’s not my baby any more. You didn’t like those people being there because you’re worried about Rupert. None of it means anything. Blah blah.”
“I did some research on the reading list when I got back from Windsor.”
“And?”
“All the main intelligence services in Europe. Of course. Then the CIA. Then Mossad. Then a number of very large companies whose main business is the extraction and processing of fossil fuels. Then some more very large companies whose main business is the mining and processing of mineral ores. One large media multinational.”
Bevan sagged back in her chair.
“Two fast-food corporations. A sports clothing manufacturer. All the main high street coffee chains.”
“Jesus,” Bevan murmured.
“Three US firms specialising in building infrastructure in countries whose ruling regimes have fallen.”
Bevan rubbed her eyes. “Am I being paranoid, or are
we
planning to invade
them
?”
“All of the multinationals were, or have been in the past, heavily involved in donating either to the Presidential campaign of the current American President, or to various members of the House Intelligence Committee. They appear to have ridden in on the CIA’s coat-tails.”
“And all these people now know about the Community,” she said. “Bloody hell, Jim. What are we going to do?”
“Do? I suppose we could complain to Shaw, but I don’t honestly see what that would accomplish.”
“This is wrong, Jim. I didn’t bring this to the Service just to have them sell it to the highest bidder.”
“The moment you brought it to the Service, it stopped belonging to you, Adele,” he told her. “You’ve had the use of the Service’s resources for – how long? Twenty years? This is the payoff.”
“It’s going to leak eventually,” she said. “Too many people are involved. It’ll leak, and there are enough crazy people in the world to take it seriously. How the hell is the Community going to react? They’re a nuclear superpower, for Christ’s sake. No.” Bevan threw her napkin down on the table and stood up. “No. They’re not going to do this. I’m going to see Shaw, and if that doesn’t work I’m going to the D-G. Someone’s got to stop this before it gets out of control.”
“Adele.” Jim sat where he was. “Adele, calm down.”
“Don’t you
dare
tell me to calm down!” she said, loudly enough to turn every head in the restaurant. “Don’t you
dare
, Jim.” And she stormed out, shoving aside one of the trolley-wheeling women.
Jim nodded to one of the waitresses for the bill, then he sat thinking for a while. He paid for the food, finished the last of the dumplings and some rather wonderful steamed pork and vegetables. He put a £10 coin on the table as a tip, then he took out his phone and dialled.
“Herold,” he said when the call was answered. “How are you?”
2
T
HE
E
NGLISH ENTRY
for the Eurovision Song Contest this year was ‘Reservoir Dogs,’ by a band calling themselves Mr Swonger’s Wee. Jim, for whom Eurovision was usually something that happened to other people, only knew about it because a distant cousin had produced the band’s album. “Utter shite,” she had confided to Jim.
There were five hundred and thirty-two entries in this Eurovision – up from last year’s five hundred and twenty, but still a long way from the so-far-record of six hundred and eight. In its own way, Eurovision was as good a reflector of the current state of the Continent as many Foreign Office briefings Jim had read during his career. Countries, polities, nations, sovereign states, principalities, all wanted to take part – the sundered wreckage of Ukraine and Moldova alone accounted for seventeen national entries – and one could analyse the voting patterns of the various national juries and sometimes see geopolitical trends developing. It was now almost fifty years since England – the United Kingdom, as then was – had won. Indeed, it was some decades since any part of Britain had managed better than thirtieth place.
This year’s final was in Amsterdam, which was why, Jim assumed, the midmorning flight to Schiphol was full of amiably drunk people wearing strange hats and singing past Eurovision hits. The final was scheduled to last two days, with another three days set aside for voting. Cramped between two enthusiastic and rather sweaty Mr Swonger’s Wee fans and drinking watery coffee from a cardboard cup, Jim wondered whether life had always been this surreal. Then he remembered what he was doing and realised that yes, it always had been.
Bekker met him in Arrivals. As they shook hands, a knot of Eurovision fans passed them, all singing and towing wheeled suitcases. Bekker raised an eyebrow and Jim shrugged.
“Personally,” Bekker said, “I favour the Padanian entry this year.”
“I have no idea,” said Jim. “I really don’t.”
Bekker was a tall, athletic man with cinnamon-coloured hair and a row of small silver rings in his left earlobe. He laughed. “You should! It’s part of your cultural heritage.”
“Not mine,” said Jim.
An unmarked car was waiting outside the terminal, and it whisked them away towards the new ring-road that encircled the city.
“It was ridiculously easy, of course,” Bekker said when they were out in the traffic. “The one we got doesn’t appear to have been doing it very long. He doesn’t seem particularly bright.”
“He doesn’t need to be,” said Jim.
“You still haven’t told me why you’re doing this.”
“No. I’m sorry.”
Bekker seemed to be considering his next question. He said, “We have known each other how long now...?”
Jim thought about it. “Ten years? That security conference in Jakarta.”
Bekker nodded. “About that long, yes. Would you say we were friends? Insofar as anyone in our business can be friends?”
Jim nodded. “I’ve always thought so.”
Bekker said, “Are you in some kind of trouble?”
“Trouble?” Jim shook his head. “No. Why do you ask?”
The Dutchman shrugged. “One develops an... instinct. Some things are kosher and some are not, and this...”
“Seems unkosher?” Jim chuckled. “No, it’s all official and above board.”
Bekker thought about it and nodded. “Okay, then. This time, I was wrong. It just seemed like an unusual request.”
“We’ve both been in this game long enough to know that there’s no such thing as ‘usual,’ Herold.”
“True.” Bekker shrugged. “Very true.” He looked out of the window as the outskirts of the city rose discreetly around them. “Very true.”
The headquarters of the AIVD, the Dutch Security Service, was a brand-new wedge of reinforced glass and stressed carbon composites in a business park to the north of the city, surrounded by a picturesque moat and a discreet thicket of sensor poles. It didn’t advertise its presence, but most Dutch people knew it was there, and referred to it as ‘The Secret Cheese.’
Inside, it was like an upmarket media design company. Low padded benches were deployed across the foyer, between tall green plants and shallow pools. Everyone inside looked young and capable and enthusiastic, as well they might. Shorn of the Caribbean Netherlands, the country – despite consisting of a dozen occasionally-fractious provinces – seemed immune to the fashion for micronations which had overtaken Europe in the wake of the Xian Flu. Jim thought it was because the Low Countries had taken the brunt of the pandemic on the Continent. The Netherlands had lost almost half their population, had almost gone to their knees. There was a mass grave outside Eindhoven which contained the cremated remains of almost five million people. After a shock like that, people wanted safety, security, rather than the uncertainty of new nationhood. At least, the Dutch had. The Dutch had been among the first to leave the EU, and the guilder was one of Europe’s most stable currencies. It was a good place to be an intelligence officer. Calm, quiet, reflective.