At the front desk, an efficient young woman already had a visitors’ badge ready for him. Bekker led him across the atrium to a bank of lifts, and they rode down five floors to a silent corridor lined with wooden doors. Each of the doors had a glass panel set into it at head-height. Bekker stopped at one, and Jim peered through the panel and found himself looking into a small, plain room with utilitarian furniture, not unlike a budget hotel room. Lying on the bed, eyes closed and his hands behind his head, was a young man, no more than twenty.
“I thought you’d appreciate at least taking a look at him,” Bekker said with heavy sarcasm.
Jim sighed. “Yes. Thank you, Herold. Can he hear us?”
Bekker shook his head. “The glass is one-way. The door’s soundproofed. We don’t appreciate being made fools of, my friend.”
“You’re not being made fools of,” Jim said.
Bekker made a rude noise. “Of course not. You know” – he tapped Jim’s chest, then his own – “it’s only our friendship that’s preventing me going to my bosses about this little pantomime.”
Jim looked him in the eye. “You’re welcome to do so,” he said. Deep down inside, he felt something wither and die. A meeting with his Dutch opposite number had been in his diary for months, part of the endless interagency handshaking that characterised the intelligence community, so his presence here was easily explained. In fact, he had been putting it off because of his work with the Committee. For the rest, he was relying on a friendship which would never be the same again.
“Pah.” Bekker turned away and started to walk back towards the lifts. “I know when something’s off the books. This thing stinks.”
“I only want to talk to him,” Jim said, falling in beside him.
“And what’s stopping you doing that for yourself? Hm? Plausible deniability?”
Jim smiled.
Bekker sighed. “He wants to meet at a coffee shop in town.”
Jim shook his head. “I’m sorry, Herold.”
They got into the lift, and started to rise towards the surface again. “He said you’d say that. This one’s no fool; he’s been doing this a long time. I can tell.”
“You’ve met?”
Bekker shook his head. “We spoke on the phone. I could tell by his voice, though. Whatever you’re up to, be careful.”
“I will. I promise. Did he give you a fallback routine in case the coffee shop wasn’t suitable?”
“Information kiosk at Muiderpoort Station in two hours from now. Third one from the left. He’ll call you with an alternative meet.”
“You won’t be listening, will you?”
“Of course we will; we monitor all the public kiosks. Try not to say anything incriminating,” he added heavily.
The lift reached the ground floor and the doors opened. “Can I ask you not to have me followed?” Jim asked.
Bekker sucked his teeth. “Let me ask
you
a question, Jim my friend. Are you doing something which endangers the security of the Netherlands?”
“No. Absolutely not.”
“You’re just using us as a convenient playground. Is that it?”
“At least I’m doing it openly.”
“Professional courtesy?”
“Friendship.” They reached the doors of the foyer and stepped outside into the warm sunshine. Jim looked about him. It was nice here. Far nicer than the office on Northumberland Avenue, where everything seemed to take place in an atmosphere conjured up from early le Carré and Deighton and films like
The Man Who Never Was
. “Do you suppose your people would take me in if I were to defect?” he mused.
“Defect?” Bekker burst out laughing. “Well, you could do worse. The pension plan is
terrific
.”
T
HREE HOURS LATER,
he was standing, feeling rather peckish, in front of
The Night Watch
in the Rijksmuseum. The room in which the painting was housed was full of serious young students, some of them sketching the Rembrandt on their tablets, some using more traditional paper and pencil.
He had been standing there for some minutes, hands clasped behind his back and overnight bag on the floor by his feet, when a quiet voice behind him said, “I always hated this painting. No, please, don’t turn around.”
“What don’t you like about it?” Jim asked.
“It’s very gloomy,” said the voice. “It’s really called
The Company of Captain Frans Banning Cocq and Lieutenant Willem van Ruytenburch Preparing to March Out
, you know. A ponderous name for a ponderous painting.”
“The guide says it’s a masterpiece of light and shadow,” said Jim.
“I’m more of a Caspar David Friedrich man, myself,” said the voice. “
He
was a man who knew how to use light and shadow. May we have our man back, please?”
“Of course you can. I certainly don’t want him, and I doubt the Dutch do either.”
“Oh, I’m sure they don’t. Shall we walk?”
The voice belonged to a tall middle-aged man with a face that looked as if it had been carved by a flint knapper. “I am Kaunas,” he said as they made their way towards the exit.
“Alan Sheridan.”
They each silently acknowledged the falseness of the other’s name, and went out into the sun.
“So, Mr Sheridan,” said Kaunas. “You don’t want our Coureur, the Dutch don’t want him. To be honest with you,
we
don’t want him, particularly. He’s hardly been a shining success.”
“He’s still young. He’ll learn.”
They struck out across the Museumplein towards the Van Gogh Museum. “I’m genuinely intrigued, Mr Sheridan,” Kaunas said. “You ask the Dutch to set up a Situation and then arrest the Coureur who comes to deal with it. Presumably because I, or someone like me, would then turn up to sort things out. Presumably because you wanted to speak with me, or someone like me.”
Jim nodded. “Which raises a number of questions.”
“It does indeed,” Kaunas agreed. “Shall we address them one at a time?”
“By all means.”
“I suppose the first question would be why you went to all this trouble when Coureur Central has always had a reasonably good relationship with English Intelligence.”
“It’s not really a ‘relationship,’ is it,” Jim pointed out. “We tolerate you.”
“It’s better than we get in many places. But the point remains: you could just have contacted us through channels.”
“Not an option,” said Jim. “Sorry.”
Kaunas nodded. “So my second question would have to be, is this contact part of something...
al fresco
? Off-piste?”
Jim’s visit to The Secret Cheese was easily explained, his request that the Dutch Security Service detain a random Coureur less so. This meeting, not at all. “Better you don’t know,” he said.
Kaunas nodded again. “Let’s go into the Van Gogh Museum,” he suggested. “They have an excellent café. Allow me to buy you a snack.”
In the restaurant, Jim sat at a table while Kaunas bought coffees and a plate of sticky pastries. They ate in silence for a little while, then Kaunas said, “My final question would have to be, what do you want, Mr Sheridan? Bearing in mind that I cannot make any undertakings myself.”
Jim took a breath and looked Kaunas in the eye. “I have a missing man, Mr Kaunas.”
“Just Kaunas, please. Are we discussing a certain gentleman last seen in Austria?”
“We are. And a certain gentleman of your acquaintance was the last person to see him, I understand.”
Kaunas spooned sugar into his coffee and stirred it. “I doubt Leo told us anything he did not tell you,” he mused. “I can’t help you there.”
Jim put his elbows on the table on either side of his plate and leaned forward. He said, “My missing man may be dead. Or he may be in an... unusual location. I need help to find him and bring him home.”
Kaunas looked him in the eye. “There seems to be a sudden use of the personal pronoun,” he said.
Jim looked away, looked back at the Coureur. “Something has slipped beyond my control,” he said. “I need to get my man back. I need your help.”
Kaunas sat back and looked at him. “And in return for our help?” he asked finally.
“All the product from the working group of which I’m part.” There it was. How very easy it seemed to commit treason. “Whatever Leo told you, I promise it’s just the tip of the iceberg.”
“Mundt?”
“Mundt is a distraction. Forget him for the moment. This will change your world. Literally.”
Kaunas watched him for a while. “And you are unable to use the resources of your own Service for this because...?”
“I just can’t. I don’t trust it any longer.”
“You think you’ve been compromised?”
“For the moment, I think our aims have diverged.”
“And your aim is?”
“This man didn’t volunteer. I asked him to do this job; it’s my responsibility to help him get out.”
Kaunas thought for a long time. He nibbled the edge of one of his pastries, took a sip of coffee, dabbed his lips with a napkin and wiped his fingers. Finally, he said, “
Les Coureurs
are not a charity. We do not do
pro bono
work. I presume you were not going to insult our intelligence by holding our young colleague hostage to force us to work for you.”
“There will be funds,” said Jim. “More than enough.”
“I think you should let us judge what is more than enough,” said Kaunas.
“The Service is not made of money,” Jim said. “Sadly. It’s going to be tricky enough as it is.”
Kaunas thought about it. “Contact protocols?”
Jim took from his pocket a little plastic box and put it on the table between them. “Frequency-agile encrypted bubble-SIM,” he said. “Put it in any phone and we’ll have secure communications. Don’t use it to call out for pizza.”
That tickled Kaunas. He chuckled and took the box. “I think I may enjoy working with you, Mr Sheridan.” He tucked the box in his pocket and said, “I will pass your proposal on to my superiors. I’ll be in touch to discuss the details with you.”
Jim breathed in, breathed out, felt simultaneous waves of relief and sheer terror. “I’ll tell the Dutch to release your man,” he said.
Kaunas shrugged. “Fuck it. Let them keep him another couple of days. It might teach him to be more careful in future.”
3
S
PRING TURNED TO
Summer. He saw Bevan less and less at the office, and when he did see her she seemed grey and shrunken and defeated. She wouldn’t tell him how her meeting with Shaw had gone, nor whether she had eventually been to see the Director-General. She was distracted, vague, ill, sometimes absent altogether, and he found himself taking on more and more of her responsibilities.
At the same time, it seemed that he now warranted his own personal bodyguard, a bluff ex-Special Branch man named Courtney who accompanied him when he went to check on the continuing reinforcement of the Campus beach-head or the search for the Windsor branch line. Courtney was amiable enough company, but there was little doubt that he had instructions not to let Jim out of his sight. When Jim asked Shaw about this development, she made some vague noises about operational security being tightened up, new guidelines, etc and etc. There was no way to tell whether it had anything to do with his visit to Amsterdam or whether it was something new.
“I think it’s safe to assume that I’m under surveillance at all other times as well,” he told Kaunas one night.
“You want us to jump you out of there?” the Coureur asked.
Jim thought about that. “You know, it honestly hadn’t occurred to me,” he said.
“The offer’s there.”
Jim was sitting in the garden, smoking and talking to Kaunas on the encrypted phone link. Dusk was falling, and bats were tumbling between the trees, hunting insects. He said, “I still have things I need to do here.”
“I’ve found you someone,” Kaunas said. “He’s young and he’s had a bad time of it, but he’ll do.”
“All right.”
“We think there’s a map somewhere, out in the wild.”
Jim sat up straight. “Where?”
“We don’t know. The situation’s confused; the map was stolen, now it’s gone.”
Jim hurriedly ran through the options. He had nothing left to offer Kaunas in return for a map other than his sincere thanks. He said, “The map would be useful for your operative, if you could bring the two of them together.”
There was a silence at the other end of the link. It went on for so long that Jim thought the other man had hung up, but then Kaunas said, “We’ll see. How about the money?”
“That’s all in hand. I’ve found a... source of deniable funding. It’s so deniable I think even the Service has forgotten it exists.”
“Must be nice, to just
find
all this money.”
“If anyone finds out what I’m doing, I’ll go to prison for a very long time. If I’m lucky.” He gave Kaunas the details. “Try not to spend it all in the same place.”
“Thank you. Any word on your man?”
Jim thought about a single freeze-frame from a security camera at Dover, four people boarding the afternoon Calais ferry. Hardly anyone used the ferries these days, the boat must have been half empty, but all they had was that one blurry frame – four men and a woman queuing patiently to board. The Eurostar would have been faster, but Eurostar security was ferociously tight. At least on the ferry they’d stood half a chance of getting away with the minimum of fuss and bother. He hadn’t dared send the image for enhancement – Rupert was now officially lost in action – but he was sure he recognised one of the men.
“He left the country,” he said.
“Which is a hopeful sign,” Kaunas mused. “At least they didn’t kill him out of hand.”
“I don’t know what to think any more,” Jim said.
“Well, whatever happened he’ll be out of reach now.”
“Yes. We just have to hope your man can find him.”
“It may take a while.”
“Then it takes a while. Keep me informed.”
“Yes.”
They hung up and Jim went back into the house. In the wake of the
decree absolute
, his wife had elected to leave him the building but take every stick of furniture and electronic equipment. Sometimes, late at night, he drifted from room to empty room, although he was finding it harder and harder to remember what exactly had been where. His stepson’s bedroom still had its Big Blue Cat stickers on the wall, but everything else had gone. He found himself missing the little boy more than he missed his wife.