Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(94)

1.





MR HANSEN FLEW in to Stansted on a Thursday morning. He was a tall, distinguished-looking businessman with a confident walk and a very fine suit, and his only luggage was a small overnight bag.

He took a taxi into London. The driver was a young man whose grandparents, when they had only been a little older than him, had made the perilous journey from Syria to Turkey to Greece to Croatia to Austria to Germany to England. It had taken them a long time, and their children, born during their flight, grew up multilingual and stateless, citizens of crisis. With the carelessness of the young, the driver liked to joke that he had borders in his blood, and when he mentioned this to his passenger as they sped down the M11, Mr Hansen expressed the opinion that he understood exactly how that felt.

The taxi dropped him outside a building opposite Liverpool Street station. The ground floor was a coffee shop, but the upper floors comprised suites of serviced apartments, available to rent at short notice for periods of as little as two nights. The entrance, to one side of the coffee shop, led into a lobby with a concierge and two lifts. Mr Hansen spent five minutes checking in, then continued up to the third floor. Here, at the end of a short corridor, he waved his phone at a door. The lock clicked open and he stepped inside.

Long experience made him pause at the door, looking about him. The apartment was bright and airy and modern. There was a living area, with a sofa and armchairs and a coffee table and an entertainment set, an open-plan kitchenette and dining area off to one side. The apartment had only one bedroom, and from where he stood he could see, through its half-open door, the end of the bed and the door to the ensuite bathroom.

Mr Hansen put his overnight bag down by the door and went over to the windows. Without lifting aside the net curtain, he looked down on the buses and traffic and pedestrians moving along Broadgate. He liked London; there was a sense here, for all its modern buildings, of history. He found it comforting.

“It’s a place, not a name,” said a voice from the bedroom.

He stood very still, considering the options. While he stood there, the bedroom door swung open and Rudi was standing there, leaning on a cane. His face was still boyish, but the passing years had marked him. He looked tired, worn down. He did not seem to be armed.

“You’re not even Lithuanian, I think,” he said.

Kaunas shrugged. “A nom de guerre. You know how it is. You’re looking well.”

“That wouldn’t be hard; the last time you saw me I’d just been waterboarded by the Line’s security men.”

“That was regrettable; I’m sorry that happened to you.”

“I’ll bet.”

“I presume there’s no Situation here? You sent me that crash message?”

“That was regrettable,” Rudi deadpanned. “I’m sorry that happened to you.”

“Oh, please,” Kaunas said irritably. “Don’t be childish.”

Rudi walked into the living room. “I need to talk to Crispin,” he said.

“Who?”

“Don’t,” Rudi told him. “Just don’t. The people Crispin works for are planning a strike against the Community; I can’t stop them by force so I’m going to have to talk them out of it.”

Kaunas sighed. There was a part of him, he realised, which had always known this conversation was coming, but it’s human nature to avoid awkward conversations, to hope they won’t happen, and there was nothing anyone could do about that. “May I sit?” he asked.

Rudi made an after you gesture, and Kaunas walked over to the sofa and sat down and clasped his hands across his stomach. “Perhaps,” he said, “you could begin by explaining to me why you think I can help you to contact this ‘Crispin’.”

“Because Central was involved with the Realm.”

Kaunas raised an eyebrow.

“I had a contact who was going to sell me information about a Coureur operation in Luxembourg,” said Rudi. “He was going to sell someone else information about the Realm. At the time, I thought he was selling two different pieces of information, but he wasn’t. It was just different angles on the same thing.”

Kaunas nodded. “Yes, we were hired for that Situation. Actually, not even hired. We owed Crispin a favour. Logistical support.”

“Who is he?”

Kaunas took a moment to gather his thoughts. “Europe is inherently unstable. It’s been in flux for centuries; countries have risen and fallen, borders have ebbed and flowed, governments have come and gone. The Schengen era was just an historical blip, an affectation.”

Rudi walked across the room and sat at the dining table.

“Governments, nations, borders, they’re all surface, they always have been,” Kaunas went on. “The real structure underlying it all is money, and the institutions which control it. Finance houses, banks, organised crime; if you drill down deep enough, it’s all the same. Money has no nationality, no allegiance. While nations rise and fall, it remains the same. It’s the most powerful polity of all.”

“And that’s a very pretty metaphor, but it doesn’t tell me who Crispin is.”

“The European Union didn’t just go away,” Kaunas said. “It splintered, and then it splintered again and again, but a thing like that doesn’t just wither and disappear. It’s still there. The institution still exists, and so does its money.”