Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(98)

“You’re not?”

“Nah. I’m just going to send them a message.”

They drove for another few minutes in silence, then the car pulled to a stop and Crispin said, “Well, here we are.”

Rudi leaned around the passenger-seat headrest to look out through the windscreen. A few metres ahead, the road simply stopped. In front of the car, for as far as he could see, were fields and hedges and little stands of trees. In the distance, above the trees, a faint twirl of smoke from a chimney.

“This is new,” Seth said.

“This is not going to be one of those times when the criminal mastermind reveals his master plan and then the plucky heroes use the information to foil his schemes,” warned Crispin. “There’s nothing you could do, and even if there was, it’s way too late for you to do it.”

“To be honest, it’s unusual for me to have any information at all,” Rudi told him sourly. He opened the door and got out of the car and put his hands in his pockets. The road ended in a sharp, straight line, as if God had reached down with an enormous craft knife and severed it. God had then gone on to peel up everything on the other side of the line and replace it with a new landscape, as if he was laying carpet. On this side of the line were the houses of West London – and people were just starting to come out and stand looking in wonder at what had erupted into their lives. On the other side was...

“Impressive,” Rudi said to Crispin, who had got out of the car and come over to stand beside him.

“Where’s Heathrow gone?” said Seth, walking up to the edge of the new landscape, not quite daring to step over.

“I’m not going to tie up all the loose ends for you,” Crispin told Rudi. “You’ll have to do that for yourself. I don’t even know what all the loose ends are, and frankly I’ve run out of f*cks to give.”

Rudi half-turned and looked at him.

“Ho Chi Minh attended the Versailles Peace Conference,” Crispin said. “Did you know that?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“He was there to ask the Great Powers to support an independent Vietnam,” Crispin went on. “He had an argument based on the US Declaration of Independence. Imagine that. Nobody paid him any attention. The world would have been a different place if someone had just had the courtesy to listen to him.”

Rudi waited.

“The creation of the Community was a family secret,” Crispin said. “It got handed down from generation to generation of Whitton-Whytes until about two hundred years ago. I don’t know what happened then because there’s no predicting what families will do – maybe someone just got f*cked-off because they weren’t invited to a wedding or something – but at some point there was a failure to transmit information. The chain got broken and the family secret wound up leaving the Community and eventually Roland Sarkisian inherited it from his mother.”

“The treatise.”

Crispin nodded. “Sarkisian and his bunch of number crunchers were at Versailles, too,” he said. “You’ve seen the photo. They had a proposal for the Great Powers as well, but the difference was that people paid attention. They’d just come through the most terrible war the world had ever seen, and Sarkisian offered to build them a new world, one without nationalities or borders, and they jumped at it.”

“Why?” asked Rudi. “Why would the Collective do that?”

“Because Roland Sarkisian was one of the most venal men who ever lived. All he was interested in was money. The Americans didn’t want anything to do with it – they thought Sarkisian was crazy – but the Europeans already knew about the Community, so they ponied up an advance and Sarkisian and his boys cooked up a proof of concept for them.”

“The House By The Sea,” said Rudi. “Where time passes ever so slowly.”

“Yeah. That was Phase One. By the time Sarkisian and his guys took off with our money, it was already twice as large as the Community.”

“That was over a hundred years ago,” Rudi said.

“Yeah.” Crispin beamed. “Now it’s a whole planet.”

Rudi stared out over the fields, the enormity of what the Sarkisians and their patrons had done only now beginning to dawn on him.

“The Machine in Dresden tells us things,” Crispin said. “It’s been telling us a lot of stuff about the Community.”

“Have you ever,” Rudi asked, “read Billion Dollar Brain?”

Crispin snorted. “It cost a lot more than that.” He scratched his head. “They’ve done a deal with the devil,” he said. “I don’t know what they thought they were going to get out of it, but Europe and the Americans are just going to want more and more of their resources. Eventually the Community are going to put the brakes on, Europe’s going to retaliate somehow – probably economically, at first – and what do you think’s going to happen then?”

Rudi thought he heard, in the far distance, the faint sound of a church bell.

“The Community’s trigger-happy,” Crispin went on. “This progressive faction that’s running things now is only hanging on by the skin of its teeth. They’ve got nuclear weapons and they’ve got the flu virus – which they’ve both used, if you’ll recall. They’ll just burst out of there like pus from a boil and there won’t be anything anyone can do to stop them but they’ll try anyway and things will get utterly f*cked up.”