Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(99)

“This is the Community, isn’t it,” Rudi said, waving across the fields. “You’ve swapped them over, like you did with the Realm.”

Crispin looked at him. “You’re really quite smart, you know,” he said.

“If I was smart I wouldn’t have found Charpentier for you.”

Crispin beamed. “You knew exactly what you were doing. You figured out that thing in Warsaw, didn’t you.”

“Sort of,” Rudi admitted.

Crispin shook his head. “I’m genuinely sorry I f*cked things up for Snowy like that, but I was in a hurry. He’s not in any trouble in Poland; I made sure of that.”

“Doesn’t matter; he’s safe now. It might be a good idea never to contact him again, though.”

“Hell,” said Crispin, “he’s never going to see me again. Nobody’s ever going to see me again.”

“What were you doing working in the Warsaw Metro in the first place?”

Crispin shrugged. “Keeping an eye on our investment. Staying busy. Keeps me off the streets, anyway.”

Rudi walked forward to the edge of the farmland, reached out, plucked a stem of long grass, twirled it between his fingers, marvelling that not so long ago it had been in another universe. He said, “This is...”

“Pretty cool, huh?” said Crispin, smiling and looking out over the new landscape. “Fuck me but I love it when stuff works.”

“And this is your message?”

Crispin nodded proudly. “Think we’ve got their attention?”

“You could have just sent an email,” said Rudi, and Crispin laughed.

“Who elected you King of the World?” Seth called from the edge of the farmland.

“I did,” said Crispin. “You have a problem with that?” He said to Rudi, “We’re going away. We’ve made ourselves a place and we’re going to see if we can make it work out.”

“Sarkisian World?” Rudi said. “Mafia World?”

Crispin took out a packet of cigarettes, lit one, stood with one hand in a pocket of his jeans, gazing out at his creation. “The EU never stood a chance,” he said, almost to himself. “Too many borders. We’ll do it better, but we want to be left alone. Or we’ll do more of...” He gestured out across the fields.

Rudi glanced about him. Quite an appreciable crowd was gathering here at the end of the road. Most of them were filming the scene with their phones. Others were calling friends, family, news outlets. Any moment now there would be police vehicles and army helicopters, but just now it was really quite peaceful. A paused breath at the dawn of the pax Crispin.

He said, “Have you run this particular scenario through the Neustadt? The one where you cause so much fuss that everyone calms down and has a good think about what they’re doing?”

Crispin grunted. “Do I look like I came down with the last fall of snow? Calm never lasts long. A century, maybe two, and Europe and the Community will be at war.”

“That’s quite a long time. A lot could happen.”

“One thing about time,” Crispin mused. “You think you have a lot of it, but it runs out real fast.”

“Where’s Heathrow gone?” Seth asked again, and when Rudi looked at him he saw that the catenary of lights in the sky had begun to break up. Silently and without any apparent fuss they were all beginning to rise into the sky again. The nearest set of lights, though, was continuing to descend, and now he could see the aircraft slung between them. He could just hear the sound of its engines, over the excited chatter of the people around him.

He said, “They weren’t after the train, were they. They were after the tunnel.”

Crispin sighed. “I said I wasn’t going to tie up all the loose ends for you.”

“Hey,” Rudi said. “I’m doing my share of the lifting.”

“They were really stupid,” said Crispin. “All the tunnels on the Line are border crossings. Blowing one of them up barely slowed us down.”

“Because of the Campus?”

Crispin pulled a sour face. “They blamed us for what happened to the Campus. We weren’t dicking around with viruses in there; that was all their own stupid fault. All we were doing was working with the Science Faculty.”

“In secret. Behind everyone’s backs.”

Crispin made a rude noise. “Sometimes that’s the only way to get stuff done. It was just the sort of f*cking fit of pique you’d expect from them, and that’s one of the reasons why they’re dangerous. They’ve got really poor impulse control.”

“You didn’t try to negotiate? Try to explain?”

“We’re the European f*cking Union,” Crispin said. “We don’t negotiate.” Then he chuckled.

The airliner was much closer now. It was huge, one of the new transcontinental jets, big enough to carry the fuselage of an old-style 747 in its belly. It was still descending, even though it must have been obvious to everyone on the flight deck that Heathrow was no longer there. Rudi wondered what was happening in the Community, the sudden eruption of all those hectares of concrete and buildings and gigantic passenger aircraft into the peace and quiet, and it suddenly occurred to him that Crispin’s organisation had just gifted the Community an air force, of sorts. Actually, not just an air force; Europe and the Community would be in the courts for decades, trying to establish who the cornucopia of technology and duty-free and bonded goods and gold bullion at Heathrow belonged to now. Maybe that would keep them too busy to invade each other, maybe it would bring hostilities closer. There was no way to know; if he’d been clairvoyant he wouldn’t have got involved in this mess in the first place.