“I want to leave,” Rudi told him when the preparations were complete.
Gibbon shook his head sadly. “I’m afraid we have information that your life is in danger,” he said regretfully.
“From whom?”
Gibbon consulted the documents in the folder. “Certain factions within Greater German counterintelligence,” he said, running the butt of his pen down the list. “The Estonian government. Coureur Central.”
“I beg your pardon?” said Rudi, feeling a chill down his back despite knowing that this was almost certainly part of a provocation.
Gibbon raised his eyebrows and returned the butt of the pen to its previous position. “Yes.” He looked calmly at Rudi. “We have rather good intelligence that your own people want to kill you. I’m afraid we don’t know why.”
“That’s impossible,” Rudi said, trying and failing to imagine something so heinous that Central would want to kill one of their own.
“It is rather good intelligence,” Gibbon told him again.
“Where does it come from?”
Gibbon sighed and scratched his head. “Yes, well, we always give our sources away to complete strangers,” he said with some sarcasm. He clipped his pen to the documents in the case and folded his hands across his ample belly. “The fact is, there are very few safe places for you right now, and one of them is with us.”
Rudi looked at him for a few moments. “Is business so slow these days that English Intelligence is carrying out individual rescues?” he asked.
Gibbon laughed as though he found this genuinely funny. “Oh, goodness gracious me no,” he said, shaking his head. “Although it’s a good thought, it really is.”
“So, assuming we accept this fantasy story you’ve just told me, you obviously want something from me.”
“Presumably,” agreed Gibbon, still chuckling at the idea of MI6 riding around the globe like a knight on a white charger.
“‘Presumably?’”
Gibbon shifted in his chair. “May I be frank with you?”
“It would make a pleasant change, yes.”
“My station was tasked with facilitating the insertion of Major Ash’s team into Estonia and their extraction of yourself. We were tasked with looking after you until you’d recovered sufficiently to travel.”
“Travel where?”
Gibbon looked nonplussed. “Well, London, of course.”
“Where all answers will be forthcoming?”
Gibbon shrugged as if to say, well, London, who knows? He zipped up the folder again. “You realise I’m telling you all this as a professional courtesy,” he said. “London tend to look down their noses at you Courier chaps, but out here we hold you in rather high regard.”
“Not high enough to get our name right,” Rudi said, and felt cheap the moment the words were out of his mouth. Gibbon was at least treating him decently, even if everything he said was probably a lie.
Gibbon raised an eyebrow. “Aye, well,” he said. “Anyway, you’ll be going to London. And perhaps all answers will be forthcoming there. I’m just sorry we had to meet under these circumstances. I’d have welcomed a chance to chat with you about operational matters.”
“Except we’d have to kill each other afterwards,” said Rudi.
Gibbon chuckled. “Yes, there is that.”
“It’s really a very boring life.”
“Yours doesn’t seem to be.”
“That isn’t really my fault.”
“Are you sure?”
“I was on holiday when your pet special forces men kidnapped me.”
“Saved your life,” Gibbon corrected gently.
“Allegedly.” Although a thought sent a pulse of goosepimples up his arms.
Gibbon was either very good at reading faces, or he was telepathic. He nodded. “It would have been rather an opportune moment to bump you off, with all that chaos going on, wouldn’t it?”
Rudi swallowed down a sense of fear, of forces beyond his comprehension. “It’s ridiculous. What am I supposed to have done?”
Gibbon shrugged. “I’m only privy to the intelligence I just passed on to you, I’m afraid.”
Rudi stared at the Englishman for a very long time, completely at a loss for words. Gibbon, for his part, sat serenely in his chair as if regarding a particularly restful countryside scene. No fuss, no hurry, not a thought in his head.
Finally Rudi said, “When do I leave?”
2.
THE JUMP WAS utterly beyond belief.
Rudi’s dealings with the intelligence services of governments had been fairly limited, down the years. They were, in his experience, mostly professional, if entirely without scruple.
MI6, in contrast, appeared to be making everything up as it went along, using a joke book as its guide.
At six o’clock on the morning after his interview with Gibbon, there was a brisk knock at his door and Major Ash, looking rather avuncular in tan chinos, blue blazer, blue shirt and red-and-blue striped tie, put his head into the room.
“Ready to go, sir?” he asked cheerfully.
Rudi was still in his pyjamas and dressing gown, sitting in front of the entertainment centre, his hands poised in mid-gesture as he read through the BBC News website. “Not really, no,” he said.
Ash stepped into the room and closed the door behind him. He was carrying a black nylon travel bag, which he held out. “Flight’s in three hours,” he said. “You might want to get dressed.”
The bag contained some fairly blameless casual clothing – jeans, sweatshirt, underwear, training shoes, another zip-up fleece to go over it all. Rudi looked at it, then looked at Ash, then went into the bathroom to dress.
He had no luggage, so leaving was fairly straightforward. He actually felt a little pang when Ash led him out of the room. He’d rather liked it there.
Ash led him down a thickly-carpeted corridor and into a lift, which deposited them in a basement garage. A lovely black BMW was waiting for them. They climbed in, and it accelerated up a ramp and into the pre-dawn darkness of Helsinki’s morning rush hour.
Rudi didn’t know the city well enough to orient himself; he caught a glimpse of a large, imposing, official-looking building as they drove alongside the Embassy, but that was all he ever saw of its exterior, and to be honest it could have been any large, imposing, official-looking building. By the time he had some vague idea where he was, they were on the road to the airport.
Where, utterly appalled, he found himself queuing to go through passport and security checks along with families, old people, teenagers and a large and extremely boisterous group of university students who, from their shouted conversations, appeared to be on their way to Madrid.
In the car, Ash had provided him with an envelope containing a false passport and a printout of an eticket. The passport was the only thing Rudi could later identify as even faintly resembling tradecraft, and by then he could no longer hazard a guess what went on in the heads of the British Security Services.
The eticket was for a seat on a scheduled budget airline flight. Rudi stared at it for so long that he almost forgot to hand it over at the desk.
On the other side of the checks, Ash led him to a departure lounge Starbucks and there, mind reeling, Rudi sat for fifty minutes until their flight was called.
At one point, Ash got up and said, “Just going for a wee. Back in a sec,” and walked off across the lounge in the direction of the toilets, leaving Rudi quite alone.