Beneath Mr Bauer’s rooms, Smithson’s Chambers went on with their everyday work, giving hope and succour to the weak, the indigent, the hopeless and the frankly criminally insane. Mr Bauer had arrived from Harvard Law almost fifty years ago, clutching his newly-minted degree, independently wealthy due to his connections with some Boston Brahmin family and determined to carry out pro bono work of the most hopeless kind, defending clients no barrister in the history of the Inns of Court would have been crazy enough to defend. And for quite a long time – a very long time, actually – he had made a success of it. He had driven England’s most eminent judges to their knees in court, over and over again, leaving them bleeding and weeping for mercy while his clients walked free. He defended peers and petty thieves, blackmailers and perjurers, murderers and – once – a Traitor of the Realm, a Foreign Office clerk who had been caught passing confidential ministerial briefing papers to a contact in the Russian Embassy. He lost that one – some said deliberately, because loyalty to one’s country was of paramount importance to Mr Bauer. But he won enough cases to blaze a trail through the British legal system. There was even an old biopic of him, made during one of those blink-and-you’ll-miss-them windows when Hollywood was interested in courtroom dramas.
That he was a decayed colossus these days was fairly well accepted. But he was still a colossus. And that was why, when he did his hail-fellow-well-mets around the Inns, people replied to him, because even if he didn’t know who they were, they knew who he was, once upon a time.
Rudi thought he had been kidnapped and put in the hands of lunatics.
As if the thought had summoned him, Mr Self passed through the room, probably looking for Mr Bauer. Mr Self was a cadaverous young man with sharp suits and even sharper sideburns and one of the most insincere smiles Rudi had ever seen. He deployed it the moment he saw Rudi sitting in the armchair.
“Hey, Rudi,” he said, all golly-gosh bonhomie. “Got everything you need? Good. That’s the way, eh? Looking for Mr Bauer, actually. Great man passed through here recently?”
“He’d prefer it if we called him ‘Red,’ actually,” Rudi said without stirring from the chair.
“I know,” said Mr Self. “Silly old sod. Can’t do that.” His eyebrows went up. “See where he went, did you?”
Rudi pointed, and Mr Self nodded thanks and left the room.
The past seven weeks had been a genial and thoroughly civilised learning curve for Rudi. He had learned that the Temple was actually part of London’s legal heart, named after the Knights Templar, who had once had a house there. It housed two of the Capital’s Inns of Court, the professional legal associations so-named because once upon a time they really had been inns, places of residence for barristers. These days the Inns were mostly barristers’ offices, known as ‘Chambers,’ of which Smithson’s Chambers, a group of about a dozen barristers led by Mr Bauer, was one.
All of this information was doled out in a laconic drawl by Mr Self, who was notionally Mr Bauer’s clerk but who seemed to have a busy and full life all of his own, to judge by the little time he actually spent in the Chambers.
Rudi was mostly left to his own devices, which gave him many diverting hours in which to think back over the events of the past couple of months.
Firstly, it was all bullshit. The whole thing. The jump from Palmse, as much as he remembered it, seemed relatively professional. Indeed, it had happened more or less the way he would have done it, using the cover of the riot. It reminded him of the abortive jump in the Zone. In fact it reminded him too much of the abortive jump in the Zone, and for that reason he found it suspicious. Gibbon seemed to have known about the recent problems with German counterintelligence, therefore Rudi had to assume Gibbon also knew something of his operational history, and if Rudi were going to jump another Coureur and wanted to gain their confidence, he might very well use a scam which had worked for the Coureur before, appeal to their professional vanity. It was too obvious.
So that was that. Then there was Gibbon’s little speech at the Embassy. Rudi couldn’t guess which spy novels these people had been reading, but it was clearly not the better ones. No intelligence officer with any self-worth at all would have told him all those things, even if they were lies. Life was not like fiction. In real life, aged British espiocrats did not just suddenly emerge from the woodwork and tie up plot points for everyone.
And he had no evidence that he had actually been at the British Embassy. He’d been unconscious when he arrived, and he had never left his suite until the final morning. The drive to the airport had been disorienting enough to confuse him. The only thing he was actually certain of was that he had been in Helsinki. Unless whoever was behind all this had gone to the trouble of mocking up an entire airport for his benefit.
Secondly, when he finally arrived at his destination, no one showed the least professional interest in him. Not once in seven weeks had anyone tried to debrief, interrogate or even ask him an intelligent question. Mr Self appeared to be his liaison with whomever, but all Mr Self was interested in was whether Rudi found his lodgings to his satisfaction. No one seemed particularly bothered when Rudi went for walks in the Temple and sat for hours in the gardens, looking out at the Thames and the wall of buildings on the South Bank. No one seemed to care at all.
There was still no indication of why his hosts should think that Central would want him dead, nor indeed how they had come across this information. The subject was never mentioned. His Coureur life was never mentioned. It was as if he was a favourite nephew, come over from Europe to visit his Uncle Red for a couple of months. Mr Bauer was the very image of the amiable, absentminded and indulgent uncle. Mrs Gabriel was the very image – the very archetype – of an English housekeeper. So much so she might have clambered down off the pages of a Conan Doyle novel.
That, in the end, was what decided Rudi. These people all came from Central Casting, and in his experience there was no such thing as an archetype.
After about a month observing the comings and goings at Smithson’s Chambers and the other chambers on King’s Bench Walk, Rudi began to see a discrepancy. You had to look carefully for it, and even then you might still reasonably convince yourself that you were imagining things, but Rudi had a Coureur’s eye for surveillance, and he knew. Smithson’s Chambers was a shopfront. Fewer clients were passing through its doors, fewer barristers worked there, than at the other chambers. Taken with other observations, the logical inference was that Mr Bauer was a sockpuppet. If he extended that inference, Mr Self was a troll representing, however tenuously and deniably, the people who had set up the shopfront.
Quite what the shopfront was for was another matter entirely. Just a safe house for babysitting people of… unusual provenance? Or something more? It was impossible to say with any certainty.