Rudi limped over to the burnbox and upended it over his bed. Pages and notebooks and flashcards cascaded onto the coverlet. “I just wanted to try something.”
“Try what?”
Righting the burnbox, he stuffed a printout copy of yesterday’s local newspaper inside, closed the lid, spun the combination, swiped the lock twice to arm the device. “I want to see what happens when this thing goes off,” he said. Then he twisted the latches and pressed them outward.
What happened was Lev screaming, jumping up from the table, and diving behind the room’s monumentally-ugly sofa. A few moments later he bobbed up again, shaking his head.
“Never let it be said that Lev Semyonovitch Laptev ever failed to over-react,” said Rudi, who hadn’t moved from beside the bed.
“Sometimes,” Lev said, attempting to regain his composure without yelling, “a burnbox is designed to destroy its contents and the person who is trying to open it.”
Rudi looked at the box. “Oh.” He put his hand on the side of the briefcase, and, yes, it was warm. Not hot, but definitely warm, the flash-heat inside leaking through the insulation.
All of which made him think nostalgically of the briefcase he had taken delivery of in Old Potsdam. He’d worried that the act of smuggling it to Berlin might have destroyed it or what was inside, but what if the Package had triggered it before slinging it under the wire? What if it had been cooking its contents the whole time? What if it had contained maps?
So why, in their last moments of life, had the Package slung the briefcase through the wire, if it was in the process of destroying its contents? In Rudi’s world there was only one reason to do that – to get people running, to make the people who wanted the case back believe it had been delivered. And Bradley had said that the contents had got through, so either he knew the case had destroyed whatever it contained, and had been lying, or he didn’t know and had been passing on a lie told to him by his superiors.
He had other things to think about. There was the steady stream of decrypts, page by page building up a picture of the Community of the nineteenth century. There were the more mundane mechanics of getting himself and Lev from hotel to hotel, from island to island.
And yet he couldn’t stop thinking about Potsdam, going around and around, picking away at it.
Rudi sat for hours with the printout of the Baedeker, shuffling the pages, waiting for the movie moment, the moment when the hero claps his hand to his forehead and cries, of course! The moment when all becomes clear.
It didn’t happen.
This was a Big Secret, certainly. No doubt about that. Easily worth killing both Fabio and himself. But the geometry of what had happened to him over the past ten years or so eluded him. He was certain that Potsdam fitted into that geometry, somehow, but it was impossible to say precisely how.
Taking the Baedeker as his guiding principle, his entire career as a Coureur took on a different aspect. There was one phrase in the book, The Community has the most jealously guarded borders in Europe, which altered everything. How many governments, intelligence services, espionage organisations and criminal groups knew about the Community and had tried, over the years, to gain entry? If he had learned anything from his years wandering around Europe, it was that people really hated to find places that they could not go. Thus, safecrackers broke into banks, MI6 officers passed through Checkpoint Charlie, CIA rezidents ran networks of stringers in Moscow and Bucharest. Oh yes, they were stealing the company payroll or gathering intelligence on the enemy. But, really, when it came down to it, they were going where others could not go. Rudi was aware of the sense of power, the sense of omnicompetence, one could derive from something like that
And the Community had defeated them. They had not been able to gain access.
Whoever they were – and he didn’t rule out a committee of apparatchiks representing Central and every intelligence community in Europe – these were subtle men and women. Rudi thought that much of his time as a Coureur had been devoted to provocations – not to breaking into the Community directly, but to flushing them out like a beater on a grouse moor. Who are they? Where are they? What are they doing? The eternal questions of the intelligence controller.
It was possible that his first live Situation with Fabio had been a legitimate attempt to steal the map of entryways into the Community. Equally, it could have been an operation to flush out a Community operative in Poznań’s Line consulate, someone who could then have been identified, arrested, interrogated, turned and fed back into the Community to report back to their new masters. It might have been a success, or it might have been a failure. Or it might genuinely have been Fabio acting on his own initiative. He would never know.
Similarly, the Situation in Potsdam (and perhaps even the one in the Zone, he had always thought there was something not quite right about that one) and the death of Leo had something of the stage about them, something with larger objectives than the individual players would ever be able to perceive.
This of course brought him to his present situation. Was he once again part of a provocation? Was he being run against the Community, for reasons he would never know, by people he would never meet?
It was impossible to be sure. He could, of course, elect to do nothing for the moment, and see what happened. He could try to second-guess the situation and pick the least likely course of action, but he would never be certain it wasn’t the course of action he was supposed to take. He could throw himself into the sea and drown, but there was always the itching suspicion that someone, somewhere, would have taken that possibility into account. Unlike the espionage soaps, where there was always a way to drop a spanner into the works and somehow come out victorious, he was in the hands of planners who had seen every eventuality. They were the students of centuries of expertise, from the couriers of pre-Christian Pharaohs with secret messages tattooed on their scalps, through the agents of Francis Walsingham, through the gentleman adventurers of the Great Game, through MI6 and SOE and OSS and the Okhrana and NKVD and the CIA. They knew their stuff.
This was the basis of his epiphany on that street in London, a sense that it didn’t matter what he did because he was part of a Plan, a Plan designed to make it seem as though he had complete free will. And he may have been right; he hadn’t been arrested. Whoever They were, They wanted him to get away with the money from Smithson’s Chambers, and use it for whatever ends he decided.
Oddly enough, this did not bother him as much as it might have. It was oddly liberating, knowing that whatever he did had been planned for. And so he chose to default to himself. Rudi the Coureur. Rudi, who saw a phrase like the most jealously guarded borders in Europe, and saw, behind those borders, people who wanted to leave.
“It sounds,” he told Lev, “like a challenge.”
ONE MORNING RUDI told Lev that he was going away for a couple of days. “I really shouldn’t be more than forty-eight hours,” he said. “If I’m gone longer than that and you don’t hear from me, put everything in the burnbox and activate it. Then get out of here and drop the box in the sea.” He handed Lev a slip of paper on which were printed several strings of letters and numbers, encrypted codes for private bank accounts. “Can you memorise these?”
“Are you joking?” Lev snorted. Some of the strings ran to fifty characters.