The cop looked in through the window and raised an eyebrow.
There was a long silence. Rudi sat behind the wheel, trying to behave like a law-abiding citizen, and the cop continued to jab a fat gloved finger at his palmtop.
Rudi wondered if the cops realised the irony of what was happening here. The original Glienicker Brücke was a wooden bridge built by Friedrich Wilhelm, the Great Elector, to carry the road between his summer palace and Berlin across the Havel. Centuries later, it had been one of the most famous bridges on Earth.
A student of borders, Rudi remembered seeing old news footage from the days of the Wall, when this place was one of the crossing points between West Berlin and East Germany and spy exchanges took place here. He thought of all those grainy black and white clips, the two lonely figures approaching each other from opposite ends of the bridge. It seemed to Rudi, no matter how many different exchanges he watched, that something would always happen to the way they walked as they passed each other, as they suddenly found themselves closer to homecoming than captivity. Sometimes it was impossible to tell who was going West and who was returning to the East.
The greatest irony of all, of course, was that this was not the original bridge; that had been pulled down, ostensibly because it didn’t meet with EU guidelines, and this new bridge, lovely as a swan, had been built to replace it, at more or less the same time that new borders began to spring up all over Europe.
Finally the policeman at the front of the car slammed the bonnet down, and moments later the one at the back did the same to the lid of the boot.
Rudi and his policeman looked at each other. “Is that it?”
“Yes.” The policeman handed Rudi’s documents back. He walked away, eyes already fixed on his next victim.
Rudi wound the window back up. “The least you could do,” he said quietly, switching on the ignition, “is order me to have a nice day.” He put the car into gear and drove off the bridge and away along Königstrasse, towards Berlin.
IN ALEXANDERPLATZ, HE parked the car in a garage under an office building and walked a block to a public phone. He dialled a number.
“Hello?” asked a woman’s voice.
“Hello,” he said, “is that one seven two seven three?”
The woman sighed, as if this happened to her all the time. “No, you’ve got a wrong number. This is a private flat.”
“Oh,” said Rudi. “I’m sorry.” He hung up and walked another two blocks to another phone. It was ringing as he arrived. He picked up the receiver.
“Jürgen?” asked a man’s voice.
“Aunt Gertrude wasn’t there,” Rudi said. “But she left her knitting behind.”
The voice at the other end of the line sighed. Another lost Package. “You stupid bastard.” Just routine tradecraft, no offence intended. “She really wanted to talk to you.”
“I know. But at least she left her knitting.” Central loved this kind of cloak-and-dagger stuff.
“She did?”
“She did. And it’s very good.” Rudi wondered if the call was being monitored, and if there wasn’t some security policeman somewhere who was having a good laugh right now, without having a clue what he was laughing at.
“Well,” said the voice, “I suppose that’s what she wanted.”
“By the way, I heard that Uncle Otto and Uncle Manfred have set up in business together.” Just to let Central know that the New Potsdam security men and Old Potsdam’s Polizei appeared to be cooperating for the moment. Even after five years as a Coureur, Rudi still felt slightly embarrassed when he used communication strings; it all seemed so innocently transparent to him, he couldn’t understand why the presumed listeners didn’t see right through it.
“Really?” The voice at the other end sounded properly surprised. “It’ll never last.”
“We’ll see.”
“All right. I’ll see you around. Will you be at work tomorrow?”
Rudi frowned. “Yes.”
“Maybe I’ll see you there, then.”
“I expect so.”
They hung up. Rudi stood in the telephone kiosk for longer than was absolutely necessary, looking at the phone.
He sighed, gathered himself, and went back to the underground garage. He drove the car out into the cold again, and down a series of side-streets until he reached a little garage, not much more than a shed with warped wooden doors.
The owner of the garage was waiting for him, alerted by a phone call from a callbox somewhere between Old Potsdam and Berlin. He was a squat, middle-aged man with a squashed boxer’s nose and a network of fractured capillaries in his cheeks. He opened the doors and Rudi drove the car inside.
“You’re late,” the garage-owner said, closing the door.
“Potsdam police,” Rudi said, getting out of the car.
The owner made a rude noise. “You’ve got an hour.”
“Okay,” said Rudi, and watched the older man leave through the judas-door.
It took him forty minutes to get the engine far enough out of the car to be able to reach underneath and wiggle the briefcase out of its hiding place, just as it had taken him about three-quarters of an hour of nitpicking concentration in a Babelsberg garage part-owned by Central to get the bloody thing in there in the first place.
He hadn’t actually been sure it would work, whether the heat of the engine would mask the heat of the briefcase, whether the Polizei would spot it when they searched the car, whether the case would overheat and cause some unspecified but spectacular disaster.
He felt the case again. There were half a dozen things he could have done to check what was inside, but he didn’t doubt the thing was boobytrapped against x-rays and NMR scans and millimetre-wave radar and simple old-fashioned lock-picking. He wondered if there was anyone, anywhere, apart from the Package he’d had to leave behind in New Potsdam, who knew how to open it.
He put the engine back into the car – the garage owner came back about halfway through and helped him finish up – and drove it back to the Hertz office and turned over the keys, then walked to a café not far from the Alexanderplatz S-Bahn station. He bought a coffee, sat at a table near the back, and put the briefcase down on the tiled floor beside his chair.
The café was very busy, bustling with people wrapped up against the cold. It took him five minutes to finish his espresso, and at some point during that time the briefcase vanished.
He never saw it go. One moment there, next moment lost in the crowd, another moment gone altogether. He looked down at where it had been. A scrap of paper lay pasted to the tiles by the melted snow that customers had tracked in on their boots, the writing on it already blurring and dissolving. It lasted long enough to read, then he got up to go and unobtrusively scuffed the paper to bits with his toe.
ALTHOUGH THEIR EXISTENCE was regularly denied by various Government agencies, everybody knew – or thought they knew – all about the Coureurs. There were Coureur films, Coureur novels, Coureur soaps, Coureur comics, all of varying degrees of awfulness.
What none of them mentioned, with their tales of unending derring-do, was the sheer crashing boredom of Coureur life. In the soaps there was a new Situation every week, whereas a Coureur might in fact go for months without a sniff of action. And the action, if it did come, was usually nothing more than Coureur Central’s core business, which was the movement of documents and encoded data across Europe’s continually reconfiguring borders.
In the series, the Coureurs spent an hour rescuing beautiful female scientists from polities populated by characters with sinister Latino or Slavic accents, and usually wound up in bed with the beautiful female scientists, who were properly grateful for their deliverance from actors with dodgy accents.