In the real world, Coureurs spent most of their working lives delivering mail, which at its most clandestine meant nothing more than a pickup from Dead Drop A, a short train or car or aircraft journey, a delivery at Dead Drop B, and very little scope for getting laid.
The Coureur fictions annoyed Rudi. The one thing that really annoyed him was that every week these tall, wide, handsome unreal-looking people, who couldn’t submerge themselves in a crowd if their life depended on it, had a new Situation. Every week the word came from Central that someone needed rescuing, some impossible task needed accomplishing. That hardly ever happened. A Coureur would do his job, dust off, and go back to ordinary life for a month or two months or six months, or years even. You never got Situations back-to-back.
THE SLIP OF paper at the café had given the address of a post office in Grunewald, and a name.
“My name’s Reinhard Gunther,” he said at the counter. “There may be some poste restante mail for me.”
The clerk went to check. Rudi idly scoped out the post office. Will you be at work tomorrow was a communication string for a crash Situation, something urgent and immediate. He had never been given it in operational circumstances. It also meant that, whether he liked it or not, he was being assigned a partner.
The clerk came back with an envelope. Rudi showed him the Gunther ID he’d had made up by a cobbler in Pankow. It was a rush job and not very high quality, but it didn’t have to be. The clerk barely looked at it, handed over the envelope, and Rudi walked back out into the cold.
He had rooms in two different pensions, under different names. He took a bus to the nearest, in Charlottenburg, and made sure the door was locked before he sat on the bed and opened the envelope.
Inside was a luggage-locker keycard with a photo of Hansel and Gretel, Berlin Zoo’s Siberian tigers, embossed on the front.
IT WAS SAID that if you were a criminal, a member of some tinpot political party, an agitator for a minority interest group, a drug addict, a property speculator, a forger or bootlegger of any kind, an artist, a fashion designer, a writer, underground film director, musician, or just plain crazy, Berlin was where you would eventually end up. It seemed to be the repository of all Europe’s extremes. Extreme poverty and extreme wealth. Extreme greed and extreme philanthropy. Extreme good taste and extreme bad taste. Everything was here.
It was a long time since Rudi had last visited Berlin, and the place didn’t seem to have improved very much in his absence. The business heart of the city, built after reunification along the no-man’s-land where the Wall had been, towered over the rest of Berlin in a shining clean ribbon of modern office buildings and hotels, but everything else seemed to be falling into decay and disrepair.
The streets around Berlin-Zoo S-Bahn were lined with beggars, wrapped up in layer after layer of rags and blankets and sheets of Berliner Zeitung. Most of them were shivering with the cold. A few had stopped shivering and just sat there, frost on their eyelashes, waiting for the evening police patrols to pick them up and take them to the morgue. They shared the pavements with whores and pushers and pickpockets and muggers and tourists and business people, all shuffling along through the filthy slush.
Inside the station was almost as bad, despite the efforts of a trio of uniformed Polizei to move the various undesirables back out into the cold. Rudi went across the concourse to the left-luggage lockers, found the door that corresponded to the number on the key, swiped the card through the lock, and opened it.
Inside, looking out at him with a surprised expression on its face, was the severed head of a bearded man.
EVERYONE IMAGINED COUREUR Central differently. In some movies it was a clean, efficient but anonymous modern office building in some neutral Western European city. Brussels, perhaps, or London, or Strasbourg. In some novels it was hidden away under a ruined hotel block or tenement in the East, access only granted to those who knew the correct code words. In at least one network series Central was housed in one of those elegant chateaux that line the Loire, and Coureur operational decisions were taken in a tense atmosphere offset by Louis Quinze furniture and ormolu clocks.
The common misconception that everyone suffered was to take the word Central literally. That, and the fact that the organisation chose to call itself Les Coureurs de Bois, led most of the European populace to believe that Central was somewhere in France.
The truth was that Coureur Central no more needed a central headquarters than any other multinational organisation. Modern communications made it possible for a company’s boardroom to be in London, its personnel department in Bonn, its PR office in Prague and its computer centre in St Lucia. In the case of Coureur Central, it was somewhat more spread-out than that.
So when the crash signal came in, it had been automatically switched between four different telephone numbers before being received by a communications centre in Padua, which rerouted it still in its encrypted state to another ground station in Dubrovnik, which bounced it off two Bell-Telecommunications European comsats and through an automated switching system on the roof of the old NatWest Tower in London before reaching an attic room in – as it happened – Paris. All of this took roughly four-fifths of a second.
Madame Lebec, the occupant of the once-elegant house in the Sixteenth Arrondissement, had only heard the discreet chime of the equipment in the attic twice before. Both those times, she did what she did now.
She calmly climbed the stairs to the attic room and locked the door behind her so that the maid, Ysabelle, would not come barging in and break her concentration.
Seating herself at one of the consoles installed around the room, she typed a short string of commands and watched the encrypted message come up on the screen. She typed another string, even shorter, and the message decrypted itself.
If Coureur Central had had a central location and organisation, Madame Lebec would have been a middle-ranking executive whose security rating stopped five or six levels below the top. Central paid her a monthly stipend for the rent of her attic and the very very occasional demand on her time. Madame Lebec thought it all rather an adventure; her great-great grandmother had been with the Resistance during the Second World War, and her diaries spoke of manning a clandestine radio transmitter, with which she sometimes communicated with London.
Madame Lebec’s job wasn’t nearly so hazardous, no matter how much she was inclined to romanticise it. She was breaking no law and threatening no government. All she was required to do was receive messages, decrypt them, and evaluate them.
The other two times, the messages had fallen outside her remit, and she had simply typed a code-string and passed them on to someone else and forgotten all about them. But this time she did not. She sat and calmly read the two lines of text again, identified by a number of codes as being a voice message from a public telephone.
Perhaps her heart beat a little more quickly as her mind went back to the days of the War, her great-great grandmother crouched in an attic somewhere with a pair of headphones pressed to her ears, straining to make out the faint, desperate communication of an agent in trouble somewhere out there in Occupied Europe. She read the message again, trying to decide.
She typed a line of plaintext, pressed the encryption key, and pressed another key to transmit a message that would be heard on the receiver at the other end as a disinterested man’s voice, giving the Coureur a communication string instructing him to be waiting at a certain public phone in twenty minutes. Then she moved to the dedicated console on the other side of the room and made her report to her superiors.