“Unless you’re Dear Old Leo,” said Rudi. All the bonhomie went out of Bradley’s body language for a moment; it was astonishing to watch. For a fraction of a second, he looked about ten years older. “Could I have a drink?”
Bradley reached for the decanter and held it out. Rudi got up and poured himself a brandy. He took his glass over to the window and looked through the net curtains into the street.
“Central’s an apolitical organisation,” Bradley said. “That’s the only way it can exist. No sides, no favourites. If it threatens governments or security, it threatens them all equally. That’s the whole point. Nothing we do is against the law, strictly speaking.”
“Ah,” Rudi said to the street. “The law. Now that’s a very grey area, Bradley, from place to place.”
Bradley sat down in the chair Rudi had just vacated. He looked into the fire, thinking. He said, “What happened to Leo, that’s not what Central is about. We call ourselves Coureurs because that’s all we are, really. Just glorified postmen. Sometimes we facilitate the departure of someone from one place or another. What happened to Leo was a clumsy warning.”
“Clumsy but extremely effective,” Rudi said. “Particularly for Leo.”
Bradley heaved a huge, worldbreaking sigh, refusing this time to rise to the bait.
“What was the Situation Leo and I were supposed to be taking care of?” Rudi asked.
Bradley shook his head. “Not live any longer, old lad.”
“So there’s no reason why you shouldn’t tell me.”
The Englishman appeared to be thinking about it. He took another drink of his brandy. He shook his head again. “Sorry.”
“Was there a jump? Everything according to plan? Textbook dustoff?” He drained his glass in one gulp. “Fuck you, Bradley, tell me what Leo had his head cut off for!”
Bradley remained sitting, completely calm and even-humoured. “Please stop shouting, there’s a good lad. You’ll disturb Madame.”
Rudi snorted and turned to look out of the window again.
“What happened to Leo had nothing to do with the Situation you were supposed to be handling,” Bradley said. He was silent for a long time, thinking. “There was an incident in Hamburg back in October. Central and German counterintelligence tried to occupy the same space at the same time.” He sipped his drink. “A number of their officers were killed.”
Rudi turned and looked at him. “I beg your pardon?”
Bradley looked thoughtful. “It wasn’t a Situation. Just a stringer going about her business maintaining a legend. I don’t know what went wrong.” He shook his head. “A bad business. Very unprofessional.”
“Unprofessional,” Rudi repeated dully, his imagination refusing to construct a scenario where the routine maintenance of a false identity could result in multiple deaths. “Jesus Christ, Bradley.”
Bradley shrugged. “German counterintelligence take this kind of thing personally, of course. They’ve never been comfortable about us operating on their territory. It seems that Leo was a message.”
“They could have emailed us.”
Bradley chuckled sadly. “Well, I presume they decided an email wouldn’t have quite enough emotional weight.”
Rudi came back from the window, topped up his drink, and sat in the other armchair. “Is Central going to do anything about it?”
Bradley thought about it. “It’s possible that negotiations will be attempted. I can’t really say. It may be possible to come to some kind of accommodation.”
“Did you just say negotiations?”
“What you must understand is that Central won’t fight these people,” Bradley said. “It’s not what we’re about. Wiser heads than ours have decided to open a line of dialogue with them.”
Rudi closed his eyes.
“The alternative is that we kill one of their officers in retaliation for Leo. And they kill another Coureur. And so on and so on.”
“Good lord,” Rudi muttered.
“Take a holiday,” Bradley went on. “You’ve more than earned some time off; the jump you did in Potsdam was an absolute classic and you’ll be more than handsomely rewarded for it.”
“I had two Situations go bad on me in the space of two days, Bradley,” Rudi reminded him.
Bradley shook his head. “There was nothing you could have done in Potsdam. Your Package wanted to make their own way over the Wire; short of invading New Potsdam you couldn’t have helped.”
Rudi rubbed his eyes.
“You did the important thing,” Bradley said. “If you weren’t as good as you are, the briefcase would be in the hands of New Potsdam’s security forces or Old Potsdam’s City Council right now, instead of at its destination. You were absolutely professional in Potsdam and I, for one, am proud of you.”
Fuck you, Rudi thought.
“And the Situation in Berlin was just taken entirely out of your hands by events.”
Rudi shook his head.
“Go away for a while,” Bradley told him. “Relax.”
“Just leave some contact numbers, right?”
Bradley positively beamed. “Absolutely.”
“Is this a roundabout way of saying that the Germans are looking for me as well?”
Bradley performed a very Gallic shrug. “Better safe than sorry, old son.”
“And Leo?”
The smile dimmed until it was hardly perceptible. He sighed. “That was entirely out of your control. Not your fault. Don’t think about Leo. Leo, to my eternal shame, is on my conscience.”
GOOD WITH
LANGUAGES
1.
ONCE UPON A time, the one thing he had wanted most in all the world was to be a chef.
He could even remember the day this obsession took root. It was the day of his eighth birthday, the day his father finally relented and installed a satellite dish. Which would make it two years to the day since his mother left them, appalled by his father’s decision to uproot the family yet again by taking a job as a ranger in the Lahemaa rahvuspark.
Rudi’s father had trained as an architect, but as far as Rudi knew he had never worked as an architect. Instead, he had embarked on a series of jobs for which he was both temperamentally and educationally unsuited. He worked on the docks in Tallinn. He worked as a guard on the railways. He retrained to be an air traffic controller. He lived in squats and anarchist colonies. He was even, family tradition had it, a politician for a short while; it would have been simple enough for Rudi to check this, but he had never bothered. True or not, what difference did it make?
In the family chronology, it was while he worked as a bus driver in Tallinn that Rudi’s father had met Rudi’s mother. Sometimes, when he was drunk, the old man would tell his two sons about the beautiful young woman he saw waiting every morning at the Pronski stop on Narvu maantee, just going home after her shift at the Hotell Viru, how she would fall asleep in her seat, threadbare coat covering her maid’s uniform. When he was very drunk, which was increasingly often when Rudi and his brother were growing up, he would wax lyrical about her hair, which was long and fine and the colour of polished mahogany, about her skin, which was the colour of milk and without any blemish, about her eyes, which had just the merest tilt at the edges to betray the Lapp heritage which lay far far back in her genes. Neither Rudi nor his brother could remember this extraordinary beauty, although they had once discovered in the back of their father’s wardrobe a series of photographs of a short, dark-haired, irritated-looking young woman in old-fashioned clothes. Surely, they reasoned, this must be some old girlfriend of their father’s.