Europe at Dawn Read online

  Praise for the Fractured Europe Sequence

  “The Europe sequence is some of my favourite fiction this century, and Europe in Winter is no exception. Mind-bending, smart, human, with espionage thrills wrapped up in a reality-altering Europe, all told with sparkling prose and wit that should, if there was literary justice, catch the attention of prize after prize. I love these books. I want more. Now.”

  Patrick Nesson Europe in Winter

  “As rich and as relevant as its predecessor. It’s funny, fantastical, readable and remarkable regardless of your prior experience of the series. Which just goes to show that, no matter how well you think you know something – or someone, or somewhere, or somewhen – there’s almost always more to the story.”

  Tor.comon Europe at Midnight

  “Europe in Autumn is one of the most sophisticated science fiction novels of the decade: a tour-de-force debut, pacey, startlingly prescient, and possessed of a lively wit. When approaching its follow-up, I felt both nervous and excited. Would Hutchinson be able to pull off the same magic a second time? The answer is undoubtedly yes. Europe at Midnight is pitch-perfect, bursting with the same charisma and intricate world-building as its predecessor.”

  LA Review of Bookson Europe at Midnight

  “In a way, what is most striking about Europe at Midnight is not the hard edge of its politics, or even the casual brilliance of its science fictional reworking of the political thriller, but Hutchinson’s thrillingly assured control of his material. He writes wonderfully, his prose animated not just by a keen eye for character, but by a blackly witty sense of humor.”

  Locus Magazineon Europe at Midnight

  “The author’s authoritative prose, intimate knowledge of eastern Europe, and his fusion of Kafka with Len Deighton, combine to create a spellbinding novel of intrigue and paranoia.”

  The Guardian on Europe in Autumn

  First published 2018 by Solaris

  an imprint of Rebellion Publishing Ltd,

  Riverside House, Osney Mead,

  Oxford, OX2 0ES, UK

  www.solarisbooks.com

  ISBN: 978-1-78618-115-2

  Copyright © 2018 Dave Hutchinson

  The right of the author to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any Form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the copyright owners.

  EVERY COUPLE OF years, Pete and Angie did the whole of the Staffordshire and Worcestershire, from the Great Haywood junction with the Trent and Mersey to the staircase and lock that opened into the Severn. They’d been doing it ever since they bought Grace Mercy, almost thirty years ago now. Usually, they left it as late in the Summer as possible, after all the tourists had gone. Sometimes they did the trip with the kids, and latterly grandkids, but these days they mostly did it alone. It made a nice end to the season.

  Grace Mercy was a fifty-footer, an old hauler Pete had first seen, derelict and rotting, tucked away in a corner of a basin in Bristol. He and Angie had only been married for a couple of years – he was working for a local engineering company and she was a nurse at the Frenchay Hospital – and they were struggling with the mortgage and the bills. He saw the old boat every day as he walked to and from work, and sometimes he just stood and looked at her for a few minutes, a half-formed idea somersaulting lazily through his head.

  He was not an impulsive man, even when he was in his twenties. It had taken him almost five years to get up the momentum to ask Angie to marry him, and by then her parents had been warning her that there was something ‘slow’ about him. The looks on their faces at the wedding ceremony suggested that they hadn’t changed their minds very much.

  It took him a little over eighteen months to broach the subject of Grace Mercy with Angie. They were having dinner one evening at their flat in Bedminster and he looked at her and said, “Ange, how about we buy a boat?”

  “A what?” she said.

  “A boat,” he said. “A narrow boat. We could do it up, take tourists for cruises.”

  “Are you crazy?” she said. “We can barely afford this place, let alone a boat.”

  “No,” he said. “I mean sell the flat, live on the boat.”

  “You must think I’m as daft as you are,” she said. “I’m not living on no boat.”

  And there the conversation lulled. But if Pete was not an impulsive man, he was also not a man to just drop an idea once it lodged in his mind. At lunchtimes, and late at night, he sat with a little paper notepad and a pencil and he worked out the figures. After work, he hung around the basin for a couple of hours, chatting to some of the old geezers who lived on the boats moored there. One of them, a little leathery chap named Arthur who claimed to have been born on the Kennet and Avon, gave him a tour of his boat. “And that there is the counter, and that over there is the cratch cover.”

  Arthur himself was dismissive of Pete’s plan. “Don’t know why anyone would want to take themselves off travelling,” he said. “It’s a fucking horrible life; I had a bellyfull of it.” But he carried on his patient little tutorials, and Pete started to get an idea of what he would need and what he could get away with, and eventually the figures started to agree with each other.

  Finally, he tracked down Grace Mercy’s owner, a solicitor who lived over in Redland, and asked to have a look at the old boat. The solicitor had inherited it from a cousin and she had no idea what to do with it, and no time even if she had. She was basically paying the mooring fees and half hoping the boat would either sink or be stolen; at least then she could claim on the insurance and be rid of it. The idea of anyone actually wanting to buy the old wreck had never occurred to her, and she was more than happy to let Pete have the keys for a couple of hours during his lunch break.

  Some work had already been done to convert Grace Mercy for cruising, but it looked as if the solicitor’s cousin had either run out of money or died before they could complete the job. The hull appeared sound. Inside, she was just dirty and a bit mouldy, lacking all but the most basic fixtures and fittings. Nothing a bit of elbow grease and a lick of paint wouldn’t sort out. The engine was a monster, a Beta Greenline diesel rated for fifty brake horsepower, an engine for a much heavier boat. It was a ruin, but Pete knew engines and he knew he could fix it. He took the keys back to the solicitor at her office in the city centre and told her he was interested. He just had to have a chat to his wife.

  This, of course, was the insurmountable barrier, the immoveable object. The figures worked out, just. They had some savings – a wedding present from his parents, only to be touched in the direst of emergencies but already being chipped away – and a bit of equity in the flat, but in order to buy Grace Mercy they would have to sell the flat first, then live onboard while they renovated the boat, and there was no way Angie would agree to that.

  And then, one day, something so absurd happened that Pete could only liken it to winning the Lottery. He was poking disconsolately about below decks one lunchtime, the memory of yet another evening’s argument still painfully sharp, when he heard someone calling from the quayside, and when he went up to look there was a plump, round man in an expensive suit standing there holding a briefcase.

  “Are you the owner?” asked the plump man.

  Pete shook his head regretfully, realising as he did so that he was finally letting his dream bob away. “I wish,” he said.

&nbs
p; “Do you know who the owner is?”

  “Yeah. I was going to buy it off her, but there’s no way I could afford it.” Then he found himself qualifying it to this complete stranger with, “Well, I could, like. Just. But it’s the wife.”

  The plump man gave him a long, level look that Pete found quite unsettling, even though there seemed no malice behind it. “Is it just the money?”

  “Well, yeah. And the living on a boat, like.”

  The plump man seemed to come to a decision. “May I come aboard?” he asked, looking dubiously down at Grace Mercy.

  “Knock yourself out. There’s a ladder just along there.”

  With some difficulty, the plump man managed to negotiate the ladder without dropping his briefcase into the water. He was breathing heavily when he finally made it down to the cockpit, but he immediately put out a hand and said, “I’m Alan Strang. Would it be any help to you if you had a sponsor?”

  “A what?” Angie asked that evening, when Pete told her of this turn of affairs.

  “He won’t say who it is. Just someone with a lot of money who wants to help out local folk. Like that charity that makes kiddies’ dreams come true.”

  “Kiddies is right,” she snorted.

  “They’ll give us the money to buy the boat and do her up,” he said. “All they want in return is a trip on her every now and again, just to see how we’re doing.”

  Angie looked unconvinced. “All sounds a bit rum to me,” she said.

  “It’s just someone local who had a bit of luck and wants to spread it around,” Pete said, almost literally beaming good thoughts at his wife. “Come on, Ange. We don’t have to sell the flat. We can do the boat up at weekends and in spare minutes, and we can take her out on our holidays.”

  Angie shook her head. “You’re the one with all the spare minutes, sunshine, not me.” But he could see her starting to waver, and over the next couple of weeks she wavered more and more, and finally they were sitting in a rented office with Alan Strang, signing some papers. And a month or so later Grace Mercy was theirs.

  It took him almost three years to renovate the boat, at weekends and after work, spare stolen moments tinkering with the diesel and replacing bits and pieces and painting and sanding and painting again. Arthur and some of the old geezers wandered over from time to time, to point out what he was doing wrong and generally make nuisances of themselves. Eventually, Angie started coming down to the basin when her shifts allowed – she’d taken one look at Grace Mercy the morning after he’d told her about Alan Strang’s offer, and said, “Well, it’s only someone else’s money and your own time you’re wasting” – and pottering about with the painting. Before long she was standing watching disapprovingly as he disassembled the diesel, which he had dubbed Behemoth, and not long after that she was helping out. After a few days she knew the abused old Greenline better than he did.

  Together, they managed to get Behemoth working well enough to putter over to the basin’s dry dock so Pete could inspect the hull properly and give it some coats of bitumen paint. One of the sacrificial anodes that helped protect the hull from corrosion was missing, probably the result of a collision with something, and Pete welded on a new one, but remarkably, apart from a few dents and scrapes, almost everything below the waterline was in good order.

  They converted the fore cargo space into family accommodation, keeping the original after cabin for themselves. The fore cabin would be a bit cramped for more than three people, but that, reasoned Pete, was part of the experience. Tourism was belatedly starting to pick up again after the Xian Flu; people who had stayed at home were beginning to venture out, and if they were still not confident enough to travel to the Continent, or couldn’t be bothered to negotiate the dizzying array of visa requirements that had sprung up as the European Union splintered, then they were happy enough to take a break at home.

  And Grace Mercy was good to Pete and Angie, down the years. Families did book the boat, for weekend breaks or longer cruises. Eventually, the business was doing so well that they gave up their respective jobs, and they moved onto the water more or less full time, although they never did quite sell the flat. The kids were born and brought up on the boat.

  They never saw Alan Strang again, although they exchanged cards at Christmas and a stipend from their sponsor continued to be paid into their account every month for the upkeep of the boat and a little extra left over. The sponsor themselves never showed up, as far as they knew, although Pete always suspected that they’d come on board incognito, as a paying guest, just to check things out.

  A few times, he got emails from Alan Strang asking that he take the boat to this or that set of GPS coordinates and transport whoever was waiting there to another set of coordinates. Angie was suspicious of these jobs, but their passengers seemed, on the whole, perfectly blameless and innocent, and Pete considered them a harmless part of the deal they had struck in order to buy Grace Mercy in the first place.

  Once, on the Kennet and Avon, he’d been asked to go to a certain place, and following the GPS he’d found the boat chugging along a stretch of canal he’d never seen before, opening out onto a big wide powerful river. He checked the coordinates and found the satnav had gone down, but there on the bank stood a woman, waving her arms above her head, so he brought the boat alongside and she hopped on board.

  “Hi,” she said, “I’m Hannelore.” She looked as if she’d spent the night in a hedge, but she appeared cheerful and relaxed, even though there was what seemed to be gunfire in the distance.

  “What’s that?” asked Angie.

  Hannelore looked towards the sound. “LARPers,” she said.

  “Whaters?” said Angie.

  “Live Action Roleplayers,” Hannelore said. “Corporate team-building weekend. Men playing Cowboys and Indians.” She gave Angie a long-suffering look that Angie understood very well. “Muppets.” She beamed at them. “Still, exciting though, eh? A bit like Dunkirk.”

  Pete looked around him at the river, the wooded banks. He realised he didn’t know this stretch of water at all. “Well, not really,” he said.

  Hannelore shook her head. “No, not really. We’d best be on our way, Captain,” she told Pete. “If they find us here they’ll just be tiresome for a while and I’ve had about enough of men being tiresome.”

  This was not a problem; Behemoth could shift the boat at a surprising speed, if need be, but Pete found himself momentarily at a loss. “GPS has gone down,” he said.

  Hannelore just grinned and shook her head. “Nah, it’s okay, Captain,” she said. “I know the way. I’ll show you.”

  And so she did, and Pete soon found himself back on familiar waters, and shortly after that they dropped Hannelore off at Swineford Lock and watched her walk off down the towpath as if she didn’t have a care in the world, although Pete thought he detected a certain determination in her body language.

  Angie gave him a hard look, and he winced.

  “Suppose she’s on the run from the police or something?” she said.

  “She’d have to be bloody desperate to make a getaway on a narrow boat, love,” he said.

  That, at any rate, seemed to be the last of what Angie called ‘the bloody weird jobs’ for quite a long while. Years passed and the only people to set foot on Grace Mercy were tourists. Sometimes things went wrong, but more often they went right, and Pete thought that wasn’t such a bad way for everything to work out.

  1.

  THE BIG FILM that year was, improbably, a Polish-Estonian coproduction, a blockbuster featuring much gunfire and many explosions and a body-count roughly equal to that of the Thirty Years’ War. Rob opined that it had the stupidest title he had ever seen, and refused to watch it.

  Much of the film had been shot in Tallinn, with some location work out in Lahemaa. It had had its world premiere at Kino Sõprus, the oldest cinema in the country, and because the director was from Prestwick it had fallen to Alice to liaise with the film company and the cinema organisers, an
d to arrange a reception at the Ambassador’s residence afterward. And that, Rob had been interested in, sticking to her like a limpet, demanding to know who was who, wanting to be introduced to people who caught his eye, crashing conversations she tried to have, and sucking up to Nicky, the Ambassador, who couldn’t have cared less because she genuinely despised the English in general and Rob in particular. At one point, orbiting genially back through the party after a visit to the loo, Alice had seen him across the room, pressing a printed copy of his latest self-published collection into the hands of one of the producers.

  The thing with Nicky and Rob had actually become a Thing, had threatened Alice’s posting here for a while until Rob had announced he was going to report Nicky for racial discrimination. Alice, terminally embarrassed by the whole shouting match, had attempted to keep her head down while Rob and HR exchanged angry emails and angrier phone calls. Rob had accused her of not giving him sufficient emotional support, which was something he did a lot.

  Eventually, the whole thing blew over. Alice never really heard the full story, but she got the impression that word had been sent from Holyrood that the business was starting to attract media attention and that everyone involved should have a quiet word with themselves and shut the fuck up.

  “Big Mo threatened to come over and shake some people by the ears,” Selina confided over lunch one day. Big Mo was Scotland’s First Minister, and the mere prospect of a visit from her was enough to put the fear of god into the entire Embassy.

  Alice didn’t really want to talk about it – would rather it all went away or a hole appeared in which she could bury herself, or something – but curiosity got the better of her and she said, “What happened?”

  Selina shrugged. “Politics.” And she held her hand up beside her ear and wiggled her fingers – her shorthand for the kind of bollocks which no rational person would take seriously, but which ruled the lives of the Embassy staff.