Rudi stood looking at the closed door for a minute or so after Fabio’s departure. He was surprised to discover that, on his first live Situation, he felt like a child brought to his father’s workplace.

These days, things were more complicated. Border disputes often meant that delivering mail from polity A to nation B was impossible. So people contacted Les Coureurs, and the mail got through. Sometimes the mail consisted of people for whom the passage from polity A to nation B might otherwise be impossibly delicate. Sometimes it was items which

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

The big thing in Europe these days was countries, and there were more and more of them every year. The Continent was alive with Romanov heirs and Habsburg heirs and Grimaldi heirs and Saxe-Coburg Gotha heirs and heirs of families nobody had ever heard of who had been dispossessed sometime back in the fifteenth century, all of them seeking to set up

There had been border disputes, frontier actions, Polish war games within yards of Hindenberg’s border fence. Hindenberg unofficially offered its services as a haven for some of Poland’s wealthier and more powerful mafia bosses, and refused to sign an extradition treaty with its Slavic neighbour. The latest tit-for-tat involved Hindenberg’s railway

He had begun to wonder why he was a Coureur. Some do it for the money, some do it because it offers their lives a little harmless adventure. Fabio didn’t know any longer.

“You have time to visit a barber? Alter your appearance somehow. No one ever looks exactly like their passport photograph; it makes immigration officers suspicious if they do.”

On a costings level? We’d have a few tight years in the beginning, then we’d start to show a profit. We’d licence settlers, sell visas. Make the visas really arty so people would regard them as souvenirs. We should have a park mascot. Villem the Bear. Everyone loves bears. Especially if we design him right.”

Rudi thought the popular media had inflated them out of all proportion. They were just couriers, and people had been couriering stuff around Europe since at least the Middle Ages, and smuggling things for considerably longer.