Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(100)
The airliner dipped closer, the sound of its twelve engines drowning out the rising panic of the crowd at the end of the road. It really was colossal; it seemed so utterly unlikely to Rudi that it could stay in the air. He pictured the scene in the London Air Traffic control centre in Hampshire. He imagined there was shouting.
It was only a few hundred metres above the treetops when the note of its engines changed; there was a boom of thrust and for a moment it seemed to hang there, suspended in the air above two superimposed worlds. Then it started to climb again, at first imperceptibly, then more quickly. It passed deafeningly overhead and the crowd, almost as one, ducked. A stink of aviation fuel washed down out of the sky. Everyone turned and watched the immense aircraft rise slowly into the east. A small forest of arms went up as everyone lifted their phones to film it.
“That was pretty neat,” Crispin said. “You think that was autopilot or someone at the controls?”
“I have no idea,” said Rudi, hoping that his heart would one day stop tapdancing in his chest.
“Pretty neat,” Crispin said again. His phone rang; he took it out and held it to his ear. “Yeah? That’s good.” He hung up. “No casualties in the Community, either,” he said.
Rudi thought of the end-to-end takeoffs from Heathrow every day. Crispin’s timing must have been exquisite not to trap at least one jet in the air in the Community. He appreciated that kind of professionalism.
He said, “So, why have I just watched that?”
“You’re running things,” Crispin said.
“I am not running things.”
“You’re running the Coureurs, whether you meant to or not. And that means you’re running a big chunk of the action, one way or another. Of course, a lot of it’s our action, too, so maybe one day one of our representatives can have a quiet discussion with you about matters of jurisdiction.” He shrugged. “Between you and me, you can hand all that stuff over to someone else, or use it to do something useful. Up to you.”
“So...?”
“Someone needs to deliver the message,” Crispin said. “Someone who can talk to people here and in the Community. People who will listen and not be dicks. Play nice, don’t try to find us. Do you think that’s too complicated to understand? It’s all words of one syllable.”
“You’re assuming that anyone will listen to me.”
“They’ll listen. We’ll probably have to do this one more time before they get the point, maybe two. But they’ll listen.”
Now the airliner was gone, some of the braver souls in the crowd had decided to step out into the fields. When they didn’t explode or disappear or fall down writhing in agony, others had followed them. Now maybe a hundred people were standing waist-deep in the wheat, chattering excitedly and filming each other and making phone calls. In the distance, Rudi could see figures with torches walking towards them from a line of trees in the growing dusk.
“And for my next trick,” Crispin said, half to himself, “I’m going to make a railroad disappear.”
From behind them, up the road, Rudi heard approaching sirens. He said, “We’d better make ourselves scarce. We don’t want to be here when the authorities arrive.”
Crispin seemed completely at ease. Having everything go to plan will have that effect on a person. He grinned and shook his head. “Nah,” he said. “Just innocent bystanders, that’s us.”
BY THE TIME they left the site of the event, the crowd was more than a thousand strong, at least a hundred of them baffled Community citizens. There were police vehicles and fire engines and ambulances and helicopters and journalists and cameramen and no one seemed to have the first idea what to do. It took Crispin’s driver almost an hour to back the car down the road to a place where he could turn round. As they drove back towards Central London, a fleet of trucks went by, their loadbeds stacked with fencing.
Crispin chuckled. “Gonna need a lot of that.”
Rudi found it more interesting that the English had managed to find that much fencing and so many trucks and get them loaded in such a short time, but he said nothing.
Instead of driving into town, the car turned off onto a busy road. Rudi saw a sign that said Borough Of Ealing go by, then a big grassy space, then they were dipping down a hill to a frankly insane-looking interchange choked with early-evening traffic.
“Where are we going?” Seth asked.
Crispin didn’t answer. He seemed perfectly happy giving the driver directions, even though the driver appeared to know where he was going.
The car negotiated the interchange, then spent forty minutes or so stop-starting at traffic lights. Rudi saw a sign for Wembley Stadium. A branch of IKEA went by. He thought about what must be happening at the moment in the place where Heathrow had once been; it would be interesting to look at social media right now and be one of the few people in the world – in either world – to know what was going on. That would be a considerable novelty for him.
Eventually, after one particularly bad traffic jam, they turned off the busy road. Shortly after that, they made a right turn beside an Underground station. Bounds Green. Rudi, whose knowledge of the geography of Greater London was sketchy at best, was entirely lost, but that didn’t matter. For a very long time, it seemed to him, he had felt like a fly who had wandered into a grandfather clock and was gazing in awe at all the cogs without the slightest idea what they were for, just a dim insect sense that everything fitted together somehow. Maybe it was time he stopped, because it hadn’t done anyone any good.