Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(13)
There was a silence. Bethan sat looking at him, while he sat watching the traffic go by outside, remembering other times like this.
Finally, she said, “I know someone who’s got a job going.”
BETHAN LIVED IN one of the streets off Bellenden Road, a name which always made Spencer snigger. The house seemed perpetually full of furniture from other homes. Passing through the living room, he noticed stuff that seemed to have washed up here since his last visit – most notably a large elephant’s foot umbrella stand, several intact turtle shells that were probably two hundred years old, and a glass-fronted case containing what appeared to be a meerkat stuffed by a taxidermist in the throes of a powerful breakdown. Any of these could have got her arrested for possession of the products of endangered species, but Bethan didn’t care. It was just Stuff. She picked it up here and there, sold some of it, kept some of it, periodically threw the rest away.
A previous owner of the house had built a small extension on the back, probably in defiance of planning regulations. It wasn’t much more than a spare room, into which Bethan had installed the servers and monitors and other assorted hardware of her job. The walls were white and the lights were bright and it was always too warm for Spencer’s tastes in there. It was also fantastically well soundproofed. When the four-inch-thick door was closed there was a sense of dead air, a sense of being sealed off from the rest of the world
Bethan sat him down in front of one of the monitors and waved up an interface. She stood behind him, air-typing through menus and submenus and diallers and anonymisers and it all got a bit confusing for Spencer so he asked for another of her tablets and washed it down with a bottle of water while she talked and talked and talked calmly and quietly and then there was an image on the monitor and another voice was talking, slowly and soothingly, and Spencer felt his eyelids grow heavy and his head loll forward and it seemed such a very, very long time since he had slept properly.
2.
AIR TRAVEL IN Western and Central Europe could be tricky these days. If there was an appreciable lag between booking your ticket and actually taking your flight, there was an outside chance you’d discover that your destination airport was no longer actually in the country you wanted to go to. Most polities which sprang into being with a national or – the great prize – international airport were smart enough to realise that a large machine for making revenue had fallen into their laps, and swiftly renegotiated fees and timetables with the major carriers. Some, though, were bloody-minded, and Europe was dotted, here and there, with ultramodern airport architecture falling slowly into disuse and disrepair because the airlines had grown tired of various micronations’ demands and simply told them to f*ck off and gone to land elsewhere.
The situation was, if anything, even worse the further East you went. Beyond Rus – European Russia – and Sibir was a patchwork of republics and statelets and nations and kingdoms and khanates and ’stans which had been crushed out of existence by History, reconstituted, fragmented, reinvented, fragmented again, absorbed, reabsorbed and recreated. The situation was not helped by a tradition of short-lived and frankly catastrophic regional airlines, some of them flying aircraft more than a century old, many of them with a cheerfully cavalier attitude to irksome expenses like basic maintenance. Air travel east of Nizhny Novgorod, say, had always been a bit of an adventure – there had been times when getting on a flight travelling east of Moscow had been an act of considerable bravery – but airspace beyond the Urals had turned into an enterprise on a par with the early days of the Oregon Trail.
Spencer flew from Heathrow to Moscow, where he had five hours to wait for a connecting flight. He took a cab into the city and spent the time shopping for cold-weather clothing, was back at Domodedovo in time to board the UralAir flight to Yekaterinburg.
At Yekaterinburg, Koltsovo Airport was still over-run with old 787 cargo conversions belonging to international aid charities working on the relief effort two hundred kilometres or so to the south. Looking out of the window as his flight taxied to the terminal, he could see ranks of heavy-lift airships tethered to the tarmac. The humanitarian catastrophe following the Ufa explosion still hadn’t eased noticeably. Tens of thousands of refugees from the surrounding countryside had upped sticks and marched on Chelyabinsk, where they had set up camp at the city’s airport. They called it ‘Putingrad’ and started to farm between the runways. Nobody could move them, not even the army. Even if they left tomorrow, the airport would be next to useless for years.
The next two legs of the journey took him to Novosibirsk and then on to Krasnoyarsk, at the eastern edge of Sibir. Looking from the window as the rackety old turboprop made its descent, he saw a snowbound city nestling beside a river surrounded by deep forests. He saw, in the final light of the sunset, tall industrial chimneys expelling solid plumes of vapour or smoke. The plane made a steep turn to line itself up with the runway at Yemelyanovo airport, and he found himself looking almost straight down into the amphitheatre of a football stadium, all lit up and full of people.
That was, it turned out, all he saw of the old Russian border city. Yemelyanovo was some distance outside town, and he was booked into one of a complex of grim-looking budget hotels beside the airport. He stomped into the foyer in thermal boots, quilted coldsuit and fur-lined parka, to find that the temperature in the hotel had been cranked up to tropical levels.