Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(15)
Finally, though, he emerged from one corridor into a vestibule the size of a tennis court. It was open on one side, and when Spencer stepped out and stood at the railing which ran along the edge he found himself looking across a space so huge that its far side was almost lost in a mist of humidity.
Craning his neck, he could barely see the great panes of the dome through the glare of the lights strung from it. They hung over an enormous steep-sided amphitheatre, its sides scored with a spiral of broad terraces paved with broad walkways and festooned with hanging plants. Spencer could see crowds of people and bicycles moving along the terraces. The walls of the amphitheatre were set with tens of thousands of windows. The air was warm and humid and it smelled like a jungle. Far below, cupped in the base of the great bowl, was an elliptical lake with a small island in the middle.
In theory, the Mirny EcoState had been quite a simple proposition. Take a colossal stepped hole in the ground, roof it over with a fullerdome, build apartments and shops and cinemas and theatres into the walls of the hole, landscape the terraces, and install a closed-loop biosphere. Everything is simple, in theory. Before anything could be done, specialised equipment had to be brought in. The single road connecting Mirny with Almazny and Chernyshevsky, the two nearest cities, was useless for the Mirny EcoCompany’s needs, so the airport had to be rebuilt to handle wide-bodied cargo freighters, in temperatures so low that metal tools shattered like glass and the ground had to be thawed with jet engines before any work could be carried out. After that, things only got more difficult.
Spencer leaned on the railing. A delta-winged microlight was whining like a mosquito across the great open space of the arcology a hundred feet or so below him, navigating the slowly roiling air currents in big slow spirals. A dozen or so parakeets flew past the balcony, squawking loudly.
He walked down a set of broad steps leading down to the nearest terrace, and walked unhurriedly, stopping to look in shop windows and examine the menus of cafés and restaurants, until he reached a bank of lifts. He took a lift down to the next terrace, walked some more, took another lift.
The terrace this one opened onto was mostly residential, the walls lined with doors and windowboxes and broad shallow concrete planters full of vegetation. Pausing to make sure he wasn’t being observed, he dumped his overnight bag in one of the planters, hiding it among the foliage. A few metres further on, he stopped at one door, and slipped a mask over the exposed parts of his face. It sealed itself to the material of the isolation suit, trapping skin flakes and all kinds of forensic evidence inside. He waved his phone at the door, and there was a click as it unlocked.
Inside was cooler, a quiet draft of aircon – the EcoState was so efficiently insulated from the permafrost it was excavated from, mainly to stop it melting its way to the centre of the Earth, that without some kind of cooling system the apartments would have eventually become uninhabitable – and smelled of eco-friendly cleaning materials and floor polish.
The front door opened into a small receiving room with cupboards and a rack of coats. This led to a flight of stairs up to a large airy living room, sparsely-furnished. He walked through the apartment carefully, looking for signs that someone had carried out a search. The people who had prepared the apartment had left tells – fine layers of dust, hairs spit-glued across door-jambs; basically stuff from twentieth century espionage novels because frankly no one did this kind of thing any more and nobody would notice them – to mark the passage of the unwary, and he was carrying an itemised list of them in his head without quite realising it. He checked the three bedrooms, kitchen, dining room, utility room, and bathroom, and none of the tells seemed to have been disturbed. Only then did he go back downstairs and take the tools from one of the cupboards in the reception room.
The tools were in two cases, each about large enough to hold a big power drill. He took them upstairs and opened them on the living room coffee table. Inside, nested in foam, were items which at first glance would have seemed more or less incomprehensible to a casual observer.
Spencer went over to the window and looked out. On this floor, he was above head-height of residents passing by on the terrace. He knelt down until his head was more or less level with the top of the coffee table and looked again. The terraces wound around the inside of the old pit in a huge gentle spiral, covered in vegetation. From where he was kneeling, Spencer could see all the way across the great open space to the other side of the spiral, maybe ten or fifteen metres lower than his position. He took a monocular from one of the cases and focused on a certain spot along the opposite terrace, where a number of people seemed to be congregating. He took out his phone and checked the time. He was on schedule, to within a minute or so. A lot of time and effort had been taken to make sure he was here, in this place, at this time, but the things in his head, the things he had been told in London, didn’t allow him to think about that. He wasn’t even aware that he had been told anything. This was this and that was that, and he was doing it because he was doing it.
He went back to the table and started to remove the tools from their cases, laying them out on the coffee table and making sure everything was there because once he had gone on a job and a certain component had been missing and he’d had to pull the entire operation. Not his fault, of course, and he didn’t even think about the consequences for anyone else, because he wasn’t wired for it.
And it wasn’t going to happen this time. Everything was here. He started unhurriedly snapping components together, making sure each piece fitted and functioned before moving on to the next one. As he worked, a rifle took shape on the coffee table.