Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(5)
Before they were even out of France Amanda put on her glasses, dialled some numbers on her pad, and settled into a long and apparently very dull conference with Marie-France in Paris, Luhansk’s merchandising manager in London, and at least two members of the band themselves, probably in some Caribbean tax haven. Kenneth could only hear her side of the conversation. Glancing at her pad, on the living room coffee table, he saw a two-dimensional representation of the conference space she and the other participants were using. It was a generic boardroom with the avis of the others gathered at the end of a narrow conference table; the perspective looked odd because Amanda was seeing it in fully-rendered three-d through her glasses.
He left her to it, went over to the window. Not that there was much to see. The twin tracks of the Line ran across Europe between high fences, about a kilometre apart. The space between the fences was a rushing wasteland of gravel broken by the occasional siding and repair depot. Any scenery was a long way away. He went and had a shower.
Amanda was still at it when he came out, sketching notes in a text editor on her pad while she carried on her conversation via the conference space. Kenneth poured himself a glass of wine and stretched out on the bed.
He woke some time later, the empty glass on the table by the bed and Amanda sitting beside him.
“Sorry,” he said, struggling upright against the headboard. “Nodded off.”
“It’s the rhythm of the wheels on the tracks,” she said. She stroked his hair. “It always makes me sleepy.”
“Where are we?”
She looked across the stateroom to the little paperscreen pasted to the far wall beside the kitchenette. It was showing, in a constantly-scrolling series of measurements and languages, their speed and present position.
“Still in Greater Germany, by the look of it,” she said.
He picked up his phone and checked the time. The bug-scanning app had finished its job and found nothing objectionable, but that didn’t rule out all forms of surveillance. “How was the conference?”
She shrugged. “It’s always the same. Last-minute tweaking, last-minute panics. They just need an adult to hold their hand and tell them everything will be fine. You know how it is.”
He sighed. “Do you want to go out for dinner or get room service?” he asked.
“Maybe we can eat out tomorrow,” she said with a smile. “I’m tired.”
“All right,” he said. He got up and went over to the entertainment centre and waved up the onboard menu.
Room service turned out to be excellent.
OLIGARCH STATUS OR not, it was still, after all, a train journey, and the next day dragged as the express crossed Poland, skirted the northern borders of Ukraine, and passed teasingly close to Moscow before angling away eastward. Amanda took care of some more work, Kenneth tried to read a novel. They sat and watched a film, and then spent an hour or so arguing about it.
In the evening, they took the wheelchair out of its cupboard, unfolded it, and headed for the dining car in the next carriage. Few of the passengers had decided to take advantage of the early sitting for dinner, and the car was nearly deserted. Most of the other diners seemed to be travelling alone. Kenneth ordered Kobe beef with dauphinoise potatoes and a green salad. Amanda chose red snapper. They ate in silence, apart from a few comments about how good the food was.
Afterward, they went back to their stateroom and lay on the bed, holding each other, while the paperscreen on the wall ate up the kilometres and the train reached the edge of the European Plain – the edge of Europe itself, as some saw it – and began to negotiate the Ural Mountains.
Just before eleven o’clock in the evening, Kenneth’s phone rang a discreet little chime. He sat up unwillingly and checked the screen on the wall, found that his calculations had only been a few tens of kilometres out, and he leaned over and kissed his wife. There was no need to say anything.
They didn’t bother with the wheelchair. Kenneth began to take it out of its cupboard, but she put her hand on his shoulder and shook her head, and he understood that this was something she wanted to do under her own steam.
As they stepped out into the corridor, Kenneth felt the train slow and lean into a curve in the track; the approach to the Ufa Tunnel, cutting beneath a number of problematical mountains in the Southern Urals which it had been uneconomical or geographically impossible to go around. At twenty-four kilometres, it was the longest of the Line’s many tunnels.
Kenneth and Amanda walked unhurriedly. Few people were about at this time of the night; they saw a couple of white-jacketed stewards carrying trays of late snacks to other sleeper berths, nodded hello as they passed. Just an ordinary couple stretching their legs before retiring for the night.
They walked three carriages towards the front of the train. At the end of the third, they came to a dead end, a blank wall. On the other side of the wall was the carriage containing the train’s power unit, whatever it was. As they reached it, there was a concussion through the train, the shockwave as it entered the tunnel at a little over ninety kilometres an hour. At that speed, they had about eight minutes until it reached the midpoint. Kenneth triggered the stopwatch countdown on his phone and looked into Amanda’s eyes. There was nothing to say, really. She put her arms around him, buried her face in his neck, hugged him tightly.
Everything had, in the end, gone all right. Kenneth thought of William, hopefully by now out of France and on his way home. He thought of Etienne, probably sleeping the sleep of the innocent in a flat somewhere in the Paris suburbs. He had liked Etienne. He thought of the mafiye family, all the other families on the train, all the children. We are not evil people, he thought.