by Tim Lees
I watched. Saw nothing.
“Up high,” he said. “It’s quiet just now. Does that, from time to time.” He glanced around. “Tell you, we’re mob-handed today. Not often we get one of these go off near home. Pleasant change, eh? Pleasant change.”
As he spoke, I saw a movement in the roof, high, high above. A single point of light shot from the shadows, moving in a straight line, then spun around and disappeared behind the Sky News video screen.
I looked at Fredericks.
“Keep watching.”
And there they were: one by one, following the same trajectory, a swarm of tiny lights, some larger, some smaller, like stars let loose within the cavern of the station. I watched them as they sailed across the gulf, then plunged after their leader to the rear of the video screen.
Sky News winked out.
I could hear the gasp from people watching: a huge, collective exclamation. It made me realize just how very big the crowd was, and how much it was in the way.
“Interesting,” said Fredericks.
There was a flicker of light on the brickwork, up above the screen, a flash of sparks, and then a sudden blaze of sharp, white light that burst across the concourse, cracking like a thunderbolt. People ducked and screamed, and even Fredericks and I took refuge behind a pillar.
“This is our stuff, isn’t it?” I said. “I mean, it’s not just ball lightning, or something like that?”
“It’s ours, all right. Reading’s good, as well. Who’d have thought, eh? So near home.”
Hard to think the residue of Brief Encounter would be a valid source of energy for coming generations. Harder still to predict it bursting out all on its own to whirl through Paddington Station like a Guy Fawkes special, and call out the entire might of London Field Ops on a Thursday afternoon, ready for rush hour. Except . . . well, there had been rumors. Stories. And now, much more than that.
Color rippled through the upper air, blue-purple shifting into red, an indoor version of the northern lights.
Then nothing once more. The air just seemed to fold down, pulse and swallow it all up. Though I doubted it was over.
Several people who had fallen to the floor began to pick themselves up. The crowd was quiet now. No one was talking. They were waiting for the next part of the show.
Even without them, it was a huge area; we couldn’t have wired it all. With them—well, it was impossible.
The cafés were still selling drinks. The newsagents was open, though half the newspapers were scattered round the concourse. And the bloody Muzak was still playing.
I said, “We’re going to have to move them.”
Fredericks nodded. There were a couple of other ops I knew nearby. I called them over. Then, waving my Registry ID card, and hoping no one looked too closely at it, I moved into the crowd.
“Excuse me sir, I must ask you to clear the area as quickly as you can. Excuse me, madam . . .”
I targeted individuals, in the hope that once a few people began to move, the rest would follow. Fredericks and the others moved in with me. I kept glancing upwards, wondering what would happen next.
“Excuse me sir—”
Any opposition, I ignored. It wasn’t worth the effort. A red-faced man said, “Who you telling?” and a bunch of kids informed me that it was a free country, they could do what they wanted. (They’d learn a lesson there before too long, but I wasn’t one to teach it.) The crowd began to thin. In ones and twos they drifted off. There was a throbbing in the air. No one was talking anymore.
I checked my reader. Something was going on, all right; the energy was spiking, jumping up in ways that seemed completely inconsistent. What was that about? The air began to pulse. People were moving now, and fast. Someone started yelling about terrorist attacks. I had to help an old couple, get them to one side, while the commuters barged past, desperate to save their own skins.
Fredericks stood motionless in all the tumult, head tipped back.
“Listen,” he told me.
I could hear it: a roar, a sound like a tidal wave building up, yet with a pattern to it, too, a sort of rhythmic clattering . . . It scared me. Just the volume of it. It set my heart thumping and made me look up, certain something huge was coming our way. I found myself watching the old Victorian ironwork, high overhead, fearful I was listening to it tear apart, ready to fall.
“Recognize it?” Fredericks yelled into my ear. He was grinning.
I shook my head.
“It’s a steam train. You’re too young to remember. Listen to it. Listen!”
I had felt it coming towards us. Now it seemed to roar by overhead, then circle, and the light shimmered, the massive struts of iron seemed to bend and shake as in a funhouse mirror.
Fredericks stood there, nodding to the rhythm.
“We’ve raised the god of railways, Chris. We’ve raised the god of steam!”
Over by the ticket barriers, a little gang were trying to set a flask up, sending runners out to right and left, trailing cables everywhere.
“It’s all coming alive. You notice that? Everywhere. The whole world—”
Fredericks gripped my arm. He stuck his nose up as if sniffing the air. “The whole world’s going to change—”
And suddenly, it all went silent again. The sound dropped, as if somebody had thrown a blanket over everything. The people with the flask looked up, looked round; they hadn’t even started on their work. In the hush, you grew aware of odd sounds: the faint rush of the wind outside, the white noise of city traffic; somebody coughing, over by the newsstand.
We waited, ready for more. Only it never came.
“One-off phenomenon,” said somebody, and Fredericks grumbled no, no it wasn’t, and started talking about something that he’d seen in India, and then . . .
He turned to me. “I hear you’re leaving us,” he said.
“No.”
“Just what I heard.”
“Secondment, that’s all. I don’t plan to stay.”
“You’re working,” he said, speaking very slowly, “for that Yank. That Shiller. Shyler.”
“Shailer. And I’m not. It’s a secondment, like I said.”
“Well.” He peeled off one black leather glove, massaged his chin. “You’re a big boy now. Don’t need telling when you’re walking into trouble, I suppose.”
He took a few steps, bent to sort out some cables tangled with a luggage cart.
“If you go now,” he said, “you’ll miss all this. Looks like it could be fun.”
“If they let you take it.”
“Oh, they’ll let us, well enough. You saw the fuss? Can’t have that mucking up your daily grind, can you? No, we’ll have Network Rail on the phone—like that, I bet.”
He disengaged the cables, started bundling them up, looping them around his arm from wrist to elbow.
I said, “I need to buy a new suit. Posh suit.”
“My, my. They have got you hooked, then, haven’t they? I’m not the man to talk to about that. Haven’t owned a suit for thirty years, not since I left the army. Proud of it, too. Still . . .” He frowned a moment, took his phone out, keyed my number. “See, I’m sending you my details. E-mail, all that. Just in case. And, well . . . you keep in touch, eh? Let me know how things go on.”
“Right . . . right.” I scuffed my feet against the concrete, back and forth.
“Can’t help with the suit thing, though,” he said again. He chuckled to himself. “Oh, no, no, no . . .”
Chapter 26
Things Change in an Instant
Seddon said to meet him in a pub in Westminster, a downstairs bar just round the corner from the Abbey. There were wooden panels and booths with padded leather seats, and a man at the door who wanted to take my coat and called me “Mr. Copeland” in a way that seemed i
mprobably familiar.
I looked at him. He had a small mouth and a large, bony nose. “Do I know you?”
“Mr. Seddon asked me to look out for you. He gave me a . . . precise description, sir.” The small mouth smiled. “He’s in the booth to the left.”
“I didn’t think I was that remarkable,” I said.
“Everyone’s remarkable, sir. If you look closely.”
Seddon was there, all right. I could see him now, stretching out an arm, giving me a wave. So I went down to join him.
“Chris. You’re looking well.” He signaled for a waiter; I was going to have a pint but he asked for two drambuies, “on the large side.” The waiter swept away his empty glass, which already seemed quite large enough, replaced it with two full ones, larger still.
“This looks serious,” I said.
“Oh no.” His large white eyebrows bounced up innocently. “Rather, I think, a celebration. Your new job.” He raised his glass. “Here’s to it.”
He took a swig. His elbow jutted, arms long and spiderish. He seemed to have been folded into the seat, the furniture here as awkward for him as a badly fitting suit.
“Well, Chris. Well.”
He put his glass down, clasped his hands as if to tidy them away.
“I thought it a good idea to have our little celebration somewhere we can . . . speak frankly with each other. Without being overheard, or having it . . . on record. Yes?”
“Derek.”
“Derek is an invaluable organizer. I’d be lost without him. And, I think sometimes, the more informal venue offers greater opportunities to be . . . forthright with each other. Don’t you?”
He downed his drink, called the waiter for two more. I had never seen him drink like this, and there was something in his manner that seemed more desperate than celebratory. The smile looked like a moment’s lack of concentration would just wipe it from his face.
“It’s a hard matter,” he told me, “being first in things.”
“Suppose. Always been an also-ran, myself. It’s easier.”
“Now, Chris. We both know that’s not true. Besides, I don’t mean coming first. I mean being first—doing something first. It means taking all the risks, having to iron out the bugs.”
“Spotting the bugs that no one else has seen.”
“Precisely. You should know, I received proposals for your placement quite some time ago, as I think I may have hinted to you. Of course, I could have simply turned it down on your behalf, but . . .”
“But you wanted someone there to tell you what was happening.”
He inclined his head, then went on.
“I’ll say this for the Americans. They are an enterprising people. Brave, optimistic . . . I believe the English were like that once. Sadly, no more. We had our turn trying to run the world, Chris. Now it’s theirs. Perhaps they’ll do a better job.”
“I thought the Chinese were on that one.”
“Oh, not yet. Not by a long way. Still - my point is this: where the Americans go now, we will go tomorrow. Politics, technology, economics. It doesn’t matter what. You follow me?”
I nodded. “That makes sense.”
“We take their lead.” He raised his glass, saw that it was nearly empty, and placed it back upon the tabletop. “I’ve just come from a meeting. I’ll confess that there were no surprises. The facility you visited . . . well, the plans have been drawn up, with a set of very interesting projections, too, assuming that they’re accurate. I have to say, I was impressed. Soon these places will be everywhere, all over the country. Common as substations, I daresay.”
He folded his hands again, as if to hold them down.
“Things are changing. Furthermore, the people I have just been with are . . . not unhappy with the change. They think it will make everything a bit more stable, more . . . easily controlled. They see Field Ops as—there was a phrase used. It was, I think, regrettable, but . . . the phrase was ‘bounty hunters.’ I tried to correct the notion, of course, but, well. They’ve never forgiven the miners’ strikes, you know, and half of them weren’t even born when that was going on.” He nodded, he sniffed. “If we’re not careful, Chris, we’ll go the same way.”
His fingers interlaced, twisting round one another.
“It’s a poor state of affairs, I don’t mind saying. We had a system that worked. I know we’d have come to an end of it eventually, but I thought it would be years from now—long after you and I were gone. And now—”
“Progress,” I said.
“Is it? I wonder. I would like to be kept . . . fully abreast of all developments. Not just official reports. You understand? I would like to get a feel of how it’s going there.”
“I can do that. And maybe you can do some things for me as well.”
“Such as?”
“Shailer mentioned an advisor. Got cagey when I asked him who it was.”
“Did he? You should be more persuasive, Chris. Can’t let him stonewall you like that.”
“Last time I tried being persuasive,” I said, “I smashed up his apartment, and you had to put in a word with the New York cops, as I recall.”
“I don’t suggest being that persuasive. But—eyes and ears open, eh? Knowledge is power, after all.”
“You’re worried.”
I had never spoken to him this way before; things between us had never been personal. His manner didn’t usually invite it. He sipped his drink, then frowned, set it down.
“I’m not young, Chris. We imagine, as we get older, life will grow more settled. We will have found our place in the great scheme of things. Yet instead, what happens is, that life moves faster. Situations change—oh, overnight. Everything one once had trusted and depended on is swept away and—oh, I’m being maudlin. Won’t do, eh? Let’s have another drink. Though I will tell you this, Chris. GH9,” he said, referring to the Indiana site which had so violently concluded, almost taking Shailer and myself along with it, “it could so easily have been built—well, not here, obviously. But there were sites marked out. In Inverness, Sutherland, Caernarvonshire . . . even Cornwall. I’m sure you can imagine . . .”
“They’ll be like McDonald’s,” I said. “One on every High Street.”
“And that may well be a great boon,” he feigned an optimistic look, “which I will not stand in the way of. On the other hand . . .”
“And Dayling?” I said. “What’s he got out of this?”
Seddon saw the link immediately but didn’t mention it.
“He’s well cared for. We get regular reports from the nursing staff there. I believe he’s calmer now. Considerable improvement, so they say.”
“They’ve given him his phone back.”
“Really? How do you know?”
“He’s been texting me. He wanted me to go and see him. I never got around to it. I feel a bit bad about that, now.”
“I suspect that it was for the best, Chris. If he’s so fixated on you.”
“I’ve got a few more days here. I was thinking—”
“I’ll send someone to see him. Familiar face, eh? Cheer him up a bit. Now. Let’s have another drink, shall we? And try to lighten up a bit.”
I stepped out into the London air. Wet gray twilight had fallen to a soggy dark, every streetlamp with its own halo of rain. I would be gone for how long? Four, five months?
I spoke awhile with my ex-wife.
“You talk as if you’re going off for years,” she said.
“No. A few weeks. Months maybe . . .”
But like Seddon said: things change in just an instant.
My flight was booked. My papers were in order. No one came to see me off. I wanted it that way.
I slept an hour on the plane and woke up somewhere over Canada, the ground below just miles and miles of pure white snow
—the whiteness of a new world, the blank white paper of a new life—
And Shailer waiting at the end of it.
Chapter 27
Big Time
“A city this size will have fifty, perhaps a hundred sites already in existence. Some of them will have a reputation. Most won’t. They will be places of worship—churches, mosques, synagogues. But there will be others, too. Imagine harnessing the energy from, say . . .” Shailer looked about, as if he’d wandered from the script. Then a grin burst on his face. “A Cubs game? If we could tap into that?”
A faint rustle of laughter ran around the room. There was even a flutter of applause. This was Shailer’s pitch meeting, and before him he had twenty of Chicago’s main movers and shakers, each replete with drinks, finger food, and several billion dollars in the bank. Any bright entrepreneur would probably have killed for such an audience.
Shailer, mock-modestly, lifted his hands for quiet.
“I know, I know. They’d have to win first.
“What we can say is this. If we continue to rely on fossil fuels and on nuclear power, within a very few years, the world we know will have ceased to be. There will be no more Cubs games. There will be,” and his voice dropped suddenly, “no electricity.” He eyed the ConEd delegate, sitting uncomfortably with his legs crossed, two rows from the front. “No light, no heat. No power. No gas. No cars, no ‘L’, no Metra. No airport and no airplanes. In short, my friends—there will be no Chicago. Let me repeat that. It’s a hard concept to grasp, but I want us all to be completely clear on it.
“There. Will. Be. No Chicago.”
He let this one hang in the air. Then, half turning from the audience, he strolled over to the podium and made a show of straightening his papers, as if he’d finished for the day. As if the whole show had come to an end.
I’d seen him speak before, in Hungary, years earlier. He hadn’t lost his touch. He was as good with people en masse as he was crude and sneaky and inept with them as individuals. He made you want to nod when he did, smile when he smiled, frown when he frowned. His manner was fast-paced, lively, kinetic, and it hit the highs and lows just when it needed to.
