Peter James - Dead Tomorrow

He passed, on a stand to his right, a crimson Audi TT – a later model than Cleo’s – with big signs around it in German. He could not read them, but assumed the car was being advertised as a prize. He could do with winning a car, he thought, to replace his wrecked Alfa. For sure, the insurance company bastards were going to come up with a derisory offer that might just about enable him to replace it with a second-hand moped.

Next, he passed a bar, followed by a Relay news stand and bookstore, then an empty departure gate. Faces on the opposite side of the walkway glided past, all ages, half of them talking on mobile phones.

He glanced at a beautiful young redhead, in a fur-trimmed leather coat, looking like a million dollars, who was heading towards him. Saw her big, classy handbag and wheeled suitcase, and wondered if she was a model, or a supermodel, or whatever they were called these days. He’d always had a thing for redheads, but had never actually dated one.

Strange, he thought. Before his relationship with Cleo had begun, he would have looked longingly at that girl, but now he didn’t lust after anyone, except for Cleo herself. This redhead was one of the few women he had even glanced at twice in recent months. As the walkway continued moving him forward, he again reflected how lucky he was, just how incredibly lucky, to love this amazing woman.

Four Japanese businessmen, talking intently, swept past in the opposite direction. His nerves were jangling even more. Screaming at him. He could almost feel a crackle of static in the air. Had the flight affected him?

Then two camp men in their twenties, wearing almost matching leather jackets, were heading towards him, holding hands. One had a shaven head, the other, blond spikes. He strode on and they shot past. Then the walkway track ahead of him was blocked by a large gaggle of teenagers, all with rucksacks, who were clearly off on some adventure.

Suddenly, gliding towards him, on the parallel walkway some distance ahead of him, her face blocked by an elderly couple who stood as motionless as statues, he saw a flash of light brown hair that reminded him of Sandy.

It was like a punch in the stomach.

He stood transfixed.

Then his phone pinged with an incoming text. He glanced down at the display for a split second.

Hans-Jürgen’s call disconnected abruptly again, as if he had gone into a tunnel. Why did the stupid guy always pick the places with the worst signal reception to call her from? It drove her nuts at times. Except, of course, she knew how to control her anger, so that nothing ever did truly drive her nuts any more – not like the way stuff used to.

Anger management was all part of the mental rebirth process of the International Association of FreeSpirits. The Scientologists operated the ‘Clear’, under their universal banner, THE BRIDGE TO TOTAL FREEDOM. The organization she had deserted them for offered similar mental regeneration, but through a less aggressive – and expensive – process.

Sandy was still a novice, but she was pleased, this morning, as she stepped off the end of the first stretch of the moving walkway and crossed the short distance to the next, passing a shoe-shine and a small bar, that the initial flare of temper she had felt at Hans-Jürgen’s call had been instantly extinguished, like the flame of a match in the wind.

That was one of the things her new masters were teaching her: to be a FreeSpirit was to be a flame in the wind, but not one that was attached to the wick of a candle or the top of a matchstick. Because if you needed a crutch to survive, when that crutch was gone, so were you. Extinguished.

You needed to learn to burn free. That way you could never be extinguished. Every FreeSpirit sought, one day, to become a free-floating flame in the wind.

She stared at the passing humanity on the opposite walkway. People chained to their BlackBerry emails, their iPhone keypads, their departure times, their financial worries, their guilt. Their stuff. They didn’t realize that none of it mattered. They didn’t realize that she was one of the few people on this planet who knew how to set them free.

She singled out one of the faces. A truly sad-looking man, tall and bendy, with a bad comb-over, wearing Porsche sunglasses and one of those Mandarin-collared leather jackets that were covered in motoring badges, and were designed to give off the impression that you were something important in the world of motorsport.

I could free you , she thought.

Beyond him was a group of teenagers, with backpacks, noisily teasing each other. Then her phone rang again.

Fumbling to answer it with her gloves on, she dropped it on the floor and instantly knelt down to retrieve it.

When Roy Grace looked up again from the display of his phone, the woman had gone.

Did I imagine it? he wondered. An instant ago, he was sure he had seen a woman’s hair, the same distinct, fair colour of Sandy’s hair, behind the grim-faced oldies heading rapidly towards him.

He glanced down at the display again and pressed the key to open the text message:

Yo, old-timer. At sea. Haven’t thrown up yet.

How u doing?

He composed a reply, then sent it:

Me neither.

Out of curiosity, he looked behind him. The woman with the same colour hair as Sandy had reappeared, standing behind the elderly couple, receding into the distance.

Again he felt that punch in his stomach. He turned, squeezed past a tall, irritated-looking man in a trench coat, and half walked, half ran a few steps back against the direction of the walkway. Then he wormed his way through a cabin crew group, all in uniform and towing their luggage.

Then he stopped.

Stupid.

Come on, man! Pull yourself together!

A few months ago, he might have continued to run after her, just in case…

But today he turned round and began, instead, threading a path back through the cabin crew, saying some of the few words of German he knew. ‘ Entschuldigung. T’schuldigung. Danke !’

The four of them had been up all night and were cold, wet through and exhausted. On top of that, Raluca was strung out and getting increasingly agitated. She needed money, now, to go to her dealer, she told Ian Tilling.

None of the three Romanians knew what he meant when, venting his frustration, and ignoring Raluca for a moment, Tilling banged the table-top in the smoke-filled café and shouted out, ‘This is like looking for a fucking needle in a haystack!’

But they got the drift.

They were in a café, inside a corrugated-iron shack, one of a row that included a butcher’s and a mini-mart, adjoining a rubbish-strewn dirt road that was one of the main suburban arteries of Bucharest, running through Sector Four. The snow was doing a good job of tidying the street up by covering the litter.

Tilling munched hungrily on a massive, dry bread roll that had some kind of meat in the centre – he had no idea what it was. It was dead and had the consistency of leather, but it was protein. He was wired from caffeine. Ileana, Andreea and Raluca, all barely awake, were smoking. Their task was almost impossible. In a city of two million people, as many as ten thousand lived outside of society. Thousands, mostly young people, whose common currency was silence and suspicion.

For the past fourteen hours, they had scoured the sector’s shanties along the steam pipe network and they’d crawled down so many holes in the road they had lost count. But so far, nothing. No one knew Simona. Or, if they did, they were not saying.

He yawned, his tiredness bringing back memories. He’d forgotten the sheer exhaustion that came, at times, with the territory of being a police officer. The days – and nights – when you had to keep going, running on adrenalin, fuelled by the scent of progress.