Europe in Winter (The Fractured Europe Sequence)(4)
“Him? He’s just started school. Strong as a horse.”
Etienne, standing quietly in the corner using his pad to process their documents, glanced up momentarily, but said nothing.
“That’s good,” Amanda said with a smile. “I’m glad.”
Claudine beamed and patted her on the shoulder. “There,” she said. “You’re done.” She looked at Kenneth. “Now you, if you please, sir?”
Kenneth also passed the security scan, as did their luggage, and as Claudine packed up the scanner Etienne took over again, showing the couple out of the room and down another corridor and through another door and suddenly they were on the platform and there it was in front of them, the sleek blue and silver Paris-Novosibirsk Express, all seventy carriages of it, sleeping in the lunchtime sunshine.
“I have taken the liberty,” Etienne announced, beckoning a liveried porter over to help with their luggage, “of upgrading your berth.”
“There was no need to do that,” Kenneth said. “Really.”
Amanda reached up and touched him on the arm. “Darling.” She said to Etienne, “That’s very kind of you, Etienne. I’m sorry that we’ve caused you so much trouble.”
“You have caused us no trouble at all,” Etienne assured them, handing their documents back to Kenneth. “It has been a pleasure to meet you, and I hope you have a safe and comfortable journey.”
He turned and walked back along the platform, no doubt to firefight some other small problem. Kenneth watched him go, knowing that the young man’s life was about to become interesting in ways he could never possibly have imagined. Then he followed Amanda and the porter along the train, where a ramp had been fitted to allow Amanda’s wheelchair to board.
The upgrade Etienne had told them about turned out to be roughly the equivalent of upgrading from a Sopwith Camel to Concorde. They had booked the cheapest sleeper they could afford, a cramped berth with bunks and many space-saving features. The berth they were shown to was more of a stateroom.
“It’s got a bed,” Amanda said with a big smile.
They were obviously in oligarch territory. Kenneth had spotted the mafiye family a little further down the corridor, entering their own stateroom. “And a shower,” he said, peeking in through an open door.
“Oh, thank God,” she said, levering herself out of the wheelchair. “I really need the loo.” She went into the bathroom and closed the door, leaving Kenneth to tip the porter, who collapsed the wheelchair, stowed it in a cupboard, and left.
Kenneth wandered around the stateroom. It seemed unbelievable that they had been upgraded quite so far, and if it was unbelievable it was suspect. He took his phone from his jacket pocket, opened an app that would sweep the room for bugging devices, and left it on the bedside table. There were baskets of fruit, chocolates and complimentary toiletries on the bed, along with a bottle of a nice-looking Cabernet and two shrink-wrapped wineglasses. He picked them up, turned them over, put them back.
The room was in fact four regular-sized berths knocked together. At one end was a little kitchenette-diner area; in the middle was a living area with an entertainment set and a coffee table and a small sofa. He looked in the cupboards in the kitchenette, found basic cooking equipment. One cupboard hid a little fridge with some wrapped cheeses and sliced meats. In one of the drawers he found a corkscrew, and he took it back to the bedroom and opened the bottle of wine, set it on the bedside table to breathe. The phone was still scanning, but it hadn’t found anything yet.
The door of the bathroom opened. Amanda came out, saw him sitting on the bed, and came over and sat beside him. She took his hand and held it against her cheek. Neither of them said a word.
THE LINE HAD been decades in the building. It had originally aspired to being a straight line drawn across Europe and Asia, from the Atlantic coast of Spain to Cape Dezhnev, facing Alaska across the Bering Strait. Geography and simple pragmatism meant that this was never achievable, and the Line crossed the continent in a series of meanders and doglegs. Only one train a year ever made the entire journey – popular with tourists and gap-year students with wealthy parents and train buffs who had spent the previous decade saving for their tickets. The rest of the scheduled services ran on a weekly or monthly basis, vast trains crossing the continent at up to two hundred and fifty kilometres an hour and peeling off down branches from the main Line to reach their destinations.
The Paris-Novosibirsk Express ran twice a month, in each direction. The capital of the Republic of Sibir had reconfigured itself into a financial powerhouse to rival Shanghai, a genuine global player, and according to Kenneth and Amanda’s temporary Line citizenship application they were travelling there to meet with a group of hedge fund managers who had shown some interest in investing in Amanda’s business. Siberian businessmen were big on physical presence; for important meetings they preferred face-to-face, in-the-flesh stuff rather than teleconferencing. It was a nine-hour flight from Paris, which Amanda’s doctor had advised against, and driving was out of the question. Which left either a journey on various national railways made almost impossible by interminable border delays, or a three-day trip on the Line.
The train left Savigny on time on a quiet vibration of motors. It was said, although no one had yet been able to prove it, that Line trains were powered by fusion generators, notwithstanding that fusion power was still in its infancy. The train made its way down the branch line from Savigny at a steady seventy kph, leaned into a long curve as it joined the main West-East Line, and accelerated smoothly up to full speed.