Dead Tomorrow

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.
    Beyondhim 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…
    Buttoday 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 !’

87
    Thefour 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’dcrawled 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