The Adjacent Read Online Free PDF

take a look at her. She had a strong face, with good features: a firm jaw, wideforehead, dark eyes. He did not like her frown, the humourless sense of authority over him. He thought perhaps she was in the police, but the law required all officers to identify themselves to members of the public. If she was a cop, did his presence in a government Mebsher place him temporarily outside the category of member of the public? Then again, she might not be a cop.
    He kept the lightweight camera in his hand, cupping it lightly. The slow journey continued. After a few minutes one of the drivers fed the BBC news bulletin into the passenger compartment, but the storm and its after-damage were hardly mentioned. Most of the bulletin was about an Emirate meeting of heads of state, due to take place in Toronto. Tarent lost interest and continued to peer at what he could see through the small window. After the politics, the news turned at last to the storm.
    It sounded bad. Several of the southern English counties had been affected by damage and floods from the storm surge, but most of the water had already soaked away, especially from the towns and along the Channel coast. Essex was worst affected. Inland rivers had swollen and broken through their banks and levees, cutting off towns and villages, bringing down power lines and swamping electricity relay stations. Many wind turbines had been damaged or put out of use. The tidal generators in the Essex archipelago were no longer functioning, or were producing reduced power. Tarent, remembering the country he had just left, one almost without any fresh water at all, imagined the streets of IRGB cities transformed into canals, the quietude that always attended a flood, the slow sound of the water draining away, the stench of mud, sewage, rottenness spread about.
    Above everything now, a cleaned and cloudless sky, brilliant blue. The last spiral outriders of the storm system had rolled away eastwards over the North Sea and the hurricane, spawned in the warm Atlantic waters of the Azores, was gone. Officially, IRGB was never at risk from hurricanes, too far to the north, too far east, so they were called Temperate Storms. The news said that Edward Elgar had been less intense than was feared at first, but nevertheless it had caused extensive damage.
    Another storm, TS Federico Fellini, was already crossing the Bay of Biscay, gathering intensity, but its likely strength by the time it reached Britain was still not known, nor was its route.
    The radio clicked off, with an ear-popping snap of static.
    Tarent, growing bored, stared around the compartment he was in.Much of his journey down to Turkey had been inside vehicles like this one: they had been picked up in Paris, travelled down to Italy in a Mebsher, transferred to a train across to Trieste, then another long slow haul in a Mebsher through the Balkans. The tedium of being trapped inside the vehicle was always much the same. You felt safe because of the strength of the armour, but you were always more vulnerable because the sight of a slow moving personnel carrier was often too tempting to be ignored by insurgents. While they were crossing Serbia a pair of youths had loosed off RPGs at them. One had missed but the other struck the armoured side. The noise of the explosion was terrifying, and he was still suffering tinnitus as a result, but there was no serious damage to the Mebsher. The only injuries to the passengers – himself, Melanie and two doctors – were cuts and bruises from being hurled violently around inside the cabin, but nothing more serious had happened. After that, no one was willing to complain about the cramped conditions, the unrelenting heat, the noise, the boring food. Instead, they travelled in tense silence, fearful of another attack.
    At least in Britain the armed gangs who controlled some parts of the countryside were carrying mostly automatic weapons, not grenade launchers. And during the summer months in Britain the