The Way Inn Read Online Free PDF Page B

a drink with an acquaintance. You know how you keep running into the same people at these things. Which can be a very good thing.”
    â€œYeah.” I was rewarded with a shy smile. Pneumatics hissed—one of the buses was opening its doors at last.
    I decided not to overplay my hand—there would be other opportunities. “Really good to see you again,” I said. “Let’s talk later.”
    â€œSure,” she said. “I’d like that.” Her mobile phone, briefly removed from the social mix, reappeared like a fluttering fan.
    Boarding the bus, I felt heartened by the encounter. It wouldn’t be too difficult after all.
    The bus filled quickly, but there was a further mysterious delay before it got moving. Still, it was warm and dry, and the throbbing engine was as soothing as the ocean. The air had a chemical bouquet—new, everything was new. I stared at the patterned moquette covering the seat in front of me. Blue-and-gray squares against another gray. Hidden messages, secret maps? No, just a computer-generated tessellation reiterating to infinity. People milling around outside. New tarmac. A woman sat in the seat next to mine; I appraised her with a half-glance and found little that interested me. She ignored me and thumbed her phone, her only resemblance to Rosa.
    Movement. One of the organizers appeared at the front of the bus, craning her neck as if looking for someone among the passengers. The bus doors closed with a sigh; the organizer sat down. The engine changed its pitch and we moved off.
    We drove along an access road parallel to the motorway. The motorway itself was hidden from view by a low ridge engineered to deaden the howl of the high-speed traffic. The beneficiaries of this landscaping were a row of chain hotels: the Way Inn behind us, ahead a Novotel, a Park Plaza and a Radisson Blu, all in the later stages of construction, surrounded by hoardings promising completion by the end of the year. Here was the delayed skywalk: an elegant glass-and-steel tube describing most of an arch over the access road, the ridge and the unseen motorway, but missing a central section, the exposed ends sutured with hazard-colored plastic. On the Way Inn side of the road, the skywalk joined the beginnings of an enclosed pedestrian link between the hotels at the first-floor level. Eventually guests would be able to stroll to the MetaCenter in comfort, protected from the climate and the traffic, but only the Way Inn section was finished. Perhaps all this construction work was evidence of industry, investment, applied effort—but the scene was, as far as I could see, deserted. There were no other vehicles on the road.
    Signs warned of an approaching junction and myriad available destinations. The bus circled the intersection, giving us a glimpse down on-ramps of the motorway beneath us, articulated lorries thundering through six lanes of filthy mist, and then of the old road, a petrol station’s bright obelisk, sheds, used cars. We didn’t take either of those routes. Instead the bus turned onto another access road, again parallel to the motorway, but on the opposite side. A vast object coalesced in the drizzle: eight immense white masts in two ranks of four suggesting the boundary of an area the size of a small town, high-tension steel crosshatching the air above. The MetaCenter. My first instinct was to laugh. For all its prodigious size and expense, and the giddying alignment of business and political interests it represented, there was something very basic about it. It was, in essence, a giant rectangular tent, with guy ropes strung from the masts supporting its roof, keeping the rain off the fair inside. Plus roads and parking. So there it was, the ace card for the economic planning of this whole region: a very big dry place that’s easy to get to. And easy to see—the white masts, as well as holding up the immense space-frame roof, were a landmark to be noticed