“One of the marches. People are throwing things and everything. It’s horrible.”
They made their way back to the house and occupied the big old leather chesterfield sofa in the lounge. The screen on the wall was showing one of the preprotest marches. Over two thousand people were moving along Whitehall with the intention of handing in a petition to Downing Street calling for the Euro Socio-Industrial summit to be canceled. But the police weren’t letting anyone near the solid metal security gates sealing off the prime minister’s residence. There was a lot of pushing and shoving, cans and plastic cartons were landing on the police. Several fistfights had broken out.
“That was stupid of the cops,” Tim said. “If they’d just let them hand in the petition there wouldn’t have been any trouble.”
“What are they all doing?” Margret asked.
“They don’t like the summit,” Tim explained gently. “A lot of people believe it’s an attempt by Brussels at social engineering. They want to either stop it or have their say.”
“Why?”
“They feel excluded. It’s like at school when the teacher just tells you what to do for no good reason you can see.”
“But fighting’s silly,” the young girl exclaimed. “We don’t do that at school.”
“I’m glad to hear it. But there are so many people protesting that you’re bound to get some silly ones in there.”
Vanessa frowned, searching the faces of the crowd. The news stream was showing images from cameras within the main body of the march. There was a great deal of anger and frustration building up. “I’m not so sure. They look like they’re out for trouble no matter what.”
“You still want to go down on Monday?”
“Yes. Brussels won’t listen to us otherwise, we have to show them just how strongly we feel about them. This is our only option.”
They carried on watching the news all afternoon, seeing the police block off Parliament Square with big metal and concrete barricades. The marchers began to spill back into Trafalgar Square. Shop windows were broken. Police vehicles raced in from side streets.
IN THE EVENING, Vanessa put some frozen pizzas in the microwave. They sat around on the old chesterfield, eating slices and swigging beer straight from the bottle as the news continued relentlessly. Sometime after ten o’clock an overturned police Land Rover was burning furiously outside the National Gallery. Vanessa had curled up against Tim, with his arms holding her protectively. She stirred, finally repelled by the images on the screen, and turned to kiss him. They made their way upstairs.
In bed, together, it was more for comfort’s sake than for passion, a physical action whose excitement and pleasure managed to obscure the grim outside world with all its pain and tragedy. For a while, at least.
48. ….ALWAYS COMES…
JEFF RECALLED THE BLITHE COMMENT about personal safety he’d made to Sue as soon as he arrived in London. With all private cars banned from passing through the security cordon around the summit, he had to take the train down to Kings Cross. As soon as they stepped off the train car they were greeted with a raucous barrage of sound. Protestors were thronging the end of the platform, letting off horns and pressure whistles. More protestors arriving on the train greeted the welcome with cheers and began chanting obscenities at the line of uniformed riot police, who were struggling to keep the station concourse open for ordinary passengers.
Lieutenant Krober took one look at the situation and hurried Jeff and Annabelle out a side exit onto York Way. He called ahead for their car on his secure encrypted link. The big black sedan drew up beside them as they emerged from the gloomy Victorian brick edifice and into the bright sunlight. There were dozens of shops along the other side of the road from the station, groovy franchises that Jeff had never heard of, all boarded up and closed to avoid looting by the protestors. A dozen police vans were parked along the curb. Apart from the pigeons, nothing moved along the length of the canyonlike street. Lucy Duke glanced down toward the front of the station, where the protestors were contained behind a high wire mesh. “I didn’t realize there would be so many of them,” she muttered nervously.
The summit was being held in a massive ten-year-old convention complex, the Marshall Centre, that had been built on the site of the old London City Airport. It occupied the entire wharf between the Albert and King George docks, a collection of auditoriums, conference theaters, restaurants, cafes, bars, and hotels enclosed by a single structure, with a fifty-story octagonal tower soaring up out of the center. Protestors had swamped the University of East London, whose modern eco-sympathy buildings ran along the northern side of the Albert Dock in the broad sweeping curves of concrete that belonged to the kind of future that the 1930s believed in. The university campus ran parallel to the conference complex, allowing the protestors to gaze across the grubby waters of the ancient dock at the sheer facade of black carbon girders and gold mirror glass.
At the west end of the dock, the police had kept the Connaught Bridge open to officially sanctioned traffic. As they drove over, it was clear to Jeff that the police were only just managing to hold the protestors off the road. He wondered if they were all wearing Rob Lacey masks again, but he was too far away to see clearly. Somehow he doubted it; stones, bottles, and chunks of wood were being thrown over the police lines to litter the tarmac on the slip roads at the big raised traffic circle. The chanting and taunts carried a strong current of menace. There was nothing good natured about this crowd, they were committed and serious.
The Euro Socio-Industrial summit was intended to provide a forum between academics and corporate researchers and the legislators. As with most government-organized summits the intention was a noble one. With so much new technology emerging so rapidly, especially in cybernetics and semiorganics, the effect and upheaval on people’s lives was becoming progressively larger. If, however, the Brussels Parliament and the European commissioners knew what was going to be released into the market, they could predict the effect it might have on employment and social patterns. That way, once trends could be anticipated, then legislation could be drawn up to smooth the introduction. Of course, the reverse was also true: Desirable trends could possibly be induced by new innovations and developments, of which a high-temperature superconductor was the prime example. Legislative and financial incentives could therefore be formulated to encourage and facilitate such desirable advancement. Every scientific discipline was involved and invited, from microbiological waste processing to optronic computing, genoprotein therapy to reusable packaging.
To a broad spectrum of Europe’s political activists, and even some of the smaller mainstream political parties, it was a monstrous technocrat attempt at social engineering. Who decided what was a desirable trait and trend? Where was the slightest hint of democratic input? Where, every Separatist movement demanded to know, was consideration for national integrity and sovereign culture?
The summit had managed to attract a phenomenal amount of antagonism over the preceding months. The coalition of protest groups formed to counter it talked of mobilizing a Million Citizen Voices to have their say. By the time the delegates were arriving to register, police put the numbers massing outside the center at close to twenty thousand. Thousands more were assembling at every mainline railway station across London with the intention of marching on the Marshall Centre. They’d arrived from right across Europe, most of them earnest but peaceable.
It was Europol’s Internal Security division that had overall responsibility for maintaining public order at official pan-European events. And as the anti-federal movement became more vocal over the years, so the commissioners had responded by giving Europol an extraordinarily wide common-security brief to observe and interdict the Separatist terrorists. The last six months had seen Europol’s electronic intelligence division monitoring encrypted data traffic between the coalition’s more extreme elements. It had issued warnings to the Internal Security Commissioner’s Bureau and the English Home Office concerning the strong possibility of riots and civil disturbances being orchestrated by known radicals and Separatists. The officials took it under advisement.
As with any major event, the protest had snowballed far beyond the original concept of its instigators. When the first groups started to announce their intention to picket the venue, and an equally strident Commission
