“The hubs?”
“You’d be surprised how dependent our world-wide network of energy and material flows is on a few key nodes. Grain silos, power stations, oil sources and refineries.”
“Like Houston.”
“Like Houston. And of course an awful lot of these facilities are on the coasts, even on flood plains. So we’re trying to sustain that network as far as possible. In the short term it’s all about emergency measures. For instance we’re trying to make sure all the tanker fleets are kept at sea. Any manufacturing or processing facility we believe might be lost is being worked as hard as possible to produce durables for the transition period-that is, the transition until everything’s been moved inland or uphill, and is made safe against the floods. Bronze, stainless steel, plastic, that sort of thing, age-resistant. You should see the Goodyear plant.”
“Goodyear? The tires people?”
“They’ve been here for decades. Now they’re churning out mountains of the damn things.”
“Why do we need tires?”
“Rafts,” he said.
That simple word took her aback. She had had the sense with Piers since they had come out of Barcelona that he was much closer to the center than she was, that he knew far more than she did, that he looked that much further into the future.
The car slowed. They were southwest of downtown at an intersection of two major avenues, Montrose Street with Westheimer Road. She glimpsed galleries, cafes, restaurants, bars, shops. It was a lively area that Amanda would probably have called “counter-cultural.”
“This is the Montrose District,” Piers said. “One of the few walkable neighborhoods in the city. I thought you’d appreciate being here. Your hotel is just around the corner-there, you see? Look, I have to go back to work for a few hours. Sorry to abandon you for now.” He handed over her bag.
On impulse, she kissed him on the cheek. “Later then.”
“Sure.”
The car door opened, and Lily jumped out. Again she was struck by the sheer physical intensity of the sunlight that bounced off the sidewalk flags. There were few people around in the heat of the day.
Piers called from the car, “Oh, Lily-make sure you’re in your room at about midnight. I’m fixing up a conference call with some old friends. Call it my treat.”
“It’s a date.”
The car closed itself up and slid away. She hurried up the steps and through sliding doors into the hotel’s cool, dark interior.
23
Helen Gray and Michael Thurley took a late breakfast in the IAEA trailer they shared.
Then, still early in the morning, they prepared to take Piers’s conference call. They installed themselves in a bar close to the waterfront of Bushehr’s old port, and set up their laptops on a plastic table. The computers were battered relics of the noughties, all the International Atomic Energy Agency could afford. The heat was already gathering. But the open-fronted bar was used to western visitors, and was equipped with fans and plenty of iced water, and would be bearable for an hour or more yet.
While they waited for Lily to log on Helen sipped orange juice, and looked out at the Persian Gulf.
Bushehr was at the end of a long, flat island, once joined to the Iranian mainland by a tidal marsh; now it was cut off by the rising sea, and you got here by boat or aircraft. A battered cargo ship made its way toward the deep outer anchorage, probably stuffed with the dried fruits and raw cotton that were the principal exports of the region. Its gray form passed between rows of buildings. Looking inland Helen could make out the industrial hinterland of the old city, the food-processing and engineering facilities attracted here to serve the regional oil distribution center that was the town’s main function. There was a smell of spices, of oil, of hot metal, of thick coffee from inside the bar, and a muezzin call floated on the hot morning air.
And there, like a pale mushroom rising above the old port, was the containment dome of the nuclear power plant, the reason they had come here.
The laptop screens lit up. There was Lily sitting in what looked like a hotel room, and Amanda, her sister, in the cramped confines of a caravan or a mobile home. These were just still images. They had to wait a few more seconds for the links to be fully established; bandwidth wasn’t what it used to be. Helen and Michael had never met Amanda, but had got to know her online through Lily, like a member of an extended family.
Helen murmured to Michael Thurley, “So this is it. No Gary, no Piers-even though Piers is supposed to have set up this online reunion in the first place.”
Michael said, “Well, Gary’s at the bottom of the bloody sea somewhere, so you can’t blame him. But as you say, Piers set it up. You’d think he could find half an hour to speak to us.”
“He did it for Lily. That’s what he says.”
“Surely for himself too.” Michael rubbed an unshaven chin. “I was brought up a Catholic, you know.” Actually she hadn’t known that about him. “We were quite a tight community, we Hampshire Catholics. Not many of us, for one thing. I lapsed at a young age, seventeen or so.” He smiled. “Not everybody in the church was as tolerant of my homosexuality, my ‘sin,’ as they might have been. But my mother continued to practice.
“A few years later my father died suddenly, and my mother said she had lost her faith. She stopped attending Mass. I found it rather upsetting. Although I had no intention of going back myself, I found it somehow comforting that she continued to practice. As if I had a route back. Well, she did go back for my sake, she made her confession and that was that. A good thing too. I think she found the church a comfort in the years before she died.”
“So maybe Piers is the same, you think. He won’t meet us, but it’s comforting for him to know that the rest of us still do.”
“Perhaps. But do any of us really understand each other? Why, I don’t even understand us.”
And nor did Helen, though she had had to try to explain her relationship with Michael to the IAEA inspectors and nuclear engineers, western, Russian and Iranian, who regularly hit on her. She was a single mother, Michael a homosexual in early middle age, and they were locked in a peculiar relationship: sexless, passionless-but not really platonic, it was more than that. They had come together in the trauma of the London flood, of course. Maybe they had found in each other something they needed, something each had lacked separately.
Or maybe, on some deeper, more cynical level, all she really cared about Michael was that he still represented the best chance she had of getting her child back.
Lily’s image jerked to life. “Are we on? Howdy from Texas.”
Amanda smiled, her face lighting up, and blew kisses.“Hello Bushehr, here are the votes from the Luxembourg jury.”
Helen and Michael waved back, feeling foolish, sitting in this empty bar waving at aging laptop screens.
They quickly established where and when they were: Lily in her hotel room in Houston at midnight, Amanda in a caravan in the Chilterns, not far from Aylesbury, where it was very early morning,“sitting on a hillside with a bunch of sheep and half the population of Chiswick,” and here were Helen and Michael outside an Iranian nuclear plant, some thousand kilometers south of Tehran.
Amanda said,“I don’t really understand why you’re there. Aren’t you looking for your baby, Helen? His father was Saudi, not Iranian. And I don’t know what you have to do with nuclear reactors…”
It was a complicated story. This reactor, built under contract by Russian engineers, was not long ago a pricking-point of world tension as a pivotal point of Iran’s uranium enrichment program. But Bushehr sat right on the Persian Gulf, and, like more than four hundred of the world’s nuclear facilities, was threatened by the rising sea. Not only that it was a lousy piece of engineering, full of design flaws eradicated from most plants since Three Mile Island. The IAEA team were rushing to work with the Iranians to decommission it before the sea had a chance to overwhelm it.
“Naturally HMG is supporting that effort,” Michael said.“I managed to get myself assigned to our small diplomatic team. All an excuse to stay close to the trail of baby Grace, you see.”
Grace had disappeared into the complicated clutches of Said’s branch of the Saudi royal family. One
