"Like here?" She smirked.
"Point taken," he muttered as they drove slowly past a minibus that had been pulled over by heavily armed special constables. The occupants were filing out, hands on heads, and lining up by the side of the road in front of a cash and carry and a money transfer bureau, apparently both owned by the same Indian family. A hand-painted sign hanging in the window of the money transfer announced "Fresh Basmati this Tuesday!" The minibus passengers looked like they were probably Pakistanis, or 'deshis from the Enclosures in South London, being bused into the city for a work detail. They had a sullen, beaten-down air of resignation about them and paid no heed to the three Indian children who came laughing and spilling out of the shop to watch. One of the specials crouched down on one knee while keeping his MP5 trained on the detainees to exchange a joke with the smiling, chattering children. Caitlin wondered whether the detainees envied those on the watch list who'd been deported. The Enclosures was a very grim and isolated place.
And then they were past the scene. Alan Smith continued in his calm, almost sublime way, recounting tales of horror from the night. The firebombing of a Hindu corner store in Newham that had killed the family of eight sleeping in the rooms above. The famine in western China. And an Amnesty International report on death squads in President Morales's South American Federation led into a final bookend report on Brazil's resurgent nuclear weapons program.
Caitlin listened despondently, wondering whether there might be a lighter story at the end of the bulletin simply to lift the spirits. But before handing off to the sports desk, the newsreader finished with a reminder that government inspectors would be double-checking ration cards this week after a significant increase in the incidence of forgeries.
"Enough gloom for one morning, I think," Dalby said, and he switched the audio to his classical compilation CD. The track that came on was Albinoni's Adagio in G Minor, which to Caitlin's way of thinking wasn't exactly "Disco Inferno." It was more "music to eat your pistol by," and she did her best to block it out.
"Have you sent anything to Wales about Baumer yet?" she asked. "He'd want to know."
"Mister Larrison, you mean? Yes. Vancouver liaison gets a routine weekly brief from the Cage on all of our doings and a-goings-on. And given your involvement, I sent an extraordinary update as soon as I had enough detail."
Caitlin sat up in the passenger seat.
"So did Wales have a reading on it?"
Dalby frowned. "I'm afraid that with this business in New York all of your government's intelligence resources have been retasked onto the pirate issue. Indeed, most of ours, too. A good deal of Echelon's continental and African assets are now actively attempting to interdict the pirate traffic at the source. So although Mister Larrison was concerned and sent his best wishes, he was happy to leave the running on Mister Baumer to me and thee. Like you, he saw this as a personal vendetta and best dealt with… personally."
Caitlin was a little pissed off that Dalby hadn't told her about the contact with Wales, but he had been so good about everything else that she let it slide. After all, her old controller had effectively shined them on, and he would have been hell busy with New York.
Instead, she concentrated on the view outside. As bleak as that was, there were a few pleasant interludes. They stopped behind two buses outside a small park just after Wharf Lane. She could see a few families over the brick wall, laboring away at their vegetable plots while smaller children played in the trees. They had probably come down from the council flats behind the converted garden and seemed to be enjoying themselves tending the rows of carrots, peas, and potatoes. An older man, half stooped and white-haired, a geezer in the local parlance, shared a thermos of something hot with a large black man, a West Indian, she guessed, who wore the bright red patch of a London council auxiliary sewn on his sweater. He leaned on an ax handle while enjoying his "cuppa." He would be there to discourage any raids on the site by gangs of chavs or munters who, in Caitlin's opinion, could do with a bit of fucking Enclosures themselves.
By the time they had driven down as far as the All Saints station on the East India Dock Road, the residents of the flats that lined both sides of the street were beginning to shuffle out into the gray, wet morning to join lengthening queues for buses and trains. Dalby's zippy German car attracted many envious looks as he subtly increased his speed through the area, and more than a few of the waiting commuters resentfully gave him the finger.
They drove for another twenty minutes, passing thousands of people trudging to line up for public transport into the city, if they were lucky. Many would have to make multiple transfers, and as much as everybody had once bitched about being caught in peak-hour traffic, it seemed much worse when there was no traffic at all save for the fleets of buses. It had never been an issue for Caitlin, of course, but she had read that it wasn't unusual for people to spend up to four or five hours a day in transit, and she often wondered why they didn't just move closer to wherever they needed to be.
They passed another park given over to agriculture, except this one was much larger than the little plot closer to the city. It looked big enough to have hosted a whole complex of sports fields at one time, and she could tell at a glance that the two tractors plowing the rich black soil were preparing it for a single seed planting. It must have been a ministry operation, as modest little council plots did not run to the sort of gas allowance one needed for tractor farming, although the small crowd she saw huddled at the rear of the field undoubtedly meant the actual planting would be done by hand.
"Must make you a bit homesick for your own place, then, eh?" said Dalby.
She sighed and shook her head, imagining how cold and miserable those people were going to be. They were probably on a work-for-the-dole scheme.
"I forget sometimes how good we have it down there, Dalby," she said. "I mean, we have refugees and everything, and so you're always reminded of how fucked things are for some folks. But even for them, it's gotta be better than trying to scratch together a living up here."
"Well, I imagine that's why there is such a long waiting list to get onto farm stay programs like yours and Mister Melton's. I cannot think I would remain long in London were it not for work."
He swung off the A13 at River Road, just before the Lyon Business Park, where there wasn't a lot of business being done. Indeed, half the premises seemed to be shuttered up, but Creekmouth wasn't completely derelict. Trucks rumbled to and from the nearby gravel pits, and the sewage plant across Barking Creek was churning away as always. The Thames Cafe and Daddies Snack Bar were open, serving chip butties and sweet tea to a few hundred workers who had precious jobs in nearby metalworks and manufacturing plants. There was a surprisingly healthy marine engineering trade, an industrial cleaning plant, a wire factory, a joinery, and a food wholesaler. One of the largest, most modern facilities belonged to DHL, the courier company, a German engineering firm had just taken over six large factory buildings on Long Reach Road, and there was talk of them opening an engine plant for the new BMW compact under an EU redevelopment program. As far as Caitlin could tell, however, nothing had changed at the abandoned site beyond the erection of a high razor-wire fence.
Dalby drove past all this activity, carefully avoiding the jouncing trucks that rumbled along the crumbling, potholed road, spewing black diesel fumes and not much caring whether they sideswiped him. They carried on past the Crooked Billet pub, an honest drinking hole that smelled of stale food, refried grease, and cigarette smoke. Caitlin had lunched in there once and been taken by the stained-glass windows and an unusually large collection of Pat Benatar tracks on the jukebox but not so much by the grim Dickensian atmosphere and the openly lecherous stares of some of the factory workers nursing their pints and roll-yer-owns.