The Horse at the Gates Read Online Free Page A

through the door and closed it behind them. Another short corridor, this one lit by a single overhead strip light, the walls grey cinderblock. The smell of decay and damp was gone, replaced by warm air and a low electronic hum. Davies led them into a dimly-lit corridor, a glass partition running along its length. Behind the glass was a high-tech control room, dozens of monitors and coloured lights glowing in the darkness. Bryce estimated there were a dozen or so people scattered around the windowless walls, dressed in civilian clothes and monitoring banks of surveillance screens, the bright wash throwing their faces into stark relief.
    ‘Don’t worry, they can’t see you,’ Davies informed them. He tapped the glass with a knuckle as they headed toward another door at the end of the corridor. ‘All this is one way. The operators in there are monitoring the accommodation areas on the old runways.’
    Bryce watched the watchers as they filed past. He paused behind an operator and the first thing he noticed on the screen was the lack of activity, no doubt due to the late hour and the terrible weather. The camera angles were varied; most were high, some were low, some wide-angled and others narrowly focused. There were interior shots of brightly-lit communal rooms and long, empty corridors with doors on either side stretching into the distance. There were night vision cameras in shades of ghostly green, probing dark and muddy alleyways and deserted open areas. Litter seemed a common feature in almost every shot, spilling out of plastic bins, piled in corners or tumbling through the barren dreamscape. A sudden movement caught Bryce’s eye, a distant camera capturing a man ducking out of an accommodation block, a burqa-clad woman trailing behind him. The man unfurled a striped umbrella on the muddy steps of the block, then headed out into the night, stepping carefully around the puddles, making no attempt to share the shelter of the brolly with the woman behind him. She hurried after him obediently until they were out of sight.
    ‘What a charmer,’ observed Ella.
    They followed Davies up a metal staircase to his first-floor office; originally an observation deck, the Operations Chief explained as he closed the door. A single desk occupied a space near the far wall, alongside two metal filing cabinets. The other walls were decorated with a multitude of large-scale maps of the Heathrow site, apart from one wall that looked out over the runways. That one was made of a single sheet of glass and Bryce was drawn to it, Ella falling in beside him.
    ‘Jesus,’ she breathed, shaking off her coat.
    It had been just over eighteen months since Bryce had last visited the site, almost two years since Islamabad was destroyed by the nuke. Back then, he’d given a short speech over at Terminal Five, emphasising the need for the countries of Europe to join together, to give aid and comfort to the refugees who’d travelled so far and suffered so terribly. Thirty prefabricated temporary accommodation blocks had been erected, clustered around the old taxiways and aircraft stands of Terminal Five, each housing two hundred people. He’d welcomed the new arrivals, drank coffee, posed for photographs and then returned to London, his duty done. It was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, a short-term fix; considering the international pressure being brought to bear, the civil war in Pakistan was not expected to last this long. Yet it had, the violence spreading across the country, the refugees continuing to flee westwards, transiting through the Gulf States to Egypt, where over two million people still languished in desert camps outside the cities. From his elevated vantage point, Gabriel Bryce stared out across the expanse of Heathrow and shook his head; it was hard to imagine that an airport once existed here at all.
    Beyond the waiting helicopter below, beyond the double chain-link fence that surrounded the terminal building, the Heathrow