NEW WORLD TRILOGY (Trilogy Title) (10 page)

• • •

9 a.m.

The phone rings.  After several cycles, an arm slowly appears out of the thin, white sheet and picks up the receiver.  "Hello?" whispers Sascha, knowing it's probably Ikaros.

"Hey, it's me.  You up yet?"

"No, what time it is?"

"Nine.  I'll meet you down in the lobby in forty-five minutes, okay?"

"Okay … I'll try."  She places the phone down and groans for a moment under the sheet in an effort not to fall back to sleep.

One hour later

Sascha emerges from the hallway and enters the lobby, sees Ikaros sitting on a couch near the front windows, and smiles pleasantly.  She checks out and politely says her goodbyes to the receptionists, then walks towards the exit, where Ikaros is already waiting.  "Did you have a good sleep, then?"

"Yeah, I did, actually.  It was pretty good, considering.  How 'bout you?"

"Yep.  I was too tired to worry about anything.  Actually, I haven't slept that well in a while and kind of feel a bit bad about it."

Ikaros nods slightly in silence.  Without saying anything else, they walk out the door, down the steps and stand on the pavement where they met just four days earlier. 

"Do you want some breakfast?" she asks.

"I do, but … I was stupid: I should have worked this out yesterday.  I reckon it would be best if we separated and got out of the country today, if at all possible.  Get the next flight to wherever and hook up with one back to Germany just in case they track us down at a hotel here or end up waiting for us at the airport or something."

"Don't you think that's a bit paranoid?"

"Maybe…  It's careful, though, and we don't know who we're dealing with.  We know it was a big operation, though, and you can't do that kind of thing without a lot of help.  Our only advantage is if they still don't know who we are exactly, but if they work out it was us who got away, the bus driver or tour guide could profile us for them very quickly … if it comes to that, anyway."

"Oh, my God.  We're screwed."

"Not exactly.  We just have to get to the airport.  But we should stay away from each other when we're there, okay?"

"Sure."  Sascha looks out at the street.  "I don't really wanna stay here now, anyway."

Ikaros nods.  "It's probably best to get back to Berlin and start studying again … and do our best just to get on with things.  We're not likely to forget about this, though."

"Yeah … we needn't bother trying, really."  She stares out across the street without paying attention to the dense morning traffic.  "Do you think you'll be okay … I mean, with what you did?"

"What did I do, though?  I was just making survival choices.  Everyone was."  He stares at the cracks in the pavement.  "The world isn't a better place now.  It's just about the same."

"It's not quite the same as it would have been 'cause we're at least still alive.  We should let that make the difference, okay?"

He manages a slight smile before seeing a taxi coming down the street and waving it down.  He picks up her trolley case and, after placing it in the trunk, leans in through the back window, where she's now sitting, and kisses her lightly on the cheek.

"Will I see you again?" she asks, knowing she's been unable to get him to share even a sketch of a plan, no matter how vague.

"I might make it to Berlin in the next year or so … depending."

"See you then, then … if not at the airport."

"Yeah, at a distance, okay?  Bye."  Ikaros watches as the taxi pulls away and joins the flow of traffic.

Chapter 8

4:15 p.m.

Ikaros sits quietly in a departure lounge waiting to board a plane to Kuala Lumpur, where he plans to catch a flight direct to Johannesburg, South Africa.  Forty minutes earlier, he watched Sascha board her flight to Tokyo unimpeded, which made him feel slightly more hopeful about his own prospects.  He still feels anxious, though, due to the two-hour-long maintenance delay that his plane has been inconveniently undergoing: he just wants to get airborne as soon as possible so he can get some distance between himself and what was supposed to be a relaxing break before getting on with what he's really interested in doing.

Twenty minutes later

From his window seat as the plane taxis towards the runway in preparation for take-off, Ikaros watches baggage handlers and maintenance crews going about their business on planes he passes by.  He knows nothing, and will never know anything, about the fact that the authorities are about to conduct a search through the airport's mainframe in an attempt to determine whether their foreign targets have already left or are about to leave and can be stopped; by the time they discover that Ikaros is on board his plane, however, it's fortunately too late.

Ikaros waits patiently for the view of the surrounding city and countryside to emerge as the ground drops away from beneath the plane and it begins to make its sharp ascent.  The two detectives at the scene, having just received information about Ikaros's whereabouts, stand quietly in the terminal and watch as the foreign-owned jetliner disappears into the distance.

• • •

The detectives were too late only due to the cover up vainly attempted by the surviving staff at the operating centre.  Petrified that they would lose their jobs or be eliminated for incompetence, the staff only reported to the collection helicopter when it arrived early that morning that the prisoner responsible had been dealt with on site.  Although this satisfied curiosity for a while, the next morning, when the remaining organs were collected and taken to Bangkok for processing, the discrepancy in the accounting was immediately apparent when cross-referenced with the bus's passenger list.  An armed team was consequently sent to the operating centre, where all the members of staff were subjected to interrogation for several gruelling hours until two of them cracked and gave up the required information.  Thus, the hunt for Ikaros and Sascha only had a chance to begin that afternoon; evidently, if the pair had not found themselves in such fortuitous circumstances, they would have been apprehended and dealt with long before arriving at the airport.  For their part, though, the men responsible for the duplicity were subsequently summarily executed and their bodies were incinerated with those of regular victims; replacements were deployed and activities returned to normal except that extra precautions were implemented to ensure that no one else in future was able to make an escape — and no one ever did.

• • •

India: nearly two weeks earlier

On a small river boat on the Hugli River, a distributary of the Ganges, Sascha and a classmate from her undergraduate degree, Meike, whom she'd met up with some weeks earlier, stand on the top deck at the bow away from the twenty-odd other passengers.  With the late-afternoon sun approaching the cityscape, they look over at the sprawling city of Kolkata running down to the river bank only thirty or so meters away.  The preceding three weeks' travel around the country have taken their toll on them both, and they're happy to have this opportunity to be as far away as they can from the poverty and the incessant bustle and chaos of the city without being locked up in their hotel room.  Really, they're just waiting for their respective flights out of the country over the following two days: Meike is heading directly to Berlin to start back at work, while Sascha plans to spend ten relaxing days in Thailand to wind down before returning to continue on with her thesis at the Free University of Berlin.

Meike stares out at the darkening outline of the city and says in German, "You know, I knew India would be something like this, but it still surprised me to see so many disturbing things."

"Yeah, I know," replies Sascha, having had the same feeling for some time.  "But the thing that gets me the most isn't the fact that so many millions of people have died here in recent years because of the flooding, crop failures and all the other social and economic problems, it's that there seems to be little sign here on the streets or in many people's eyes that anything unusual has happened or is happening.  I mean, beyond the immediately affected areas and people, it seems that everyone else is just carrying on with their lives as though it doesn't even matter to them…"

"Mm, maybe it doesn't."

"… And there are still so many people everywhere.  Life is cheaper here than it used to be, and it's been pretty cheap for a long time."

"They're just better at segmenting parts of society than they used to be, but then that's kind of been one of their specialities all along, hasn't it?"

"Mm, the ghettos are little more than places to be ignored until you die.  But that's the same with countries everywhere and always has been…  Is there actually anything really different about now and the past?"

Meike doesn't need much time to think about this one.  "Sure there is … the intensity, the scale and … the diversity of all the terrible things."

Sascha becomes visibly frustrated.  "It's just about impossible to get away from it, and it's just about impossible to combat it.  As far as I can tell, I just … I don't know how we're going to avoid some of the things that are gonna happen: millions of people
will
die prematurely here before the end of the year and there's no realistic global response that can prevent it.  We might have been able to do something effective if we started acting appropriately at some critical point in the past, but now … oh, it's hopeless!" she concludes.

"Yeah, just about hopeless."

"I want to help people, but, more than anything, I want
everything
to change!  I just think that if nearly everything isn't changed, then there's little hope for many of the people that we actually try to help.  The problems are too big now, I mean, this century alone we've seen umpteen revolutions, dramatic changes to our political and economic systems that they claim will bring wealth and stability to more countries and people, a bunch of organisations stating aims to alleviate poverty, and just about everyone is in the midst of implementing a development or aid programme of one kind or another, and then there's 'international cooperation.'  But what's happened?  Things are still getting worse…  This has got to be the worst century in history, and we're only half way through it!"

Meike interjects, "Hey, let's forget about it for now, we'll drive ourselves crazy thinking like this.  There's nothing we can do at the moment.  There's no problem we can solve by getting ourselves worked up like this."

"Okay," smiles Sascha, "but that's still part of my point, though, isn't it…?  The helplessness of it all," she adds wryly.

Meike nods, and they watch as the sun disappears behind the sprawling city, the pollution-filled air providing fuel for a brilliant red glow to have developed in the surrounding sky — they try to appreciate its beauty, anyway.

• • •

The decline of India was, ironically, a concomitant of its development: the steadily growing population in the early decades of the twenty-first century led to a situation in which the Indian economy and means of agricultural production couldn't keep pace with the demand, which was exacerbated by certain ineffective economic policies and trading practices.  By 2032, the difficult situation that India had fallen into was becoming clearer with the death toll from starvation escalating to unprecedented levels; changes in the climatic conditions, including a bombardment of extremes, and the consequent problems with insufficient and unstable crop production, led to millions of farmers having to walk away from their farms destitute.  This in turn increased the significance of the nation's over-population and also impacted not only on the country's but also the world's economy and food supply because India had positioned itself as a leading food exporter, which was enabled by the radicalisation and near-complete modernisation of its agricultural practices, infusing its food production with that of multinationals and the global market at an unprecedented and unsustainable level.

The critical point of crop failure was in 2038 when it was estimated that the yearly crop production was insufficient to fulfil the basic survival needs of the population for that year without reducing the hoped-for growth rate of the export market.  As a result, that year witnessed the first in a series of mass famines in India for the century; the international media reported that an estimated sixty-five million people died.  In fact, the actual figure was nearly double that amount, but this was still almost imperceptible on the streets with a population of nearly 2.2 billion.

Unable to hide this situation totally from the world, the Indian government was compelled to take the assistance of the international community, which was officially promoted as a massive unified effort to help alleviate the problem and prevent its recurrence.  As a result, the agricultural focus partly shifted away from luxury produce, such as coffee and exotic fruits and vegetables, to the production of essential foods strictly for domestic consumption.  However, in the following year, there was still a domestic food shortage, and the export profits slumped not just because of the reduced supplies of export produce but also because of a backlash against Indian exports by international consumers, slightly disgusted by the unfolding events and unaware of the effects that their largely unorganised mass boycott would have.  In that year alone one hundred million more died.