Doctor Who_ Trading Futures - Lance Parkin [4]
The menu was guilty of all the worst sins of bad website design back home – doing things simply because it could, piling information on information, it was designed to actively – interactively – get in the way of simply ordering a meal.
Fitz had insisted on keeping the menu even after they’d ordered, and had played with it through each of the four courses, leaving Anji to play with her food.
The view was spectacular. The Mediterranean, on a beautiful summer’s evening, now a beautiful summer’s night. There were flaming torches on the beach, and some sort of party going on down there. Anji’s fellow diners glanced out every so often, but now the singer had gone, most were looking at the vast wall‐mounted TV screens. A soccer game between the Eurozone national team and Brazil was getting underway. Every few minutes play would stop for an ad break, which ended with a short news bulletin.
There was trouble in North Africa – Anji tried to get the context from the tiny snatches of news and a few images – gleaming tanks with EZ flags nudging past bemused Arab onlookers. The tanks were chrome, the shape of tortoiseshells. Sci‐fi weapons. Cut to a White House spokesman in jeans and T-shirt, with the anchorwoman talking over him, saying class twos had been deployed, purely in a peacekeeping capacity. Hyperlinks swarmed uselessly around the pictures.
Then back to the soccer game. The referee started the second ninth as soon it was clear the ad break was over.
‘Where is he?’ she asked.
Fitz looked up. 'The Doctor? He said wait here. He’ll be here.’
‘Have you any idea how we’re meant to pay for this meal?’
‘It says they take any IFEC card.’
‘And do you have an IFEC card?’
‘No.’
‘Do you even know what one is?’
‘Back in my day,’ Fitz said, changing the subject, ‘if you couldn’t pay, you had to do the washing up. I suppose they’ve got robots to do all that now.’
‘I’m sure the waiter’s giving us a funny look.’
‘Relax. We’re the customers. Just keep ordering coffee. They’ve got different types, you can mix and match. Look. Decaffaraspberchino.’ He waved the menu at her, before returning his attention to it. ‘You can get it to do different languages. What do your lot speak?’
‘English.’
‘No… ah, there we go. Hindu.’
‘Hindi.’
‘Look at it.’
‘I know what a cup of coffee looks like.’
‘This is coffee of the future. Look, the last couple of places we’ve been, the coffee wasn’t up to much. Enjoy it while you can.’
There was an explosion out at sea. Just a flash of orange light. The other diners, and the waiters, hurried over to the window. Which was almost certainly exactly the wrong thing to do in the circumstances. Anji remembered when a few IRA bombs had gone off in the City. There had been an email circulated about it – if a bomb goes off, stay away from the windows. Glass shatters. Shattered glass does nasty things to your eyes if it gets into them.
‘Could it be terrorists?’ one of the tourists said.
‘There aren’t terrorists,’ the other one reminded her. ‘Not any more.’
‘But this might be some sort of comeback. There was an article about neo‐terrorism last week and –’
Fitz looked up from his menu.
There was something burning on the horizon. A black shape, surrounded with flame. So how far was that? A mile? No, more than that.
‘It could be nothing. A coincidence,’ Anji suggested.
‘Yeah, right. Coincidence. Like every single time we land somewhere there’s a big coincidence. Before you met the Doctor, did things ever explode?’
‘As a matter of fact –’
‘Hey, look at that,’ Fitz was saying.
She realised, with a start, that they’d interrupted the soccer match on TV to report the explosion. An aerial shot – some news channel’s helicopter, already on the scene.
Anji was more interested in the man who’d just walked in through the door. He was in his early forties, apparently at least, and wore a long black