Simon got up and stood at the window, looking over the square as he watched the people go about their business: some going to work, some rushing there, others sauntering about to go from one edifice to the next or not even that.
The sun shone bright with a crisp autumn wind and the few white clouds that loomed in the sky were far from threatening. However, if you lived in the city, you knew within yourself that a shower is never far away. The meteorologist could have it very easy – generally sunny skies with an easterly northeasterly wind of about five knots and a shower or two.
The Met office could actually have the script ready for every single day of the year and have any dummy or even an android read it out for them while they played strip poker at their desks or in the canteen (or mess, as they befittingly called it.)
And a right mess it was too!
The kitchen area of the mess and the eating area were both bright. Thanks to the windows all over and that was a rare blessing in this building. The rest of it seemed like an enclosed concrete box. The windows were closed and secured in that position with rivets and the handles removed as bits of aluminium replaced the holes that were left behind. It was one of those inconspicuous concrete blocks, which seemed to have been made to order and simply dropped off with a crane into a cement-walled, gaping hole in the ground.
Anyone could have designed that one: so many offices, so much area, so many floors, so much window space in the walls, two doors, so many double-glazed windows so secure fixed into the space that they didn’t have space to vibrate when the planes whizzed past on the south easterly runway.
Boeings and Airbuses kept replacing their likes at the embarkation gates as accordion arms covered the entries and exits of each one of them as it got the required quantity of petrol, the luggage was removed and replaced by other bits and pieces of the passengers’ belongings and one engineer went all around the plane to closely examine if it required any specific attention.
From one of those numerous and anonymous airbuses emerged a young couple, both in their thirties; he was just over six-feet tall and looked in his early thirties, she seemed closer to thirty than him, tall, slim and with a pair of cat eyes. Both were dressed as tourists and held hands as they headed into the terminal building and the