by BRM Stewart
I heard the engine start as I walked across from the drop-off bays to the bright confusion of the terminal building, dragging my suitcase behind me, my rucksack over my shoulder, wondering what was going to be at home when I got back.
I had checked in online, of course, but still had to join the queue at check-in. No one around me could explain this. No one got annoyed at the young American couple who came in at the front, bypassing the queue, and proceeded to take forever to check in overweight bags, parts of which were re-distributed – slowly and carefully. I sighed inwardly.
Finally I was through. Security wasn’t too bad, and I scrambled a coffee and pastry in departures before the flight was called. Then it was up through the clouds to a blue sky, and eventually back down to the grey wetness; from my side of the plane I could see only flat land and fields, and roads.
I switched on my mobile as the bus took us on the long drive to the terminal building, and texted Helen to say I’d got there. As I typed, a text came in from Vodafone, welcoming me to Holland and telling me how much they were going to charge me to use my phone here.
I stood looking at the huge departure board at Schiphol, trying to find the Bucharest flight and dodge the policemen on Segways, and I wondered how I could retrieve the situation with Helen. I could understand why she was angry that I’d lied to her – because I had, and had been lying, by omission, for years – but did she really think I’d been unfaithful to her with Charlene? I wouldn’t have done that, I really wouldn’t.
I got through security at the gate after an age. We were processed one at a time, and many passengers didn’t seem to have flown at all since everything tightened up. They had to be told to take their jackets and belts off, and get their laptops out. One old guy was just confused, and was body-searched twice before they gave up on him. And of course they all took an age to get all their stuff back together again on the other side of the screening machine. I forgot to take my mobile out of my trouser pocket, so that held us up a bit too – I got scowls from people behind me.
At last we were through, the flight was called, and we wandered down the walkway. We stood at the door of the aircraft, filtered on board, and waited while somebody put his case in the overhead luggage bin, took his jacket off and his newspaper out, and sat down. Then had to get up because I was sitting in the window seat beside him.
By the time I slumped down, I was exhausted. I had forgotten to take my jacket off, but decided to leave it on because of the disruption it would cause. I looked out of the window at the cloudy, wet day, and tried to tune out of the noisy bustle of the aircraft filling up.
Was I really alone again? Was it really over with Helen? It almost took me back to losing Fiona, but this wasn’t nearly the same. Sam? A youthful, lustful episode, a reaction to Fiona, to needing someone, and I still felt bad that I’d never had any feelings for her beyond the sex. I wondered where she was now. Elizabeth? Then Helen, built on a dream, a memory of Fiona.
We pushed back from the gate, and were taxiing. And taxiing, and taxiing. We taxied across a motorway, and I began to the think that the pilot maybe wasn’t fully trained and was therefore going to have to drive all the way to Bucharest. But finally we stopped, settled, revved up, and hammered down the runway and into the sky.
I shook away the thoughts of Helen. Let’s get this job – whatever the hell it involves – out of the way, and get back and either make amends with her – should be easy if I left the company – or start again, on my own, without her. That thought brought tears into my eyes.
I dozed off and on. At one point I fished out my Romanian phrasebook and the man beside me smiled. ‘Is not too difficult,’ he said. I smiled back. It was really difficult. I don’t have a good ear for language, but I can usually pick up key phrases like hello, please, thank you, good-bye, and come back here and give me my change you robbing bastard. But nothing in Romanian was sinking in. Maybe it would be better when I actually heard people speak.
When lunch came – bizarrely, a cheeseburger – I put the phrasebook away. ‘Finished?’ the man beside me grinned. I nodded. ‘Simple.’
The flight passed quickly, and I looked down as we dropped through the clouds and approached Bucharest. It was different from Scotland, or anything in Britain, or anywhere else I’d been. First impressions were of flatness, though everything looks flat from altitude. Strip-farming. Houses clustered along straight roads for mile after mile. Thick clumps of forest – houses that had either, impossibly, been shoe-horned into think clumps of forest, or, equally impossibly, have had the thick forest grow around them.
And we were down, after those seconds of flying just above the runway when you feel the pilot is shouting at the rookie co-pilot ‘down a bit more you idiot or we’ll run out of runway’, then the brakes and the reverse thrust, peering at the terminal building as we taxi up as if that gives you any idea of what a foreign country will be like. We bobbed to a halt, and I yawned. I was really, really tired. I wanted a beer and to go to bed.
As we lurked by baggage reclaim, I switched on my mobile. Vodafone welcomed me to Romania, and again told me how much using my phone would cost me. Nothing from Helen, but I texted her anyway to tell her I was on the ground safely. I put my phone away and sighed with relief as my bag came round the carousel.
The folk on passport control were straight out of a cold war movie; the pretty blonde woman was stricter than anyone, as if trying to demonstrate that pretty blondes really can give you a very bad time. Everyone was scrutinised very closely, but those who looked in any way Middle Eastern were scrutinised more. One guy got ten minutes of close discussion before being let through. The next guy got fifteen minutes of close discussion, and then had to go to talk to someone higher up. As a result, my queue was very, very slow to clear. But I know that if you jump to another queue, it will be slower. Other people behind me didn’t know that, and as a result that rule didn’t apply. But it would have if I’d done it. I yawned. What was I doing here?
I got was processed relatively quickly and went out into the exit area. I experienced that feeling you get when you arrive in a new country: confusing signage, voices loud in a foreign language, different toilet systems. You’re abroad. You don’t know anyone. You can’t speak the language. (You haven’t any currency – I had brought Euros before finding out Romania wasn’t in the Euro-zone.)
There were loads of people holding up signs, and finally someone with my name. I went up to him and he smiled. ‘Hello. I’m Martin McGregor.’
He smiled again. ‘I am Aurel.’ He was a bit shorter than me, a little bit overweight, with brown hair and a friendly smile. ‘How was your flight?’
‘Good thanks.’
‘Let me take that.’
He wheeled my suitcase and I carried my rucksack. We went out into the heat of the car park across the road from the terminal building, with a black sky and flashes of lightning in the distance. Taxi drivers tried to persuade me to go with them. A young Romany girl appeared at my side and flashed a bright smile in a pretty, dark-skinned face. ‘Money?’
Aurel muttered something sharply to her but she stuck with us. ‘Do not give her money, Martin,’ he said.
‘Don’t worry. I haven’t any.’ He smiled as if that was a joke.
Aurel had a small, silver Toyota saloon. He manoeuvred my suitcase into its boot, and I dropped my rucksack in too. ‘Please.’ He ushered me towards the front passenger seat. I looked around. More lightning flashes, and a rumble of thunder in the distance. The Romany girl was helping another couple get into their hire car: she manoeuvred their trolley, and wheeled it away to the trolley park. A Romany boy materialised by me. He showed me some notes crumpled in his hand: ‘Money?’ I ignored him and slumped into the car. Aurel started it up, and the air conditioning blasted at my face.
I relaxed for a few moments as Aurel got us out of the car park and through the junctions and roundabouts to the main road. Then I ignored the past and started to worry about what was to come. I kn
ew nothing about arrangements or plans: I had been told I’d be met, and that everything would be organised by the people here. I wasn’t in control at all. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly. ‘So,’ I said. ‘What now?’
‘I have good hotel.’
‘Good. Good.’ Another deep breath. ‘Where is it?’
‘Not far. How was your flight?’
‘Good. Thanks.’ The déjà vu passed as I realised that he really had asked me that before. His kind face smiled at me, then he went back to looking ahead at the road.
I turned to look out of the side window, wondering whether I could sleep. But the scenery was too different. The houses didn’t seem to stop, and every one had a fence, with a gate. There was almost a continuous line of fencing, some wooden, some rusty metal, and some very smart indeed. The houses were similar: some – literally – falling down, some very nice and smart, and some quite luxurious. Here and there I saw a wrinkled old peasant woman dressed in black and sitting outside her fence; it looked like she was just passing the time in a scene that could have been from any time in hundreds of years.
I didn’t know too much of the history of Romania, just the basic Eastern European thing and the orphans. Now it seemed they were in that twilight zone between communism, with its corruption and its patronage and its universal poverty, and capitalism, with its corruption and its patronage and the schism between rich and poor.
As I sat beside Aurel with his inscrutable smile, I felt unsure, alone. I didn’t know how these people thought, how they worked. Back in Glasgow, I could talk to someone for five minutes and get a pretty good grasp of what their background was, and hence their basic nature, what their needs were, and what drove them. I could judge how clever they were, whether streetwise or academic. Which gave me a good idea of how safe I was with them, how I should behave to keep myself safe. But not here. It wasn’t even like Portugal or Spain – it was different.
We were reaching another city, even though there had been little discernable countryside. We crossed over a mass of railway lines: I saw a huge station, and an oil refinery in the distance, and then we were onto a broad boulevard with trees, and a long park alongside it. We passed a mixture of modern buildings and big old red ones, and then we were off the boulevard, past some banks – RBS! – and came to a halt, illegally, in a tiny car park in front of a tall, fairly modern hotel. Most of the cars around were Renaults or Logans.
‘Where are we?’
‘This is Ploesti. Important city in Romania.’
We got out of the car into the heat. ‘Oh?’
‘Oil fields, all around. In the war, allies bomb us. Then Germans bomb us.’ He smiled. ‘Very bad time.’
Aurel helped me with my case up the steps and into the open reception area, a restaurant away to my left, and a bar area – I really needed a drink. Aurel went up to long reception desk, and there was much murmuring and checking of computers and paperwork. I stood yawning. Then he called me over, and I showed my passport and signed the registration form, and got my room key.
‘OK,’ Aurel said. ‘You rest, Martin. I pick you up here – ‘ he pointed to the leather sofas near the window – ‘tomorrow morning at eight thirty. Then we start work. OK?’
I nodded, fighting another yawn. ‘OK.’
‘You put all drinks and meals on your room, I pay.’
‘Great.’
We shook hands and he smiled and left, and I made my way over to the lift and upstairs. My room was big and comfortable, and clean. I stood at the window and looked out over what I could see of the city – which was the car park and the tall banks just beyond. It was late in the afternoon, so I decided not to go out for a walk, just have a quiet evening and an early night.
Dinner was good, though odd – a fillet of salmon dressed with cheese sauce – and the wine was OK. The waitress was a tall young girl with long dark hair and a short red skirt. The local Ursus beer was tasty too, though I don’t regard 0.4 of a litre as ‘large’. The restaurant was almost empty, the main noise coming from a parrot in a cage.
I sat on the comfy leather chairs in the reception area in a cloud of drifting cigarette smoke, watching people come and go, getting my beer regularly topped up by the barman – who now responded to a simple lift of my eyebrows, and brought small bowls of nuts and other vague salty snacks to keep me thirsty. There was free Wi-Fi in reception – and a free wired connection in my room, which was better than most British hotels – so I caught up with my online life. Not that there was much: there were no emails from Helen, no Facebook activity, no texts. The cold shoulder in cyberspace, I thought. I texted Helen that I was in my hotel, and told her it was very comfortable.
Eventually I realised I needed a good night’s sleep, and the cigarette smoke was getting to me – amazing how we had got used to the smoke-free environment in the UK – so I shook my head as the barman spotted me finishing my beer and gestured to the tap, and rode the lift upstairs. The two hours time difference was big enough to make me feel strange; I felt jet-lagged.
I set the alarm on my mobile, and got to sleep after an hour of over-tired thrashing around, and an overwhelming misery.
*
I was in the reception area dead on 8:30 as Aurel came through the door with his smile.
‘You sleep well, Martin?’
‘Yes – not bad,’ and I yawned. ‘Lots of barking dogs outside.’ And people emerging from a nearby nightclub in the small hours.
‘Is big problem in Romania. Not so bad now. Please, you come.’
I put on my sunglasses and shouldered the rucksack containing my laptop, and the two of us, in our suits, headed out to the heat of the anarchic car park and into Aurel’s Toyota. We didn’t drive far – maybe ten minutes – across vague junctions where only the fastest survived, around rattling trams that looked like they dated from before the war. I looked at the large red sandstone houses fallen into terminal disrepair, and the dirty grey concrete blocks of flats, some with balconies windowed off to become part of the main flat.
I commented on the fine houses now falling down. ‘Communists,’ Aurel explained. ‘They put families without homes in big houses. Owners move out. No one takes care of building.’
We parked up behind an old building that looked like it might have once been a school. The back door was open, a notice with a string of Romanian words pinned to it, including ‘USA’. I asked Aurel about it, thinking maybe it was some political comment. ‘”Usa” means “door”,’ he said. ‘”Please keep door closed.”’
We smiled, and he led me through the open door and up a narrow staircase, past a reception desk with a middle-aged, grey woman who gave us the briefest look, and along echoing linoleumed corridors, past half-open doors, up stairways, and finally into a carpeted room, with half a dozen office desks and chairs, a collection of filing cabinets and cupboards, and four people, all formally dressed. An air-conditioning unit hummed away at the top of the high windows.
’Martin,’ Aurel said, ‘I present to you Bianca, Coralia, Tudor – and Gheorghe.’
I smiled, and shook hands with them. This felt more normal, like my usual work.
Bianca was middle-aged, with shoulder-length mid-brown hair. She had an attractive face, and an intelligent smile; her handshake was firm. Coralia looked about eighteen, but must have been older; she had olive skin that suggested a Romany heritage, and huge brown eyes, full lips and thick black hair pulled back in a knot at the nape of her neck. Tudor was tall, with a handsome face, bright eyes, a full head of hair combed back and showing distinguished grey at the temples. Gheorghe seemed to be the boss: they all stepped back when I shook his hand. He was short, squat, balding, with a round face; his suit hung badly on him, and he smelled of cigarette smoke.
Gheorghe was silent as the others asked about my flight and the hotel, and was the weather warm enough for me – I explained about Glasgow weather, and they laughed.
Then they all chatted together in Romanian, and Coralia eased herself to
my side and put her face close to mine. I looked into her eyes as she almost whispered: ‘They would like to start the meeting now. I am the translator.’
‘Good.’
We pulled the office chairs from out behind the desks, and sat in a rough circle. Gheorghe spoke something gruffly to Bianca, who smiled and responded, and they all laughed. Then Bianca said something to Coralia, who said to me: ‘They would like you to tell them about computer fraud, and what the best ways are to deal with it.’ She smelled of perfume and cigarettes.
‘How to prevent it?’ I asked.
Coralia spoke rapidly to the others, and there were smiles and rapid-fire statements. Bianca spoke to Coralia, who said to me: ‘In order to prevent fraud they must understand how to carry it out, so they want to know that.’
OK, I thought: we’re going to pretend this is legitimate, but we all know what’s really going on.
Bianca said something else with a broad grin, and Coralia added to me: ‘They would like to spend today talking in general about what might be done, and what they would need. For the rest of the time you will work with them to get things… working. Then you fly back to England.’
‘Scotland,’ I corrected automatically. ‘Who are these people?’ I asked her.
Tudor interrupted: ‘Is better you do not ask, Martin. Let us just say that we work for a large computer company, like yours.’
I held up my hands and nodded. So, they could understand what I said most of the time, but I couldn’t understand them. Nice.
*
We spent that day with me going through the main elements of computer crime, from simple phishing scams, through keyloggers and Trojans, to programs like Zeus which could intercept and redirect online banking transactions; denial of service attacks and botnets; the need for contacts with hackers and carders. They listened carefully, took notes, and had regular chats amongst themselves – usually, but not always, prefaced by a polite ‘Excuse, Martin – we talk.’