Continental European Time The sky was weak lemon in color and Perdido loomed above the hotel, powder snow blowing off its peak in little gusty clouds. Eleven thousand feet of mountain and nothing to do but ski. The lodge was huge with a heavy-handed massiveness that failed to create the kind of rusticity it was evidently intended to provide. The Germans had built it just last year—the Germans, who built everything in Spain. They had hacked a road up the mountain and built Perdido Spa out of Krupp steel and Hilton plastic, and endeavored to give it the quaint appearance of logs. It was an abomination. Liam McNeely stood outside the lodge on a wooden deck the size of a football field, open to the sky. Ordinarily it would be crowded with little tables occupied by lunching skiers but today there were no tourists. Premier Perez-Blasco had shelled out of the Spanish treasury enough to hire Perdido Spa for the duration of President-elect Fairlie’s skiing visit. The tables had been removed and Fairlie’s Navy helicopter squatted there on its skids, motionless rotor blades drooping.
