Chapter 1
UNPOL Headquarters, Jurong Island, New Singapore
Thursday 5 December 2109, 11:24am +8 UTC
“At which point all trace of Mr Jibril Muraz disappeared from our systems and he hasn’t said a word after that.” The woman who had just presented raised her eyebrows as if to invite a question from me. We were sitting in a small conference room on the new Biosense office seats that procurement had seen fit to torture us with.
“And he was drugged?” Well it might be stating the obvious but she was clearly expecting me to say something, and I still had last night’s leaving party for Milo banging around in my head. The last thing I needed was a runner.
She looked at me like I was some kind of novice. “Yes, of course he was drugged. Under the situation this was natural and after clearing his medical we proceeded with the Truth Treatment.”
“I see, and how did he respond to that treatment?”
At this Agent Sharon Cochran looked just a little perturbed and a slight edge of doubt crept into her voice, “He, um, appeared to resist the Truth Treatment, although that is hard to prove.”
I sensed she was dodging around something here that she didn’t want to talk about.
“Well, in what way was it hard to prove that he was resisting?”
She looked me in the eye. “Under the Truth Treatment he stated that he was an alien being from another dimension.”
I spat out my Starbucks latte over the table in front of me. “He what?” I couldn’t help it, and Sharon raised an eyebrow.
“He claimed he was an alien being. Look, this case is a problem. We’re under intense time pressure to get it cracked and all we have is a runner who claims he’s from another planet or dimension or whatever. I don’t have time to debate the how and the why we got here. We need answers and we need them quick. Can you talk to him or should I call someone else?” With this last thrust of her best executive power-presenting performance she looked at her watch and then frowned at my latte splattered all over the table.
“Why me? I’m an arbitrator. Why don’t you take this up with the prosecutors’ staff?” I rose from the Biosense chair and dabbed at the spilt latte with my handkerchief. I really didn’t need this right now. I had a huge caseload already and this pro bono work for UNPOL was just something I did to appease my uncle.
“He doesn’t want to talk to any arbitrator. He wants to talk to you.” She smiled as she saw the frown on my face and again looked me right in the eyes. “He asked for you by name.”
I sat back down.
“OK Sharon, maybe you’d better start at the beginning, because a sec ago you said you’d be happy to call someone else and now you’re saying he knows me and wants only to talk to me!”
“First of all I didn’t say I’d be happy to call someone else. I said I would if you wouldn’t take the job,” she said, leaning over the table so her face was only cents away from mine. And secondly, this guy was running sixteen illegals at the same time, all of them grade one, which is something we have never heard of, never mind seen, and we only discovered him by complete accident. At this exact moment in time we have sixteen of the most wanted people in the universe running around, and we haven’t got a clue where they are. We need him to talk and fast. Can you help?”
I really wanted to have Sharon right there and then on the table, having been thoroughly dominated and turned on by her power shakedown. I resorted to the male primeval of telling her this with my eyes. There were only two problems with that: one, she was happily married, and two, she was a lesbian and one hundred percent committed to her partner, both of which were facts she communicated right back with her eyes, basically telling me to fuck off and hell would freeze over before I got within touching distance of her body.
“OK, I’ll talk to him.”
“Thank you. The complete file is in there; don’t worry it’s a standalone and this room is silent,” she said, indicating the Dev with a wave of her hand and smiling, almost in pity I thought, as she left the room. The door clicked shut.
“Shit,” I spat out, my lips compressed tightly in annoyance. I should have turned it down flat. It had trouble written all over it and my stupid fantasies about Cochran had led me into a place I really didn’t need to be. I blew out my cheeks and let out a long sigh. This had been a dumb move, but then Milo’s party was partly to blame — I’d drunk too many alkys for my own good. I stood and ran my hand through my hair. Doing a quick inventory of what I’d said and thought while with Cochran. “Shit, shit, shit,” I said, and was hitting the table with my fist, when out of the corner of my eye I saw the door open and Sharon pop her head back in. I froze and shifted to try and make it look as if I always sat like this.
Sharon frowned and said, “Oh and Jonah, the Director, would like to see you before you talk to the runner.” With a last quick flash of that feline smile and a quirky raise of the eyebrows she was gone, closing the door behind her.
The Director of UNPOL Sir Thomas Bartholomew Oliver, my uncle. He’d never asked to see me about any official matter in all my time in New Singapore. UNPOL really did have a problem if he was getting involved at this level. If he was involved then it was very serious, and my name was in there — the runner had asked for me by name. I had to see why my name was in there.
I turned to the Dev on the table in front of me and said, “This is Arbitrator Jonah James Oliver, sign on.” The device snapped on with the Center’s Portal set as the landing page. I saw that the detached icon was displayed, so the Dev was disconnected from the network, and my credentials and icon came up in the bottom corner. “Provide me with case file on Jibril Muraz.”
The screen filled with the data stream dating back from today with referenced digital information on Jibril Muraz. There wasn’t much, but what there was I couldn’t believe. This guy had been running sixteen of the most wanted criminals on earth. Then, when they were interrogating him, all reference data to his PUI had disappeared along with all the reference data related to the criminals he was running. He was forty-six years old, and registered to a non-existent address at Sholle Street, Paddington, London. Scanning his transcript I saw that he claimed to have been doing this since he was fourteen. How many other illegals had he placed in society? He was being kept in Level Ten, ‘The Deep’, as they called it here at UNPOL.
I said, “Show me references to Oliver.”
The Devscreen resized around the scant information, and zoomed to the end of the transcript just before he had sat down and meditated. The transcript didn’t give me his exact words, which I would have liked to have seen, just that he requested to see me.
This was a big case. It was interesting too. Most of the pro bono work I did for UNPOL was incredibly routine and dull, albeit occasionally gratifying in helping someone out of a mess, but this case was going to be big news. My mind suddenly conjured up an image of the cases I had stacked up at my regular contribution. Although the case was interesting, I should pass. Let someone else have the limelight on this one. I was just too busy.
I popped my Devstick into the Dev and, taking a copy of the data, logged the copy.
“This is UN Operative Jonah James Oliver, sign off.” I got up from the table and steeled myself for the coming encounter. Time to see the Director.
Chapter 2
UNPOL Headquarters, Director’s Office, 244th floor
Thursday 5 December 2109, 11:55am +8 UTC
