no easy way out there. I sucked power from those big green eyes of hers. Sucked it in deep. Deep in my belly, down by the base of my spine, the feeling grew. I breathed out heavily and drank in deep the salt air of the cave.
“All right. Defeat is not an option. However, it appears to me that the chance of success in stopping the Tag has been greatly diminished.”
“Agreed. Now what are we going to do to counter that?”
“The only thing I can see possible is to somehow figure out a way to block the Tag Law legally, but I haven’t come up with the anything yet.”
“Have you been researching that online?” she spat out with a horrified look on her face.
“Yes, but it’s OK. I sort of cleared it with Sir Thomas when we played golf. At least if I get asked why I am researching the law I can say it is to help him.”
Mariko blew out her cheeks. “Sheesh, don’t do that to me, please. Tell me more about this game of golf. What happened when you talked about the Tag Law?”
“I can do better than that. I can show you.”
“You recorded it?”
“No, Call did.”
“Who’s Call?”
“Call was the Devcaddy that Sir Thomas rented for me when we played golf. They can record your game so that you can study it later for improvement. I just asked him to keep recording at all times. Here, look.” I flipped the screen of the Devstick over so that she wouldn’t have to view it upside down.
She watched intently as I talked with Sir Thomas, the two of us sitting at the drinks stand. We were suddenly treated to a close up of the back of the wall of the stand until Call had emerged from the other side and refocused on Sir Thomas and I. The image zoomed in on the two of us and the sound was clear. Mariko nodded at me and I hit pause.
“Who’s this Annika Bardsdale?”
“I saw her on a newsfeed sometime ago. She was arguing, not very successfully, against the Tag Law on a panel discussion.”
“So you don’t know her at all?”
“No.”
“Perhaps you should. How about this for a short-term plan? You get together with your uncle again, as soon as possible, on the memoir. You’ve planted the seed of Annika Bardsdale so use that. What if you tell him that you’re planning to offer your services to her and you wanted to prepare him for the inevitable media fallout that will cause?”
“Why would I do that? I’ve already told him that I’m for the Tag Law.”
“So that you can betray their efforts at the last moment. You show Sir Thomas that you’re capable of doing that and he might just invite you into the Hawks.”
“OK, so that gets me next to someone who wants to stop the Tag Law but cannot, and into the Hawks. The only action that I can think of so far to discredit Sir Thomas is to expose myself as Mark Zumar. Suppose I had an independent DNA analysis done and requested, under a court order, that Sir Thomas had the same done, to compare. Even allowing for the fact that might take up to two years to get through the courts. He could easily corrupt the process somehow.”
“Yes, but Sir Thomas is an evil man. No matter how clever he might be, that fact pervades and touches everything he does. The fact is that your birth is registered in a hospital and your DNA is registered at that hospital. Gabriel substantiated that.”
“But that’s all we have. The birth register in Byron Bay shows Mark Anthony Zumar on the 23rd of September 2075, and then there’s Sir Thomas’s registering of my birth in Glasgow which shows my birth as being registered on the 29th of October 2075, thirty-six days later. Then there’s my entire upbringing within the auspices of the Oliver Foundation. Wait a minute. That is one possible avenue. The Oliver Foundation. What if I’m not the only one? What if Sir Thomas has killed the parents of other children?”
Mariko pursed her lips together and nodded her head. “Go on.”
“The Oliver Foundation was started with me. I mean he founded it the year of my birth and the year of the death of my fictional parents, his brother and step-sister. But it has spread. They are on every continent except the Poles and in every major metropolis. What if there are other Jonahs? And what is he really doing with the Oliver Foundation? It’s for gifted children only, so doesn’t that define them as Hawks, or at least a breeding ground for potential Hawks. Hawks started with families right? Passing it down from one generation to the next, father to son and daughter. Sir Thomas has no family but he has the Oliver Foundation, right. What if he’s using children from there as his branch of the family?”
“Cochran was Oliver Foundation you know.”
“No. I didn’t know that. How do you know that?”
“Just SOE gossip. I was talking with a colleague about her being wounded in the bomb and he mentioned it.”
“I could visit the foundation under the guise of doing the memoir. I mean the home where I was raised, it was the first of the orphanages. I could dig around in my birth records and try to identify other ex-Oliverans.”
Mariko shook her head. “No it would take too long, and what if you do identify others like you? You have no way of knowing if they’re Hawks or not. Stick with Bardsdale. That seems like the best course of action for now.”
It made sense. We were running out of time and to try to convince others without knowing where their loyalties lay was too dangerous. At least if I got close enough to Bardsdale, it could lead me to being more trusted by Sir Thomas and hopefully induction into the Hawks. At least it was a direction to move forward in. I nodded.
“Agreed.”
“I’ll get closer to Cochran. You know I helped her the night of the bombing?”
I shook my head. I had no idea.
“I was the first team member to get to her. Patched her up. Anyway, I’ll also ask her to assign me as your personal bodyguard. In light of the bombing she might agree.”
“Be very careful, OK. She’s telepathic. When you’re with her, don’t think about anything other than what you want her to know. Best would be to think about impressing her and what a brave woman she is. What do you think about that? Was she seriously wounded?”
“No, minor wounds only and the rumor mill has it that a call to her Devstick from her partner Sunita Shido saved her life.”
“Do you think that was coincidence?”
“No, not for a sec. I think the whole thing was intricately planned, and perfectly timed, but it still takes a special kind of woman to walk into a bomb.”
“What about this Martine Shorne, the high-level UNPOL officer who is now on the Most Wanted list right under Gabriel? They’re saying she’s a high-level subversive, and used a booby-trapped Devstick as the bomb?”
“They found her prints on fragments of a Devstick. She’s disappeared and they’ve charged her with being absent from her post for now. Nothing more than that. She used to work with Flederson. The rumor is that he approved and supported her transfer from Large Commercial Crimes unit into Deep Trace. In there she’d have had access to everything. I suspect we just found out who our allies were.”
“You mean Shorne and Flederson?”
“Yes, but they’re no use to us now. One’s in a coma in deep regen. He’s a complete wreck of a human. Lost both legs, burst ear drums, collapsed lungs, ruptured intestines and over fifty fragment wounds. It’s amazing he’s still alive but he isn’t going anywhere for at least a year. Shorne has gone to ground. No sign. Her team were questioned and one of my guys was the guard. They haven’t got a clue what’s going on. Of course it’s possible that she’s already dead.”
I looked down into the dark of the pool. My reflection shimmered in the water. Mariko’s danced and twisted beside mine, the light of the Devstick between us a wavy shaft of white.
“There’s something else that we haven’t explored, but I can’t think of a way to do it without arousing suspicion.”
“What?”
“Bo Vinh and my father had friends. They must have. Some of those friends may still be alive. Sir Thomas
