OK?”
Marty laughed. “It’s great to see you. How are you guys holding it together?”
Stanislav sat down and his face loomed large in the screen as he leaned forward nearer the camera. “Not good, but OK.”
His comment made Marty feel guilty. It was irrational she knew but they were her team and they were struggling without her. She couldn’t do anything about that now but made a mental reminder to try to stay in touch with them as much as the chaos to come would allow.
“What’s Cochran got you guys tracing?”
“We’re still on the runner. We got given other stuff after you left but then when his letter came out she put us back on him.”
“OK, here’s what I need.” Stanislav had leaned back from the camera and it looked like he was watching something else as he wasn’t looking at her. “Stanislav?”
“Yeah, sorry, just checking to see that nothing is on to our chat here, but we’re cool. OK go ahead.”
“Has Cochran got you guys looking for me?”
“No, but she did order us to report any contact from you on pain of instant containment of aiding and abetting a fugitive if we didn’t.” He grinned at her, “Looks like I’m back in the crime business.”
“No, you’re not. Very much the opposite. OK then, what I need you to do is build an ironclad story around finding my location and then report that location to Cochran. Build up some trace around it and be aware that with the embarrassments the runner and I have given her lately, she will want to be absolutely sure that you are right. So be sure. Can you do that?”
“Yeah.” Stanislav put on his bored expression — his ‘this is too easy’ look.
“When she is ready to come and get me, let me know. Now, we need to set up a link between us. Can I leave that with you. It must be secure and easy to check.”
“Utopia’s best. I’ll set up a dead drop and message you from there.”
“That sounds fine. I’ll leave my hooks in their member base then and wait for your message. There’s one more thing and this is the skillful part. You have to wait for my signal before you get Cochran to make her move on me. You’ll only have a very small window, perhaps no more than fifteen or twenty mins to convince her to move.” Stanislav straightened from his slouch and flashed her a quick, cocky grin.
“Na- na- na- no problem.”
“All right then. I have to go. Give my love to Fatima and Dom and take care of each other and be very careful. OK? Cochran is a very dangerous person.”
Stanislav grinned at her again, and a twinge of conscience hit the pit of her stomach. He’s so young. Is it right for me to do this? Put him in this danger? The stakes are so high that the end justifies the means. Oh boy, what a slippery slope this is, she thought. His image disappeared from her Devscreen and she placed her palm where his face had been, just for a sec. She coughed and cleared her throat.
Sitting in the room next door, Gabriel heard the murmur of Marty talking as background noise. It was there but he didn’t pay it any attention. He was focused on his code. A Dev runs on code. The code he was writing had to be small, very small, and therefore it had to be elegant. The idea for hiding the code was simple. Make it very small. The problem with that is that the code has to do a lot. It has to find and destroy the list. Failing that it has to destroy the databases holding the PUI records of all humans. He also needed to figure out a way to get it into Sir Thomas’s Dev without any alarms going off.
A borrower, he thought. That’s what it can be. I can string together a sequence that when activated borrows the code from other code in the Dev. Then it’s just a wait for start sequence code and a sequence code. That would keep it small.
He reclined in the Siteazy and using both hands brushed his hair back and sucked in a long breath. And held it. He closed his eyes and cast thoughts aside as they came. Clearing his mind. He pictured himself with an old fashioned broom sweeping dry leaves off a bare cement floor. Slowly, he exhaled through his nose. More thoughts snuck in. The broom went back and forth, back and forth. Let it go. He opened his eyes and stretched his fingers onto the input tablet in front of him. He began to type.
Mariko lay on the molded plastic sleeper. The room that she was in was two meters long and three wide. It was colored white. It reminded her of the White Room in UNPOL. She’d had a tour when that room was first built. This room had none of the special effects of the White Room but it was still a long time. All she knew was that she had been stupid. How could she not have been more aware? Dumb. She suspected that it must have been Sir Thomas who had grabbed her but she didn’t know. She hadn’t seen anyone. She idly wondered how long it would take for her to go insane if she was stuck in here for a long time. Don’t think like that. Basic crisis training, stay positive and look for a solution. She assumed she was being watched. The meals gave some clue — she knew from her biological clock when she was hungry but as they had drugged the food she had no real idea of time.
She had expected to be questioned. But it never happened. A positive sign, she thought, and fought against the despair that the reason they didn’t need to question her was because she had been eliminated. Pushed into a hole and forgotten. No, they still feed you. Stay positive and in control of yourself. She hadn’t said anything. Hadn’t asked why she was being kept captive. She was following training. Do not provide any unnecessary information unless you really have to. Asking why she was here was irrelevant.
She’d adopted her ‘hard face’ for the benefit of whoever might be watching, and tried not to think about Jonah and how he would be feeling with her gone. She knew he would blame himself for not being able to protect her. She knew that and smiled. Him protect her — it was a funny thought that distracted her from her surroundings for a sec. She felt guilty for not being there to protect him. For exposing him to the dangers of her captivity. Don’t. Pointless exercise. Guilt is negative. Use the time you have.
She closed her eyes to the light in the room and continued to write the poem she had been working on. It was in her head. She carefully thought of each new word before adding it to the ones already there. By her count she’d spent about three hours on the last word and she smiled again. It had been worth it. Torpor. Euphoria in Torpor. A whole new line to think about. The luxury of having an entire day to think of a single word to describe something. Captivity. Bring it on.
Maloo had left Melbourne traveling in the same Levtube but leaving fifteen mins before Jonah’s. He shifted his bulk on the seat and stared at the little white dot progressing its way down a line of connected white dots. He formed an image in his mind. A future bark painting or maybe rock. Yeah, rock.
Maloo was going to Bangkok to set up the Wigley kill. Jonah would be the one to do it but Maloo would prepare the ground. He shifted the backpack containing his clothes to a more comfortable position on his lap and leant his elbows on top, his chin cupped in his hands. His massive shoulders and the look on his face gave him the appearance of a bull about to charge. Yet he hated violence in all of its aspects. It was the only thing he did hate.
A while later, he took a hand off the backpack and felt in the pocket of his bottom outers. The diamonds were still there. All two million creds’ worth. Easily enough to get what he needed in Bangkok and pay so well that no one would say a thing for fear of losing the rich life ahead of them. He glanced around the Lev. None of the other five passengers had noticed his surreptitious feel of the stones.
The painting continued to develop in his mind. Connected white dots, large to small diameter. Two lines next to each other. A white rectangle. A sorry business, he thought in Waalpiri, using the term they use for a funeral. To represent six billion, the stars in the sky as people. He wondered how this painting would unfold.
Cochran landed her new Bell 400 VTOL (Vertical Take Off and Landing) Turbo-charged Heliocopter on the lawn in front of the SingCom residence. The copter’s blades retracted with a whir and clunk into the space behind the pilot’s seat where she sat. She exhaled steadily and softly. Red-lining it all the way in, in a straight line, she’d covered the distance from UNPOL in 1:59 min. Her mind flicked back to Jonah getting into the Lev in Melbourne. An intuitive sense of unease rose in her gut. Something was wrong with him being out of sight for three days with Annika Bardsdale.
She climbed out of the angular nose of the Bell’s cockpit and stood beside the machine. The warm New Singapore night quiet on the dark lawn. Tomorrow, no today, she thought with a glance at her Devstick — it’s 2:18am — I’ll get the little fat Arab girl, Fatima, to run a scenario on Bardsdale and Jonah. Thinking of Fatima made
