UNPOL Complex. The thump-whoop-whir of a Heliocopter startled me as it passed overhead and I glanced up to see the black underside a mere ten meters above me, speeding away toward the warehouse district. Cochran has taken the bait, I thought.
I passed one of the alkys to Sir Thomas. He took it and raised his glass to mine.
“Cheers, Jonah, salute.”
“Cheers, Uncle. What are we raising our glasses to?”
“To tonight. To this moment. Victory. And to you, Jonah. I must confess I wasn’t sure you had it in you, but you’ve made me proud.”
I clinked my glass against his to forestall any more talk of what had made him so proud of me. Conscious of Mariko standing by the door, her arms loosely by her sides, I glanced across at her. Sir Thomas read my glance and nodded his bald head minutely in understanding.
“Have you worked it out yet?”
“With a name like the Cull Party, it didn’t leave much for the imagination. Yes, I think so. You’re going to cull a portion of the population using the Tag somehow.”
He turned and smiled at me. “You were always a bright boy, Jonah. Sometimes I wondered if you were too bright. Too much thought and no action. Well tonight is about action. Tonight we’re going to change the world and make it a better place. Not just a portion of the population, Jonah. That is thinking too small. No. A large portion. Six point three billion people will die at midnight tonight, and an hour from now we will own the world and everything in it.”
I looked out over Topside and, not trusting myself to say anything, slowly sipped the alky.
Cochran, sitting in the Heliocopter, hovered silently in position, two hundred meters from warehouse twenty-one. She was waiting for the SOE teams she’d called to get in position. A dark blue helo assault craft slid in beside her. She couldn’t see it and wouldn’t have noticed except for it showing up on her Devscreen. Her eyes were on the next Devscreen, showing the infra-red satimage of the three bodies in the warehouse. She thumbed her comms switch on the secure channel.
“All teams report in.”
One by one the five teams reported in. One team to cover each wall and she would lead the entry team through the roof.
She steeled herself and checked her weapon — a Glock 45 loaded with fragmentation shells.
“On my mark.” Mark? Why did that word jar with her — Mark Zumar of course. She thought back to the mind conversation at the party and shook her head. Focus.
“On my signal, three, two, one. Go.”
Stanislav and Dom had split the tasks evenly. Stanislav had taken all comms into and out of Cochran’s Devstick and her Heliocopter. It had taken him all week to set up but Cochran had no idea that she was talking to him and him alone and that the satimages she was looking at were false. Dom had taken the comms role for the four other teams that didn’t exist and Fatima had taken the UNPOL operations center pretending to be Cochran. There was no getting around the one team that they had allowed to be dispatched: Cochran would be too suspicious if there was no one on the roof with her. The other four teams were digital illusions on Cochran’s Devscreen. To all intents and purposes she was about to enter the warehouse without back up and with no one aware of what she was doing except Sir Thomas.
The explosive tape wrapped around the skylight was ready to blow. Cochran looked over to the team around the other skylight. She raised her fist, her stake for the rappelling rope in her other hand primed to fire into the roof. The signal came. Electricity cut and she pumped her fist downwards. Twin spirals of smoke blasted up and the skylight in front of her dropped in as she pulled the trigger on the stake. Heaving on the rope to make sure it was tight in the ratchet, she turned on the night vision helmet and tossed her coil of rope through the black charred edge of what remained of the skylight. She walked to the edge and dropped into the hole.
When she reached the floor and cast free of the rope in a crouch, her team spread out around her. The warehouse was empty except for two huge round disks leaning against the walls. She thought, Wha -
The light hit her as her brain computed what the disks were, a fraction too late. Lunar lights used by mining Ents on the Moon. Turn night into day. With her night vision helmet on and her wide open pupils, the light blinded her instantly. Her retinas burnt away. Blackness now, a red kind of blackness. She heard a clicking sound and turned towards it and heard the bodies of her team hit the floor. Something rolled along the floor. It rolled and rolled and then stopped. Devstick, she thought, and reached for it in its holster across her chest. The teams outside will get me, she thought.
She still hadn’t figured out that her Devstick had been hijacked.
“Sharon.”
She froze. That thought had been in her mind but it didn’t belong to her. Her grip tightened on the Glock. She thought a tentative, “Yes.”
“Sharon. Put the weapon down on the floor and put your arms out to your sides. No one knows you are here. No one’s coming to help.”
She hesitated. Perhaps if she removed the helmet her eyesight would come back.
“Sharon. If you don’t put down the weapon I will be forced to cut off the hand that is holding it. Put the gun down now.”
Cochran quickly knelt and laid the Glock on the floor and straightened, holding her arms out to her sides. She heard footsteps approaching across the floor, getting nearer. Steady footsteps. She thought, I can reach it.
“Sharon. Don’t even think about it. Just stay calm and everything will turn out all right. Do something stupid now and you’ll be dead or worse.”
She thought and heard her little voice say. Did you hear? He said or worse. Yes I heard it.
The footsteps stopped and a hand gently took hers and calmly pulled it behind her back, doing the same with the other and putting a restraint on her wrists. The hands took the helmet off. She kept her eyes open. Darkness, no more red, a deepest, darkest blue, almost black. A hand took her by her upper arm and pulled, indicating she should walk. She went, following the pull of the hand. After thirty steps, she’d counted, the hand stopped her. Two hands now held her by her upper arms and pushed down. She sat, resisting the urge to ask what was happening to her. She tried not to think.
“There is no list,” said Sir Thomas in response to my question, and looked at his watch.
Well that’s it then. Plan B, I thought, and glanced over my shoulder into the room. It had been twenty minutes since Cochran left and any moment now Shido would be getting the call. I looked at my Devstick. 11:45pm. In the fifteen minutes we’d been talking, he’d told me everything about the Tag. The Ents that made it, the toxin from South America, and the last most shocking information, that there was no list.
“How do you select then?” I said, turning to face him, one arm on the railing.
“It’s a simple algorithm based on simple parameters. Find, inject, move on to the next. When It reaches six point three billion confirmations, it will stop. Simplicity is always best.”
Sunita Shido yanked the sliding doors open and, brushing past Mariko, barged in between Sir Thomas and me, a Devstick in her hand.
“They’ve got her.”
“Calm down, my dear, calm down. Who has her and who is she?”
Shido jerked her head back and for a sec I thought she would hit Sir Thomas. So did he because he took a step backwards and his hand dropped inside his jacket.
“We have to delay. We can’t do it tonight. He has Sharon and he says he will kill her if we relay the command.”
I moved behind Shido so that I was closer to Mariko — Shido and Sir Thomas in front of me.
Sir Thomas, with one hand slid into the lapel of his jacket, said, “Who has her, Sunita? Who is he?”
She stepped backwards towards the railing and seemed to notice me for the first time. Her look hardened and she raised her hand, a finger pointing straight in my face. If I reached out with my mouth I could have bitten it.
“His brother. That’s who. It’s my satellite and we are going to cancel this ri — ”
