Brain Storm (US Edition) (30 page)

Carla was walking around the interior of the garage with wide eyes. She kept her arms tight at her sides and was keeping a certain distance between herself and everything else in the room. She backed up close to the main garage door as she sidled past a workbench where a half-dismantled telescope sighted sniper rifle was in the process of being repaired. Her foot tagged the folded tripod lying under the bench next to the old-fashioned 7.62 general purpose machine gun it was intended to be used with.

Sara finished checking the extra magazines she had claimed for the small tactical machine pistol and silenced pistol she had claimed. The magazines had been armed with bullets taken from the trays in the back of the garage. There were different trays for the differently sized rounds, some of the larger bullets were bigger
than her fingers. There were also trays for armor piercing, tracer, or explosive ammunition. Sara clicked the last bullet into place in the last clip and then slapped it home in the handle of the silenced pistol. She replaced the weapon in the shoulder holster on her left side which she had also claimed from Jaret. Most of the other equipment would be going in a small black backpack. The only other things that weren't were the tactical machine pistol that was in a shoulder holster under her right arm, four of the spare clips, two for each weapon, that went in her right and left jacket pockets, and the dagger she had in a sheath down one of her boots.

She was turning to Jaret when he looked over his shoulder at her. He closed the lid on the portable terminal and retrieved the egg-sized electronic jammer from beside it. After disconnecting it from the wires and leads it had been attached to for testing he stepped between Sara and the terminal and handed it to her.

"It checks out. There should be enough power in it to give you a jamming signal for at least an hour. That time is based on having the device on the standard settings. If you have it transmitting over a greater distance the amount of time you can have it running for will be reduced accordingly."

Sara nodded and rolled the device around in her hand. She looked Jaret in the eyes and went to move past him to the portable terminal. Jaret stepped to the side to block her path. Sara went to move past him on the other side and again he blocked her.

"Don't you trust me?"

"We both know the answer to that," Sara replied. "Are you going to make me embarrass you by putting it into words."

Sara used her free hand to move Jaret out of the way. She flipped up the lid of the terminal. Jaret tried to scramble away back to the exit but Sara caught him with a kick in the gut that stopped him in his tracks. She set the jammer down on the side of the bench next to the terminal and used both her hand to send Jaret flying into to ammunition trays in the corner. He hit in his back and fell to the floor amidst a scattering of ammunition. She stalked across towards him.

Carla appeared in her way. "What are you doing?"

Sara didn't look at the younger woman, her glare was focused on Jaret cowering in the corner. He was so shocked by her assault that he didn't even consider going for one of the many weapons that were arrayed around them.

"Look at the screen. This cowardly bastard just transmitted a message to ECSIS, the people I'm supposed to work for, telling them that we are here. He just sold us out."

Jaret spat and used his hands on the floor behind him to start pushing himself up to his feet. "The amount they're offering for the pair of you is sizeable even by my standards." He looked at Sara. "It's nothing personal, just business. If you'd taken my first offer things could have been different, depending on how well you performed."

Jaret was only just vertical when Sara slammed her right knee up into his gut. She rammed it in a total of three times until he started spitting blood out along with his saliva. She grabbed him on the back and by the hair on the back of his head and slammed the side of his skull into the back  wall of the garage. He went down in a liquid heap, twitching. Sara swept the pistol out of the holster under her arm and trained it on Jaret's head.

"No, don't." Carla was close to tears standing close by Sara.

"Give me one good reason," Sara said, her aim never wavering.

"They'll be here soon," Carla said. "We have to go."

"It won't take long to put a bullet in his head."

Carla moved so that Sara could see her face and so that she could look into her eyes. "Do this and you
will
be a murderer. You'll deserve to have them after you."

Reluctantly Sara slipped the pistol back into the holster. She looked down on Jaret. "Let's get out of here before they arrive then." She retrieved the jammer from the table then knocked the portable terminal to break on the floor. She delivered a final swift kick to the side of Jaret's head on her way out of the garage.

Chapter
Twenty-four

The advertisement being projected by the bricks and the outside of the glass on the windows of the building polarized to reduce the amount of glare being caused by it and the angle of the sun. When the polarization was at optimum to get maximum visibility for the maximum number of people it halted the process automatically. Every half an hour it would go through the same procedure until it grew dark and the advertisement would have to close down to avoid falling foul of the light pollution laws that applied in this area of the city. At the base of the building standing in front of a pair of two meter tall boots two women watched the traffic on the street in front of them thin as a city maintenance bot cleaned the road surface of the accumulated dirt and grime.

The two women hurried across the street. Sara wanted them to move quickly but without drawing attention. Jaret's betrayal would have narrowed down the area that the conspirators had to search. They would now be using Jaret's garage as the central point of the search perimeter instead of where they had last encountered them at Grosset's bungalow.

Sara now had her jacket done up to conceal the two weapons holstered at her sides under her arms. Anyone who knew what they were looking for would have been able to tell what she was hiding but most of the people they encountered wouldn't have a clue. She had the backpack containing more ammunition and the intrusion equipment from Jaret slung over a single shoulder. She had checked through the equipment in case Jaret had had the foresight to know he wouldn't be able to hold the two women and had prepared a contingency plan for that eventuality. There were no obvious tracking devices. Sara tried not to worry about whether or not any of the equipment could have been modified to include a tracer. There wasn't anything she could do about it if they had been and she couldn't hope to get inside Omnitech without it.

Getting inside Omnitech was why the two women were positioned at an information kiosk. The booth wasn't designed to fit more than one person at a time but both women were only slightly built, it wasn't exactly a comfortable fit but it was good enough. The booth was framed in transparent plastic, posters and flyers plastered around the booth cut them off from the rest of the people in the street. It was still only mid-afternoon and there were plenty of people out there who could be looking.

They could discount the listings for Omnitech for anywhere outside this city. Although the corporation was a large one with offices and facilities throughout the Confederation, for Grosset to have been working for them on any particular project and still be living here indicated that the work was being carried out reasonably local to where he lived. The trouble was that that still left a trio of Omnitech facilities within the city limits. The first was down on one of the borders between the rich and poor sectors, the second was located inside a large shopping centre, the last was the only facility which was named, it was the local Omnitech head-office.

Sara couldn't be certain that the facility Grosset had been working in would be an officially named Omnitech facility but she had to start her search somewhere. They were due some luck sooner rather than later and Sara wanted to keep a positive rather than a defeatist mentality.

Sara touched the icons on screen to gain more information about each of the facilities. It divided into three equal segments, one for each facility. Sara immediately deleted the facility located in the shopping centre from the screen, as expected it was just a small outlet advertising how good Omnitech for recruitment and sales purposes. At a first glance the facility on the left of the screen, the one located on the poor sector's border, appeared to be the most promising. It was reasonably secluded and was large enough to be used for all manner of purposes official or not. The regional headquarters on the other hand was located bang in the middle of the most densely built-up area of the city.

"We should try there first," Carla spoke up pointing to the right half of the screen.

"I don't think so," Sara said. "This looks like our best bet. It's out of the way, they'd have enough privacy to do whatever they wanted without anyone scrutinizing them too closely."

Carla shook her head. "No, it's more likely to be here."

Sara hesitated before speaking again. "Is this another one of your miraculous guesses? Because I don't think we should rush into anything rashly based just on that."

"It isn't just that, although my instincts do say that's where we should go for answers. Read through the rest of the text. That other factory has large numbers of people working there drawn from the
neighboring poor sector. They manufacture mechs and bots there's nothing there to indicate medical research."

"If the research is unofficial it stands to reason that the fact that medical research of any kind is going on could also be unofficial."

"I get that but why would someone qualified in the areas Karl was qualified in be working in that kind of manufacturing plant. They had to consider the possibility that someone would notice where he was travelling to work. The regional HQ has work going on there that relates to all of Omnitech's major interests, Karl going in there regularly wouldn't arouse any suspicion. Besides the headquarters has sections that are open to the public and it’s closest so we should check that out first."

Sara had to hand it to her, they were all valid points. There was also the fact that the place they had escaped from had been located underground in the main rich area of the city. Maybe Grosset had been working somewhere underneath the regional headquarters. Even her unofficial division of ECSIS had been under the city. Also if there was anything going on there would be someone in that building who knew about it and who had records.

"Okay, we'll check there first." It would be a risk but they weren't going to get themselves out of this without taking a few risks.

Sara searched through a selection of other nearby businesses to cloud the fact that she had been looking exclusively for information on Omnitech. She doubted that they would be able to track the records from the information points and link them to her in anything less than a few days if at all. She had used it once while on an operation for the division and it had seemed to take her an eternity to build up a pattern and track her target through his access. All the same it was better to be safe than sorry.

They moved out into the throng once more. As the afternoon progressed into evening, and people headed home from work, the crowd would start thinning, until it filled out again with people heading out for the night. They passed a couple coming out of a fast-food restaurant and the greasy smell that wafted out of the doorway and that clung to them reminded Sara that she and Carla hadn't had anything to eat or drink in quite a while. There simply hadn't been the time to find anything, now that they had the time they couldn't get anything because neither of them had any money on them. Sara would have to rectify that problem.

"Wait over here." She guided Carla into another information booth so that she could wait around without drawing attention.

"Where are you going?" Carla asked holding onto Sara's sleeve so that she couldn't leave her.

"I'll just be a minute, I'm going to get us something to eat. I'll be right back, I promise."

Carla studied her face and then nodded her head as she released her sleeve.

Sara was aware that what she was about to do could expose her. Even if the people who were surrounding her didn't
recognize her outright as a wanted woman if any of them saw what she was about to do they would alert the police to her presence. Finding somebody who was carrying cash wouldn't be too difficult. As much as charge cards had made carrying hard currency needless to buy most items you could think of, there were still the street vendors who either didn't have the equipment to carry out a transaction using a card or who their customers didn't trust sufficiently to hand their cards over to. All Sara had to do was hang around on a corner near one of those vendors and choose her target.

Even though her mind should have been fully on the task of assessing and grading the people around her in search of a promising target her mind kept going back to the events of earlier in the day. As much as she was loath to admit it, even to herself, she had been ready to kill Jaret for selling them out. If Carla hadn't intervened Jaret would be a corpse and Sara would be a murderer.
She had always prided herself on not killing without reason. She had killed plenty of times in self-defense, defense of others, or because an operation demanded it, but she had never done so for no other reason than because she was angry. The thought that if somebody aggravated  her, if they pushed her just that little bit too far, that she would be prepared to end their life because of it scared the hell out of her. She had always known that her personal code of morality was slightly skewed in comparison with most people’s but she had never realized just how far out of whack it had become. She wondered how far removed from normality she would get if she carried on doing this for as long as some of the agents the division, she had only been working there for a little over two years they had agents who had been active and doing this stuff for twenty years or more.