Brain Storm (US Edition) (9 page)

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Carla just stood there and let the tears and water wash over her. They hadn't provided any cleaning gel or soap and nor would Carla have hurried to use it even if they had. She couldn't stop them watching her but she wasn't going to perform for their pleasure. Apparently the guards had realized that she wasn't going to be moving any time soon to give them a better view.

"Hey bitch turn around for us," the darker man said. "You aren't shy are you?"

Both he and his companion laughed at that. Carla didn't move.

"He asked you a question," the ginger one said. "If you ignore us we might have to get nasty."

Her tears came on faster now but Carla ignored the threats and stayed where she was. Surely whoever was in charge wouldn't let them do anything to really hurt her. A little embarrassment or humiliation might be allowed but not anything more. Please nothing more.

"Playing hard to get then. Or maybe you like it rough."

Both men laughed again and the sound burrowed deep inside Carla's mind and crawled underneath her skin.

"Don't touch me." It was meant to sound defiant, but whatever she intended it came out in a frightened squeak.

The laughter got louder. "We don't have to lay a finger on you to get what we want."

There was a
moment’s hesitation and then a crackle. There was a flash of blinding light and a burst of static exploded in her head. She felt hot and itching and painful. She blinked her eyes to try and get her vision back but multicolored blobs of light swam all around her.

Her sense of balance returned first out of her senses and she
realized she was lying on the floor. Then she reclaimed her sense of touch and realized she was twitching and had no control over her limbs. The soles of her feet burned and she thought she might have banged her head. Her control returned quite quickly along with her sight. The two men were standing over getting a good look at her body which was on full view. The ginger one held his tazer staff with the pronged end touching the shallow pool of water in the base of the cubicle.

"That was a minimal setting anything more in that environment would have killed you." The dark one pulled a rag from beside the shower cubicle and dropped it on top of her.

"We've seen everything you have to show us so there's no need for you to play about conserving your modesty while you get dried. Just do it as quickly as possible and put this on."

A baggy orange prison all in one was dropped just outside the cubicle. Carla stood and ran the rag over her quickly just as a cursory effort to remove the moisture. Then, still sodden, she climbed into the overalls eager to get her body back under cover.

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Sara Fox waited as the shower of hot water, she liked her
showers just the right side of scalding, slowed and gave ways to jets of warm, drying air. When the cycle finished she was clean and dry, refreshed. She started pulling the spare set of clothes out of the small cupboard and stepped into the underwear.

She was just pulling a tight sweater over her head when the internal communications screen built into the side wall of her office chimed to let her know that she was wanted. Sara finished adjusting the sweater, pulling it down at her waist and checking that the neck was straight, as she stepped over and hit the button to let the transmission continue. She was just pulling the last strands of her frizzy red hair out of the sweater when the screen came alive.

"We are ready for your debrief, agent Fox. Report to room 132 level negative twelve in five minutes."

They didn't wait for her to respond, the communication simply came to an abrupt end and the screen went back into standby mode.

On her way out of the office Sara grabbed a comb from the drawer of her desk. She would have to do what she could with her hair on the short journey to the debrief. If she didn't the frizzyness caused by letting it be dried in the shower cycle would drive her mad.

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The debrief wasn't overly long. It was just about average, but as usual the seemingly endless going over of every minor detail over and over again soon started to wear on Sara's patience. She kept her composure through years of having to deal with these sorts of things. The debrief itself was entirely routine and the only surprise for Sara was one of omission. No mention was made of the events after the operation was concluded that Sara had also had a hand in.

While it wasn't obviously connected to her operation she had thought that a security mech going crazy and trying to kill an innocent civilian that ended up killing many more civilians and wounding numerous members of the security forces would have warranted attention. Even if they didn't expect Sara to be able to offer any wonderful insights into what went wrong they should still have questioned her   about it, to give them as much information as possible so that they would stand a chance of discovering what had happened.

As she rode the elevator back up to the fourth level where her office was located Sara kept trying to tell herself to let it go. The fact that they hadn't questioned her about that incident had meant that she could get out of there that much sooner. But the fact that they hadn't brought it up had robbed her of the chance to ask them what they thought had happened. They probably wouldn't have given her the information outright but she would have been able to assess what they were thinking based on the questions they asked and the information they were most interested in seeing if she could provide.

The elevator doors opened and Sara stepped out into the corridor. It was entirely functional as everything else in this division of ECSIS with no expense wasted on creating a comfortable atmosphere. There were no potted plants or pictures
anywhere in the division unless they were in private offices brought in by those who worked in them. The floor of the corridor was plain concrete, no carpet or other covering. The budget only allowed for carpets inside the offices and even then they were thin things.

Lighting was provided by white strip lights in the ceiling. Those lights combined with the cream paint that covered the walls lent the whole place a sterile atmosphere. Because they were underground here their air was provided by a ventilation system that sucked air out of the office building above, drawing air into vents that the workers up there thought provided them with air-conditioning  and down to them out through grills high up on the walls. The hum of the fans drawing air down and pushing it out through the grills was a constant low level drone that was rapidly tuned out by anyone working down there.

The walls along either side of the corridor were lined with doors to offices. Only a rectangular plaque located in the middle of the door containing a number and a name provided any distinction between one door and another. A middle-aged man carrying a stack of files emerged from one door up ahead and they passed in the corridor without exchanging a word or even a nod of acknowledgement. Sara had never bothered with getting to know any of the other agents she worked with in a personal capacity. It just wasn't the done thing. In this type of work where you could be called upon to do any number of unpleasant things with or to any number of people it was easier just to maintain a professional detachment from the people you worked with.

Building close friendships with other agents or other personnel within the service was also frowned upon by those in charge. It wasn't forbidden but almost as good as. Romantic attachments
were
expressly forbidden. That didn't mean agents were prohibited from making friends or falling in love, so long as they did it with people outside the service. This led to another set of problems for some people though, because they couldn't tell their friends and loved ones what they did for a living some people felt they were living a lie. The service's response to any such grievance was simple they gave agents three options; they could either put up with living a lie, put up with living a lonely life, or the service would take care of the problem which meant either terminating the agent in question or those that they had become close to.

For a mostly solitary individual like Sara keeping to herself and living with acquaintances instead of friends had never proved too much of a problem. Orphaned at an early age when her parents were killed in an attack by  terrorists, or dissidents as they were called in those days, Sara had become very self-reliant. She knew that she was the only one that she could fully rely on not to let her down. She had bounced around the system from care home to care home until when she was still in her teens she had found her way into government training. Her talents had been spotted quickly and she had found her way here.

Sara went back into her office and flopped down into the seat behind her computer terminal. What bothered her most about not knowing what had gone on in the incident with the security mech was that she did not know if the young woman she had rescued after the mech targeted her was doing all right. She didn't usually need such follow up information, once their life’s path had turned away from the direction of Sara's path she was ordinarily happy to go on as if that person had never existed. But there was something different about this one somehow.

Sara activated her computer terminal and entered her password, Christine, it had been her mother's name. To get further access to the ECSIS system and
database, rather than the general functions and net access available from any terminal, she had to enter her personal ECSIS identification number and authorization code. Entering those codes gave Sara access to the full ECSIS database, the database used by the official division of ECSIS headquartered above ground, and what they thought was the only one, as well as the database maintained by the unofficial division. She started a search for any information collected about any event in the general area of the memorial park and gave the time index for the conclusion of her operation.

The system would conduct its search and collect her anything that matched the parameters of her search generally so that if there was a discrepancy of up to half an hour either side of her time or a couple of square
kilometers outside her target area the information would still be collected and forwarded to her. The settings could be altered to narrow a search if one knew the exact time and location or widened if the information was sketchier. Sara didn't bother extending her search to include any of the databases of the police or other security forces that had been present. If ECSIS didn't have the information she was after nobody would.

She leaned back in her chair as the terminal conducted the search. She tilted her head back so that it rested in the gap at the top of her shoulders to stretch her back. She extended her arms up to the ceiling to stretch out further. She rolled her shoulders and her muscles rippled and shifted of their own accord under her skin as they unknotted themselves.

The terminal chimed once to indicate that the search had been concluded. Sara used the tracking ball at the side of the keyboard to scroll through the reports. The first few dozen were all concerned exclusively with the hostage situation and bomb threat at the statue, there was a transcript of Sara's debrief already filed on the database, Sara was impressed with whoever had the job of entering information onto the system.

She ignored all of those files and found a grand total of three reports that dealt with anything other than the situation at the statue. The first was an official ECSIS report compiled by the boys upstairs that was little more than a statement of the problem with the security mech. Sara skimmed through the report. There was no indication that they had any idea why the mech had gone crazy the only speculation was that it was some sort of random systems failure. There was no mention in the report of the mech having targeted any specific individual just that civilians had
been killed. The final body count was thirty-two dead civilians and twenty-eight civilian wounded, there were also eighteen wounded officers. Sara didn't think there was anything particularly wrong with the report failing to mention the woman, it had all happened very fast and the ECSIS officer who filed the report could have been too far from the centre of the action to get a true idea of what went down. The second of the three reports was similar to the first again with no mention of the mech targeting the woman for execution before the killing spree.

The third report came from Sara's division of ECSIS and had in fact been compiled by her supervisor, Marc Ash. His preliminary report consisted mainly of details concerning the assault on the statue and also a little about the situation with the mech. He outlined how one of his agents had recklessly endangered herself during the debacle to remove a civilian from the area. He went on to describe how he had used an electromagnetic pulse grenade to deactivate the mech. Ash's report also contained other references to the woman Sara had rescued. He noted that the mech had identified her as a criminal threat but an unidentified  malfunction had caused it to go after her as a priority one threat rather than the threat she should have been classified as for her crime. Sara skipped past his speculations on what could have caused the malfunction to get at the details of the crimes the woman was wanted for.

Sara blinked her eyes and read through the details again. It was there in front of her as plain as day but Sara knew for a fact that what was on the screen couldn't be true. She had been there so she knew that this was a lie. Ash had reported that the woman had been identified as a member of the CDM who had escaped the statue in the moments before the full teams moved in. Apparently there was evidence that she had killed a hostage inside the statue.