Freedom Incorporated (29 page)

“
You don’t
have to tell me this if you don’t want to,” Jen said gently,
without the earlier snappiness in her voice.

“
Yes.” He
forced a smile. “I think I do. You deserve to know how I ended up
working for the devil.” The jest was too close to the mark to
elicit a smile from either of them. “I suddenly found myself
without a job, nothing to do, and far too much time to think about
what’d happened.”

Jen was curious to know
what had reduced such a proud man to this, but she dared not ask.
She didn’t believe she had the right to an answer, and besides, she
thought she might prefer never to know.

“
I was a good
cop,” Dan said, his eyes drifting out of focus. “I never took
bribes, although plenty of people offered them.” He grunted. “I
never wanted to do anything else.”

Jen waited in
silence.

“
I accepted
UniForce’s standing offer because I needed something to take my
mind
off
my
problems.” Dan felt profoundly depressed and his confession wasn’t
helping. He distantly wondered why the Zyclone wasn’t
prop
ping
his mood
above a lethargic flat-line. “It’s intense work, it keeps me
occupied and keeps my mind busy.”

Dan was sitting in the
single-seater and Jen leant forward to understandingly touch his
forearm.

The warmth of
her touch surprised him
.
I
t scalded his skin and he nearly
flinched away until he realised it was pleasurable. He focussed on
her fingers. Her hands looked like Katherine’s and he had to
suffocate a sigh.

Just as Jen’s warmth had
startled Dan, the chill of his skin had startled her. It felt
dead.

“
You don’t
need to stay at UniForce, do you?” Jen asked in a low voice,
wondering whether Dan was beyond salvation.

“
I suppose
not, but I can’t think of anything else to do. I couldn’t return to
the nine to five slog, I’m not cut out for it.” He faked a smile.
“That probably sounds lame, eh?”

She shook her head. “No,
not lame.” The thought of spending 30 years working for a
multinational sent a spasm of revulsion through Jen’s body. “I’m
not sure I’m cut out for it either. I admire people who can do it
though.”

“
Maybe if
I-”

“
Hey you
guys!” Cookie’s shrill voice sliced through the air and severed
their touch, leaving them with a spark of remorse and a pang of
guilt.

“
What?” Jen
vaulted the couch and resumed in her usual position next to his
chair, gazing at the monitor. Dan remained seated and wondered why
they bothered, nothing on that screen made sense to him and he was
tired of pretending it did. He watched from the relative comfort of
the single-seater.

“
I found your
record.” Something in Cookie’s tone forewarned that it wasn’t all
joyous news. “And this is your current status field.”

“
And?” Jen
prompted impatiently.

“
They’re using
encryption that I
can’t
reproduce from here. If we change any of the data, we’ll trip
an alarm. They already know we’re sniffing their doorstep but
modifying anything in the database would totally give us
away
. They might even discover where we
are
.”

“
You mean
track us here?”

“
Right.”
Cookie pouted, wondering what they’d want him to do
next.

“
There’s no
way around it?” Jen asked despondently.

“
Not unless
you get me a copy of their front end. Maybe then I could reverse
engineer it and forge a seal, but that’s a very big
maybe
.” He sighed
resignedly. “They’ve protected all the keys. There’s absolutely no
way we can change that field from here. At least, not unless we
give ourselves away… and that would kinda negate the point,
wouldn’t it?”

“
Hmm.” Jen
frowned. “Maybe we should go for plan-B.”

“
What’s
plan-B?” Samantha didn’t like the tone of Jen’s voice, it
frightened her.

“
We order you
all a new identity and you disappear,” Dan answered from the
corner. “We’ll set you up with a new life.”

“
Or I turn
myself over to UniForce,” Jen said, providing her teammates with an
alternative. She was willing to sacrifice herself for their
wellbeing if that’s what they voted.

“
No.” Samantha
flatly refused.

“
Hang on a
minute,” Cookie said. “I’ve got another idea.”

Something
tingled on the edge of Dan’s mind and the hairs on the back of his
neck stood upright. And he knew:
Something’s wrong.

*

He fawned at
the glorious orb, basking in the light and sulphurous fumes that
billowed from its gluey skin.
Give me the
sign,
he urged.
I
need it now… give me the sign.
The Raven was
on his knees, begging for a taste of freedom, even if it were
temporary.

The vibration buzzing at
his temples was nearly unbearable and, as usual, it spread to his
back teeth. Then the omen said what the Raven wanted to hear before
fading to black with a final splutter of jelly. The Raven recovered
quickly and got to his feet, flexing his fingers around his Redback
before trekking stealthily to Jennifer Cameron’s
apartment.

*

“
We’re out of
time.” Dan drew the curtain back an inch to get a better look
outside. “We can’t wait – he’s coming now.”

“
How do you
know?” Jen wished she knew what to do, she wished she had a
weapon.

“
I just do,”
Dan snapped. “Cookie! Forget whatever you’re doing, can you find
where they store their mail?”

He nodded. “Yeah man,
it’s right here.”

“
Can you find
a mailbox for Roche? Michele Roche?” Dan never took his eyes from
the window. The Raven was stalking them; he could feel
it.

The tapping of keys
continued for lengthy seconds while Cookie muttered and wove his
programs through the network. On top of finding the mailbox, he
also had to evade the system administrator who was attempting to
uproot him. He doubted the administrator yet knew he’d breached the
final defence and gained proper access to the network – he’d been
very careful to mask his tracks. But the more he tinkered, the
greater the risk that the administrator would notice him and sever
his connection.

“
Okay, here we
go. Roche, Michele. What do you want with her?”

“
She’s the
bounty co-ordinator for UniForce,” Dan said succinctly.

How does he
know that?
Samantha and Cookie both
wondered. Their curiosity culminated in a questioning look at Jen,
who looked away, worried that the answer was scrawled across her
face.

“
Can you write
an e-mail from her account?” Dan was making it up as he went along,
half expecting the Raven to crash through the front door at any
moment. He’d prepared for that contingency, he knew precisely where
to shoot for his .45 calibre rounds to puncture the wall and riddle
the intruder. Standing by the balcony window was smarter than
guarding the door; he had better visibility where he
was.

“
I think I can
arrange that,” Cookie added a few seconds later. “What do you want
to say?”

Dan paused,
trying to remember the e-mails he’d received from Michele Roche and
copy
her
distinctive style. “Hi Raven.”

Cookie took the dictation
in his stride, typing it around his endless prop-
the-file-and-evade-detection parade.

“
Their’s,” Dan
spelt it for him, “T-h-e-i-r-apostrophe-s” – he needed to replicate
Roche’s mistakes to make it look genuine – “a new assingment I want
you too do 4 me.”

Samantha arched an
eyebrow. “You realise that’s not how you spell-”

“
I know,” Dan
replied before resuming his dictation. “This has the highest
priority. I need u to start on this rite away.” Dan’s words were
slow and deliberate. “This is contract I’m offering to u alone,
because of the good stuff u done.”

Samantha gave
him a quizzical look.
No co-ordinator
writes that poorly,
she thought.

Every nerve in Dan’s body
tingled with dread and he scoured the scene from the balcony window
with ever-increasing ferocity.

*

The Raven skirted the
rat-infested townhouse, the only abandoned building in the suburb.
A plastic sign proudly heralded the beginning of a new development
on the highly prized block. In a year, the two-story weatherboard
Queenslander would live only in memories and aging photographs,
reduced to rouble and rebuilt as a multi-million dollar investment
that did nothing to bridge the housing disparity between rich and
poor.

The Raven’s
multiprocessing mind was feeding off no fewer than 60 information
streams, digesting the data and presenting him with the best
approach. His black clothing melded perfectly with the shadows and
he passed as just another puff of breeze. The target was
tantalisingly close.
Targets,
he corrected himself.
Now there are two.
Jennifer Margaret Cameron and Dan Sutherland were standing
with one foot firmly planted in the grave.

An alarm beckoned him to
water, screaming for him to appease his body’s need for fluids. It
made him hesitate and he recalculated his success quotient,
figuring he was operating at a bleak 72 percent of optimum physical
capacity. Only water and rest could rectify the problem.

Regardless, he
pressed on, deciding upon a 20 percent safety margin. Fear wasn’t
about to degrade his self-evaluation and he
knew
he could take Dan out if he could
just surprise him. He calculated the best approach to his targets
was via a roof-access hatch at the front. He would position himself
above the living room, step onto the insulation batts, fall through
the jip-rock ceiling in a perfect firing position, and shoot them
all before they understood that death was raining from above. The
house plans he’d retrieved from the Tweed Shire Council’s database
depicted meagre security for Jennifer Cameron’s building and he’d
previously stored the necessary information to thwart such a
primitive alarm.

He approached on light
feet, carefully selecting every step and nimbly avoiding the
pitfalls that less experienced hunters would fail to
discern.

Standing in front of the
security screen, he eyed the electronic lock and inwardly laughed
at how easy it was going to be. From deep within the wraith-like
folds of his coat, he withdrew a screwdriver set and multi-charge
Pulse Stick. With practiced precision, he prised the cover off the
lock and selected a 12-volt pulse at 0.5 amps, giving the Pulse
Stick a total power of 6 watts. He carefully applied the
pencil-like device to the switching circuit and pulled the trigger,
gratified to see the ‘armed’ LED flicker out.

An evil grin licked the
Raven’s face when he snuck inside, splendidly pleased with his
progress.

Death doesn’t
knock.

*

“
I said I
don’t know!” Dan was getting irritated by the barrage of questions,
especially now that time had run out.

“
A criminal
maybe?” Samantha offered helpfully.

Dan shook his head. “No,
we’d be signing the death warrant of anybody we mention – that is
if he falls for it.”

Jen’s mind
traced through the list of possibilities.
How do we get rid of him?
She couldn’t
think of anything other than Dan’s proposal.
But who’s so evil I’d want to set a crazed cyborg on
them?

“
Are you sure
it’ll look authentic coming from Michele Roche’s
account?”

Cookie nodded, bristling
at having his work questioned. “Yes. It’ll appear to originate from
her computer. It will have an unusual time-stamp.” He checked his
watch and added, “Unless she usually gets to work at six in the
morning. But we can’t do anything about that. It’ll have all the
correct encoding and encryption applied, we are writing this from
inside the UniForce network, remember?”

“
Good.” Dan’s
left calf cramped from the tension. “Look in her address book for a
contact called ‘the Raven’.”

Cookie swivelled in his
chair to face the computer again, his breathing rapid and shallow.
“Okay, got it. Just give me the command and this’ll shoot strait to
the Raven.”

“
Now if we
could just
finish
the message…” Jen piped in, cringing at her pessimistic
sarcasm.

The silence in the room
was so profound it seemed to stretch to infinity, and
beyond.

“
Ah.” Dan
snapped his fingers. “I have an idea.”

“
Fire away,
man. My fingers are at your service.”

“
Write: It’s
worth a million Credits if you accept the assignment
immediately
.” Dan felt an
ill-ease crawl across his skin. He knew the Raven was close.
And he’s not coming through the
balcony.
He raised his Colt, nerves wound
tight enough to snap at anything.
And now
for the target…
“The order has been
warranted for…” He went to the keyboard and typed the name in
himself – index finger after index finger – before quickly clicking
the icon marked ‘send’.