Freedom Incorporated (8 page)

The ugly fact
was, there was very little he could do. UniForce wasn’t the type of
corporation he could accuse of double-dealing.
No.
He shook his head. Dan needed
proof before he could confront anybody with anything.

He arched an
eyebrow and his recently ignited resentment flared up. He wouldn’t
mind if it was anybody else.
But that
fucker’s dangerous.
He hated the Raven and
hated running into him. Periodically crossing paths with the Raven
had convinced Dan
to
switch to exclusive lists in the first place.

If I just had
proof.
He wondered if it would be enough to
prove the Raven
took
a bounty
from Dan’s
list
. He knew it wasn’t. UniForce was
unlikely to find such evidence in their database. Dan
scowled.

So I do
nothing.
It irked him, but he had no
option
.
E
ither he quit bounty hunting, or he
play
ed
according to
the rules UniForce put on the table.

*

Tuesday, September 14,
2066

UniForce
Headquarters

18:20 San Francisco,
USA

Jackie watched the rain
trickle down her window.

It streamed in
rivulets across the glass, sliding one way and then the other in
its journey to…
Where?
She supposed the small rivulets would merge with larger
streams and then flow into the torrent-choked stormwater drains and
finally out into the bay.
Mergers.
Her ensuing smile pulled her
cosmetically altered skin tightly across her bones, giving her a
cheaply manufactured mannequin look. She felt the stretch in her
cheeks and uttered one of her favourite epithets at the surgeon
who’d done the damage.
Surgeon?
Her mind used the term
loosely.

She clenched her jaw –
she looked more human that way, and she knew it. So the surgical
disaster had snuffed her infrequent smiles. Now she just looked
stern, something she didn’t mind in the least. Her rich chocolate
hair was also fake, though a good enough forgery to look authentic.
Nobody had yet guessed that she used three different shades of
brown to achieve the natural look. Certainly nobody had guessed she
was turning grey.

Her skin was
brown and leathery, the product of extensive cosmetic surgery and
too many hours wasted in a tanning bed. Sunshine was for the hoi
polloi. Executives used tanning salons – safer, faster, better –
for 1,000 Credits an hour. And the salons threw in free
dermal-hydration treatment. But for all that, her teeth were white,
despite her daily regime of seven cups of coffee. And her eyes
sp
a
rkl
ed
intensely
blue – bluer than even contact lenses could make them. Ironically,
her irises were real, though nobody believed it.

Her black suit
bulged in places it oughtn’t and lacked volume in places
she
would’ve
preferred it. She knew she was fighting a losing battle, but
she wasn’t yet ready to give in and rigidly stuck to her routine in
the gym. Absently she felt her bicep; it felt strong under the
flabby padding. But, infuriatingly, the firmness of the muscle
tended to highlight the ocean of blubber on top. She grunted
disgustedly and shifted her thoughts back out the
window.

San Francisco
looked beautiful in the twilight, no matter what any of the others
said. But she wasn’t ready to pack up and head home yet, the day
had only just begun to get interesting. Besides, there was
depressingly little for her to go home to
–
her cute little mixed-breed dog,
Sasha, and
the mounting
pile of dishes. She needed a technician to
fix her
dishwasher and made a mental
note to call one.

Her buzzer honked and the
tiny strobe light attached to the communication panel started to
flash. She decided it would have to go; the damn thing gave her a
headache whenever it went off.

“
Yes?” She
snapped irritably.

“
Paul
Savage here to see you.” Joanne’s
voice sounded clear through the latest in speaker
technology.
They’ve gone too far this
time,
Jackie thought, annoyed that she
couldn’t pin down the source of the sound. It made everything sound
larger than life, almost as though the voices came from inside her
head.

“
Send him in.”
Jackie pushed back from her desk with a sigh and waited, less than
patiently.

Her massive
wooden doors, intricately carved with Michelangelo’s cherubs, swung
ponderously inward and
Paul
Savage shuffled into the room.
She’d never met a man with a weaker spine
or
less direction in life. She noted,
with irritation, that he didn’t bother to hide his grey hair. And
he’d clearly given up fighting the spare tyre sagging around his
middle.
It’s easy for
men.
She hated it, but it was still true.
Even in the socially conscious ‘60s, women had be beautiful while
men could let themselves go. Seven decades of social commentators
hadn’t yet raised enough public awareness of what her favourite
author had called The Beauty Myth.
Typical,
Jackie thought.
The public is so stupid.

“
Yes?” She
tried to pre-empt his rambling greeting.

“
Uh – yes. Uh…
hello, Jackie.”

She’d obviously
failed.

“
I have some…
things that I’d like you to, uh, take a look at. Uh, if you
wouldn’t mind?”

Jackie fought the urge to
sigh and stifled it into a semi-normal breath. “What is
it?”

Paul ambled to her desk,
zigzagging inefficiently. Inefficiency tended to be his
hallmark.

He looks
drunk.
Jackie wondered whether he’d spent
the day in a bar and tested the air with her nose, trying to
detect
alcohol on his
breath.

Paul
often
look
ed
drunk,
though he partook in alcoholic beverages strictly after work and
restrained himself to a glass of wine with dinner. He was once a
real boozer until the doctors warned him that what was left of his
pathetic balance would dissolve entirely if he kept it up. The
alcohol was sustaining a strain of bacteria that feasted on
something in his inner ear. They’d tried antibiotics with little
success; it was one of the resistant strains. Experts blamed the
prevalence of antibacterial products and over-prescription of
antibiotics in the late twentieth century. The practice had lasted
until the ‘30s when antibiotics finally lost their kick. Paul
didn’t really have anyone to blame but himself, or society’s
selfish ways. After all, he’d used antibacterial soap,
antibacterial dishwashing liquid and antibacterial household
cleaners just like everybody else. And so the bacteria in
Paul
Savage’s head
continued to eat, and he grew less steady on his feet by the
day.

He placed a thin manila
folder on Jackie’s desk. “It’s for the, uh, shareholder
meeting.”

Jackie didn’t take her
eyes off him and didn’t reach for the folder. She waited for him to
explain.

She waited a long
time.

Eventually
Paul said, “There are some puzzling, uh, yes, troubling figures
projected for the final quarter.”
When he
frowned, h
is big bushy eyebrows came
forward so far they nearly pushed his glasses off. He
removed
the
spectacles and took a moment to rub a tired hand over his
ruddy face. “If you could take a look at them, uh, before the
meeting then that’d, uh… that’d be great.”

It was times
like these that Jackie had no idea why she bothered with Mr
Savage.
Like any of his work will make it
to the meeting.
Jackie reminded herself not
to smile.
What a fool. You’re my puppet,
dear Savage, you’ll do and say everything I want you
to.
“Okay, I’ll take a look.”

Paul nodded his thanks
with a friendly smile. Jackie was yet to decide whether it was
genuine or whether he could turn warmth on at will. She wished she
could do that.

“
Thanks, uh…
Jackie.” Paul took his leave and shuffled in the general direction
of the door, unaware that Jackie Donald’s eyes were boring into his
skull from behind. With what seemed like a colossal effort, he
closed the doors behind him.

And, finally, he was gone
from Jackie’s sight.

“
Stupid
dumb-shit goddamn motherfucker.” Jackie had learnt to swear from
her one
and only
boyfriend back in college. She rocked in her chair, inwardly
twitching at the thought of
Paul
Savage running a shareholder
meeting. But it had to be that way. Paul
was
the public head of the company.
Only a handful of people knew
Jackie
was the real CEO. She could count them on one
hand:
Paul
Savage,
James Ellerman, Michele Roche, Esteban Valdez and Carole Lam. And
the WEF of course, but they didn’t really count.

She opened
Paul’s folder with a scowl of contempt and scanned his lame excuse
for a report. How dare he drop something like that on her desk? She
wondered whom he’d asked to write the report. That was, after all,
the way he worked. The man hadn’t done anything original that
Jackie had ever seen. Paul had scratched a few indecipherable notes
in the margins and underlined a few words, probably to pretend that
he understood the content. Jackie pushed it to the corner of her
desk in disgust. She could imagine the conversation she’d have to
have now.
You made some good points in
that report Paul, but I think we should focus on
this
in the
meeting
– and hand him the list of items
she wanted him to cover.

Sometimes she
wished she could work with someone competent. But competence might
threaten her position, and therefore her vision. And as things were
she felt almighty
.
T
he power she wielded as CEO of
UniForce was unparalleled. Sure, leaders from some of the other
giga-coporations brandished more financial power, but Jackie’s
fingers stretched in ways that were more important.

Gently she
closed her eyes, conjuring an image of the world she intended to
create.
A world where people feel safe to
leave their doors unlocked
at
night
.
She furrowed
her brow.
Where nobody would dream of
raping a young girl.
She’d buried the memory
so deeply into the folds of her psyche that she no longer flinched
at the word ‘rape’. There
was
a time when it would have sent her into a tailspin
depression, but that was before
she’d
started taking
Genyrex, the Xantex wonder
drug.

Pity.
Sometimes she wished the people
around her understood her vision. Sometimes she wished they had the
intellectual capacity to fathom that it was actually possible. The
fact that she intended to make billions in the process was just an
added bonus.
And the fact that some people
need squashing…
She shrugged.
Too bad. Some people deserve to have their lives
ended under the heel of a shoe. My shoe.

Personal
security – the way of the future.
She’d been
striving
toward
it
for seven years. Personal security was the Holy Grail of the law
enforcement industry, something truly worthy of her dedication. She
knew she could rocket UniForce to number one on the Lawson scale if
she could just crack the personal security market.
Not just bodyguards, company security
too.
She’d even created a new position; the
papers were in her third drawer. She didn’t have anyone in mind
yet, but she’d recognise the right person when he or she came
along.
Guard co-ordinator, head of the
final corporate branch.
She had a vision
where UniForce provided security personnel for all the
giga-corporations
, each with a personally
tailored and
neatly outsourced package –
for a modest fee. Then, after conquering the corporate sector, it
would only be a matter of time before she could weasel her way into
the spineless government sector and promote UniForce as
the
law enforcement
solution for the world.

She screwed
her fingers into tight fists of rapture.
Timing.
Jackie knew it was the most
important factor.
Too soon and they’ll
run… too late and I’ll miss the opportunity.
And she knew exactly how to do it: feed them information about
the crime riddling their innards and then propose a solution to
flush the vermin from their pipes. She couldn’t help another smile,
but it quickly reverted to a frown when she felt her skin
tightening across her cheekbones.