Spiral (39 page)

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Carter finally.

There came a sigh, like the dry passing of autumn leaves over a grave. Carter felt himself shiver and he looked up - back in the real word - and his gaze met Natasha’s as Kade’s presence became even more menacing at the back of his skull.

‘I
have been thinking. About our relationship.’

‘Oh yeah?’ Carter could not keep the snarl from his tone.

‘And I have been thinking about Natasha.’

‘What about her?’

‘She works for the Nex,’
said Kade softly.

‘You are wrong.’

‘No. She works for the Nex and that fucking meat-carver Feuchter. Carter, I have been thinking; it wasn’t
you
who led the Nex to Gol. It was her. I bet she contacted them - or was somehow bugged. You are just her piggyback ride; her host; and she is the parasite. She betrayed her own father out of hatred; wept her fake tears and you all believed her and now she’s here, in your pocket and trusted by you and that fuckwit Langan.’

‘I think you should stop,’ said Carter.

‘If you wish, Carter. But just think about it. Seriously. Think about it and think about the QIII schematics - the Nex’s goal. Natasha worked on the inception of the QIII for Spiral... she has always known what it can do, what it is capable of. She used to work with Feuchter - I bet you didn’t know that, dickhead. Therefore, maybe the QIII is Natasha’s goal as well. Maybe she works for - the Big Man.’

‘You are wrong.’

‘Why am I?’
Kade’s voice was still soft, a heroin needle easing into the vein of Carter’s subconscious.
‘She brought you the Schwalenberg mission - every fucker on the planet can see that one was a set-up. Part of the execution of the DemolSquads. And she came to warn you - ha. Just because she took a bullet doesn’t mean she can be trusted. Notoriously bad shots, these assassins, eh? And then she fucked your brains out, ahh, how sweet. And how convenient: fuck with your brain and then fuck with your dick, soften you up, make you even more compliant and controllable
—’

Carter looked up. Saw Natasha staring at him strangely. She spoke to him, but everything seemed suddenly surreal; the world had descended into black and white, all colours, all shades vanished and Nats moved towards him as Kade’s heady rich voice ran like warm honey through his brain—

‘We need to kill her, brother, kill her and leave her body here to rot in this ditch. She is a spy. She will betray us. We have to work together on this. Carter, Natasha is the enemy.’

Carter felt the world swimming.

Natasha reached for him, her mouth open, her words unheard—

‘No!’

The scene swung violently back into focus. Colours swam, the scene like a water-splashed painting, hues running in vertical lines and Kade’s cool mocking laughter fading as Carter retook control. He looked up into Natasha’s concerned eyes.

‘No - what?’ she said.

Carter merely licked his dry lips and released a tightly held breath.

‘Are you feeling OK? You look grey, weak. I think you need to have a few hours’ rest.’

‘I ...’ began Carter, then halted. He realised: Kade had nearly taken him. Nearly taken control without his permission, without his consent - a mind-rape, a brain-fuck.

Carter shivered. ‘I think I’m weaker than I first realised. From the bullet wound; from the loss of blood. I will sleep now.’

‘Good,’ soothed Natasha. She ran back to the BMW under the fast-failing light and retrieved a thin blanket from a pannier. As she stood, her eyes took in the twilight desert rolling away for infinity and she felt suddenly lonely - and incredibly, frighteningly vulnerable.

She shivered as sand whipped around her boots.

What would she do if Carter died out here?

What would she do if she was left alone?

She looked hurriedly round, over her shoulder, into the darkness pooling under the boughs of the date palms that crowded the rocky basin, questing for water—

Natasha shivered again, deep down to her bones.

When she returned, Carter was asleep. She covered him with the blanket; she did not see the Browning 9mm in his hand as he nestled in the darkness. She did not see that the safety catch was slipped into the opposition. And, of course, she could not see the bullet loaded snugly into the firing chamber.

They had decided against building a small fire, despite the chill of the desert night; this part of Rub al’Khali was not as desolate as it first appeared, and all they needed was a platoon of the White Guard stumbling across them as they cooked sausages. The subsequent questions would be awkward.

Natasha, strangely, felt very alive; no need for sleep touched her and she sat huddled in the robes that Carter had acquired for her, only her face visible from within the folds of the shamag, eyes staring up at the twinkling stars.

Around her, the small bowl depression - and the desert beyond its boundaries - was silent. Occasionally noises would interrupt the silence; the cries of hyena and jackals, the scuffling of lizards and sand grouse. After a while, Natasha gazed down to watch Carter’s face in sleep. She studied the lines, the curve of his twisted nose, the profile of his chin, the tousle of short hair that she knew he would claim was ready for a fresh shaving. His shape was obscured in the gloom and muffled by his clothing, but she imagined the taut muscles beneath the robe... and imagined herself lying beside him, their bodies naked and pressed together, him coming awake, his hands on her hips and her breasts...

She killed the fantasy.

Carter had been cold recently. Cold and strange ... Occasionally light banter would break through his shell, but she could sense his pain; not just physical pain but something internal - the demon he carried in his soul? She smiled dryly. Who could believe such a thing? Surely it was a mental state - some form of delusion, some attempt at blocking out the brutal and violent side of his work, especially from his past during his days with Spiral... what better way than to blame the murders he committed on something that dwelled within him, some part of his soul that he could not and would not answer to? That way, all guilt fell from his shoulders and he could sleep at night.

Natasha smiled to herself softly, lifted her hands and rubbed at her eyes. Pain stabbed at her from many different locations; the bullet wound from back in Scotland nagged her, it still hurt her to speak after Carter’s emergency procedure with a ballpoint pen - and to top it all, her chipped teeth nagged both at her pain threshold and her vanity.

Killers.

She smiled again, although the taut grin held little humour.

She had met many men - and a few women - while working as a Tactical Officer for Spiral; many killers, murderers, assassins, members of DemolSquads... their names were various, their objectives usually one and the same. To kill, and to destroy. And she had found one connecting link that ran like a gold skein, a bright lode through all their souls - their mental tiptoeing along the verge of insanity. After all, what sane person could kill in cold blood? What sane person could plant a bomb and detonate it - no matter how justified the action seemed?

And, sooner or later, something had to give.

With all the Spiral people she knew, no matter how professional, how adept at killing, how inhuman they seemed - it was all bullshit. They were all human. And they might be able to block off the self-contempt for a while, but it always came back to haunt them. Their time as killers was finite; only as long as the fuse that led finally to blood-red detonation.

Spiral was like the army, Natasha understood this now. It absorbed people; it used people; it destroyed people -and then it pissed them away. Its operatives were expendable; they
had
to be expendable because there was no such thing as an ice killer, no such thing as a person without a soul, without a conscience. There was always a spark there ... somewhere.

Natasha sighed, and felt the ECube in her pocket. She pulled it free and stared at the small surface area. Acting as a GPS, the 12GHz RISC processor could navigate somebody across the whole world, but of course this data would have been relayed straight back to the Spiral mainframes ... if the mainframes had still existed. Now the CommNet was down it was a joke - and not a very funny one.

She rubbed the tiny device between her thumb and forefinger, then, settling back, pulled a small knife from a pocket, slipped free the blade, and sliced the soft and almost organic-feeling protective layer from the ECube’s tiny surface. The ECube gave a warning buzz that Natasha ignored; she examined the alloy cube without its skin and smiled softly.

She pulled out a tiny plasma screen - about the size of a matchbox - and plugged it into the ECube. It lit up brightly, glowing blue, and Natasha couldn’t help feeling very strange about using such a high-tech piece of equipment in a small naturally carved bowl valley, probably the product of millions of years of natural geological evolution. And yet here she was, using the latest cutting-edge agent technology.

She started to scroll through a series of scripted instructions.

She tapped in a short message.

With a tightening of her lips, bloodless in the cool moonlight, Natasha clicked on SEND.

And then it was done.

Transcript of recent news incident

CodeRed_Z;

unorthodox incident scan 554670.

The House of World Finance was left in chaos after thousands of mainframes that store world trade information and data on stocks and shares and facilitate in the high-speed optical transfer of this data around the globe crashed this morning.

Despite having triple-tier security and laser-dig-optical back-up systems, it left Wall Street and other major global trading centres without resources. Brokers and traders were left staring at blank screens as technicians attempted to resurrect the mainframes staged at five main sites spanning New York, London, Paris, Tokyo and Hong Kong.

Kiosoto Hiranamu, MD at Tadao & Tadao Financial Directorates, claimed: ‘This is an act of financial terrorism! We have been attacked by some kind of super-virus, a new breed of computer termite intent on domination or destruction of the world’s financial sectors.’

The effects of this crash will be felt by all as even simple tasks such as exchanging currency become, at least for the immediate future, impossible.>>#

J
essica Rade’s eyes opened and stared at the rendered ceiling. Darkness lay like a veil of mist around her. Everything was silent - deadly silent. And yet:

She knew.

Knew it was almost complete.

Knew it was almost ready ... a few tweaks here and there, some optimisation of code, a few re-routes and the QIII would be 100% operational; the math was in place; the WorldCode was in place.

That could only mean that the QIII proto was—

Alive
...

Whispered a voice in her mind.

Why then, Jessica mused, did she feel so pissed off?

And it came to her, a wave of annoyance, anger, frustration: to create something so wonderful, to be involved in a world-breaking project and then to restrict its use! It was like creating a work of art and then hanging it in a cellar, never to be seen by anybody.

The QIII could benefit
everybody ...
medical science, space exploration, the imminent world fuel crisis - it could be used to cure life-threatening diseases, take genetic research to its limits ... But no.
They
had better uses for this new technology, this new baby, and she suspected those uses were military.

And she could still remember Gol’s words, when he had contacted her.

The Spiral secret police. Jessica shivered.

But she had complied with their wishes ...

Copying the schematics had been the easy part; getting them to Gol had been where the real difficulty lay.

Don’t ever call me unresourceful, she mused.

Jessica smiled, emotions on her face conflicting, and she rubbed at her tired eyes. She knew that the QIII wasn’t
really
alive - after all, it was only semi-organic: it was still, basically, silicon. And a mix ... another synthetic substance that the scientists wouldn’t allow out of their labs and that was tip-top secret. But basically silicon ... ha, but humans were basically carbon, weren’t they? And when the QIII was ready, the WorldCode complete, the implementation of probability math and probability equations finally successful then she would be able to have a long, long, well-earned rest—

Her duty to the world, and Spiral, and Gol, was nearly complete.

Jessica Rade thought all these thoughts as she stared at the ceiling. Her hand came up, ran through her long curls, and then she registered something; not so much a
noise
as a single high-pitched note on the very verge of her hearing ...

Jessica frowned. She sat up.

Through the doorway between two of the apt rooms she saw a glow from one of her terminals. She didn’t remember leaving it on. In fact, she
knew
she had not left it on—

And the terminal was protected. Electronically. Her own code. Her own triple firewalls to intercept hackers and so forth. She had even tried to hack her own system; she had found it impossible. That meant (a) somebody had hacked it - unlikely (b) somebody had
spied on her
and even now was in the apt using the terminal or (c) aliens had taken over the computer. Jessica shivered. None of these alternatives really appealed to the young woman.