Tag - A Technothriller (6 page)

Sitting on the hard metal seats that ran along the cabin, she didn’t bother with the safety webbing, couldn’t waste the time to put it on as she was focused on the action on the screen of the Devstick. The Heliocopter came in fast, landing with a thump, a bounce and slight grind of a skid on the roof of the UNPOL Executive Club. She disembarked, one hand heaving her out of the cabin, and ran in a crouch towards the stairs leading to the Lev port that would take her down to the command center. She had to catch him: this couldn’t happen, not on her watch.

***

The Mole shot out of the hole it had first made six days ago in the floor of the warehouse in Jurong Port, and skidded to a stop just before hitting the wall. Gabriel glanced at the time on the Dev screen hanging from the ceiling of the mole, 8:40pm, and hit the open door release. The door hissed open and swung free. He jumped up from his crouched position and, one hand on the circular titanium frame of the door, jumped to the floor of the warehouse. Maloo and Isaac quickly followed and the three of them walked over to a large plastic sheet laid on the floor of the warehouse. No one spoke. They knew what they had to do and they had already agreed on the best way to do it. Maloo and Isaac stripped off everything they were wearing, dropping it to the plastic sheet. Gabriel, already naked, walked over to a shelf with three deep-sided trays stacked one on top of the other. He picked the stack up and walked back to Maloo and Isaac who had finished stripping and were folding the plastic sheet into a small block.

Gabriel laid out the three trays side by side with a meter in between and the three men each sat in front of a tray. Inside was the identity, the person they would become to enable their escape. Running. An identity designed to be anonymous, to fit in with the masses, to not be an anomaly, and therefore to pass under the radar to the other side. In the single nation an individual can travel anywhere provided he acknowledges the right of the nation to know who he is and what he is doing at any time.

As individuals travel through security zones, PUIs, or Tags as they are called, are activated and visually compared to known statistics and image. Everywhere on the Earth, the Moon and Mars, the three 'worlds' human beings occupy, this invasion of privacy is accepted for the right to travel anywhere freely. Every day in New Singapore, half a million people travel through the city and its surrounding area. To run, you need an identity that will appear in its movements and digital actions not to be suspicious, but to be normal. And they each had a tray of normality.

Gabriel, on the far right of the others, glanced to his left. Maloo was struggling into the brown boots he’d selected. With a final tug he laid back his elbows on the cement floor and said, “Well brother, do we look like Haulers?”

“You’ll do,” said Gabriel, and walked over to the wall of the warehouse. A section of the wall stood detached from its space that was just big enough for them to squeeze through. Gabriel went first and the others followed, each turning sideways through the narrow gap. Once on the other side, Gabriel and Maloo pulled the piece of the wall into place and Isaac picked up a tube of instant cement. As soon as the wall fit he pulled the trigger and the cement gun spurted a thin tube of expanding cement from its nozzle. Gabriel and Maloo quickly walked across the floor of the warehouse and went through the next space.

Two warehouses over from the one the Mole had made its exit, a seventy-five meter articulated chrome-plated long-hauler stood waiting with all systems running. The last wall space closed and cemented, the three men headed for the entrance to the long hauler. The door was open and Gabriel made his way up the winding staircase until he reached the bridge. He sat down in the primary driver’s seat and pulled the View Devscreen closer to his eye position. Maloo climbed into the seat next to him and Isaac disappeared down the companionway stairs.

“Activate mapped course to Jakarta, full autopilot on,” Gabriel said into the mic that distended from the edge of the Dev screens. It looked like a fly hovering just a cent from his mouth. Telemetric data from the vehicle flooded the Devscreen with numbers scrolling in a constant flow across images which showed the warehouse from the front, rear, side and top of the vehicle.

Gabriel looked out of the front windshield of the bridge, over the sloped chromed snub-nose of the long-hauler, at the cement floor twenty meters below him. The roof of the warehouse was just high enough with only ten cents clearance between the top of the long-hauler and the ceiling. The doors to the warehouse slowly slid open and the long-hauler pulled out onto Wharf One of Old Jurong Port. Gabriel glanced at the time set into the sweeping console of the bridge in front of him. 8:49pm – slightly ahead of schedule.

Chapter 7

On Her Watch

UNPOL Headquarters, Active Trace Command Center

Thursday 5 December 2109, 8:50pm +8 UTC

The Active Trace Command Center (ATCC) at UNPOL Headquarters is the largest single user of Devscreen displays in the world. It is designed to provide a global, real-time surveillance and interdiction capability to UNPOL to safeguard the citizens of the world. Capable of reading a watch face, cameras circling the planet capture movement and display that movement on the Devscreens. Actions are compared against an optional set of parameters for a given area. Parameters might include humans, vehicles, walking, running or driving, and when any of these are triggered the camera can zoom down to a minute detail, Tag the movement and bring up any associated information attached to it. Or, in the case of a human being tagged, its Personal Unique Identifier (PUI).

There are approximately six point three million people living and moving around in New Singapore at any one time. Tracking this amount of movement by human eyeballs is possible but requires too many people. ATCC instead relies on its computational ability to solve this problem. Everything from washing machines and mobile phones to electric automobiles has computational ability. This computational ability is called a Dev. ATTC’s Devs are huge, occupying four floors in the massive complex and drawing seven percent of the total power output of New Singapore.

Cochran entered the command center at a fast walk and immediately headed to the primary Devcockpit console set high and at the rear of the room, picking up the helmet that lay on the console she put it on, adjusting the mic to the right angle for her mouth. The room was buzzing with activity. She thumbed a switch on the console and the room’s buzz was replaced with the sound of two UNPOL officers questioning a suspect. The image on her Dev had a blue frame to show it was the active screen that she was listening to.

She said, “Change,” and the image and sound switched to another suspect being questioned, this time aboard a ship on the ocean just off UNPOL Headquarters. From the Devcockpit she had a view of all the Devscreens in the room.

She immediately issued an UNPOL Blue Notice requesting assistance in arrest and containment or any information related to the whereabouts of Jibril Muraz. The Blue Notice also contained the line ‘suspect is believed to be armed and dangerous’ and was flashed to UNPOL offices globally. Scanning the Devscreens arrayed in front of her, she looked up, hands on her hips, and surveyed the rest of the room. It was busy and had been since Muraz had escaped. UNPOL was on high alert and all shifts had been called in.

The Devs do their work in spotting suspicious movement or actions, and then human eyeballs take over to provide analysis and interpretation. Everyone’s Devstick carries their PUI and the log of that PUI can be pulled up for inspection. Everything we’ve achieved and everything we do digitally is attached to our log and transparent to UNPOL. This is their right, just as we have the right to investigate UNPOL and seek access to all files or information that is on record, unless blocked by Court order for reasons of National Security or the safety of others.

Cochran surveyed the list of tagged PUIs and noted their position on the overlay map of New Singapore. The number was around one hundred suspicious acts in progress, but this number rose and fell according to tags being cleared off and new tags being added. The Geographic area of New Singapore had a total of thirty-two thousand, three hundred and thirty-five crimes committed so far this year, an average of eighty-eight point five eight crimes per day. Today, that average was up over ten percent, but Cochran didn’t care about the other ninety-seven point eight seven. The whole department was focused on a single crime; one that was unique in the history of UNPOL, that of Jibril Muraz escaping the Deep.

Most of New Singapore was within ten minutes’ reach. As UNPOL units contacted each suspect and cleared them off the list, the number of suspicious tags started dropping. Within five minutes this had fallen to an average of ten suspicious acts going on at any one time. The Devscreen showed the images of the suspects being halted and questioned, but none of the images showed what she wanted. She glanced at the time again: 8: 53pm. She felt the panic rise in a surge and squashed it down, focusing on the Devscreens in front of her.

A Devscreen to her far left told of events in the tunnel made by the Mole. Mines had been left and the bomb disposal unit was still trying to figure out how to defuse them. Still no progress.

“Send in a remote control unit to sweep. We might lose a couple but it will be faster than this,” Cochran said into the microphone. The UNPOL BDU officer in the tunnel nodded his head. She changed the active Devscreen again. Still nothing. Where, where, where? Where is he? He must have gone out to sea, but everything there had checked out as normal.

A chrome-plated long-hauler pulling out of Old Jurong Port driving along Wharf One caught her eye. She made it the active screen. Three male occupants. She ordered a check of the vehicle. A closed-circuit camera at the exit of Wharf One gave her a close-up image of the two men sitting high up on the long-hauler’s bridge. One was black, had the features of an aborigine from Australia, hair in dreadlocks. The other was white, bearded, with dark hair over his shoulders and wearing a blue NY Yankees baseball cap. The PUIs checked out – they were regular drivers and their PUI images matched their image on the closed-circuit cameras. She flipped the active Devscreen, her fingers drumming a steady beat on the console.

***

In the bridge of the long-hauler, Gabriel had his Devstick folded out on his lap, fingers and voice giving commands. On his Devscreen he had images of all the closed-circuit cameras and satimages that were focused on his route. The satimages he didn’t worry about as they could only see the top of the long-hauler and this was a regularly scheduled trip. The closed-circuit cameras were another matter, and those required the intervention of his actions. He had made his early living being a runner; it was his craft and he was one of the best. Each time they approached a camera, his intervention through his Devstick caused the digital signals to be changed – substituting the correct PUIs and the images from footage that they had captured from the same cameras that were now trying to track them. Normality is the hardest thing to detect, and everything about their profile was normal.

He checked the time: 8:55pm. In another five minutes they’d clear New Singapore and be on the Australasia Travway. Once there, the long-hauler would increase speed to six hundred kilos an hour. They’d be rolling through Jakarta by 10:30pm. At the Australasia Long-hauler park, just outside of Jakarta, they’d swap with the real drivers in the food court. He smiled and thought, three very wealthy drivers, and focused his attention on the upcoming main security zone for the on-ramp to the Australasia Travway – the huge eight lanes either way transport route running from Auckland to Osaka.

They reached the on-ramp and the long-hauler slowed in the queue of traffic waiting, attached now to the mag lev tracks set into the surface of the Travway. The traffic around them was mostly long-haulers with a few EVs, electric vehicles, in the far right lane. They were on the far left lane. The security zone had sixteen cameras. Gabriel had all the cameras up on his Dev. As each scanned the bridge of the vehicle, he altered the signal in the camera, sending the images he had on his dev of the real drivers. They moved up in the queue and a light on the Dev console of the long-hauler flashed green as their speed picked up and they went up the ramp. As they crested, Gabriel looked at the speed indicator on the Devscreen set into the console of the bridge, two hundred and fifty kilos and climbing. Home free.

***

Cochran checked, for the hundredth time. The time was 10:35pm. He’d escaped. She knew it in the marrow of her tired, defeated bones, and it cut like a hot knife in her gut. She showed no emotion and kept issuing commands, even though she knew it was futile. Rage and despair warred for dominance in her. Rage won. She wasn’t going to just capture this Jibril, she was going to kill him, but only after she’d made him suffer. She was as sure of that as she was that he had escaped. On her watch! The only ever escape from The Deep. The hot knife twisted. She sucked in, evil thoughts of revenge racing in her mind.

Chapter 8

A Normal Life

Jonah’s Env, Unit A, 20th floor, Woodlands Envplex, Woodlands, New Singapore

Thursday 12 December 2109, 5:15am +8 UTC

As I woke up I realized that what had been nagging at the edges of my brain had worked itself out. I knew why I trusted Gabriel, or Jibril in Arabic. It was his eyes: they were like mine.

The escape of Jibril Muraz was reported on newsfeeds globally, and an UNPOL Blue Notice, Contain on Site, was issued. All the major newsfeeds carried it, and his image, this time clothed, was broadcast continuously with appeals for further information. The manner of his escape, however, was a closely guarded secret and known only to those who had to know in order to do their work.