Freedom Incorporated - Peter Tylee (best biographies to read TXT) 📗
- Author: Peter Tylee
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Book online «Freedom Incorporated - Peter Tylee (best biographies to read TXT) 📗». Author Peter Tylee
It was a giant cross. Long corridors stretched in four directions, inviting them to explore the nether-regions of the information superstore. Two elevators at inconvenient locations ferried passengers to lower levels where they were even less likely to find what they sought. Computers with crystal-cube readers were in most vaults so that investigators would have no excuse to remove media. Police, it seemed, had gathered notoriety for forgetting to return things.
“Now where?” Dan asked.
Simon shrugged. Still crunching on his bar, he mumbled around the mouthful, “Check the directory.”
The vault door closed behind them with a resounding rumble, jarring their nerves. When Dan was finished watching it, he strode to the terminals, which officers used to locate desired records in the expanse of useless data. One terminal had an ‘out of order’ sticker slapped haphazardly across the screen, but the other one responded to his request. “Vault-1D,” he said. “According to this.”
“This way.” Simon felt less jittery and far less crabby now that his stomach had something to digest. “Just down here.”
“I know, I remember,” Dan reminded him. “I used to spend hours down here too, remember?”
Simon looked sheepish. “Oh yeah, so you did.”
The light above the entrance to Vault-1D was flickering erratically. The effect reminded Simon of a B-grade horror movie as he let the scanner read his microchip. The Department hadn’t bothered with two-tier security on inner doors. Vault architects had presumed anybody capable of passing the first two titanium doors had a legitimate purpose and was therefore unlikely to force entry into places they shouldn’t.
An ear-piercing siren wailed as soon as they opened the door. All inner doors had a self-locking mechanism that engaged after 20 seconds and the siren was to remind officers not to leave their fingers anywhere nearby. Dan put his fingers in his ears. He’d always hated the siren’s pitch and its ascending urgency grated his back teeth.
Once inside, and once the siren had stopped, he set to work. He located the appropriate box and began fishing through thousands of tiny crystal-cubes. Each was stored in a separate plastic container and each was capable of holding a snapshot of the Department’s network. Isn’t nanotechnology wonderful, Dan thought as he rummaged. Without an adequate budged to secure the network, officials had mandated the storage of crystal-cube snapshots as the next best alternative. So, if data went mysteriously missing, someone could always recover it by scrounging through the archives.
The air in Dan’s lungs felt heavy as he plugged the correct cube into the reader and launched the retrieval application. He couldn’t keep the trepidation from his voice. “I think this is it… yes. Here we go.”
Simon curiously peered over his shoulder, swatting absently at a trail of sweat trickling down his sideburns. “What’re we looking for?”
Dan chewed his lip - he often did when reading. “I’m not sure yet.” He’d located a record from the day before Katherine’s murder and a shiver ran down his spine, accompanied by an overwhelming desire to turn back the clock. “Look.” He stabbed the screen with a finger. “He was from Sweden, here for a conference… didn’t have many friends according to this.”
“Maybe they cleansed it before you got a copy.”
“I doubt it. He had one friend, a colleague in The Netherlands, see?” He stabbed the monitor again, hard enough to make the surrounding pixels swirl with colour and smear a fingerprint on the matte screen. “It was an angle I never pursued. Nothing indicated…” He trailed off, unwilling to finish the thought.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Simon asked, hoping he wasn’t.
“Yeah, I’ve never been to Holland. It might be nice.”
Simon sighed deeply, wondering why he chose such high maintenance friends. “I guess I should come.” He yawned. “I can sleep next century.”
*
“Give me your weapon.” Dan held out his hand.
New South Wales police didn’t have permission to carry weapons or ammunition out of the country so Simon reluctantly complied. “I assume your new identity has clearance?”
“Yeah.” Dan added Simon’s pistol to his arsenal.
They strode to the immigration counter and Simon’s disbelief grew with each weapon Dan placed in a neat row for tagging. “What’re you… preparing for World War III or something?”
Dan ignored him.
“That’s four bottles now, chief.” Chuck winked. It was a slow night and wondering what Dan was doing kept him entertained for hours.
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Saturday, September 18, 2066
15:42 Groningen, The NetherlandsHans felt a tingle at the back of his neck, which set his nerves on edge and made him jumpy. Kat was complaining about the pile of trash in the kitchen, unambiguously letting him know how disgusted she was by spraying the mound with urine and meowing furiously for his attention. He’d been in the middle of another doomed experiment when the altercation started.
He lowered his goggles. “Oh Kat. What’ve you done?”
She looked at him guiltily and came purring to brush against his leg, supremely proud of herself for snaring his attention.
“Oh God, what a mess.” Hans scratched Kat behind her ears. “You know you’re not allowed to piss inside, right?”
She purred louder.
“Okay, let me clean up and then I’ll play with you a little.” He used a sponge to soak up the yellow puddle and rinsed the foul stickiness off his hands with soap and, when that didn’t remove the smell, a mild acid. The big bags of trash made a disgusting tacky sound when he peeled the plastic from his linoleum floor.
He slipped into his sandshoes, which he always kept beside the door. With laces tucked inside, he used them as a pair of outdoor slippers. My God that’s gross, he thought, holding a paper towel under the bags to stop the sour fluids seeping through and dripping onto his carpet. “I’ll be back in a minute,” he said, gagging.
Kat looked at him innocently, sitting delicately on the couch like a grand lady.
Hans skipped down the stairs two at a time, hoping to rid himself of his stench-bombs as quickly as possible. His main concern was the neighbours; he didn’t want them to know whose trash would be spoiling in the sun all day Sunday. He felt guilty enough without hearing them complain.
He tossed the bags onto the cleft of bricks at the front of his building with an explosive sigh of relief, staggering back to gulp fresh air. So he was too distracted to notice two men approaching from his left.
Their words, English words, startled him. “Excuse me; may we have a few minutes of your time?”
Fear illuminated him as his eyes darted over them. One was dark skinned and heavy-set, wearing neat casual clothes. His shirt was burgundy and his trousers dark blue, reminding Hans of the bouncers who worked in the red-light district. The other was a Caucasian, slightly taller and wearing an outfit that would look natural at a funeral.
He didn’t need to think, he’d become so preconditioned to fleeing that it had become instinct. His fast-twitch fibres contorted with a surge of adrenaline and he sprinted in the opposite direction, dismayed to see the men chasing him when he risked a glimpse over his shoulder.
Focus. Hans worked his body hard, pumping his arms and legs to full speed. His toes, curling into tight fists to keep his loose sandshoes from flying off his feet, slowed him down. So, desperate to put distance between himself and death’s advocates, he added an extra kick to each leg and shed the burden of shoes. Grinding his toes into the paved street, he lowered his head, summoned his desire to live, and sprinted.
He looked again. The podgy man had abandoned the chase, pulling to a halt and gripping his hamstring with a wince of pain. But the man dressed in black was closing the gap. Hans made eye contact and what he saw filled him with dread: unadulterated determination. He had the pure clarity of purpose that people could only get when they were willing to self-sacrifice for their goal.
Hans drew an extra-deep breath and swerved to slice down another street. His lungs felt as if they were on fire and already his thighs were becoming numb, but he forked more adrenaline into the furnace and kept up the pace. The sudden onset of terror left his mind fragmented and incoherent. Part of him was entertained by how fast he could run and enjoyed the rush of breeze through his hair. Another part giggled at the thought of running barefoot through the park, drunk on the influx of endorphins.
He was still selecting the best path to take when his pursuer kicked his legs out from beneath him and his flight to freedom came to an abrupt end as he split his chin on the pavement. An instant later, someone heavy slammed on top of him. His flexible ribs absorbed the impact, compressing his heart between sternum and spine and sending him dangerously close to cardiac arrhythmia. The world faded and all he could hear was the ringing in his ears. When his vision cleared and he’d collected his thoughts, he was supine and the pain had nestled in his chin and at the back of his neck. Both men were standing over him, their breathing laboured.
“That was a little rough don’t you think?” It was the black man. He’d doubled over and was clutching his midriff. “You might’ve damaged him. Are you even sure it’s Hans?”
The white man looked uncertain. “Yeah, I think so.”
“You think?”
He shrugged. “His hair’s longer and he didn’t have stubble in the photo, but the facial structure’s the same. Look, you see his chin?”
“I see it’s split open, yeah.”
The man who’d floored him extended a hand. “Sorry about that, I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
Hans refused to accept it and struggled to a sitting position alone. “Aren’t you going to finish the job?”
“I’m not here to kill you, I’m here to help.”
Hans laughed, dabbing his chin with a sleeve. “I see.”
“No really, I’m Dan Sutherland and this is my… my partner, Simon West.”
He didn’t see the look they exchanged; he was too busy preparing himself for a bullet between the eyes.
“You’re Hans van der Berg, right?”
“No.”
Dan hesitated while reassessing the man’s facial features, but wound up even more convinced he had the right person. “Come on, don’t make me steal your wallet to prove a point.”
“I do not carry identification,” Hans said, telling the truth. Many people had stopped carrying wallets since microchips served most purposes. Besides, he’d only expected to take out the trash and he didn’t need identification for that.
“So you’re not Hans?” Simon asked, feeling like an oaf for letting Dan overreact. He didn’t think his friend’s emotional condition was up to making rational decisions.
What the hell, they’re going to kill me anyway. Hans shook his head. “No, I’m Hans. But it’s van de Berg, not van der Berg. You make me sound German when you say it like that.”
“Sorry.” Dan chalked it up to his Australian accent. He often said an ‘r’ where there should be none and dropped the ‘r’ from words that needed them. Instead of ‘Australia’, he said ‘Us-tray-lee-yar’, and instead of ‘chair’, he said ‘cheah’.
“So,
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