by J. A. Hailey
Fluent in every language, like all virtuals, Rosa had maneuvered the friendship to a point where they had begun using voice apps to chat on the Internet.
“You know, one year, when my mother had gone to attend to her own mother, my grandmother, in Aleppo, she had arranged for me to eat all my meals at your house. It was such fun, and your mother, Mamma Zahra, taught me to cook so many of my now favorite dishes, like hummus and foul, which must be the best thing for breakfast.
“Of course, outside of school hours, I was in charge of you, like a babysitter. Surely you have some memory of me, though I understand that it could be all blank, as you were such a small child. Not baby or toddler, but maybe five or six, and I was like your elder sister. Sadly, the very next year, we moved back permanently to Aleppo.”
And so, when the entire plan was in place, and when BC and Esmeralda had scheduled themselves to fly to Dhamman for their role in the plot, Rosa had told the Syrian girl that she herself would soon be visiting Dhamman with her army husband, and staying at a top hotel there, which would give them a chance to meet physically, and renew the now-forgotten togetherness they once had.
They were both theoretically in the same boat, after all - one in which they were married to men who were providers of financial means and social security, rather than being lovers, and whom they did not fancy much. It was a lifestyle in which they shared a common type of existence, living alone and bored for much of their days, passing time chatting on social media, and watching movies.
The Syrian girl was more than ready to meet Rosa, accepting unquestioningly that Rosa, who had adopted a fake Arabic name, did not know the city, and that it would be she who would go over to the hotel for the reunion.
Rosa felt a bit sorry for the girl, who was genuinely viewing the forthcoming get-together as a most exciting event in a desperately boring life.
“If done right, she’ll remember nothing,” said Priya.
It was a betrayal, of sorts, but when every single item in the reunion was fake and manipulated, Rosa agreed that the greater good purpose that would be served would make the little evil deed unnoticeably small.
Rosa and the Syrian wife met in the lobby, exchanging hugs and kisses and squealing about old times, before proceeding to order coffee and cake.
Woman taking woman up to her room in the hotel would attract neither suspicion nor attention, and after coffee the two girls, talking animatedly, took the elevator up to Rosa’s 10th floor room.
The girl immediately detected a smell of chloroform, but as Rosa had prepared the tableau, she was able to feign that she herself scarcely noticed anything untoward, and, pointing at a large medical dressing lying open on a side table, said, “It must be that.”
In due course, when the girl was truly groggy, Rosa took out a zip-lock pouch from her handbag, which pouch contained a pad of cotton wool soaked in chloroform, and made the unaware girl unconscious.
Caesar now came into the room, and took up his role of guardian of the door, although they had already turned the entire hotel secure through the Internet, to ensure that they would not be disturbed.
Rosa, now an expert neurosurgeon, immediately injected some other anesthetic into the girl, and proceeded to make the small incisions in her scalp, one of which received the amnesia looping, and the other the neural implant.
A little over fifteen minutes after entry into the room, the Syrian girl had effectively ceased to exist, with Rosa entering her head and taking over.
There was nothing else to do after that, but to wait for Colonel Abood Dawah’s call to drive over to the Al Abyad airport.
27
Although division of consciousness was prohibited under a blanket law, to prevent the perceived abomination of one virtual living as two humans, the two screenside operatives had been given the go-ahead by the seniors’ group, to conduct necessary division for the mission. Thus, Caesar, in Dominic’s body, spent that night with the French Rosa in the hotel, but Rosa had to divide virtually, and, as the Syrian wife, take the girl back to her house to ensure that no routines were broken and no alarms sent out.
Sure enough, in the course of a dirty conversation with the husband that night, the colonel told her to be at the Al Abyad airport at midday the next day, driving over, as always, in the large four-wheel-drive Toyota he had given her.
The drive was a mere 500 miles, on absolutely empty highway, through utterly unpopulated desert.
Rosa started the Syrian mistress off early, picking up Caesar at the hotel, while leaving her French self in the room to pass the day alone, after which it was a straight one-stop drive to the airport, the one stop being at the only petrol station on the way – to fill petrol, have a cold drink and to use the toilet.
This part of the world was so inhospitable and unpopulated, and so infrequently travelled through, that the government maintained a number of vehicles to solely drive back and forth on the highway. Those vehicles were often the only barrier to death for anyone whose vehicle had broken down on the isolated highway – its isolation enhanced by the absence of mobile signals on huge stretches of the road.
That did not matter to the screenside team, as each one carried a personal satellite signal enhancer gadget, the very invention that Fatima, the Customs inspector in Cairo, believed to be a heart monitoring machine.
The Al Abyad airport was so unimportant that there were scarcely any security measures actually enforced, and whatever measures were implemented were based entirely on recognition of the people coming in and going out.
The three senior officers of the King’s guard, effectively the most senior bosses of the Al Abyad Airport, had jointly put together a camper van, which was permanently parked to one side of the vacant little building that had a sign facing the road – ‘Al Abyad Airport’. An airport worker was deputed to keep the interior of the van clean, and it was used by all three colonels, for sexual encounters with their young wives and mistresses.
Again, because of its unimportance, tower-based mobile signals were available in the little hamlet and in the airport, which meant the virtuals of screenside were familiar with routines.
Just before getting to the open gate of the airport, Caesar clambered into the back, through the gap between driver and front passenger seats, to get down onto the floor with a sheet over his body for additional, although unnecessary, concealment. The Toyota, and Colonel Dawah’s Syrian wife were well known to the trio of armed security guards at the open gate, and Rosa drove through without stopping, merely waving acknowledgement, as the wife always did, at the guards.
She drove right up to the camper van, and no one saw Caesar walk casually out of the Toyota and step into it. Thereafter, it was merely a waiting game.
In due course, the King’s food-ferrying propeller plane from the palace landed. It taxied right up to the little building, and when it had stopped, Colonel Dawah jumped out and hurried to the camper van.
Dominic was a strong man, and with Caesar inside him his strength was multiplied many times over, so the colonel, once inside the van, and beginning to unzip his trousers while leering at his wife, stood no chance of getting the faintest squeak out when Caesar stepped forward from concealment behind him, and forcefully held a chloroform-soaked cotton wool pad over his nose and mouth.
Thereafter, what Rosa had done with his young wife, was done by her to him.
When through with chip insertions, she drove Caesar, herself and Priya, attending through the virtuality, hysterical with laughter, by saying, “Go along, darling; he’s all yours. Crawl into him.”
Under the screenside law that allowed virtual couples to engage in sexual activity, when out as couples in humans who were already involved in intimate physical relations, Caesar and Rosa enjoyed their permitted human sexual encounter.
They then went their separate ways, with Rosa needing to return the unaware Syrian girl to her house in Dhamman, and to accompany Dominic, who would now be under Caesar’s div
ided management, back to Paris.
Caesar would put more of himself into the new person, the one alone, and with an important mission, while leaving it mainly to Rosa to look after Dominic, all the way back to Paris. Undoubtedly a virtual, especially one of Caesar’s stature, could easily manage more than one human at the same time, but this was the first case, and there was uncertainty for the safety of a human mental patient in care.
Therefore Rosa became responsible for Dominic, while Caesar transferred a very large proportion of himself into the colonel.
And that meant that when Colonel Dawah walked out of the van to take on the world again, he was literally a different man.
Caesar’s successful possession of the colonel was instantly known in screenside, which led to Esmeralda and BC boarding a flight to Dhamman the very next morning, checking out of the hotel in which they were cooling their heels, in Sheikh Abdul’s neighboring tiny desert country.
Because they were able to buy and deploy the best, latest and most expensive equipment, security checks at airports of oil countries were almost entirely entrusted to scanning and X-ray machines. Physical checking did take place, but primarily with sexual harassment and coercion as the goal.
Nothing of the sort happened with BC and Esmeralda, as BC took control of every scanning machine, to show their suitcases as filled with only clothes and other items of daily use.
Thus the virtual ‘hit’ team entered the kingdom with all the weapons and ammunition it had brought along.
In the city, it was to be a waiting game, similar to Rosa’s and Caesar’s, and the two virtuals went to the same hotel in which the first two virtuals were staying. They had their own room, booked in advance, and it was Rosa, in the person of the Syrian mistress, who rented them a suitable, new-but-nondescript Toyota for the drive to Al Abyad, to be undertaken as soon as Caesar was able to induct himself into the colonel’s next fresh food run.
It was necessary to keep the Syrian wife under control until they had left the country, intending to release her from possession as soon as the mission was over. As the neural implant would remain in her head, Rosa could move into her, if and whenever necessary, from anywhere in the world.
Thus, she took the girl home, and then returned to the hotel to pass the night with Caesar-Dominic, after first joining up with Esmeralda and BC, in a foursome, for a great Arabian meal.
The flight out for the return journey to Paris was at a reasonable hour the next morning, and Rosa booked a hotel taxi for the transfer to the airport, continuing with Dominic, without incident, onto the aircraft.
Caesar, with his personal unit of the small and very convenient satellite signal enhancing and broadcasting device that he and BC had fashioned in Paris, made the isolated palace an Internet zone, into which the virtuals of screenside entered and were present as soon as Colonel Dawah physically returned to it, although it was not possible to be freely present throughout all areas, because of the restrictions on mobile phones and other devices capable of connecting to the Internet.
Caesar went to the housekeeping office, in which he himself was a bit of a boss, and printed out ‘domestic servant’ identification tags for both Esmeralda and BC, entering them in as existing servants who were being transferred from a palace in a large city. With Wendy fiddling relevant details and photographs in every Internet-connected computer throughout the kingdom, no loophole existed for Esmeralda and BC to be busted, except by physical facial identification. Caesar also acquired a set of uniforms for each of them.
Male palace servants, throughout the kingdom, had a fixed uniform of dark blue trousers and white shirts, over which was worn a special checked jacket, with large external pockets to carry essential implements at all times; things such as bottle openers, corkscrews, fruit peelers and knives, cigarette lighters, and often keys to doors of the section they would be working in.
Female servants had the option of black trousers or knee-length skirts, and shirts in a selection of light colors, over which they were required to wear a very light jacket with similar large pockets, in the same checked pattern as for male servants.
Time passed swiftly, and Colonel Dawah was on the food run again, after a gap of only one day.
Getting through the Al Abyad airport gate would be considerably more tricky for these two virtuals, as neither their vehicle nor their faces would be recognized by the guards, so they did not drive onto the airport tarmac, but instead went straight to park in the designated parking zone, marked with a faded ‘Parking’ sign on a bent pole, which parking lot was an open plot of flattened sandy land, on the side of the building away from the guards, and thus out of sight. They walked to the van, with the colonel at hand to cover for them in case they were challenged.
There was no challenge, because nobody cared to look at what was going on, and they entered the van to change into their servants’ uniforms, with Esmeralda having opted for black trousers.
Caesar had already told the pilots that a couple of new servants would be flying back with them to the palace, and, though unusual in the extreme, it sparked no questioning whatsoever, because of his very high rank in the security network around the King. And, when finally seen physically, walking to the aircraft wearing palace uniforms with ID badges on chests, no eyebrows were raised at all.
On landing, the colonel, after attending to a few other duties, took the two transferred, lowly servants to the gate for domestic workers at the palace. They had already been placed into the palace’s locally-networked computer system, and were expected by controllers of servants within the palace, and arriving as they did, in full uniform, accompanied by such a senior security officer, both were taken in immediately, shown their separate, gender-segregated quarters, and told that their duties had commenced.
28
Everyone had discussed it together, and it had been agreed that Esmeralda and BC should begin conducting investigations, as far as possible, on the very day of entry into the palace.
“We don’t know what has happened,” said Wendy. “And we don’t know who is doing what, and how they are communicating. What we do know, is that both Sabine and Louis, in their physical forms, are known to them as having been mentally challenged humans managed in Paris by you two. All three Americans have seen you in Paris, and there are thousands of scenarios in which you could be spotted and recognized - a chance meeting in a corridor, a glimpse out of a window, or even servants’ photographs maintained on the local computer database - and they’ll know you have got past all their security systems, and are inside the palace. You might even be caught when entering a room to unknowingly serve a group that includes one of them. Every single extra moment is an unnecessary extra moment that will simply amplify the chances of being caught, leading to confrontation and potential deadly harm to these two humans.”
“Yes,” agreed Jennifer. “Just imagine that it is sure you have to shoot and kill your way out of there. Be ready for it from the moment you enter. I agree that it is best and safest to commence looking through the palace the very day of entry. You have some methods of silent killing, like strangling, and Candy and I have got hold of these wonderful syringes, meant for multiple measured injections of insulin into diabetic people. The syringes come in very handy and secure carry cases, and the two in our hands have been filled with some sedative liquid by Priya and Rosa. They are experts, you know, and they’ve adjusted the strength of the dosage to be delivered according to the calibration for diabetes. Have a look. See, that’s how to go from inoculation to inoculation, from the first injection to the tenth, and with this you have the possibility of putting ten people to sleep for most of the day – and all in this one, ready-to-hand, prefilled syringe. Lovely, huh?”
It really was a wonderful extra weapon to have in hand, and they each took one, as it would help to dispatch innocent servants, without killing or even seriously harming them.
“Imagine that a servant sees us behaving suspiciously, wandering around in t
he wrong place, or sitting at a computer. Open zip-lock pouch containing chloroform-soaked pad; forcibly hold over face and make groggy; no more struggle; inject, conceal the body behind furniture, and move on; no death or long term damage; fantastic,” chortled Esmeralda, visibly relieved at the option. “And zip-lock chloroform can be resealed to use repeatedly.”
The astonishing advantage they had on-site was that Caesar would be with them, in a commander colonel’s body, and in a position to mislead the King’s forces, besides being a third gun.
“But the best thing is this,” said Candice, rather cruelly. “The colonel is no one to us, unlike Sabine and Louis, and can be shot dead without any personal loss to us.”
“It’s like the book by Gabriel Garcia,” giggled Wendy. “No one cares for the colonel.”
“Oh yes,” said Caesar, emphatically. “Once the action starts, he’ll be right in the thick of it, totally unconcerned about being hit and killed, giving commands while bullets are flying around, and also shooting to kill. I’ll make sure he has a very powerful, rapid fire weapon in his hands, maybe one in each hand, absolutely oversupplied with ammunition. His weapons are to be issued by the King’s system. He should also be safe to some extent, as those shooting will view the colonel as part of the team.”
When slightly comfortable inside the palace, Esmeralda spoke with a young Romanian female servant. “I’m new here, and I am afraid I might blunder my way into the King’s private areas. Are we allowed or banned from going there?”
“How do you speak Romanian?” asked the astonished girl. “Are you one of us?”
“Sort of,” said Esmeralda, offhandedly. “I lived in Bucharest for a year, when I had a Romanian boyfriend. If you are from Bucharest, we can meet after work hours to talk about our experiences in the city, and try to discover if we have any common friends. Are we allowed to meet each other?”
