Tag - A Technothriller

by Simon Royle

  She puffed her cheeks and blew out her breath, unfolding her hands from behind her head and swinging her legs over the side of the sleeper. She rubbed her face vigorously with her fingers trying to coax energy out of her body. Fuck it, she thought, and reached to the handle of the table drawer beside the sleeper. Pulling it open, she took out a small capsule that looked like a tube of lipstick. She lifted her bum and pulled her bottom outers down, spreading her knees. Taking the capsule in one hand she pressed one end against her inner thigh. A little green light flashed several times and she pressed the top of the capsule. Marty hated stimulants but she just didn’t have the energy to run. While she sat waiting for the drug to hit her system, she took a deep breath in and held it. The stimulant hit. She felt it coursing through her veins.

  She put the capsule in her pocket and pulled her outers over her bum again. Time to run.

  Chapter 29

  The Naked Truth

  Jonah and Mariko’s Beach House, Sisik Beach, Malaysian Geographic

  MONDAY 6 JANUARY 2110, 7:13AM +8 UTC

  I felt hopelessly out of my depth.

  The sun climbing over the horizon seemed to be moving faster than usual, forcing its influence on the colors in front of me. The news over the weekend had shown me that I was outnumbered, outwitted and had little chance of success. The odds were stacked too high. How could I possibly convince people that a man sitting with the Secretary General of the United Nation could be a murderer and genocidal?

  Although I had crafted Sir Thomas’s speech at the the UNPOL press conference, Sir Thomas had told me to include the Hawks name. That puzzled me at first. Why bring them into the spotlight? But then the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Pre-emptively naming the Hawks as the terrorists was a smart move. Now, if anyone claimed that the real Hawks were a small cadre of highly placed officials in positions of power, the claim would automatically be rejected as propaganda from the terrorists. The opinion polls focusing on the Tag Law told its own story. The number of those for adoption of the Tag had increased to over sixty-five percent. Gabriel’s image was everywhere. On every feed and broadcast Devscreen in every city around the Globe.

  Where are you my brother? I sighed.

  “Hey, why so solemn?”

  I jumped and spilled my coffee on the railing of the deck. Mariko laughed.

  “Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”

  “Yes you did,” I said, smiling back at her and reaching out with my arm, pulling her in close to me. I put my mouth close to her ear.

  “I don’t think we can stop them,” I whispered. Mariko pulled my head down and put her mouth next to my ear.

  “Let’s go for a swim. Bring your Devstick,” she whispered. It was high tide and the underwater cave entrance would be hidden. I smiled at her and went inside to get my swimmers and the Devstick. When I came back out onto the deck, she was already stroking hard for the point off the headland where the cave was. I ran down the beach, putting the Devstick in a side pocket of my swimmers, running into the surf as far I could before diving in.

  The tide was still coming in and I had to swim hard through a choppy swell. I didn’t hurt as much from the running now and my times had improved every day. I was thankful for the training - if I’d had to swim in this swell a week ago I would have been exhausted by now. About fifteen meters from the headland, I dived and swum down till my eardrums hurt with the pressure and then aimed for the mouth of the cave. I surfaced in the darkness and swam to the wall with the ledge where we had sat before, reaching out my hand, feeling for it in the dark.

  My hand touched Mariko’s leg and I felt her grab my wrist and pull me up onto to the ledge. I skirted my bum over and got a firm seat, taking the Devstick out of my pocket. I opened it and folded it out onto the ledge in between us. The light from the screen of the Devstick lit the cave. Mariko was squeezing the water out of her black hair, twisting it into a thick rope that reached to her belly button. She turned to look at me.

  I sat back a bit farther on the ledge. All the warmth that she had shown on the deck had gone from her eyes. She looked the same as when she’d come out of my Env in Woodlands that day when we’d left to come to Sisik. I scrambled to think who she could have argued with.

  “Mark. You can stop this defeatist bullshit right now.”

  I started to speak, but she sharply held up the palm of her hand right in front of my nose. “No, not yet. I am going to say this once and once only because we don’t have time for another one of these kinds of talks. I called you Mark because that is your real name. That is what your parents named you. Your brother has not been captured and so far he’s run rings around Sir Thomas and his friends. And now he needs your help. Our help. This was never going to be easy and it was always for high stakes. The minute you opened that file on your Devstick you accepted this role. Let’s run our conversation from this morning in a different way. Let’s start with the premise that defeat is not an option. Now what do you have to say?”

  I looked at her, feeling pretty low about myself. I looked into her eyes. They held no compromise. There was no easy way out there. I sucked power from those big green eyes of hers. Sucked it in deep. Deep in my belly, down by the base of my spine, the feeling grew. I breathed out heavily and drank in deep the salt air of the cave.

  “All right. Defeat is not an option. However, it appears to me that the chance of success in stopping the Tag has been greatly diminished.”

  “Agreed. Now what are we going to do to counter that?”

  “The only thing I can see possible is to somehow figure out a way to block the Tag Law legally, but I haven’t come up with the anything yet.”

  “Have you been researching that online?” she spat out with a horrified look on her face.

  “Yes, but it’s OK. I sort of cleared it with Sir Thomas when we played golf. At least if I get asked why I am researching the law I can say it is to help him.”

  Mariko blew out her cheeks. “Sheesh, don’t do that to me, please. Tell me more about this game of golf. What happened when you talked about the Tag Law?”

  “I can do better than that. I can show you.”

  “You recorded it?”

  “No, Call did.”

  “Who’s Call?”

  “Call was the Devcaddy that Sir Thomas rented for me when we played golf. They can record your game so that you can study it later for improvement. I just asked him to keep recording at all times. Here, look.” I flipped the screen of the Devstick over so that she wouldn’t have to view it upside down.

  She watched intently as I talked with Sir Thomas, the two of us sitting at the drinks stand. We were suddenly treated to a close up of the back of the wall of the stand until Call had emerged from the other side and refocused on Sir Thomas and I. The image zoomed in on the two of us and the sound was clear. Mariko nodded at me and I hit pause.

  “Who’s this Annika Bardsdale?”

  “I saw her on a newsfeed sometime ago. She was arguing, not very successfully, against the Tag Law on a panel discussion.”

  “So you don’t know her at all?”

  “No.”

  “Perhaps you should. How about this for a short-term plan? You get together with your uncle again, as soon as possible, on the memoir. You’ve planted the seed of Annika Bardsdale so use that. What if you tell him that you’re planning to offer your services to her and you wanted to prepare him for the inevitable media fallout that will cause?”

  “Why would I do that? I’ve already told him that I’m for the Tag Law.”

  “So that you can betray their efforts at the last moment. You show Sir Thomas that you’re capable of doing that and he might just invite you into the Hawks.”

  “OK, so that gets me next to someone who wants to stop the Tag Law but cannot, and into the Hawks. The only action that I can think of so far to discredit Sir Thomas is to expose myself as Mark Zumar. Suppose I had an independent DNA analysis done and requested, under a court order, that Sir Thom
as had the same done, to compare. Even allowing for the fact that might take up to two years to get through the courts. He could easily corrupt the process somehow.”

  “Yes, but Sir Thomas is an evil man. No matter how clever he might be, that fact pervades and touches everything he does. The fact is that your birth is registered in a hospital and your DNA is registered at that hospital. Gabriel substantiated that.”

  “But that’s all we have. The birth register in Byron Bay shows Mark Anthony Zumar on the 23rd of September 2075, and then there’s Sir Thomas’s registering of my birth in Glasgow which shows my birth as being registered on the 29th of October 2075, thirty-six days later. Then there’s my entire upbringing within the auspices of the Oliver Foundation. Wait a minute. That is one possible avenue. The Oliver Foundation. What if I’m not the only one? What if Sir Thomas has killed the parents of other children?”

  Mariko pursed her lips together and nodded her head. “Go on.”

  “The Oliver Foundation was started with me. I mean he founded it the year of my birth and the year of the death of my fictional parents, his brother and step-sister. But it has spread. They are on every continent except the Poles and in every major metropolis. What if there are other Jonahs? And what is he really doing with the Oliver Foundation? It’s for gifted children only, so doesn’t that define them as Hawks, or at least a breeding ground for potential Hawks. Hawks started with families right? Passing it down from one generation to the next, father to son and daughter. Sir Thomas has no family but he has the Oliver Foundation, right. What if he’s using children from there as his branch of the family?”

  “Cochran was Oliver Foundation you know.”

  “No. I didn’t know that. How do you know that?”

  “Just SOE gossip. I was talking with a colleague about her being wounded in the bomb and he mentioned it.”

  “I could visit the foundation under the guise of doing the memoir. I mean the home where I was raised, it was the first of the orphanages. I could dig around in my birth records and try to identify other ex-Oliverans.”

  Mariko shook her head. “No it would take too long, and what if you do identify others like you? You have no way of knowing if they’re Hawks or not. Stick with Bardsdale. That seems like the best course of action for now.”

  It made sense. We were running out of time and to try to convince others without knowing where their loyalties lay was too dangerous. At least if I got close enough to Bardsdale, it could lead me to being more trusted by Sir Thomas and hopefully induction into the Hawks. At least it was a direction to move forward in. I nodded.

  “Agreed.”

  “I’ll get closer to Cochran. You know I helped her the night of the bombing?”

  I shook my head. I had no idea.

  “I was the first team member to get to her. Patched her up. Anyway, I’ll also ask her to assign me as your personal bodyguard. In light of the bombing she might agree.”

  “Be very careful, OK. She’s telepathic. When you’re with her, don’t think about anything other than what you want her to know. Best would be to think about impressing her and what a brave woman she is. What do you think about that? Was she seriously wounded?”

  “No, minor wounds only and the rumor mill has it that a call to her Devstick from her partner Sunita Shido saved her life.”

  “Do you think that was coincidence?”

  “No, not for a sec. I think the whole thing was intricately planned, and perfectly timed, but it still takes a special kind of woman to walk into a bomb.”

  “What about this Martine Shorne, the high-level UNPOL officer who is now on the Most Wanted list right under Gabriel? They’re saying she’s a high-level subversive, and used a booby-trapped Devstick as the bomb?”

  “They found her prints on fragments of a Devstick. She’s disappeared and they’ve charged her with being absent from her post for now. Nothing more than that. She used to work with Flederson. The rumor is that he approved and supported her transfer from Large Commercial Crimes unit into Deep Trace. In there she’d have had access to everything. I suspect we just found out who our allies were.”

  “You mean Shorne and Flederson?”

  “Yes, but they’re no use to us now. One’s in a coma in deep regen. He’s a complete wreck of a human. Lost both legs, burst ear drums, collapsed lungs, ruptured intestines and over fifty fragment wounds. It’s amazing he’s still alive but he isn’t going anywhere for at least a year. Shorne has gone to ground. No sign. Her team were questioned and one of my guys was the guard. They haven’t got a clue what’s going on. Of course it’s possible that she’s already dead.”

  I looked down into the dark of the pool. My reflection shimmered in the water. Mariko’s danced and twisted beside mine, the light of the Devstick between us a wavy shaft of white.

  “There’s something else that we haven’t explored, but I can’t think of a way to do it without arousing suspicion.”

  “What?”

  “Bo Vinh and my father had friends. They must have. Some of those friends may still be alive. Sir Thomas couldn’t have killed them all.”

  “Yes, and?”

  “Well, we might find support there, that’s all. Some of those friends may be in positions of influence and power. Considering the two men, we could say that it is likely that their friends would be their peers and as such share their sentiments. If we could find out who they were, they may be willing to help us.”

  “Have you started work on it yet?”

  “What?”

  “The memoir. I mean he’s going to ask to see what you’ve done at some point.”

  “You’re right. No, I haven’t, but he hasn’t put a timeframe on it yet either.”

  “Why don’t you suggest one – the Tag Law, March the 15th. What more suitable date to gain maximum exposure for his memoirs could there be than that. But if you suggest such an early date then you’ll need to convince him you’re making rapid progress. How many words is a memoir?”

  “Varies but commonly between eighty and one hundred thousand.”

  “That’s a lot of words to put together in a short time.”

  “Yes it is. Moving up the timeframe is a good idea though. It’ll make my immediately poking around his past more acceptable if we’re on a tight timeline. Give me more freedom to move. I’ll just have to get on with it and start drafting the memoir. Show that to Sir Thomas and hope he sees the need for me to go and see the first orphanage.”

  “That’s our plan then. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  Mariko held a clenched fist out in front of me. I put my lips to her fist and kissed it softly.

  “Not like that. You’re supposed to thump the top of it with your fist. It’s what we do in SOE each time before we go into action.”

  “Oh please, I prefer my way. Yours is just a bit too rah rah for me.”

  “Rah rah. All right, have it your own way but out there you’re going to need clenched fist not soft kiss. OK?” She fixed me with a stern look made hard by the harsh light and softened by the smile stalking around the corners of her mouth.

  “Yes ma’am.”

  ***

  I looked at the time on Devscreen. It was 10:30am. Since coming back from our swim, I’d worked steadily on the outline and had what I thought was a passable concept. As I’d discussed with Sir Thomas, I planned to tie his life into the most significant major global events that had shaped it. Or perhaps that he had shaped? A quick search online of EarthLog, the major online database of factual events, gave me a list of the major events that had occurred in the last seventy-five years. 2035 to the present day. I noticed there was already an entry for the bombing of the UNPOL Executive Club.

  Within each of these ten year periods, I filled in major events. There wasn’t much to write about the early years but perhaps that could focus on his parents. He was the second child and born when his mother was in her early forties. His father fifty. The next decade dealt primarily with the war and its after
math. His court martial, exoneration and later posting to New Boston to manage a refugee camp.

  From 2066, we have the rise of One Nation and the global PopVote comes into full existence, TBO transfers from the military to UNPOL. In the early years, he is inducted as a Senior Officer Grade 3, equivalent to his rank of Captain in the military. And at the very end of the decade we have his rise through the ranks and the assassination of Bo Vinh on the 1st January 2075.

  The latter years were a bit sparse for major events but I pulled in things like the Australasian Travway and Vactubes being built. These could be tied into greater movement of peoples and the whole ‘we are a village’ concept that Bo Vinh espoused through his book, ‘One Nation’. I could link that back into the present day and Sir Thomas needing to close off the village to protect its inhabitants.

  The whole time I was working on this I was also thinking about what kind of alternate history Sir Thomas really had. For instance in 2075 I knew he had killed my parents, stolen me and formed the Oliver Foundation, but what else had he really done. Was it possible that he was responsible for killing Bo Vinh? Was Bo Vinh’s replacement, Ted Hughes, really a puppet of Sir Thomas? Was it possible to manipulate the Secretary General of the UN? I sat back in my chair thinking about that one. Was it possible? Sure everything’s possible but was it likely that Bo Vinh’s replacement as Secretary General could be manipulated? Possible. Suppose Sir Thomas or other Hawks had incriminating evidence used to blackmail and corrupt him. Anyway, useless to speculate but worth the time to take a look at the lineage of Secretary Generals since Bo Vinh’s time.

  I chopped, changed and added to what I had until I was satisfied with it. It looked real. The three hours of effort that I’d put into it was worth it. I picked up my Devstick.