by Andrew Grant
All of a sudden I wasn’t feeling so bad about the hard arrest being ordered. Or that I was the one who’d get to carry it out.
I did go into the store, in the end. I saw a crowd of people checking their e-mail and tweeting and updating their Facebook pages, but there was still no shortage of available computers. I set up on one at the end of the left-hand table, near the door, but with the screen facing the wall rather than into the room. The Internet connection was fast, the first set of keywords I used hit their marks, and I had no trouble finding useful material. There were plenty of good Web sites. They yielded lots of intriguing detail. But none of it made me feel any better about what was happening. I spent a good half hour intensively browsing, thinking less and less favorable thoughts about McIntyre and his buddies from Equatorial Myene, and was just about ready to leave when Lucinda called back.
“You were right,” she said. “There was something about the gas. As in, one thing.”
“Only one?” I said.
“Only one that I could find. I used every tool we have, and searched every source we know about. And that’s all I could turn up.”
“OK. Well, one’s better than none. What can you tell me?”
“That I won’t be sleeping well tonight. Probably not all week. I hope you’re not anywhere near this stuff, David. It’s not very nice.”
“I didn’t think it would be. How bad are we talking?”
“Pretty bad.”
“Can you describe it? I need to know what I’m dealing with here.”
“Oh, you’re going to absolutely know in a minute. The resource I found includes a video clip. Have you got an e-mail address? A private one, I mean. One that the service knows nothing about.”
“I do—[email protected].”
“Wow. Nobody’s going to stumble across that one by mistake. OK. I’m going to send the link to you. You won’t recognize my address, either, and you won’t be able to reply. It’s a throwaway.”
“No problem. I’ll go back inside and log on.”
“Wait. Inside where?”
“The Apple store. I’m right outside. I was just using one of their machines.”
“David, no. You haven’t been listening. You cannot—cannot—view this anywhere that a civilian could catch even a glimpse. Absolutely not.”
“OK. I’ll head back to the consulate. Like you said, they have computers.”
“No. You can’t do that, either. You shouldn’t be going anywhere near this Web site. It’s on a classified server we’re not even supposed to know about. Service computers are way too easy to trace. The cyberfuzz would be all over you before you got halfway through.”
“Where can I view it from, then?”
“Didn’t you bring a laptop of your own?”
“No. I don’t own one.”
“Oh. Really? Then I don’t know what to say.”
“How about, maybe it’s time I put that right? I’ll go inside and buy one. Then take it to my hotel.”
“OK. That would work. As long as you don’t have anyone stashed away, in there.”
I didn’t reply.
“Oh,” she said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that. It was really insensitive of me.”
I took another moment.
“Going and buying a laptop is a great idea, by the way,” she said. “And I like the direct approach. Another reason why it’s always a pleasure.”
“The pleasure was all mine,” I said. “And thanks for your help, Lucinda. If it wasn’t for a couple of little details, I’d commend you to your boss.”
“Like, what I just said? I feel horrible about that.”
“Like, if he knew what you were helping me with, you’d get fired. Probably arrested. Possibly deported.”
“Oh. Yes. Any one of those would suck.”
“So how does lunch sound, instead, next time our paths cross?”
“It sounds like the proverbial tomorrow. You don’t have to make any empty promises. I was happy to be of assistance.”
“You’re a princess.”
“Thanks. I am. And actually, if there’s any way lunch could ever work out, that would be lovely. If I’ve recovered from watching that damn video by then.”
SIXTEEN
I read an article recently about jobs-related stress. Funnily enough, though, my job wasn’t covered.
I looked at all the factors that were listed and tried to relate them to the times I’d been sent to offices and factories and call centers and other, more mainstream places to work. I found I could relate to quite a few of the issues, from what I’d seen in other people. But what surprised me most was that despite the lack of knives and bullets and explosive devices, there were several areas that corresponded pretty closely with how I felt. In particular, the impact of seeing a tangible result of your labors.
Jobs where I investigated and found there to be no verifiable threat were by definition good for the service, but boring for me.
Where I found a threat and neutralized it, that was bad for the service and satisfying for me.
And where there was a threat that remained unresolved, that was the worst of both worlds.
It doesn’t show up in my service record anywhere, but a while ago I was given a job in Ulaanbaatar. It’s in Mongolia. I was there for a week, and the place I stayed in couldn’t really call itself a hotel. The most it could honestly claim to be was a hostel. It cost six dollars a night. And it had free wireless Internet. So you can imagine how irritated I was when I got back to my expensive room that afternoon in the center of Chicago. Unpacked my shiny new aluminium-bodied MacBook Pro. Fired up the browser. Typed in my Web mail details. And got redirected to a screen that demanded twenty-five dollars for a day’s Wi Fi access.
When I’d parted with the cash, I found I’d received three new e-mails that day. One for cheap Viagra. One for cheap copies of expensive watches. And one with no subject. It was from someone called koala32. I guessed that would be Lucinda. I opened it. A URL had been pasted in, but nothing had been written. I crossed my fingers and followed the link. The Web page it led to took a long time to open. And when something did appear on the screen, it wasn’t very helpful:
Error 404: page not found.
I closed the browser and tried again. The screen was just as slow to react. I sat and watched as nothing happened, until eventually it returned the same error message. This wasn’t the result I wanted. Fothergill’s people could break something loose at any moment. It’s as if computers know when you’re short of time, and deliberately move at a snail’s pace to show you who’s boss. I didn’t have time to mess around so I picked up my phone. I was going to call Lucinda and ask her to check the details she’d sent when I remembered something I’d seen once in a similar situation. A trick someone had used at a logistics firm I’d been sent to infiltrate in the Czech Republic. I moved the cursor to the top left of the screen. Clicked. And dragged it down to the bottom right. The blank space turned blue. And within it, in the center, three words appeared:
File 1
File 2
CCTV
The error message must have been a fake. Just text on the page, not a real status report generated by the system. The server must have opened the page slowly on purpose to simulate a routing problem. And the file names were displayed in a white font on a white background, making them seem invisible. I was impressed. But I didn’t waste any time admiring anyone’s ingenuity. I just clicked on File 1.
The link opened a text file, but there weren’t any words involved. It was only being used as a vehicle to display photographs. There were two. They were both large, high-resolution color shots. The subjects were similar. Both showed the inside of large rooms. The first was some kind of auditorium, like a theater or cinema. It was full of curving rows of fixed red velvet seats. The photographer must have been standing near the stage or screen, looking back at the audience. There were maybe a hundred and fifty people in the shot, out of a capacity of probably two thousand. B
ut they weren’t evenly distributed throughout the space. At least eighty percent of them were concentrated in four main groups, at both sides, near the walls. The remainder were spread out among the other seats, but with fewer and fewer remaining toward the center. The people were lying back, slumped listlessly in their places. I guess there was a chance they were asleep. In theory, at least. But my money said they were all dead.
The background in the second picture was far less luxurious. The floor was plain, scuffed wood. The walls were a dirty, blotchy version of white. The chairs were the interlinked, removable kind. They were arranged in straighter rows, and looked hard and uncomfortable. But they held a similar share of bodies. Again, I’d say well over a hundred. The people were sprawled out in the same way, as if they’d all suddenly fallen asleep. But this time, they were spaced out pretty evenly throughout the room. I couldn’t see any distinct groupings anywhere, front to back or side to side. So either the occupants had been distributed differently from the outset, or whatever had gone to work on them had done a more thorough job.
File 2 turned out to be a spreadsheet, but again it wasn’t being used in the normal way. There were two worksheets—labeled iv and v—and neither contained any numbers. Someone had drawn black outlines around large blocks of cells, and then colored them in to form a kind of pattern or diagram. Some were filled in with red. Some with green. And the rest, yellow. The only marking on either sheet was a lowercase x in a few of the cells. There were four on each side of the first sheet, and three on each side of the second.
The red cells were predominantly bunched up in groups near the edges of the first worksheet. The pattern looked familiar. I thought about it, and realized it reminded me of how the bodies had been arranged in the first picture. I opened the text file again to check, and saw there was a definite correlation. It was as if someone had used the spreadsheet to re-create a kind of bird’s-eye view of the room. Red clearly represented the seats where people had died. I guessed green meant that the people in those ones had survived. Yellow was less obvious. Maybe the people had died later. Or perhaps those seats had been vacant. I was still mulling over the options when another thought struck me. There were hardly any green cells at all in the second sheet. If I was right, that meant nearly the entire population of the second room had been killed. Which left just one element to identify. The x’s. And when I went back to the photo, it was obvious what they were, too. Air vents. Large ones, set into the walls. I was looking at a record of the carnage caused by something airborne. It had to be Spektra. The gas that McIntyre was selling to the Myenese.
I clicked on the final link, and for a moment I thought nothing was going to happen. Then a separate window opened. A video viewer appeared and automatically began playing. I hit the FULL SCREEN button and realized I was looking at the inside of a large inflatable structure, like a blow-up marquee. Or part of one, at least. I could see a long expanse of bulging horizontal panels, like giant cigars. They were bright, shiny white. The part of the wall in the shot was at least fifty feet wide, but the frame wasn’t big enough to see either end. There was no sign of any doors, either. Just windows. There were five, evenly spread out. They were flat, but so thick they were barely transparent. I could just about make out rough cinder-block walls on the far side, interspersed with heavy iron girders. If I was pushed, I’d say it looked like the tent had been built on the inside of an abandoned factory or ware house.
A row of chairs ran parallel to the wall, facing away from the windows. I counted twenty. They were arranged in one single, unbroken line. The seats and backs were covered with rough, khaki canvas that was stretched over simple tubular frames. The chair legs disappeared into a continuous concrete plinth, twelve inches high and three feet deep. I guessed that was to anchor the chairs firmly in place. No one would be able to knock them down, now, or tip them over. Assuming that anyone sitting in them was able to move. Higher up the sides I could see where straps had been attached. There were three on each chair. One at shoulder height. One at waist level. And one that would wrap around the thighs. They were made of black webbing, and had silver buckles at the ends like the seat belts on passenger planes. Once they were fastened up tight, with your arms pinned to your sides, there’d be no getting them off. Not on your own.
The line of chairs was bookended by a pair of square wooden frames. They were held up with scaffolding and filled with narrow parallel louvers, which were angled toward the ground. An electric fan stood behind each one. They were large, industrial models like they use on movie sets, mounted on battered mobile stands. And in between each fan and frame, I could see a tripod. Each tripod had a metal cylinder clamped to it. The size and shape of the cylinders was familiar. They were just like the one I’d found in the machine shop in Gary. The color was the same, too. Matte green. But at the top, things looked different. The normal clamped-down lids had been replaced with black spheres, about four inches across. They were peppered with tiny holes. And a thin radio aerial snaked out from the top of each one.
The kind of aerial you use to trigger remote explosive devices.
I was studying the base of the closest cylinder, checking for tell-tale yellow markings, when the screen went blank. Nothing happened for five seconds. Then a caption appeared:
Live subject exposure test #2
Variant A
Spektra IV (no BMU8)
A bar at the bottom showed the date, which was almost eighteen months ago. There was a clock, which was showing just after 6:00 A.M. And there was another figure for elapsed time. This seemed to be frozen on one second, but as I watched it jumped forward to ten minutes and then kept running. The black screen bled away, and the interior of the tent became visible again. Everything looked the same, except that now the line of chairs was no longer unoccupied. A person was sitting in each one. There were men. Women. Boys. Girls. Toddlers. Geriatrics. Some looked strong and healthy. Others were frail and feeble. At least one of the women was pregnant. All the people were different in some way, like some kind of carefully constructed social cross-section. But they also had one thing in common. They were all strapped down.
There was no sound to go with the picture, which I was extremely glad about. You could see people’s mouths opening and shutting as they yelled and screamed. Some fought and struggled against the straps, heaving and pulling and wrenching with all their might. Others sat quietly, almost serenely, waiting for their fate. I scanned along the line and saw a pool of liquid appear under one woman’s chair, near the center. It grew steadily then flowed off the concrete platform and splashed onto the ground, twelve inches below. But no one around her cared. In fact, no one even noticed. Everyone’s attention was taken by a sudden movement at both sides of the room. The giant fans had sprung into life. Their curved blades started slowly, then spun faster and faster until you could only just make out a gray blur behind the protective wire mesh covers. And it may not have been visible to the people in the room, but thanks to the camera I could see another thing that had changed. Something at the top of the cylinders. As soon as the fans had reached full speed, a tiny red LED light on each one flashed three times. And after the final time, they remained illuminated.
Most of the eyes in the room remained locked on the fans, but a few people started to glance at their neighbors. Fear and helplessness were etched clearly into their faces. A couple of them started to struggle again. Then the person third from the left—a boy, maybe fourteen or fifteen years old—was suddenly thrown back in his seat. His legs straightened out like staves and his neck bent so far back that his head seemed to disappear. All I could see was the underside of his chin. He hung there for a moment, rigid and still. Then his body began to shake. He was twitching so fast and so hard you’d think he had hundreds of volts running through him. The movements were so violent you wouldn’t have been surprised if one of his legs, or even his head, had been torn clean off his body. The fit lasted maybe thirty seconds without any sign of letting up, then stopped as suddenly as i
t had started. It was as if someone had thrown a switch and the kid was freed to slump back down, torso sagging, legs slack, head lolling to the side.
It was impossible to know this for sure, but I imagined the inside of the tent was completely silent. The nineteen survivors were all fixated on the dead boy. The people nearest him were trying to look away. And failing. The ones at the far end were craning their necks and stretching for a better view. All their faces were pale and shocked. No one was unmoved by what had just played out. Things seemed tense, but a few notches down from hysterical. They stayed that way for maybe a minute. Then the woman at the end on the right jerked back in her seat. The same thing happened to the next two people in line—a man, and a girl who looked less than ten years old. They started thrashing at virtually the same moment, and before they collapsed another nine people had succumbed to the same fate. The computer screen was a mass of uncontrollable movement. It was such a frenzy my eyes could hardly make out what was happening. But within a minute, the outcome was clear. Thirteen people were dead.
