Thermals

by Evan Currie

  “Thank you, Ma’am.”

  “Don’t thank me, Anselm,” She said, voice softening slightly. “We should have moved faster than this.”

  “Didn’t have the evidence, Ma’am,” He told her flatly, “couldn’t do anything different.”

  “Perhaps,” She replied, her voice noncommittal. “Good luck.”

  “Thank you, Ma’am.” Anselm said again, nodding as the connection closed.

  He stood up, stretching out and tried to work some of the knots from his muscles, and looked around to find that the office was empty.

  “Gwen?” He called out, stepping to the doorway.

  There was no immediate response, but a few moments later he heard the sound of movement from down the hall and Inspector Dougal appeared with a tray in her hands.

  “Awake I see,” She smiled wryly at him, walking up the hall. “I figured you might like some coffee to start your morning.”

  Anselm nodded, taking the cup from the tray gratefully.

  “Not my preferred source of caffeine, actually, but it’ll do.” He told her, glancing down the hall. “What time is it? I forgot to check.”

  “Midmorning,” She frowned, shaking her head. “The morning shift should have come on at the switchboard, but there’s no one here.”

  “No one?” Anselm raised an eyebrow as he sipped his coffee.

  That was odd, he had to admit. A police station, no matter how calm, was never left unwatched.

  “No one,” Gwen repeated with a scowl, “That strictly against regs too. The automated emergency response line will redirect calls to the duty officers, but there still should be someone at the front desk.”

  Anselm frowned, “Something scheduled for today?”

  She shook her head, “Nah. We’ve got a major event coming, but that’s not for two days.”

  “What’s that?”

  “The Anniversary of the activation of the Tower,” She answered, shrugging. “It’s the biggest day of the year around here. We usually have an ‘all hands on deck’ for that day, only one man here in the station, everyone else is on duty around the city.”

  Gwen shook her head, setting down her coffee and headed back down the hall. Anselm followed her, questions starting to rise in his mind. The police force had come back clear in his check through the CIA and Interpol databases, but of course that would only have identified terrorists with previous records. There was every chance that there were others that weren’t on anyone’s lists as of yet.

  Gwen led him to the squad room, and stopped by one of the terminals in front of a wall screen. The ubiquitous wall size screens were nearly invisible until activated, but this one was already online and showing a top down view of the city with the huge greenhouse and tower at its center.

  “That’s odd,” Gwen murmured, “Everyone is in the Tower Facility.”

  “Everyone?” Anselm asked, his stomach dropping.

  “The other officers,” She corrected herself, and Anselm relaxed somewhat. “Most of them anyway. Some of the deputies and a couple officers are around the facility, at the monorail and road access points.”

  “Can you get a view of them?”

  “Yeah, hang on…” She said, tapping in a command.

  The screen abruptly shifted, showing a view of one of the monorail access points where a crowd was gathered, waiting for the next car.

  “What’s going on out there?” Anselm asked sharply, his heart quickening.

  She shook her head, “I don’t know.”

  “Where are they all going?”

  She tapped in another command, bringing up the monorail command system and showed the overhead schematics of the lines. After a moment she let out a long, shocked breath.

  “Oh…” She shook her head, “They’re going into the greenhouse.”

  “What!? Why!?”

  “I don’t know!”

  “Stop them!” Anselm blurted.

  “How!? I don’t have controller access! This is just used to view the car movements!,” She snapped, twisting a smaller screen over to where she could look at it.

  “Well call someone who does!”

  “I’m trying that!” She growled, “Now shut up a second and let me do my job!”

  Anselm shut up, watching as she tried to open an outside line, only to have the computer on the other side refuse her. After a minute and three tries, she slapped her hand down on the desk and growled in frustration.

  “Damn it! There’s no answer.”

  “Where’s the control center?”

  “Inside the tower facility.” She gritted out, shaking her head. “Most of the administration is inside, Anselm. The Police only moved outside a little over a year ago, before that we were semi-officially under the auspice of the power company as a ‘security force’.”

  “So, what you’re basically telling me, is that the entire command and control system for the city’s infrastructure is probably under the command and control of Abdallah Amir,” Anselm said sarcastically.

  “Well it’s not like we planned it that way!”

  “He did, I’m sure,” Anselm said dryly, shaking his head. “Alright, something’s going on, and I’m guessing that it’s not a good thing. How’s he getting everyone into the tower anyway?”

  “I think I know,” Gwen said grimly, pointing to a wall screen tuned to the local webcast channel.

  Anselm straightened up and walked over, watching as the announcement looped and began playing again. “Free drinks and food, come celebrate the pre-anniversary party at the Tower Gardens?? Oh Christ…I don’t believe this crap…”

  “We have to warn people!”

  “How?,” Anselm asked tiredly, shaking his head. “You want to run through the streets yelling like idiots in the movies?”

  “Actually I was thinking about maybe posting an official warning,” Gwen replied sarcastically. “As a police officer I have that authority, you know.”

  “You do, or your Captain does?”

  “Well…” Gwen hesitated.

  “I thought so.” Anselm shook his head, “Why don’t you try to contact him again.”

  “Right.” Gwen nodded, “I’ll try.”

  “While you’re doing that,” Anselm said, “I’m going to check on my research. Something tells me it’s about to become very important information.”

  “You do that,” Gwen said absently, already activating the Captain’s contact line.

  Anselm left her to it, not expecting her to accomplish anything, and went back to her office where his programs were still running.

  He was pretty certain that things were well on their way to the crapper, though he’d be damned if he could see what could be done to stop it.

  *****

  “Alright, come on folks! There’s no rush here, the next car is coming right along in a minute…” Inspector ‘Pete’ growled, shaking his head as he waved a few people back, then nudged one of the deputies working with him, “Man, this is nuts. Why couldn’t they wait a couple days, we had all the arrangements made. This would have been a breeze.”

  The deputy, one of the part time men that rarely got called up, just grunted in response as he roughly pushed a man back from the platform.

  “Hey!” Pete yelled, coming over. “Just give em a warning damn it! They’re not rioters for crying out loud, mate!”

  The deputy actually looked mutinous for a second, and Pete had to match his glare for glare, but he finally nodded and backed down, grumpily telling the next group to get into line.

  Thank the maker that this crowd should thin out pretty quick, Pete thought, shaking his head. This yo-yo is trying me nerves.

  Aloud he just waved to the next person, smiling as he ushered the woman and her children onto the monorail car.

  “The fair ground, right Ma’am?” He asked, nodding to the children.

  “That’s right,” She nodded.

  “This is the car for you lot, then.” He winked in an exaggerated way to the kids, his white teeth
and eyes contrasting heavily to his black skin, and they giggled in response.

  “Thanks.”

  “Have a good one, miss!” He waved as the door shut and the mono-rail car took off.

  The next car was coming into the slot as he turned to the deputy, and nudged him again. “That’s how you handle this lot, mate. Now come on, give me a hand here.”

  The man just grumbled again in response, and Pete sighed, glancing to his wrist watch as he began to mentally count down the hours to when he’d be able to pay a visit to the free food and drink himself.

  It’s a good thing I love being a cop, He thought as he helped the next group into the car, Cause otherwise this traffic control shit would really get a mate down.

  *****

  “The police inspector has begun accessing the net protocols from the station,” Director Jacob said, approaching from behind Abdallah as the terrorist entered a security code into a wall lock.

  “Oh?” Amir smiled, looking over his shoulder. “Took her longer than I expected. Very well, I suppose that we’ve taken all the time we are likely to get. Follow through with the first stage of the plan.”

  Jacob nodded, “Very well, Amir. Shall I send a team to the Station?”

  Abdallah paused for a moment, considering. On the one hand, he didn’t generally approve of random killings while in the process of achieving a mission, they generally attracted the wrong kind of attention to the random killings he was hoping to achieve at the fulmination of his plans. Long term deaths were more important, after all.

  However this Inspector and the Interpol agent she was associating with were a long cry from ‘random’ targets. They were, perhaps, directly to blame for the increased time schedule he was now operating under, and the directly proportional loss in expected casualties of his plan. If anyone deserved to die, it would be them.

  More to the point, they were going to be a pain in the ass if left alone. He could just feel it.

  “Very well,” He said finally, tapping in the final code to open the large metal door before them. “I suppose that it’s time to end the charade. Proceed to phase two as well, and eliminate the police that aren’t under our control.”

  “All of them?” Jacob asked, his voice uncertain.

  “Well, wait until the crowds have died down, but yes. All of them. No point in having people who actually aspire to heroics kicking around alive, Jacob. They’ll just get themselves killed in the long run anyway,” He said, pulling open the huge counter weighted door. “Give them what they want.”

  Jacob nodded, a hint of a smile on his face. “We have a few people who are looking forward to that.”

  “That’s why we keep them around,” Amir said, stepping into the secured room.

  Jacob nodded, stepping back and vanishing, as Amir looked at the rows of stainless steel canisters that lined the wall of the small room. The terrorist smiled privately, taking satisfaction in the stark, clinical image of over a decade of research and preparations.

  Chapter 8

  Anselm slid into the chair, pulling the keyboard out from the desk as his eyes roved over the screen briefly. The numbers were still, predictably, being crunched, but enough of them were in to give him a bleak image of the situation he and the innocent civilians of Tower City were facing.

  So far there were almost sixty known or suspected terrorists in the city, and it was absolutely mind boggling to Anselm that none of them had tripped security alarms before Adrienne Somer had recognized a familiar face in a honeymoon photograph.

  The fact that Director Jacob was on the list, of course, made it somewhat easier to believe, but that was hardly enough. Some of these people were in the criminal population, such as it was, and while it wasn’t standard protocol to run miscreants through international terrorist databases, neither was it entirely credible that all of them could simply slip through.

  That meant someone was running interference through the computer systems.

  Unfortunately, that didn’t narrow matters much. Hacking computer systems was a time honored tradition in the post digital age, and even the most secured of systems were known to be breached from time to time. Given the fact that Abdallah had obviously had his claws into the Tower Project from early on in its inception, it was literally child’s play to hook intercepts into the infrastructure of the local web access nodes.

  After all, how often does one really get a chance to be on in something literally from the ground up?

  Anselm shook his head, tapping in another command, only to be met with an alarming whistle from the computer, followed by a loss of connection with the CIA and Interpol computing clusters.

  “Ah hell,” He muttered, tapping in more commands, “Now what!?”

  He tried to restart the connection several times, but got nowhere, and instead gave up and pushed back from the desk. He got up and headed for the outer offices, “Gwen!”

  “What!?” She snapped back, eyes flaring, and he guessed that she had no more luck than he’d just experienced.

  “We’ve lost net access.” He told her.

  “What?” Now she just sounded perplexed, which Anselm well understood.

  The network link for a police organization was a dual line fiberoptic bundle, either of which fully capable of taking up the full slack for any conceivable use they’d have for it. Both lines were linked, by preference, through separate feed stations though in cities such as Tower City that wasn’t always possible.

  In effect, a police station was never supposed to fall off the international police network.

  Gwen started tapping at the configurable keyboard in front of her, ordering a connection reset, only to receive the same error as Anselm had seen a moment earlier.

  “This isn’t right…”

  “I figured that,” He said dryly, drawing his portable from his pocket. “I’m calling the Director.”

  She ignored him, continuing to work on the computers while he tapped in the directors name on his buddy list.

  A moment later he looked up, “I can’t get a signal.”

  Gwen’s head snapped up, eyes widening, “That’s impossible.”

  It should be, that was certain, Anselm conceded. A portable didn’t operate on any single connection scheme, and should have been able to establish a link over any open internet connection within the entire city. Failing that, its secondary protocol was the cellular links that still crossed the planet in almost every nation, and certainly here in Australia.

  There was no single place where a break would disrupt the use of a portable computer, which meant that short of a nuclear attack or asteroid strike, which Anselm was relatively confident hadn’t happened, no accidental event could possibly cut off a portable.

  “They’re getting started,” He said grimly, shaking his head. “We’re too late.”

  Gwen fell back in her chair, paling as she pushed her red hair out of her eyes and whispered, “Oh no.”

  “The last numbers that came through put the opposition at almost sixty men,” Anselm said, taking a deep breath. “I don’t know how many people they could have convinced to join them in the tower, but I doubt it’s anywhere near Abdallah’s optimal number…”

  “What are they going to do next?”

  “I don’t know,” He shook his head, “They’ll have to hold the greenhouse…secure it before they can start…”

  “That’s a big facility, Anselm,” She said, shaking her head. “Twenty five thousand acres of parks, crop lands, thermal tanks…it’s a lot of place to secure.”

  “Maybe…maybe not,” Anselm shook his head, “They don’t care what people do once their inside, right? They just don’t want them leaving.”

  “That would make it easier,” She nodded, shrugging. “I don’t know…Still a lot of emergency exists around the outer ring…”

  “What if they keep everyone to the inner rings?”

  She shook her head, “Mostly empty sections there, thermal capacitance tanks, dehumidification…it’s indus
trial…at least as much as we get around here.”

  Anselm sighed shaking his head, “Jesus…Twenty five thousand acres to spread themselves out…if they have the men to do it…How many people could they possibly have in there?”

  “Thousands,” Gwen told him grimly. “Maybe tens of thousands.”

  Anselm considered the numbers for a moment, then shook his head, “I don’t care how many people he has, there is no way Abdallah can control that many people. He just can’t possibly have the numbers.”

  Gwen laughed bitterly, “What does it matter? Sixty men or six hundred? You and I don’t stand a chance in hell of doing anything to stop him.”

  Anselm had to admit that she had a point, but he wasn’t willing to give up so soon. There had to be a way, even if it was just warning the people in the tower. If they revolted against the terrorists, they could easily run over whatever men Abdallah had. It would be messy, almost certainly, but it was possibly the only way.

  The only question was what other insurance did the terrorist have?

  Explosives?

  The threat of being blown up was an effective deterrent, to be sure. Especially when you might not have enough guns to watch over a population effectively.

  Of course, once they were infected, the people would become considerably more docile. They’d have other things to worry about, their bodies being weakened by the combination of illness and radiation.

  It could very well be that this was what Amir was holding up his sleeve as population control.

  In the end, though, it didn’t matter because Anselm didn’t have much choice in his course of actions. He had to prevent Abdallah from releasing that virus, one way or another.

  “Where do you keep the precinct weapons?” He asked grimly.

  She stared at him, eyes widening, “Are you daft!? You don’t stand a chance if you go in there, guns blazing like some movie character!”

  “I’m not going to challenge Abdallah to a showdown in the town square, if that’s what you mean…”

  “That might have a chance compared to anything else you might think up!” She snapped.