Sycamore 2

by Craig A. Falconer

  Ernesto insisted that he wanted to appear in front of Amos at the same time as Kurt, but Kurt overruled him. Ernesto’s face would mean nothing to the crowd, Kurt argued, and it would be harder for two people to sneak into position than one. Kurt said that Ernesto could look on from the crowd if he wished, but that it would harm their chances of success if he jumped the barriers and confronted Amos. Ernesto was disappointed that Kurt saw it this way but could, on reflection, understand his point. He agreed. There was no longer any doubt who was in charge.

  At 2am, four hours before their scheduled departure, the three men went to their respective display bedrooms in Tasmart Home.

  Kurt didn’t sleep.

  ~

  Everyone who was staying in the mall got up early to see the departing group off.

  All of the necessary supplies had been loaded into the truck, including plenty of pillows and blankets for the kids. Ernesto’s power banks and the computers were there, too.

  Minter had a last-minute idea to attach Stacy’s tiny camera to the truck’s front license plate, providing a window to the outside world via Kurt’s computer. The others agreed that it was an excellent idea.

  As everyone was saying their goodbyes, Michael called Kurt over with his hand.

  “Yeah?” Kurt said.

  Michael leaned in to whisper. “The cameras picked something up last night,” he said. “A SkySweeper.”

  “Here?”

  “Not over the mall itself, but at the edge of the parking lot.”

  “Does that mean anything?” Kurt asked. “It’s a big parking lot.”

  “It’s the first time we’ve seen one. But there was only one, which means it was a routine flight. I just thought you should know.”

  “Thanks,” Kurt said.

  Michael nodded.

  Kurt turned to the group and made an unplanned announcement. “We’ve decided that Mary is going to come with us. There might be a need for Randy to leave the truck,” he said, making up the excuse as he went, “so we need someone in there to look after Julian and Sabrina.”

  Mary smiled as soon as he said it. “I haven’t packed, though. Can I pack?”

  “Quickly,” Kurt said. “We’re only going to be gone for two days.”

  Michael looked at Kurt without saying anything.

  Lisa’s expression reflected her sadness at Mary leaving again. Ty did his best to comfort her.

  Everyone apart from Kurt walked ahead to the truck while Mary packed, leaving through the fire exit at the north end of the mall. Mary returned with her bag of things and said her goodbyes. She then hurried to catch up with the others.

  Last to leave, Kurt shook Michael’s hand and told him to make sure his group stayed safe. To the others this sounded like a platitude, but Kurt and Michael knew what it meant.

  Anthony shook Kurt’s hand without saying a word, still sour about having his concerns ignored.

  Harry told Kurt to get the job done and Joyce told him to get back safe. Lisa made a joke about the palm-spreading contraption from Kurt’s first day and pecked him on the cheek. Ty was more emotional than anyone else. He looked up to Kurt even though there was little between them in terms of age, and his hatred of Amos had intensified after having to edit his despicable highlight reel.

  Ty looked Kurt in the eye, put his hands on his shoulders, and said two words: “Destroy him.”

  At 6:04 on a breezy Monday morning, Kurt Jacobs left La Plethora Mall & Resort. He was ready for the takedown.

  27

  Kurt and Minter were used to travelling in the back of Harry’s truck, but it was a new experience for the others.

  Sabrina complained almost instantly that the road was too bumpy. Kurt said there was nothing they could do, so there was no point in thinking about it.

  “This is the bumpiest part of the whole journey,” Mary said. “Don’t worry.” She was better at this kind of thing than Kurt.

  The back of the truck was well lit thanks to the numerous flashlights Ernesto had placed around the edges. There were more pillows than before, too, but having a camera on the front of the truck made the biggest difference. Where Kurt and Minter had once been blind to the world outside, they could now see. And Val had a phone which allowed for contact between the front and back of the truck, another thing which was lacking during the original trip north with Harry and Joyce.

  Sabrina fell asleep quite early in the journey, two or three hours in, which was understandable given how early she had been woken up to get ready.

  The truck felt crowded but not as packed as Kurt had expected. Any more people would have made it uncomfortable, though.

  The truck’s limited space was the key reason why the entire group couldn’t come. Aside from this, the other main reason was that both of the vehicles and four of the six people left behind were known to Sycamore. Everyone apart from Harry and Joyce would have been unsafe driving in the open and even they might have been unsafe in either Michael or Randy’s car given that Sycamore knew who those vehicles belonged to.

  After another two hours or so, Julian, Randy and Mary decided to watch a movie through Kurt’s computer. Because they were all wearing their hacked Lenses and still had their in-earphones, the movie didn’t disturb Kurt, Minter or Ernesto.

  Ernesto’s mobile internet was working perfectly, which was a colossal relief. None of them had even considered the possibility that it might not work until the browser’s home page took a few seconds to load. After the briefest of panics, everything was fine.

  They read some news articles about the president’s reaction to the audio of his secret deal with Amos being leaked. Apparently the president had dismissed the audio out of hand, insisting that “it could be anyone’s voice.” Adeline Lemarchand was credited with the leak in most of the international articles they looked at. When they searched for Lemarchand, various auto-translated French articles discussed her upcoming appearance on Rene Cordier’s show. She promised to show some “explosive footage,” which was more accurate than she knew.

  Kurt signed in to his throwaway email account, not in anticipation of a new message from Lemarchand but rather to make sure that it didn’t automatically self-destruct due to 24 hours of inactivity.

  Minter then accessed the ECI to check once more that the times were all correct. He had to do the same double password routine as before, but there was no drama this time. Ernesto looked over everything carefully when Minter pulled it up, to see if his fresh eyes could spot any discrepancies. He was satisfied that everything looked correct.

  Ernesto then suggested that they should watch Amos’s vista from early the previous morning when the news about his conversation with the president first broke. Minter navigated to the footage and let it play. When Amos received the voice call that told him the audio had leaked, his only reaction was to curse the president’s lax security. There wasn’t even a thought in his mind that someone might have hacked Sycamore’s systems, much less that Minter had been treating the ECI like a smorgasbord for two days.

  Amos didn’t seem overly perturbed by the news. Though it would crush the president, it would have little to no impact on Amos. A quote from Stacy about the SycaNews came to Kurt’s mind: “Evidence doesn’t matter when you set the agenda.” She had been right. This time, though, Amos wasn’t setting the agenda. Until 10:05 on Tuesday morning, Amos wouldn’t even know there was an agenda.

  “Do you know what we’ve never checked?” Minter said, inspired by Ernesto’s idea and the footage they had just watched.

  “What?” Kurt asked.

  “We’ve never checked to see how Amos actually reacted when we cut our Seeds out.”

  For a second Kurt wondered how they could ever have overlooked such an obvious opportunity. But he then reflected that Randy and the kids were already in the mall when Minter first got inside the ECI, meaning that the question of whether Amos believed the death story didn’t matter nearly as much as it had in the beginning.

  Kurt was curious
, anyway, so he encouraged Minter to check it out.

  As it turned out, Amos bought their story hook, line, and sinker. He sent two Sycamore agents to check Kurt’s house only 25 minutes after Kurt and Minter left. When the agents told Amos of the bloodstained furniture and the Fury River hit-list, Amos ordered extra security for himself and Colin. He even mocked the killer for including Michael on the list when he hadn’t worked for Sycamore in months. Minter grinned smugly at that part, since it was precisely why he had suggested writing Michael’s name.

  “Now Barnford Park,” Ernesto said. “Can you search his history for that? If not then just go to the morning when Val was attacked.”

  Minter searched for Barnford Park in Amos’s chat logs and found several mentions, all from the past week. The first mention indicated that a letter addressed to E. Palamino, bound for Box 44 in Unit 7b at Barnford Park, had been spotted and identified in a sorting office. Ernesto was only slightly surprised to hear that Amos viewed him as enough of a threat to demand that sorting offices alert him every time a letter or package for E. Palamino passed through their doors.

  Later mentions of Barnford Park were in reference to a woman accessing box 44, always in the same car and always at the same time of day. The final mention claimed that the target had been neutralised, which was a gross exaggeration unless they had been targeting Val’s car rather than her.

  “Now search his history for La Plethora,” Kurt said. “Just so we know for sure that the others are safe.”

  There was one result. It was a straightforward single-line message sent to Amos from Bryan Ness, a name Minter recognised as the man who had replaced Michael. Like Michael, Bryan Ness was a drone specialist.

  The time: 45 minutes ago.

  The message: “They’re at La Plethora.”

  ~

  Kurt immediately took his phone from his pocket to Chifi Val and tell her to turn around. As soon as his phone was in his hand, Ernesto grabbed it from him.

  “What are you doing?” Kurt shouted.

  The sudden volume of Kurt’s voice woke Sabrina, but Randy, Julian and Mary remained obliviously immersed in their movie.

  Ernesto held Kurt’s phone behind his back. “It’s the wrong move.”

  “It’s not a move,” Kurt said. “They’ll be slaughtered if we don’t do something.”

  “What can we do?”

  “Turn around!”

  “And then what?” Ernesto asked. “Fight the drones?”

  Kurt remembered only then what he had thought at the time was an empty comment from Amos, made in the middle of a discussion about CrimePrev and gun control: “Good luck with your rifle when we send round the drones.”

  “We have to do something,” Kurt said, desperately searching for an idea.

  “Why? So we can feel like we tried? Sometimes there’s nothing to do. It would take us about six hours to get back.”

  Kurt stared at Ernesto in amazement. “I can’t believe you want to leave them to die.”

  “If I have to play the bad guy, I will,” Ernesto said. “But don’t act like I don’t care about them. I’ve known Val since we were little kids; since before you were even born. And I owe everything I have to Anthony for taking the case and to Michael for sticking with him when Amos was pressuring against it.”

  Both Kurt and Ernesto turned to Minter for support. “We can’t go back, man,” Minter said, and that was all he would say on the matter.

  Kurt slumped against the wall and let his head touch the floor.

  Sabrina, half awake, was looking at him from the far side of the truck. “Are Lisa and Ty okay?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” Kurt said, willing his eyes to stay dry. “Lisa and Ty are fine.”

  28

  No one told Randy, Julian or Mary about the mall when their movie ended and they returned to consciousness from their fully-immersed state. Kurt expected Sabrina to say something, but he knew there was a strong chance that she hadn’t fully understood what Kurt and Ernesto were arguing about.

  Kurt remained slouched against the side wall while they decided which movie to watch next. Sabrina wanted to watch it, too, which ruled out anything with too much profanity. They settled on a family comedy that Kurt had downloaded for free when it was Deal of the Day on one of the old digital marketplaces. All four quickly faded into full immersion.

  Minter still had the computer in front of him but Ernesto had moved away to lean on some pillows. Kurt didn’t hate them for deciding not to go back — he had come to think that Val probably would have vetoed it, anyway — but he didn’t understand how they had been able to say “no” so easily.

  Kurt saw Minter cover his face with his hand and peek through his fingers at the computer.

  “What is it?”

  Minter shook his head.

  “What is it?” Kurt repeated.

  “You don’t want to see,” Minter said.

  Both Kurt and Ernesto rushed to Minter’s side and looked at the computer. He was watching Bryan Ness’s vista from a few minutes earlier. Bryan Ness, already identified by Minter as a drone specialist, was looking at a screen which relaid visual input from what seemed to be a combat drone.

  The image on the screen showed the north end of La Plethora engulfed in flames.

  “No one’s surviving that,” Ness boasted. “Not a chance.”

  Another voice rang out through Ness’s vista, immediately recognisable as Amos. “Get it in closer,” Amos said, presumably watching the drone’s pictures through Ness’s vista just as Kurt was. “Get right in. I want to see the bodies.”

  Kurt thought of Ty and Lisa, of Anthony and Michael, of Harry and Joyce. Harry and Joyce were only there because of Kurt, which crushed him. His late decision had spared Mary, at least, but that was scant relief from the sorrow he felt for the six others.

  “Uh, getting in that close is not likely, sir,” Ness said.

  “Do it,” Amos boomed. He didn’t have to ask again.

  Ness, remotely piloting the drone, took it to the north end of the mall and zoomed in as far as he could. The flames almost looked artificial, such was their intensity. Ernesto’s stores of gas provided ample fuel for the fire, and the whole area had been ravaged.

  “Turn around and show me that door,” Amos said. “Near the car. What amateurs, leaving a car in plain sight! Come on, right in on the door. Look for people who were trying to escape before the second strike.”

  As Ness zoomed in on the fire exit between the decimated areas that used to be Home and the food court, Ernesto sat up dead straight.

  “Michael’s car,” he said. “Michael’s car is gone. Look! Randy’s is burnt out, but Michael’s is gone.”

  Ernesto was right. The white car was gone.

  “Michael told me the camera picked up a SkySweeper last night,” Kurt revealed. “But he wasn’t worried because it was on its own. Maybe he saw more of them today and decided to get everyone the hell out of there.”

  “I thought those things only flew at night?” Minter said.

  “For routine flights,” Ernesto said. “Michael said the SkySweepers fly low enough to be seen and respond to crime reports. So if the routine flight last night picked something up, they might have sent more to check it out. And Michael has the place rigged with sky-facing cameras, so he wouldn’t miss it.”

  “Where would they go?” Kurt asked. He wished for a way to contact them; for any way to contact them.

  Ernesto shook his head very slowly, as though trying to think of an answer before fully committing to saying he didn’t know.

  “Harry’s,” Minter said. “Harry and Joyce are the only people Sycamore don’t know. Where else could it be?”

  Neither Kurt nor Ernesto knew where else the group could go, but it didn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. A few minutes earlier they had assumed with good reason that everyone in the mall was dead. Now they had equally good reason to think they had escaped.

  Six people in Michael’s car would
have been a squeeze, but it was a whole lot more comfortable than the alternative.

  Minter then checked Ness’s vista from earlier in the day and saw that he had indeed sent an investigative trio of SkySweepers to pass over the mall. As Ernesto watched, he reiterated that there was no chance Michael would miss something like that.

  None of the investigative SkySweeper footage that Ness reviewed showed the area where Michael’s car had been, so neither he nor Amos could notice that it was gone. And given that Ness hadn’t mentioned seeing a car driving through Verdant Heights, Kurt felt safe in assuming that Michael had managed to evacuate the mall without being detected during the window between the second SkySweeper visit and the arrival of the combat drone. It had been a close call, but the signs looked good.

  ~

  As night rolled in, apparent only because of the camera on the license plate, the mood in the truck was sombre. When Minter and Kurt first came north in the truck there had been a degree of excitement about reaching Ernesto. Kurt was still itching to get to HQ and carry out the takedown, but the emotionally draining are-they-or-aren’t-they drone episode had somewhat taken the wind out of his sails.

  The kids, who were uncharacteristically quiet the whole way, both fell asleep before 9pm. Julian would normally have been up much later but with no natural light and not much to do, there was no reason to fight sleep.

  Val stopped the truck to rest for three hours at 1am, having given the group notice via her phone. They were at a truck stop, which they all figured was as safe a place as anywhere. Val said they were around four hours away from their destination, so would arrive at approximately 8am. Kurt liked that time. It was early enough, but no more.

  As usual, Minter fell asleep as soon as he closed his eyes. Kurt and Ernesto each insisted that they would keep watch over the camera while the other slept. Kurt conceded defeat in this contest after almost an hour and won the consolation prize of a two-hour sleep.