by John Zakour
“And you don’t?”
“I wish I could,” she said, eyes lowered, “but what she’s done here is unforgivable. You need to help us.”
“I’ll do what I can.”
“Thank you, Zach,” she said softly.
She took my hand, gently interlacing her fingers with mine and raised it between us. Her fingers were soft and warm and I could feel her pulse racing. That’s when I knew we were in trouble. This kind of thing happens a lot with female clients. They see me as the man who can solve their problems. I’m their white knight; cool, aloof, and unflappable. It’s only natural, I suppose for them to develop an attraction toward me. It’s all based on a fantasy but it’s real to them. These kinds of things may seem innocent but, believe me, getting involved with a client is a recipe for disaster so I usually do my best to break the news to them gently.
“Inga, I’m flattered really but…
Then she took her hand computer and gently touched it to my wrist interface. The two interfaces beeped softly as data was transmitted and received.
“I’m sorry, what were you saying?” she said, letting go of my hand.
“Um, nothing. What was that file transfer?” I asked.
“The information that my investigators have gathered thus far on Enga.”
“You’ve been investigating her without your Grandfather knowing?”
“I’m doing what I think is best for the company,” she said. “Sadly Grandfather won’t listen to the truth from me. He needs to hear it from you.”
“I’m not going to judge anyone, Inga. I promised your grandfather that I’d find Enga. I can’t control what happens after that.”
“Hopefully the information I’ve gathered will help you find her more quickly. And once you’ve found her, well, I know that you’ll do the right thing.”
She slowly backed away as the elevator arrived and I stepped in.
“Please find her, Zach,” she said. “Find her before she does any more damage.”
And the elevator doors closed.
* * *
Inga’s investigation of Enga had been pretty thorough. She’d hired a couple of corporate snoops to do surveillance and a hacking outfit to keep track of her purchasing activity and expenses. The snoops had lost Enga’s trail a few weeks ago (since shortly before the bombings began). Her purchasing activity had stopped as well. If she was buying things, she wasn’t paying for them with her above-ground accounts, which certainly made sense if you were buying things you didn’t want to be tracked.
Inga had done a good job gathering the information but she clearly didn’t know how to analyze it. HARV needed only a few nanos to collate the surveillance info with the purchasing data to see the patterns of the activity. A nano more and he’d flagged a trio of locations in the city that warranted investigating. The first was an apartment in the mission district but that turned out to have been abandoned two months earlier. The second was a small loft space above an Arabic grocery store (abandoned a month ago). The third was a large unit in a low-rent storage facility which is where we headed late in the afternoon.
As we made our way to the storage center, HARV filled me in on the background information that we’d received from Big Blow and that he’d pulled from his public and not so public sources. His hologram sat in the passenger seat beside me as I drove. The visuals he was showing appeared on the computer screen in the car dashboard. There were several images Enga, most from within the past year and honestly, she didn’t look very happy in any of them. It’s hard for a beautiful young woman with orange hair to look dour, but Enga clearly had mastered that skill.
“What about the security camera footage from the actual bombings?” I asked. “Did Big Blow give us that?”
“Yes, I’ve analyzed that as well,” HARV said. “Switch the car control over to me while I go through it. You’ll want to pay full attention to this and I’m better at multi-tasking than you.”
I did as I was told and let HARV remotely pilot the car. He’s right about the multi-tasking.
Recently, HARV has begun projecting a human-sized avatar of himself whenever he and I are alone or with people he knows. He tells me that this allows us to interact more as equals. He could have chosen any form for his personal avatar but from the very start of this behavior, he opted for the form of a dignified, middle-aged gentleman in a neatly tailored gray suit; sort of like a twen-cen English butler. I find it particularly odd that he chose this avatar even though his interface is neither British nor subservient but it’s clear that HARV’s is an evolving intelligence (which worries me a little).
“This is the footage taken the night of the first bombing,” HARV said as the color images came onto the screen. “The camera itself was destroyed in the explosion but the images were beamed back to the central security station where they were recorded.”
The shot from the camera was from a high angle and looked downward at the trunk of the tree at the point where it began to split into the multi-pronged branches that held the actual windmills. The scene seemed peaceful at first but after a few nanos we saw a figure come into view as it climbed the trunk of the tree and smoothly lifted itself onto the crook between the branches. As expected, the figure was wearing blue overall knickers with a light blue shirt underneath and a painter’s cap on its head. The clothing was loose but it was easy to see the female curves to the figure’s body, especially when the breeze hit the right way and the clothes clung to her hips or chest. Heavy boots covered the climber’s feet and there were thick, oversized gloves on her hands.
“She’s a good climber,” I said.
“She’s using special gloves and boots that electromagnetically adhere to the tree,” HARV replied. “They’re standard issue for Big Blow maintenance workers.”
“Are we sure that’s Enga?” I asked.
“Give it a nano.”
The climber pulled a package the size of a bread loaf from the pack she wore on her back and set it down on the branch of the tree. At that nano a heavy gust of wind must have come because the painter’s cap on her head shifted suddenly, blowing off. She reached back quickly attempting to grab it, tilting her head and looking upward directly at the camera as she did so.
“There,” HARV said, freezing the playback.
He enhanced the image, zooming in on the face.
“The definition of the images is excellent,” he said as the zoom continued, “especially for surveillance footage. This zoom actually requires no real enhancement from me even at a twenty to one ratio.”
A nano later, the screen was tight on the climber’s face. And the image matched those we had seen of Enga perfectly.
“Yeah, that sure looks like her,” I said.
HARV kept the image magnified but re-started the footage in slow motion. With the painter’s cap gone, her hair had come loose and the cascade of orange locks fell to her shoulders. Her hair was so full that the top of her head looked like a silken forest of orange.
“Even more so now, don’t you think?” he asked.
“Sure does.”
HARV pulled back to the standard image and we watched as Enga turned her attention back to the small device at her feet. She pressed a button on its control panel and the device began to glow a light shade of orange.
“What’s she doing there?” I asked.
“She’s securing the bomb in place with an electromagnetic field, much like the one utilized by her boots and gloves.”
“Any reason why the field is orange?”
“None,” HARV replied. “Other than that seems to be her favorite color. The bomb at this point is secured and armed.”
“How much time does she give herself to climb down?”
“Not much at all. Because she doesn’t climb.”
“What do you mean?”
HARV motioned again toward the screen and I watched as Enga stepped back from the device and did a quick check of the belts and straps on her backpack. Then she began running along the length of
the branch and dove from the tree.
“Wow,” I said.
The backpack unfolded as she leapt and thin sheets of polymer fabric folded out from within, quickly molding themselves into wings.
“Are you kidding?”
“We don’t follow the entire arc of her flight but my calculations are that she lands roughly 200 meters from the tree in slightly less than twenty seconds. These next images are from a ground mounted camera and better illustrate what happens next.”
The shot changed and I saw the tree again, this time from a distance. Its windmill filled branches were fully spread and the rotors spun madly in the breeze. Then the picture flashed as the bomb at the apex of the trunk exploded. The glare from the explosion was intensely bright, nearly overwhelming the camera lens as the center point of the tree blew apart. The array of splintered branches and windmill rotors crashed onto and around the trunk as the structure collapsed upon itself before tumbling to the ground. The image shook as the impact of the debris hit the ground with what must have been earthquake force.
“That was pretty dramatic,” I said.
“I agree.”
“The flash when the bomb first exploded was bigger than I expected. You think the explosive was a flash-boom?”
“I think that’s a safe assumption,” HARV replied. “A flash-boom device would provide that type of dramatic display and yet have a very controlled blast ratio.”
“It’s odd that she would try to make so big a show of it,” I said.
“Any theories as to why?”
“Not yet. But I guess the best way to find out is to find her and ask her ourselves.”
“If that’s the plan,” HARV said, “then I suggest that you ask her while wearing Kevlar armor, just in case.”
* * *
Enga’s storage unit was in the basement of the facility in a very secluded corner. HARV picked the computer lock without breaking a binary sweat and we made it inside without incident.
“You’re sure there are no hidden alarms?” I asked as we entered.
“I disabled them when I picked the lock,” HARV replied. “I’ve worked with you long enough to know how to commit a felony.”
“It’s only a felony if we get caught.”
“The judicial system would obviously disagree,” HARV said, “but I won’t waste time arguing the point.”
I switched the unit lights on as I entered. At best they cast only a dim orange glow over the long room but I could tell right away that we were in trouble. The storage unit had been set up as a make-shift weapons lab. Several industrial plastic storage containers lined the sidewall and a sturdy workbench cluttered with tools and what looked like bomb components sat against the far end.
“Yeah, this isn’t good.” I said.
We took a closer look at the workbench and I turned on the heavy duty work-light mounted on the side to get a better look. A variety of tools were laid out on the bench along with several containers of various circuitry but it was a small, heavy duty security case at the center of the bench that caught my eye. I carefully undid the clasp on the lid and wasn’t surprised to find two small black plastic cubes snuggly fitted into the grey protective foam inside. There were actually spaces in the foam for ten cubes but eight of them were empty. I gently lifted the cubes from the box and held them up to the light so that HARV could scan them via the wrist interface.
“Are these what I think they are?”
“They are if you think they’re glam-dice,” HARV answered, “Good quality too.”
“Lucky us,” I sighed, putting the cubes in my coat pocket.
The explosions that had destroyed the windmills had been flash-booms; explosives that are specially designed to be extremely visible but also very controlled. They do a precise amount of damage, but do so in a very visible way. Glam-dice put the flash in the flash-booms. They’re light bombs. When a specific electric current hits the core the dice explode in a flash like a thousand high-intensity spotlights. The flash lasts only a couple of nanos and, although the dice burn pretty hot when they ignite, they don’t do any concussive damage, or even make any sound. Explosive experts often build the light bursts into real explosives to give the pyrotechnics a little more personality.
“I’m assuming that these other cases probably held the actual explosives?”
“That would be logical,” HARV said. “The cases are empty but my scan detects residual traces of the Q-5 chemical signature.”
“Any estimate on how much Q-5 would have been in the cases here?”
“Easily two dozen kilos,” HARV replied.
“That’s enough to take out a lot of windmills.”
“Precisely. And since the cases are all empty and most of the glam-dice are gone…”
“That means we’re running out of time,” I said.
“You got that right!” replied a threatening voice from behind me.
“Uh-oh,” HARV said.
I’ve learned from experience that anything that makes HARV say ‘uh-oh’ is something I definitely need to avoid. So I’ve trained myself to immediately drop to the floor every time he uses the phrase. In this case, it was a good move because at that nano a barrage of small arms blaster fire scorched over my head, hitting the wall of the storage unit nearby and blowing apart a small chunk of its polymer structure. I rolled onto my side and looked up to see three large men with blasters standing in the doorway, blaster’s flaring.
“I knew this was going too well.”
I grabbed the edge of the workbench and upended it toward me. It fell onto its side, scattering the tools and bomb components across the floor but more importantly it put something solid between me and the thugs. I flicked my right wrist, activating the pressure trigger in my wrist holster and on cue, my gun popped into my hand.
Yeah, I carry a gun. In my line of business, I’d be crazy not to. My gun’s a special design, created specifically for me by a close friend. It’s a Colt 45, version Two-A and it comes with a bag of tricks as big as most of the guys who are usually trying to kill me.
The OLED display on the gun’s handle flashed green when it hit my hand, recognizing my heat signature, and I fired a few rounds of low intensity blasts from behind the workbench. The three thugs took cover behind the doorway.
“I don’t know who you are,” the lead thug growled, “but you came to the wrong place.”
I could see right away that they weren’t your run of the mill thugs. Sure they were big and bad but they were also wearing blue overall knickers and white long-sleeve shirts. Under most circumstances, the sight would have been comical, but the blasters that each of them were firing at me sort of took the humor out of the situation. It’s also worth noting that each of the three had orange hair.
“You scanned the room for chemical traces of Q-5 but you couldn’t spot three armed goons sneaking up on us?” I whispered to HARV.
“The test for Q-5 searches for trace chemical elements in the air,” HARV replied. “Whatever chemicals these gentlemen are exuding into the atmosphere, they do not register as explosive.”
“Maybe not from where you’re smelling.”
I cocked my head slightly toward the door and held tight to my gun. “Hey fellas, I think there might be a misunderstanding here. I’m looking for my grandmother’s storage unit. I’m trying to find her favorite afghan. I think I accidentally opened the wrong door.”
“And the computer key you had just happened to work on this lock?” the goon yelled.
“Funny coincidence, huh?” I said. “Look, I don’t want any trouble here.”
“It’s too late for that,” the goon growled and the three of them let loose another cascade of blasts.
The workbench shook and buckled from the blasts. I knew that it wouldn’t hold up much longer and that it was time to make my move. The trouble was I didn’t really know what that move was.
“Too bad the workbench isn’t as blaster-proof as the glam-dice security case,” HARV said.
&
nbsp; And thanks to HARV I realized I had a move after all.
“The glam-dice.”
I pulled one of the dice from my coat pocket and held it in my left hand. I fired a few blasts at the doorway to buy me some time and tossed the cube toward the goons. It hit the floor and slid across the tiles into the hallway.
“Tase me bro!”
The OLED light on the gun flashed green again in recognition of my voice command and I aimed and fired at the glam-die as it came to rest on the floor of the hallway just outside the doorway. The gun shot a blast of electricity across the room that enveloped the die and triggered its payload.
I shielded my eyes with my arm as the die exploded in the hallway letting loose a silent but intense blast of light. The goons yelled in surprise, which I took as my cue to, eyes still covered, get up and run toward the doorway.
The effect lasted only a few nanos but it was enough for me to reach the doorway and by the time the light faded, the goons were still off balance and disoriented, which gave me the perfect chance to end things quickly.
“Heavy stun.”
The light on my gun flashed again and I fired off three high-powered stun blasts, knocking the three goons out of their knickers (figuratively speaking) as I made a b-line for the exit.
“Start the car, HARV, and bring it to the entrance.”
“Done and done, Boss,” HARV said. “Be careful not to hurt yourself on the stickshift when you jump in. Your bruise from the last such escape hasn’t fully healed yet.”
“Shut up, HARV. You’re killing the moment.”
* * *
The firefight with the goons left me with a bit of a moral quandary. I couldn’t call the police on them because they were likely to implicate Enga in the bombings and like it or not, I’d promised Gundervson that I’d keep this quiet for as long as possible. It’s not likely that the police could have held them for very long anyway since there were no actual explosives in the storage unit. And now, of course, Enga would know that someone was looking for her. The goons were definitely a loose end that I didn’t have time to deal with at that nano, especially because all indications were that Enga had built more bombs. Worse still, she had removed the bombs from the storage unit. That meant that she was either storing them somewhere else or, worse, was planning to use them soon. Either way, I knew that we had to find her quickly.
