Hunting Nora Stone

by Colin Weldon

  “I really hope Gordon cleared this car with secret service,” Hiran said.

  Eddie did too. The last thing he needed was to be picked up. Not with Stone and Tarsis out there.

  “We should really get out of here Eddie,” Abigail said.

  She was right of course. Royo was locked up tight for the night. He made a left at the next set of lights and turned away from the hotel, making his way towards their base for the evening.

  “I may have something here,” Hiran suddenly said from the back seat.

  Eddie looked in the rear view mirror.

  “Oh?” Eddie said.

  “This is very odd,” Hiran said.

  “Jesus Christ, Hiran what is it?” Eddie snapped.

  Hiran kept his eyes on the computer.

  “Flight radar for the last twelve hours. I’ve had the computer analysing fight paths and matching call signs to airliners. Then this happened,” Hiran said leaning forward through the gap between the driver’s and front passenger seats. He handed the computer to Abigail who took it and placed it on her left knee. The screen was blue with what looked like hundreds of little red blips moving in every direction. Each blip had a number next to it denoting the flights call sign.

  “Watch this,” Hiran said hitting a key on the computer.

  The screen changed to a close up of a group of aircraft.

  “This one,” Hiran said, “British Airways flight 0012 on route to Charles de Gaulle.”

  “I don’t get it,” Abigail said.

  Eddie watched the red blip as it moved across the screen. He looked up suddenly and swerved to miss a parked car. The sudden jerk threw Abigail and Hiran to the left on top of him.

  “Sorry,” Eddie said.

  He pulled the car off to the side of the road and stopped. He needed his full attention on this. The trio watched the screen as the little red blip suddenly turned into two blips. The second only visible for a few seconds before turning off at right angles to the British Airways flight and disappearing.

  “What the hell?” Eddie said leaning in.

  “Could just be a radar blip; happens now and again if there’s interference,” Hiran said.

  Eddie frowned.

  “When was this?” Eddie said.

  “Two hours ago,” Hiran said.

  Eddie took a breath.

  “Play it again,” he said.

  Hiran did. The BA flight showed up as a circular green blip on the screen. After a few seconds it suddenly split into two. The second one moving off at right angles before disappearing from the screen entirely.

  “Clever girl,” Eddie said, “she rode its belly all the way here.”

  “What?” Abigail said.

  “She must have flown directly beneath the planes fuselage all the way here, avoiding radar detection,” Eddie said.

  “That’s incredible,” Abigail said.

  Eddie shook his head.

  “It’s impressive alright. Can you identify where that plane landed?” Eddie said, pulling car away from the curb.

  “Looks like a private airfield called Chelles le Pin, twenty kilometres east of Paris,” Hiran said.

  Eddie shook his head.

  “Shit, she could be anywhere by now,” he said, “Ok Hiran I need that uplink to Todd Holt.”

  Hiran reached in and took his computer back from Abigail.

  “Eddie, he’ll be able to triangulate our position in a matter of minutes; there’s no way to protect against that,” Hiran said.

  Eddie turned off down a slip road and pulled up next to a dumpster. He killed his headlights and switched off the engine, then sat there for a moment and tried to think of his next move. They would have to sleep in the car. He looked up and down the alleyway to see if they had been followed. It was almost pitch black. A single car drove slowly past the corner straight ahead, its lights illuminating the side road momentarily before driving off. Eddie frowned. He looked up at the rooftops.

  “We need to get high, we’re dead on the ground, ” Eddie spoke in a low voice. “Hiran can you pilot a helicopter?”

  Hiran looked at him.

  “If you want eyes in the sky, fast manoeuvrable eyes in the sky then we need a drone swarm,” Hiran said.

  Eddie looked at him.

  “To get access to the Jaguar tech here, we need to call in, Eddie,” Hiran said.

  Eddie thought about it for a second, then shook his head.

  “No, we need to go dark; we call in, we’ll have the agency down our throats. We have to draw her out,” Eddie said.

  Hiran sighed.

  “Why don’t you just buy them?” Abigail said.

  Eddie looked at her.

  “Well for god’s sake my nephews have two of the darn things. They’re just toys,” Abigail said.

  Eddie smiled.

  “I can definitely hot-wire a bunch of them together; would only take me few minutes,” Hiran said.

  “Can you get us into a local store without setting off any alarms?” Eddie said.

  Hiran looked offended.

  “Sorry, of course you can; right then let’s go shopping,” Eddie said.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Paris

  07.01 am

  “Checkpoint Alpha report in,” came the voice in his earpiece.

  “Checkpoint Alpha all clear,” replied Tarsis calmly in the same voice as the young sniper whose neck he had just snapped in two. The facial recognition of the young man had told him his name was Josh Butler, from Tennessee.

  He sat with his legs crossed behind the small wall at the top of the old building, which overlooked the main entrance to the president’s hotel.

  The night began to give way to the day as the grey haze of the predawn light spread its blanket on the rooftops. Tarsis marked the positions of every sniper in the area. It was quiet. He heard birds begin to sing in the distance. He looked down the scope of the dead man’s rifle at the entrance to the hotel. He watched as the unmarked cars patrolled the parameter. He scanned upwards and let his scope rest at the president’s window. The blinds were drawn. The uploaded security protocols in his memory banks informed him that they would remain closed during the day. He would be firing blind. It made no tactical sense, so he kept to his original plan. He calculated an eighty two per cent chance that he would be successful.

  The morning sunlight suddenly split open the sky and spread cool white light over the architecture of the old buildings. Tarsis gazed straight at it. He looked over and saw the silhouetted image of the Eiffel Tower. It looked like a black sword reaching from the ground all the way to the horizon. It was beautiful. Tarsis paused and began processing a new sensation that he had not felt before. Beautiful? He thought to himself. He frowned not knowing what to do with the strange reaction he had just experienced. The new data did not conform to any of his logical reasoning programming. This paradoxical information had no purpose. He looked down at his hands and noticed them shaking. He was malfunctioning.

  He looked back at the rising sun, he listened to the birds as they sang and watched it rise slowly, casting reds and yellows as the sky turned an intense shade of blue. He saw something in his mind. A smiling face. A woman. A child. A calm river surrounded by snow-capped mountains. The same female face. Smiling at him. The images came in millisecond bursts. He knew the woman. Had seen her before. The images kept coming. Flooding his mind. He was feeling something. The images changed. He saw blood. He saw masked faces standing over him. He saw a body. His body. Torn to pieces. His chest was open. He was lying on something. He felt weightless. He saw himself underwater. In a container. Floating. His eye would not move. He had no body. The reflection of a disembodied spinal chord free-floating below him. He felt pain. Tremendous pain.

  “Chase me Daddy,”

  The same voice of a young boy. His young boy. He knew
him.

  He looked down at his shaking hands and realised that his CPU had just been compromised by something. He felt a sense of madness, of confusion, of hate and betrayal, of love for that female face. He felt a rage consume his reasoning centre. He had to act before his systems shut down. He accessed his main CPU and set it into a diagnostic cycle shutting down his higher brain functions and initiated a full reset.

  He felt a release as his mind went quiet and the world fell away from him. He laid the rifle on the ground and lowered his head as he shut himself down and attempted to purge the malfunctioning data. He closed his eyes, and slept.

  * * *

  The Academy

  “That was odd,” said Tyler Shaw as he watched the diagnostic screens. He turned towards his assistant, a young Chinese man by the name of Liu Jie. He had just turned thirty but looked much older. After being poached from the Tsinghua University in China, he had been sent here. He had taken to the isolation well and with no wife or children back in Shanghai his profile fit the bill nicely. After seeing what went on at the infamous area 51, Liu Jie had followed Shaw like an apostle follows a prophet. He was in awe of him and consequently was easy to work with. Shaw did not like people very much and Liu’s quiet propensity for obedience made him the first assistant in twenty years that he had actually tolerated.

  “Yes, Doctor, very odd,” said Liu looking at the readouts from Tarsis’s CPU, “He’s put himself into a diagnostic and reboot cycle; he was not scheduled to do that.”

  Shaw frowned as the data from Tarsis flowed down the screen. He paused and punched up a cluster group of data enlarging it on the screen. It read:

  ERROR - //ALU -123/332 - CORRECTING

  ERROR -//ALU -892/939 - PURGE

  Shaw looked at the two codes and looked at Liu.

  “Maybe he’s just correcting a minor glitch. He is programmed to do that, should one arise, and a shut down and reboot would solve most of those minor issues. By the looks of things he’s in a seventeen minute cycle and should be back up when it’s done,” Liu said.

  Shaw looked at the error coded. ALU, or Arithmetic Logic Unit, was the part of Tarsis’s CPU that performed logic operations. If it was any other part of the system Shaw would have shrugged it off, but anything surrounding the central processing unit worried him. He rubbed his greying beard and stared at the data as it streamed through the computer. Everything else looked normal. Neural pathways, musculature, higher brain functions, everything. He looked at Liu.

  “What are the organic component readouts saying?” Shaw said.

  Liu turned to another screen which was attached to a wall mount on the far side of the room. A three dimensional image of a brain was being displayed with various computerised animations that looked like tiny fireworks going off at random intervals all over the image. Liu stared at the image for a moment and looked at the biometric data being fed down the right hand side of the display. He looked at Shaw who made his way over to join him.

  “Looks normal to me,” Liu said.

  “Give me the readouts from just before Tarsis set himself into the diagnostic,” said Shaw.

  Liu tapped some commands directly onto the screen and the image froze. The screen flickered and the time index on the bottom right hand corner changed to a few minutes earlier. The little animations began again. This time there was something different about them. Tiny neurons came to life in areas of the brain thought dormant.

  “Look,” said Shaw pointing, “what the hell is going on in the prefrontal cortex?”

  The two men stared at the image of the brain as a flurry of colours and tiny lightning- like flickers of light exploded around the brain for several seconds before disappearing completely.

  “Eh,” Liu said, “could be feedback from the charge. It was his first one; maybe the current was too strong?”

  Shaw knew that it had nothing to do with the several hours of charging that Tarsis had just undergone.

  “No this is something else,” Shaw said. “That’s the area of the brain responsible for long term memory.”

  Liu looked back at the screens streaming in the diagnostic information. They had stopped. He pointed at them.

  “Look, I think it’s done,” Liu said.

  Shaw and Liu moved back over to the consoles and looked up, waiting for the video feed from Tarsis’s eyes to recommence. Shaw looked back at the readings and waited. It read:

  //-ALU-SECURE

  //-STNBY

  //-SYSTEM NOMINAL ….

  The screen above them suddenly came to life as the blinding sunlight lit up the lab.

  “See, he’s fine,” Liu said.

  Shaw watched through Tarsis’s eyes as he slowly moved closer to the edge of the Parisian rooftop, peering over and reacquiring the secret service snipers on the roof.

  “Send him a report command,” Shaw said.

  Liu typed in a series of codes into the computer.

  //-TARSIS REPORT STATUS…

  There was a bleep as the response came in. Shaw’s mouth opened. He looked at Liu whose eyes mirrored Shaw’s reaction.

  //-BEAUTIFUL DAY TODAY

  “What the hell?” Shaw said frowning, “send it again,”

  Liu complied and sent the following:

  //-TARSIS CONFIRM MISSION STATUS

  They waited, watching the screen for a response. Then it came.

  //-KILL PRESIDENT HAROLD ROYO

  //-KILL AGENT NORA STONE

  //-MISSION STATUS GREEN

  //-WHO IS THE LITTLE BOY?

  Shaw looked at Liu.

  “His protocols check out, he’s still on mission status,” Liu said.

  Shaw scratched his beard. He moved towards the computer and typed in a command.

  //-DETAIL PREVIOUS REPORT

  “What little boy?” asked Liu.

  Shaw remained silent and shook his head. He sent the request and folded his arms as the video feed showed Tarsis calmly looking around the area surrounding the hotel. There was no response. They waited. Shaw looked up at the screen and saw that there was an audio file being transmitted.

  “Doctor…” said Liu.

  “I see it; activate the audio feeds,” Shaw said.

  Liu complied. The sound was low. It sounded like Tarsis was whispering something.

  “Enhance that,” Shaw said.

  Shaw listened carefully. It sounded like he was singing something under his breath. It was hard to hear.

  “What is that?” Liu said.

  The pair listened. It was something familiar to Shaw.

  “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas, Everywhere you go, Take a look in the five and ten, Glistening once again, with candy canes and silver lanes aglow…” Tarsis sang.

  Shaw looked at Liu who looked completely baffled.

  “Oh shit,” Shaw whispered to himself.

  * * *

  Eddie sat on the round stool and waited for the waitress to place his black coffee on the table. It had been a long night. Their break-in had gone off without a hitch. Hiran had disabled the electronics store security systems with ease and had taken six lightweight drones straight off the shelf. The whole operation took less than ten minutes. Hiran had some work to do before they could send them up; before Royo left the hotel. He had to install signal jammers on all six or the short wave scanning equipment would easily pick them up. The secret service had small drones of their own. Eddie could hear them while they slept in the car the previous night. They sounded like a high-pitched boomerang whizzing about around the buildings. The TX range were small, fast and manoeuvrable. They patrolled and mapped the security parameters.

  Eddie ducked out to a nearby coffee shop as soon as the sun rose over the Parisian streets the following morning. A simple espresso shot for him. He also ordered some croissants and two coffees for the others. Ab
igail was back in the car helping Hiran as he installed the jamming devices. Eddie assured Hiran that he would be less than five minutes. He rubbed the side of his head. It still hurt after the explosion on the ship. He looked out at the quite street. The traffic was only beginning to wake up. Through the window, he could see that there was still a layer of rain on the surface of the cobbled street. The coffee shop was a modest-looking place with seating for about thirty people. The rustic style of the bare wood floors and walls was in stark contrast to the Rococo style of the other shops surrounding it. It had a large front window with a simple awning that covered two old barrels with two stools on each side for customers to sit on and watch the world go by. There were two men reading a paper and smoking cigarettes in one corner. They looked like bankers or lawyers, Eddie thought. There was an old man with a light grey cap sitting next to the counter, gently prying open a croissant and filling it with jam. The kind of lonely old men you see scattered throughout cafes and eateries the world. Eddie looked onto the street. A black unmarked BMW passed by, followed by another. Sweep teams, he thought. He’d better get a move on. He turned back to the counter just as a tray with three styrofoam cups was placed on the table in front of him.

  “Ah, merci beaucoup,” He said without looking at the waitress.

  He took a single sugar sachet from the table, poured it into his coffee and drank it back in one go. The waitress remained standing beside the table. Eddie glanced up to see what it was she wanted. Had he forgotten to pay? His face dropped at the face he saw.. Nora Stone smiled. He held his coffee in his hands for several seconds, trying to figure out what had just happened. The young girl who had served him at the counter was gone. He looked back up at Nora’s eyes. Her short dark hair was pulled back behind her ears. He let his eyes drift down to her hands, which were half covered by a long sleeved black top, but there was no mistaking the technological implants. His heart began to beat fast as he tried to think what to do next. For the third time in as many days she had gotten the drop on him.