by Rob Aspinall
Security was slow and strict. Sniffer dogs. Bag searches. Each and every passenger padded down.
Katerina Alaverdy was back. The wig and the passport even faker than my overnight tan. But this time a fake VISA, too. The official story: I was an international liaison for a coffee company in the U.S.
I had no clue what Inge or Roni’s cover stories were, but this was second nature to Inge. And Roni looked respectable as hell in a buttoned up white blouse and dark business suit. She wore a pair of thick-framed glasses and a dark-brown wig tied up neat. She’d even taken her piercings out and put on a sweet smile for the guards.
It took an age to make it through security. Every minute a sweaty-palmed lip-biter.
But we were through. Into departures. On the plane. It was a long flight. I slept and watched movies, trying to take my mind off things.
Off Alex.
Off Philippe.
Off the new normal.
My head was a mess. I comforted myself with the thought that at least GEMA hadn’t clamped down on salted peanuts.
Maybe salted peanuts were next.
We touched down in Denver.
Security was tight in Toronto. But in Denver they had drones. Three shark-eyed custom officials sprayed the same rapid-fire questions at me in different order.
I passed the test. Strode beyond the drones. Hips and tits, as Becki always said. Or was it boobs and bum? Shit, I’d forgotten.
Just play it cool Lorn. Drones can’t pick up on body language.
Or could they?
They could have been reading me right then and there. The thought of it made me want to wee.
“Yeah, way cool,” my inner devil said. “As cool as a sumo eating a bag of jalapeños in a sauna.”
I tucked my nerves away and acted like I owned it, passing through Nothing to Declare and into arrivals.
I headed straight through the automatic doors and caught an underground train to a sprawling main terminal. It had six floors and a roof design that resembled giant white wigwams sewn together. I walked out of the terminal and hopped on a free courtesy bus that ran to a nearby hotel.
The sun was fierce, the sky an unbroken blue. And the airport roads wide.
Aside from the strange teepees and the weird works of art throughout arrivals, I noticed the Blue Mustang. A creepy horse statue rearing up with glowing red eyes.
Giles reckoned the horse was the symbol of some kind of secret society. He also thought Denver was the place. He seemed even surer than Roni. Not least because the place had been designed for massive future expansion.
He’d had it on good authority, apparently . . . A former JPAC whistleblower who’d contacted him online. It could have been a trap. But hey, mobile plans, Tinder dates . . . Everything was a potential trap these days.
I rode the bus a short distance and got off. Inge and Roni met me around the side of a long-stay multi-storey. We checked for prying eyes before ditching our cases between parked cars. We moved out of the car park as a unit, staying tight to a glass wall until we came to a side door. It was locked. You needed to swipe a card through a magnetic strip to get in.
“You sure this is the spot?” Roni asked.
Inge checked her phone. She enlarged a blueprint plan of the airport. “If your boyfriend is right, this is one of two possible access points.”
Roni didn't argue the boyfriend tag. So they were going steady already. Fast work, G-Man. Suddenly I felt a little jel me and Alex hadn't made it official.
Inge slipped her phone back in her pocket.
This was some plan.
The most insane one yet.
And with no weapons, gadgets or comms, we were going in unarmed and blind.
“Whose idea was this again?” I asked.
“What, you had a better one?” Roni said. “Cause if you spoke up, I didn’t hear you.”
“You know, if we're gonna work together, we may was well be nice,” I said.
Roni put on the most ridiculous voice. “Aw, did I hurt Barbie's feelings?”
“I wouldn't worry,” Inge said. “You won't have to put up with each other for long. ”
“Oh Thank God, we getting rid of her?” I said.
“No,” Inge said. "But suicide missions rarely end well.”
“I’m noticing a common theme with you Type A’s,” I said. “Didn’t they teach you about pep talks? Positive thinking? Any of that stuff?”
“We’re going in blind and unarmed behind enemy lines,” Inge said. “Presumably that’s why you asked the question.”
“You’re supposed to lie and say it’s all Wunderbar.”
“Denial is for British people,” Inge said.
“Besides, we're not totally unarmed,” Roni said, taking a platinum credit card from her inside jacket pocket. The door unlocked. Inge pulled it open.
“Wow, can I have one of those?” I said, following Roni through the door.
“Me too,” Inge said.
Roni smiled and tucked the card away. We were through the first of what I assumed would be many doors.
I was right.
It was very unassuming. Wide, empty service corridors and little else. The odd airport worker wandering about, but nothing suspicious.
We came to a lift door. Industrial size. It had a keypad. “Give me a sec,” Roni said, taking out a smartphone. She took a pin from her wig and prised the front panel off the keypad. She messed around with the wires until the lift door opened. She replaced the panel and we stepped inside.
The control panel for the lift was black ceramic with numbers zero to nine. There was also a minus sign.
Inge pushed the minus and then the nine, each button lighting up blue. She paused and pushed the nine again.
-99 showed on the panel.
Inge looked at us and raised an eyebrow.
“What the—” Roni whispered.
The lift rolled down through the numbers. At first it was like any other lift. It dropped in near silence, the ride like velvet.
Rather than a mirror, the back wall was transparent—the view, a series of concrete and steel girders.
Then it all changed.
The space opened up into a dark passageway. The lift stopped and went sideways to the left.
We looked at each other. Shared a collective shrug. The lift began to drop at the same time. Now we were going diagonal at sixty degrees.
Through the glass wall of the lift, the passageway wall fell away.
Our jaws hit the floor.
“I guess this is the place, ” I said.
36
Ling’s Mission Journal: Part I
We land in Tokyo. Security is tight. No matter. We make it through. My disguise is good. And Zak and Giles are nobodies.
I meet them outside the terminal. It’s raining. We take a taxi downtown. It’s twenty-two-hundred hours. But this is Tokyo. It never gets dark.
Neon signs flash bright as the sun. Pigs in different colours waddle across skyscrapers. They explode into coins, hearts and butterflies. The taxi takes the expressway into the city. I check my watch. Fifteen hours ahead of Denver Mountain Time. The other team should be there by now.
I look across at Giles and Zak.
Giles is smart and earnest. Zak has unresolved sexual issues, but Giles said he’s a genius with tech. Not like Roni, but a good standard.
Zak and Giles tap at speed on their phones.
“Is the word out?” I ask.
“It’s out,” Giles says. “And spreading.”
They tuck their phones away to stare at the city.
“This place is awesome,” Giles says.
“Totally,” Zak says.
The taxi driver stops the car outside the entrance to a hotel. “Grand Hyatt,” he says.
He hands over our cases at the kerb and I pay the man. He drives away.
“Sweet, is this where we’re staying?” Zak says. He cranes his neck. Looks all the way up the hotel.
I assume the question is rhe
torical, but I answer anyway. “No.”
I stride off with my case. Giles and Zak hurry to catch up.
“Then where are we going?” Giles asks.
I don’t like being the leader. Leaders have to talk. And I don’t like to talk. Unless it’s about my cats or Hello Kitty.
Or guns, swords and superbikes.
“Well?” Giles says.
“You’ll see,” I say, leading them to a wide intersection.
The rain has stopped. But Tokyo is hot and humid. Steam hangs in the air. Hundreds in raincoats wait at the side of a crossing. We join them. The light turns and we cross the street. A flood of people. Three left turns take us into an alley. To a big steel door. I take out my phone call a number. “We’re here.”
We wait.
“We’re not staying here, are we?” Zak says.
“Since when did you get so picky?” says Giles. “You’ve only ever stayed in youth hostels.”
“That was before the mansion,” Zak says. “I'm sure we can spare enough cash for a nice hotel room. Somewhere with a mini bar and . . . tastefully shot movies.”
I sigh. The flight was long and these two chatter like tree monkeys.
“No one is sleeping,” I say.
Zak yawns. “I could sleep right here. The jet lag is killing me—”
I turn around. “You fall asleep and I’ll cut your throat.”
“I think she means it,” Giles whispers to Zak.
“Did I say sleepy?” Zak says, slapping himself. “I meant pumped.”
The door opens. Akihiro greets us with a smile. He’s tall and lean. He wears a punk t-shirt. His fringe long—hair shaved at the sides.
“You ready?” I say.
“And waiting,” he says. “Follow me.”
We follow him up a tight set of stairs, carrying our cases. I hear cheering and chanting through the walls. Some screaming, too. Distant but getting closer. The stairs go up and up. The sound is close now. Akihiro pushes through a set of double doors. And another. Into an indoor arena, with seats rising high.
We stand to the upper right of the stage.
To the left. The right. At the back. All seats taken. Most of the audience kids and teens. Some in normal clothes. Others in cosplay. They’re watching two young guys on the stage below us. They play a game of Exploding Pigs in DreamPlay glasses.
The game ends. One wins. His arms thrown up in victory.
Akihiro speaks into a microphone. “It’s time for the main event.”
A spotlight shines on our balcony. I look out across the centre floor of the auditorium. I see a thousand of Tokyo’s best gamers. Maybe more. All wearing DreamPlay glasses.
Akihiro is twenty-one now. A three-time Tokyo Explosion champion. He commands the room. A Pro-Gaming legend. “Kerei!” he cries down the mic.
The entire room snap to attention. Fists in the air. “Kerei!” they reply: Japanese for salute.
“This might just be cooler than Star Wars,” Giles says.
Zak stares open-mouthed. “I think I just came.”
37
Another World
As the walls fell away, an underground world of multi-storey levels opened up. The lift continued its diagonal route through the complex.
Giant, sprawling floors full of empty prison cells made up the upper levels. They soon turned into open-plan office spaces as we descended further. And into vast warehouses as we dropped deeper into the complex.
The warehouse levels were the craziest: packed with row after row of sleeping drones. All shapes and sizes: humanoids, canines, tanks, EAVs and UAVs. All ready to roll out of the base.
The lift took us deep, deep below the airport. Everything lit low with LED strip lights built into the walls and floors.
Probably on some eco-friendly energy plan, knowing JPAC.
I think they genuinely did want to save the world. They just had a funny way of going about it. The evil kind of funny. Not the funny ha-ha.
Inge could have pushed for a floor even lower. We still had a few to go by the looks of it. But the lift stopped on minus ninety-nine. We expected the lift doors to open. Instead, the glass wall slid to one side. We stepped out onto a warehouse level. Half a square mile of drones. The floor was vast—space enough for transporter trucks to drive up and down. In fact, one of them was loading up right then and there. A soldier climbed in and steered the truck out of a loading bay. Long, flat trailer stacked with so-called humanoids.
“How do you think they get them out?” I said.
“I dunno. Tunnel system?” Roni said.
We walked past a long line of canines. They were more advanced than the early versions I’d faced in Germany. They had moulded grey body armour around the body and head, to resemble the shape of a dog.
I kept expecting them to jump out and attack me. They were powered down, of course, but the place gave me the creeps.
As we reached the end of the line, Inge snatched a plan of the complex off a steel pillar. She ran a finger down the floor numbers. “We want the next floor up," she said to Roni. “Lorna, you’re heading down.”
“Belly of the beast,” I said. “Why always me?”
“You know how to hack into a cybernetic mainframe?” Roni asked me.
“Fine, I’m going,” I said, making my way to a doorway signed Fire Exit. I paused and turned around. “If this is, you know, goodbye . . .”
“Almost definitely,” Inge said.
“Later,” Roni said.
“Yeah, later,” I said, heading through the door and down the fire exit stairs.
There were six more floors to drop down. That meant twelve flights of stairs. I reached the bottom and pushed through the fire exit door into the guts of JPAC.
It was a bit like being in their intestines, too, walking around tube-like corridors over steel mesh floors. Everything echoing hollow.
The first thing I had to do was get myself a gun.
An opportunity came fast around the corner. A guard dressed head-to-toe in black fatigues. I flashed him a smile as he came my way. He smiled in return. I grabbed his arm as we crossed paths and threw him onto his back. I kicked him hard in the head. I took the pistol from his holster. A Glock 9mm. My favourite.
I looked up at a small CCTV camera built into the ceiling to my right. I fired a round and disabled it.
I moved on my way. Came across a female soldier my size. I took her down. She was tough and lasted a couple of moves. But I had her on the floor in four seconds. I dragged her out of sight into a storage room stocked with office stuff. I pulled her outfit off her. She came around. I pistol-whipped her back to sleep. I left her my suit and fastened the boots. They were velcro-strapped, comfy and high quality.
Nothing but the best when you’ve got an unlimited slush budget stolen from a world of tax-paying, crap-buying suckers.
The uniform said GEMA in yellow stitching on the breast. Even now, on the brink of world domination, the JPAC-massive still weren’t willing to come out loud and proud.
I holstered the previous guard’s weapon and took a spare clip from the woman’s gun. I stepped out into the corridor in full uniform except for the cap.
I walked along a few more corridors, wondering if all this was for nothing. Would this Nadia woman even be here? Inge seemed to think so.
“Committee members will be underground—in a secure bunker somewhere,” she’d said. “But Nadia will be active. In an operations centre. If Denver is the main base of ops, she’ll likely be directing traffic from there.”
She may have been right, but I didn’t see any sign myself. Maybe I had the wrong floor, I thought, as I rounded another corner. I came to a junction. A corridor running across my path.
I had to choose left or right.
Great, I whispered to myself.
Then a voice spoke through a hidden P.A. “Take a right,” she said in English. A woman with a foreign accent—Mediterranean maybe.
I hesitated. Looked around me. Saw a camera overh
ead.
The voice spoke again. “The righthand corridor, please.”
I walked to my right, to the far end of the corridor. The voice told me to take another right and then a left.
“Through those doors ahead of you,” she said.
I came to a set of automatic glass doors. They shushed open. I found myself in the foyer of an office. A large open space with a piano tinkling in the background. Black leather sofas up against walls. Huge fern-like plants and modern art on the walls.
Across the white lino floor of the foyer was a reception desk. A young woman sat stiff-backed behind it, face made up and black hair in a bun.
“Hello,” the receptionist said with a smile. “Can I help you?”
I approached the desk. “Base security,” I said, thinking she might not be in league with the voice. “I’ve been ordered to report to Nadia Mishra.”
The receptionist smiled. There was something automated about her. Like the smile was part of her programming. Maybe she was the next phase of drone. “Through the doors on the right, there,” she said, motioning to a set of frosted glass doors.
“Thanks,” I said, heading for the doors.
They were automatic, too. They led into a carpeted hallway with a wall on the left and meeting rooms on the right.
“Third door down,” the voice said.
I walked along the hallway. The door in question said Operations Room 2. I turned the handle and stepped inside.
It was a long room with almost as long a conference table—solid oak polished to a sheen.
The grey carpet was deep beneath my feet. There was a big plate of cookies and a set of tea and coffee in stainless steel jugs in the centre of the table.
A bank of screens played out images at one end, to my left. A tiny Mediterranean woman sat alone at a laptop. A phone and a tablet laid out beside the computer. Another phone in hand. She spoke into it. “Welcome Lorna.” I heard her voice on the PA system as the door closed behind me.
“Cool app,” I said. “You must be Nadia.”
