Freedom Incorporated (52 page)

“
Thanks.” Dan
didn’t often permit himself to reflect on the danger of his plans,
but it dawned on him there was a decent chance he’d be dead before
sunrise Monday. It was a chilling thought and he demanded it leave
his mind, whereupon it slunk back to the depths of his
psyche.

Simon fished a
small pad from his pocket and patted himself down for a pen. “This
is my private number.” He didn’t need to add that he only gave it
out in exceptional circumstances. “If you need anything, ring once
and then hang up. I don’t want you talking on that
phone.
” He pointed at the telephone on the
lamp table. “Echelon
and
the New South Wales Police
Department both monitor it.” He’d already ensured they weren’t
carrying cellular phones; they were too easy to
pinpoint.

“
I’m gonna
want that number too.” Dan scratched Simon’s mobile number onto a
leaf of paper, and then added the number engraved into the plastic
on the safe-house telephone.

“
This place is
always well stocked; it should have enough food to last a month.
You’ll find dozens of tinned tomatoes, baked beans and tinned corn
in the pantry.” A malevolent smile played on
Simon’s
lips. “You might even find a
cookbook in the drawer, but I wouldn’t bother with it, you won’t
find the ingredients for any of the recipes.”

“
All right,
we’re off.” Dan headed for the door.

“
Dan?”
Samantha stopped him with a delicate hand on his shoulder. “Please
bring Jen back.” She’d sealed her emotions in order to cope with
the trauma of losing her best friend to kidnap and the threat of
murder. But she couldn’t control them indefinitely. Fear, anger,
hurt, regret… they’d all begun to resurface. She’d pinned all her
hopes on Dan.

“
I will,” Dan
promised, though to whom
he’d made
the promise wasn’t clear. It was partly a promise
to himself, partly a promise to Samantha, and partly a promise to
Jen.
I just hope she’s alive when I find
her.

Simon and Dan left,
lingering at the door for long enough to hear the bolts sliding
home.

“
What now?”
Simon asked, willing to play chauffeur.

“
How about
some more coffee?” Dan still had a lot on his mind and couldn’t
think of a more appropriate setting to ask his friend for another
favour.

“
Only if I get
to choose the café this time.” Simon grimaced.

“
Deal.” But
Dan was too agitated to wait for the café; he opened up in the car.
“They’re good people you know.”

“
I didn’t
doubt it,” Simon replied. “Not all criminals are bad; they’re just
breaking the law. It’s my job to stop that.”

“
Oh, come on,
you’ve applied the law selectively in the past. We both have.” Dan
looked at him incredulously.
Has less than
a year changed him that much?
“They’re
activists, not rapists or murderers. They’re just fighting for the
opportunity to be heard. Why shouldn’t they have that
right?”

“
Hey, it’s not
that I don’t agree with you,” Simon said, defending his position.
“But that’s why we’re cops, we uphold the law no matter how unfair
or ridiculous it seems. It’s not our job to change things, we’re
here to maintain order and keep the peace.” It all sat straight in
his mind and he didn’t appreciate anybody upsetting the balance –
his beliefs were too fragile to withstand much punishment. It had
taken him a long time to justify arresting people for things that
society had considered natural half a centaury ago.

Dan was deathly
quiet.

“
Okay, you’re
right. I apply the law selectively, everyone does. If we have a
choice between going after a murderer and a jaywalker, we’re going
to pick the murderer. It’s simple to justify, the murderer does
more harm to society-”

Dan cut him
off. “Then by that same philosophy we should focus on the people
who killed Katherine,” –
and maybe Jen
too
– “instead of busting people for
activism.”

Yes, it’s
just a pity they’re so far beyond our
jurisdiction.
Police had a love-hate
relationship with portals. The technology had introduced a problem
that nobody had foreseen and nobody had bothered fixing with
legislation. It was too easy for criminals to commit crimes
bridging multiple countries, effectively hamstringing law
enforcement communities that were still squabbling about
jurisdiction and spheres of control, concepts that hadn’t changed
for a centaury. Simon could see they needed more international
co-operation to tackle increasingly sophisticated criminals, but
lawmakers were content with things the way they were, possibly
because the lawmakers were committing the grandest crimes.
And it’s worse in America.
Australians couldn’t touch Jen’s abduction case because part
of the crime had happened in America,
but
the Americans would consider it an
Australian problem.

So that left Jen with Dan
as her only champion.

Simon inhaled deeply as
he turned a corner. “Okay, so what’re you planning?”

“
Simple. I’m
going to find them and kill them.”

A chill shuddered through
Simon’s body, but even more disturbing than Dan’s calm was his own
willingness to help. “Are you doing this for Jennifer? Or for
Katherine?”

The two were
inseparable in his mind. He knew he couldn’t leave
Jen
. I
f his wife
were still alive, he still would’ve done everything in his power to
save
Jen
. But, for
the same reason, he would have
sought
Esteban’s death
if he’d never met Jen.
Revenge was a primal desire and Dan had no inclination to rein in
his feral instincts. He fed from rage; it kept him from
collapsing
due to
grief. “Both,” Dan finally replied, flaring his nostrils.
“They’re living on borrowed time.”

“
I know.” He
remembered how close Dan had come to insanity while weeping over
his wife’s body, and how savagely he’d searched for her killers. He
remembered the anguish Dan had suffered when he found nobody to
blame, and how he’d thrown away a promising career by repeatedly
disobeying orders to leave the case alone. Simon felt a twin’s
sorrow for his friend, empathising with him deeply. He’d seen the
determination in Dan’s eyes then, and he saw it again now, as fresh
as ever. Most of all, Simon knew his friend. He knew what Dan was
capable of and thinking about it paled his dark skin. He didn’t
question whether Dan would succeed, not when he looked at the stony
mask of death chiselled on his face. He reminded Simon of a coiled
spring that was ready to disgorge its energy in one furious
explosion. Simon just hoped Dan could control himself when it
happened.

“
How long
since her kidnapping?”

Dan didn’t
take his eyes off the road. “She’s alive. They’ll toy with her
first.”
But even if they start now, she’ll
be blind in four hours.
He fervently hoped
they’d wait before beginning their satanic ritual of torture and
abuse.

Simon sighed. “I know I’m
going to regret this, but… what can I do to help?”

“
What?” Dan
peeled his eyes from the road and stared at his
ex-partner.

“
I can’t let
you do this alone.” Simon’s soul wouldn’t allow it.
Lord, if I’m to be proud of one thing when I’m an
old man, let it be this.
“You need my
help.”

Dan felt a wave of
gratitude and didn’t know how to put it to words. “Slime…
I…”

“
Yeah, I know
mate.” Simon turned another corner. Their friendship had survived
the interlude in fine form. Simon felt just as close to Dan now as
he had before Katherine’s death. It was almost as if they were
working a case together. And in a way, they were. A quick catch-up
conversation and it
was
as though they’d never been apart. But Simon was stoic by
nature and didn’t feel comfortable being that close to emotion; he
twisted the conversation back to business. “So this Valdez guy, any
idea which rock he crawled under?”

“
No, but I
know where to find out. Look, if you’re going to help then protect
Samantha and Cookie no matter what happens to me.”

Simon nodded. “I’ll see
what I can do.”

“
And poke
around the Department’s database to see what you can find on
Esteban. It wouldn’t be the first time they’ve
kept
more accurate records than anyone
else.” Dan pointed at a portal station they were passing. “Can you
let me out here?”

Simon pulled to the curb.
“We’re not getting coffee?”

He shook his head. “Not
this time. How about when I get back?”

“
Yeah, okay.
Just make sure you bring your carcass back alive. Where’re you
going anyway?”

Dan’s steely eyes burned.
“The belly of the beast.”

*

Saturday, September 18,
2066

19:00 Sydney,
Australia

Cookie busily
set up his computer and got comfortable for a long stint at the
keyboard while Samantha pottered around the kitchen, trying to fix
something tasty from the unimaginative range of tinned vegetables
stocked in the pantry. He didn’t feel safe in the safe house
despite Detective West’s reassurances. It reminded him of a tomb.
Police contractors had spent a lot of energy making the house
secure, but had neglected the finer touches.
I guess there was no money in the budget for
fixtures.
Tile patterned linoleum covered
half the house and a coarse, synthetic-fibre carpet covered the
remainder. And they both looked as if an amateur had laid them. The
seams were rough and visible, and the carpet was fraying at the
edges. Tasteless wallpaper, which was fading in some places and
sagging in others, covered the concrete walls. Two layers of
bullet-resistant glass protected the windows. Manufacturers could
no longer call it bullet-
proof
because, disgruntled, arms
manufacturers had developed munitions capable of puncturing it. But
two sheets would stop most projectiles that weren’t anti-tank
calibre.

The neighbourhood was
simply frightening. Where Cookie had expected it to be raucous, it
was ghostly silent. He couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was
stalking them and it gave him the creeps.

He focussed on
his computer to force the uneasiness into
a
corner of his mind. The jack hooked
directly into the New South Wales Police Department’s
network.
Well that’s stupid of
them.
Cookie couldn’t understand why a
network administrator would authorise something like that.
No protection at all…
He
wasted no time burrowing from the Department’s uninteresting
network and gaining access to the mainstream nano-net. From there
he linked up with his pipeline and entered the heart of UniForce’s
network, feeling torn between his hammer-type attack on Echelon and
digging for information that might help Dan recover Jen. In the
end, he settled for both.

He had to be
careful not to trigger electronic traps. Now they were everywhere,
not just near Echelon, and they slowed his progress. His
adversaries had planted them like mines around every major system.
Like bear-traps, they would clamp around his paws the instant
he
came within range
and alert UniForce personnel of his whereabouts. It
understandably made Cookie nervous.

Echelon, he
determined, was impenetrable. Somebody had run an impassable ring
around it during
the
interlude.
Damn.
Cookie swore luridly in his mind. Still, he had to admire the
beautiful simplicity of the solution. They knew he was on their
network and that repairing the UG7 barriers would take time, so
they’d erected a rigid
blockade
around Echelon, their most
pri
z
ed
possession.
He couldn’t
reach it
, not
anymore.
A
heavy
feeling settled in his chest
.
All that work for
nothing.

Samantha felt his
sorrowful vibrations from the kitchen and took a break from her
frustrating culinary exercise to see what was wrong. “What is
it?”

“
We were away
too long,” Cookie explained. “They’ve
tucked
Echelon into a steel box and
buried it in their backyard.”

“
So? You can
cut through steel, can’t you?”

He slowly
shook his head, feeling defeated. “Not this time. Whoever did this
is good enough to know what he’s doing.” He grudgingly admired it.
Cookie would complement even a hated enemy if he or she did
something particularly clever. “There’s no way through this.
They’ve
restricted network
traffic to the bare minimum Echelon needs to do its job.
And
I can’t slip in
pretending to be genuine data because it scans those streams for
executables. Fuck me, but they’ve even locked
themselves
out, so I don’t know how
they intend to do maintenance.” He mused over that for a moment.
“They must have a key, but they’ve buried the lock. So only they
know where to find the door.”