Freedom Incorporated (53 page)

“
Oh,” Samantha
said, mirroring his sorrow for deeper reasons than mourning over
Echelon. “Well don’t worry about it. What’s the point now Jen’s
gone anyway?”

Cookie pulled her to sit
on his lap, wrapped his arms around her, and drew her close for the
hug he knew she needed. “Hey, it’s going to be okay.”

“
Oh yeah?” She
snorted indelicately. “How’s that? Jen’s probably dead
already.”

“
Don’t say
that.” Cookie was desperately clutching
to
hope and was finding the straws
harder to hold onto than he’d imagined. “There’s a chance she’s
still alive and I’m sure she wouldn’t
want
you talking about her like she’s
already dead. She’d want you to keep hoping for her, wouldn’t
she?”

Samantha smeared silent
tears across her cheeks. “I guess.”

“
What do you
think of Dan?”

She shrugged. “He’s
already saved Jen once, so I guess he’s all right.”

“‘
All right’
enough to save her again?” Cookie asked, wondering whether it was
smart to pin all their hopes on one man.
And a bounty hunter at that… not the most dependable
profession.

“
I hope so.”
The fragile quiver in Samantha’s voice spoke volumes about how
little hope she actually had, she was just trying to project the
appearance of hope for Cookie’s sake. Bubbly and cheerful much of
the time, she was also a realist. She knew Jen’s chances were
slim
.

“
Well,
Echelon’s out of the question, so I can dedicate my time to digging
up helpful information.” Cookie squeezed Samantha tight, trying to
impart some of his feigned strength.

“
And I have
some more sacrificing to do in the kitchen.” Samantha kissed him on
the forehead before scooting away and Cookie felt her lips on his
skin long after she’d removed them, leaving him warm and fuzzy to
offset the desolation within.

A datamining program
returned some interesting results and enveloped his train of
thought. He’d set the application to work mining for information
about Esteban’s history, cross-referenced with Dan. There were five
records and he examined each in chronological order.

The first was
a memorandum from the previous assassination co-ordinator.
Interesting…
Cookie
wondered how damaging that single record could be; UniForce spent
much time and advertising money denying the existence of their
assassination branch while simultaneously promoting it in the
corporate underworld. He suspected he had access to enough
information to indict the entire management team and sink the
company for good, so he began caching all the records he inspected,
just in case. It was tempting to replicate the whole database but
he knew that would create enough network traffic to alert even the
sleepiest system administrator. He or she would simply have to
follow the torrent of data back to the Department’s network and
from there it would only take minutes to pinpoint his
location.
Tempting, but too
dangerous.

Irritation
oozed through the memorandum in which the co-ordinator outlined the
problem: a lowly Australian detective based in Parramatta wasn’t
dropping the UniForce-tagged case. It finished by recommending
UniForce
apply
pressure on the Australian Government to control the
rogue
officer
.

The second
record detailed how political pressure had been unsuccessful
in
dissuading
the
determined detective, Dan Sutherland. Furthermore, the situation
was becoming dire: Sutherland was sniffing at the assassin’s heels.
The co-ordinator said he had reprimanded the operative, Esteban
Garcia Valdez, for his slovenly procedures, which had enabled
Sutherland to track him.
He’d used the
record to
reinforc
e
UniForce’s work ethos and warn
active assassins
to act
professionally at all times – UniForce would not tolerate sloppy
killings.

Cookie,
totally hooked, devoured the third record. It depicted the horrors
UniForce had inflicted upon Dan to persuade him to drop the case.
They’d slaughtered his cat and scattered its entrails across his
property, phoned him every night to deliver death threats, and
offered staggering sums of money as a bribe.
Jesus H Christ,
Cookie thought.
Who the hell is this guy?
He couldn’t think of anyone stubborn enough to withstand the
brunt of UniForce’s shit. The list of atrocities scrolled for three
pages, a catalogue of horror that chilled Cookie’s blood. But the
record made it clear that UniForce had been meticulously careful to
veil their hand in the matter. As far as Dan was concerned, Esteban
had orchestrated everything alone.

He was almost
afraid to open the fourth record. When he did, the words assaulted
him with a dark portrayal of Esteban’s arrest. Whoever had updated
the database had been furious that someone had poached one of
UniForce’s top assassins. It listed serious justifications for
declaring company emergency. Esteban had been one of the few
assassins with detailed knowledge about UniForce’s assassination
branch. The co-ordinator was worried he might use the information
as currency to buy himself a lenient sentence. UniForce therefore
applied the full weight of their political muscle and the fifth
record was a glowing report of their success; Esteban was off the
hook.
Yeah, but only thanks to a dubious
judicial decision.
Cookie wasn’t
impressed.
So much for judges being
impervious to bribes.
But UniForce had
stripped Esteban of his field status, planting him in management
instead.

How could he
start working for such an evil company?
It
didn’t make sense
. Even if he didn’t know
they were the ones who killed his cat, he knew they were behind the
assassination. Didn’t he put two and two
together?
Cookie was puzzling over it when
the datamining application dredged up two more records.

He read them
hungrily, his appetite whetted by the developing mystery. “Oh
my
G
od.”

Samantha had just walked
in, balancing two plates of slop and two sets of cutlery. She put
one on the bench Cookie was using as a desk. “Here’s your
soup.”

“
Ta,” he
replied absently, reading the final records a second and third
time.

“
What’s ‘oh my
god’?” Samantha asked, tasting her concoction and wishing she’d
found some salt in the cupboard.

“
I know why
Dan’s wife was murdered… and I know why Esteban was the one who did
it.”

“
What?” She
abandoned the soup and leant over his shoulder to read the words
herself.

“
We’ve gotta
buzz Simon.” Cookie was trying hard to regulate his breathing. “Dan
would wanna know about this.”

“
Already? The
poor guy probably just got home.”

“
He said to
call him if we needed anything, and this is important,” Cookie
rationalised.

A few seconds more and
she capitulated. “Okay, what’s the number?”

He gave her Simon’s card.
“Just one ring.”

“
I remember.”
She dialled his number, let it ring once, then terminated the call
and replaced the
receiver
. “Okay, now what?”

Cookie resumed
datamining. “Now we wait.”

Chapter
8

The earth is
not dying, it is being killed. And those that are killing it have
names and addresses.

Utah Phillips

Saturday, September 18,
2066

UniForce
Headquarters

01:29 San Francisco,
USA

To say James
was in a foul mood would be a grievous understatement. Dark bags
had settled under his eyes, the product of ten hours sleep in three
days. Sweat soaked his clothes and a repugnant odour, a thousand
times worse than deodorant alone could mask, leaked from his
armpits. He was treating a throbbing headache with unwise doses of
Hexadril, a new Xantex painkiller. And he was beating back fatigue
with stimulant after stimulant, which were rapidly losing their
effect. His mind would race for half an hour after popping a pill
before nestl
ing
back
to a numbing daze. Yet he’d surprised himself with his gutsy
determination and endurance. He hadn’t pulled an all-nighter since
he was a student and he’d never attempted a foolhardy four-day
marathon. The ten hours rest didn’t count because he’d hardly slept
– the dangerous quantities of stimulant he’d ingested had ensured
that.

His efficiency
was suffering too. It’d taken him twice as long as usual to erect a
barrier around Echelon. He checked the system’s pulse. James was
proud of the defence he’d designed.
It
should go in the next issue of Computing Genius!
He had the only key, a memorised sequence of alphanumeric
characters that he needed to apply in sequence in order to pass
through the digital fortress.
Stupid UG7…
this wouldn’t
be
necessary if that bloody network had kept them out in the
first place.
Indeed, overconfidence in the
UG7-rating was why there was no security on internal systems.
Everybody had believed UG7 protection was more than
adequate.

Other members
of his team had done a superb job securing the mail system.
One less thing I have to worry
about,
he thought while chewing a
fingernail.
Now… let’s kick this hacker’s
butt back to his terminal.
James surveyed
the sorry state of the network. His team had made spaghetti of
it.
Oh Christ.
It
was tempting to shut everything down and repair the damage at his
leisure.
But Ice Bitch would kill
me.
He snorted. Disconnecting the network
would necessitate shutting Echelon down and he had no idea how long
it would take to repair.
We could be
offline for a week. Hell, it might be faster to rebuild the fucking
thing from scratch…
Interrupting Echelon was
not an option, not even for a second. Besides, he’d just spent two
days protecting it from internal attack,
which had purchased
him time to
isolate and eradicate hostiles behind the firewall.

Echelon was
the lifeblood of UniForce. Without it, UniForce couldn’t generate
income. And if the shareholders thought
Echelon
were vulnerable, they’d
abandon UniForce stock in droves and the company might go
under.
That reminds me,
James thought with a satisfied smile.
I should dump
my
UniForce stock before tendering my
resignation.
He still planned to jump
ship.
I’ve just gotta wait for this to
blow over.

His wife had
phoned twice in the past 24 hours, becoming increasingly annoyed
that he hadn’t come home. She’d started to suspect James was
avoiding her. After all, who in their right mind would demand an
employee stay at work for three consecutive days? He
snorted.
How about my boss, the Ice
Bitch?

And James’s
mind was starting to play tricks on him, either from fatigue or an
unforseen side effect of taking ultimately damaging doses of
stimulant. A few hours ago his water bottle had talked to him,
conversing authoritatively about the nuances of the
chip-economy
.
Before that, the colours on his monitor had swirled into a
dizzying fractal and he’d had to close his eyes. Impossible things
had happened, disconcerting things, things that only years of
therapy could help him understand and deal with. But, if seeing
meant believing, then he had to believe a speckled snake sat coiled
in the corner. It was huge, had a diamond-shaped head, and would
periodically rear into the air and hiss at him to hurry up. At
first he’d rubbed his eyes and stared in open-mouthed astonishment
but more recently he’d begun talking back. Michele, bored as bat
shit, had decided that was an appropriate moment to leave him alone
with his apparitions. She’d then retired to her office, annoyed
that Jackie expected her to stay throughout the crisis.

Another facet
of James’s distorted reality was his growing obsession with winning
the online battle. It had become so vitally important to him that
he considered it more crucial than life itself.
David Cooke might be a legend on the hacker
circuit,
he thought.
But I’m better!
He shouted in his mind
repeatedly:
I’m better! I’m better! I’m
better!
And he was
surprised to find those words filling three hundred pages in
his favourite text editor when next he opened his eyes.

He slapped
some precious water on his cheeks.
Come on
James, get with the program.
He refocused,
trying even harder to lock onto the source of the signal that had
come uninvited into what he’d started to regard as his personal
network.