Freedom Incorporated (71 page)

Only once Dan had closed
and locked the door did the conversation continue. “Put the beers
in the sink.” He didn’t want Adrian to have ammunition to throw.
“Now turn around and put your hands on the wall.” Dan patted him
down and removed the remainder of the beer before declaring him
weapon-free. “Going to a party?”

“
No,” Adrian
replied soberly. He smothered his billowing sense of dread and
reasserted his mask of confidence. After all, he was helping to
recover Sutherland’s girlfriend, wasn’t he? Didn’t that deserve
appreciation? It therefore made sense that he merely needed to
convince the man that he was trying to help.

“
Where’s Jen?”
Dan demanded, steadying his aim toward the centre of Adrian’s
forehead.

“
She’s twenty
feet underground in Baltimore,” Adrian replied, failing to consider
how Dan might interpret his words.

Dan blinked, stunned by
the traumatic image brought to mind. “You killed her
already?”

Adrian emphatically shook
his head. “No, no! She’s in an underground building, is what I
meant.”

“
Is she
okay?”

“
She’s fine.”
Adrian nodded, risking a bullet between the eyes to adjust his
glasses. “At least she was two hours ago.” Sometimes he simply
didn’t know when it was wise to keep his mouth shut. “I mean, I’m
sure she’s still fine, I just haven’t been back for a
while.”

“
Is she hurt?
In
any
way?”

Adrian thought about the
bruises Esteban had left on her breasts. “No, she’s fine. We
haven’t touched her, I swear.”

“
Take me to
see her.” He knew everything would be fine if he could just reach
her.

“
I can’t,”
Adrian replied remorsefully. “The portals only accept member
chips.”

The bathroom had an
identical décor to the one downstairs. Blue was the punch behind an
ocean theme. Wavy tiles reflected the light, resulting in a ghostly
shimmer across Dan’s face. It highlighted the deadly black itch in
his eyes and an erratic flicker from an overhead fluorescent added
a tinge of the surreal to Dan’s threatening stance. He looked like
a soulless monster, clad in black and towering over his cringing
victim.

Adrian’s voice cracked
under the pressure and a trickle of blood escaped from his left
nostril. He snivelled. “Look, I’m trying to help.” But the bounty
hunter was deaf to his plea. “I’m helping her escape. Look.” He
reached for his pocket but Dan jerked his Colt a fraction to regain
Adrian’s attention.

“
Don’t do
that,” Dan warned coolly. “Move like that again and you won’t have
a head to consider how shithouse that idea is.”

“
Reach into my
left pocket,” Adrian implored. “I have Jen’s microchip.”

Dan faltered and said,
“Turn around and face the wall again. Hands up high.” He wasn’t
stupid enough to risk rummaging through Adrian’s pocket while
facing him. “If you’re lying I’m going to shoot you in the knee for
whatever stupid prank you’re pulling.”

“
I’m not
lying,” Adrian assured him, patiently waiting while Dan fumbled
near his groin. “It’s deeper.”

Dan thrust his hand in up
to his wrist and extracted the device. It was cold. “Okay, back
around.” He stepped back two paces to a safe distance, taking his
eyes off Adrian for long enough to flip through the identities in
the selector. They were Jen’s. “What were you doing with
this?”

“
I stole it
from Esteban,” Adrian said proudly. “I was going to give it to Jen.
The portals have no restriction on outbound travellers so she can
escape with it. She underground, the building has no doors so I
couldn’t just let her out. Hey, I’m on your side.”

Dan unsheathed
his knife and twisted the blade to the light, savouring the note of
fear in Adrian’s eyes as he pressed the tip to the soft patch under
his chin. “You’ll never say that again if you know what’s good for
you. You and I will
never
be on the same side.” He didn’t
assign any nobility to Adrian’s selfless act. He didn’t allot him
any credit for risking his life to steal Jen’s chip selector. All
he could see when he looked at the man was the second person to
rape his wife. Urine from this man’s bladder had soaked Katherine’s
lungs, and Dan could never forgive or forget a detail like
that.

“
But I’m…”
Adrian frowned, not sure Dan understood what he was trying to
say.
I’m helping you.

Dan didn’t care and
stubbornly refused to accept his assistance. He reversed the knife
and turned the serrated edge outward, placing it tenderly against
Adrian’s lower eyelid. With the slightest dip to Dan’s wrist, he
could tear the lid clear from Adrian’s face.

Adrian squirmed backward
until his head was pressing against the cold tiles. He couldn’t
understand why Dan was so aggressive toward an ally. It didn’t
occur to him that he was seeking retribution for past
crimes.

“
Nothing would
give me more pleasure than to rearrange your face.” Dan tilted his
head to one side. “Maybe if I cut off your cheeks you’ll stop
dribbling shit.” He was the closest to insanity that he’d ever
been. It was in the air; he could smell it and taste it. It hung
around him like a sour cloud, obscuring his thoughts and twisting
him to its will. And the insanity had a name:
Revenge.
Every atom in Dan’s body
ached to inflict as much damage on Adrian as he’d caused to
Katherine. He wanted them all to pay. He wanted them to see that
they couldn’t flippantly torture someone and expect to get away
with it. Murder victims had husbands, brothers, fathers, or
sisters, mothers, and wives who were frequently willing to
retaliate with their own round of death and destruction.

“
I need
something from you.” Dan put more tension on Adrian’s
eyelid.
Wait, I have to give him
hope…
“If you co-operate I’ll give you the
chance to live. If not, well… you can go under the knife. So? How
about it? Do you want plastic surgery? We could see how pretty your
smile is without cheeks. I bet you have lovely teeth.”

Adrian fluctuated between
looking as pale as plaster and flushing dark red when he suffered
successive outbreaks of anxiety. He would’ve nodded if Dan’s
serrated knife weren’t resting on his eyelid. “I want to help.” His
voice was hoarse. “Just tell me what to do.”

“
Good.” Dan
retracted his knife. “I need a code to the portal in that
underground building.”

“
I told you,
it won’t help,” Adrian explained hesitantly. “It only
admits-”

Dan silenced him with a
warning finger. He was still aiming his Colt at Adrian’s forehead.
“Not the destination code, the… other code. Long. Forty digits…
alpha-number shoelace or something.” He was struggling to remember
how Hans had explained it.

“
You mean the
SAT?” Adrian prompted, trying to be helpful.

“
What the fuck
is a SAT?”

“
The Standard
Address Transform, it’s for identifying portals on our routing
tables. It’s a forty-digit alphanumeric string.” He snivelled on
his trickling nosebleed. “But you can’t do anything with
that.”

“
I’ll worry
about what I can and can’t do with it; you should worry about how
helpful you’re being.” Dan’s threat struck home.

This is an
exam.
Adrian gulped. He’d never been fond of
exams.
And I need to pass in order to
live.
He felt a flutter in his stomach when
he realised he had no idea of the pass mark, but he rallied himself
to be as helpful as possible. “I’d need to go to work to get it. I
need my computer.”

“
Fine.” Dan
was willing to suffer a lot to get the number. It was his gateway
to Jen.

“
You know, if
you let me go I could save you a lot of trouble,” Adrian
offered.

“
Do you think
I’m an idiot?” Dan wagged his pistol to get Adrian moving and
scanned the corridor for unfriendlies before ducking to the
portals. He didn’t trust Adrian to tell him the number for PortaNet
reception, he was more likely to select the Guild and vanish from
Dan’s grasp forever. Instead, he ordered Adrian to stand in the
tube while he entered the code for the nearby portal station.
“Remember, I’ll be right behind you, so if you’re thinking of
running you’d better be damn fast.”

Adrian flashed away and
Dan jumped inside the white circle, typed in the code, and braced
himself for the shift in vision. He raised his Colt and was ready
to defend himself if Adrian took advantage of his momentary
disorientation to launch an attack. Instead, he found Adrian
placidly waiting eight metres away.

“
You expected
me to run,” Adrian said. “You don’t trust me yet.”

“
I’ll never
trust you,” Dan replied gruffly. “Come on. Let’s get this over
with. When we reach security, you’re going to tell them we have a
meeting and ask them to scan my chip into the authorised access
list. Got it?”

“
Okay, I got
it.” Adrian walked briskly in silence, past the reviving New York
streets, toward the monolithic symbol of the commercial
world.

“
If you so
much as sneeze or wink I’ll blow your fucking head off.
Understood?”

Adrian nodded.

“
And fix your
face. You have blood everywhere.”

He pinched his nose with
a handkerchief until the bleeding stopped and used saliva to dab at
the encrusted blood. Then he ran a hand through his hair and
adjusted his tie. He’d ruined his jumper after all – half a dozen
specks had soaked into the wool and he knew blood was difficult to
remove.

Dan calmed his voice so
it would pass as normal conversation. “So, if you were telling the
truth, why were you helping Jen to escape?”

Adrian thought for nearly
a minute before finding the right words to phrase his answer. “I’m
tired.”

“
Pardon?” Dan
squinted through his frown.

“
It’s pretty
simple, what part don’t you understand?” Adrian asked, already
wishing he’d kept his sarcasm in check. “I’m tired. I need a rest.
I’m walking out of my job, I’m walking out of the Guild, and I’m
tired of them abusing those women.”

“
Women?” Shock
pinged through Dan’s brain. “There are more?”

“
A few,”
Adrian admitted. He felt the shame returning.
It sounds so bad when you put it to words.
He didn’t share Esteban’s philosophy – he didn’t believe the
women were better off in the Guild rather than prison. Esteban
might’ve been right, but Adrian was tired of witnessing the women’s
repeated abuse.

The news stoked Dan’s
already blazing fire and a distended vein on his temple began
pulsing in tune with his throbbing heart. But their imminent
arrival at PortaNet security severed any further progress in the
conversation.

“
You again?”
They eyed Dan suspiciously. Now there were two: an even greater
threat, practically a riot. But at least the second man was wearing
expensive grey trousers, a collared shirt, a tie, and a well
preened – if splotchy – jumper. He looked well enough presented to
have worked there.

Adrian stepped forward
and invited them to initiate a scan.

“
Ah, hello
sir,” said the senior guard after confirming Adrian’s identity. “I
presume you’re here for your meeting?”

Time slurred
while Dan waited for Adrian’s response. If the PortaNet executive
wanted to break for freedom, he’d do it now, with a fistful of
armed guards to protect him.
Not that
they’d react in time.
Dan had already
decided Adrian Miller would be the first to die, only then would he
see about saving himself from the deadly rush of bullets that would
surly follow.

“
Yes, add him
to the day-visitor list would you?”

The guard with the
scanner brushed his wand past Dan’s spine and the device locked
onto Tedman Kennedy’s signal from Dan’s pocket. He then integrated
the information with PortaNet’s security database, granting Dan
access to the building’s internal portals.

“
Messed up the
times did you?” The guard asked with a smile, wanting to engage in
small talk.

Dan nodded, never moving
his eyes from Adrian. “Yeah, looks like I did.”

“
Okay, you’re
free to enter, if you could just hand over any weapons you might be
carrying.” His eyes roamed over Dan’s thick coat as he wondered
what mysteries it might conceal.

He unhooked the
pulse-emitter and reversed the grip, handing it to the guard. It
wasn’t every day the musclebound man saw a sonic weapon and he
pored over the oddly shaped handgun, breaking off his inspection
for long enough to sling a probing look at Dan. What sort of person
carried a pulse-emitter?

Dan took advantage of the
stir to slip past unquestioned.

One guard, a gaunt man in
his early 30s, called after him in a weaselly voice, “Don’t forget
to check back with us after the meeting.”

Dan replied
with a saluting gesture and nudged Adrian forward. “Keep moving,”
he muttered quietly. “Don’t look back.” Dan herded him to the
ground-floor portals. There were dozens of them, neatly lined
against the far wall. The building’s innards were a study in
understatement. It wasn’t as flashy as Dan had expected for the
richest company in the world. Their annual profit was several
hundred times greater than the GDP of the United States, yet
PortaNet hadn’t spruced up their headquarters the way many
giga-corporations had.
I guess when
everybody knows you’re the richest you don’t need to remind
people.
But PortaNet reminded people several
times a day. Whenever someone stepped inside the white PortaNet
circle and jumped instantly somewhere else, he or she was reminded
just how indispensable the corporation really was.