Freedom Incorporated (9 page)

Jackie
focussed her attention on her computer screen where figures
revealed the growth of each UniForce branch, subdivided into
country and product statistics. One column was particularly
interesting and she arched an eyebrow. Exclusive level
bounty-hunting lists were selling particularly well. “Well done
Michele.” She had to praise good work where praise was due. The
bounty apprehension rate had increased two percent, but revenue
from lists had jumped an astonishing sixteen percent. She’d more
than outstripped the growth Jackie had expected and had
single-handedly lifted the corporate average by three points.
Jackie approved – she approved of Michele, and she approved of her
decision to promote Michele. Her predecessor had finally
retired.
And about time too, the old
fuck
, Jackie thought. Within five months
Michele had revolutionised the branch.

“
Good for
you,” Jackie said, lifted her chin to survey the room and reassure
herself it was empty.

She licked her
lips. Just thinking about Michele’s plump breasts and ample rump
hardened her nipples and made her breathing go heavy. A few
key-taps later and
she’d locked
her computer
.
S
he
needed
to go home, back to
where she could get comfortable and allow Sasha to satisfy
her
swelling
desires.

*

Wednesday, September 15,
2066

NSW Police Department,
Parramatta Office

10:51 Sydney,
Australia

Simon warred against the
urge to thump his keyboard.

Every damn
word!
He clenched a fist in anger and
stuffed it as far as he could into his mouth, biting his knuckles
to stop
from
smashing the computer. His spacebar was playing up again. His
typing style meant that he always pressed the key with his thumb on
the far right side of the bar, but for a week it’d been loose and
was wobbling on a broken spring. It just jiggled when he pressed
it. To insert a space he had to press hard, really
hard
.
H
e was getting into the habit of
slapping it at the end of each word, but sometimes he forgot and it
gave him the shits.

“
Damn it
Mike!” Simon thrust his wheelie chair back and stretched to his
full height – six foot and two inches.

“
What?” Mike
demanded, the frosted glass door muting his voice.

“
I’ve put in a
request for a replacement keyboard every day for the past week!”
Simon burst from his office and scowled at Michael Tolhurst, the
officer in charge of supplies.

“
Well there’s
nothing
I
can do
about it, you’ve gotta ring it through to the Hell Desk,” Mike
grumbled in reply. He always turned sullen when someone yelled at
him.

But Simon wasn’t yelling
at anyone in particular, he just needed to yell. And Mike was the
nearest target. “Oh, fuck it!”

His language
caught him a warning glance from Steward across the room.
The
Superintendent
wouldn’t tolerate foul mouthing in the office. It was his job
to ensure the force retained what little was left of their
dwindling public image, and he considered ripe language too uncouth
if there was a possibility of civilians in the building. Simon
understood why, though he hated the reason. They weren’t just
working for public interest anymore; they were entrenched in a
bloody battle for survival. And they were losing. They had private
contractors to worry about now. And the enemy were slick. They
offered candy to anyone who turned up for questioning and the
public loved their extravagant advertising campaign. The Australian
Government was just searching for excuses to axe the police force
and outsource the entire mess.

Simon
swallowed hard. He was uninitiated in the game of
politics
.
In
truth,
it scared him senseless.

“
All right.”
He slunk back to his office and closed the door behind
him.

He grunted in
disgust and dialled the number, trying
to
relax
before someone answered.

It was
a
long
wait.

“
Good morning,
Help Desk. This is Peter, how can I help you?”

“
My keyboard’s
broken, I’d like it replaced.” Simon tried to keep his voice calm
and good-natured. It was still deep and husky and sounded like a
rumbling volcano, but that was as pleasant as he could make
it.

“
Okay, can you
describe the problem to me?”

“
I just did, I
need a new keyboard.”

“
Yes, but
what’s the fault with your keyboard?”

“
The
spacebar’s broken.”

“
So when you
press the spacebar it doesn’t print a space on your
screen?”

Simon nodded
and the movement squirmed into the tone of his voice. “Yeah, pretty
much. It looks like the spacebar’s come loose because I have to
press it hard in the dead
centre
or nothing happens. It just
wobbles. I’ve called about this every day for the past week, you
know.”

“
Oh, okay, do
you have your reference number?”

“
Huh?”

“
When you
first logged the call you would’ve been given a reference number.
It’ll help me find your call in the system.”

Simon closed his eyes in
frustration. “No, I don’t have a damned reference number, I wasn’t
given one.”

A pause.

“
Can you spell
your name for me please?”

“
Simon West.
That’s w-e-s-t. As in, the opposite of
e
ast.”

Another pause.

“
Okay, I’ve
found your call… hmm… oh…” Simon heard him swallow. “It looks like
this call was waiting on the serial number from your keyboard
before we could place it through to Global Integrated Systems for a
replacement.”

Simon was flabbergasted.
It was a true testament to his incredible self-control that he
didn’t leap down the phone and strangle everyone on the other end.
“Okay, fine.” He rattled off the serial number from the bottom edge
of his keyboard and scribbled down the reference number he received
in return.

Steward Vincent chose
that moment to crack Simon’s door and peer into his office. “You
got a moment?”

Simon switched on his
smile and perfectly aligned white teeth beamed from his dark
complexion. “Yeah, sure.” He waited while Steward crossed the room
and sat on a corner – the only corner – of Simon’s desk not covered
with paper.

“
Hey, if this
is about the swearing just before you wouldn’t believe-”

“
It’s not
about that,” Steward said, cutting him off. He slapped a
manila-bound file in front of his top detective.

“
What’s this?”
Simon opened it and immediately saw the designation-52 in the top
corner, appropriately written in red. “Oh, no.”

“
It’s your
turn,” Steward said apologetically, which was unusual for
the
Superintendent
.

“
No, no!”
Simon pushed the file away, trying to get it off his desk as if it
were a snake. “Get someone else to do it, I’m too busy.”

“
So are the
others.”

“
What about
Anders? He didn’t look busy, or Kim?”

“
No, it’s your
turn. Nobody likes them. Today it’s yours.” With a note of
finality, Steward stood and straitened his trousers and necktie.
“Make it quick. Don’t let it get in the way of real
work.”

“
Great,” Simon
mumbled when his
Superintendent
was gone. “Another
bullshit case.” He didn’t really have any pressing work, but the
thought of paper shuffling a designation-52 made the curly hairs on
the back of his neck stand straight. 52 was the code the force used
to identify an ‘explainable, unsolvable’. That usually meant
UniForce was involved and there was a WEF sanction on the killing.
Ergo, he couldn’t do anything about it.

“
Okay, so…
what’ve we got?” he said to nobody in particular. “Another dead
dude. What a surprise.” The words were stale; he uttered them at
the beginning of every case.

Adam
Oaten.
Simon ran his finger across the page,
reading the description of the incident.
It’s already old.
The crime had
happened on Monday.
Must’ve bounced around
before finally landing in Parramatta. Those cocksuckers in
Strathfield wouldn’t have the balls…
His
animosity rose above typical precinct rivalry; he truly believed
the officers in Strathfield were worse than useless. Simon had
spent his orientation in Strathfield after leaving the academy, but
he’d been so revolted by their standards and ethics that he’d
requested a transfer six months later. He’d been working in
Parramatta ever since.

He turned the
page.

Someone had
done the preliminary work. He wondered who, and why he or she
hadn’t taken the case themselves. He read the dry description of
the scene and his imagination
coloured in
the
details. But the unemotional
description of the cadaver made him squirm. He’d seen what
nanotoxin could do to a body and it wasn’t a pretty.
Comes with the job I guess
. He swallowed hard and poured a cup of
office-coffee
, which
looked more like muddy water. It was lukewarm and bitter, and
made his stomach cramp, but it diluted the ghastly images in his
mind.

So, someone
shot him with nanotoxin and took his
fifth
thoracic
vertebrae.
Simon skimmed the remainder of the autopsy report and keyed
the case number into his computer, trying hard not to let his
frustration boil over at the busted spacebar.

The
Department’s database had more information than Superintendent
Vincent had handed him, but it still wasn’t much and probably
wouldn’t be in Simon’s final report. There was a list of names and
destinations corresponding to the portal activity in the
surrounding suburbs for two hours before and three hours after the
murder. In total, it was nearly 85,000 entries.
No
wonder he didn’t bother printing
it.
The period of interest coincided with
the homeward rush of commuters. Simon entered a few search terms to
refine the list by ruling out private portals and eliminating all
portal activity after seventeen-hundred hours. The list shortened
to just over seven-hundred entries. On a whim, he decided to
eliminate everything but the portals in Meadowbank. He honestly
doubted that anybody
woul
d be stupid enough to kill a man in the Meadowbank reserve and
flee
using a
portal
in
the
same suburb.

Twenty-six
entries.
He briefly scanned the
list
,
but
the seventh entry caught his
breath.

What?
Simon sat straight in his chair
and arched an eyebrow.
Dan?

He
double-clicked the applicable entry and squinted at the details.
Dan Sutherland had portaled out of Meadowbank station to his home
address in Andamooka at 16:18.
What were
you doing there buddy?
Simon rocked back in
his chair and stroked his neat goatee, lost in thought. It’d been a
long time; it felt like years since he’d last seen Dan. Time was
funny that way; it was really only a few months.
Five? Six months?
He
couldn’t be certain.

“
But… he
couldn’t have…”
Chief
Inspector
West entered his access code for
the WEF apprehension database and scanned for Adam Oaten. He
impatiently watched the flashing cursor and sipped some more of his
coffee, unblinking. After a grinding sound from his antiquated hard
disk, the list of possible matches appeared for his inspection.
There were only two and he checked both. One was for an Adam Oaten
somewhere in Florida but the other was for Sydney, Australia.
Tingling with adrenaline, Simon’s set his coffee a safe distance
from his trembling hands.
But… not
Dan.
He checked the DNA profile listed on
Adam Oaten’s WEF database record and compared it to the DNA taken
at the autopsy. It was the same. He was both relieved and terrified
to note the apprehension status – target terminated. The WEF had
only issued an apprehension warrant. Adam Oaten’s death
was only permissible
if he
resisted.

Okay, so
someone from UniForce tried to nab the guy and he put up a
fight.
He shrugged.
It’s not the first time.
The
disturbing element was the possibility, no matter how slim, that
Dan was somehow involved. It was death by nanotoxin after all.
Simon had heard that Dan had crossed over to the private sector,
but he couldn’t believe Dan was wantonly cruel.