Heaven is a Place on Earth

by Graham Storrs

  He blinked in surprise. “I don't. He's just another name in the sheaf of papers my informant gave me. But he's an important name. He's of great interest to September 10. They seem to have been tracking him for years. I think they might have recruited him.”

  “No,” she said, shaking her head. “Cal's not a terrorist.” But there was doubt in her eyes. She knew something that maybe suggested her friend really was one of the bad guys.

  “But he asked you to do a favour for him, isn't that right? And the favour led you to Tonia. And then...” And then what? He was out of guesses for now, but fortunately Ginny started talking.

  “And then a killer turned up. A man named Dover Richards. He surprised me out in the hallway, just like you did. He wanted to know all about Cal. And later a cop turned up from Missing Persons. Another man in the hallway. He wanted to find Cal too.”

  Rafe's mind was racing. “So there's a tagger after him. Cal ditched his tag, right? Gone off the grid? They can do that. They've got a doctor who helps them. I thought you might be the doctor.”

  “Me?”

  “It's all I could think of to explain why Tonia had your name in her papers. But you're not a doctor. You're not anyone – if you'll forgive me saying.”

  “Feel free.”

  “So it's something else. It's Copplin. He's the important one. How come you're friends with a terrorist?”

  Ginny threw up her arms. “I'm not. Cal's just, like, a normal bloke. I met him. We had a couple of dates. We talked. He seemed nice. He's not a terrorist any more than I am.”

  “Maybe you're more of a terrorist than you think you are. What was the favour he asked you to do?”

  Ginny scowled at him and walked away, towards the kitchenette. Rafe realised he was hungry. He wished he could find a good restaurant and get lunch but, without a tank, there would be no point eating.

  “Have you got any food in the house?” he asked. “I mean, real food?” Ginny scowled at him in response. “Well, do you know somewhere that sells food? I mean a real fast food place or something?”

  She turned to the fridge and seemed about to open the door when she stopped. “Are you really travelling on an expense account.” He nodded. “OK, then, you can take me to lunch. There's a place in Toowong that serves real food. Very pricey. For the jaded rich who want to try something different.. They've got a chef and everything. It's only a fifteen minute walk from here. I've always wanted to go and now's the time. Come on.”

  Rafe didn't much like the sound of it – Becky would kill him when she saw the bill – but if that's what it took to get the story, she'd understand. Or, at least, she'd forgive him one day.

  -oOo-

  “I heard about you,” Ginny said, studying him. “You were on the feeds.”

  Rafe nodded and scanned the menu in vain for anything that cost under a week's wages.

  “They tortured you or something, nearly killed you. You're famous.”

  “What about you?” he asked, wanting to change the subject. “Written anything I'd know?”

  “I write soundscapes not pop songs. Ever been to the National Museum? You're from Canberra didn't you say? I worked on the Dali exhibition there last year.”

  “Yeah, I saw that. You did that, huh?” He tried to look impressed, but he hadn't really noticed the soundscape. In fact, he'd never really considered that someone actually wrote the ambient sounds he took for granted wherever he went.

  “Not my best work,” she said. “Very conservative bunch at the National Museum.”

  He glanced at her, not sure if that was meant to be a joke. He grinned anyway, just in case.

  A robot rolled up to them and took their order. Ginny seemed to be intent on bankrupting his employer while Rafe tried to mitigate the damage by ordering the cheapest dishes he could find. If his guest noticed, she did not comment, but chattered away about her various clients and some big proposal she'd just put in to a wordlet design company he'd never heard of. A lot seemed to be hanging on it, so he tried to sound interested and make intelligent comments, all the while trying to get the conversation back to Tonia Birchow and her gang of saboteurs.

  “So, tell me how your meeting with Tonia went,” he said at last, cutting across an ecstatic monologue on the subject of how much better real food tasted than sim food, or printer food, or the processed rubbish they deliver from the supermarket warehouses.

  Ginny closed her mouth and looked at him across a spoonful of desert that had been making abortive sorties towards her mouth for quite some time. There was a flicker of defeat across her features and Rafe realised she had been deliberately waffling on about anything and everything to keep him off the subject. She put down her spoon and regarded it for a moment.

  “She pulled a gun on me,” she said. “The woman is certifiable.” Rafe swallowed hard. Perhaps he hadn't been so paranoid yesterday when he'd fled Tonia's apartment. Maybe she had been armed after all.

  “Why would she pull a gun on you?”

  “Because I went to her brother's house, to deliver this package Cal gave me.”

  “Her brother's house? You mean Gavin?”

  “I mean, the late Gavin. As in, he was dead in the kitchen, according to Tonia.”

  “Had she killed him?”

  “I don't think so. But who knows? I thought she was going to kill me. She said I was working for the taggers. I didn't even know what a tagger was. In the end she let me go.”

  Rafe pressed her for the details and, by the time he'd finished his coffee, he had the whole story. “And you have no idea what was on those data cubes?”

  She shook her head. “I should have opened the package. My friend, Della, says all kinds of people might be in danger because of me.”

  Rafe could only agree, but he said, “You thought you were helping a friend.”

  “But they blow things up,” she said. “They could disrupt services or even kill someone.”

  “September 10 you mean?”

  “Yes, I looked them up after I met Tonia.”

  “I wish you hadn't done that.”

  “Why? The police already know I'm involved. Besides, it hardly looks suspicious if I try to find out what September 10 is. I mean, if I was one of them, I'd already know, right?”

  “Do the police know you met Tonia?”

  “I don't think so?”

  “Or about the package Cal asked you to deliver?”

  “No.”

  “So your sudden interest in this particular terror group might just seem a bit surprising to anyone who's monitoring your Net usage.” She frowned at him, as if trying to work out how serious he was. “Never mind,” he said. “Tell me what you found out.”

  A movement near the door caught his eye and he looked up to see a man talking to a robot waiter. The waiter led the newcomer over to one of the many unoccupied tables. “Now there's a coincidence,” he said.

  “What?”

  “I know that bloke. I met him just – ”

  The realisation hit Rafe like a jolt of electricity. Fear ran through his body like a fire. He stood quickly but as quietly as he could. He needed to act while the man was distracted with taking his seat and dealing with the waiter. He grabbed Ginny by the arm and pulled her to her feet, saying, “We've got to get out of here. Come on, quickly. Don't make a sound.”

  She rose, looking around to see what had spooked him, but he hustled her towards the door. A waiter rolled after them and he waved the stupid machine away. The last thing he wanted was any attention being drawn to them. He tried not to look at the man, but he couldn't help stealing a glance as they reached the door. They were OK for a few more seconds. The man was looking at the menu. He hadn't checked yet that Rafe and Ginny were still at their table.

  The bill flashed up in his aug as they stepped outside and he flicked it away. They needed somewhere to hide and fast. The restaurant was in a row of what once must have been shops and eateries on a broad street that curved away around a corner to his right. Opposite was
a massive building without windows that might once have been a shopping mall but was now clearly a distribution warehouse. Robot trucks of all sizes were driving into and emerging from a wide black tunnel that led to the interior. He considered hiding in there but dismissed it at once. There would be security. The robots would challenge him, perhaps even arrest him. No, his best bet was to escape down the road.

  Ginny was starting to resist his tugging and asking what the hell was wrong. “Someone followed us to the restaurant,” he said. “Someone's been following me for days.”

  “Who?”

  Then he saw what they needed. “Come on.” He grabbed her tighter and dragged her with him across the road. Vehicles stopped and waited politely for them to cross. He led her to the entrance where the delivery trucks were emerging. “That one,” he said, pointing to a flat-bed truck loaded with large crates. The crates were fastened down with webbing.

  They reached the truck just as it slowed to a halt before turning onto the main road. “Climb on,” he said. Ginny resisted and he pushed her forward. “Climb on. It's easy.” It was, too. The electric truck's bed was low and the webbing made for easy hand-holds. At the speed it moved as it edged around the corner, a child could do it. “Get on the truck, Ginny. He'll notice we're gone any moment now and come out to find us.”

  She hesitated a moment longer but, perhaps responding to the desperation he must have been showing, she grabbed the webbing and pulled herself onto the bed of the truck. He was up beside her in an instant. They were on the opposite side of the crates from the restaurant. “Keep low,” he said, unnecessarily. Ginny was already crouching out of sight. The truck began to pick up speed, whining up through its gears to reach its maximum twenty-five kilometres and hour. Rafe risked a quick look through the webbing at the back of the load and saw the man come rushing out of the restaurant, scanning the street left and right but not spotting his quarry.

  “Oh my God,” Ginny said in a low, frightened voice. Rafe turned to find her ducking down again, having also taken a peek at the man from the restaurant.

  “What is it? Do you know him?” She nodded but didn't speak. “Well? Who is it?”

  She swallowed and licked her lips, as if her mouth was dry. “It's Dover Richards,” she said.

  -oOo-

  They stayed with the truck for a long, long way, before climbing off at a junction and continuing on foot to a small, ramshackle park. A robot mower was just finishing when they arrived and they sat on a bench that had seen better days. The air was full of the smell of cut grass.

  “So Richards followed you from Canberra to Brisbane?” she asked.

  “Yes. I met him in the airport lounge. He said he was a mining engineer. I've still got his card.”

  “Couldn't it have been a coincidence?”

  “What, that some guy picks up my trail in Canberra and is still on it two days later in Brisbane – at a real food restaurant of all the unlikely places – and he just happens to be the same guy that our terrorist friend said killed her brother?”

  “Yeah, all right. So no coincidence then.” She stared into the distance, pouting. “So what does he want? Why is he following you? How could he possibly know you're involved with September 10 and Tonia and all that?”

  She was right. Dover Richards had been onto him before Rafe himself even knew what he'd become mixed up in. “He must have been monitoring Tonia's calls. It's the only possibility. But who is he? If he's not a cop and he's not with the September 10 crowd, it must mean there's another group out there, one we have no clue about.”

  “Except we know they kill people, and follow people.”

  Rafe wasn't even sure about the killing part. They only had Tonia's word for it. “Maybe they only kill terrorists.”

  A small grin creased Ginny's cheek. “You're just trying to cheer me up.”

  Surprised, he grinned back. “That's me, always thinking of others.”

  He studied the woman beside him while she studied the shrubbery at the far end of the park. He liked her. More to the point, he trusted her. Just a pleasant, not unattractive woman, making her way in life, not completely alone, doing something not uninteresting, not uncreative. Not unlike himself. In another life, if they'd met in some other way, they might have become friends, lovers even.

  The ludicrous idea of a jaded hack like him starting up a new relationship almost made him snort in derision. There was a time, fifteen, twenty years ago, when it was all he wanted. He'd found Zoe and they'd set up a virtual home together. She lived in South Africa and he was in Sydney at that time but they lived together in virtual space for nearly five years. She was endlessly fascinating, intelligent and witty. The cybersex was beautiful. She had been a one-woman intellectual fireworks display. And she had him dazzled. But while she had grown brighter with each passing year, Rafe had grown duller, more cynical, less able to shake off the mundane. He blamed it on the crushing tawdriness of his work. She said he had simply failed to rise above the limits of his imagination. When she left him, it felt like watching the angels leave the Earth.

  “I can't go home tonight,” Ginny said, interrupting his maudlin mood. “He knows where I live.”

  He snapped back to the park, the hot Brisbane sunshine, the smell of mown grass. “There's a hotel I've been using,” he said. “It's not bad.”

  She shook her head. “I can't afford hotels. I just blew a bundle on going down to see my folks.”

  Not really my problem, he thought. “What about friends? There must be someone you could stay with.”

  She pursed her lips. “Probably the only one I could ask, I don't want to get involved. Who'd thank you for maybe bringing an armed killer to their door?”

  He nodded. He shouldn't go back to the same hotel either. Richards would know he'd been there. It would be the first place he'd check. But how many hotels were there in Brisbane? Two? Three? It wouldn't take long to find him wherever he went.

  Again they drifted off into silence until Ginny said, “I've got it. I know where I can go tonight. You could stay there too if you're worried about going back to your hotel.”

  “Where?”

  “Follow me. It's not far.” She jumped up and held out a hand. He took it and let her lead him.

  Chapter 9

  The entrance to Cal Copplin's apartment building seemed unremarkable, latched or not. Rafe peered up and down the street before turning to the woman beside him. “Looks clear to me,” he said.

  “I sort of expected there'd be police tape across the door or something,” Ginny said. “Or one of those 'Crime scene. Do not enter.' signs.”

  “It's not actually a crime scene,” Rafe said. At least, he hoped it wasn't. Just the empty apartment of someone who'd gone missing. “And how are we going to get in?” he asked, again.

  Ginny sighed. “I think the door will just open for me.”

  They crossed the street and Ginny pushed a button only she could see. They had agreed beforehand that Rafe would remain on minimal aug while she latched to the building. After a moment, she said, “Ginny Galton,” and the door clicked open. So far, so good. They were inside the building at least.

  Ginny led him to Copplin's apartment and to Rafe's surprise, the door unlocked itself as they approached. Ginny flashed him an excited smile and walked straight in. With a last look up and down the hallway, he followed her inside, closing the door behind him.

  The apartment was cleaner and tidier than almost any he had ever seen, as if Copplin hadn't relied on the rough-and-ready services of the dombots but had actually done the cleaning himself. He'd heard about people who were like that, but he'd never met one. “You know, the police might be monitoring this unit in case Copplin returns.”

  Ginny shook her head. “I don't think Cal would let that happen.”

  “Pardon?”

  “There was something about the way the unit responded to me last time I was here. I got the impression Cal has these systems under his thumb. It's sort of how I knew the unit would l
et me back in.”

  “It must be nice to have faith.” He went to the kitchen and looked in the fridge. It was full of food. “Thank Christ for that,” he said. The prospect of having nothing to eat until tomorrow had been nagging at him. He hadn't walked so much in years and he was already hungry. The fridge was stocked with enough food for them to stay several days if they needed to. He grabbed the kettle and took it to the sink. “Why don't you ask the unit where your friend is if it's so smart?”

  “I'm not sure I want to know.”

  “Coffee?” Ginny nodded and he set about hunting through the kitchen cupboards for mugs and ingredients. “Can you cook?” he asked, realising that Copplin had pans and utensils of the sort he'd only ever seen in VR.

  “I can microwave.”

  “Yeah, me too.”

  “I could ask the unit if there are any more messages from Cal.”

  “Can't hurt?”

  “You're joking, right?”

  Rafe gave a sheepish grin. “Yeah, stupid thing to say. But you should try it, anyway.”

  “Right.” Ginny went silent for a moment as she communed with the apartment. Her eyes widened. “Oh God, there's a message.”

  He put down the spoon he was holding and went to join her. “Hold on. Let me latch so I can hear it.”

  Ginny nodded and waited for him to give her the OK. “You know, it's bloody weird that this place looks the same with and without aug,” She nodded again, a quick, nervous bob of the chin, and popped up the message.

  Cal Copplin's face appeared. He looked relaxed and untroubled by the mayhem his disappearance had sparked. He seemed to be sitting in the apartment, so Rafe guessed the recording had been made before he ducked out of his life.

  “Hello again, Ginny,” the recorded voice of Cal Copplin said. “If you're watching this, it's because you came back to my unit. And the only reason I can think of for why you might do that is because you're in trouble and you've come back looking for answers. I'm sorry. There was always a chance the little errand you did for me would go wrong, but this is my attempt to help you sort things out.”