by T. K. Toppin
The sound of the front door disengaging made my heart thump erratically in my chest. John, my immediate thought. It was. He looked haggard and drained, his face pale and suddenly aged. Dark circles under his eyes and stubble on his chin showed he’d not slept at all. He saw me and froze, clearly surprised, since I never woke so early. He managed a weak smile as I walked up to him and gave him a long, enveloping hug.
“You look like shit.” I leaned back to inspect him closely.
“I feel like it.” Even his voice sounded exhausted.
I smelled the whiskey on his breath, made a face, but kissed him anyway.
“I’ve a few things to do this morning, but as soon as I’m done, come with me to the underground shelter. I want you to stay there.”
I narrowed an eye. “And what about you?”
“I’ve got to be here.”
“Then so will I.”
John sighed. “Josie…” He ran a hand through his hair, then scrubbed his face. “It’s for your own safety. It’s better if you wait in the shelter. I won’t be able to function properly knowing you’re not safe. Stop being so stubborn.”
“Then stop being such a martyr. Even the greatest leaders of the world ran for cover with their tails up their asses. What makes you any different?” Hands on my hips, I took a step back to scowl at him. “Besides, I didn’t wait three hundred years to find you, to then have to sit and stew underground, waiting to see if you actually live through this. No fucking way. I’m staying right here.”
We regarded each other with simmering anger for a moment longer. John wore a look that said he was considering knocking me over the head and dragging me by force—I knew how his mind worked well enough—but he had the good grace to mutter an airy sigh and with a small shrug, walked past me. He was learning not to test me.
“Is there anything to eat? I’m starving.” He opened the refrigerator door and rummaged about. “I met with Wellesley just now.”
I came around, leaned on a stool by the kitchen counter and addressed John’s back. “Oh? And?”
“And he’s going to be helping us. He’s got some men with him. Seems to think Adam has nothing to do with all this.”
Finding nothing worth eating, he poked about in a container on the counter, found a stash of strawberry tarts, and popped two into his mouth before I could snatch them away. I rooted about in the container to find nothing but crumbs. Cursing, I settled back down on the stool.
“Don’t you find it all very coincidental?” I sucked grains of sugar from my fingers. “The graphic novel and Adam knowing about it. I mean, what are the odds of that? And now the so-called leader of these fanatics is now using this very same book—its character, the storyline… You couldn’t even find it, but how is it that they can—did?”
I propped both elbows on the kitchen counter and gazed curiously at John. He continued to scour the countertop for more signs of sweets. His face was set with furtive determination, and he kept flicking quick glances at me in case I tried to steal them, should he find something.
“Yes, I do. Very coincidental. But remember, there’s an entire underground network out there. Anything is out there if you know where to look, and are willing to pay for it, and if they don’t suspect you as government, then doors open. And like Adam, if you’re bored enough and look around long enough and can blend in like one of them…” John shrugged and gave up his search. He copied me and leaned on the counter, rubbing his eyes.
“So you think Adam’s telling you the truth? I mean, the man’s brilliant and sneaky. You don’t think this is all some elaborate ruse? That he planned it all along?”
“Could be. I don’t know. But I’m moving him underground this morning just in case. You’ve a very suspicious mind, Josie. You’d make a very good operative—if you’d just stop being so hard of hearing and do as you’re told.” He waited a beat; no doubt waiting for the slap I’d give him. Since I didn’t bite, he continued. “Regardless, and I do hope we are wrong and our suspicions are just that, Adam’s mind is valuable. Aline is livid with me, by the way.” He glanced up at me as if I could tell him something that would appease Aline’s temper.
“She believes him, then,” I replied. “Aline’s a very good judge of character. He is your brother.”
“That she is. She’s the middle sibling and always stood up for either of us, depending on who was inflicting the hurt. But her love for him tends to blind her.”
“Doesn’t it always? So what happens next?”
“We’re going to flush them out.”
“How?” I watched him work his mouth, grinding his teeth, giving me an odd look. He was deep in thought. “Don’t tell me you’re going to use yourself as bait? If that’s the case, I’ll kill you myself.”
“Nothing so dramatic. Decoys. If they want to play tricks with us, we’ll play tricks with them.” He tweaked my chin between his thumb and finger, and gave it a little shake. My face went slack, and my lower lip wobbled. “You’ve sugar on your lips…bring them here.”
Snapping back to attention before John could kiss me, I jerked away and gave him a nasty look. “So you’re going to let some poor unfortunate bugger get himself killed, just so you can draw them out? Now that is just plain barbaric!”
He snorted in amusement, but with a straight face gave me a reproving scowl. “I don’t know how they did it in the dark ages, but these days, we like to use holograms. They don’t bleed so much, and why don’t you have any food in this house?”
I smacked him across the shoulders. “Asshole.” Flouncing off the stool, I walked off a bit and crossed my arms. “Tell me, why is Adam so paranoid?”
John clicked his tongue and shrugged. “He’s always been like that, ever since he was little. Germs, ill people, touching people, touching things he deems nasty, being seen in public, birds with straight beaks, birds with webbed feet, animals in general, synthetic fabrics—you name it, he shunned it. He’s a bit of an obsessive-compulsive. It…runs in the family. Correction. He is obsessive-compulsive. He wouldn’t even let Mother kiss him goodnight. Then when he got sick, he got worse. Why do you want to know?”
“No reason, just wondered.” I mulled something over in my mind. “A person who’s obsessive-compulsive, like Adam, wouldn’t want to rule the world, would they? That would involve too much publicity, too much attention, right?”
John smiled and drew me in close. “If you’re trying to make me feel bad about having my brother arrested, it’s working.”
“What I mean is,” I twisted, but his amorous clutches were too crafty to elude, “if he’s all of that, then if he really was involved, wouldn’t that send him all apoplectic? Too many people to be around and stuff like that. Aline might be right about him. He has nothing to gain from it, just more phobias. He’s probably just collateral damage. Right?”
John face was buried in my neck and his tongue was doing incredibly mind-numbing things under my ear. I gasped.
“So,” he murmured, his breath hot and insistent, “I haven’t had a shower since yesterday morning.”
“Gross.”
“Care to join me?”
I giggled. “You should’ve started with that.”
Chapter 45
The holographic projection of John Lancaster going about his daily business went live before mid-morning. There was even one of me, strolling in the community courtyard, as was my custom. These projections were even programmed to interact briefly with people, appear to eat food, drink liquids, and perspire. They looked and sounded exactly like their originals. Holograms had come a long way since I was born.
While the projections carried on with our day-to-day routines, John and I were tucked away with Simon and a few of his team in the Primary Sub-Level, monitoring and waiting. Despite her initial resistance, Aline agreed to join her family in the Tertiary Sub-Level along with Adam, who had been placed in a secure holding area in one of the annexes.
So far there were no hits. All was quiet. Simon and John wer
e glued to video screens and consoles, watching surveillance footage, muttering every so often, nodding, agreeing, disagreeing, and in general ignoring me. John insisted I remain close by, and I suspect it was so he could keep an eye on me rather than for me to lend assistance. Boredom and anxiety were making me go berserk. There were moments I ended up loitering nearby to see what they did, which was mostly watching the faces of the population flit by while the computer sorted and filed each into appropriate groups and sub-groups. John and Simon behaved, I’m guessing, as if it were old times, slotting back into their respective habits and mannerisms. I got the feeling they were actually enjoying this all. People of this future were weird.
We used Simon’s sub-level offices where all the deep, dark secrets went into effect—as I started calling it—because what I saw there, I wished I’d never seen. No wonder Simon knew everything about everyone. I’d never be able to pick my nose in peace again.
The offices were made up of three rooms; the first two were where Simon’s assistants and subordinates worked in cubicle-like sections. One was the active-files group, which handled daily matters like spying on and monitoring everyday citizens and their daily routines to see if anything went amiss. While it might seem intrusive, it was specially designed to monitor suspicious behavior or behavioral patterns deemed too normal. Though it didn’t monitor persons inside their own homes, unless they were on a home security network, it did monitor them everywhere else—from personal unit usage, associations, and activities to how often they went off-site or had friends and families come to visit them. It was all very confusing. I mean, how could they tell normal innocuous behavior from other innocuous stuff.
The other section was the archiving group. This was where all the information from the active files that had been red-flagged were sent, sorted, and then separated into categories of varying importance. At the moment, they all seemed quite excited about Citizen 0552681: Kassou, Ross M., Professor of Bio-Engineering, University of Sciences and Research, found on two occasions escorting two students directly to the main entrance and transferring personal unit information on both occasions, the signal scrambled, motives questionable. Subject: Targeted for immediate questioning.
This information was then redirected to Simon’s office, which was a large room furnished with the bare minimum in personal comfort. His so-called desk sat before a solid, black metal wall, which backed him. He claimed the black cut the glare, but he also confessed it was embedded with a series of weapons and self-defense mechanisms, should the need arise. Simon’s desk was a massive console with pressure-sensitive pads and holographic keys, decorated with an array of lights and small screens. From here, Simon sat in a pilot-like chair set with more pressure-sensitive pads on its armrest. Before him in a wide semi-circle was one gigantic screen, which could split into a multitude of smaller screens doing separate functions and tasks. It wasn’t that impressive to me, I only glanced at it now and again just to occupy myself. Besides, the semi-darkness of the room made me sleepy and agitated.
John sat at another console, much smaller and to Simon’s right, and happily settled into his second-fiddle standing in Simon’s domain. He cast his dark glare to a small section on the lower right side of the main screen. His screen showed surveillance of the main entrance from the previous day. He’d been tagging people’s faces one by one and running recognition scans on them. Taking nothing for granted, he even tagged a small baby and ran it against its mother’s identity for confirmation of birth and registry.
“Josie,” he muttered. I loitered near the doorway—again—nosily looking on at the outer office. A glass door closed it off, so I stood before it, hands plastered on either side like a small child peering into a toy store. “Come away from the door and stop staring. It’s rude.”
I turned around. The sight I’d been looking at disturbed me. “I can’t believe you snoop into people’s lives! Now that is rude.” Hands on hips, I marched across to stand before him. John tapped some keys on his desk, flicked me a quick glance, and resumed his mouth-clamped inspection of the screen. “Isn’t that intrusive? Violating all sorts of privacy laws? Or have things changed in the last three hundred years?”
“This is how the Citadel functions, Josie,” Simon called out from the other side. With the practiced response of a seasoned father, he obviously registered me as dull background noise, to be noted and monitored every few minutes. How insulting. He was deeply engrossed in whatever it was he did, and didn’t even bother to look at me. “And this is why it’s been so safe here. Until now, that is. Ever since you came to town,” he added pointedly.
“I take it you’ve been spying on me—no wait. Of course you have!” I flapped my arms dramatically and turned away to glower at the large screen. I muttered some choice swear words, ones I knew would curdle their earwax, and roughly folded my arms across my chest. The wide vista of faces, images, and places flitted across the screen and splashed the darkened room like a kaleidoscope. For effect, I cast a dark look behind me to shoot nasty looks at both Simon and John. John narrowed his eyes at me when, I’m sure he heard, I grumbled on about not being able to scratch one’s ass in peace.
“Stop!” The word spewed out my mouth. I turned to both men.
John flinched and jerked his head up with a distracted frown.
Simon groaned and rubbed a hand across his face. “What now? You’ve already spent the entire morning pestering us with questions and idle chatter. Do you know how irritating that is? You’re worse than a child.” Real anger marred his words, but I didn’t care. “Just enough already.”
“There!” I swung back to the screen and pointed at a section in the upper left-hand corner. A scene of a coffee shop and their patrons played. “Right there.” I jabbed menacingly. “Go back some—the man in the green sweater and brownish hair.”
John hurried to stand beside me, eyes riveted to the spot I pointed at. Simon furiously tapped commands into his console and cast a quick glance up to the screen. “There?”
“Yes. Him.” I walked a little closer to see clearer. “I’ve seen him before…at Lorcan’s. That guy, there, with the ass-crack-chin. He’s the fucking butcher!”
John tugged my arm and turned me around. An incredulous look marked his face, a mixture of surprise and elation. “You’re sure?”
“Yuh-huhh.” I pulled away in annoyance, my attention back to the screen. “What the fuck is he doing here? Go find out—follow him. Look, he’s going into the toilets.”
“That would be invasion of privacy,” John replied with a smirk. He pulled me again, planted a loud kiss on my forehead, and turned to Simon. “Tag him, bring him in. I want to know why Wellesley’s butcher is here buying coffee as if he was having a leisurely holiday.”
* * *
“He’s visiting his sister—got a valid three-day pass. She operates the coffee house on the South Block.” Simon read from his personal unit, but I could tell most of it was from memory. “His name is Ullman, Mathew, thirty-two. Sister is Ullman-Stein, Moira, thirty-seven. Husband, deceased, no children. He was in the air force, killed in action three years ago when we had some trouble in Brazil. Mathew Ullman works for Foster Farms in Britain. He’s been there for about eight years. Now get this. His father and grandfather, Ashton and Ashton Senior, they ran a printery and were arrested several times during your father’s time for printing underground propaganda—as well as graphic novels of an inflammatory nature.”
John kept his head bowed throughout the report, but now gave Simon a dark look. We sat in a sort of lounge in an area that housed John’s temporary offices. It was nothing more than a small two-room apartment unit with a desk and chair for his use, a sitting area, where we were now, a small kitchen, and sleeping quarters around the corner with an adjoining bathroom. Very, very basic—surprising, given his position—if you didn’t take into consideration that parts of the walls had hidden compartments housing an array of weapons, and a false panel by the bedroom wall that opened out into an escape
pod, which took you directly top-side in a matter of seconds. I shared the room with him, he insisted, in another thinly-veiled tactic to keep tabs on me.
When Simon finished, an icy sensation ran down my spine, pebbling my arms with goose bumps. The butcher! Was it possible? The connections and coincidences were just too numerous and obvious.
“You think he’s Uron Koh? That his grandfather was the one who printed that book?” I risked the question on everyone’s mind.
“Don’t know yet. But it does look very suspicious, wouldn’t you say?” Simon pocketed his personal unit, stood, and retrieved the coffee mug he’d left on the desk. He took a slurp, made a face. It had obviously gone cold. “We’ve put a soft tag on him. Didn’t want to arouse any suspicion. Strange thing is, he seems to be repelling any signals. Every time we run an electronic scan on him, we lose him. So we’ve gone back to basic tactics. Foot patrol.”
“He’s got a jammer then?” John asked, speaking for the first time. We’d just finished a quick snack of protein bars and some vile-tasting drink, but at least we weren’t hungry anymore. “Can we not neutralize it?”
“That’s the thing. It’s not on him, it is him.”
John knitted his brows. “Inside him?”
“Or his clothes or something. Makes him invisible on our scanners.”
“His—” John stopped short as if remembering something. “I see. Wellesley got into my office undetected. His clothes, they made him invisible, almost. I wonder…”
“You think Lorcan’s fooling us?” I croaked. Something in the pit of my stomach fell rapidly to the floor. “I don’t believe that. He wouldn’t.”
“No. But wherever he got his outfit, they have them, too. That’s why we can’t find them. They are invisible. He said they were everywhere. I understand now what he meant.” John got to his feet and paced the room, face set grim and determined. “They could be anywhere.”