by Todd McAulty
“That’s terrible—how did it happen?”
“Venezuelan Military Intelligence blocked our request. The AGRT has approved it, but military intelligence demanded additional paperwork.”
Military Intelligence. Hayduk.
Just like that, I was paranoid all over again. Had he figured out what we were doing already? Would he move against the reactor directly? I was anxious to discuss the possibility with Joy, but I bit my lip. She was stressed enough as it was.
Joy let out a frustrated sigh. “Sergei would know who to talk to, to solve this. Every minute he is missing, the project slips further into crisis.”
“We’ll find him,” I said.
“Your friend, Nineteen Black Winter. You think he can help?”
“I’m certain of it.”
“Do you believe he will come?”
I nodded toward the west. “I think that’s him now.”
Black Winter’s car slid toward the hotel like a yacht gliding into port. A shiny black limo, low to the ground and an almost featureless black, it purred up to the curb and rolled to a slow stop. A door opened soundlessly, and a machine stepped out.
“Black Winter,” I said with a smile.
“Good to see you again, Mr. Simcoe,” said Black Winter, his voice boisterous in the cold morning air. “Who is your lovely companion?”
I introduced Black Winter to Dr. Lark. He gave her a solemn and gentlemanly bow. “I am genuinely honored to meet you. It was the surgeons and mechanics of the AGRT who saved my life, scarcely a week ago. I don’t quickly forget such kindness.”
“Thank you,” Joy said, a little flustered.
“Zircon Border said you had something urgent to discuss,” Black Winter said. He gestured toward the hotel. “Shall we go inside?”
“Actually,” I said, glancing toward the knot of soldiers giving us curious stares, “it would be better if we talked out here.”
“I’m freezing,” Joy said.
“Can we talk in your car?” I asked.
“Of course,” Black Winter said. He made a subtle gesture, and the car door swung open smoothly. Black Winter helped Joy inside. Me, however, he stopped at the door.
“Wipe your feet, will you?” he said, staring down at my muddy shoes. “Don’t track mud into my sweet ride.” Rolling my eyes, I complied, and then climbed in after Joy.
The inside of the limo was not what I expected. The last time I’d been in a limo was during a press junket just after a high-tech IPO in Toronto. They’re usually pretty spacious. This one, not so much. The space inside was surprisingly cramped, with a lot of display consoles and highly secure telecom equipment. Joy and I had to scooch around until we found a place to sit.
Black Winter climbed in after us, closing the door. “Excuse the tight space,” he said. “The car wasn’t really designed for comfort.”
“Or human passengers,” I said, looking around. There was something odd about the digital equipment surrounding us, and it took me a second to spot it. There were no keyboards or other input devices. Black Winter likely had no need for them. He probably communicated wirelessly with the car.
“Does the Manhattan Consulate even employ any people?” Joy asked. She was perched next to a large console that monitored the limo’s various systems. It looked like the right front tire was a little low on air.
“Not many,” Black Winter admitted. “We have a handful of bike messengers on retainer, and there’s a systems tech who rotates through once a month. We share her with consulates in five other sectors.” He spread his hands apologetically. “We’re a small organization.”
“But a resourceful one,” I said, smiling at Joy.
“That’s true,” Black Winter said. I felt the car accelerate away from the curb. We were headed east on Upper Wacker.
“The car is electronically shielded, and we are out of earshot of the AGRT,” Black Winter said easily. “Now, how may I be of assistance?”
“Thank you for coming so quickly,” I said. “We’ve lost a friend of ours, and it’s urgent we find him as soon as possible.”
“Who is it?”
“Sergei Vulka, a medical specialist with the AGRT.”
“I remember him,” said Black Winter. “From the day we met. When did you last see him?”
I turned to Joy. “It’s okay,” I said reassuringly. “You can tell him.”
Haltingly, Joy began to tell Black Winter about their late-night drive to Columbia College. She skipped most of the details, and Black Winter gave me a lot of wordless glances. When she was done, I filled in the details as best I could.
“You think Sergei was pursued by AGRT soldiers?” he asked when I finished. “Do you believe he was captured?”
“It’s possible,” I said.
Black Winter leaned forward in his seat. He addressed the both of us. “I appreciate that your venture to Columbia College was a private matter. However, it was done after curfew, and if the AGRT has become involved, then—rightly or wrongly—they may have interpreted your actions as a violation of the Statute of Occupation. Finding your friend may well require that we anticipate how the AGRT will react. That means that the more information you can share with me, the more I can help you.”
“What do you need to know?”
“What were you doing at Columbia College after curfew?”
“We were stealing medical equipment—centrifuges,” I said. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Joy stiffen.
Black Winter simply nodded. “Was the theft discovered?”
“By now, certainly. Joy and her team brought the equipment back to the hotel, but Sergei never made it to the car. As Joy said, last time we saw him, he was being chased by soldiers.”
“I don’t wish to be the bearer of bad news, but if you haven’t heard from Mr. Vulka since early this morning, he is almost certainly dead—or in custody.”
Joy let out a stifled sob. She covered her mouth, staring aghast at Black Winter.
“I apologize,” Black Winter said. “But the section of the city we’re discussing is heavily patrolled by aerial service machines.”
“Drones,” I said.
“Yes. Even if Mr. Vulka managed to avoid his foot pursuers, he was almost certainly detained by those machines—or terminated as a looter. The chances that he escaped without assistance are very slim.”
“Sergei had the . . . device in his possession.”
“Ah.” Black Winter sat back. “That thing. Yes, that changes matters.”
“At lunch last week, I think you mentioned that Sector One has some drones over the city,” I said to Black Winter. “Is that correct?”
“Yes. Not many, but a few. The Kingdom has been granted a high-altitude operational corridor in Chicago airspace by the AGRT, and we maintain certain assets there.”
“Do you have aerial surveillance footage of the region directly north of Columbia College from last night?”
“Almost certainly. Perhaps not with the detail and coverage you need, but it’s a definite possibility. However, I’m not certain that footage would be useful to us. If Sergei is carrying the device, he will be invisible to the Manhattan drones—and to me.”
“I understand,” I said. “However, the raw feed won’t be useless to Joy and me.”
“You want to manually search through the footage, looking for Sergei?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think you know what you’re asking,” Black Winter said. “Our drones record thousands of hours of high-resolution footage, across a wide range of electromagnetic spectrums. It’s an enormous amount of data.”
“I appreciate that,” I said. “We’ll need to narrow it down drastically. We can give you the exact time and location of Sergei’s last known coordinates. We’ll start there. If that footage is unavailable, we’ll advance by five minutes, and expand our search radius half a mile.”
That’s exactly what we did. Black Winter got to work immediately, and in short order half a dozen of the consoles in
front of us were displaying high-altitude nighttime images of Chicago.
“Unfortunately,” Black Winter said, “during the time period in question, we had only two functional assets in the air, and neither was tasked with ground surveillance. However, both were tracking assorted ground targets, and that included several close by.”
The console in front of Black Winter began updating as he was talking. “The first set of images that could be useful was recorded . . . twenty-two minutes after you last saw him,” he said.
I nodded. That was disappointing, but not the end of the world. “Let’s see them,” I said.
A second later all six consoles flashed and began displaying a tight grid of dozens of images. I peered at them closely. Each seemed to show an enhanced infrared pic of roughly two square city blocks.
“How would you like to start?” Black Winter said. “We can divide up the images and give you both a few to get started.”
“No,” I said. “Find the soldiers. The ones chasing Sergei. There were two of them, both in AGRT uniform. They’ll be within a three- to four-mile radius of the college. They shouldn’t be hard to spot.”
They weren’t. Less than ninety seconds later, Black Winter found them. On the two screens closest to us, up popped a high-resolution overhead image of two soldiers, moving north on South Wabash. The timestamp was just over eleven minutes after Joy had last seen Sergei.
“That’s them,” Joy said excitedly. “Those are the soldiers that chased Sergei.”
The streets ahead of them were empty for at least two blocks. “Looks like they didn’t catch him,” I said. “Is this the most recent image you have of these two?”
“Unfortunately, yes.”
“All right,” I said. “Reset to this location. This is our new starting point. Can you get me still images radiating out three miles from here in a two-block grid, at intervals of five minutes?”
Black Winter complied, and Joy and I got to work. “What you’re doing now is eliminating,” I told Joy. “If the streets are empty, discard the image. If you see something—a shadow, a blur, anything that might be a person—set the image aside, and we’ll come back to it.”
Joy and I worked quickly and efficiently. We had over a hundred images to get through, but in less than twenty minutes we were nearly finished. Joy finished first, and then opened the file where we’d stored those images that were possibilities. She and Black Winter started to examine them.
They started to disagree almost immediately. I wasn’t paying attention at first, but Joy quickly became agitated. “We should not discard this image,” she said, her voice rising.
“The others are definite possibilities,” Black Winter said. “But that’s just high-altitude distortion.”
“Let me see the image,” I said.
Joy pointed to an enhanced photo on the nearest screen. In the top left was a blur that looked a lot like a man walking fast.
“What do you see here?” I asked Black Winter, my finger jutting toward the screen.
“Nothing,” he said. “That’s just a distortion pattern.”
“How sure are you?”
“One hundred percent.”
“Excellent. Then I think we just found Sergei.”
XXIII
Wednesday, March 17th, 2083
Posted 10:29 am by Barry Simcoe
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I waited in the restaurant while Joy and Black Winter went to pick up Sergei. It was obvious Joy was anxious to go, and there was barely room in the car for three—and they’d need to have space for Sergei on the way back. Once Black Winter had tasked a drone to deliver fresh images and we’d confirmed Sergei’s current location, I was more than happy to let them fetch him while I cooled my heels and sipped fresh coffee.
I hadn’t been sure the drone-jamming device Sergei was carrying could conceal him from drones and robots in still images. But based on Black Winter’s complete inability to see him in any of the images we found—including several that were very clear—it was now obvious that it functioned across all electronic media.
I had no idea how that was possible, but it sure simplified the process of finding him. Whenever there was a smudge on screen that Black Winter couldn’t see, or swore was just a distortion pattern, that was our man. The hardest part had been convincing Black Winter to send one of Manhattan’s two aerial drones back into the area to confirm his current location.
Sergei was almost five miles from the hotel, and it looked like he was headed northeast. The dude was a hundred percent lost. Black Winter said that as long as he didn’t vanish into a building or something, they’d have him back to the hotel in fifteen minutes.
Joy would have to be Black Winter’s eyes, of course, since he wouldn’t be able to see Sergei until Sergei turned the device off. But I was confident Black Winter could manage it.
A pair of on-duty soldiers came into the restaurant while I sat at my booth nodding off over my coffee. They looked around, obviously searching for someone. When I spotted them my first instinct was to duck, slink under the table, and hide. But it seemed rather pointless, and besides, I was far too weary for another chase. I met their gaze as they purposefully strolled around the mostly empty restaurant, watching them with little more than tired curiosity.
They passed right by me. Before long, they found a young soldier, out of uniform and asleep in the corner. They shook him awake and harangued him out of the restaurant, shouting as he danced ahead of them making extravagant excuses. It looked like this wasn’t the first time they’d had to wake him up to report for duty.
I was still a free man. For now. I wondered how long that would last.
Eventually, I dozed off. I awoke to the sound of Martin’s laughter. He was standing with a group of people on the other side of the restaurant. He waved when he saw me and came over.
“When a man falls asleep while drinking coffee, that’s a sign of a rough night,” he said.
“That’s the truth.”
“What the devil did you get up to?”
“Just . . . another project with Sergei.”
“Well, he looks a lot more awake than you.”
I sat up. “You’ve seen him?”
“Yeah, two minutes ago. Walking through the lobby with a woman. A big black car dropped them off.”
“Damn. Thank you.” I settled up quickly, and raced out of the restaurant. A clock by the entrance told me I’d only dozed off for a few minutes.
Sergei and Joy were gone by the time I reached the lobby, of course. I headed for the seventh floor.
“You just missed him,” said Jolene, one of the process engineers. “He swung by to make sure the batch culture had been inserted correctly, then headed downstairs.”
“Did he look okay?”
“I guess.” She shrugged. “He looked kinda cranky.”
“He’s always cranky. Cranky is a good mood, for Sergei. I meant physically—he wasn’t injured, or anything?”
“No. Why would he be injured?”
“Never mind.”
I took the stairs down to the third floor, heading for the command center. The hallway was crowded with soldiers. There was a lot of activity. It looked like a couple of squads were prepping to head out.
I’d coped with the two guards in the restaurant just fine, but plunging into a crowd of Venezuela’s finest made me very nervous. Every time one of them looked my way, I expected to see a jolt of recognition. Then shouting and drawn weapons. Christ, coming this way was a bad idea. They’re probably getting ready to go out and arrest you.
I kept my head down and kept walking, but it took some effort to not turn around. Sergei, you damn well better be there.
A woman giving instructions to her squad turned
slightly, twenty feet ahead of me, and suddenly I was face-to-face with Van de Velde.
I stopped walking. Van de Velde, in the middle of a briefing to a semicircle of uniformed men and women kneeling and sitting on the floor, stopped talking.
Her squad was watching her. I didn’t initially recognize them in the bright light of morning. But these were the men and women who, less than six hours ago, had been chasing me relentlessly through the tunnels under Chicago. Many were still mud-spattered. Some seemed exhausted or shell-shocked from their deadly encounter with the Orbit Pebble, but most still looked alert.
Then they were regarding me with curious gazes. I returned their stares, looking for any sign that they recognized their quarry. Fortunately, there was none. But one of the women in the front row had a strange smirk, and she whispered something to the guy squatting next to her. He fought to control his laughter.
I couldn’t read Van de Velde’s expression. She didn’t have an expression. Her eyes were cool, and her eyebrows were raised, ever so slightly. There was a thin streak of mud on her forehead, a stark contrast with her short blonde hair. She was just standing there, her rifle strung over her shoulder, staring at me.
And the next instant, she wasn’t. She turned back to her squad. She said something sharp to the young soldier struggling not to laugh, and he settled down. She resumed her briefing, as if nothing had happened.
It took me a little longer, but eventually I remembered how to walk. As I strode past the squad, several members gave me surreptitious glances. They seemed more curious than anything else.
I took half a dozen steps and stopped. I very much wanted to know what she was telling her soldiers, but of course, she was speaking in Spanish. Was she preparing them to arrest me, right now? Was she telling them to wait until I met with my coconspirator in the command center and then arrest us both?
I could put up with a lot of things, but I wasn’t about to be toyed with.
I turned around. “Sergeant Van de Velde,” I said.