Thermals

by Evan Currie

  “Can I keep this?”

  Gwen’s head snapped around to see that Jackie was playing with a plastic housing that was trailing wire leads. “Where’d you get that?”

  “Over there.” The teen jerked her head over her shoulder, indicating a short distance from the crash site. “Stuck in a bank.”

  “I’ll have to take it, Jackie.”

  “Aww…”

  Gwen grinned, “Look, if it’s nothing you’ll get it back. Ok?”

  “It’s never nothin,” the girl complained, but idly tossed the housing to Gwen.

  She caught it awkwardly, just managing to hook it against her body as she juggled it and the flashlight. Gwen braced it as quickly as she could, then played the light over it and frowned to herself. Didn’t look like much, just a plastic box with some wires, but it could have been part of his gear, she supposed.

  “Done yet?” Jackie asked rather loudly.

  “Jackie!” Donald Smitts came around the tailgate of his four wheeler and glared at his daughter and legacy. “Stop bothering the Inspector! I told you to wait in the truck!”

  Jackie shrugged and giggled, “Oops.”

  Gwen watched the young teen run back off, wondering at the fact that she was out here at all. Most fathers wouldn’t bring their daughters out to where they might reasonably expect to find a corpse if they did their job correctly.

  Most fathers weren’t Donald Smitts, though, who had brought up their daughters in the outback with a rifle in the rucksack with them every night before they went to sleep. Nor did most fathers have daughters like Jackie Smitts, who habitually rode the thermals of the Project herself.

  Gwen shook her head and clipped off the flashlight, finally turning away from the crash site and walking back to where her ride home was waiting.

  *****

  “Oh Lord above,” Kamir chortled to himself as he swallowed a pull of whisky from the shot glass. “I wish I’d been able to see that cop’s face when the Stream yanked him up short and threw him long.”

  His drinking partner smirked, “Must have been some ride.”

  The two were in a semi-private booth in the Blue Yonder, a local pub/club that catered to the Jetstream set. The place was still pretty much empty since most everyone was out looking for the man who’d gotten caught in the stream, but they were speaking low just the same.

  Low for a pair who’d been ordering whiskey with lager chasers since late afternoon.

  Not that either of them had said anything to incriminate themselves before a court of law, at least not as anything other than a pair of assholes, grade one.

  The thing is, sometimes, there are worse things than the law to worry about.

  Neither of them noticed the bartender making a discreet call after he’d served up the latest round.

  *****

  Anselm Gunnar groaned quietly as he dug through the reams of shredded material that had been left of Ron Somer’s clothing and gear. They’d stripped the Para-pack themselves back at the crash site, and thrown it aboard a four wheeler at Gwen’s suggestion, so most of the stuff here was just his clothing. His harness was here also, cut by the doctors shears until it resembled a do it yourself kit rather than a fully assembled product.

  Even if he knew what he was looking for, Anselm didn’t think he’d be able to find it in the mess that was left. If the gear had been cut prior to the accident, it was well and truly disguised now.

  What he needed was a full forensics lab and experienced team to go over all the junk, but that was one thing that he just didn’t have. Maybe if he stepped on the panic button, but unless he wanted to bring in the team that was waiting for his order in Sydney, well he was on his own.

  That left the altimeter to deal with, however. Anselm supposed it was possible that the device had been damaged in the fall, it certainly had visible damage from the fall. But he couldn’t see how that might damage the software, and the hardware seemed to check out.

  That only left sabotage as viable option.

  But why Ronald?

  If anyone, it should have been him, or Adrienne. Anselm had looked at Ron’s file, and the man was a lawyer. A defense attorney at that, not even a prosecutor. His only connection to Interpol was Adrienne.

  Unrelated sabotage?

  Someone who disliked Ron himself? Something that had nothing to do with Anselm’s investigation?

  It seemed unlikely, but he couldn’t discount it.

  Investigating Ronald Somer’s ‘accident’ wasn’t part of his reason for being in at Tower City, but neither could he ignore it because it might be connected somehow. It wasn’t like Abdallah, however, and Anselm knew the man’s profile forwards and backwards. This smacked of an amateur, if it was connected, and that might mean that Abdallah wasn’t here alone.

  Anselm shook his head, thinking about the variables that were plaguing him as he drew out his portable and began to record the state of Ron’s gear for the second time that day.

  An Agent’s portable computer was a couple generations ahead of the average civilians in many places, and several behind in others. It had decent processing power, but not as much as the high end products sold to consumers of late so the compact computer had to offload a lot of processing requests to the Grid. The same held true of memory space, Anselm’s little pocket pal could hold over a terabyte of data, but that was paltry compared to what was currently available on the market.

  In fact, in all the major areas by which the consumer market graded their electronics, Anselm’s computer wasn’t very special at all. Decidedly middle of the line, and it would be quite a bit under the ‘low end’ of computer standards before he’d trade it in on a new portable.

  Anselm’s pocket system did do a few things that consumer models didn’t, however. It was hard coded with his bio-metrics, for example, literally built from the ground up for him and him alone. He was the only person on the planet who could make use of it, aside from the forensics techs back at the lab and they had to tear it apart to do anything with it.

  It could record full motion video in High Definition, snap images on an OCD sensor that were well into the gigapixel range, and instantly broadcast those to Anselm’s network office where he always had a backup of any files he made in the field. It also scanned fingerprints, ran any of the software stored on the Central Police Network, and did any number of tasks that had once been strictly relegated to a lab.

  For most people their Portable was a toy, an organizer at most, but for Anselm Gunnar it was as much part of his job as the gun he wore clipped to his belt.

  One of the things it couldn’t do, unfortunately, was analyze DNA. He could type out blood samples, and do checks for gunpowder and such with it, but that wasn’t what he needed now.

  Anselm made a note to check with Adrienne when she had a moment to see if Ronald had brought his own suit with him. If he had, maybe there would be some evidence on it that might be useful.

  In the meantime he grabbed the shredded suit and stuffed it into a plastic bag he’d made the nursing staff give him, taped the bag shut, and scribbled a note on it.

  Then he turned on the faucet of the sink in the room, and scrubbed off the micro-polymer second skin he’d sprayed over his hands to keep his own DNA off the suit. It wasn’t as good as a plain old fashioned pair of latex gloves, in Anselm’s opinion, but medical facilities had moved over to the Second Skin for most procedures a while ago, and Anselm didn’t make a habit of carrying rubber gloves wherever he went.

  *****

  Abdallah Amir looked over the results through the powerful electron microscope and nodded in satisfaction.

  It had taken years to perfect the idea he’d had so long ago, and almost as long to locate the perfect place to deploy it.

  Well, perfection wasn’t obtainable unfortunately.

  For best effect it would have been much more desirable to use an India or Chinese location, however neither of those countries had the desire or drive to construct a marvel like the Tower. />
  When Amir had heard of the project, it had been so long ago, his thoughts were that it was just another toy. Something that could only be dreamed up by people whose heads weren’t in the real world. Green power was all fine and such, but the limitations in placement of the concept made it inherently pointless for the places that used a majority of the world’s electricity.

  Besides, Abdallah liked nuclear power plants. They had long provided him with the tools to wage his personal war.

  When he saw the details of the Tower here in Australia, however, he knew he’d found something even better.

  *****

  It was late by the time Inspector Dougal made it back to the city and went to the project medical facilities. She found Agent Gunnar waiting in the hall, talking over his portable and quickly moved up to him. He noticed her from a short distance off and said good bye to the person he was dealing with, flipped the semi-circular screen shut and slid the compact computer into a belt pouch.

  “Hey,” She greeted him, “What’s the news on our boy?”

  “The doctors think that he’ll live.” Anselm replied, his voice grim. “No word on recovery time, or how far he’ll be able to come back.”

  She nodded, rubbing a hint of beaded sweat from her forehead. “One of the response people found a box near where he fell, looks like some electronics but it’s nothing I’ve seen on any other thermies around here.”

  Anselm nodded, his expression pensive. “I just heard back from one of my people in Zurich. He’s a computer specialist, and I sent him a mirror of Ron’s altimeter software.”

  “And?”

  “Sabotage.” Anselm said grimly, “according to my guy someone re-coded the software with an altitude trigger. Basically it worked fine during all the pre-jump tests, but once it reached a certain height it began to introduce an increasing error into the system. The higher he went, the bigger the error.”

  “That’s pretty sophisticated.”

  Anselm shrugged, “depends. The way things are now, a lot of stuff that required a doctorate twenty years ago is child’s play today. I don’t think that we’re dealing with someone sophisticated here…despite the technical prowess, this was clumsy in so many ways I’m starting to lose track.”

  “How so?” Gwen asked, curious.

  Anselm glanced around the hospital halls, not wanting his conversation to become part of the local rumor mill, and then began to tick things off on his fingers. “First, a sophisticated person would have covered their tracks better. It’s hard to do, but this person didn’t even try. It’s like he didn’t think anyone would look at the instruments…”

  “Maybe he didn’t think anyone would find the body.”

  “Even so, it’s clumsy.” Anselm shook his head, “also, there was the fact that Ron was attacked at all. Why Ron?”

  Gwen shook her head, “Personal motive is always possible…but I take it that you’re thinking something else.”

  “The same day I arrive to locate Abdallah?” Anselm shook his head, “Too much.”

  Gwen wasn’t certain she agreed, but on the other hand there was remarkable little crime in Tower City. Those who lived in the Shanties wanted to be there, and had made a conscious decision to come to the middle of the outback. That made a big difference when you compared it to cities where people grew up feeling trapped by the world in which they had been born.

  What little crime they did have was mostly of the youthful variety. Joyrides where a problem, though easy enough to track given the paucity of local vehicles, as were the Thermies and their occasional ‘challenges’ like free climbing the tower. Some domestic crime existed, of course, but that was rare too.

  In fact, she was pretty certain that this event was the Project’s first attempted murder.

  So perhaps Anselm was right, the seeming odds weren’t exactly screaming in favor of this being an isolated event.

  “So you think that Abdallah Amir is behind it.”

  That was where Anselm grimaced and shook his head, “It doesn’t fit. Abdallah is more careful than this. He doesn’t make mistakes very often, and when he does it’s almost never something this blatant. In London, we closed in on him because his inside man in the Japanese Embassy got clumsy, made a call on a tapped line. No, this doesn’t have his touch.”

  “What does Mr. Amir do then?”

  “He specializes in nuclear terrorism.” Anselm replied after a moment’s thought. “Which, to be honest, makes me wonder what he would be doing here anyway?”

  Gwen nodded in agreement. It didn’t make much logical sense to her, to be certain. What would a nuclear terrorist be doing around a Solar Power Plant? There weren’t even any nuclear materials for hundreds of miles, barring the hospital’s diagnostic equipment and some smoke detectors.

  “No one would think to look for the world’s leading nuclear terrorist in the middle of the world’s largest solar power plant,” she offered. “Maybe that’s why.”

  “It’s possible, but I’m not buying it,” Anselm shook his head. “Not before Ron’s ‘accident’, and certainly not now.”

  Unfortunately, Gwen couldn’t say with any degree of honesty that she was buying it either.

  *****

  Adrienne Somer tried to breathe evenly through the shakes, as she sat at the side of the bed her husband laid in. He looked lifeless to her, a long distance from the man she’d woken up with just that morning. The man who had been so excited about sailing the ultimate thermal, and had begged her to come along. She’d begged off, telling him that she had to meet Agent Gunnar that morning, but the truth was that she hadn’t wanted to go up that high.

  She did para-sailing herself, on occasion, as well as many of the sports that Ronald was so enthused about, but she wasn’t as committed to it as he was. For her it was a diversion, a way to relax after a stressful case. When she wrapped a case, gave her testimony in court, and closed the file she liked to do something, anything, to clear it from her system.

  She’d gone diving in the Med, skiing in the Alps, and had met Ron on a trip to Colorado where she had tried para-sailing, for the first time.

  He’d been, well, far more into the adrenaline rush than she was.

  Ronald loved the rush, lived for it, even. He got a small hint of it in court when he won a case, but he’d always said that it was on the edge where he felt alive.

  He didn’t look alive now.

  Adrienne wondered how he’d felt when it was happening, the situation gone out of control, the winds beating at him, tearing apart his only lifeline. Had he felt alive then? Had it been worth it, in some bizarre way, to him?

  It wasn’t worth it to her.

  She reached up and pushed the hair back from his forehead, careful not to touch the gauze packs that covered both his eyes. The doctor had said that he had suffered corneal damage from the ice, and that surgery would be required. There was a lot of surgery in Ron’s future.

  “Come on, Ron. Honey…I love you. Please don’t die on me,” she whispered.

  How many other people had uttered those words? Please don’t die on me. It was the same line you heard in ever second movie out of Hollywood, a phrase that had always sounded kind of made up to Adrienne, in the past.

  Now she just wanted him to listen to it. To hear it.

  All she had to listen to was the steady beep, beep, beep that, along with the hiss of gas, told her he was still alive. His heart was beating, he was breathing.

  Then his hand moved.

  Her breath caught in her throat, and she grabbed his hand quickly.

  “Ron?” She asked, softly but urgently. “Ron?”

  “Love you, too.”

  His words were slurred, almost incomprehensibly, but it didn’t matter. She knew what he’d said, and didn’t need mere sound to carry the words to her. She gripped his hand and he squeezed back.

  “Can’t…” He licked his lips, “Can’t see.”

  “You have bandages over your eyes. Do you know what happened?” She as
ked softly.

  His head moved slightly. “Fell.”

  “That’s right. You did.” She was trying not to sob.

  It would have been in relief, perhaps, but he didn’t need to hear her crying. Not now.

  “’K…,” he started to say something, the beeping on the monitor suddenly jumping all over the place.

  “Don’t talk. You need your rest,” she told him, looking over as the nurses’ station began to buzz with activity.

  The nurses were rushing in now, his heart rate had alerted them to his change of status and they were milling around, as they checked everything over and over again. One of them made to move her away, but Ron wouldn’t let go of her hand.

  “Kamir,” he whispered, his voice so soft she almost missed it.

  “What? What’s kamir?” She asked, leaning over a nurse.

  “Who…” He started to say, but his grip was growing slack then and his voice slurred badly.

  Adrienne looked over to see a nurse pull a syringe from the IV connected to his arm and recognized it as morphine. Ron’s hand fell away a moment later, his faculties slipping away as the drug powered through his system. She knew from personal experience that keeping your mind focused while on morphine was nearly impossible. It didn’t actually kill the pain, just made it something the mind couldn’t focus on.

  She let him go and let the nurses push her aside finally.

  Ron was sleeping again, but he’d been awake. He’d known her, he’d said he loved her…She’d told him the same.

  She felt like a weight had been taken from her chest.

  He’d been awake. He would be okay.

  *****

  Gwendolyn Dougal sighed as she poured over the information displayed on her portable, then compared it to what Anselm was looking at, on his own.

  “I don’t think we’re getting anywhere right now,” she said finally. “It may be time to call it a night.”

  Anselm nodded in grudging agreement.

  He hated the idea of letting it sit after what had happened to Ronald Somer, but there came a point of diminishing returns when you began to work past the point where the human body drew the line between performance and endurance.