Thermals

by Evan Currie

  The profile of the target danced in his mind’s eye as Joshua began to push the underpowered electric vehicle up the rolling hill, wincing inwardly at how strained the CRV felt as it went. Abdallah Amir, the name was a joke. He was after Raymond Gorra, a traitorous piece of filth that had turned on his own people, not some so called ‘Slave of God’.

  Twenty years earlier, Joshua would have jumped at the chance for a mission like this. It had all the makings of an Agency Legend. A desperate terrorist target, the single agent sent in to rout him out. The stuff Hollywood blockbusters were made of.

  Of course, it wasn’t quite that way. There was a team being formed under Langley’s direction in California, and they’d be coming in within three, maybe four days, to take over the mission, but Langley had wanted a man on the scene, before the team arrived to provide better intel.

  Pushing forty-five years old, the last thing on Joshua’s list of desirable jobs at the moment was hunting down some crazed terrorist, who hadn’t made a peep for five years. With his luck, Joshua figured that he’d probably arrive just in time for the crazy son of a bitch to strap on his dynamite overcoat and take his last trip to visit Allah, or God, or whatever deity the bastard really worshiped.

  The dark train of thoughts fled as the old CRV-EV topped the crest of the rolling hill and the sparkling glimmer of the Project greenhouse came into view.

  “Christ,” the CIA Agent whispered, shaking his head.

  The dossier on the place, not to mention all the documentaries and tourist pictures, really didn’t do it justice. The tower just didn’t look as tall as it really was, until you started to get some perspective. And, out in the outback, there was precious little perspective to be had. That all changed, though, once you got close enough to see the small city that had grown up around it.

  It was one big tower.

  Joshua shook his head, smiling a little ruefully as he realized that he’d been staring like a country-fired rube, and stepped on the accelerator of his dinky little CRV.

  I should have taken the main road, he thought as the CRV-EV bumped and jostled along the poorly maintained side road.

  The well paved highway would have been a smoother, and faster, trip, but Joshua was posing as the kind of stupid American who would drive out through the outback in a vehicle that really wasn’t ideal for the drive. He’d crunched his numbers carefully, figuring that he’d make Tower City, just before his charge ran out.

  That was the plan, anyway.

  If it ran out earlier, well he had a quick charge capacitor stored under the spare tire to cover that eventuality. Joshua wanted to look stupid, he didn’t want to be proven so.

  Of course he didn’t feel too bright, as a stray rock clanged hard against the undercarriage of his car, wincing at the noise and the vibrations that made it through to his seat. Other than the quick charger and his Agency issue portable, all he had to complete his mission was a couple credit cards that would appear almost maxed out if anyone checked them, and the mission assigned sidearm he had under the seat of the car.

  Another reason to hate the mission, he supposed. That and the country in general. Australia’s strict policy of gun control had spilled out into so many other areas over the past decade that it was practically impossible for a civilian to get a permit to carry a knife, let alone an automatic like the Colt Avenger 9mm Extended he had checked out of the Embassy.

  In a worst case scenario, Joshua knew that he could claim diplomatic status to avoid arrest, but that would burn him in a heartbeat if Raymond Gorra had penetrated the local police. His job was to gather intel, so the gun shouldn’t be needed, but he’d paid his dues in the field and knew that shouldn’t didn’t equate with wouldn’t nearly as much as he wished it would.

  As he entered the city limits, Joshua Corvine wished once again that he could have sent his junior agent in his place. Unfortunately the damn punk kid was greener than the grass that grew on his neighbor’s lawn and there was no way that he would have sent the poor brat on a solo mission, not even if Joshua knew that he, himself was too old, too slow, and too damned fat for this kind of thing.

  *****

  Gwendolyn Dougal led Anselm into the large space the Tower City PD had put aside for maintenance work on their vehicles, and walked straight toward the badly battered Eliica that sat alone in the huge room.

  “Alvin!” She yelled, grinning.

  There was a bang and a yelp of pain, causing a pair of legs to twitch and jerk from where they were sticking out from under the Eliica. A few moments later a white-haired man that Anselm guessed to be about fifty, rolled out and glared at the redhead who was smirking at him.

  “You watch yourself, girl,” the older man, Alvin, Anselm presumed, said as he glared at Gwen . “You’re not so old that I couldn’t put you over my knee.”

  “You can try it anytime, Alvin,” she told him sweetly. “We’ll see who winds up over whose knee.”

  “Ah now,” the old man grinned. “Either outcome wouldn’t be so bad, from where I stand.”

  “You old pervert,” Gwen grinned. “How’s my car?”

  Alvin lost his smile, eyeing her with a look one might expect him to give to some lower form of life. Like a tax collector, perhaps. “You’ve got some nerve asking me THAT question, Gwenny. You’ve gone done a bad thing here, Girl…”

  “It’s a police car, Alvin,” Gwen defended herself, holding up her hands. “It’s here for a reason.”

  “Aye,” Alvin nodded. “And that reason isn’t to be bouncing around like a rubber ball just cause you think it’s a four-wheeler.”

  “There was a life at stake.”

  “Aye,” he said again, this time grudgingly in agreement with her. “And don’t you think that I don’t understand…If it had been anything else, I’d kick you out of my garage, Girl.”

  Gwen smiled, more seriously this time, and nodded. “How bad?”

  He clapped his hands clean of the dust he’d picked up while working under the car and seemed to consider. Finally he sighed and shrugged, “not so bad as you deserved, but bad enough. You’ve completely bent out the bottom shroud, so I’ll have to rip that off. It’ll take a week to get a replacement it, but I think I can fabricate one in a couple hours…”

  “Could you?” Gwen looked hopeful.

  “Don’t you go getting any ideas,” Alvin growled. “The body work is going to take all day, and I’ve got to strip all eight of the motors to make sure you haven’t got grit into the workings…those things seize up and we’ll lose the car for three weeks at least.”

  Gwen looked like a kid who’d just been told there was no Santa Claus, almost drawing a laugh from Anselm as he looked on.

  Alvin rolled his eyes, then shook his head and cuffed his feet on the cement floor. “Look, come back tomorrow afternoon…One o’clock, mind you! Not twelve fifty-five…One! I’ll…well, I’ll see what I can do.”

  “Thanks Alvin,” Gwen smiled again, giving the older man a kiss on the forehead. “I owe you.”

  He brushed her off, growling. “You already owe me, Girl…and none of that or I’ll have you up on harassment charges!”

  Gwen just laughed at him and turned away, dragging Anselm out with her.

  “He’s a sweetheart,” she told Anselm after they were back in the police station house. “Likes to talk gruff, but a real softy. A born tinkerer too, you’d think he was born with a wrench one hand and a keyboard in the other.”

  Anselm just nodded, busy trying to decide what course to follow next.

  Gwen keyed into his distraction quickly, but didn’t say anything as they continued walking back toward her office. Once inside, she finally spoke up, “What’s wrong?”

  “What? Oh. Nothing really,” Anselm said. “I’m just trying to figure out what to do next.”

  “Glad I’m not the only one,” Gwen replied dryly.

  “Oh, you’re not,” he assured her fervently. “I’m at a stumbling block right now. It’s like I’ve suddenly got a lot
of evidence, it’s just that none of it is precisely what I need.”

  He sighed, rubbing at his chin absently, “I’m afraid that I’m back to plan A.”

  “Which was?”

  “Wander around like a tourist.” Anselm replied wryly.

  Gwen chuckled, shaking her head. “When in doubt, throw a dart blindfolded. Is that it?”

  “Something like that.”

  Gwen shook her head, “You need a native tour guide?”

  Anselm grinned, “I wouldn’t say no.”

  *****

  In the Tower, air traveled at speeds up to forty kilometers per hour, making the trip from the bottom of the tower to the top in approximately eight minutes. Along the way, it turned a brace of wind turbines set into the side of the immense structure, generating two hundred megawatts of electrical power for consumption by the inhabitants of Tower City, as well as other residents of the Australian continent.

  The net result was clean, emission free power.

  Unless, of course, someone added emissions of their own.

  “What’s the reading, Mr. Jacob?”

  “Eighty parts per billion.”

  Abdallah Amir nodded in satisfaction, “If our calculations hold up, we should be able to achieve approximately double this during peak production.”

  “Will that be enough?”

  “Enough for the effects to be felt around the world, Jacob,” Amir smiled. “They talk of ‘the shot heard round the globe’, but this is the one that will be felt throughout the world.”

  *****

  Joshua Corvine grimaced as he looked around the room he’d reserved from Sydney.

  It wasn’t such a bad room, he supposed. It was large, as such things went, with room for a bed and desk, as well as a full bathroom and access to a satellite TV that was glued to the wall. Ten years ago that would probably have made the room exceptional, actually, a high definition screen, eight feet from corner to corner. Today they rolled the things off the assembly line by the millions, and just let the store cut the plastic film to the size the customer desired.

  No, the room was fine, the problem was that he was three levels underground and it gave him the creeps.

  Bloody Aussies, or Eco-nuts, or whatever these people are, he growled as he thought, sitting on the foot of the bed and taking out his Portable. All the room in the world to build out, and they dig themselves a hole in the ground.

  He liked the Aussies, Joshua did, at least most of the time. They were generally a nice people, friendly, who brewed good beer and knew how to enjoy themselves. All good reasons why Joshua had requested the Sydney post as a place to finish out his career before taking his government pension and retiring back home.

  However, like them or not, he didn’t understand them most of the time.

  Of course, what could one expect from people living in a country that housed most of the deadliest animals on the planet. Having been warned more than once concerning the danger of spiders smaller than his thumbnail back at the embassy, Joshua was relatively certain that God had tried his damndest to tell people that Australia wasn’t for them.

  Course, people being people - no one listened.

  Joshua drew his portable from its belt pouch and snapped it open. Like most modern portables it looked like an oriental fan when it was fully extended, the semi-circular screen fanned out around the palm grip. This one was NRO issued, one given out to each American Embassy in the world, plus there were a small handful, in the hands of agents doing jobs similar to the one, that Joshua was now on, and it included a few tricks that weren’t quite available on the market yet.

  Its internal memory was measured in hundreds of terabytes, and that was only because the carbon nanotube technology wasn’t as advanced when it was delivered six months earlier as it was now. The computer itself was a four core processor capable of connecting to the CIA’s heavy metal super computer cluster if it needed any extra power for calculations. The most impressive thing the little device could do, however, was what Joshua was checking at the moment.

  The device beeped at his request, then displayed a countdown timer.

  Satellite available in ninety-three minutes, forty-seven seconds.

  *****

  “From the observation level you can see eighty kilometers in any given direction…”

  Anselm and Gwen tuned out the drone of the tour guide as he talked to the group of tourists who had driven in to see the world’s tallest man-made structure from the top down. They had moved off to the side and were enjoying the beautiful, if somewhat frightening view as they talked.

  “There has to be a way to find him,” Gwen said, frowning into the distance.

  Anselm shook his head, “in a city of eighty thousand? It’s not that simple.”

  “The Shanties aren’t a huge place, Anselm,” she said. “Strangers still stick out like sore thumbs. Plus, we know he’s had some contact with the thermies.”

  “Ah, the ones who won’t talk to me?” Anselm asked with a slight smile.

  Gwen nodded once in grudging agreement, “he can’t hide forever.”

  “No, no one can when people are determined to find them,” Anselm conceded. “But that doesn’t mean that we’ll find him any time soon.”

  “I just wish I knew what he was doing here,” Gwen told him, “That thought you tossed out about radiation in the tower gives me chills.”

  “It was just a thought,” Anselm shrugged, “but it has to be something to do with the tower…Otherwise why would he be here?”

  She nodded, knowing that Anselm had a point. There were limited things of interest in Tower City, and the Tower was most of them. What was left was almost entirely included in the twenty-five thousand acres of greenhouse that lay directly below them at the moment. The Shanties themselves were only interesting for their reputation of being the ‘greenest’ of green cities, with an almost obsessive attention to reducing environmental damage.

  This made Anselm’s suggestion that Abdallah might use the tower to launch some sort of terror attack doubly chilling. It was intended to save the world. Good clean energy for everyone. Not cause more damage to an agonized planet. The idea that someone could twist it wasn’t something Gwen liked to contemplate.

  She had her duty, however, and she would do what needs must.

  “If he’s going to use the tower,” she said after a moment, “Then he needs access to it, right?”

  Anselm nodded, “Of course…But everyone has access to it, we’re here aren’t we?”

  Gwen shook her head and reached forward to rap the heavy composite dome that surrounded them, “We’re sealed in here. This stuff is practically bulletproof…if he wants to mess with things, he’ll need to be inside.”

  Anselm nodded slowly, “Alright…How many employees are in the tower?”

  “Depends on if you mean core employees or everyone,” Gwen responded with a shrug, “People with full time access to the tower…maybe fifty, give or take. But the greenhouse itself employs a lot more, especially with the tourism factor and agriculture.”

  “So…how many?” Anselm asked, looking down over the green fields that were obscured by the glass one kilometer below.

  “Maybe seven or eight hundred…”

  Anselm was caught between being dismayed at the size of the number, and surprised that it wasn’t larger. “That’s a lot of strawberries and kiwis.”

  Gwen chuckled, nodding. “They also grow medicinal plants, fragrant plants, some more basic foodstuff. Quite a lot of it actually, but that’s not surprising.”

  “Oh?”

  “Well it was founded by three Cooperatives, you know,” she told him.

  Anselm shook his head, “I didn’t.”

  “They all signed on before the project got off the ground,” she said. “A recycling group, a power coop, and an Agro-coop. The idea was that the three together covered all the bases that could be explored in the project.”

  Anselm nodded, mind rushing ahead of the convers
ation. Seven or eight hundred people would have to be employed officially, and that meant that they probably were all recorded on the national database. Since they were working within the confines of a power plant, unless Anselm was mistaken, they would have had to run print checks on all of them. The thing was, fingerprints weren’t the fool proof thing they used to be. Modern career criminals were growing into the times, learning to adapt to a world that was constantly adapting to itself. A polymer spray could obliterate fingerprints on a person’s hand for up to four days by filling in the ridgelines and blocking the oils that left traceable prints.

  More sophisticated types were able to mold new prints, using fractal equations to create prints almost as unique as the DNA derived real deal. Those types were still quite rare, but were also growing in frequency. And the real nasty types often left prints of other real people on the scene, either to actively frame the person who’s identity they had stolen, or simply too muddy the police investigation.

  So a cursory background check made by the owners of the power plant could be fooled easily enough, especially if these people had been at the cutting edge of criminal science a few years earlier before more stringent checks may have been put into action.

  Of course, that assumed that more stringent checks were put into action. The Tower was a power plant, so some form of background check was mandatory, unless Anselm was very much mistaken in his knowledge of Australian law. However, there was no dangerous materials on site, and certainly nothing anyone would expect to attract terrorism, so maybe the checks weren’t as tight as other power plants that contained little things like nuclear materials.

  “Probably isn’t as tight.”

  “What?”

  Anselm started, looking over at Gwen. “Huh?”

  “What you said, what were you talking about?”

  Anselm’s mind raced as he backed up and realized that he’d spoke aloud. He grinned, chagrined by the slip, “Sorry, I was thinking aloud. I was just considering what kind of background checks the Tower owners would have made.”

  “Oh.” Gwen nodded, frowning. “I’m pretty sure that they had to run all the standard background checks…”