Thermals

by Evan Currie

  “Facial Topography?”

  The Inspector frowned, shaking her head. “I doubt it.”

  Anselm nodded, he’d expected that much. Facial Topography had very much became the tool of choice for law enforcement over the past decade or so, much like fingerprint analysis was in the earlier part of the twentieth century, and DNA was in the latter.

  It was possible to ‘spoof’ a Facial Topography scan, but only by changing your appearance noticeably. Something that was much easier to notice than a spray-on polymer coating your fingers. DNA, of course, still provided final confirmation though.

  “Can we get access to the Tower Employee database?”

  Gwen shrugged, “We can ask.”

  Anselm smiled and nodded.

  Of course they could ask.

  And if they were told no, well Anselm had one or two tricks up his sleeve, or rather hanging on his belt, that weren’t taught in any regular police academy.

  *****

  The visual spectrum scan of the Tower complex yielded no additional information than Joshua already had in his rather sparse briefing, but the enhanced spectrum pictures were another matter altogether.

  There was a more extensive underground presence beneath the tower complex than the blueprints filed with the Australian government indicated, including one segment that appeared to be heavily shielded.

  That was an item of concern to Joshua, since there could be just about anything in that section of underground tunnels. Overhead radiation sweeps from the N-SAT scans had yielded nothing of import, a few tiny hits from where Joshua knew the hospital would be, but certainly nothing weapons grade.

  There were few reasons, however, to have a complex of tunnels quite so heavily shielded, especially under a power plant that generated no emissions, nor any radiation. So it seemed likely that Raymond was here for a reason, and that reason wasn’t the tower. It was under the tower.

  Which meant that some on-site intel was going to be needed for the team when it arrived from state-side.

  Joshua sighed, drawing his Colt from under the pillow of his bed. He looked at the weapon for a long moment, trying to decide what to do with it.

  He’d have to check out the tunnels for himself, that was a given.

  After a long moment Joshua stashed the gun back under his pillow and instead drew out a loud, garish shirt that screamed ‘tourist’. If he got caught, he’d try to bluff his way out.

  A few hours, then he’d go. Chances were that even terrorists would be tied to the solar clock, and they’d be a little off their game once the sun went down, even if they were underground and couldn’t see it.

  Joshua looked over at the pillow where his pistol was hidden, itching to slide it into his belt under his shirt, but shook his head.

  If they found him, they’d search him. If they found that gun, it would be game over.

  He’d have better luck with just the ugly shirt.

  He hoped.

  I’m too old for this cowboy shit.

  *****

  “The police have requested access to the tower employee database, Amir.”

  Abdallah Amir groaned slightly, shaking his head. “It’s that damned Interpol Agent.”

  Director Jacob nodded in agreement, “he must have forwarded the request through the local PD.”

  Abdallah snorted in derision, “of course he did. Do you really believe that the Shanty town Police would ask for something like that from the project? That’s most certainly Gunnar’s work. What did you say?”

  “That we had to respect our employees’ privacy of course.” Jacob said grimly, “however I believe that he will look for a warrant.”

  Abdallah nodded, “of course he will. However, there is only one sitting Judge in the Shanties, and we own him…We have time, but its growing short, Jacob. He’ll go for a bench warrant from Sydney, if he must.”

  “I agree, Amir,” Jacob replied. “What would you like done?”

  “Contact our people inside the Australian government try to have it delayed,” Abdallah said after a moment. “We only need three days.”

  Three days.

  It wasn’t too much to ask, Abdallah thought to himself.

  Just three days.

  Surely God, if he truly favored the cause, would grant him that.

  It was truly remarkable, Abdallah supposed, how quickly a plan could unravel with the introduction of one single random element.

  *****

  Elsewhere the ‘random element’ was looking over a file while he waited for his local ‘partner’ to return. The Tower project was a stupendous piece of engineering, Anselm knew, but he’d never really looked into how stupendous a feat it really was.

  It dwarfed any other human construct ever built, by almost a factor of two. Even the Liberty Plaza in New York, easily the number two construct, was much shorter than the Tower. Of course, Liberty Plaza was actually used as office buildings, so the design was much more complicated and incorporated a great deal of work that the Tower, which was basically just a tube of cement, steel, and Carbon Fiber, didn’t have.

  The thermal updraft created by the tower was a great deal more powerful than the original plans had calculated, though not so much in their math as in the real world effect. The eddies that wove around the pillar of warm air had altered the numbers on the mathematicians in ways they hadn’t expected. Indeed, the Tower had become one of the leading centers of Meteorology as many Universities and Laboratories sent people to its location to study the effect of the enormous funnel that pumped air up into the upper levels of the atmosphere.

  Anselm was interrupted in his studies when Gwen stepped back into the room, the look on her face telling him what he needed to know.

  “No luck, huh?” he smiled wryly.

  “I’m afraid not,” she admitted. “Director Jacob won’t violate the privacy of his employees.”

  Anselm nodded, having at least half expected something like that. Few companies were willing to just open up their database to the police, it was perceived as a bad precedent to set. In some ways Anselm agreed, but when he was looking for a mass murderer who had tried to use weapons of mass destruction on civilian populations, well he was willing to bend the rules to the breaking point.

  And then twist just one iota more.

  So he flipped open his portable and called up a program before looking at Gwen, “Do you know the Tower Project’s network node?”

  She stared at him, blinking furiously, “What good will that do you? I already told you that they weren’t giving us access.”

  “Just trust me.”

  She eyed him for a moment, but finally turned on her office system and accessed the I2 backbone, and linked to the node he wanted.

  “There,” she said after a moment.

  Anselm loaded it into his portable, then paused and looked at Gwen.

  “What?” She looked suddenly nervous, glancing around for what he was looking at.

  “Local PD Inspectors who want to maintain plausible deniability might want to leave the room for fifteen minutes or so,” he said after a moment.

  She looked at him, then at her computer, and swallowed. Finally Gwendolyn nodded and flipped her own system off and got up, “you know what? I feel like coffee. Want some?”

  “Black,” he smiled, “two sugars.”

  She nodded, “alright, I’ll be back in…fifteen minutes of so.”

  “I’ll be here,” Anselm said as she left, then waited for the door to close before he looked back to his portable.

  He was just as glad that she didn’t decide to be ‘noble’ in one way or another, either by trying to stop him or by trying to support him. That stuff worked out well in movies, but when he was breaking the law in the real world, he really didn’t want to deal with the responsibility of bringing someone else down with him.

  He accessed the node with his browser, then called up a terminate and stay resident program to monitor and operate as a gateway between his browser and the node. In
a few moments, he was deep into the Tower’s public files, but that was only the start.

  The first thing he had to do was identify the security system in place. If it was a custom job, then his work would be a lot more difficult, perhaps impossible for him personally, but the odds were against it.

  It wasn’t. It was a SecureGate IV server with a hardware firewall.

  Not a bad system, five years earlier.

  Anselm accessed the server, then sent a backdoor command to the firewall, causing it to open a port into the tower network well off from the commonly monitored routes. In a few seconds he was in and downloading the employee files.

  Sometimes it was just that easy, he supposed.

  He’d ‘acquired’ the backdoor command from a programmer he’d worked with some time earlier. Many of the top security packages included them, quietly of course, so that the company could recover files for the client, or let the client back into their own system, in the rather common event of a lost password.

  That had changed a bit when bio-metric security became vogue, but not as much as most people assumed. While it was true that it was a great deal harder to lose ones fingerprints or, more disturbingly, retina, it was also true that people who were the sole persons cleared for access to some systems disappeared, or died.

  So the tradition of putting backdoor systems into many private security programs continued unabated.

  Sometimes, Anselm thought that it was just done as a power trip for the programmers, but he wasn’t going to complain about something that worked in his favor.

  His own home system wasn’t connected to the I2 network in any fashion, largely for that very reason, however.

  So when Gwen returned with the coffee, she found Anselm leaning back in the visitors chair and watching as faces flashed past his screen.

  “I guess I really don’t want to know, do I?” She asked with a hint of distaste in her voice. “You do know that any information acquired this way won’t be admissible in court?”

  Anselm chuckled lightly, “I already have all the evidence I need on Mr. Amir, Gwen. When we catch him, he’s not getting much more than his day in court…if that. More likely his hour in Court will be enough. You don’t kill entire villages to test your deployment strategy for an attack on the UN and get away with it.”

  Anselm looked up at her then, “I’m not an Inspector, my job isn’t to prepare a criminal case, Gwen. My job is to deliver the suspect to custody.”

  She sighed, shaking her head, but handed him the coffee he’d asked for and reluctantly nodded her head toward the portable. “Did you find anything?”

  Anselm shook his head, “not yet, but I’ve only processed about a tenth of the employee files and…”

  His portable sung out suddenly.

  “Hello,” He said, looking down. “What’s this?”

  Gwen leaned in, frowning as she caught sight of a face she knew. “That’s Director Jacob.”

  “Is it?” Anselm smiled thinly as the program began confirming its initial estimate, examining the length of the nose, the height and prominence of the cheekbones, and the accent of the brow with a series of vector based calculations.

  After a moment, it beeped again and spat out new file.

  “Jacob Kalinden,” Anselm whistled, shaking his head. “Holy hell…I should have recognized the bastard.”

  “Who?”

  “Jacob Harrow Kalindan. Former member of pretty much every eco-fringe group in existence…for all the time that lasted at any rate,” Anselm said.

  “You’re kidding.”

  Anselm laughed at the utter disbelief in Gwen’s voice, “he got kicked out of almost all of them. Started suggesting that killing people was the way to change the world. Not even the hardest Green Peacers were willing to let someone say that…at least not while using their public image.”

  Gwen grimaced, remembering a few cases in the past where otherwise respectable individuals suggested what amounted to murder in the name of the Earth. It was rare, almost as rare as the proverbial hen’s tooth, but it had happened. There had been one professor in the States, almost two decades earlier, who had advocated killing seal hunters on the Canadian east coast.

  Every community had its lunatics, she supposed, but they really were the oddity among ecologists.

  “How did he get a job as Director here?” She asked, genuinely curious.

  Anselm shrugged, “It looks like he was part of the original project advocates…under the assumed name of Samuel Jacob. He applied for the position when it came open, and was accepted largely based on prior performance. Nothing outwardly questionable.”

  The portable suddenly beeped again.

  Anselm raised an eyebrow, frowning as he flipped from Jacob’s file to look at another one.

  “Holy shit.” He said after a moment.

  “What?”

  “This can’t be right.” Anselm shook his head, “I know this man is dead.”

  Gwen looked over his shoulder again, frowning. “That’s Doctor Kreig.”

  “You know this man??”

  “Of course, he’s in charge of the Tower Medical Center,” Gwen replied. “It services the entire city.”

  “This can’t be who it looks like,” Anselm said firmly. “Geoffrey Kragen died twelve years ago. I was there when it happened.”

  “A mis-identification?”

  “Possible,” Anselm looked at the picture with a sudden foreboding looming in the back of his mind.

  After a moment, he closed his portable and stood up.

  “Where are you going?” Gwen asked sharply.

  “Back to my room,” he told her. “I need to think about some things.”

  “Who’s Kragen!?” Gwen asked as he started to walk out, “Anselm? Agent Gunnar!”

  He didn’t answer, barely heard her, in fact. Anselm Gunnar had something else entirely on his mind now.

  *****

  Some time later Anselm Gunnar found himself watching the thermal shimmer of the setting sun as it wavered through the plume that rose from the bore of the Tower, not really seeing the beautiful display, as his mind lay elsewhere. He’d been trying to resolve what he knew with what he was seeing on his portable and the answer wouldn’t come out in any way that he wanted.

  Dr Kragan was dead. Anselm knew that, the way he knew that the sun would rise in the morning. He’d watched the man’s body being rolled from his own lab, pulled the sheet back from the body while protected by a Hazmat suit to confirm the identify, himself.

  The face he saw in his dreams at night was barely human, but it had been Kragan. DNA had confirmed it, along with dental records.

  So who was this Dr Krieg?

  Anselm shook his head, trying to work it out and failing yet again.

  He didn’t believe in coincidence, that had been Anselm’s credo for years in a career where coincidence almost always seemed far too pat, to be comfortable. Nevertheless, there were times when things were the results of little more than pure chance.

  This could be one of those.

  However, Anselm didn’t feel that it was. He may have been biased, almost certainly was in fact. But just because you are biased doesn’t mean you’re wrong. There are often very good reasons for being bias, and if you are prejudiced based on good and real experience, then it was an excellent rule to measure things against.

  So he wasn’t letting the ‘random chance’ card hit the table.

  Not this time.

  His mind said that Kragan was dead, his gut said that the man working at the Tower now was Dr Krieg. One of them was wrong, but Anselm wasn’t betting against his gut.

  The Director, however, wouldn’t take his gut as decent evidence. The Employee file was a good start, but it wasn’t enough. The evidence was tainted now, useless in an investigation. She’d need more before she could act against Dr Krieg, especially since the man they believed him to be was declared dead in their own files.

  It was time, then, to do what Anselm was paid to
do.

  Snoop.

  *****

  The aging Blackhawk helicopter set down easily on the pad, its motor cutting off as the doors were flung open and the first of a group of men and women in jumpsuits jumped off, ducking under the still turning blades. A couple dozen feet away the disembarkation of the five men and women in jumpsuits was watched by two hard weathered men dressed much the same.

  “Lieutenant Greene!” The lead man said, lifting his head and extending his hand as he stepped out from under the rotor wash. “Interpol. We’re on special assignment, and we need transport to Tower City.”

  The higher ranked of the two soldiers standing there raised his eyebrow skeptically, “Why is Interpol sending a START unit to the Tower?”

  “We’re being detached as a protective detail, Major,” the Lieutenant said crisply, the whine of the rotors fading out behind them.

  “Right,” the Major said dryly, “Lieutenant, do I look stupid to you?”

  Someone tittered behind Greene, but he studiously ignored it. Obviously the Major was playing a game here, and until he learned the name and the rules, he wasn’t going to risk antagonizing the man.

  “No sir,” he responded.

  It seemed like a safe answer.

  The Major didn’t change his expression, “The day that Interpol feels the need to assign a START unit as bodyguards, is the day I dance naked in the outback with the tribes.”

  There was another quickly smothered laugh, and Greene slashed his hands violently behind his back to shut whoever it was up.

  “Major, I’m not certain what you’re talking about, but we have all appropriate clearances from the Australian Government…”

  “I’m quite aware of your clearance, son,” the Major said, softening slightly. “Walk with me.”

  The Major turned away, gesturing to the man at his side.

  The man, a Lieutenant, stepped forward and gestured to the rest of Greene’s team. “If you’ll follow me, we’ll get you set for the last leg of your trip.”

  Greene nodded to his team, then stepped off and followed the Major.

  They walked off in a seemingly arbitrary direction, striding across the tarmac quickly, and were several dozen meters away from the other group before the Major spoke.