by Evan Currie
“Tell me about this problem of yours, Lieutenant.”
Greene swallowed, thinking about it. He hadn’t been specifically told not to tell anyone, but it had been made clear that his official reason for visiting Tower City was to protect the husband of Agent Somer. He hesitated only for a second, though, before making his decision. This Major clearly already knew more than the official story anyway.
“We have positive sighting of multiple terrorists on the most wanted charts inside of Tower City,” he said. “The data just came through last night confirming that at least two individuals wanted under international law are currently residing there, and our Agent on site believes that there is at least one more…”
“I see,” the Major nodded. “That was more or less what I’d been led to believe, though I wasn’t aware that you have positive confirmation.”
“Last night the photos came in, Sir,” the Lieutenant replied. “At least two employees of the Tower project are known terrorists, one of them has been presumed dead for several years.”
“Disturbing,” the major summed it up simply, then shrugged. “But what trouble can they get up to there? There are no dangerous materials used by the project.”
Greene shrugged, “not my department, Major.”
The man grunted, nodding his assent.
“Alright, Lieutenant,” the Major replied. “My men and I will prepare transport for our teams.”
“Sir?”
The Major smile was feral, “You didn’t think that the Special Air Service Regiment was going to let some nancy boy STARTers have all the fun right under our noses did you?”
*****
Penetrating the security of the project hospital had been a joke, pretty much as expected. Corvine knew better than to consider that a decent measure to judge the rest of the facility by. The hospital was in the public section of the tunnels that contained the Project administration, built under the immense greenhouse that stood above them.
Like everything else connected to the Tower Project, or the small city that had grown up around it, the hospital was connected to the outside world primarily through the Mono-rail system that serviced the entire community, though it also had a service entrance from the tower above, and a vehicle entrance for personal and emergency vehicles.
Corvine had used the mono-rail, however, having decided that his electric Honda CRV wasn’t going to be much of a getaway car if things went south. Or north, given that he was already about as far south as you got without packing a parka and a ski-doo.
His portable held the plans for the official tunnels, plus the ground penetrating radar readings from the satellite he’d tapped earlier, which gave him a good view of all the tunnels plus, how they connected. He used that information, displayed in vibrant technicolor, to plot his meanderings through the facility.
The guards that were posted in the emergency room left him alone, their job wasn’t to keep people from wandering around, and they were there to help the doctors with trouble patients and to detain anyone showing up with suspicious injuries. Joshua was neither of those, so he ghosted past them without a second glance.
It was after he’d passed his third ‘No Admittance’ sign that Joshua began to move more cautiously, eyeing the path before he tread along it. As he past, Joshua took mental notes on the activities he saw but noted nothing that appeared out of the ordinary. The radiology lab was apparently understaffed, a harried looking secretary didn’t even look up as Joshua walked past like he was going somewhere specific.
He was going somewhere specific, of course, he just didn’t know where yet.
After several minutes of wandering, either ducking security guards and hospital staff, or confidently striding along like he knew where he was going, Joshua came to a dead end in the seemingly never ending array of off white hallways that sprouted from the central corridor.
He frowned, turning half around and looking for another option, then flipped open his Portable again. The fan shaped screen unfolded in its peculiar origami fashion, and in a few seconds he was looking over the schematics again.
The official hall ended here, exactly where it was supposed to on the project plans, but the radar scan from orbit still showed a continuation for another hundred meters.
Which, at the moment, made it Joshua’s eyes and the official plans against the satellite data.
Normally Joshua Corvine was inclined to believe his eyes over electronic data, but this one time he wasn’t willing to give up quite so easily. If he was right about what was going on, under the magnificent tower that loomed far above him, he had to find the tunnel that the computer insisted was there.
*****
Everything led back to the Tower.
Anselm let himself into the administration offices under the tower greenhouse using the electronic decryption program in his portable, moving through the empty space like a wraith in the night. The lights, in keeping with the power saving theme of the entire facility and, indeed, community beyond, were all powered down to absolute minimal levels, leaving only emergency lights to dot the hallways every twenty meters.
That suited Anselm well enough, as he’d already had to access into the security Wi-Fi network and blur himself out of three security cameras. The dark would help make that job easier. Luckily, the advances of Augmented Reality had given police a great deal of tools to use for just such an occasion. Of course, that was largely because criminals had developed them years earlier.
Editing a man out of a live video feed took processing power and, of course, unlimited access to the system the feed was being relayed through. The closer you could access it to the origin of the video, the better. Since he was currently using a superuser account built directly into the Tower’s security software, he should be pretty much invisible to anyone watching.
The personnel offices were just up ahead, and that was his first destination. He needed to make a hard copy confirmation of the digital information he had already ‘acquired’, then he would move on to the director’s own office and do a quick scout to check for anything out of the ordinary there.
What that was he didn’t know, but this wouldn’t be the first time in his career that Anselm went on a purely speculative fishing trip.
The code lock that led into the personnel room was simple enough to break, its encryption key the same as the doors that led up to it, and Anselm quickly let himself in and closed the door behind him. Like most major corporations the Tower project still kept reams of hardcopy on all its day to day business, despite the gradual takeover of electronic means to record the minutia of the office.
The sheer mass of those files was represented in the eight huge cabinets that confronted Anselm once he had secured the door behind him. The Interpol man’s heart sank as he sighed and moved forward to begin working his way through the mass of paper.
*****
It was never as easy as it looked in the movies.
After almost half an hour, Joshua had given up. The corridor may, in fact, go on past the wall in front of him, but he was convinced that there was no clever catch to make it swing or slide open, no hatch that would let him go under or over it. It was exactly what it appeared to be, a solid wall at the end of a corridor.
This meant that while the tunnel might go on, he wasn’t getting into it from here.
The CIA man began to backtrack, moving back through the more populated and active sections of the hospital and working his way back out.
He’d wasted enough time on that dead end, and now needed to find another way to his goal as his time continued to dwindle away.
Joshua wandered through the halls of the hospital facility, head down as he buried himself in the data his portable was now spewing out concerning the Tower project and its construction, looking for all the world like a harried doctor or administrator, trying desperately to catch up on his work.
For all that, however, he wasn’t any nearer to finding the missing key to his puzzle by the time he had exited the facility and was sta
nding by the Mono-rail terminal once more.
He reexamined the information on his portable, taking time he didn’t really have in order to get it right. The key to accessing the deeper corridors, getting into the hidden facility within the facility, had to be there.
The NRO keyhole satellite had fed him real time images using thermal, though that was basically useless due to the entire dome of camouflage above him, and radar, and then overlayed those with data from overhead radiation sweeps. Other than the tunnels not listed in the official plans, there was nothing at all.
There had to be something down there.
Joshua was certain of that, he just couldn’t quite fathom what. Raymond Gorra, AKA Abdallah Amir, wasn’t here on vacation. He was a wanted fugitive in fifteen countries, an international terrorist, and for any and all of its faults, Australia wasn’t one of the nations that harbored such. In fact, Joshua figured, hiding out down under was one of the more spectacularly stupid things a man like Gorra could do.
And yet, he’d done it.
What was worse, it had somehow worked.
How long had Gorra been here was another question. If he had been here the entire time since his supposed ‘death’, he’d been spectacularly successful in laying low. Even dead, his picture was still on the walls and computers of too many police agencies for the man’s comfort, Joshua was sure.
He had to be up to something, and it had to be important enough to risk hiding out in a country that was just as likely to ship him off to the States as a terrorist, as spit on him.
Yet the overhead sweeps had detected no radiological hot spots other than the hospital’s own radiology room, which had been checked and cleared already.
Joshua Corvine hated mysteries, but he had a hell of one on his plate now.
To solve it, first he had to get all the information, and to do that, he needed to find a way into those hidden tunnels.
The CIA man flipped back through the ground penetrating radar images, looking for another way in.
*****
Interpol was going to owe him overtime, Anselm decided as he carefully replaced a thick file folder with the personnel information on Director Jacob.
The file was thick, meticulous, boring as an accounting course, and a total fabrication from top to bottom.
Anselm closed the cabinet, flipped his Portable shut and pocketed the electronic device. He’d scanned the files in their entirety, the relevant ones he could find at least, and had already backed them up to his Interpol network hard drive. They would establish a clear line of evidence if he had to prove conspiracy on the part of the Tower project, though he hoped it wouldn’t come to that.
It wasn’t looking good for the project though, Anselm thought privately. A single employee who happened to be a fugitive was something that could be understood, overlooked, but when that employee was the Director things started getting shaky.
Add to that the fact that He’d scanned at least five other fugitives in his perusal of the project’s files and things started looking really bad. Of course, once they’d missed Director Jacob, the Project backers had a perfect reason for not seeing the others.
Jacob could easily have cooked the books himself, which would make Anselm’s job that much harder if it came to going after the Project itself.
He locked up the cabinets then, shrugging as he did. If it were easy, he wouldn’t be the one they gave the case too.
Knowing that they were here, though, was only half the case.
What the hell were they doing here, that was the question that was burning Anselm’s blood now. The men on his list were all dangerous fugitives, men who had, in some cases, gone so far as to fake their own deaths to divert the attention of the law.
In Doctor Kragan’s case, he’d apparently faked his death specifically to come here. His hiring date was mere weeks after the ‘death’ of Dr Krieg. Which still made no sense to Anselm, as he’d seen the man’s body himself.
Drugged? Fake a death like coma?
Anselm had heard of things like that, but mostly those things were inventions of Hollywood, they didn’t stand a chance of passing a forensic examination. Put frankly, if you’re faking your death that way, you’d better be damned sure that the medical examiner isn’t going to do an autopsy.
Lookalike?
That was possible. Plastic surgery had come a long way over the past few decades, and dummying up a dupe of some guy wasn’t all that hard.
Passing a DNA test was another matter, but there were ways around that.
Anselm frowned, letting himself out of the office and closing the door behind him, thumbing a command on his Portable to lock the electronic security system again. He made a note to check the autopsy on Kreig, and have a local agent pay a call on the office that did it.
Bribing a man in the ME’s office was the easiest, supplying the mole with a confirming DNA sample. The ME himself was the best bet, if that was the plan, because that allowed you to doctor the fingerprints, DNA, and dental with one shot, and keep the radical reconstructive surgery from being reported at the same time.
Other than that, Krieg would have had to really stretch to fake his death that well.
Cloning was possible, at least since the turn of the century, but was impractical given that you’d basically have to have prescient parents to pull it off. Clones needed as long to mature as a normal human, which was pretty much why the few ‘clones’ that existed to date were simply called twins.
Anselm came up short, eyes narrowing.
A twin?
Even identical twins wouldn’t pass a full forensics examination, but it might pass a cursory one, especially if a few euros were slipped into the right handshakes.
Of course, if that were the case, maybe Doctor Krieg was the twin, and Kragan really was dead.
Anselm rubbed his eyes, he could feel a headache coming on.
Approaching footsteps startled him out of his moment of self pity, and Anselm Gunnar pushed himself back against the wall, sliding along it to an alcove, as a figure came around the corner, moving through the dark hall.
*****
Joshua Corvine frowned as he made his way back through the halls, heading toward the Director’s office.
The CIA man had compared the diagrams of the Tower Project with the Ground Penetrating Radar scans from the satellite sweep and found a couple interesting points of intersection. One of them was in the Director’s office, a thin line on the radar map that was barely visible. If he was right, Director Jacob had a backdoor into the section of the Project tunnels that Corvine most desperately wanted to see.
Joshua hoped he was right.
The electronic security was a joke, off the rack commercial software and hardware, easily cracked by the suite of security programs and supercomputer time he had access to through his portable, so he didn’t have any problems with getting in.
Dodging guards was a no brainer, since there didn’t appear to be any, the single security guard employed to protect the Project was sitting behind a desk in an office a level above Joshua, watching screens that showed him exactly what Corvine wanted him to see.
The emergency lighting was annoying though, the shadows it case made him nervous as he moved through the empty halls.
He had that itchy feeling on the back of his neck that made him feel like he was being watched.
Joshua hated that feeling.
He picked up the pace a little, quickly arriving at the large office at the end of the hall, and let himself through the frosted glass doors.
It was an elegantly appointed, large receptionist office with two large wooden doors at the far side. Those were his targets.
The security, interestingly enough, was mechanical here, not electronic. That put a crimp in the CIA agent’s schedule, but he had come prepared.
The lock pick gun whirred a few times as it randomly tried different combinations, refining its approach with every right tumbler it clicked over. In a little under a minute the heavy door
s slid open silently, and Joshua smiled wryly as he slipped in, thanking the Director for keeping his hinges well oiled.
Joshua hated that damned squeak some doors gave off. Even if a place was completely empty, it always felt like he’d just alerted an army to his presence.
Once inside, Joshua looked around the Director’s office and had to admit, he was impressed.
It was even larger than the reception office outside, and included a scale model of the Tower along one wall, the chimney reaching nearly to the ceiling. Project Awards filled that wall, plaques and trophies, as well as certificates of commendations and the like.
A bookcase killed another wall, looking like a rich man’s ego trip more than someone’s reading library, but impressive just the same. The desk that filled the back of the office was oak, unless Joshua was much mistaken, and expensive as hell.
However, none of that was what primarily interested him.
The door in the corner, now that was what he was here for.
At least, Joshua hoped so. He’d hate to have come this far just to break into the director’s closet.
*****
Anselm watched from his alcove as the man passed him, not daring to move until the hallway was clear again. He didn’t recognize the man as he’d passed, but that didn’t mean anything, the Tower Project employed hundreds of people or more.
Though, he had to admit, few of them would be walking through the halls this late at night, looking over their shoulder from time to time like they were worried about being seen.
Anselm hesitated, looking back the way he’d come from, back toward the exit from the offices, then he looked along the path of the man who had just passed.
His gut told him that the man he’d seen wasn’t an employee, which made him a very interesting person indeed. Anselm hesitated only another second, and then quickly moved to follow.
The man led him to a pair of frosted glass doors that were labeled as the Director’s office, and Anselm’s curiosity piqued even higher. Jacob’s own office, now that was worth checking out just on its own merits.
The key, of course, was not to get caught while doing it.