Remote Control

by Jack Heath

  Six swung along underneath the track, from one hand to the other, heading towards the next support strut so he could slide down.

  Time to take the offensive, he thought. Nobody kidnaps my brother and gets away with it.

  MISSION FOUR

  19:22:45

  BEHIND ENEMY LINES

  King of Hearts hit the button to unlock his office door. The QS opened the door, but didn’t step inside.

  “May I come in?” she asked. Her voice was casual, but not friendly.

  “Of course you can,” King said. “If I refused, you could have me arrested. Make this your own office, and come in whenever you like.”

  She sat down opposite him. “I shouldn’t have to tell you that the Spades perform a necessary function here,” she said.

  “You’re right. You don’t need to tell me.”

  “Without a fail-safe,” she continued, “the Deck would become corrupt. The Code would change, the agents would create their own agendas, and then the whole thing would either fragment into cells or become a company as bad as ChaoSonic. Neither of us wants that.”

  “Why are you lecturing me about this?” King demanded. “I was there when the rules were made!”

  “Is that a license to break them?” the QS asked. “I just want to point out that balance needs to be maintained. The Hearts and Diamonds are useless without the Spades keeping them in line; the Spades have no function without the red suits to monitor; and we’d all disappear without the Clubs training new recruits.” She leaned across his desk. “You know I have a right to be here.”

  “No, you don’t,” King said. “Agent Six of Hearts is the finest agent we’ve ever had. You’ve seen his mission records.”

  “You think they prove he’s incorruptible?”

  “He is,” King said, holding her gaze.

  “Less than three hours ago, we received an anonymous phone call. The caller said he had witnessed Agent Six taking money from a known Code-breaker with ties to ChaoSonic. He was able to describe Six accurately. And according to our system, Six was logged out at the time. So far, we can’t find anyone to corroborate his whereabouts.”

  “Irrefutable evidence,” King said sarcastically. “I stand corrected.”

  The QS smiled icily. “It’s not much, but we can’t let the accusation go uninvestigated. Of course, I’d like to hear Six’s side of the story.” She stood up and started to pace the room. “But when confronted, Agent Six of Hearts sabotaged an elevator to escape capture. He stole weapons and equipment from the armory, including a lock-release gun and plastic explosives. He ransacked the office of Agent Queen of Hearts—who, by the way, we can’t seem to find either. Agent Six shot a Spade agent, admittedly with nonlethal ammunition, then attacked her with a sword. He resisted arrest once again and escaped the building with a stolen parachute. We’ve checked his house and discovered that he doesn’t live there. He falsified his address on the Deck computers.” She put her hands on King’s desk. “And yet you say he’s innocent? Innocent people don’t behave like this.”

  “Did he say anything to your agents?” King asked.

  The QS let a hiss of air escape through gritted teeth. “Yes. He accused me, personally, of violating the Code by trying to arrest him.”

  “Unless you had reasonable grounds,” King said, “he was right to do so.”

  “Resisting arrest is, in itself, sufficient grounds for arrest!”

  “Agent Six has done nothing wrong,” King said. “Therefore, when an armed response team of Spades was sent after him, he could easily deduce that evidence had been fabricated to link him to a Code violation. With the knowledge that someone was trying to frame him, resisting arrest would have seemed the best course of action.” He smiled ironically. “And because your teams are so efficient, the methods he used to escape are excusable. Anything less and he would not still be at large.”

  The QS sat down again. “Our investigative teams are beyond reproach,” she said, drumming her fingernails on the desk. “If Six had given himself up, and the accusations turned out to be false, he would be back at work by now and the culprit would probably be in custody. Instead, we have a Code-breaker on the loose, whether Agent Six is guilty or not.”

  King raised an eyebrow. “Well, I’ll help in whatever way I can. Have you investigated the caller? And who was the Code-breaker Six supposedly met?”

  “You already know I won’t tell you that,” the QS growled, “just like you won’t tell me where Agent Six is.”

  There was a pause.

  “You believe him to be guilty,” King said finally, “yet you assume that he’ll call us with his location?”

  “I don’t believe he would conceal his whereabouts from you,” the QS said, giving him a meaningful look. “And it wouldn’t hurt you to cooperate with me.”

  King shrugged. “As I said, I’ll help however I can. But there are other matters that require my attention.” He switched on his computer monitor.

  The QS understood the signal and stood up. She turned back to him when she reached the doorway. “Agent Six’s exemplary mission results and test scores do not prove his innocence,” she said. “No one is incorruptible, King of Hearts.”

  King tapped out a sequence on the keyboard, and the door swung shut as the Queen of Spades left.

  The streetlamps buzzed past overhead as Six ran down the street. The shops and buildings were deserted—people had heard the gunfire and the explosions. They hadn’t been drawn towards the noise by curiosity, nor had they run away in panic; they had calmly changed their routes to avoid the area, as if it were nothing more than a traffic jam.

  Six had decided that the best course of action was to go home. His house was less than eleven kilometers away—a fifteen-minute run. He should arrive five minutes before King was expecting his call.

  Six had figured that Vanish would only have one base of operations, for the same reason that the Deck only had one—any more would make it hard to stay under ChaoSonic’s radar. Therefore the troops had probably been deployed from where Kyntak was being held.

  It would have to be quite close to the rendezvous point, so Vanish could control the situation. The soldiers would need to be able to travel between the two points via ground vehicles in a matter of minutes, not hours.

  Assuming that the base wasn’t on the other side of the Seawall, which seemed a fair assessment based on the number of troops they had, that left a semicircular search area with an approximate radius of twenty kilometers. And that meant 628 square kilometers of potential locations.

  But Vanish wouldn’t have made the rendezvous point right next door—he must have known there was a risk that Deck forces would scour the surrounding area looking for Kyntak. We’d be doing it now if the Spades hadn’t messed it up, Six thought. So he would have left a safety buffer—enough distance between the base and the rendezvous point so that the Deck wouldn’t have the manpower to search far enough. At least ten kilometers—that took a semicircular chunk out of the original area: radius ten kilometers, area 157 square kilometers.

  This left a curved strip of possible locations ten kilometers wide and more than a hundred kilometers long. Approximately 471 kilometers in area, Six calculated. Not a big part of a 7.5 million-square-kilometer City, but still way too much to search on his own.

  Six hoped the troops in the monorail hadn’t found the phone. Beyond stumbling on the base with blind luck, it was his only chance.

  As he was without a mobile or any money (and no way of getting any unless he stole it or used his card, which would attract the attention of the Spades), Six had decided to use the landline at home to call King. And if he was going to break into an enemy base with no information and no backup, he was going to need weaponry and equipment, which he could no longer get from the Deck.

  His house was just around the corner. He slowed to an inconspicuous walk. It seemed unlikely that the Spades would have found it, but it was best to be cautious.

  The house and the lawn s
urrounding it looked exactly as he had left them that morning. Six disarmed the four locks, opened the door, and punched in the alarm code. A barely audible beep of consent emerged from the panel, and Six shut the door behind him.

  He did his usual sweep of the house. No intruders. Harry was standing perfectly still in the training room, showing no sign that he had moved since Six left the house fourteen hours ago.

  Was that only this morning? Six wondered. It feels like it’s been days.

  “Harry,” he said.

  The robot didn’t respond, but that was normal. Six hadn’t asked a direct question.

  “Has anything unusual happened in the house today?”

  “You left approximately ninety-five minutes before you usually do on Mondays,” Harry growled.

  “Anything since I left?” Six asked.

  “No.”

  That was good enough for Six. He glanced at his watch: 19:37:51. The monorail might not have reached its destination yet, and he didn’t want to call King prematurely. He started his computer and opened up his in-box.

  Six raised an eyebrow in surprise. There was a new message from King, sent just eight minutes previously. It had an attachment entitled OIvanish.doc. Six read the e-mail first.

  Six

  I hacked into the ChaoSonic security mainframe and pulled their file on Vanish. It raises more questions than answers, but might be useful to you.

  I had a visit from the QS a few minutes ago and I think she’s still suspicious of me, so my phone may be tapped by now—but I’ve uploaded the program tracking your phone to the following web page: http://cww.prog91167/sim2305 3306.ds.

  The Spades don’t seem to know about Project Falcon. Someone’s trying to set you up to look like a double agent. I’ll let you know if I can work out who.

  Watch your back.

  King

  Six opened the attached document and text flooded the screen. It was a dossier on Vanish, apparently written by a ChaoSonic security analyst named Serfie Thaldurken, whose contact details were at the top of the page. Six was already discouraged. ChaoSonic had its analysts writing dossiers on Vanish, and therefore large security forces looking for him. They’d clearly been trying to find him for a long time. How was Six going to fare on his own, racing against the clock?

  The first section of the dossier was a list of events believed to have been orchestrated by Vanish or linked to him, categorized in reverse chronological order. These included numerous assassinations, abductions, and even bank robberies. There were also several break-ins at ChaoSonic scientific facilities, and a ransacking of the ruins of the Lab, Six was surprised to see, less than a month after Kyntak had rescued him from there.

  Six scrolled down, sifting back through time. The most common activities seemed to be robberies and abductions. Vanish had stolen a vast amount of equipment, data, and weaponry from various ChaoSonic facilities, along with many rare valuables, each of which would fetch a small fortune if offered to the right buyer. He had kidnapped dozens of people, usually asking for a ransom but only sometimes receiving it, and even then rarely setting the prisoners free.

  Just like Kyntak, Six thought. Vanish’s victims were all taken for some kind of strategic value less obvious than monetary—they had information, or a high public profile, or an important position within an organization. Several ChaoSonic executives, security chiefs, and shareholders had been kidnapped by Vanish; in fact, this seemed to be what had brought him to the organization’s attention.

  He believes Kyntak is me, Six thought. So what does he want with me, if not the ransom?

  The next section of the document was a list of people suspected of being involved with Vanish’s operations. There were more than a hundred names, but most had no more than a brief physical description and the reason they had come under suspicion. Many were soldiers, either suspected of working in Vanish’s army or killed and identified later. None had been captured alive. Six saw that most of the soldiers were ex-ChaoSonic—presumably having changed sides because the pay was better. He knew that ChaoSonic rarely paid its employees generously.

  Some of the suspects—in fact, all of the people who’d been abducted and later released—were higher-ranking ChaoSonic employees. At first, Six assumed that the fact Vanish hadn’t killed them was the grounds for the suspicion against them, but he then saw that all had been guilty of stealing information or technology which quickly found its way into Vanish’s hands.

  So he only lets them go if they agree to work for him? he thought. How does he keep them to their word?

  Six saw Earle Shuji on the list. The picture of her was an old one—Six could still see the greed in her beautiful dark eyes. The caption stated that Vanish had been a potential buyer for her soldier bots, but that the deal had been aborted when Shuji disappeared; apparently she had been telling the truth. The paragraph concluded with “Missing, presumed dead.”

  Six felt a touch of satisfaction. The Deck had hidden her well, and it seemed she had made no move to contact old friends.

  He kept reading.

  Retuni Lerke was on the list too. Apparently he had leaked Lab data to Vanish’s organization. This didn’t surprise Six. Eight months ago Lerke had stolen a sample of Six’s DNA and tried to sell it to a ChaoSonic security official. Methryn Crexe had been planning to have Lerke killed, but Six and Kyntak had arrested Crexe before he could do this.

  Six assumed that Lerke, like most high-ranking ChaoSonic employees, was extremely greedy if not actively cruel. But he also suspected that Lerke was actually insane. Project Falcon could not have been conceived by a normal brain, and double-crossing Crexe was madness. Six hoped that Lerke was not involved in today’s events. Vanish was scary enough on his own.

  He didn’t make eye contact with Lerke’s picture. He knew what Lerke looked like, and glimpsing that face staring out of the screen unnerved him. He scrolled down immediately, seeing the bald head and pale eyes only in his peripheral vision.

  There was a picture of the red-eyed woman who had recited the ransom demand, Niskev Pacye. There wasn’t much information—she had lived an unremarkable life before being hired as a neurologist in a ChaoSonic hospital. She’d risen to the rank of senior neurosurgeon before disappearing completely, and then showing up two years later as Vanish’s representative in a data trade. There was no indication she’d ever joined his soldiers in battle. Her role seemed limited to adviser and spokesperson.

  Six was alarmed to see Chelsea Tridya on the list. She knew too much about him, Kyntak, and the Deck. But his panic subsided when he saw that the grounds for her inclusion were slender. ChaoSonic suspected that Vanish was the one who had stolen the Lab’s supply of Tridya’s aging drug. To do this, he would have to have known it existed, and it was more palatable for ChaoSonic to assume that Tridya had told him about it than that there had been a leak within their organization.

  Six didn’t recognize any of the other names. The next section was the shortest—known information about Vanish himself. Six looked at the picture first and recoiled in horror.

  It was a black-and-white mug shot, taken in a ChaoSonic cell. The man in the photo was about thirty, bald, slightly chubby, and 174 centimeters tall, according to a text box in the corner. But it took Six a moment to notice any of this because his eyes were drawn to the scars on the man’s face.

  Three broad gashes split the flesh, one from his right nostril to his chin, one from above his right eye to his cheekbone, and one from the left side of his forehead up to the top of his skull. A series of minor scratches latticed his left cheek, and there was a small triangular gouge under his left eye—it looked like mascara that had run.

  The man’s eyes were closed. The background was an uneven grey-and-white gradient—a pillow, Six realized. He was asleep.

  The wounds had been cleaned before the picture was taken, so there was no blood, but this only made it more horrific. Six thought he could see exposed bone in the gouge in the left cheek, and he looked away, heart pounding.


  Six had once gone undercover in a ChaoSonic jail to break out an agent, and he’d seen plenty of brutality there. And vivid images of the prisoners at Earle Shuji’s factory still haunted him.

  But he’d never seen wanton disfiguration like this. He started reading the caption.

  This was the only known photo of Vanish. One of his soldiers had defected, informing ChaoSonic that Vanish was planning a raid on one of their satellite uplink stations. He said that Vanish wanted to use equipment which was integrated into the building, and would therefore have to be there in person. ChaoSonic left the facility minimally guarded, and ambushed Vanish’s fifteen-person team once they were inside. Thirteen of Vanish’s soldiers were killed. Only he and the defector were left alive.

  The ChaoSonic troops put Vanish in an armored personnel carrier so he could be transported to a secret prison facility for processing. But when the APC arrived, he was rushed straight into the emergency room. Apparently Vanish had mutilated his own face with his fingernails.

  According to the document, he didn’t speak a single word the entire time he was in their custody; but that wasn’t long. His troops broke into the emergency room less than three hours after his condition had been stabilized. It was unclear how they’d found it. The picture was taken ten minutes before their arrival.

  During the rescue, Vanish’s team killed three doctors and nine guards, leaving one doctor and one guard alive. A week later, the defector’s body was found under the ChaoSonic security chief’s desk, with a high concentration of Syncal in his bloodstream—almost double the amount that had been injected into Six that morning.

  Thaldurken drew special attention to the fact that twenty-six people had been killed: thirteen of Vanish’s and thirteen of ChaoSonic’s, including the defector. Thaldurken suggested that Vanish may have been trying to send a message to ChaoSonic—that he had only reacted defensively, with force that was precisely equal to that used against him.