Chapter Twenty-one
Kidnapping
Before two in the morning in the main corridor’s sixth level basement of the Pantrige Building of northwest New Dallas an extraction team gathers. Silently, a group wearing black tunics and facemasks crowd into a lower basement freight elevator. At the same moment, two other similar groups of dressed in black teams’ crowd into two other freight elevators in the sixth level basements of the MacElevine and the Byrom buildings. Only one person in each group is dressed normally and his face is uncovered. In the Pantrige group, it is Bakman. In the other elevators, it is Breen and Emmert.
At two hours, two minutes, and two seconds after midnight all three freight elevators move upward. All three elevators carry a group dressed in black.
On the Twenty-first floor Bakman's elevator stops, the door opens. Slowly and quietly all dark figures move silently down a long empty dimly lit hallway. The only lights are tiny emergency nightlights the size of a little finger’s fingernail spaced every four feet on the left edge of the ceiling, called safety lights activated by movement.
The group stops at a door. Two of the group separate, move down and back to form room 2137 hallway guards. Bakman and the others wait as a short slender woman, a four-foot-seven Woll the Clone operative, steps forward to slip a card with a wire into the door’s card slot. The wire is attached to a small belted strap-pack around her waist. The black hooded woman pulls the pack around to her front and flips open a covering to expose a dim green 3-inch view-screen. The fingers of her right-hand work a moment on a small console panel, dim lights on the small hooded computer screen blink, her finger touches a spot on a panel, and tiny dim red lights flash as four small lines of numbers roll on the panel.
The group waits for almost half a minute, but to Bakman it seems like two hours. He knows all security cameras are running empty hallway loops for eight minutes. After that the shift changes and new operators do a normal system sweep before new patrols start. If problems occur, the hallways guards can step inside the room, but during the first hour all patrols are occupied for the first five or ten minutes with shift information explained before patrols began again. At most they have seven minutes before they need to be out and gone or hope they survive the sweep.
As the door lock softly clicks Bakman breathes a little easier. A black figure touches Bakman’s arm and waggles a finger at him to wait as another slowly slides the door halfway back. Quickly and quietly all of the entry team, five besides Bakman and Zee, steps through the half-open door. Inside they wait in the dark hallway while the outside guard moves to ease the door back almost closed. A spring-loaded bar jammed overhead keeps it from completely closing. Inside, as they tiptoe into the living room dim safety lights blink on. When oriented Bakman points toward bedroom doors; the group divides to slip into bedrooms to clamp strong hands over each of the four mouths of the Coslett family. Their children are listed as five and seven. On tiptoes Bakman follows the pair going into the parent's bedroom with Zee at his elbow.
The only muffled sounds are of a surprised couple rudely awakened with strong hands clamped over their mouths, dragged roughly out of bed, and pulled into the living room. When both children are standing before their parents with hands over their mouths too, Bakman steps forward and lets them look at his face.
"Mrs. Coslett, my name is D. G. Bakman. The reason we’re here tonight is that your husband has been selling our secrets. At first, we were just going to kill him and make his body disappear. We decided against making you a widow, against murder. Nothing he sold has really crippled us yet, but we cannot let him continue betraying our trust. Now, your family is going to go away. His wages will continue until our project is over in three, four, or five years. Then, all of you will be released with a paper stating his termination of services was with a good recommendation. You will cooperate, do everything we ask of you, all of you, or we will change our minds and make this entire family disappears permanently as an example to others. Is that clear?"
Slowly each of the adults nods, and after the father points at each child they too nod agreement.
"Release them," orders Bakman.
A frightened Coslett family crowd around each other. Two dark figures move in front and the rest behind the family. In the open doorway Bakman whispers.
"Follow me. Quiet. No talking. No noise." Bakman waits for each Coslett to nod before moving. The frightened family moves forward in a little frightened group behind Bakman and Zee, and the last three black hooded figures follow the group. Out in the hallway the group moves quietly back down to the freight elevator. The hallway guards retreat behind the group alert for trouble. Everyone crowds inside, a finger touches sixth level basement on the control panel, and it descends.
In the empty dimly lit sixth level basement hallway the group waits quietly. No one speaks. Only one of those dressed in black moves back to guard the elevator door, a tall shapely woman holding a black purse. A little before three the light on the elevator panel shows yellow and then red, the doors opens, and a short plump brown-faced woman with wild fire-red hair in a bright orange tunic decorated with large blood-red circles motions for them to move forward and speaks.
“The rain has stopped.”
The group crowds back into the freight elevator with Bakman. It goes upward to stop on the ground floor. Backed into the loading dock is a hover bus. The family is loaded on the bus that already holds another family and a lone man. Inside the bus Bakman with Zee standing beside him gives the same speech he gave in the room to the eleven frightened people. As he leaves three of Woll the Clone's people enter. One drives and the other two are guards with double-balls at the ready set on automatic fire.
All of his people and Bakman and Zee step off the hover bus before it starts moving. It turns into a long night-time traffic gap on the first level causeway, Houston Street, traffic. The hover bus drives slowly east two blocks to keep noise down, passes the Crystal building, a building away from a small local police sub-station. At Satola Street the hover bus purposely passes under a traffic control recorder, stops to turn north, and drives slowly out of sight into the darkness.
The extraction teams scatter to elevators to take single unlighted private hovers on the sixteenth, nineteenth and twenty-second causeways, except Bakman and Zee. He rides with a black hooded mechanical woman in night vision mode driving his large public hover on the Seventh Causeway. Two blocks away between buildings the woman, Zee, pulls off her black hood shakes out her newly dyed reddish brown hair and turns their hover east two blocks. The rest of the way was a long straight run southwest to the OpDyke Building.
“I love the smell of the city in the early morning after a rain,” Bakman tells her pulling off his hood too. Smiling Bakman glances at the passing tall buildings, sparse traffic, looks at his shapely driver, and takes another deep breath. His driver smiles without taking her darting night-vision eyes off her duty of searching every shadow large enough to hold an assassin and every approaching hover-rider. On the return trip no attempt was made on Bakman’s life.
Back inside the building Dee, Vee, the mechanical Dee, and a crew of three are busy finishing removing repeating-loop recordings of empty hallways, elevators, and causeways on police surveillance computers. When all things are back to normal, they can relax and have time for Zee to relay her assassination attempt recordings from the party into Breen’s security memory banks.
During a lull in wiping out recordings, Bakman had a few quiet comments about areas that might need improvement. In the middle of this, Bakman has another thought. He asks his teams to look again at the list of supplies going with the colonist for things they need or do not need. After nodding sleepily everyone heads for bed for two hours. The next few days it will be important that everything is normal. No one is allowed to sleep late.
Bakman and Harry OpDyke’s people tell friends, relatives, and police that the two missing families were on vacation and the missing informationalist had been hired as Corporate Historian. All told t
he police they heard them speak of going on vacation. The missing workers asked for and received vacation pay; they had even chartered a hover bus together. Everyone interviewed told how the workers talked about going somewhere on the Atlantic seashore. Many said that they talked about two weeks of swimming and boating. All the police had was a picture of a stolen hover bus leaving New Dallas on Satola Street traveling north just after three in the morning.
Late the next afternoon, the police did find a stolen hover bus abandoned along side of a fish pond fifty-two miles north. The hover had been vacuumed. Inside and outside of the hover bus had been next sprayed with light oil before being sprayed with a second coat of liquid soap diluted with water, a 30 percent soap solution, wiping out any prints or clues. All other leads evaporated. When all reports were collected and studied in the main office, the officer in charge only knew that two families that worked in the OpDyke Building and a newly hired OpDyke Corporate Historian/Informationalist vanished overnight from New Dallas. All eleven people are listed as missing persons. Pictures of all eleven fill up space on all the local Information Screens for days.
The Centauri Conspiracy Page 23