Something was very, very wrong.
Nate paid his bill and then left the restaurant, his thoughts awhirl. He wanted to learn more about the Owens case, but wasn’t about to make any inquiries from his PCD where it could be traced back to him. He needed a cyber café.
The first one he came to looked a bit too upscale to have what he wanted, so he passed it by and kept looking. After another fifteen minutes he found another place, sandwiched between an auto mechanic and a shoe repair shop in an alley off of 69th that would do the trick. He paid for an hour of time at a private terminal and the proprietor led him to a closet-sized space in the back of the room that contained a triD terminal with a built-in keyboard. The gear was at least fifteen years out of date but it fired up without difficulty when Nate sat down in front of it and that was good enough for him. The age of the terminal would make what he had to do next easier, actually.
He flexed his fingers and then punched in a coding sequence he’d learned from an electronics specialist first class while overseas. The commands rerouted the console’s connection to the cybernet through twenty different pirate data havens, one after another, each one scrubbing the identifiers out of the data and hiding the originating signal in a blizzard of false streams that would take a decent hacker at least a week, maybe more, to unravel. By the time they did that, he’d be long gone.
Once he knew his efforts couldn’t be traced back to him, Nate began digging into the background of the Owens case, trying to make sense of it all. According to the documents he was able to access, the government had been chasing a leak within their classified weapons program for more than a year before investigators began to focus their attention on Owens. The break had come when an anonymous source sent in half-a-dozen photographs showing Owens passing a packet of information to Fong while they were dining together at an outdoor restaurant. There was no way for the photographs to be used in court, as the investigators couldn’t prove they were authentic given their anonymous source, but that didn’t stop investigators from using them to confront Owens, who, upon seeing the evidence, broke down and confessed. Owens had then pled guilty, saving the government years of effort and no doubt millions of dollars that would have been needed to convict him.
Nate double-checked the dates. Owens had been sentenced just over ten years ago, according to the information.
Has to be a different photograph, he thought.
He called up the image and expanded it on the screen.
It wasn’t a different photograph; he knew that immediately. While Nate had never actually held the images he’d taken that day, he had been looking through the camera’s viewfinder when he’d taken them and the image he called up on the screen was identical to the one he had in his memory.
It was his photograph.
There was no mistaking it.
He thought for a moment and then hunched over the keys once more, tapping furiously.
The console obediently put the information he asked for on the screen in front of him.
Seeing it, Nate sat back in his chair. His stomach did a slow roll and he had to take several deep breaths in order to keep from throwing up.
On the screen was an article about the hotel he’d delivered the package to during his second assignment. According to the press, a terrorist bomb had gone off on the hotel’s eighteenth floor, killing three people and starting a fire that rapidly burned out of control and ended up destroying the entire building.
The date of the fire was five years ago.
Nate’s hands shook.
“Holy shit!” he breathed.
No sooner were the words out of his mouth than a loud beeping sound filled the cubicle, Nate jumped out of his seat, glancing wildly about, convinced in those first few seconds that the corporate bigwigs at Limbus had discovered what he was up to and had sent in the riot police to drag him downtown…
There was no one there.
The beeping sound was the pager on his PCD.
Telling himself to calm down, he fumbled it off his belt, slipped the switch to silence the alarm, and looked down at the readout.
1:15, it read.
Nate didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. Not only did he have an immediate assignment, but he had twenty-five minutes to make it there.
He wiped all traces of what he’d been doing from the terminal, then exited the cyber café. Using his PCD he called for a limousine, knowing it would be faster than the slidetrain and might just mean the difference between success and failure. He had no idea what would happen if he missed the deadline and frankly he had no intention of finding out. The chauffeured vehicle had slid out of the sky seconds later and got him to the Limbus offices with three minutes to go before the deadline.
He rushed to the prep room, swapped his clothes for the ones waiting there for him, and jumped into the farcaster, his thoughts a million miles away.
As the countdown neared its final seconds, Nate glanced out through the porthole in the middle of the farcaster door and saw that he’d left the door to his locker open.
That was the least of his worries.
There, on the top shelf, was the hypo he’d forgotten to take.
In the next second reality dropped away from him and Nate felt like he was falling… falling… falling…
Recruiter 46795 entered Nate Benson’s mission prep room ten minutes after the other man had left. Despite having six operators under his direct supervision, management had yet to see fit to provide him with an assistant, so he was forced to handle even the trivial tasks like refilling the hypos and resetting the farcaster units himself.
He considered that aspect of the job to be far beneath him and constantly railed to himself against the short-sightedness of those above him. When he was promoted to executive, he’d be sure to let the others know just how demeaning he’d considered the whole…
His thoughts trailed off as he caught sight of the hypo sitting on the locker’s top shelf.
Unused.
Questions swarmed his thoughts.
How much did Benson know? Was it a simple accident that he hadn’t taken the hypo or had he avoided the injection purposely? Was he an enemy plant? Or, God forbid, working for another agency? Could he still be trusted?
What about…
Recruiter 46795 cursed aloud, once, and then got control of himself. It wouldn’t do to let something like this cause the rest of his plans to spin out of control. Benson could be contained, if necessary.
He’d wait and see what the operative did when he returned from his current assignment and then make some decisions about how to handle the situation.
Patience, he reminded himself, patience.
Nate stumbled out of the farcaster and promptly vomited all over the floor. He straightened, wiped his mouth, and was overcome a second time by the sensation of falling from an immeasurable height, a fall that just went on and on and on…
He leaned against the nearby wall and vomited a second time.
With his stomach now empty, the feeling receded. He stayed where he was, waiting for the nausea to pass. Then, and only then, did he dare to straighten up.
He wondered just how totally fucked he was.
He’d gone through the farcaster without his injection and he had no idea what kind of effects that would have on his body. He felt all right aside from the previous bout of nausea, but he knew that meant nothing. He might be sprouting massive tumors deep inside his body this very minute and wouldn’t even know it.
Fuck it. Can’t do anything about it now so might as well put it aside and concentrate on the job at hand.