She puffed her cheeks and blew out her breath, unfolding her hands from behind her head and swinging her legs over the side of the sleeper. She rubbed her face vigorously with her fingers trying to coax energy out of her body. Fuck it, she thought, and reached to the handle of the table drawer beside the sleeper. Pulling it open, she took out a small capsule that looked like a tube of lipstick. She lifted her bum and pulled her bottom outers down, spreading her knees. Taking the capsule in one hand she pressed one end against her inner thigh. A little green light flashed several times and she pressed the top of the capsule. Marty hated stimulants but she just didn’t have the energy to run. While she sat waiting for the drug to hit her system, she took a deep breath in and held it. The stimulant hit. She felt it coursing through her veins.
She put the capsule in her pocket and pulled her outers over her bum again. Time to run.
Chapter 29
Jonah and Mariko’s Beach House, Sisik Beach, Malaysian Geographic
Monday 6 January 2110, 7:13AM +8 UTC
I felt hopelessly out of my depth.
The sun climbing over the horizon seemed to be moving faster than usual, forcing its influence on the colors in front of me. The news over the weekend had shown me that I was outnumbered, outwitted and had little chance of success. The odds were stacked too high. How could I possibly convince people that a man sitting with the Secretary General of the United Nation could be a murderer and genocidal?
Although I had crafted Sir Thomas’s speech at the the UNPOL press conference, Sir Thomas had told me to include the Hawks name. That puzzled me at first. Why bring them into the spotlight? But then the more I thought about it, the more it made sense. Pre-emptively naming the Hawks as the terrorists was a smart move. Now, if anyone claimed that the real Hawks were a small cadre of highly placed officials in positions of power, the claim would automatically be rejected as propaganda from the terrorists. The opinion polls focusing on the Tag Law told its own story. The number of those for adoption of the Tag had increased to over sixty-five percent. Gabriel’s image was everywhere. On every feed and broadcast Devscreen in every city around the Globe.
Where are you my brother? I sighed.
“Hey, why so solemn?”
I jumped and spilled my coffee on the railing of the deck. Mariko laughed.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.”
“Yes you did,” I said, smiling back at her and reaching out with my arm, pulling her in close to me. I put my mouth close to her ear.
“I don’t think we can stop them,” I whispered. Mariko pulled my head down and put her mouth next to my ear.
“Let’s go for a swim. Bring your Devstick,” she whispered. It was high tide and the underwater cave entrance would be hidden. I smiled at her and went inside to get my swimmers and the Devstick. When I came back out onto the deck, she was already stroking hard for the point off the headland where the cave was. I ran down the beach, putting the Devstick in a side pocket of my swimmers, running into the surf as far I could before diving in.
The tide was still coming in and I had to swim hard through a choppy swell. I didn’t hurt as much from the running now and my times had improved every day. I was thankful for the training — if I’d had to swim in this swell a week ago I would have been exhausted by now. About fifteen meters from the headland, I dived and swum down till my eardrums hurt with the pressure and then aimed for the mouth of the cave. I surfaced in the darkness and swam to the wall with the ledge where we had sat before, reaching out my hand, feeling for it in the dark.
My hand touched Mariko’s leg and I felt her grab my wrist and pull me up onto to the ledge. I skirted my bum over and got a firm seat, taking the Devstick out of my pocket. I opened it and folded it out onto the ledge in between us. The light from the screen of the Devstick lit the cave. Mariko was squeezing the water out of her black hair, twisting it into a thick rope that reached to her belly button. She turned to look at me.
I sat back a bit farther on the ledge. All the warmth that she had shown on the deck had gone from her eyes. She looked the same as when she’d come out of my Env in Woodlands that day when we’d left to come to Sisik. I scrambled to think who she could have argued with.
“Mark. You can stop this defeatist bullshit right now.”
I started to speak, but she sharply held up the palm of her hand right in front of my nose. “No, not yet. I am going to say this once and once only because we don’t have time for another one of these kinds of talks. I called you Mark because that is your real name. That is what your parents named you. Your brother has not been captured and so far he’s run rings around Sir Thomas and his friends. And now he needs your help. Our help. This was never going to be easy and it was always for high stakes. The minute you opened that file on your Devstick you accepted this role. Let’s run our conversation from this morning in a different way. Let’s start with the premise that defeat is not an option. Now what do you have to say?”
I looked at her, feeling pretty low about myself. I looked into her eyes. They held no compromise. There was no easy way out there. I sucked power from those big green eyes of hers. Sucked it in deep. Deep in my belly, down by the base of my spine, the feeling grew. I breathed out heavily and drank in deep the salt air of the cave.
“All right. Defeat is not an option. However, it appears to me that the chance of success in stopping the Tag has been greatly diminished.”
“Agreed. Now what are we going to do to counter that?”
“The only thing I can see possible is to somehow figure out a way to block the Tag Law legally, but I haven’t come up with the anything yet.”
“Have you been researching that online?” she spat out with a horrified look on her face.
“Yes, but it’s OK. I sort of cleared it with Sir Thomas when we played golf. At least if I get asked why I am researching the law I can say it is to help him.”
Mariko blew out her cheeks. “Sheesh, don’t do that to me, please. Tell me more about this game of golf. What happened when you talked about the Tag Law?”
“I can do better than that. I can show you.”
“You recorded it?”
“No, Call did.”
“Who’s Call?”
“Call was the Devcaddy that Sir Thomas rented for me when we played golf. They can record your game so that you can study it later for improvement. I just asked him to keep recording at all times. Here, look.” I flipped the screen of the Devstick over so that she wouldn’t have to view it upside down.
She watched intently as I talked with Sir Thomas, the two of us sitting at the drinks stand. We were suddenly treated to a close up of the back of the wall of the stand until Call had emerged from the other side and refocused on Sir Thomas and I. The image zoomed in on the two of us and the sound was clear. Mariko nodded at me and I hit pause.
“Who’s this Annika Bardsdale?”
“I saw her on a newsfeed sometime ago. She was arguing, not very successfully, against the Tag Law on a panel discussion.”
“So you don’t know her at all?”
“No.”
“Perhaps you should. How about this for a short-term plan? You get together with your uncle again, as soon as possible, on the memoir. You’ve planted the seed of Annika Bardsdale so use that. What if you tell him that you’re planning to offer your services to her and you wanted to prepare him for the inevitable media fallout that will cause?”
“Why would I do that? I’ve already told him that I’m for the Tag Law.”
“So that you can betray their efforts at the last moment. You show Sir Thomas that you’re capable of doing that and he might just invite you into the Hawks.”
“OK, so that gets me next to someone who wants to stop the Tag Law but cannot, and into the Hawks. The only action that I can think of so far to discredit Sir Thomas is to expose myself as Mark Zumar. Suppose I had an independent DNA analysis done and requested, under a court order, that Sir Thomas had the same done, to compare. Even allowing for the fact that might take up to two years to get through the courts. He could easily corrupt the process somehow.”