His drinking partner smirked, “Must have been some ride.”
The two were in a semi-private booth in the Blue Yonder, a local pub/club that catered to the Jetstream set. The place was still pretty much empty since most everyone was out looking for the man who’d gotten caught in the stream, but they were speaking low just the same.
Low for a pair who’d been ordering whiskey with lager chasers since late afternoon.
Not that either of them had said anything to incriminate themselves before a court of law, at least not as anything other than a pair of assholes, grade one.
The thing is, sometimes, there are worse things than the law to worry about.
Neither of them noticed the bartender making a discreet call after he’d served up the latest round.
Anselm Gunnar groaned quietly as he dug through the reams of shredded material that had been left of Ron Somer’s clothing and gear. They’d stripped the Para-pack themselves back at the crash site, and thrown it aboard a four wheeler at Gwen’s suggestion, so most of the stuff here was just his clothing. His harness was here also, cut by the doctors shears until it resembled a do it yourself kit rather than a fully assembled product.
Even if he knew what he was looking for, Anselm didn’t think he’d be able to find it in the mess that was left. If the gear had been cut prior to the accident, it was well and truly disguised now.
What he needed was a full forensics lab and experienced team to go over all the junk, but that was one thing that he just didn’t have. Maybe if he stepped on the panic button, but unless he wanted to bring in the team that was waiting for his order in Sydney, well he was on his own.
That left the altimeter to deal with, however. Anselm supposed it was possible that the device had been damaged in the fall, it certainly had visible damage from the fall. But he couldn’t see how that might damage the software, and the hardware seemed to check out.
That only left sabotage as viable option.
But why Ronald
If anyone, it should have been him, or Adrienne. Anselm had looked at Ron’s file, and the man was a lawyer. A defense attorney at that, not even a prosecutor. His only connection to Interpol was Adrienne.
Unrelated sabotage
Someone who disliked Ron himself Something that had nothing to do with Anselm’s investigation
It seemed unlikely, but he couldn’t discount it.
Investigating Ronald Somer’s `accident’ wasn’t part of his reason for being in at Tower City, but neither could he ignore it because it might be connected somehow. It wasn’t like Abdallah, however, and Anselm knew the man’s profile forwards and backwards. This smacked of an amateur, if it was connected, and that might mean that Abdallah wasn’t here alone.
Anselm shook his head, thinking about the variables that were plaguing him as he drew out his portable and began to record the state of Ron’s gear for the second time that day.
An Agent’s portable computer was a couple generations ahead of the average civilians in many places, and several behind in others. It had decent processing power, but not as much as the high end products sold to consumers of late so the compact computer had to offload a lot of processing requests to the Grid. The same held true of memory space, Anselm’s little pocket pal could hold over a terabyte of data, but that was paltry compared to what was currently available on the market.
In fact, in all the major areas by which the consumer market graded their electronics, Anselm’s computer wasn’t very special at all. Decidedly middle of the line, and it would be quite a bit under the `low end’ of computer standards before he’d trade it in on a new portable.
Anselm’s pocket system did do a few things that consumer models didn’t, however. It was hard coded with his biometrics, for example, literally built from the ground up for him and him alone. He was the only person on the planet who could make use of it, aside from the forensics techs back at the lab and they had to tear it apart to do anything with it.
It could record full motion video in High Definition, snap images on an OCD sensor that were well into the gigapixel range, and instantly broadcast those to Anselm’s network office where he always had a backup of any files he made in the field. It also scanned fingerprints, ran any of the software stored on the Central Police Network, and did any number of tasks that had once been strictly relegated to a lab.
For most people their Portable was a toy, an organizer at most, but for Anselm Gunnar it was as much part of his job as the gun he wore clipped to his belt.
One of the things it couldn’t do, unfortunately, was analyze DNA. He could type out blood samples, and do checks for gunpowder and such with it, but that wasn’t what he needed now.
Anselm made a note to check with Adrienne when she had a moment to see if Ronald had brought his own suit with him. If he had, maybe there would be some evidence on it that might be useful.
In the meantime he grabbed the shredded suit and stuffed it into a plastic bag he’d made the nursing staff give him, taped the bag shut, and scribbled a note on it.
Then he turned on the faucet of the sink in the room, and scrubbed off the micro-polymer second skin he’d sprayed over his hands to keep his own DNA off the suit. It wasn’t as good as a plain old fashioned pair of latex gloves, in Anselm’s opinion, but medical facilities had moved over to the Second Skin for most procedures a while ago, and Anselm didn’t make a habit of carrying rubber gloves wherever he went.
Abdallah Amir looked over the results through the powerful electron microscope and nodded in satisfaction.
It had taken years to perfect the idea he’d had so long ago, and almost as long to locate the perfect place to deploy it.
Well, perfection wasn’t obtainable unfortunately.
For best effect it would have been much more desirable to use an India or Chinese location, however neither of those countries had the desire or drive to construct a marvel like the Tower.
When Amir had heard of the project, it had been so long ago, his thoughts were that it was just another toy. Something that could only be dreamed up by people whose heads weren’t in the real world. Green power was all fine and such, but the limitations in placement of the concept made it inherently pointless for the places that used a majority of the world’s electricity.
Besides, Abdallah liked nuclear power plants. They had long provided him with the tools to wage his personal war.
When he saw the details of the Tower here in Australia, however, he knew he’d found something even better.
It was late by the time Inspector Dougal made it back to the city and went to the project medical facilities. She found Agent Gunnar waiting in the hall, talking over his portable and quickly moved up to him. He noticed her from a short distance off and said good bye to the person he was dealing with, flipped the semi-circular screen shut and slid the compact computer into a belt pouch.
“Hey,” She greeted him, “What’s the news on our boy”
“The doctors think that he’ll live.” Anselm replied, his voice grim. “No word on recovery time, or how far he’ll be able to come back.”
She nodded, rubbing a hint of beaded sweat from her forehead. “One of the response people found a box near where he fell, looks like some electronics but it’s nothing I’ve seen on any other thermies around here.”
Anselm nodded, his expression pensive. “I just heard back from one of my people in Zurich. He’s a computer specialist, and I sent him a mirror of Ron’s altimeter software.”
“And”
“Sabotage.” Anselm said grimly, “according to my guy someone re-coded the software with an altitude trigger. Basically it worked fine during all the pre-jump tests, but once it reached a certain height it began to introduce an increasing error into the system. The higher he went, the bigger the error.”