The guards that were posted in the emergency room left him alone, their job wasn’t to keep people from wandering around, and they were there to help the doctors with trouble patients and to detain anyone showing up with suspicious injuries. Joshua was neither of those, so he ghosted past them without a second glance.
It was after he’d passed his third `No Admittance’ sign that Joshua began to move more cautiously, eyeing the path before he tread along it. As he past, Joshua took mental notes on the activities he saw but noted nothing that appeared out of the ordinary. The radiology lab was apparently understaffed, a harried looking secretary didn’t even look up as Joshua walked past like he was going somewhere specific.
He was going somewhere specific, of course, he just didn’t know where yet.
After several minutes of wandering, either ducking security guards and hospital staff, or confidently striding along like he knew where he was going, Joshua came to a dead end in the seemingly never ending array of off white hallways that sprouted from the central corridor.
He frowned, turning half around and looking for another option, then flipped open his Portable again. The fan shaped screen unfolded in its peculiar origami fashion, and in a few seconds he was looking over the schematics again.
The official hall ended here, exactly where it was supposed to on the project plans, but the radar scan from orbit still showed a continuation for another hundred meters.
Which, at the moment, made it Joshua’s eyes and the official plans against the satellite data.
Normally Joshua Corvine was inclined to believe his eyes over electronic data, but this one time he wasn’t willing to give up quite so easily. If he was right about what was going on, under the magnificent tower that loomed far above him, he had to find the tunnel that the computer insisted was there.
Everything led back to the Tower.
Anselm let himself into the administration offices under the tower greenhouse using the electronic decryption program in his portable, moving through the empty space like a wraith in the night. The lights, in keeping with the power saving theme of the entire facility and, indeed, community beyond, were all powered down to absolute minimal levels, leaving only emergency lights to dot the hallways every twenty meters.
That suited Anselm well enough, as he’d already had to access into the security Wi-Fi network and blur himself out of three security cameras. The dark would help make that job easier. Luckily, the advances of Augmented Reality had given police a great deal of tools to use for just such an occasion. Of course, that was largely because criminals had developed them years earlier.
Editing a man out of a live video feed took processing power and, of course, unlimited access to the system the feed was being relayed through. The closer you could access it to the origin of the video, the better. Since he was currently using a superuser account built directly into the Tower’s security software, he should be pretty much invisible to anyone watching.
The personnel offices were just up ahead, and that was his first destination. He needed to make a hard copy confirmation of the digital information he had already `acquired’, then he would move on to the director’s own office and do a quick scout to check for anything out of the ordinary there.
What that was he didn’t know, but this wouldn’t be the first time in his career that Anselm went on a purely speculative fishing trip.
The code lock that led into the personnel room was simple enough to break, its encryption key the same as the doors that led up to it, and Anselm quickly let himself in and closed the door behind him. Like most major corporations the Tower project still kept reams of hardcopy on all its day to day business, despite the gradual takeover of electronic means to record the minutia of the office.
The sheer mass of those files was represented in the eight huge cabinets that confronted Anselm once he had secured the door behind him. The Interpol man’s heart sank as he sighed and moved forward to begin working his way through the mass of paper.
It was never as easy as it looked in the movies.
After almost half an hour, Joshua had given up. The corridor may, in fact, go on past the wall in front of him, but he was convinced that there was no clever catch to make it swing or slide open, no hatch that would let him go under or over it. It was exactly what it appeared to be, a solid wall at the end of a corridor.
This meant that while the tunnel might go on, he wasn’t getting into it from here.
The CIA man began to backtrack, moving back through the more populated and active sections of the hospital and working his way back out.
He’d wasted enough time on that dead end, and now needed to find another way to his goal as his time continued to dwindle away.
Joshua wandered through the halls of the hospital facility, head down as he buried himself in the data his portable was now spewing out concerning the Tower project and its construction, looking for all the world like a harried doctor or administrator, trying desperately to catch up on his work.
For all that, however, he wasn’t any nearer to finding the missing key to his puzzle by the time he had exited the facility and was standing by the Monorail terminal once more.
He reexamined the information on his portable, taking time he didn’t really have in order to get it right. The key to accessing the deeper corridors, getting into the hidden facility within the facility, had to be there.
The NRO keyhole satellite had fed him real time images using thermal, though that was basically useless due to the entire dome of camouflage above him, and radar, and then overlayed those with data from overhead radiation sweeps. Other than the tunnels not listed in the official plans, there was nothing at all.
There had to be something down there.
Joshua was certain of that, he just couldn’t quite fathom what. Raymond Gorra, AKA Abdallah Amir, wasn’t here on vacation. He was a wanted fugitive in fifteen countries, an international terrorist, and for any and all of its faults, Australia wasn’t one of the nations that harbored such. In fact, Joshua figured, hiding out down under was one of the more spectacularly stupid things a man like Gorra could do.
And yet, he’d done it.
What was worse, it had somehow worked.
How long had Gorra been here was another question. If he had been here the entire time since his supposed `death’, he’d been spectacularly successful in laying low. Even dead, his picture was still on the walls and computers of too many police agencies for the man’s comfort, Joshua was sure.
He had to be up to something, and it had to be important enough to risk hiding out in a country that was just as likely to ship him off to the States as a terrorist, as spit on him.
Yet the overhead sweeps had detected no radiological hot spots other than the hospital’s own radiology room, which had been checked and cleared already.
Joshua Corvine hated mysteries, but he had a hell of one on his plate now.
To solve it, first he had to get all the information, and to do that, he needed to find a way into those hidden tunnels.
The CIA man flipped back through the ground penetrating radar images, looking for another way in.
Interpol was going to owe him overtime, Anselm decided as he carefully replaced a thick file folder with the personnel information on Director Jacob.
The file was thick, meticulous, boring as an accounting course, and a total fabrication from top to bottom.
Anselm closed the cabinet, flipped his Portable shut and pocketed the electronic device. He’d scanned the files in their entirety, the relevant ones he could find at least, and had already backed them up to his Interpol network hard drive. They would establish a clear line of evidence if he had to prove conspiracy on the part of the Tower project, though he hoped it wouldn’t come to that.