Beautiful Intelligence (28 page)

Leonora looked frightened. “We’ve been spotted?”

Hound replied, “Most likely an Algerian computer wondering why we’ve chartered a boat trip. State police, maybe. Can’t be too many private boats on the Med right now. Don’t panic.”

Leonora nodded. “Locate the pull source. De-spex if you have to.”

“Can’t afford to,” Hound replied, “not on a trip like this.”

Leonora sighed, concern plain in her face.

Hound turned his back on her. In truth, he was a bit freaked out. The last time he’d noticed an augmentation delay was one night chasing crims on motor bikes in Cairo, when the ancient, creaking, bureaucratic nexus almost fell over from excess real-time info pulls. But this was different. Sun up, everything worked at max efficiency.

He felt a tiny shiver pass down his back. This situation was
weird.

He whispered in their ears, “Spex off,” then went to stand beside the old man. A quick nexus query would see whether the info pull off his spex had a diabolic source.

It did not. It was extra-local.

Hound frowned. He did not have the time to design, then build and launch a probe into the nexus to locate the source.

He pulled the ladies’ hat brims low. Leonora’s face went pale. She received the message of that gesture loud and clear.

An hour later they arrived at Bejaïa. The augmentation delay receded, then vanished. At the eastern edge of the harbour they disembarked. Hound handed over five coins. “Nice knowing ya, dude,” he said.

The old man nodded, a look of relief on his face. “Peace be with you.”

Hound turned, escorting Leonora and Tsuneko into a shadow-strewn alley. There would be a market nearby – he could smell spices, leather, rotting food.

“Time to hide for a while,” he said. “A nice, covered market, that’s what we want. Man, and some coffee.”

Hound sought covered passages, then found them; they led into the butt end of the local market, slippery with rotting vegetables, grease and worse. The sun twinkled down through the rococo plastic twirls of the alley roofs. In a caf they found seats at the back, out of sight, where they ordered coffee and bread rolls.

“We safe?” Tsuneko asked.

He shrugged, then nodded. “Probably,” he said. He looked around the caf. A few of the locals had already clocked their rubber plas spheres. “Except we look like tourists,” he added.

“What about a station lock-up?” asked Tsuneko. “I heard a soltrain just now.”

Hound pulled a map to his spex, saw that the railway station was two streets away. “Let’s do it. Man, then scram. Already the locals will be broadcasting reports of new tourists to the local crim lords.”

He followed the spex guide to the station, paying cash for an ultra-secure compartment. Their stuff was safe now. But he still felt vulnerable. Bejaïa was huge compared with Annaba, where he had not been concerned about muggings. This city was different. He
felt
violence in the air. He could almost smell the gangs.

“We need to find a more... salubrious joint,” he said. “And quick.”

Leonora stood up, her coffee half finished. “After you,” she said.

They departed, walked on for a few streets, then halted. Utilising a nexus reference guide he worked out which parts of the shoreside city were best avoided.

“Look,” he said, pointing to an LCD map on a cab rank platform. “The district that the charity is in ain’t too far off. Quiet residential area, it seems. Let’s get a taxi there. Save time, save muggings.”

They paid cash to drive a kilometre or so, then hurried out into a local date palm park, standing beneath the fronds to avoid satellite eyes.

Hound pointed. “There,” he said. “I can see the roof of the charity building. There’s a big white stork perched on it. See?”

Tsuneko nodded. “What now?” she asked.

“Get a bit closer. Reccie the place. Wait ’til sun down.”

Tsuneko’s eyes flickered as she checked the time in her spex. “A couple of hours,” she said. She pulled her cotton lite around her body, then zipped it up. “Cooling down.”

Again Hound pointed. “See that old shed on the other side of the park? Probably a solbus shelter. We’ll doss there until dark. Man, I need to do some serious nexus work.”

They followed his instructions to the letter, both of them aware of the heightened security issues he now faced. A couple of the local cats came to investigate them. Tsuneko played with them awhile, but Leonora was too nervous to relax.

“You two get some shut-eye,” Hound said, nudging the cats out of the shed with one boot. “This is gonna take a few hours.”

His main concern was not the local police, the local crims or even the local madmen – his concern was Aritomo Ichikawa. An augmentation delay in broad daylight was too weird to ignore. He had to take some time to investigate it before the final stage of the mission.

First port of call was spy glitches. He used various perspectives to investigate the park, the surrounds, the city: authorities, police, local hackers, even a brat gang dealing in ketamines, who used the park as a handover location. Nothing. At least, nothing obvious. The park sent out a nul result. He then pulled a resume of his trip from Annaba, but here he had to be careful. If he pulled an entire trip resume, an observant nexus spy would notice; so he pulled the last couple of hours. Nothing.

Still he was not satisfied. He demanded an explanation of himself for what he had spotted.

He stood in the shed doorway and looked out over the gloom-shrouded park. On the railings he noticed the remains of old wi-fi aerials. He hacked into their admin portal, then ran a park scan.

There! A device. A single flicker of red in the sea of green.

But the park was empty of people. All he could see was date palms and railings around the perimeter – just grass, low bushes and a few piles of fast food packaging visible inside. Yet all three of the operational wi-fi modules detected a low level signal.

Quick as he could he arranged for a cam check. Various buildings stood around the park, some occupied (lights on, people shutting curtains), some of them dark. All of them had security cams sprouting from their eaves. These he used to instigate a sixty second patrol, so that his virtual eye viewed the park from every external angle. Nothing. He had expected to see a figure lurking behind a date palm, a shadow by a dustbin. But nothing. Just another nul result...

Okay. Time for a risk. He’d have to use ultra-precise positioning.

The nexus was based on geography, modelling where everyone and everything was. He took the electronic signature of the signal and GPS pinpointed it. There! Twenty metres south, maybe three or four west. Something lurked amidst the shadows.

He took out his flechette gun; armed it. Then he performed a deep analysis of the signal, concealing his actions by linking it to a PD-monitored armed robbery taking place a few blocks away. The spy device – whatever it was – was listed as new. Less than a day old. That was not good news. But then he spotted that it had never been re-set since manufacture. No Japanese professional would risk such an oversight, because of the possibility of old data – ‘new’ so often meant ‘reconditioned’ in the tech market. This result suggested a local crim and a genuinely new device.

He hesitated. He had to get out into the park and use his eyes.

He crouched down, moving forward step by step. The light was going – a while after dark. Distant police drones echoed as the armed robbery was busted. A distant helicopter sent
whup-whup
noises through the air.

He moved forward. Bushes lay close. In them, he saw a cat.

He froze. The cat stared at him. He was no cat-lover, but without hesitation he made clicking noises with his tongue against his teeth, held out one hand – slowly – to entice the cat. It stood still.

He stopped moving. The cat approached, centimetre by centimetre, until it was a handsbreadth away. Hound pounced.

The cat went limp. He’d expected it to screech and scrabble, but it flopped. He grabbed a pair of wire cutters from his belt bag and chopped off the collar. He dropped the cat, and it ran off at top speed.

In his hand he held a collar from which a sphere the size of a marble hung. He magnified the markings with his spex:
Silent B/Z/600 T-X.

Some kind of spy module. A local gang lord, no doubt. How the hell had that lord managed to train a cat? He dropped the collar and stamped it into the ground. It smashed into fragments.

~

“So you like cats, do you?” he asked Tsuneko when she woke up.

They were not amused by his nocturnal tale. “Was it Aritomo?” Leonora asked. “
Could
it have been Aritomo?”

“One in a thousand chance. A million. No way would Aritomo use a factory-set spy module. I mean, we know he likes cats, but, man, that’s ridiculous.”

“How can you be sure?”

“Did I say sure?” Hound replied. “No, I said one in a million. Listen to me. Imagine you buy a computer, or a mem store. What’s the first thing you do?”

“Reformat it.”

“Why?”

Leonora shrugged. “Viruses. Old information.”

Hound nodded, then pointed to the shed entrance. “Sorry if you slept badly. Man, it’s cold. But now we’ve got to see where Zeug is.”

Leonora nodded. “Then talk him out of whatever he’s doing.”

“That’s your job,” Hound replied.

He led them along back alleys to the street on which the charity building stood. He looked. The stork remained on the roof.

“That’s... interesting,” he said.

“Check it,” said Leonora.

He raised a hand. “Shush. You hear something?” He isolated the image of the stork in his spex, then enlarged it. “It’s squawking.”

“Hound, they do squawk,” Leonora said.

But Hound had seen this trick before. “Big, slow, simple animals,” he said. “
Much
easier to fake than a chimp or a corvid.”

“What d’you mean?” Tsuneko asked.

“I don’t think that’s a real stork. Do you?”

Leonora shook her head. “Analyse its noise.”

Hound obliged. The task was easy – use a cam on the building to record five hundred secs of stork sound, then send the aiff file off to a public lab in Algiers. The result came back within seconds.

“Artificial,” he said. “Repeating every hundred and twenty seconds. This is Zeug’s aerial, I betcha. That signal I first spotted is hidden in the noise somewhere. Cunning bastard! Man, he knows half the tricks
I
know.”

“You may have taught him without realising it,” said Leonora.

Remembering the events of the desert hike, Hound nodded. “Wish I hadn’t,” he muttered.

“What now?” asked Tsuneko.

“Indoors.”

“You’ve mapped it out?”

Hound rolled his eyes. “Course. We go in through the can. Man, I’ve found that’s most often got an open window.”

The two women looked at him with blank expressions.

“’Cos of the stink?” he said.

Using a cam opposite the charity building he ascertained that one of the ground floor lavatories had an open window. There was a covered route to it, crossing the road using an underground water pipe, then following hedges and a line of date palms to the building itself.

“Follow me,” he said. “Do what I do.”

They followed him in silence, crouching when he crouched, running when he ran, like ducklings following their mother. Two minutes later they were ready to enter, pressed against the side of the building like limpets. Hound listened. The can was empty, though he heard wailing patients not far off.

He flipped open the window to maximum, leaped up, then peered in. As he’d suspected: empty. He rolled in, the pulled the other two inside.

Leonora took his hand, then Tsuneko’s. “Remember,” she told him, “only you and me and Dirk know what Zeug looks like. It is very likely that the residents here believe Zeug to be human. He may have disguised himself.”

Hound grinned. “I’ll spot him, don’t you worry about that.” He took out a bolas-gun. “Then I’ll disable him gaucho style and we’ll take him to the roadside. I’ve set up a taxi call – driver thinks he’s waiting for a patient. We’ll fox him, then I’ll knock him out and drive the thing out of town. Man, I sure wanna get a good look at Zeug before we decide what to do next.”

Leonora nodded, so Hound led them to the can door. The corridor outside was empty. A map of the ground floor flipped into view via his spex. Red dots marked active cams, green marked security features (safes, com links, alarms) while blue labelled the charity’s nexus computers. All clear so far.

“Early morning,” he whispered. “Nice ’n’ quiet.”

He led them along the corridor to the door at the end, pausing when he noticed an optical port. Without hesitation he linked his spex to it, running a simulation of Zeug’s signal on the charity’s ancient AI-soft in an attempt to locate where in the building it might be.

A room on the map winked yellow. He smiled. The building’s computers, though they did not know what the signal was, had noticed and stored it. There it lay, like a minuscule pearl in a gigantic oyster.

“I got him,” he said.

He led the way to the room. They hid behind laundry baskets when a pair of blue-clothed nurses walked by. Somewhere nearby a patient screamed.

The door was labelled
Room 12.

“Ready?” he asked.

They nodded.

“Use the stun crackers I gave you... man, that’s if anyone stops us. This place is quiet as a boneyard. Stun grenade – emergency only.”

“Ready,” said Leonora.

“Ready,” Tsuneko echoed.

The door knob was round. Hound turned it. Locked. He took a deep breath then karate-kicked it. It swung aside on ruined hinges.

He span, ran forward, pointed his bolas-gun at the figure standing inside.

“It’s Zeug!” he said, firing the gun.

At once a flock of faces flew into his spex. Japanese faces. Zeug whirled on one heel, his arms and thighs locked into place by the weighted ropes tying him.

The faces peeled off like fighter jets, vanishing into virtual space. A voice sounded in his spex speakers.

“Do not kill the AIteam. Leave them to me.”

Hound whirled around. Two Japanese men stood at the door. Shoving Leonora and Tsuneko inside, they raised and fitted the door to its frame, then sealed it with ultracaulk.