The Intruder (26 page)

She thought for a moment, slowly shaking her head. "I think Duncan's right that we shouldn't go public, but I don't agree with his end-game scenario. I'd be willing to wager that the conspiracy has a contingency plan in place, in case someone exposes them. If we went public, we'd play our only card and they'd beat us. And then there'd be nothing to stop them."

"But what could they say?" MacKenzie asked. "If Duncan showed the world what he showed us? How could they make people think it's a good thing to have government goons staring over their shoulders all the time?"

"Who knows?" Hanna asked, throwing her hands in the air. "People are sheep, you know. If you pull the right strings, you can make them think what you want."

MacKenzie didn't look convinced, so Hanna tried to explain. 

"I'm sure there would be a negative reaction at first, but people would start to settle back into their routines. Life goes on, after all. And then they'd start to realize that it didn't really matter. They hadn't been bothered by it when they didn't know about it, so why should they be now? 'And,' they might think, 'if this is how the government keeps the peace, so be it. It doesn't hurt me.' So, in a way, going public
might
play into their hands. They might be able to get popular sentiment behind them, and then there'd be no chance at all of stopping them."

"But Duncan can document that they've had innocent people thrown in prison," MacKenzie protested, "that they've murdered people who were politically troublesome, that they've ..."

"And who do you think the public will believe?" Hanna interrupted. "A sour Scot with a crazy story? Duncan will make his case, and then the conspiracy will come back with everything they've got -- all their spit and polish. And don't forget Miller. Duncan says he was mostly right, but now everybody thinks he was a fruitcake. They've rewritten history, MacKenzie. What's to stop them from doing it again?"

MacKenzie wasn't entirely convinced, but she knew Hanna's prediction was plausible. She was certainly right about Miller. Everybody thought he was a nut. Was that just the power of the conspiracy's public relations? Could they make black white and white black?

She shook her head and stared at the carpet. Hanna sensed her discouragement.

"Which makes it all the more important that we find a way to stop them now -- on our terms."

"Do you think we can? Really?"

"I don't know. Do you think David could kill Goliath with a sling and a stone?"

MacKenzie
grimaced
. "If our chances are that bad ...."

"Okay, okay," Hanna interrupted. "All I mean is that it's hard to predict the future. And what does it mean to have a 'chance,' anyway? If we win, then our odds were 100 percent, and if we lose, they were zero."

"You and that brain," MacKenzie said, resigning herself to the task. "So what do we do?"

"You, my dear computer genius, are going to figure out how to throw a wrench in their machinery, and I'm going to keep you out of trouble."

*
             
*
             
*

Jeremy spent the next 10 hours on his feet, walking the halls, talking to workers and looking for net spies. He actually liked the work. He liked meeting and interacting with such a diverse group of people, and he learned a lot about the culture he'd adopted. It was truly world-wide -- except for the communities, of course, and some hold-outs in Australia.

He also discovered that there was quite a lot more tension among the staff than he had realized. It was inevitable, he knew, that cliques would form in any large organization, but the tension seemed to go beyond that. It wasn't security personnel against support staff, or technicians against the lawyers -- there seemed to be distrust within each group.

On one of his trips he found the office supply closet. He hadn't spoken to the office manager yet, so he took the opportunity to go in and talk. He also slipped a plain envelope and a piece of paper in his pocket while the office manager wasn't looking.

"What do we use the paper for?" Jeremy asked the man, whose name was Henry.

"Not much," he chuckled. "Some countries have pretty bad links to the net, so old-fashioned mail is still the best way to go. And, of course, there's Australia."

"I wouldn't even know how to mail something if I wanted to," Jeremy confided.

Henry seemed to guess more than Jeremy intended. He grabbed a plain envelope and ran it through some kind of imprinting device, then handed it to Jeremy. The upper right hand corner had a miniature hologram of an eagle with the words, "U.S. Post Office, First-Class Postage" written in an arc over its head.

Henry put his finger to his lips, signaling Jeremy to keep it quiet.

"I've heard about you," he said. "People like you around here. When you want to mail it, just give it to me."

Jeremy nodded his thanks and started his battery of questions about trouble with implant communications. Henry, like most everyone else in the office, seemed to believe that the allegedly random glitches in hole communications were caused by "all this electronic gadgetry." Jeremy took everything down carefully on the notepad in his implant, but after finishing his survey he paused before leaving.

"Is there something else I can help you with?" Henry asked.

"Maybe," Jeremy said, "as long as it's off the record." Henry's head nodded, slightly, and Jeremy continued. "Sometimes I get the sense that I'm in the middle of a feud around here. Is there something going on in this office that I ought to know about?"

Henry looked down at the floor for a minute, then looked up again, with a serious expression. "Boy, there's always something going on around here. Nobody's called it a 'feud,' but that's not far from the mark."

Jeremy shook his head. "I don't even know what the sides are, or whose side I'm on."

"And that's probably why you're popular right now," Henry chuckled. "Aside from your natural charm, and all, I mean," he added with a grin.

"Is there somebody I ought to talk to?" he asked.

"You're talking to him," Henry said. "I'm not taking any sides, and I suggest you do the same."

"So who's Lenzke's girlfriend?" Jeremy asked suddenly.

Henry's smiling face became dead serious. "Ever read the Book of Revelation, boy?" Jeremy shook his head. "Read chapter 17," Henry said, and turned back to his work. The interview was over.

While Henry wasn't looking, Jeremy returned the blank envelope he had stolen and slipped back out into the corridor.

As he continued along to his next stop, he wondered if he would ever use that envelope -- did he really want to betray the agency to Hanna and MacKenzie? He also wondered what the Apocalypse had to do with anything. Was Henry just a nut, or was there some figurative message there? He'd have to check it out later.

But what about Hanna and MacKenzie -- and Duncan? They wanted information about the agency's work, and Jeremy wasn't sure which side he wanted to be on.

The government
was
spying on people. Hanna had convinced him of that fact. But so what? He had always assumed that to be the case anyway. He came into Society expecting government snoops looking over his shoulder. He also expected that Society's keepers were feeding the population a bunch of lies. For a short time, a few weeks ago, it looked as if that might not be true, and the promise of genuine liberty had exhilarated him, but now that he found that the liberty was restricted, why should he go on a crusade to correct it? By some twist of fate, he had made himself a comfortable living in Society -- the agency needed his talents, for the time being -- and as long as they weren't doing anything dreadful, why should he bother about it? After all, governments need to protect themselves. And it wasn't as if the population was suffering under cruel tyranny. The standard of living was high, crime was almost non-existent, the nation was at peace and people were generally happy. If a few of them were being watched in secret, so what?

That left Jeremy in an uncomfortable position. If he really believed in what the agency was doing, he should report what he knew about the opposition. In fact, if what the agency was doing was really in the best interests of the country, that made Hanna and MacKenzie dangerous rebels. He should turn them in. 

*
             
*
             
*

MacKenzie was in her element, now. Duncan had assigned her one of the most powerful workstations in the office, and she was pushing it to its limits. It had been a few days since she had the opportunity to work on any of her ideas about how to restore privacy to the hole. Her private theories had been floating around in the back of her mind in a disorganized way all that time. Somehow, that always helped her to work.

But now she had a double advantage. Not only had she been subconsciously working on the problem for days, but Duncan had brought her up-to-date on his work. She had spent the last two hours refining and re-tooling her ideas, eliminating false trails Duncan had already followed.

The sun was just coming up, now. Hanna crawled out of her bed and started looking for the coffee maker. She came through the passage from the row houses into the staff living quarters, which were in the back of Duncan's warehouse, but she couldn't find any evidence of coffee, except for a slight whiff, from time to time. It led her about like a will-o-wisp, but she couldn't find the source, and almost everyone was asleep. She was starting to get nervous.

She saw MacKenzie standing like a statue in front of her workstation. MacKenzie had that look on her face -- that far-away expression that Hanna called "genius mode." Hanna knew better than to disturb her when she was like this, but then she noticed the mug at MacKenzie's elbow.
The alarm clock
. Hanna suddenly remembered that MacKenzie had brought it along. Two minutes later she was standing beside MacKenzie with a large mug of her own, comfortably waiting for her best friend to drop back into the real world.

Hanna wasn't a third of the way through her pint of coffee when, just as if someone had thrown a light switch, MacKenzie leaned over and started keying in new commands.

"Good morning," Hanna said, knowing it was safe to talk now. 

"Hey," MacKenzie replied. "I'm on to something."

*
             
*
             
*

He took a deep breath to fight the effect of adrenaline as he saw the tall, blonde-haired man approach on the narrow forest path. He wanted to reach for his knife, just to be sure it was still there, but he didn't want to scare his prey. Weatherstone didn't make eye contact. He had seen Jeremy coming, but he looked down at his feet as they approached each other. 

"Jeremy," he said, lifting his head as they came within five feet. He still didn't make eye contact. "I'm so sorry about what happened to Amy," he said. Then the eye flickered and the images took their usual course: the knife flashed, his mother cried, the gavel came down in the council courtroom. Images and sensations filled his head: the knife, the bloody body of Weatherstone, the sticky, warm feeling on his hand, the sound of air rushing into a punctured lung, Dr. Berry's face, his mother, the twitching eye, the knife as he wiped it clean on Weatherstone's pants, a woman's eye, twitching, his mother, Amy, the knife.

He sat up suddenly in his bed and immediately reached for his pad of paper. It was getting easier now. The more he tried to remember his dreams, the more details he could recall when he awoke. "Weatherstone had an implant," he wrote.  

*
             
*
             
*

"Well, Mr. Mitchell, we need you to do your first field assignment," Peter said the moment Jeremy entered his  office. Two men were already there, standing behind Peter's desk. One was a technician -- Jeremy thought his name was Gary -- and the other man Jeremy hadn't seen before.

"There's one thing we haven't told you yet," Peter said. "But you need to know it for this mission. Not all the net spies are on the other side. We have some of our own."

Jeremy decided not to fake surprise. "I guessed that," he lied. Peter raised her eyebrows. Gary smiled, but the other man had no reaction at all.

"Very well," Peter continued. "You'll be working with two of our own and a few field operatives to sweep a city block. We want to make sure it's clear of any other net spies. And Mr. Mitchell," he said seriously, "our enemies don't always play nice, so we can't afford to either. Do you understand?"

Jeremy nodded. "I understand."

"This is Taylor," Peter said, gesturing to the man Jeremy didn't know. "He'll be the AIC on this mission, and he'll brief you on your orders. Do you have any questions?"

"No," Jeremy said. "But I'd like to talk with you privately."

Peter nodded and the two other men left the office. 

"I don't like being a rat," he began when the door was closed, "but I'm supposed to report any information that might be relevant to a security leak." The procedures also stipulated that this information should go to his immediate supervisor, who was Lenzke. Jeremy expected Peter to remind him of this fact, but he was too smart not to catch the obvious implication.