Autonomous by Chris Howard – Chapters 16 – 18
Inahn got Arckale out of lockup early because she wanted to see where he worked, hoping she would be able to gather something that would strengthen the alibis she was propping up for her client.
Plodding forward, Arckale eventually made it to his office, top floor, inside belt, with big windows that overlooked kilometers of farmland in the middle of the ocean. And it was all aquaculture space twenty meters below the hex barges.
Winderrill was the nearest thing to an alien world.
Standing beside Inahn, Arckale glanced across the stretch of green, then down at his feet on the smooth synth flooring, disappointed. He was allowed to move in his own space, but this space was no longer his own. In some painful way this was worse than concrete cell walls and steel bars. He would know what the limits were then. Somehow being forced to walk in the same footsteps that had been his for years—but now weren’t—hurt him.
Inahn broke the hold the pain had on him. “How long have you worked out here?”
He looked up from the floor. “When this started, Winderrill was fifteen platforms and eleven of them were wind and solar dedicated. We had one hex for the crew. Not me. I had to sleep in the gardens, being a patho.”
Inahn made a sour face as she pulled out her tablet, took some notes.
Arckale went on, “I remember the day I landed—Winderrill’s big enough now that you don’t say “come aboard”. You land on the thing, like it’s an island. Anyway, I had my tablet with me and sketched my first approach to Winderrill—Project One for the Open Ocean City Project org. Didn’t look like much then—a hex platform mesh being towed to the middle of the Atlantic, and with the sun coming back at us from the solars it was like landing on a damn mirror at noon. I could barely draw the thing without retinal damage. And we wouldn’t get the thorium salt nuke platforms for another year.
“There.” He pointed to an old print of his first sketch tacked to the wall, fading ink outlines of a grid of hexes on solid blue, the support tug out in the lead with a nice wake. “Talked the hover pilot into floating a few while I got most of that down.”
Arckale waved at the picture. “You have to hand it to the Open Ocean City and Knowledgenix people. At a big wad of dollars per platform—the standard agro and aquaculture platform—they were hooking them up as fast as they could build them—with extra power, crew and rec platforms being added yearly like charms on a bracelet. Our first real commercial establishment was a restaurant—Tania’s Noodle Bay.
He looked over at Inahn, gauged her interest. “Want to know when the real fun began? The first hundred-crew milestone, a hundred crazy people living and working on a giant agro-raft that was growing by kilometers in the middle of the Atlantic.”
Inahn nodded, although Arckale couldn’t tell what she was agreeing to or acknowledging, and decided not to ask.
He quickly tired of his old office, and led the way downstairs, his struct appearing to enjoy walking again, down to the ocean level and into one of the cross-Winderrill shuttles.
Inahn tapped her ear, and brought them back to the phone conversation from the day before. “That was your father calling yesterday? Biologic father?”
“Kidding? No. My real father. Ninety-four years old and still asking the tough philosophical questions. I hope to live long enough to plague my children with the same.”
Inahn looked away, whispering, “Me too.”
Arckale tried to reach out but the hydraulics growled and the carceral struct jerked his hand back. “Oh, sorry. I’m an idiot. I didn’t even think.” He just wasn’t doing enough thinking on the face of things, auto-running a couple of slacker threads of thought to run the show, make facial expressions, nod at appropriate intervals, keep him breathing. Inside, most of his head wrapped around the underlying disease pathology of the thing afflicting Inahn. It’s degenerative, very invasive. He was already working on alteration strategies—which always sounded the desperation alarm. Sometimes a patho couldn’t eliminate the bad guys, but he could change their course, point them at something else that wouldn’t damage the host.
He had completely forgotten about the four deaths he’d been accused of—blood and a birthday party, and the letters MM fingered in red on the wall.
Arckale and Inahn walked all the way to 231, the last of the old hex platforms, one side walled in concave concrete with metallic lines of stun stripping four meters up, and AP charges above that. He pointed. “This was the edge of Winderrill before OpenOceanCity and Knowledgenix bolted on the restricted reactor platforms, and soon after—because, hey, we had a god’s power out here in the middle of the Atlantic—a bunch of residential blocks and a new string of restaurants: the BKK—Break Kill Koffee and a few others surrounding the original Winderrill eatery—the one and only Tania’s.”
Arckale was gripping the warm washout barrier, and it brought up memories. He used to come out here to the edge, lean hard against the railing of 231, earth-the-ocean-world’s sharp horizon coming at him, nothing but open aquaspace for miles below, and something in him always wanted to take a step off the end of this three hundred square kilometer grid of farm barges, into the cool Atlantic, soft folds of Sargasso to hold him and carry him down.
It was the seagulls crying that always brought him back. They couldn’t follow him below the waves, and he could never leave them behind.
“They’re free.”
He heard them now, ghostly pale and chattering to themselves, a few piping plaintively overhead.
Inahn leaned close, running her slim brown fingers up the edge of her tablet, watching him carefully. “Tell me what happened, Arckale.”
He started right in as if he had been preparing for the answer. “I’ll tell you what I can remember. It was a party, and I knew everybody there. I wasn’t invited, I just sort of stumbled into it. Last thing I really remember I was coming down from some testing on 3348, over on the north side.”
“Really?” She was thumbing through files on her tablet. “That’s not mentioned here. Platform 3348. You were there into the evening? Is that confirmable?”
He shrugged. “I left my mark.”
She stared at him for a few seconds. “I don’t know what that means.”
Arckale held out his open hand—a little surprised when the struct let him. “Your hands get dirty from the fieldwork, and it’s tradition to slap your muddy print against the inside wall of the nearest tumble—the walkway—before leaving. I say tradition because even though Winderrill used to be a lot smaller—lot fewer platforms, it also moved around a lot, early reconfigs, that sort of thing, and it was easy to lose the platform you were working on yesterday. We make our marks every time we leave the field. Always have.”
Her focused sharpened, but not on him. “Okay, I’ll look into that. So, there’s this party…”
He looked up, faraway, recalling something. “Looked like someone’s birthday. There’s chocolate cake, candles, and everything.”
“And they were all alive when you walked in?”
“More than alive.”
She was frowning. “What does that mean?”
“Wilma Hertzog—been here since the beginning, even before me. She’s office manager for ag services. We call her ‘The Hearse’—she’s that serious, that grim, morticianesque. When I walked into this party, Wilma was dancing, and with some pretty good moves.”
“Morticians don’t dance?”
“Not that I know of. Met a few in the Service.”
“Then what happened?”
“I don’t know. Everything else, I guess.”
Her voice rose a little against a gust off the Atlantic. “You guess? There was blood everywhere.”
Blood doesn’t sound like me.
He was a quiet, no mess, fall down and don’t get up sort. He didn’t use his skills to send messages, express rage, make messes. “Blood can be created quite easily.”
“By someone like you. And you don’t remember anything else?”
Arckale tried to shrug, but it had become a disallowed motion. “I woke with these on.” Opening his arms to show her the wrist locks, making the servos hiss up the spine of the machine that made every move for him.
The more he heard about this case the less he thought it was him. “I can’t remember what happened, but I wasn’t breaking up parties and splattering rooms with blood. In fact, this is quite possibly the worst set up in history. Just look at my battle record, it’s all low profile BW operations—biological warfare. Hell, I cut myself shaving with bladeless razors. Come on. Pathos don’t do rage killings, we do catch your death when you touch that door knob. Or shake your hand. We do that really well. And during active duty I spent far more time mounting defenses, countering the BW actions of enemy pathos. That’s what’s built into me.”
There was a mass of bio-processing threads running in his head right now, rolling through the sequences of the chromosome-breaker agent that was going to kill Inahn. Arckale had pulled more than enough to work with during their handshake. He couldn’t stop it if he wanted to. That was him to the core—pathogenic detection, decomposition, demilitarization. Not bodies tossed about the room with blood painting the walls.
Still, he was curious. “What were the wounds like? What kind of weapon was used to spill all this blood?”
Inahn nodded, flipping through the crime scene report, not enough glare across the screen to hide the infoshapes, neat framed text, bullet-pointed lists of things, diagrams and dark blocks of images sliding by. She stopped a handful of pages into the report.
“I don’t think that’s been determined. No macro-weapon wounds is my assumption. Blood from their mouths, maybe cellular damage—which points to a patho. The bodies are all in full stasis quarantine. No one’s touched them, and Open Ocean City’s sent for mainland assistance. Be here in a few days.”
17 – Break the Pattern
Malcolm drilled out a slot through the plastic in front of Bartlett’s mouth so they could hear him when he decided to talk. The Director of Port Engineering Services had spent the night in pain, staring in the mirrors at what had become of him, the plastic face mask fogging up with his tears and rapid breathing. The impromptu surgery Nalli had done on his shoulder to remove his GPS implant wasn’t looking good, swollen, red around the edges. Malcolm changed the bandages, but didn’t give Bartlett anything for the pain.
Nalli grabbed one of the two-foot long, one inch-diameter dowels Malcolm was using to drum a slow beat through Bartlett’s mask, and proceeded to give the alleged Wolfsbane op five solid hammer blows to the plastic covering his face and back of the head. Startled by the sudden violence, Bartlett let out a scream—muffled by the open slot in front of his mouth to a thin plastic whine.
Malcolm shook his head, and backed off. Apparently Nalli was tired with his slow but steady progress in cracking Bartlett, offering him hope. That’s how he was playing this one. The offer of hope. The chance to walk away with his fingers, toes, face intact. The chance to see his wife and two daughters again.
The values people held like blood, like gold, the values these people surrounded themselves with…all part of Malcolm’s interrogation toolbox. There were training manuals and self-defense experts who advised kidnapping victims to fill in the conscience gaps with real stories and names, mothers, fathers, children, birthday parties, hoping to drive enough of a wedge into the conscience of the kidnapper to stay alive.
Malcolm welcomed that sort of knowledge. He would ask for it specifically. In his book, there were few things that brought fear to the surface more rapidly than asking a man to say his daughter’s name. Bartlett had already spilled his whole family to Malcolm.
Nalli grabbed the mask, shook Bartlett hard, shoving at the small but well-calculated slack Malcolm allowed in the cabling anchored to the walls, floor and ceiling.
Tilting his head up as much as the cables would allow, Nalli shouted in his rigid plastic face. “Who did you kill? Were you recently in Arizona? Canada? Why are you killing with such an obvious pattern? A then Z, then B and Y? Why not break up the pattern?”
Malcolm walked out, knowing Bartlett wouldn’t answer the questions. Not yet. The Wolfsbanes had multiple divided personalities. It might take days to break down the walls to the others, if it could be done at all without a lab and a significant research budget. The personality Nalli was railing against was a director level exec in a port services company. Nothing more.
Malcolm leaned against the wall just outside the room, rubbing his eyes, and didn’t bother looking up when Nalli moved like a hungry cat past him. She punched the wall, breathing hard through her nose, then turned her anger on him, pointing over his head.
“That worthless fuck was in Canada three days ago—in Vancouver where Zia was killed.”
Malcolm nodded, pushed himself off the wall, and came to her. “That’s fine. I expected some evidence of him being involved in at least one of the killings.” He reached out, put a hand on her arm. “But this guy is a lot deeper than this. Think of Raymond Bartlett as the mask the Wolfsbane op underneath wears—a nearly permanent mask that we will have to remove a layer at a time.”
Nalli spun on him, still angry. “And what? We talk to this piece of shit like he’s—”
Malcolm wheeled toward the sliding glass doors, following her gaze.
His focus started out at the horizon, the Bay, something that caught her interest in the “stunning view” promised from the balcony of his new condo. He reeled it in when something solid was blocking part of the sky. A killer in black, barely visible against the deep blue, crouched—balanced—on the balcony railing, twenty-one floors above the street, pointing what looked like a long black tube into the room. Malcolm had a fraction of a second to wonder about the wisdom of shooting a gun while balanced on a railing only inches wide, then noticed the black vertical lines of cables running from his shoulders into the sky where—presumably—a gunship hovered.
There was a pop, a sharp crack as something very fast went right through the glass and hit Nalli in the face. Another crack when it exploded. Then she was in the air, her hands in the process of swinging up to block something, her toes pointed like a dancer. Malcolm watched helplessly, turning to shout a warning way too late, mouth wide open and empty. Nalli seemed to drift by him, the shape of her face remaining, but everything else above her shoulders in runny dark fluid motion. It seemed to last minutes, the slow thud of his heartbeat like a fist against his chest, Nalli coming apart right in front of his eyes.
He screamed something that was supposed to be her name, reaching out for her, but the room shifted under his feet and she was flying away from him, thrown into the wall by her own jump for safety and the explosive round’s impact. Malcolm couldn’t find his balance, didn’t have time to look for it. He was falling backward, eyes squeezing shut as a fist-sized hole erupted in the wall next to his ear, plaster and sharp wedges of painted wallboard slicing across his arms.
Somersaulting backward, Malcolm ended up feet in the air, his head slamming into the condo’s front door. Vision blurring, he reached over his head, grabbed the doorknob and used it to get back to his feet.
That’s when all the glass in the sliding balcony door blew in. That also explained the faint slapping sound of a limpet charge adhering a moment before.
Twisting to one side to lower his profile, Malcolm yanked up his arm, bent at the elbow across the side of his head. You could get by just about anywhere bleeding from any place but the face. People took notice when a strange, quiet, or distraught man boarded a bus or hailed a taxi with a bleeding face.
He swung the door in, using it for cover as the killer on the railing jumped through the window frame into the living room, the soft punching noises of silenced rounds hitting the wall just behind him.
Malcolm ran, left everything behind, the prisoner in his custom plastic torture shell, Nalli dead, her body twisted unnaturally, one knee up by her shattered face and skull, her right arm folded too sharply behind her back, the hand sticking out at her hip on the opposite side of her body, fingers stabbing at nothing. Nalli, like a doll ripped apart, bloody, and thrown against the wall.
Malcolm jumped the stairs four and five at a time, slamming into the wall at each switchback landing, springing off painted concrete with both hands thrusting him into a spin to conserve momentum, so he could hurl himself down the next flight of stairs.
Never looking back, he crossed the courtyard at a sprint, cutting back through the north tower, heading for the freight entrance, the way he had come in.
The world, so solid a few minutes before, had turned to mist that threatened to drift off with the dawn. Nothing solid, nothing real, except the hard street under his feet, a serious question about the break in the killing pattern, and one name—the name of the other Wolfsbane operative identified by the Cons.
Nathan David Isenart.
18 – Long and Lat
Nathan Isenart thumbed in Tom’s number and the old trooper picked up after the first ring. “Hey, Nathan?”
“It’s a coordinate passing scheme. The numbers Valerie was keying in were her longitude and latitude, cut down to two six-digit numbers stuck together. A zero or one in the middle represented a positive or negative.” He glanced down at his own phone. “So 4295600707800 is 42.9560 north, minus 70.7800 west, which puts her right where she was killed.”
“So what was with the other set of numbers?”
“I think I have that worked out too. They’re just off the coast. My fairly certain guess? It’s Avi—stands for Active Vehicle Identification, her autonomous submarine calling her back every time she initiated a call. She was using this scheme as a homing mechanism.”
“Sort of a ‘hey submarine, where are you now’?”
“Right. And as long as Valerie kept calling it, the sub would continue to make its way back to her exact position—or close enough to be picked up, given the coordinates.”
“You’ve seen this kind of thing before?”
“Never. This doesn’t even fit with the rest of what I know about Bennefield. She was sharp. This seems like a total hack to me. Maybe something scared her and she just rigged it together.”
Tom sighed and came back with his usually wisdom. “Always a why.”
That was something Tom said repeatedly. Nothing was ever done without a reason—in Tom’s experience-filled book.
“Yeah, when I was with some of her colleagues at UNH I brought up the idea of Valerie using secret codes over the phone, and they looked at me like I was from a different planet.”
Tom made a small humming noise, intrigued. “Reason for her secrecy?”
“That’s what I was trying to figure out. Things were getting pretty tight around her projects, money promised, investments, DARPA involved at the grant level. I don’t think she was filling in her advisor—not with the details. She was keeping a lot of people in the dark, not because she thought her colleagues were thieves. I’m pretty sure it’s because she was moving fast, and just didn’t have time to slow down to tell anyone. I don’t believe it was because she wanted to keep data or project specs to herself. She doesn’t seem like that kind of person. But this was valuable stuff. Someone may have wanted it all, cutting Valerie out of the picture.”
“Yeah, I was afraid of that.” Tom sighed loudly over the phone. “The rest of this case is for someone else, Nathan.”
“That’s the way it’s going anyway. The office called. Hand everything over to North Hampton PD, get back as soon as you can.” He didn’t like the disappointed sound in his own voice.
“Good.” Tom seemed a little pushy, but Nathan had known him a long time, and it was probably the old man’s way of keeping him out of anyone’s line of fire. “What do you have on this right now? A research rival who hires a pro killer for a possible payout years from now?”
“Possibly.”
“This has to be bigger than some other grad student trying to cut in on the action. This was a hit. By someone with money and power. It was either drugs, money, or…a mistake.”
“The killer took out the wrong person? That’s unlikely.”
“It’s a possibility.”
Nathan threw back Tom’s own, “Always a why.”
“Yeah, yeah. Doesn’t really matter, does it? We’re talking about a professional hit, so you’re in over your head, Isenart. Leave it to North Hampton or the FBI org crime guys. Stick to computation, encryption, image enhancement, code breaking.”
“Thanks for your concern.” Nathan ladled in the sarcasm. “I promise I’ll be home for dinner.” He pulled in a deep breath, let it out slow and thoughtful. “I’ll hit up Detective Smiles one last time. I just want North Hampton PD to understand this communications piece. Could be the key to the whole case. Has to be.”
Tom went silent for a few seconds as if giving the coded communications a second look. “The long and lat thing doesn’t seem right to me.” He kept it serious, turning the talk back to the cryptic phone tag teaming, as if he really was determined to help get the communications part solved for North Hampton and get Nathan off the case as soon as possible. “Why not just encrypt all communication if it was about eavesdropping?”
“Shit.” It hit Nathan like a lightning strike. “But it’s not. This wasn’t about secrecy. It’s about location, room to maneuver. Using cell hardware gave her the sea-room she needed to change her plans. This has to be about location. Maybe she knew she was being followed, or feared that she might be. Or maybe she didn’t like the possibility of her sub falling into the wrong hands. This was a rigged up way to talk to her AUV—her autonomous underwater vehicle—and be able to confidently guide it to her no matter where she happened to be. It only responds to her phone number is my guess. She could feed it long and lat numbers for Cape Hatteras and take a ride down to North Carolina to pick up Avi if she needed to.”
“Whoa, hold on. So the sub is still out there? Waiting for her to call it home?”
“I think so.” Nathan looked through his windshield at the soft folds of the Atlantic curling into North Hampton Beach. “Somewhere.”
He could picture Tom shaking his head on the other end of the phone. “This was a professional hit. Do you think the shooter had the ability to intercept her phone calls to Avi?”
“Probably not. The stuff the FBI has access to is barely authorized—and certainly not approved of by your average citizen. But I doubt she’d spot a tail—well obviously not. She was followed to North Hampton Beach. Plus the shooter knew where she lived, and knew who she was.”
There was a pause on the other end, Tom typing something. He came back a moment later. “Where are you?”
“Sitting in my car, about twenty yards from where Valerie Bennefield was killed. I was just hanging around, thinking, and…letting go. As I said, got a call from the office—busy as usual, and I’m being moved off this case. Onto a new one. Happy now? I have a couple things to wrap up here. Going to head into town to talk to Smiles about borrowing Valerie’s phone, or at least the SIM.” The SIM—Subscriber Identity Module—was the little card in almost every phone, used by the cell carriers to identify the person using the phone. The SIM allowed the network to route calls to the right phones, and it could be swapped out or placed in a different phone to send and receive calls.
Tom made some noises that made it clear he was trying to make up his mind, and then came back with, “Right. I agree. It’s time to move on.”
Nathan could hear something different in Tom’s voice over the phone, but it didn’t match what he knew of the old man.
Tom was afraid.
“What is it?”
“I have a favor to ask first—before you leave it all to the guys with guns and move on to a case with computers, not killers.”
Nathan had to smile. “Guns? I consistently shoot in the top five percent. I don’t even practice. Drives the guys with guns batshit—the secret codes computer guy beating the crap out of their accuracy numbers every week.”
Tom laughed, thin and not very sincere. “Do a favor for me? Before you hand the case back to NHPD?”
“Sure, what is it?”
“Come out to the house, see me before you go to the police. I want to run another idea by you, something I can’t talk about over the phone.”
“Okay.” Nathan dragged out the second syllable. “Now I’m intrigued, but no problem. I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
Driving the point home, Tom said, “See me first, then you’re off the case.”
“What else am I going to do? Professional killers aren’t my thing.” Nathan started his car, tucking the phone between his ear and shoulder as he threw one arm over the passenger seat and looked out through the rear window as he backed out of the space at North Hampton Beach. “Talk to you soon.”
Nathan thumbed off the call and dropped the phone in the seat.
