Brain Storm (US Edition) (7 page)

Just before she hit the ground there was a blinding flash of light and the grating sound of a static burst. Sara hit the dirt with a bump and looked up at the abruptly immobile security mech.

"Very impressive, Agent Fox. Of course if we hadn't hit it with an electromagnetic pulse just then you would be dead right now."

Sara slowly got to her feet getting her breath back and started knocking dirt off her outfit. "I was only trying to buy time for just such an event, sir."

Supervisor Marc Ash stood there looking her up and down, evaluating her. "I thought I told you to return to headquarters for a debrief?" he said at length.

"I heard the shooting and came to do what I could to help, sir," Sara replied. "I got the woman the malfunctioning mech seemed to be targeting to a pair of ECSIS officers back there. They should be taking her to HQ while we investigate what happened."

"If there is any investigation it will not be carried out by us, this is not an ECSIS matter."

"With all due respect this could be indicative of something we should be looking into. If the people who reprogrammed that mech have done similar things to others . . ."

"We don't know what happened here. All you are doing is imagining possibilities. After a proper
factual
investigation it will be determined whether this is something that we need to look into. That decision will be made by people rather more informed that you are."

Sara bit back a reply that would have landed her with a disciplinary hearing. Her supervisor was a bureaucrat first and foremost. She didn't know anything about his past, whether he had worked his way up slowly through the ranks to get to his present position or whether he had fast-tracked and got where he was today by astutely taking advantage of situations and sucking up to those in charge. The fact that he was still only quite young, Sara gauged his age at being late thirties early forties but the full beard he wore probably added a couple of years, indicated that
he had most probably arrived where he was by the latter route. Still he had come in at the forefront of the full assault on the terrorists just now proving that he wasn't all talk with nothing to back it up.

"Yes, sir."

Ash then offered her a rare smile. "You did good work today agent. You came to help sort out a problem when you could just have sat back and said that you had already earned your pay. That kind of dedication to duty is good to see, just be careful that you don't take it too far."

Sara smiled back releasing some of the tension that had started to build from the confrontation. "Thank you, sir."

"Dismissed agent, get yourself back to HQ for that debrief. And try not to get involved in any more action before then, your activities earn you enough in the way of bonus pay to take a sizeable chunk out of our budget as it is."

Chapter
Six

They slammed the door open and dragged her out of the tiny, barren cell she called home. The men who took hold of her seemed like giants. Their hands, covered by black gloves, seemed as big as her head. Where they gripped she would have  bruises the next day. To match the bruises she had already received on the previous occasions.

The men were walking too quickly for her to keep up on her shorter legs. The men didn't break stride when she tripped over her own feet in her hurry, they just dragged her along the corridor. Even though the tiled floor was smooth the friction between her feet and the surface was enough to open the wounds she had suffered on the other times that they had come for her.

They stooped at the end of the corridor as they always did and one of the men slid a key card  through the panel beside the door and entered the access code on the door's key pad. Like usual the man stood with his body obscuring her view of the pad as he entered the code. The thick metal door hissed open and she was dragged into the chamber. It was even smaller than her cell but they only waited inside for a moment, but that moment was the signal for the little girl to start being afraid. The fear started as soon as they came to take her from her cell but here, when she was on the verge of passing through into that den of torture was when the terror fully took her.

She struggled against the men holding her but she knew it was in vain. She screamed at  them to stop, to let her go but they never gave any sign that they had heard her. These weren't men, they were devils. Only a devil's heart could fail to be touched by the sound of a little girl
screaming in mortal terror. Only devils took little girls to hell.

When the door closed behind them there was a hiss of air and then the inner door opened. She was dragged kicked and screaming inside to her eternal torment.

***************

Carla woke to find herself laying on her back on a cold, hard surface. She was staring up at a plain dark ceiling with no features on it whatsoever, there weren't even any small cracks that she could make out in the dim light. In those first few seconds Carla had no clue what had happened that she would end up in a place like this.

Then in patches she started to recall. She had wanted to go to the memorial park to see if her friend was there, but there were terrorists in the statue in the middle of the park and the police weren't letting anybody through. Carla concentrated, why had she wanted to find her friend so urgently?

The terrorists
. Her friend might have been at the statue when the terrorists took it over and she had wanted to see if he was all right. She had tried to get someone's attention so that she could ask them about her friend, but the only attention she had got was from a security mech that had told her she was under arrest and then had tried to kill her.

Oh no
. It had all come back to her now. The security mech firing at her. The people falling like flies all around her as they were struck by bullets that were intended for her. She had been dragged out of that situation by a barely glimpsed woman dressed in black. Carla had thought she was saved but then she had been handed off to a pair of men who had stuffed her into the back of a van or something. And then . . .

Carla strained to remember what had happened after that but try as she might it wouldn't come. The next memory she had was of waking up here.

She wanted a better look at where she was being held. Perhaps she would see something that would let her identify who was holding her and why. With an effort Carla pushed herself into a sitting position. Swinging her legs off the edge of the concrete shelf that had been serving her as a bed. As soon as she did so she regretted it.

The wave of nausea washed over her all of a sudden. There wasn't time for her to look for anywhere better to do it, she had to throw up there and then. Vomit splattered the cement floor and spread into a puddle amidst other stains. Carla clutched her middle as her gut was wrenched by debilitating cramps. She kept trying to throw up even though there was nothing left in her stomach to expel. She dry heaved for what felt like hours. After a long while the cramps started to fade and Carla slowly tried to straighten up.

Her legs were unsteady and as she strove to balance she felt light headed and dizzy. She half expected to have to throw up again but the dizziness passed quickly. At first Carla had to use the concrete shelf to keep herself upright until her strength gradually returned. She used that time to look around and study her prison. It was a quick exercise.

The cell was about four
meters long by three wide. It was all the same color as the unstained sections of the drab grey floor. There was a plain metal rectangle on the wall opposite that Carla took for the door since there was no other break in the featureless walls. Faint illumination was provided by a small panel in the middle of the ceiling. Apart from the concrete shelf there didn't seem to be anything that resembled furniture. As she surveyed her surroundings Carla was struck by a weird sensation of déjà vu. She looked underneath the shelf and found a bucket that would have been useful to have had before she made a mess of her cell.

Further study revealed a small circular opening in the back corner of the cell up against the wall. There was no chance of escape that way though, she couldn't even fit her whole hand into the opening. It took her quite a while to work out that the hole was there for her to empty the bucket into. She was glad of the task though because it kept her mind from wondering about other things.

Like where I am, who has me. And worst of all what they are planning to do to me
.

Carla had never worn a watch regularly and had no way to measure the time except by her own dead reckoning. She didn't have a clue how long she had been unconscious and so there was no way for her to guess at what time of day or night it was. She gave up trying to keep track of time after what she thought was an hour and a half.

She started out lying on the uncomfortable shelf waiting for someone to come and get her. For something to happen. When she was bored with that she stood up to stretch her legs and paced around inside the cell.

She sat back on the shelf and pushed herself back so that her feet were off the floor and she could swing her legs back and forth. The smell of drying vomit started to get to her. Carla slipped off the edge of the shelf and looked at the crusty puddle trying to come up with a way of getting it into the drain. She could push it over with her hands or feet but then she would be left with it on her hands or her shoes and then the smell would go with her even if she was taken out of here. In the end she removed her shoes and pulled her socks off. She put her shoes back on over bare feet and then put her socks on over her hand to sweep the vomit into the drain.

She was only partially successful. In some areas the vomit had already dried to nothing but yet another stain. There was a trail of vomit leading from there to the drain when Carla was through. She had got rid of a reasonable portion though and so declared herself victorious. She took the sodden socks off her hands and put them on the floor and put the bucket upside down on top of them.
She had thought about stuffing them down the drain to join the rest of the vomit, but if they caused a blockage things could get much worse in the cell. Especially if she was forced to stay inside much longer. She kidded herself that her efforts had made the room smell any nicer.

With that exercise over Carla was back to just her boredom and her wondering. Needing some activity to occupy
her Carla started going around the cell putting her ear to every wall and the door to see if she could hear anything. She strained her ears but her greatest efforts only caused her to hear her own blood pumping through her ears.

She felt all around the sides of the door. She didn't know what she hoped to achieve by that but it was something to do. In the end she gave up and went back to
lie on the shelf.

Sooner or later somebody will have to come and feed me. If they wanted me dead they would have killed me already.

That thought only comforted her for a short time. Somebody had tried to kill her.
And
also,  if they didn't want her dead, what else could they want to do with her?

***************

Sara made it back to ECSIS headquarters without any further altercations which should please Ash. The European Confederation's Special Intelligence Service, abbreviated to ECSIS, it was an unwritten law that all such organizations had to be known by their initials, wasn't exactly a secret service. No attempt was made to hide where their headquarters were. In fact there was a sign with letters two meters tall that proclaimed which tall building in a city of tall buildings was their HQ. The building was even open to the public, they could just walk into the lobby, through metal detectors and other weapons scanners to make sure they weren't armed of carrying explosives of course, most of the buildings had them and there were mobile checkpoints on the roads. Sara just had to flash her ECSIS ID card to be allowed through them at any time of night or day.

But simply because the
organization chose to reveal one representation of itself to the public didn't preclude it having a large division that was secret. Sara never went into the headquarters building through the main entrance. She had never set foot in the lobby or any of the other floors above it. The ECSIS building had over seventy storeys above ground filled with people busy at work oblivious to the real work the organization carried out and monitored from the twenty or thirty levels under their feet.

The upper floors provided the visible facade of ECSIS. They were the ones who worked visibly with the police.
The ones that conducted official investigations. They did the more respectable, less morally ambiguous and dangerous jobs. The jobs where the chance of a major screw-up was low and so the operation didn't need to be deniable. The official ECSIS were good at what they did, but some jobs required more moral flexibility and less adherence to the laws which certain individuals tried to hide behind. The unofficial ECSIS handled jobs that were too sensitive to be made public, or jobs that the public might find distasteful.

              Sara entered the lower levels of the ECSIS building through the basement of the neighboring office building owned by a large law firm. The law firm wasn't simply a front for ECSIS, although it was controlled by them. It handled real cases for real clients and it was an invaluable source of information. Powerful clients would go in there thinking they had the usual attorney client confidentiality deal but everything that was said in those offices found its way either into official or unofficial ECSIS intelligence networks.