The Grief Team (3 page)

In the next second, the two blond Wildkids—twins, Gordon realized, as he saw them up close—fired their zipsticks at the same time.  A sharp cry of pain momentarily preceded the intense, pungent smell of burning human flesh. Gordon fell against the display cabinet, dead before he finally slid onto the floor. 

He was spared the agony of witnessing the murder of his wife.

And the abduction of his only child.

The Director of the Grief Team was a reluctant passenger onboard the Mall’s cocktail-and-indoor-barbeque-circuit, gatherings which Gabriel Kraft loathed and attended only when he could no longer find excuses that would satisfy his father, the Mayor. He complained of wasted time, time better spent monitoring Grief Team operations and watching Toronto Nation as it went about its business; time to fine-tune his daily timetable much as a craftsman might tinker with the delicate mechanism of a fine watch. Elias, Gabriel knew, didn’t sweat the details in his performance of his mayoral duties and that meant someone had to crunch the numbers.  Someone had to maintain the integrity of the Stream. Enter Gabriel, the apple of his father’s eye and the true product of his father’s loins, which was saying something in these days of manufactured offspring. 

Elias, however, as Mayor and pater familias, had the authority to order him to attend whatever-and-whenever-he-wished. And he didn’t mind insisting at least five or six times a year. “You’re their protector, Gabriel,” Elias had said again last week, in between bites of a Bammo! sandwich-built-for-two, so big it needed handlebars. “You have to be seen. Otherwise people get the idea that you’re hiding something.”

Hiding something. Too fucking right
, thought Gabriel who, privately, always felt himself to be sitting on a time bomb with no idea how to defuse it. Yet he always appeared composed and utterly affable whenever he was in the company of Elias. He moved placidly amid the noise and haste, and nothing that Elias ever did managed to shock him. Known for his outlandish behaviour and give-’em-hell bonhomie, Elias’ recent drunken striptease at the Mango Lounge had been incredibly funny after all, and Gabriel had laughed as loudly as the rest of the Mayor’s drunken electorate. Elias, responding to taunts of ‘shake that thing!’ had done exactly that. For some reason, the citizens of Toronto Nation loved him for it, seeing in his excesses not the fall of Rome but the sustenance of the grape and the good life.              

Gabriel had been raised under his father’s corny, antiquated Maritime tutelage and that of Mayor Dickie, another East Coaster, who had been his second, equally loved ‘father’ until his death ten years ago. Quite naturally, Elias had been elected as the new Mayor of Toronto Nation, a hand-picked successor to the man now revered as the Father-of-the-Malls. In the immense shadows of such popular men, Gabriel had learned to make his own space. In such darker recesses, he had thrived on manipulating the Stream, the ubiquitous descendant of the old Internet, until its waters flowed in any direction guided by his will.

When he was eighteen, his blessed mother Margaret had expired in yet another plague mutated out of Jeffrey Meilgaard’s demonic replicating virus. Elias, and through him his son, miraculously possessed the gene which resisted each plague (thus far) and which kept them alive. Margaret Kraft had not been so fortunate, yet even now her presence was still felt in the small, warm apartment high in the E.C. on ‘A’ complex which Elias shared with his son.

“Are you hiding anything, Gabriel?” Elias asked abruptly, pausing in his futile attempt to lash a vivid red tie around his vast neck. It was Tuesday, close to six o’clock, and one of those rare occasions when father and son were actually together in the same place at the same time.

Gabriel fielded the throw out of left field as cleanly as he always did. “I’m hiding my contempt for your choice of tie.”

Elias had spared a quick glance at his son. “That’s a polite way of saying it looks like shit. Dogs’breath, son, there isn’t a tie in this mall that would look good around this neck.” 

That was probably true, given the three folds of fat which it had to circumnavigate, but Gabriel had no quarrel with his father’s physical size. He had long ago accepted that Elias was determined to live the kind of life that he wanted to live. Good food and lots of it! Good sex and lots of that too! Let-the-good-times-roll! 

Gabriel accepted it as he accepted everything. Self-determination, of one kind or another, had to be admired after all was said and done.  And self-determination in Toronto Nation was the stuff of life, wasn’t it?  Millions—no billions!—had died in the attempt to prove otherwise. All the same, Gabriel was thankful that his own trim features reflected the athletic side of his mother’s family.

“Tell me about Gordon Latimer.” Elias had given up on a bastardized Windsor knot. He slung the tie across the small apartment, reaching for a Western string tie instead. He’d purchased it in Calgary when he’d gone west as a teenager to see the Stampede and get laid. Cowtown was now as hard to find as those adolescent years.

“You’ve heard.”  In Gabriel’s precise tones, it had been a simple statement of fact. He knew that Ferria d’Mont, his father’s assistant, had informed Elias only an hour before. Elias knew that he knew, of course, it was just his way of approaching a potential problem. 

“I mean, tell me about him. You knew him fairly well, didn’t you?”

“No, not really. Met him at parties you forced me to attend. He appears to have led a rather normal life on the third floor. I can’t imagine a Director of Crematoria leading anything other than a discreet existence really. Wife, child, one playmate, standard Stage Two parental apartment in F complex, Priority 3 for rations...he had nearly twenty credits stashed away at the Royal Bank so he obviously was saving for something. My guess would be a planned move into D, or maybe even C, complex. By all accounts, a well-liked individual. Mr. Ordinary really, except for the fact that he burned people to ashes for a living.”

Elias had smiled at that, a big beaming red-faced smile which every one of the 16,135 mall-voters knew on sight. Elias was nothing if not popular and he didn’t stint when it came to injecting a little humour into the situation. Some of his dirty jokes, particularly those broadcast on Mall TV, were said to have peeled the laminate right off the sets, but no one ever held it against him. Elias, of course, with his trademark comic leer, would immediately have declared that he very much hoped that at least some of the women would “hold it against him.”

“He asked for a meeting with me.”

Gabriel concocted mild surprise. The Stream had reported that fact moments after Latimer had dropped it into the waters. “How well did you know him?”

Elias waved five fat sausages in the air before slapping them on his broad chest, making the metal-tipped ends of the Western tie jump.  “So-so. Across a desk at meetings. Capable man. Good provider. Shame about his wife and child. Always thought his wife would look good under me. Guess I’ll never know what he wanted.”
              And with that, Elias shifted his considerable bulk towards the door, already thinking about opening several of the large tins of beluga caviar promised at the reception. An incredible find in the storeroom of a delicatessen on the Danforth by a Grief Team member, one who knew the Mayor’s appetites and who had earned himself a healthy couple of credits as a reward. Caviar! Elias licked his lips, hoping that someone would remember to provide those little crackers he liked as well. There would be some serious scoopin’-’n-’chewin’ going down tonight!

Gordon Latimer, whatever he’d wanted, was no longer worth thinking about.
              Several hours later, Gabriel had had ample time to dip into the Stream to retrieve the bits-and-pieces of Gordon Latimer’s existence. His office, the central hub of video and electronic consoles in the Grief Team’s operations centre at the top of the E.C., was his second home and he was adeptly assembling the information on Latimer. The ex-Director was, unlike so many of his clients, not a broken man wandering into a Crematoria reception centre bent on purchasing a deluxe package. Latimer was efficient, capable, and insofar as Gabriel could tell, utterly competent. Other than the discreet request to see Elias, and there were dozens of those every week from the mall’s citizens, there was nothing.

In the back of his mind, a niggling thought...one that had as yet not crawled its way onto the open tactical battleground that was his consciousness. Gabriel relaxed and let it float to the top. It arrived as a disturbing surprise.
Had Latimer somehow cottoned on to the problem in the Embryo Centre in Cedarbrae?
An immediate threat assessment: highly, highly unlikely. Latimer was a merchant of death. He spent his days thinking up new advertising campaigns, appeals designed to bring people flocking inside those shiny metal Crematoria doors where his staff of thin-lipped lizards in formal undertaking garb stood waiting. They did their best to seduce those shopping for termination into purchasing something extravagant. And if extravagant wasn’t in the cards, the next best thing would do. A sale was a sale was a sale in-and-at the end.

Gabriel sat up straight, pulled his locator-bar into range and began tapping the keys furiously. Rivulets of information began to move across the screen. He slowed, merging his consciousness with them, nudging the flow, wooing it until it was thick as rich cream. Crematoria files began to pour across his monitor: names of client-suicides, expense reports, projections for fuel consumption, updates of the all-important Endlist; millions of bits of data flowed inexorably in what was, Gordon mused, a river of death.

Minutes later, the Director of the Grief Team sat back in his chair, dumbfounded. Exactly how Latimer had known was yet to be determined, but there it was: a notation in the deceased’s personal notes, buried deep in the Crematoria’s database and thrice encrypted. 

Emb.Cedar?

That was all. Nothing more. But it was enough to send a jolt along Gabriel’s spine.

It appeared 44 hours preceding the tragic events in the Children’s Mall. There were no other references.

Gordon Latimer knew!

No...wait!
He suspected was a more logical determination. Gabriel used his right index finger to sink the notation out of existence, knowing instantly that Bluebands would have to be sent to F level in the Parents Block to scour the apartment. In another thirty seconds, he had made the arrangements and dropped them into the Stream. As far as the ex-Director of Crematoria and his lovely wife was concerned, what they would never know wouldn’t hurt.             

Meanwhile, there was the issue of the unlocked door in the E.C. to deal with. Gabriel tapped his consol twice and the report unravelled. He glanced at it cursorily, his mind still dealing with the Latimers.

I’m sorry about your wife and I’m sorry about your daughter,Cathy.  She’s with the WildKids on the Outside now. We picked her up on the vidkams on top of the Tower and as far as we can determine they wasted little time streetsmarting her. Poor little thing.

She would spend the first few days crying for her parents, wondering why she wasn’t being catered to anymore. It wouldn’t take her undersized, feral captors long to serve her in the straight-forward biological fashion; age never was a barrier to the more instinctual matters and there was no doubt that Wildkids were only capable of four functions (in random order): eating, sleeping, fucking, and killing. Sometimes, Gabriel mused, you just have to shake your head and wonder. Still, stocks were high and SkyDome was operating close to capacity. And it had better be, Gabriel grimaced, while I figure out what to do about Cedarbrae.

The Grief Team was proficient in its duty inside the walls of SkyDome, where reports of daily events flowed along a tributary of the Stream available only to Gabriel himself. With a flick of a switch, he terminated the report flow on the unlocked door, satisfied that the officer responsible had been terminated, and blocked the Stream. There were other more pressing matters and, to be truthful, he could not help Cathy Latimer other than to monitor her progress from time to time...if she survived and if she happened to wander in range of a vidkam. She might. The ‘Kids were pretty random in their selection of food and they might see some sense in keeping her with them as long as she didn’t hold them back. Too bad really. On the other hand, if she survived, there would always be the ever-ongoing sweeps by Grief Team to avoid. There was no question of returning little Cathy to her former existence in the E.C....once Outside, it was Outside forever. 

Gabriel leaned back into his chair and sent the castors reeling to the other side of the hub where the Exchange was being monitored. A practiced eye scanned the numbers, missing nothing, intuitively assessing each trade being registered across the globe. He paused as new figures from the Zone were downloaded. He’d been carefully tracking the data flow, noting signifiers, catching the rumble that something was in the works. It had been hectic all day: someone had been moving chunks of shares and Gabriel smelled a major transaction underway. The size of the flow whispered Celts but the latest figures out of Lindisfarne disputed that. It was unlikely that they possessed the necessary credits to deal with Toronto Nation. No, Gabriel surmised, more likely they were fronting for the New Deutsches. Whoever it was, someone in Lindisfarne was getting ready to open an offer for 200 units. The Swedes? Gabriel dipped into the flow and found what he needed on the ticket order. Blonds and blondes. Of course!  

A month before, special Outside units of the Grief Team had conducted a particularly successful sweep in the old Richmond Hill area, snagging dozens of WK’s. Reports to the Centre from the field team had been specific: all blonds, no dyes, minimal radburns. The rumbling in the Zone was probably a preliminary diversion by the Swedes as they shifted their holdings into dummy accounts, the better to plead for reduced rates from Toronto when the time came. The Swedes would buy all right, they needed the population in the worst way after the last virus.