Free Tag - A Technothriller by Simon Royle Page B

our beach cottages is that right, sir?”
    “Yes, that’s right. As near to the sea as possible, OK?”
    “Yes Mr Oliver, thank you. So we’ll look forward to seeing you around lunchtime then.”
    “Yes, thanks, and save me some of that fish for later,” I said. His face broke into a grin and he gave me a thumbs up as I cut the call. I felt better. At least I was doing something, moving. It had to be an improvement on sitting around brooding over the circumstances I found myself in. I looked across the room at the clothes racks by the sleeper, and frowned. I didn’t have any clothes that were suitable for the beach. Everything I had was either formal or smart-casual. Do clothes define a person? Probably not, but they do tell you a lot about someone’s lifestyle, and mine spoke volumes. The last time that I had taken any time off, ‘self-time’, was when I had just arrived in New Singapore from the Scotland Geographic. All I ever do is contribute and sleep a dreamless sleep.
     

Chapter 9
     

The Gang of Four
     
    UNPOL Headquarters, Deep Trace Operations Room, 188th floor.
    Thursday 12 December 2109, 10:00am +8 UTC
    Martine Shorne was the eldest in the team– ‘The Gang of Four’ as they were unofficially known: Marty, as she was usually called, plus Dom, Fatima, and Stanislav, the boy from the Urals Geographic. Together they traced the untraceable. They got the cases that others found impossible, and Case #JM-2109 was somewhere out there beyond impossible. But there was always something.
    They had been given the case at 4:45pm yesterday, six days after his escape. They’d heard about the escape along with the rest of the planet’s population by mid-noon on the Friday when it had been released to the newsfeeds globally. The news quickly became the most commented upon topic online and off.
    Marty had gone over the entire timeline and absorbed all the data. It amounted to nothing. By the second degree of separation, everything disappeared. The lead from the tip-off that led to the raid, the capture, transportation to New Singapore, the footage of the interviews, containment, and finally the clouded-out, gas-filled image of the black hole in the wall of the White Room and the blunt cylindrical rear end of the mole.
    The Devcockpit they’d recovered gave them nothing; neither did the Mole, found six kiloms away in a warehouse in Old Jurong Port, and completely destroyed with a magnesium bomb. She smiled: she had to admire the planning and execution. Altogether it was a work of art. From the fake mines in the tunnel, the collapsed roof of the tunnel three-quarters of the way down, to the electromagnetic pulse mines that had destroyed the remote control bomb disposal units, it was all beautifully planned and flawlessly executed.
    The sixteen grade one illegals had also disappeared, their PUIs a complete falsification. She knew they were dealing with someone brilliant, but then the 'Gang of Four' were pretty stellar too, and now it was their turn to play. Trace Operations had its hereditary roots in the profiling of serial murderers by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in the twentieth century; their primary role being to predict where the accused was and what they were likely to do next. They played ‘what if’ all day and often all night long until they had worked out what was the most plausible course of action for any given individual, group or event. In a sense, they made predictions. In another they were fortunetellers, but a far more sophisticated truth is that everything they did was based on intuition, insight, experience and derived from fact. They also loved a challenge.
    They had half a floor of the northern tower of the UNPOL Complex to themselves. Two thousand square meters of cool rubberized black floor space. The walls were Devscreens and the ceiling appeared to be whatever they wanted it to be, on any given day. It was a huge Devscreen separated from the floor by a height of fifteen