Free With These Eyes by Horst Steiner Page A

tell Tonati was nervous.
Instinctively, the pair headed for the kitchen and moments later,
went through the open part to the outside. The buzzing that sounded
like the propeller of a small plane or perhaps a helicopter was
coming from somewhere in the sky above her house. Isabelle scanned
the evening sky for its source, but it was to no avail.
    Together, Isabelle and Tonati walked the
property. Isabelle headed just outside the front gate where she
looked up and down her street. The monotonous hum of the overhead
drone was drowned out by the roaring of car engines. Several of the
cars that had been following her appeared on both ends of the
street and came racing towards her with their engines revving high.
Isabelle turned around and headed back to her front yard. She
pushed the close button for the gate and heavy wrought-iron
separated her yard from the street. The cars were still coming
closer but their engines were running quietly and their drivers
adhered to the neighborhood's 25 mile-per-hour speed limit. Woman
and puma returned to the house. On the way, Isabelle grabbed a
couple of starfruit and a mango for dinner.
    It had gotten cold quickly without the warmth
of the sunlight. Isabelle closed the large glass doors and the
granite island's partition. A quick look around the interior of the
house confirmed what their instinct had already told each of them:
there was no one else in the house. Isabelle returned to the
kitchen. She had left the starfruit and mango on the counter on her
way in. She fixed her dinner much like she had prepared breakfast.
Cooking, especially with food she had harvested in her own garden,
was an important part of Isabelle's life. It gave her time to
relax. After all, water can only boil so fast: a pace much
different from traffic or chasing a story. This day, an elaborate
dinner preparation would help Isabelle focus her thoughts on
solutions to her obvious troubles. It gave her a chance to discount
the possibility that any of this posed a real threat. Tonati wasn't
bothered much by the buzzing from above. His thoughts were on
Isabelle and the dinner he knew she was preparing for him.
    Unbeknownst to Isabelle, the cause for all
her problems wasn't far at all down the street. By the side of the
road was an Apophis Library Bookmobile . Tasha had changed
vehicles and with the help of her Troopers was busily following
Isabelle's every move. Rather than the curved main screen of the
cement mixer, the bookmobile offered a multitude of flat-screen
displays in a wall array. One of Tasha's Troopers sat behind a
digital cockpit, piloting the source of the constant buzzing above.
The drone provided an infrared view of the interior of Isabelle's
house. The command post's main view-screen revealed the heat
outlines of Isabelle and Tonati in the kitchen. As the drone
circled the house, the steam rising from one of the pots on the
stove obscured Isabelle's image slightly with its heat plume.
Isabelle's cable box afforded Tasha a view of the living room. Via
their built-in wireless interfaces, the robotic floor-mop and
vacuum cleaners generated a crude floor plan that showed any moving
objects detected by their sensors. Virtually anything that ran on a
microprocessor had come under Tasha's control and was serving as
some sort of surveillance device.
    A screen profiled when lights and appliances
were used and Isabelle's channel surfing and Internet patterns. A
section of the display identified Isabelle as a threat to the power
structure, listing her as an “energy terrorist”. Her behavior
patterns from the time of day she went shopping to her reading
habits were applied to a terrorist's template. Several of
Isabelle's activities fit that profile despite her complete lack of
such involvement. For Tasha, this was all she needed to be
convinced that Isabelle posed an aggressive threat to the future of
Apophis and to her own existence. She was determined to stop
Isabelle from going any further.
    A bit of time had