Free She Is Risen (She Is Risen: The Gun Control Case Studies) by Travis Adams Irish Page A

looking
uncomfortably around the room, and then up into Henri’s piercing eyes.
     
                “What did Maxwell say!?” Henri demands, raising
his voice as if trying to command a domestic animal to start being wild.
     
                “He said ‘sure thing, we’ll be there before his
Viagra kicks in.’” Tom relays the insult with a nervous stare, as if being
forced to tell his own mother about his sex life. 
     
                Henri doesn’t say another word.  He turns his
wrist over above the green marble surface of the security desk, tapping the
material slowly with the top of his watch as if deciding how to reward this
insult.  After a brief pause, he exhales in a controlled fury, and then makes
his way to solid steel door, grabbing it with ferocious anger, and slamming it
so that his rage echoes through the deep hallways of the concrete building. 
     
                High on the solid, black catwalk of the OBDAT,
Maxwell and Lorabell are waiting for Henri, talking casually and sipping
coffee.  The large, black catwalk is the eyes of a massive datacenter project. 
Below them, there is heat rising from over twenty massive racks of servers. 
There are cooling units in the opposite corners of the room, both as large as a
two car garage.  These units also clean the air of dust particles, or any smoke
that might enter the facility.  The floor below is covered in immaculate, white
panel tiles that can be easily removed to run power or data cables. 
     
                Above the observation catwalk is a host of
seventy-inch, flat panel LCD displays, each of them showing crisp, high-definition
video surveillance from several projects taking place across the country. 
There are two rows of six displays, able to switch between a network of over
one-hundred-and-fifty high-definition surveillance cameras.                   
     
                “Great to meet you, Lorabell!” Henri Edwards
says with a dry smile as he approaches her and Maxwell on the observation
catwalk.  “Welcome to the OBDAT.”  He shakes her hand with a pleasant demeanor
after joining them next to the control panel.  “Oh, and Maxwell,” Henri
continues, showing his upper teeth and raising his eyebrows, “Tom gave me your
message… Fuck you!”
     
                Lorabell looks at the two men for a moment,
smiling at first, but then feels suddenly awkward, being caught in the middle
of this exchange on her first day. 
     
                Maxwell smirks in his typical demonic defiance,
showing a morbid disrespect for the aging Congressman.  In his efforts to
become ‘the bad boy of technology,’ Max Maxwell has completed the look by
breaking every dress code in the building.  His head is shaved and his eyes are
coated in thick, black eye-shadow.  He is wearing loose, white cargo pants, and
a black, short sleeve T-shirt with a ‘Grip Inc.’ band logo, and the word
‘Ostracized’ printed on the front.  His ears are pierced with stainless steel
studs, and he has black and red tribal tattoos running down both of his
forearms.
     
                “Anyway, moving on,” Henri continues, gesturing
for Lorabell to turn toward the screens, “we call this the OBDAT because it is
an Observation Datacenter.  All of the information you’re seeing on these
screens is collected and analyzed by the enormous computing power below us.”
     
                Lorabell stares with a bit of naughty excitement
at the two rows of large, colorful screens hovering just five feet in front of
her, and over fifty feet above the datacenter floor.  Her delicate, Asian
features display a knowing smile as she looks from one monitor to the next,
feeling a clandestine thrill for the voyeuristic aspect of her new job. 
     
                “We know you like to watch.” Henri declares with
a wicked smile, causing Lorabell to look at him