“Buzzt! Wrong! Have you ever been to Haumea station? I have. I go every week. I know every ventchamber. I’ve watched our grandparents’ toxic crap sail off into space. There aren’t any corpses going through.”
“If not Haumea, then another invisible asteroid out beyond Neptune. It’s a big company, as you said. With infinite resources.”
“She’s alive!” Callum cried. “Now fucking let me go. I’m going to find her, with or without you. Do you want to know where your friends went or not? Because I’m your only chance to find out.”
After a long moment, Akkar nodded. Dimon sighed in disapproval, but bent down and unlocked Callum’s handcuffs.
“Okay, company boy,” Akkar said. “What do we do now?”
Callum rubbed at the red marks on his wrists. “Secret rendition, that’s what’s happened here, right? They’re all sitting in some deep hole somewhere: disused mine, hollowed out volcano, North Korea. We’re agreed on that, yes?”
“Yes.”
“Then there’s only one thing we can do now. They vanished down the rabbit hole. We have to dive in after them.”
—
The sun had set two hours before, leaving the Sydney skyline ablaze in neon and office lights. As always, Yuri hadn’t noticed.
“We’ve got movement, chief,” Kohei Yamada said breathlessly.
Yuri looked up from the screens on his desk to see his deputy leaning on the doorframe grinning excitedly.
“Movement?”
“Dimon just broke surface. Active ops is tracking him.”
“Now?”
“Yeah. We’re live!”
“Shit.”
The two of them hurried along the corridor to the active ops center. Omri Toth was duty operations manager. He gave Yuri a thumbs-up. “Facial recognition got him outside the Kintore hub five minutes ago.”
“Where did he go?” Yuri asked.
“He didn’t.”
“Show me.”
Omri gestured at Tarli, who was on one of the desks. Yuri peered at the main screen at the front of the room. It had a camera view of the Kintore hub: a hexagonal green-and-white tiled lobby with four portal doors, two for the town’s tiny loop, the other pair leading to the Northern Territory central hub.
“Seven minutes ago,” Tarli said.
Yuri watched Dimon linger just outside the entrance barriers, looking around slowly. The big man spent a couple of minutes observing pedestrians come and go, then left.
“Current location, hanging ’round outside twenty meters away,” Omri said in a bemused tone.
The screen switched to one of the hub building’s external cameras. Sure enough, Dimon was standing farther down Main Street.
“Kohei, get me the duty captain at the Northern Territory central hub,” Yuri said. “And put our armed response team on active alert.”
“Yes, chief!”
“And no national police. Let’s keep this in-house.”
He watched Dimon, who was still standing on Main Street. The man was wearing one of his charcoal gray suits, which must have been disturbingly hot in Kintore’s evening heat.
“Is his mInet using the internet?” Yuri asked.
“Difficult,” Tarli said. “I’ll put our G5Turing into the local servers, see if we can identify his digital signature.”
Boris threw a communication icon across Yuri’s screen lenses.
“Captain Dalager, the Northern Territory hub network security chief.”
“Okay, captain,” Yuri said. “We have some activity at the Kintore hub. A suspect on our critical wanted list may try to get through central hub. I need you to start shutting it down.”
“Sir?”
“You heard me. Let everyone currently in the hub go through, but close the barriers and every portal door to new traffic apart from Kintore. My authority.”
“That’s going to cause chaos!”
“I don’t care. Once the hub is empty, deploy the tactical response team to pick him up. I want him to walk straight into this eyes open.”
“Yes, sir.”
Omri was chuckling. “Oh, man, regional control is going to dump on you from a great height. You shut central, and you’re closing down the whole Northern Australian Territory.”
“The Hubnav app will throw everyone a route through the secondary networks; that’s why we have multiple overlaps. It’ll take people thirty seconds longer.”
“As long as I don’t get hauled in to corporate to explain this.”
“You won’t be. Now, get all our Kintore spy drones into the air. Do not lose Dimon. I don’t care about stealth. This needs to be wrapped.”
“Already launched.”
“Tarli,” Yuri said quietly. “Open a secondary cache, and copy all this operation’s files into it. My access only, not New York.”
“Got it, chief.”
“Boris, notify Poi Li we have a situation developing—”
“It’s him,” Tarli exclaimed.
“Who?” Yuri stared at the screen.
“Akkar. That uniform isn’t fooling anyone.”
Yuri felt his excitement building as he saw the tall eco-warrior walking along Main Street toward Dimon. “He wouldn’t dare,” he breathed. Akkar was wearing the brown-and-green jacket of StepSmart couriers, along with matching shorts. The company’s standard-issue canvas satchel was slung over his shoulder. His cap had a long peak which he’d pulled down until it almost touched his broad wraparound sunglasses. That, along with several days’ stubble, was possibly enough to confuse a low-level facial recognition program, but not anyone in active ops.