Scale, p.21
Scale, page 21
“They really are idiots,” Loretta said bitterly. “You’d think they were trying to make our job harder.”
Genevieve said, “I bet there’s a struggle going on in Wendale right now, between people who want serious talks with us, and people who only want capitulation. We only see the result when the second kind win, but that doesn’t mean our kind have stopped fighting.”
“So how do we make our allies stronger?” Pablo asked.
Genevieve thought for a while, then shrugged. “Win,” she said. “Win against the enemies closest to us, the ones we know best, and it can only strengthen the people far away, fighting against the others.”
Chapter 34
Jake wasn’t sure exactly which parts of the submarine were off-limits to him, so he played it safe and rode in the cabin where the guards were holding Shane and “Mollinson.” Shane kept glowering at him, and mouthed the phrase “ten guards” several times, but Jake was hoping there’d be less danger of him deciding to scrap the plan and do something rash if he remained beside him, making it as clear as he could that the two of them were still in this together.
One of the guards, Axel, turned to Jake. “What did you do before this?”
“Security work,” Jake replied. “But not in Mauburg. Glasford.”
“Glasford?” Axel was taken aback. “That’s a long journey. At least a day, right? Even if you did it in one stretch.”
“Yeah.” Jake had no idea, but that sounded about right.
“I couldn’t handle that. It would be like being a fucking prisoner on the train.” Axel glanced at his own captives and smiled, as if he expected them to be tickled by the comparison.
“I had to get away,” Jake said, hinting at a dark secret that couldn’t possibly be revealed in a casual conversation.
“I knew a woman whose family came from Glasford,” Axel said. “But they took four generations to get here. You really put some distance between yourself and the old place. What happens if you want to visit your parents?”
Jake said, “We can still talk on the phone.”
“If that high speed rail really happens, you could go back and forth in ... maybe an hour,” Axel mused.
“That would be something,” Jake replied, trying to inject some of his genuine homesickness for Mauburg – or just dry land in general – into his voice.
As he turned away from Axel, he noticed Mollinson regarding him with skeptical amusement. Jake didn’t think they’d interacted at all during the initial stages of the ambush, but if this man found it so obvious that Jake didn’t work for Spotlight, he might have taken the trouble to let his comrades know when they were beating him and tying him up.
An announcement came over the public address system, but between the sub’s echoey acoustics and some form of specialized lingo being employed, Jake could make almost nothing of it.
Axel noticed his confusion. “They’re going to send up an antenna on a buoy and talk to Mauburg before they decide where to dock. We might be landing somewhere out of the way, so it could take a bit longer to reach than usual.”
“Okay.” Jake wondered exactly what else the radio operator would discuss with Spotlight. While the people in head office would have known something was wrong when the truck failed to return, this would be the first they’d be hearing about the attack on the base. There’d be a lot of ground to cover; with any luck, there’d be no room at all to mention a new employee who’d lost their paperwork in the ruckus.
“How long have you been doing this?” Jake asked Axel. He would have preferred not to risk talking at all, lest he trip himself up on some aspect of the business that even a newcomer would have been thoroughly briefed on, but failing to reciprocate Axel’s polite interest would just make him look cagey.
“It’s coming up to sixteen days,” Axel replied. “I go right back to the wild times.”
“These aren’t the wild times?”
Axel laughed. “We’re just turning into D7’s army, now. I’m talking about snatching a Scale One woman off her boat—”
One of Axel’s colleagues was giving him a warning look. Axel said, “I should save that story until you’ve had your clearances re-issued.”
Jake nodded. “By then, I should be able to trade you my escape from module B without losing it completely.”
“That must have been rough,” Axel conceded. “I wasn’t here when they were building the whole thing, but I talked to some of the engineers who were.”
“Yeah?”
“You know they towed out the modules with people inside them, to work the machines that helped them align the connections?”
“The engineers who designed them,” Jake asked, “or some poor suckers who had to take the risk?”
“Mostly the engineers,” Axel replied. “They really put themselves on the line. I’ll introduce you to some of them, when we’re back in the base. You know they all think they’re going to the moon?”
Jake said, “I want my high speed rail first.”
Axel grew serious. “Sure, but it would be sad if they ended up too old to make it. They’ve given us a lot; they should get to be a part of everything that comes from it. All the things that people only dreamed about before.”
“Yeah.” Jake didn’t really have to fake his admiration; he had no doubt that many of the people who’d made the first breakthroughs for G8 had been genuine idealists – and that there was still a chance for everyone to benefit from what they’d done. It was the whole mess of pre-emptive secrecy and political power plays feeding off the transition that had made it so fraught.
The sub had been quiet for a while, but now the engines started up again. Jake assumed the navy would have ships in the river by now that could track them with sonar, but even if the dock they were approaching could be pinned down in advance, there’d be a lot more than three sentries guarding it this time.
He closed his eyes and pretended to doze off, as much to help him focus on his plans for getting Shane home as to dissuade anyone else from talking to him. Turning the possibilities over in his head was easier when there was nothing else distracting him, but he was glad he was sitting in a room with the actual participants. There was nothing like the presence of the guards with their lethal firearms to scuttle any fanciful notions that he could just punch a hole in the side of the truck taking them back to Mauburg and jump out onto the road, dragging Shane with him, and the two of them would sprint off into the distance before anyone fully grasped what had happened.
The public address system emitted more incomprehensible noises. Jake opened his eyes and yawned. Axel said, “Let the shore leave begin.”
While the guards were busy with their own preparations, Jake went up to the loading bay. A bridge, much like the one he’d helped the hijackers deploy, was sliding into the entrance. There were at least half a dozen trucks waiting, and more sentries gathered around them than he could count. The bay was full of crates that had been brought in from the base before he’d boarded; he had no idea what was in them, and wasn’t inclined to take the risk of asking.
When the first truck drove into the bay, workers wheeled over a hydraulic lift to raise a single crate and put it in the truck, which then departed with its cargo bed still eighty percent empty. Jake supposed this could be a matter of distributing valuable items in a way that would make it harder to steal them all, but when the second truck was loaded he paid more attention to the way the tires and suspension responded. Empty space notwithstanding, the truck simply couldn’t have borne more weight. As it was, the bed must have been specially reinforced to take a whole crate full of Scale Seven rifles. Eventually, the vehicles themselves might be upgraded to carry five times as much, but not until the roads of D7 were all upgraded too.
The prisoner escort arrived in the bay; Mollinson and Shane were gagged and hooded now, as well as shackled. Jake contemplated trying to get close enough to Shane to whisper a couple of words to him, promising him that he hadn’t been abandoned, but the guards were too close. The only thing that could help now would be actually living up to his commitment.
Six guards went with Mollinson into the fifth truck; the rest boarded the last one with Shane.
“Are you coming?” Axel asked Jake.
“You sure there’s room?”
“Of course there is. And it’d be a long walk into town.”
Jake climbed up into the back of the truck, and sat beside the crate of weapons. Shane was almost opposite him, head bowed low, shoulders hunched. He was wearing a belt that the guards had clipped to a reinforcement bar. No one was going to be leaping out when the truck paused at a traffic light.
“Cover the window,” Axel told Jake. Jake drew the shutter across it; they couldn’t see outside at all now. “Don’t worry,” Axel said. “I’ve told the driver where you need to get out.”
“Thanks.”
The truck drove slowly out of the bay and across the bridge. When it reached land, Jake could hear the sentries talking and joking among themselves; whatever they’d heard about the hijacking, they sounded confident that no-one would pull off anything like it again.
He could feel the truck speeding up, only to slow down again when it crossed onto an ordinary road. “Pretty sure I could walk faster than this,” Jake said, only half joking.
Axel nodded at the crate. “Hit a bump at high speed, and that could go sliding.” The crate looked like it was strapped firmly in place, but Jake could appreciate the need for caution.
He listened to the guards talking among themselves, but they gave away no clues about Shane’s destination. Eventually he began to hear traffic sounds nearby, and the truck went from merely slowing now and then to halting completely at crossings.
Then the truck stopped, and someone yelled from the cabin, “This is Spotlight.” As Jake rose, Axel cautioned him, “Make sure no one can see the kid as you get out.”
“Sure.”
Jake opened the back of the truck no wider than he needed, then slipped through and closed it. The truck was parked right outside Spotlight’s office, in the middle of town; there were workers on their lunch breaks, and shoppers all around them. Jake stood staring at the back of the truck, all his crazed fantasies about grabbing Shane and dragging him to safety resurfacing. Would anyone really fire on them, with so many witnesses? But the belt clipped to the body of the truck made any rapid maneuver impossible, and once he lost the element of surprise he’d be so outnumbered that no one would need to use their weapons.
The truck wasn’t moving; there was a line of vehicles backed up ahead of it, waiting for a light to change. Jake stepped onto the footpath, and saw the driver glance his way. If he didn’t enter the office immediately, would the driver find that suspicious? Maybe. It didn’t seem worth the risk.
Jake walked in, closing the door quietly behind him, then stood in the lobby, trying to judge the time until the truck was sure to have moved on. The receptionist – the same one who’d been at the desk the last time he visited – looked up and said, “Oh. So they did hire you?”
Jake shook his head. “The manager never called me back. I was thinking of trying again, but ... maybe I should just take no for an answer.”
The receptionist smiled politely, but he looked even more bemused than Jake’s irritating presence warranted. “I know they hired you,” he said, gesturing toward Jake, as if the evidence for this claim was written across his face. “Who was it you wanted to see?”
“Never mind,” Jake said. He turned and walked out; the truck was gone, but it was not yet out of sight.
It was moving slowly enough that he didn’t need to make a spectacle of himself to follow it; he just looked like someone rushing to keep an appointment. But as he wove his way through the crowds, the receptionist’s odd assertion stuck with him. I know they hired you. Why would anyone think that? Jake had left his own clothes back at the base, but the ones they had provided him with were not a company uniform. Or at least ... there was no logo, and the colors weren’t identical to those the other Spotlight employees had worn. But the cut and the fabric had been the same. They’d all come from one source. And whether that constituted a deliberate code that was meant to facilitate recognition, or it was just a consequence of some bulk purchasing decision, if it was obvious to the receptionist that he looked like he’d been hired – when in fact he had not been hired – it might not take long before this observation led to someone linking his name to the nonexistent Gabriel Levy.
Jake tried to stay focused on the truck. It was heading north, toward the Town Hall, but he didn’t want to rely on that assumption; he needed to know exactly where Shane ended up. As he crossed the street and glanced to his left, he saw some kind of earthmoving equipment being deployed over the border in D6, but he didn’t stop to try to make sense of it. The crowd was growing thicker, and people were finding it harder to move out of his way, however willing they might be to defer to the apparent urgency of his mission. But he was keeping up with the truck, even as sweat dripped down his face and the shoppers he was inadvertently elbowing were starting to look anxiously down the street in search of whoever was pursuing him.
The truck arrived at the Town Hall, driving across the courtyard and then backing up to a side entrance. Jake took out his camera; he was sure he saw guards moving a shackled figure from the back of the truck and into the building, but he couldn’t get a clear shot through the crowd. He slowed as he drew nearer, worried about being seen now. After half a second, someone brought a hydraulic lift up to the truck and carried the crate in. Then the truck drove away.
He found a phone booth and looked up Elaine Beckman’s number. “This is Jake Palmer,” he said. “I think I know where your son is right now.”
Whatever anger she felt about his long silence, she hid it well, giving him a chance to explain what had happened. When he’d sketched his and Shane’s misadventures, he said, “Can you meet me at the police station? I think we’ll have better luck getting them to act if we go together, to back each other up.”
Elaine said, “I’ll be there in fifteen seconds.”
Jake stopped at a water fountain to slake his thirst, then waited outside the station. When Elaine arrived, she seemed to be having second thoughts. “Is this the right way to help him? I don’t want Shane to go to prison.”
“I’m not going to lie to the police,” Jake said, “but I can leave things out, if they don’t ask me directly. You hired me to find your son, and you showed me his photograph. I believe I saw the person in that photograph being taken into the Town Hall in shackles. That’s all they really need to know. The Town Hall isn’t private property; they should be able to search it without a warrant.”
“And when the police show up there, all the accusations against Shane will come out,” Elaine fretted.
“Maybe, maybe not. Either way, they have no legal right to hold him. And even if they start spinning some story about hijacked submarines, I doubt they’ll have the evidence on hand to have him charged with anything immediately, and they’ll be too busy worrying about their own kidnapping charges to make it a priority.”
Elaine still looked dubious, but she said, “All right.”
They walked in together. Jake gave the bare minimum version of their story to the officer on the desk, who wrote everything down then asked them to wait.
“I’m going to kill his uncle,” Elaine whispered to Jake as they walked over to the benches.
A second later, a woman approached them. “I’m Sergeant Benson, Missing Persons.” She was carrying a folder; she took out a sheet of paper and showed it to Elaine. “This is your original report?”
“Yes.”
“There’s nothing here that would make us think that your son has been caught up in the recent political developments.”
Elaine said, “I don’t know about anything political, but Mr. Palmer says he saw Shane at the Town Hall, and I have no reason to doubt him.”
“But is there any reason that they might have detained him?”
Jake said, “They have no right to detain anyone.”
Benson turned to him. “I said ‘reason,’ not ‘right.’”
“I know what I saw,” Jake replied, trying to sound emphatic without becoming combative. “And whatever this kid got mixed up in, I hope we can agree that a private security firm doesn’t get to lock him up.” It seemed prudent to keep quiet about the Scale Six soldiers; for all Jake knew, a dozen diplomats were hard at work negotiating their release, but regardless of their situation, they couldn’t be allowed to set a precedent.
Benson said, “All right, then. Let’s go and take a look.”
As they followed her out of the station, Jake felt a surge of optimism. He didn’t think Benson had even had time to phone the Mayor’s office to ask for their view on the matter, so she’d be arriving unannounced.
There was a Spotlight employee with a rifle standing by the main entrance, but Benson walked straight past him to the reception desk. She showed her badge, then said, “I’m conducting a search of this building for a missing minor named Shane Beckman.” She opened the folder she was still carrying and took out a photo of Shane. “Have you seen this boy?”
The receptionist was flustered. “No,” she said. “Do you want me to ... ?”
“I don’t want you to do anything,” Benson replied. “And please don’t call anyone and tell them we’re coming, or you’ll be charged with interfering with an investigation.”
The receptionist stared at her, dumbfounded.
Benson turned to Jake. “Mr. Palmer, could you do me a favor?”
“Yes.”
“Go outside and watch the side entrance.”
“I can’t stop anyone from leaving,” he said.
Benson said, “I know. But you can see whatever happens, and maybe get a photograph this time.”
“All right.” He exchanged glances with Elaine; she seemed to accept that the strategy made sense. He didn’t think Benson was playing them, and Elaine was every bit as capable as Jake was of deciding if the search was thorough. He would have preferred half a dozen officers conducting a sweep of the building, and another two blocking the exits, but on the basis of the limited evidence they’d provided, Benson was probably giving them about the best response they could have hoped for.
