Heaven is a Place on Earth (14 page)

They walked back to the flyer together, hunched up against the cold, Stanthorpe wind. The sky had clouded over while they were with Kelly Ahn and rain was threatening. Rafe did not like the idea of walking around wet in that icy wind.

“
I should go back and thank her again,” Ginny said.

“
For what? Anyway, you thanked her enough.”

“
What's she going to say to Derek, do you think?”

“
Look, if you think there's any way they'll give you a contract after this, you must be off your head.”

She sighed, looking miserable. “She thinks we're terrorists. She'll probably call the police.”

Rafe didn't think so. “She knows better than that. She's not stupid.”

“
She said the designs showed where to attack the Parliament worldlet. She said they sketched out ideas for bypassing the security.”

“
And she was smart enough not to ask how we'd come across them, or what we intended to do with them.”

His companion was a huddled ball of misery as they trudged along, following the bright green arrows through the darkening cold. He could feel unhappiness radiating from her. “At least we know what these are now,” he said, holding out the cylinder and the box.

It had taken Ahn no time at all to work it out. She took the back off the box, peered inside, shut it up again, handed the cylinder to Ginny, and pressed the button. The world went crazy. The inside of the old church became a wild jungle. Sounds and scents assailed Rafe. He couldn't see anyone else, the undergrowth was so thick. He shouted out in alarm and suddenly the world was normal again. Kelly Ahn's two children started crying and the nannybots whirled about them.

“
It generates some kind of mass hallucination,” Rafe had said, recovering from the shock.

“
But not for you, eh?” Ahn had said to Ginny. Rafe looked at the cylinder in Ginny's hand as understanding dawned.

“
You've seen these before?” he asked Ahn.

“
Heard about them. Crims use them. Makes robbing a bank easy if everyone else is seeing things that you're not.”

“
We're not crims,” Ginny had said.

In reply, Ahn had looked pointedly at the bulge in Ginny's overall where the handgun sat heavily in her pocket.

“I should go back and explain,” Ginny muttered, trudging into the biting wind. “I should tell her everything.”

“
You'd only put her in more danger than she's in already.”

They walked in silence. When they reached the building with their flyer on the roof, Ginny said she needed a pee.

“Well, there isn't anywhere.” Rafe had grown grumpy and resentful from listening to her unreasonable whining and the unrelenting cold wind. “You should have gone before we left like I did.”

“
I didn't want to go then.”

“
Well good luck finding a public toilet around here. Just find an alley or something. I'm going up to get in the flyer before I die of exposure. You can join me at your leisure.” He pushed ahead into the building, leaving Ginny standing in the street looking helpless.

The wind on the roof was stronger and colder than it had been at street level. Rafe broke into a jog at the sight of the flyer and the expectation of relief. He'd gone just a few paces when a man stepped out from behind a water tank and quickly moved to stand between Rafe and the quadcopter. Rafe stopped dead.

The stranger waited, keeping his eyes on Rafe. He was a young man, late teens maybe, but tall and broad. He had a look of contempt on his face and his eyes were still and calm. There was no shred of doubt in Rafe's mind that the man was there for him. His insides turned to water. His heart pounded in his chest. A footfall behind him made his head twitch round. A second man had appeared, as young as the first, but bigger, standing between him and the stairwell.

The fear made Rafe's head swim. “Oh Jesus,” he said. A kind of prayer. He'd been hurt too much. He couldn't take it again. He held out his bag of documents. “Here. This is what you want.” He threw it to the first man but it fell well short, sliding across the tarmac roof. “Just take it. I don't want anything to do with it. I won't write the story. I won't say a fucking word.  Just... Just don't hurt me.”

Still the two men said nothing. Rafe knew it was hopeless. They were going to beat him, kill him, make him tell them everything he knew, name everyone who had helped him. He looked about for a way of escape. There were two quadcopters on the roof now. His own and the one these men must have arrived in. Why hadn't he seen it as soon as he came out of the stairwell? How could he have missed a bloody great flyer?

He made an effort to compose himself. He was panting, he realised, every muscle taut. He needed to run. He couldn't let them catch him. His stomach was so knotted it hurt. The man in front of him took a step, then another.

And Rafe was running. He didn't remember starting but he was sprinting across the tarmac. He reached the knee-high wall that ran around the whole roof before he dare look around. The first man was vectoring across to cut him off and the second was following behind. He glanced over the wall at the wide street beyond and the dizzying, six-storey drop.  He felt sick, hopeless. He stopped running and his pursuers slowed to a walk. He climbed up onto the wall. It was barely wider than the length of his feet. The empty space in front of and below him seemed to suck at him, making him teeter.

“
Don't come any closer,” he yelled, not daring to turn around, not daring to move at all. He could not hear their footsteps but the wind blustering in his ears made it hard to hear anything. “If you touch me, I'll jump.” And he would. He meant it.
I should have died in Melbourne
, he thought. At the time he'd prayed for death, longed for release. Everything since then had been borrowed time. He looked up at the grey sky and thought about stepping out. It would take so little and yet would change everything so profoundly.

“
Go ahead and jump you fuckwit,” one of the men said. “Save us the trouble of pushing you.”

“
Shut up, dickhead,” the other said. His voice was an angry snarl. This one was in charge and he didn't want Rafe swan diving onto the pavement. It did not comfort Rafe that they wanted him alive.

“
Get down from there,” the boss said. “We only want to talk to you.”

“
Don't come near me,” Rafe shouted through clenched teeth. He was shivering in the wind and he didn't know how long he could stay up there on that wall. He didn't know what to do. If they touched him, he'd jump. He knew that.

“
We're just here to warn you off,” the boss said. He was trying to sound reasonable but Rafe could hear the lie. “You don't have to do this, mate. We're all reasonable men.”

“
Yeah, just keep your nose out of Consortium business,” the second man said. “Then you can walk away with all your fucking body parts still attached.”

The boss was not happy with the interjection. “Will you keep your fucking trap shut? Or do I have to cut your fucking tongue out?”

“I was just trying to – ”

“
Shut up!”

After that yell of rage, the boss seemed to need a few seconds to compose himself. Rafe didn't care. They were going to kill him. They'd try something soon and then he could jump and it would all be over. Everything would be over.

“Look, Rafe... That's a bloody stupid name if you don't mind me saying, mate.”

“
Up yours,” Rafe said. “Go fuck yourself.”

“
We just want to talk, Rafe. We want to know what you know, who else is in on it, if you're working for someone, that kind of thing. Just a few questions, that's all.  After that, you can go on your w – “

Rafe heard a quick rush of footsteps.
This is it. It's happening
. He closed his eyes, feeling his body sway.

There was a grunt and the sound of a weight falling. Then a shot. He jerked, shocked. He hadn't thought that they might shoot him. He reached with his mind to where the pain must be and didn't find it. Would he be dead before he hit the ground? There were more steps. Someone running. Another shot. He turned to look and lost his balance, toppling over into the void, arms flailing.

Then Ginny caught him and yanked him back.

He twisted and fell onto the roof. Ginny let go of him and bent down, fumbling for the gun that was lying there. One of Rafe's attackers lay on the ground in a heap. Ginny lifted the gun in both hands, pointing it across the roof to the stairwell, and fired it twice. Twice more, he realised. Ginny had jumped those two thugs single handedly. He goggled at her, not yet able to take it all in. She cursed and turned to face him.

“Are you OK?” she asked.

“
I... I...”

“
He got away,” she said, glancing back at the stairwell.

Rafe was still on the ground. He tried to move towards the fallen man but his arms were trembling and his legs wouldn't work. “Is he alive? Did you... ?” There was blood pooling under the man's head, but not much. If she'd shot him in the head, surely there would be more.

Ginny walked over to the man, pointing her gun at him. “I don't know,” she said, her voice shaky. “I hit him from behind. With this.” She lifted the gun briefly. “I hit him as hard as I could. Would that kill him?”

Rafe nodded although Ginny wasn't looking at him. He tried to get up and this time found he could manage it. “They were from the Consortium,” he said. He glanced back at the edge of the roof. Had he really been about to jump? It already seemed incredible.

Ginny put a foot against the man's shoulder and pushed him. He stirred and groaned. Ginny jumped back, gun aimed at him, holding it desperately, as if it were a charm against evil. But the young man did not wake up. “He's alive,” she said, almost a cry of triumph. “And I didn't hit the other one.” She seemed to feel exonerated of some charge that Rafe had not made. She had fired four shots, two of them probably at close range, and had missed every time. It seemed to Rafe that the survival of either man was pure good luck. “We need to find out what the Consortium is,” he said, trying to stay focused.

But first they needed to get off that rooftop. Every building, inside and out, every street, every field and farm had sensors of all kinds, all feeding their data into the local networks, all feeding the augmented reality that the world lived and worked within. Without doubt, the sensorium had picked up the gunshots, identified them for what they were, triangulated them, and fed the location to the local police. They could only hope that the nearest police officers were a long way off and would take a while to arrive.

“We could bring him round and ask him. Make him tell us,” Ginny said, sounding queasy at the idea.

Rafe shook his head. No, he couldn't do that. Never that.

“Come on,” he said. “Let's just go. We should just get out of here.”

Ginny nodded and they moved away from the fallen man, watching him, moving slowly. When they were a few metres away, the hold he seemed to have on them weakened and they looked towards the flyer, began to hurry. Ginny made a beeline for it, her distaste for the machine seemingly over.

Rafe took a detour to his attackers' quadcopter, grabbing up the bag of documents on the way. Even latched, the flyer bore no markings, no company logo, no registration number. He opened the cockpit and looked inside. It was bigger and more luxuriously appointed than the rental he and Ginny had hired. It smelled new. He poked around in pockets and cupboards but found nothing to identify its owners. He stepped out of it and saw Ginny sitting in the other flyer, watching him anxiously. The very least he should do was to disable the machine.

The wall that ran around the roof was brick with concrete coping stones on top. He ran over to it and pulled at the nearest coping stone, a flat slab of concrete as long as his arm but not very wide or deep. The crumbling mortar gave way easily and he soon had it free. He dragged it back to the quadcopter, it was too heavy for him to carry for more than a couple of seconds. He leaned it against one of the rotor cowlings to get his breath.

Immediately an alarm sounded from the machine and a loud voice in his aug said, “This machine is the property of the Rice Consortium. Any damage to this machine will be reported immediately to the police and could result in a criminal prosecution.”

Rafe stood back in surprise and almost laughed out loud. After all his searching it had been that easy. A yell from Ginny made him look up. She was pointing the gun back towards the stairwell where the second of Rafe's attackers and two friends he'd found somewhere were emerging onto the roof. With an adrenaline fuelled heave, he lifted the heavy concrete block and let it fall onto the rotor, crushing several of the blades and knocking the plastic cowling sideways. There was no way they would be flying that quadcopter without a replacement part.

A shot exploded from the other flyer and ricocheted off the roof. He bent low and ran to join Ginny.

“
What the hell were you doing?” she demanded as he climbed in. She fired the gun again, shooting across him. His ears rang and he yelled at the machine to get them airborne. The canopy began to close over them and Ginny yelled, “No! Don't close it or I can't shoot them.”