Tag - A Technothriller (3 page)

Jibril was still sitting in the Lotus position. I took a tentative step forward and then another. My feet made no sound on the floor. I took another step and then another and then I sensed something and put out my hand. Nothing. Another step with my hand held out in front of me and then my hand touched something solid. Despite my foreknowledge of the partition I still felt a quick surge of relief flow through me at the physical touch of this transparent wall between us. I looked down and around and saw a Biosense come out of the floor just behind me. I sat down. The Biosense felt cool on my buttocks. I wondered how many people were watching this.

“I’m Jonah James Oliver, Arbitrator, but my friends call me JJ. You asked to see me.” From what I could tell Jibril was tall, brown hair, graying at the temples, with a pale, almost translucent, complexion. His eyes blinked open.

“I know,” he said, and smiled. It was the first genuine smile of warmth that I had received all day, or for that matter a very long time. The more I looked at the smile the more I felt its warmth and the more I wanted to smile back. I didn’t but I wanted to.

“Do you know what the name Jonah means?” he asked. His voice was very soft but firm and clear. There was a pure quality to it, each word enunciated perfectly.

“It means bad luck,” I said.

“That’s but one interpretation of the meaning and a rather literal one at that. According to the Ancient texts, Jonah was a Messenger of God. Do you believe in God, Jonah?” His eyebrows raised slightly as he waited for my answer.

I was thinking that this conversation was not going as planned, but then who was I kidding? What plan? The only plan that I was following was the 'fly by the seat of your pants' plan, so I decided to go along for the flight.

“Well, yes and no.”

“Ah, Jonah,” he said, with what I could have sworn was a twinkle in his eye, “belief in God is not a yes and no issue. You either do or you do not. The word belief is the crucial one there. It does not allow for fence-sitting or quibbling. So do you?”

“Maybe.”

“Perhaps I shouldn’t be asking such personal questions so early in our relationship, but then I feel as if I have known you for so many years.” He shifted his position and with both hands resting on his knees looked comfortable despite the fact that he was naked. Yes he was tall, judging by height of his torso, at least one hundred and ninety cents, perhaps taller.

“Jonah was a prophet for all religions, the Son of Truth, a dove. He appears in the Old and New Testaments, the Koran, and the Jewish bible, not to mention the Bahai faith. In each he is seen as a Messenger of God, and a fairly strict one at that. Are you strict, Jonah? Will you request God to strike me down for my sins, or having sought repentance of Him, shall I be saved as you were vomited from the great fish’s mouth onto the shores of Nineveh?”

I was thinking that this runner had quaffed a spike too many in his running days, but held the thoughts and didn’t speak them out.

“You’re probably thinking that I am totally crazy,” he chuckled, a hand coming up to cover his mouth as if to hide his mirth at my totally readable expression.

“No, no, not at all. I just haven’t heard that story of my name before. It’s very interesting.”

Again I lapsed into silence. I hadn’t a clue what to say, and in those circumstances it’s usually better to keep your mouth shut and let everyone think that you may be a fool rather than opening it and removing all doubt.

“I don’t think you’re a fool, Jonah. Yes, Jonah, that is right.”

Wait. I heard that but his lips didn’t move. He didn’t say anything but I heard him say that I was right – right about thinking he might be a telepath. This guy was freaking me out. Was I that readable? He continued to smile with a warmth that enveloped me and I felt embraced by it, even in my shock. Nothing in my training came close to enabling me to deal with this situation. As arbitrators, our thoughts are our refuge, and if mine were on open display with him then I had nothing left.

“Yes, Jonah, I am in your mind, but perhaps all of us are in each other’s minds. However, that philo discussion will have to wait for another day for we do not have much time. Jonah, we will have two conversations. One will be for the people monitoring our meeting and the other will be for you and me. Of course, you are free to divulge to your superiors both of our conversations, but I ask that you hold off until we have finished. Now what we need to do here is very complex and usually takes months of training to get right. Obviously we don’t have that much time. So this is how you do it. I have every faith in you, Jonah. I know you can do this.

“You will ask me a question using your voice. When you have finished, I will tell you something using my mind. As I am replying to your question using my voice, you will reply to my question using your mind, and so we will continue. Are you ready Jonah?”

I thought,
“Yes,”
and said, “You know my name, indeed seem remarkably well acquainted with it, so how should I address you?”

Just before I finished saying this, my mind was assaulted in a way that I can only describe as what I imagine insanity to be. His words, transmitted to my mind, overrode what I was saying and it was a struggle to not repeat what he was saying in my mind, but I succeeded, just barely managing to strangle out the last spoken phrase.

In my mind he said,
“I came here to enlist your help on urgent matters of global importance; there is a conspiracy that if successful will send this planet, and the colonies on the Moon and Mars, back into the Dark Ages.”
I raised my eyebrows as if waiting for a response to my question, but it was more a reaction to the assault on my mind.

His voice said, “Names and PUIs aren’t that relevant to me as a runner, Jonah. Look at you. You have carried your name for all your life without understanding its true meaning. However, for the purposes of ease of conversation, you may call me Jibril.”

The smile had gone from his face to be replaced by a slight frown. I wondered if this was as a result of his having to concentrate on what I was thinking while he was talking.

I thought,
“Why me?”

And said, “So, Jibril, you have admitted that you are a runner and have agreed to produce a statement of your activities for purpose of judgment under Article 2 of United Nation Containment Code, but you stopped the process and insisted on seeing me. How is it that you know of me?”

While saying this, again my mind was overlaid with his thoughts. Somehow I managed to get the words out, but now my temples were throbbing in pain at the effort of conducting these two conversations.

His thought said,
“Jonah, your name is not Jonah, your uncle is not your uncle, and you are not you, as you know you. My real name is Gabriel – Jibril is Arabic for Gabriel. You must trust me Jonah, it is vital for the future of this planet that you do.”

I heard his voice say, “You represented an illegal that I once ran. He said you were kind and fair to him, which was good enough for me, and so I asked for you.” I saw a bead of sweat roll from his temple down his jaw line and fall onto his chest.

I thought,
“How can I trust you when I don’t know who you are or where you come from?”

I said, “Do you perhaps remember which illegal this was? I mean the one who said that I treated him fairly?” My voice was strained; I hoped those monitoring this didn’t notice.

“Your voice sounds natural enough, Jonah, and we’re nearly finished. Proof of what I say and my trust in you is that in less than eight hours I will be gone from this room.”

This thought overrode everything I was thinking and then his voice said, “Who the illegal was is of no importance. The important thing is that I know the whereabouts of sixteen of the most wanted people in the universe, and your superiors want that information. To get it, they’re going to have to give me what I want.”

While he said this, I thought,
“How does your disappearance provide me with the proof that I can trust you or that anything you have claimed is real?”

And I said, “Well, Jibril, perhaps if you tell me what it is that you want, I would be happy to relay that to the appropriate people.”

I felt a trickle of sweat run from my armpit down my ribs. This wasn’t easy, this dual conversation stuff. His thoughts again crowded in, swamping my thoughts of sweat, piercing into my head.

“Jonah, the proof is that I came here to meet with you to give you this message. When I leave, you will realize that the only reason I allowed myself to be caught was because this was the only way that I could reach you without causing suspicion to fall upon you.”

“Ten million units, a full pardon and a drop off in the outlands of the region of South America,” he said and smiled, sitting even further back in his chair. “Then with the aid of a Dev, I will track all sixteen of the illegals who were dropped when I was so rudely interrupted in my work.”

I couldn’t think of anything. I froze. My mind was a shattered nothing. I just looked blankly at him.

“That’s enough for now, Jonah, I can feel you’re at breaking point. When the time comes, you will know what to do and you will do the right thing. Don’t trust Agent Cochran: she’s a telepath as you are, so be very careful when you are in the same room with her to think of anything but this conversation or else you will find yourself here in the Deep, or worse.”

Somehow my mind cleared enough for me to say, “Do you have anything else to add to that or is that the sum of your requests?”

Immediately after I’d spoken, I thought,
“All right. I will wait eight hours and if you’re gone then what do I wait for? And did you say I was a telepath?”

“No, I don’t want anything else. That is all I require,” he said and closed his eyes. I stood up and turned around. As the door behind me opened, a final thought entered my head.

“You were born a telepath like your father, the man your so-called uncle captured, tortured and then killed, but you are untrained so unless you must use it to save your life, then do not. When the time comes we will send you a sign and you will do the right thing. Goodbye my brother, for that is who you are. I await the day with eagerness when we will meet again.”

I was dripping with sweat, sopping wet, and I felt wrung out mentally and physically. It was all I could do to walk through the door and retrace the steps to the Lev port. One of the Special Ops team handed me my clothes and wanted to take me by the elbow but I shrugged him off and followed the lights. My brain was frozen and I couldn’t muster a single thought to my command. My exhaustion dominated all else. I entered the Lev port and sat down.

The Lev said, “I am instructed that your next destination is the Director’s office, Arbitrator Oliver. You will arrive there in approximately eight minutes.”

The door slid shut silently and eight minutes was the time I had to recover from what I had been told by Gabriel. My head was still a mess and I could hardly recall our spoken conversation but our unspoken conversation was as clear as if it had been printed on the inside of my forehead. I could see every word and feel the emotion behind them. I sat back in the Biosense and shut my eyes.

“Off-line travel, please, Lev.” I started putting my clothes on again.

Suddenly life had changed. That single thought dominated. I opened my eyes and, taking my Devstick out, looked at the time. In less than twenty-four minutes, the time it had taken since I had left the Lev to the time that I was sitting here right now, my entire life had changed.

When I was twenty-six, I had driven a car - it was a bright red Tesla Mach 4 with a beautiful raked black windscreen - into the back of another car. The anti-collision had failed, and I went through the windshield at about eighty kilos an hour. Two days and a hundred and twenty staples later, I was sitting outside in the hospital’s garden under a huge Banyan tree feeling like the happiest guy on earth. Everything petty had just washed off me like mud off a sluice: I had felt so light that I thought I might float right up into the arms of the tree. Well, OK, the painkillers they’d given me probably accounted for some of my happiness, but the point is, I was having such a moment again. Only this time I didn’t feel happy, I felt scared. But I wasn’t crying over spilt latte either. I became focused upon my own survival.

“Destination is estimated to be reached in approximately six minutes, Arbitrator Oliver.”

I realized, as if awakening to a whole new dimension of life, that suddenly circumstances had created a situation in which I might be a central figure to a plot of global significance. More indeed than simply significant, the future of the universe as we know it perhaps depended on my successful actions, whatever they turned out to be.

Don’t panic. Focus. Right, OK. Me, save the planet. Right, no problem. I let out a long breath, emptying my lungs of every milcube of oxygen, until my diaphragm was pressed against my spine, and I held that moment, then with a slight gasp, I drew in a breath as long as its exhaling partner. The only immediate solution, being the rational arbitrator that I was trained to be, was to re-evaluate the evidence surrounding this circumstance in another eight hours.

Gabriel had said that proof of his message would be in his disappearance and that would happen within eight hours. Therefore I had everything to gain and nothing to lose by being the old me for another eight hours. I would banish, no, wipe out, all thoughts of my little mental chat with Gabriel and simply wait.

I mean the whole thing could be a set up. This could all be part of some elaborate training exercise designed to test me under adverse circumstances.

What if they’ve got an internal and external transcript of the discussion? Do they have that kind of technology? I mean I know they can read heart rate, blood pressure and temperature, that kind of stuff. Can they record your mind while you’re having a chat? I don’t know. Then don’t worry about it. If they do, you’re finished, but if Gabriel’s telling the truth and you do walk into Uncle’s office and spew out everything you two talked about, then you’re headed for brain wipe or worse.