Toploader by Ed O'Loughlin

Author:Ed O'Loughlin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: FIC052000 FICTION / Satire
Publisher: Quercus

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Colonel White sat alone at a drone console, smoking a cigarette, while the fingers of his free hand caressed the shaft of a joystick. Smoking was banned in the drone room no matter how exalted one’s rank, but so too were computer games, even on the graveyard shift. As the evening dragged on, however, he and the two duty drone jocks had come to an unspoken truce. He could do whatever he liked now as far as they were concerned; engrossed in their online multiplayer game of Bitchslapper III—Curb Sandwich, they hadn’t even noticed when he blew up that chicken coop.

His cell phone buzzed. “Yes,” he said, and heard the hiss of static and the rumble of an engine. “Have you got it?”

“Er, no.” Smith’s voice crackled in his ear. White shut his eyes tightly and allowed his forehead to sink into his cigarette-bearing hand. “Then where is it?”

“Don’t know yet. We have a couple of leads, though. Won’t be long.”

Colonel White opened his eyes and looked back over his career. From the age of eighteen onward it had never seemed anything less than glittering. For it all to end here . . . Over in the corner of the control room, their faces gray in the light from their screen, the drone jocks were garroting a rival pimp so they could make off with his Bentley.

“What about this terrorist mastermind of yours? What have you got from him?”

Smith’s reply had the squared-off modular distortion of a voice that had been scrambled well and then badly reassembled. “We’re still trying to contact him, sir. But he has deactivated his cell phone. As soon as he puts the battery back in, we’ll know where he is.”

“What’s his name and phone number?”

“Dear Lord, I can’t tell you that, sir! Even if we weren’t on the radio! He’s going to be my confidential agent; his identity is need to know only!”

White had to think somewhat harder than he was used to doing. “Don’t worry about being overheard, Captain,” he managed. “This is a specially scrambled line we’re on now—air force encryption, the best there is. If you give me his number, I might be able to trace his phone even if he has taken the battery out—through its electromagnetic resonance, that sort of thing. It’s a new technology we have in the air force. Very secret. You won’t have heard of it.”

There was a long pause during which Colonel White listened to the APC’s tracks grinding through some structure or other, and then Smith spoke again. “Oh, all right,” he said. “Have you got a pen?”

Cobra’s donkey was a clever beast, with a nose for the weeds that sprouted unseen in the hidden corners of bombed-out lots; it had taken Cobra half the night to find it again. Wearily, he locked the massive gunmetal-gray door of his lair, then plodded down the damp concrete steps that led to the damp concrete floor of his cellar. Reaching the bottom, he dropped his keys and his pistol on a walnut occasional table, then took out his lighter and lit a fresh candle.

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