Tag - A Technothriller Read online

  tag: 1noun. (pronounced ‘tag)

  “A children’s game in which one player chases the others in an effort to touch one of them, who then takes the role of pursuer.”

  tag: 2noun. (pronounced ‘tag)

  “A unique identification number assigned to all citizens by the United Nation Population Division by order of the United Nation Personal Unique Identification Law, enacted on January 2073. Requires all citizens to carry upon their person an electronic device containing the means to broadcast their Personal Unique Identifier (PUI), and authorizes the monitoring of the identity, location, movements and actions of any citizen, without prior cause warranting such monitoring, by satellite or any other means by, specifically, The United Nation Police, but extending to assigned authorities of the United Nation, as may be required.”

  Prologue

  A Case File

  UNPOL Section Office, Pratunam, Bangkok

  Date: Monday December 2 2109

  Case #: JM-Bgk-2109

  Location: Pratunam, Bangkok

  Log Time: 3:30pm

  Subject: Jibril Muraz Personal Unique Identifier (PUI): 230963UK

  Containment Officer/s: Somchai Pisanulock; Jirasak Pancharoen

  Charge/s: Illegal Wiretapping, Identity Fraud, Counterfeiting.

  Statement:

  Acting on information from a confidential informant we entered an unlicensed gambling den. Upon entering the premises we found that an illegal migration operation was in place and immediately enacted a containment order on all individuals and equipment. Further investigation of the equipment led us to believe that Jibril Muraz was in fact assisting criminals listed on UNPOL’s Most Wanted to evade detection using counterfeit PUIs. Subject did not resist containment and did not offer a statement.

  Date: Tuesday December 3 2109

  Case #: JM-Bgk-2109

  Location: Pratunam, Bangkok

  Log Time: 4:30pm

  Subject: Jibril Muraz Personal Unique Identifier (PUI): 230963UK

  Charge/s: Illegal Wiretapping, Identity Fraud, Counterfeiting.

  Transfer Order:

  By request of Serious Crimes Unit, UNPOL HQ, New Singapore. Please arrange immediate transfer of subject to New Singapore UNPOL HQ. ContainmentUnit prepared to receive at Changi Levport.

  Date: Wednesday December 4 2109

  Case #: JM-Bgk-2109

  Request: Truth Treatment.

  Location: Level 10, UNPOL

  Log Time: 12:30am

  Subject: Jibril Muraz

  Request Filed by: Agent Sharon Cochran

  Requested authorized for Submission: Director of UNPOL: Thomas Bartholomew Oliver

  Request Authorized: Judge Miriam Wu

  Truth Treatment Transcript:

  Cochran: I’d like to start by asking a couple of basic questions that you should have no trouble answering. Is that OK? A Yes or No answer is sufficient.

  Muraz: Yes.

  Cochran: Your name is Jibril Muraz? And your PUI is 230963UK?

  Muraz: No.

  Cochran: Your identification and PUI were gathered from your Dev at the time of your containment in Bangkok; are you saying that this is not your true identity?

  Muraz: Yes.

  Cochran: Could you tell us your real identity?

  Muraz: Yes.

  Cochran: Good, excellent. We do appreciate your cooperation. Now perhaps you could give us more information about who you are beyond a simple Yes or No answer. What is your real identity?

  Muraz: My real identity is Unknown.

  Cochran: Um, yes, I see. All right, let’s move on, we can come back to the issue of your identity later. Your fixed abode is listed as 61 Sholle Street, Paddington, London, however we have checked that address and it doesn’t exist. Can you tell us where you normally live?

  Muraz: Yes.

  Cochran: And where is that then?

  Muraz: I live in another dimension. It is alien to you.

  Cochran: I see. Perhaps you could tell me more about this dimension. Where is it?

  Muraz: I can’t explain it to you. You do not have the mental capacity or knowledge to understand any answer I could give you about that dimension.

  Cochran: Well why don’t we try at least, could you tell me more about this dimension?

  Muraz: No.

  *** End of Truth Treatment Transcript ***

  Subject refused to answer the last question, and biometrics for the subject indicated that he fell asleep after saying, “ No”.

  Truth Treatment concluded. The effectiveness of the truth treatment is in doubt in this case. The results are inconclusive and provide no further information for trace unit, other than what is already known.

  Date: Wednesday December 4 2109

  Location: Level 10, UNPOL

  Log Time: 11:30pm

  Subject requested to produce an oral statement for the court

  Transcript of Statement: Jibril Muraz 230963UK

  Attending Officer: Agent Sharon Cochran

  Statement Follows:

  I was working as an illegal runner in a small shop in Bangkok. Life was simple. Eat, sleep, work. The rate was good, too good. We were running illegals, mostly out of the China Geographic but some from other Geographics too. If you could come up with the 50k cred for the counterfeit Personal Unique Identifiers we spent our days scripting, then you were eligible. We’d been at it for six weeks operating in shifts, two shifts, twelve to a shift, each of us running between three and eight illegals. At 50k per illegal good rates were being made by all us: 50% in cred cards, paid then and there, each time we got someone through the security zones to their agreed destination.

  The guy running the shop was a bastard, a real mean sadistic son of a bitch. He kept the temperature down, said it kept us awake. The shop was cold; I had to keep blowing into my hands just to keep my fingers from freezing. The booths had no heating, it was just horrible, but warmth, comfort, ethics, morals, rights and wrongs, well it was easy to forget all that with that amount of cred we were making.

  I’ve been a ‘gun for hire’ since I was fourteen and here we are twenty years down that track. You want to know what happened and why. I can tell you the what. The why I am still working out.

  [At this point, the subject Jibril Muraz requested, under article 3 of the United Nation Containment Code, that he be allowed to meet with arbitrator Jonah James Oliver. Request was formally denied on grounds of level 1 security threat.]

  Statement continued:

  The light show didn’t work. The drugs haven’t worked, and in another half an hour everything you know about me will disappear from your systems and you will not know who or what I am. Better get me what I want or you’ll come out of this with nothing you want or need.

  [At this point subject appeared to adopt a meditation position and began to meditate.]

  Chapter 1

  The Request

  UNPOL Headquarters, Jurong Island, New Singapore

  Thursday 5 December 2109, 11:24am +8 UTC

  “At which point all trace of Mr Jibril Muraz disappeared from our systems and he hasn’t said a word after that.” The woman who had just presented raised her eyebrows as if to invite a question from me. We were sitting in a small conference room on the new Biosense office seats that procurement had seen fit to torture us with.

  “And he was drugged?” Well it might be stating the obvious but she was clearly expecting me to say something, and I still had last night’s leaving party for Milo banging around in my head. The last thing I needed was a runner.

  She looked at me like I was some kind of novice. “Yes, of course he was drugged. Under the situation this was natural and after clearing his medical we proceeded with the Truth Treatment.”

&n
bsp; “I see, and how did he respond to that treatment?”

  At this Agent Sharon Cochran looked just a little perturbed and a slight edge of doubt crept into her voice, “He, um, appeared to resist the Truth Treatment, although that is hard to prove.”

  I sensed she was dodging around something here that she didn’t want to talk about.

  “Well, in what way was it hard to prove that he was resisting?”

  She looked me in the eye. “Under the Truth Treatment he stated that he was an alien being from another dimension.”

  I spat out my Starbucks latte over the table in front of me. “He what?” I couldn’t help it, and Sharon raised an eyebrow.

  “He claimed he was an alien being. Look, this case is a problem. We’re under intense time pressure to get it cracked and all we have is a runner who claims he’s from another planet or dimension or whatever. I don’t have time to debate the how and the why we got here. We need answers and we need them quick. Can you talk to him or should I call someone else?” With this last thrust of her best executive power-presenting performance she looked at her watch and then frowned at my latte splattered all over the table.

  “Why me? I’m an arbitrator. Why don’t you take this up with the prosecutors’ staff?” I rose from the Biosense chair and dabbed at the spilt latte with my handkerchief. I really didn’t need this right now. I had a huge caseload already and this pro bono work for UNPOL was just something I did to appease my uncle.

  “He doesn’t want to talk to any arbitrator. He wants to talk to you.” She smiled as she saw the frown on my face and again looked me right in the eyes. “He asked for you by name.”

  I sat back down.

  “OK Sharon, maybe you’d better start at the beginning, because a sec ago you said you’d be happy to call someone else and now you’re saying he knows me and wants only to talk to me!”

  “First of all I didn’t say I’d be happy to call someone else. I said I would if you wouldn’t take the job,” she said, leaning over the table so her face was only cents away from mine. And secondly, this guy was running sixteen illegals at the same time, all of them grade one, which is something we have never heard of, never mind seen, and we only discovered him by complete accident. At this exact moment in time we have sixteen of the most wanted people in the universe running around, and we haven’t got a clue where they are. We need him to talk and fast. Can you help?”

  I really wanted to have Sharon right there and then on the table, having been thoroughly dominated and turned on by her power shakedown. I resorted to the male primeval of telling her this with my eyes. There were only two problems with that: one, she was happily married, and two, she was a lesbian and one hundred percent committed to her partner, both of which were facts she communicated right back with her eyes, basically telling me to fuck off and hell would freeze over before I got within touching distance of her body.

  “OK, I’ll talk to him.”

  “Thank you. The complete file is in there; don’t worry it’s a standalone and this room is silent,” she said, indicating the Dev with a wave of her hand and smiling, almost in pity I thought, as she left the room. The door clicked shut.

  “Shit,” I spat out, my lips compressed tightly in annoyance. I should have turned it down flat. It had trouble written all over it and my stupid fantasies about Cochran had led me into a place I really didn’t need to be. I blew out my cheeks and let out a long sigh. This had been a dumb move, but then Milo’s party was partly to blame – I’d drunk too many alkys for my own good. I stood and ran my hand through my hair. Doing a quick inventory of what I’d said and thought while with Cochran. “Shit, shit, shit,” I said, and was hitting the table with my fist, when out of the corner of my eye I saw the door open and Sharon pop her head back in. I froze and shifted to try and make it look as if I always sat like this.

  Sharon frowned and said, “Oh and Jonah, the Director, would like to see you before you talk to the runner.” With a last quick flash of that feline smile and a quirky raise of the eyebrows she was gone, closing the door behind her.

  The Director of UNPOL Sir Thomas Bartholomew Oliver, my uncle. He’d never asked to see me about any official matter in all my time in New Singapore. UNPOL really did have a problem if he was getting involved at this level. If he was involved then it was very serious, and my name was in there – the runner had asked for me by name. I had to see why my name was in there.

  I turned to the Dev on the table in front of me and said, “This is Arbitrator Jonah James Oliver, sign on.” The device snapped on with the Center’s Portal set as the landing page. I saw that the detached icon was displayed, so the Dev was disconnected from the network, and my credentials and icon came up in the bottom corner. “Provide me with case file on Jibril Muraz.”

  The screen filled with the data stream dating back from today with referenced digital information on Jibril Muraz. There wasn’t much, but what there was I couldn’t believe. This guy had been running sixteen of the most wanted criminals on earth. Then, when they were interrogating him, all reference data to his PUI had disappeared along with all the reference data related to the criminals he was running. He was forty-six years old, and registered to a non-existent address at Sholle Street, Paddington, London. Scanning his transcript I saw that he claimed to have been doing this since he was fourteen. How many other illegals had he placed in society? He was being kept in Level Ten, ‘The Deep’, as they called it here at UNPOL.

  I said, “Show me references to Oliver.”

  The Devscreen resized around the scant information, and zoomed to the end of the transcript just before he had sat down and meditated. The transcript didn’t give me his exact words, which I would have liked to have seen, just that he requested to see me.

  This was a big case. It was interesting too. Most of the pro bono work I did for UNPOL was incredibly routine and dull, albeit occasionally gratifying in helping someone out of a mess, but this case was going to be big news. My mind suddenly conjured up an image of the cases I had stacked up at my regular contribution. Although the case was interesting, I should pass. Let someone else have the limelight on this one. I was just too busy.

  I popped my Devstick into the Dev and, taking a copy of the data, logged the copy.

  “This is UN Operative Jonah James Oliver, sign off.” I got up from the table and steeled myself for the coming encounter. Time to see the Director.

  Chapter 2

  The Director

  UNPOL Headquarters, Director’s Office, 244th floor

  Thursday 5 December 2109, 11:55am +8 UTC

  “Jonah come in. Take a seat. How are you my boy?” Sir Thomas said with a smile and a jab of his hand indicating the chairs in front of his desk.

  “I am well, Uncle, thank you,” I said and walked across the room to Sir Thomas’s desk and sat down on one of the two straight-backed wooden chairs facing him, and waited for him to speak. He looked at me, his eyes large in the rimless glasses. An affectation, technology rendering the glasses unnecessary, but Sir Thomas refused the surgery and preferred the round rimless glasses. He fiddled with a trackball on his desk and then looked directly at me again.

  “Jonah I have to ask you this, as a matter of protocol, and whatever the answer I need the absolute truth from you. This man who’s requested to meet with you: do you know him?” Sir Thomas held my eyes with a solemn expression. I had a flashback to a moment when a vase had been broken in his study and he’d asked me then for the absolute truth. The answer that time had been yes I had broken it and hidden the evidence. This time I was sure I was innocent. Somehow even at thirty-four years of age my uncle could make me feel like a little boy again.

  “No sir, I’d never met or heard of him before this morning’s events.”

  Sir Thomas stared at me hard, looking deep into my eyes with his enlarged pupils and the corners of his mouth twitched upwards.

  “Good. I believe you. Any idea why he is requesting to see you?”

  “No sir, I hav
e given it some thought and I checked back cases for any references to his name, but I haven’t come up with anything.”

  “No, neither have we. So it seems we need you to talk to him. Are you comfortable with that?”

  “Honestly? No. My caseload is fairly heavy right now, and I really don’t have the time. However, judging from the evidence and the seriousness of the alleged offenses it would seem that we don’t have any choice.”

  “Quite so, quite so,” said Sir Thomas, nodding his nearly bald head up and down. I thought it was remarkable how little we actually resembled each other given that I was his brother’s son. I broke my thoughts to focus: Sir Thomas was speaking again.

  “Yes, I read of your recent victory in the Schilling vs. Bauer case. Excellent work, that. You saved them 130 million cred. I was – am – very proud of you.”

  “Thank you sir.” I wasn’t surprised that he’d heard of the case; it had been dragging on for four years by the time it reached me at Coughington and Scuttle.

  Sir Thomas sat forward in his Siteazy and clasping his hands together rested them on his dark wooden desk. “Yes, well, I have taken the liberty of asking the Board of Governors to send a note to Bill Scuttle requesting an immediate leave of absence for you in connection with your pro bono contribution here at UNPOL. We haven’t given them any details of your role here other than to say it is of vital importance to the Nation. Something that won’t do your Contributory Record any harm either. Now take a look at the wall screen,” he said, indicating the wall behind me. I stood up and turned the straight-backed wooden chair to an angle that would allow me to talk to Sir Thomas and have an easy view of the screen. I sat back down and folded my hands into my lap.

  An image appeared of a man sitting naked on a Biosense chair in white space. Jibril Muraz. He sat in the lotus position, his eyes closed. He seemed perfectly still, and were it not for his bio data indicating his vital signs streaming across the bottom of the screen in a constant flow, like a stock ticker, you might have thought him dead.