Rogue Element

‘Where’d you get that from?’ he asked, trying not to grunt with the effort required to block out the stabbing sensation that shot through his side with every word. Christ, it seemed like every part of his body was somehow connected to his broken rib. He tested the theory and gave his eyelids an experimental blink. To his profound surprise, the action didn’t hurt.

There was a fair bit of noise in the cabin, but Wilkes heard Joe’s question above it as if there had been silence.

Joe gestured for a closer inspection of the disk but stopped a few inches into the movement when the pain caught. The sergeant leaned across and placed the disk in Joe’s open hand.

‘That’s mine,’ said Joe, to the astonishment of the soldier. ‘All my rewritables are blue.’ He turned it over. ‘My trademark, see?’ he said, indicating a logo on the reverse side, a caricature of Albert Einstein with dreadlocks and a nose-ring made from a lightning bolt.

Wilkes gave him an odd look.

‘My on-line sign is Cee Squared, as in e = mc².’ Joe read their concentration as confusion.‘“Cee” is the co-efficient for light. My name’s Joe Light. Cee Squared, light?’

‘Yeah, got it,’ said Wilkes, vaguely resenting being spoon-fed the connection. ‘The disk. What’s on it?’

‘Don’t know. Could be anything. Where’d you find it?’ asked Joe.

‘On the people shooting at you.’

Jesus, thought Joe, his brain working at half speed. It must have been picked up at the crash site. No, the Indonesians must have actively searched for it. They must have known which seat he’d occupied — easy information to obtain. The Indonesians could have done a little hacking of their own and lifted it from the Qantas server. But how had they known Joe Light had done the hacking? Was it feasible, possible, that the call had been traced? Not only that but his identity known? No it wasn’t, he told himself. Or was it?

Wilkes and Suryei reached for the disk. ‘Is this the disk? The one you saved the map to?’ asked Suryei.

Joe shrugged slightly and squinted with the pain-spike the movement caused. He hoped like hell that the disk was blank. If it held the information he’d lifted from the TNI general’s server, there was no way he’d ever be able to convince himself that his actions — and his actions alone — hadn’t caused the horrible deaths of so many innocent people in the plane crash. The fact that finding the general’s plans might also have prevented a war was too abstract. Too many ifs, buts and maybes.

The four hundred passengers left behind in the Indonesian jungle were an awful fact — unequivocal, irrefutable. It aided his conscience immeasurably to speculate that just maybe something else could have caused the crash. He didn’t want to have to carry around the terrible burden of so many innocent deaths for the rest of his life. ‘Can you run it?’ he asked, hoping they couldn’t.

Wilkes nodded and handed the disk to McBride. ‘How about it?’

The captain paused, uncertain.

‘Look, pal,’ said Wilkes impatiently, sweat, dirt and blood combining with the wicked gash on his cheek to give him the appearance of some kind of horror film creature. ‘All of us are cleared for this kind of stuff. As for Joe and Suryei here, I think they’ve paid their dues. So don’t give me any of your top secret national security crap, okay?’

McBride took the rebuke on the chin. Wilkes was morally right, although his own superiors would no doubt think differently. He shrugged mentally, and tapped the disk on his thumb while he walked from sight into the forward comms compartment. Wilkes instantly regretted handing over the disk. This American spook could switch it, wipe it — anything. He didn’t know much about the NSA or how it operated beyond the fact that it was enormously powerful, and apparently all-pervasive.

A dull white square of projected light appeared on the bulkhead that doubled as a screen. Static scrambled across it. The soldiers all looked up, expectantly. A few floaters drifted lazily down the screen. The audio channel came to life with a bottomless atmosphere. The air in the V22 was charged with electricity. The men craned their necks from side to side to get a better view over the heads in front. After a pause, a violin hummed a single high note and held it for several seconds. A chord of music from an electric guitar crashed through the headphones and the speaker boxes hidden throughout the aircraft. Then the vocals came, screamed by a man who sounded as if he was in agony.

Take my life on the point of your knife,
Show me a war, the World Bank’s whore,
Where you come from, man, is full of sin.
Who do you thank,
when you’re shot point blank?
Blood soaked earth, yeah, blood soaked earth…
whoa, blood soaked…