The central district of Baghdad was completely abandoned. Everyone was huddled in their homes as if they could avoid having to make a decision. But the declaration had made its effectiveness clear, and everyone belonging to an admedistration who had WatchMe installed was at risk.
It was hard when you were forced to make a very personal decision in a society that stressed following advice and cooperative consensus.
<list:item>
<i: Should I kill someone to live?>
<i: Should I kill no one and die?>
<i: Should I choose not to believe what I saw with my own eyes?>
</list>
I had no doubt that the tech-heads were busily combing the admedistration servers, looking for holes in security. Holes in the WatchMe servers responsible for monitoring the medicules in several billion people’s bodies.
For my part, I had just used my privileges as a Helix agent to slip some eavesdropping medicules into Gabrielle Étaín when I shook her hand. The medicules went in through the skin, finding their way through her body, until they activated the eavesdropping circuit in her HeadPhone. Though there hadn’t been a single thing wrong with Étaín’s performance to make me suspect her, she was the only lead I had.
A call came in from business-card man as I drove down the deserted road.
“Did you meet with Gabrielle Étaín?” Vashlov asked. He sounded pleased with himself.
“Word travels fast.”
“The SEC Neuromedical Research Consortium is just one public front of the Next-Gen Human Behavior Monitoring Group. Étaín is one of them, Inspector Kirie.”
“And you know this how?”
“We followed the money. I realize that’s a bit beyond the capabilities of a Helix agent.”
“Then why not bug Gabrielle Étaín instead of me?”
“Oh, we are. With little result. She knows she’s being watched.”
“Then why didn’t you stop me from going to see her? If I’d known she was involved—”
“Because we were hoping for a chemical reaction.”
<discomfort>
That was troubling. So the man from Interpol had used me, letting me meet with Étaín in hopes that the specter of an official agency investigation would elicit a reaction from the Next-Gen group. They had reached a dead end with their informants and surveillance, so they put their money on my being just the element of surprise they needed to tip the scales.
“Well, don’t I feel stupid.”
“You understand how critical the situation is. They might take defensive action. Take care of yourself.”
“Oh, I always do. There’s no shortage of terrorists who would like a Helix agent as a feather in their cap.”
</discomfort>
I ended the call to my HeadPhone and pulled in to the Baghdad Hotel.
Back when this had been a war zone, the American occupying forces had surrounded the place with four concrete walls to keep out the improvised explosive devices and the RPGs. In the middle of the explosions and the debris, the CIA had set up camp here. Though most surveillance of the terrorist sector these days was carried out by Geneva Convention forces and the military information suppliers they hired, at the time, the CIA was the largest information network run by any nation in the world.
That age had passed, and now the place was just a typical upscale hotel on Sadoon Street, where it passed through the Baghdad Medical Industrial Zone. Coming from Geneva forces camps on the front lines, I preferred less ostentatious places to stay, but there was a tradition of WHO and admedistration officials coming to the Baghdad Hotel, so I had little choice in the matter. I went through the lobby, passing by admedistration officers and WHO VIPs along the way. When I reached my room and pressed my finger to the door, it swung open. A single folded piece of paper fell to the floor.
<cautiously>
Reflexively, I switched off my AR. I didn’t want anyone who might be snooping on my visual feed to see what, if anything, was written on the note. Like I had been able to see those records of the suicidees, the police and Interpol and certain civilian MIS had the authority to snoop on visual feeds in real time. Just to be sure, I went into the bathroom and used removal liquid to wash the AR contacts out of my eyes. Then I shut the door and crawled under the bed. Interpol was using me. They could easily be monitoring my room. Curled up like a fetus in the dark, I opened the twice-folded paper.
ABŪ-NUWĀS. EVENING. NO AR, NO RIDERS.
I crawled out from beneath the bed and looked out the window.
The sky was slowly growing redder, getting ready for dusk. By riders they meant visual and audio bugs. Someone wanted me to see or hear something they didn’t want recorded by AR and sent to any servers.
</cautiously>
Evening was pretty soon.
In a movie Miach showed me once, someone who’d received a secret message had used a lighter to burn it in an ashtray. How convenient that must’ve been, I thought as I changed into my civilian clothes and shoved the paper into a pocket.
It was very rare to see an actual Iraqi within the area occupied by the medical industrial collective. It had been a strange chain of events that led to this Middle Eastern country becoming the world center for medicine. But like there was no place better than any other for making movies or manufacturing PassengerBirds, there was no best place for making medicine. Once a little bit of wealth had accumulated, it had taken off, transforming the desert into a giant industrial zone.
The fact that Iraq had, during the Maelstrom, suffered from nuclear fallout meant that there was no shortage of disease here for medical researchers to study. But in those days, it would have been hard to find a place that hadn’t been hit by nukes. Nor were the tax breaks and morally lax laws enough to explain the bizarre medical oasis that had sprung into existence here. The only explanation you could give was teleologicaclass="underline" the wealth had accumulated here because of an accumulation of wealth.
Military resource suppliers took care of the security.
<list:company>
<c: Security Arts Co.>
<c: Hard Shield Co.>
<c: Eugene & Crups Co.>
<c: etc., etc.>
</list>
The zone was completely reliant on military resource supplier security.
Though from the nineteenth century to the twentieth century nonstanding forces had still been the property of nations, as the nations weakened, the balance of military force shifted to MRSs and military information suppliers. On the surface, there was very little difference, though, seeing as how nearly all MRSs and military information suppliers were contracted by the Geneva Convention Organization, an international body formed by an accord between every admedistration. I stopped at a SecGate in the several kilometer–long wall surrounding the medical zone so a medical soldier in his pink uniform could check my identification. They also needed my acknowledgment that they could not guarantee my well-being outside the security zone, and that my WatchMe would go off-line.
I was free, once again in a world without WatchMe, medcare units, or AR. I looked around at scenery that time had forgotten: barracks after barracks after barracks, a tangle of crumbling buildings. The place had a feel to it that was completely missing from any admedistration city, and the air was filled with scents and smells.