With These Eyes (26 page)

Isabelle was a few kilometers ahead and stuck
in traffic. The concrete of the Autobahn was wet, cold wind pushed
the rain through the warmth of her suit. Ahead laid a viaduct that
spanned an enormous river valley. Temperatures had fluctuated
around the freezing point and the icy-cold rain combined with the
strong wind had prompted the roads department to activate ice
warnings in both directions. Digital road signs on either side of
the lengthy bridge reduced the speed limit even further. With the
risk of black ice imminent, road closure signs illuminated shortly
thereafter and directed motorists towards a small curvy highway
through the valley.

Three lanes of traffic came to a crawl,
everyone waiting to merge onto the detour's exit ramp. Isabelle was
close to the detour, waiting her turn to merge off the congested
roadway. Tasha's visor was splattered with near-freezing rain. Her
heads-up display left no doubt, Isabelle was less than two
kilometers ahead of her and barely moving forward. With no regard
for the strict rules of the Autobahn, Tasha switched on her
bindingly bright, dual high-beams and raced down the line between
the two left lanes. Her actions brought a variety of rude European
hand signals to the scene as she angered most everyone she left
waiting behind her. Much like her ride across parts of Denmark,
Tasha traveled with a complete disregard for laws or the welfare of
other motorists. Her command of the digital world gave her a sense
of invincibility that transferred to the real world. She left
behind a group of drivers united by a common foe. Finally - the two
blips on her map were almost touching. Tasha passed under a signal
bridge that indicated the detour was 100 meters ahead. The command
post had reached the back of the traffic jam and reported in over
Tasha's talk-back system.

"Tiger-eye, we're reading a sudden
temperature drop at the bridge sensors to negative four
Celsius."

A gust of wind had brought up a mass of cold
air that had collected on the valley floor. The rain on the cold
roadway no longer possessed the energy required to stay in liquid
form. At an instant, entire puddles turned into solid ice when
there was no more energy to be drawn from its own volume or the
roadway underneath. Tasha could see Isabelle's helmet through the
windows in a row of cars occupying the fast lane. Finally, she
would take out Isabelle, who had become so much more than just
another mission. A bullet would do the job nicely this time. No one
would be too concerned about a dead terrorist and Tasha was quickly
arranging her own escape.

"Join me at the top of the line for
extraction."

"Yes, ma'am!" replied the Trooper behind the
rolling command post's console.

The driver activated the vehicle's emergency
signals. Blue lights were flashing from the enormous truck's roof
and grill. A deafening two-tone siren announced the platoons
approach. The engine's turbo-charger whined as the Trooper shifted
down and pushed the accelerator into the floorboard. The truck took
a prominent position between the two leftmost lanes and forged
forward. Motorists had no choice but scramble out of the way of the
intimidating mass of rolling metal. Cars in the left lane ran up
towards the snow-covered median before they were stopped by the
center guard rail. The autos to the right of the Troopers' fake
rescue vehicle made for the slow lane, causing a series of fender
benders. Like a pressure wave, the speeding command post sent
ripples of traffic spilling across the superhighway. In its wake,
Tasha's flotilla of force followed in eleven prestigious-looking
Trooper cars.

Tasha had reached the head of the jam. An
array of digital signs above the roadway was lit up with closure
and ice warnings. To the right, unable to absorb the heavy flow of
vehicles, the off-ramp was jammed. Tasha stopped. Within arm's
reach was what had been so hard to pursue -
the package
. For
the first time, Tasha was looking at Isabelle with her own eyes,
her identity concealed by the helmet. Tasha reached for the gun
holster on her right thigh, it was time to complete the mission
objective. A tractor-trailer loaded with Apophis-brand superfluid
helium-4 provided cover from witnesses to her right. She checked
her rear-view mirror and noticed that the two shapely young women
on motorcycles had caught the attention of a car full of eighteen
year-old guys. One of them was taking their picture with his cell
phone. Tasha looked down to the closure of her gun holster. A photo
of the hit would draw unneeded attention. She saw ice crystals had
formed at the edge of the puddle at her feet. The sudden drop in
temperature had caused the puddle to tip from liquid to solid. Like
a fast growing fern, the crystalline structure spread before her
eyes. This would be Tasha's solution, to use nature as a weapon.
With a tone of victory in her voice, her orders boomed from the
speakers in the command post.

"Deactivate detour. Display
no speed
limit
."

While the convoy continued to plow through
the jammed traffic, one of the three Troopers in the surveillance
room was accessing the
Autobahnmeisterei
's computer system.
A few keystrokes and the digital signs on either side of the
enormous bridge switched to display red circles with white diagonal
slashes. This signified unrestricted travel despite the fact that
even in dry weather the bridge had a speed limit of 100 kilometers
per hour.

With no limits before them, six lanes of
impatient drivers poured onto the bridge from both sides. Isabelle
felt her feet slip on the ice that was forming under her. She
sensed something wasn't right about the woman in the purple leather
combo to her right. Isabelle knew her head start wasn't going to
last forever. The unusual road sign activity was an indication that
things weren't what they seemed to the other travelers. The large
tanker-truck to Tasha's right side moved forward. She was
desperately trying to find her way to the exit ramp so she could
avoid the potentially fatal ride across the frozen viaduct. The
tanker had moved too far ahead for her to get around. Tasha tried
to wait so she could squeeze past its back but traffic was now
flowing on either side of her as she still sat stopped, illegally,
between two lanes. The angry drivers she had passed earlier weren't
about to lose more time over Tasha and aggressively pushed forward.
She had no choice if she didn't want to get run down but drive onto
the bridge. Patches of black ice were forming all across a bridge
that was filling up with speeding traffic. The flashing blue lights
of the rolling command post approaching from behind added to
everyone's sense of urgency. Much like a person who can feel that
he or she is doing the right thing, Isabelle could sense where it
was safe to ride.

Tasha wasn't about to be outrun, neither by
Isabelle nor by traffic. With the roar of her bike's engine, she
sped ahead. The purple-clad warrior had barely passed the helium
tanker when her front wheel lost contact with the road on a patch
of ice. The force of the spinning rear wheel pushed the bike’s
front to the right. With no traction, Tasha toppled and went into a
high-speed skid across the slippery concrete. She slid diagonally
across the road towards the slow lane, directly in front of the
tanker. The driver slammed on his breaks to avoid flattening Tasha
and sent his truck into a jackknife skid towards the center
divider. Still straddling her sliding road-rocket, Tasha impacted
with the guardrail at the edge of the bridge. Its wheels wedged
between the metal rail and the roadway, causing the bike and its
rider to flip upwards. Like shot from a catapult, Tasha was flung
over the edge of the bridge. Fortunately for her, she was close
enough to the end of the lengthy structure that she landed
head-first in a snow bank at the face of the mountain, while
Isabelle cleared the bridge on her way to Berlin.

The angry drivers behind the jackknifed semi
slammed on their brakes only to watch the enormous transport of
hazardous cargo crash into the center divider. The trailer snapped
off the truck's saddle mount and with an incredible groan, the
pressurized tank ground across the metal guard rail. Its fill-valve
snapped off on the divider and a flood of liquid helium spilled
across both sides of the roadway in a matter of seconds. The
drivers in the oncoming lanes were the first to feel the effects of
the spill when their tires froze solid and shattered as they sped
onto the river of liquefied gas.

Cars in all three lanes flipped forward and
were sent flying into the air at Autobahn speeds. The innermost
vehicle cleared the divider and collided in mid-air with an
automobile from the other direction that had suffered the same
fate. What followed was a flood of collisions that spilled across
the roadway, high above the valley floor.

Below the carnage, a river snaked through the
snowy valley. By its side, an Apophis bottling plant was reducing
the proud stream of pristine water to a mere trickle. Instead, an
unending stream of trucks was flowing thought the plant, carrying
the life-giving commodity off in plastic bottles.

While the destruction on the bridgeway was
skidding to a super-frozen halt, the cold of the winter had
prevented the liquid helium from evaporating too fast. The
superfluid found its way to the road's drainage system from where
it flowed into a hillside storage tank, intended to collect rain
water for the months when the river was low and fire danger was
high. The tank was 30 meters in diameter and still full from the
autumn rains. The helium froze the mass of water on contact. As it
solidified, the expanding ice ruptured the thick steel walls of its
enclosure. Like an enormous hockey puck, the house-size disk of ice
proceeded to slide down the mountainside at rapidly increasing
speed. It left nothing standing in its path towards the bottling
plant.

In a five-year campaign, Gene's chemical
plants and pharmaceutical companies had strategically poisoned
rivers around the globe to the extent that it was a certain death
sentence to use municipal water for cooking or drinking. Gene had
bought up the land surrounding all major wells and springs. Those
who could afford to do so, bought the bottled and still drinkable
water. The poor fell into Gene's plan to reduce the world
population to a more profitable size, after becoming fodder for his
healthcare machine.

The bottling plant at the bottom of the
canyon supplied the drinking water for a good portion of northern
Germany. It was a busy plant. Several huge pumps siphoned virtually
all the water from the river. A warehouse of bottling machines was
filling thousands of disposable plastic bottles with the precious
bounty. A line of trucks snaked to one end of the warehouse where
machines offloaded empty bottles.

The never-ending stream of tractor-trailers
billowed black diesel smoke towards the bridge above on their way
to the other end of the plant. At the shipping dock, countless
machines were loading cases of water bottles onto pallets, which
rolled down conveyor belts into the back of the empty trucks. The
flow of water left on an endless convoy up the highway. As if
nature was fighting back with one of the four elements, the frozen
disk crashed through the side of the warehouse. It thundered across
the entire length of the large production facility, leaving nothing
intact. The pumping station became its final casualty. The river
returned to its full, majestic flow. The bridge above was littered
with superfrozen body parts of motorists who shattered when their
cars crashed. Tasha was slowly gaining consciousness in her snow
bank on the side of the mountain, while her platoon had stopped
just short of the bridge.

Tasha was going to have to wait for a
helicopter to take her to the command post and backtrack across the
local road to catch up with Isabelle.

29 ISABELLE ARRIVES IN BERLIN

Isabelle had, once again, enjoyed a peaceful
and picturesque journey with no interference from her still unseen
nemesis. The sky had cleared and the sun was setting behind her
when she approached the greater Berlin area. The warm light of the
evening sun bathed the city in a beautiful orange glow. After a few
minutes only the top of the cityscape was illuminated as night fell
onto the streets and rose up the length of the tallest buildings
until it reached the sky. The day had given way to the night, where
Gene and Tasha were at their strongest. A road sign signaled
Isabelle she had reached her destination.

City - KuDamm
.

Isabelle followed the exit towards Berlin's
prominent promenade. Ralf's apartment was near the KuDamm, he had
told her she could stay there, but it didn't seem to Isabelle that
she would be safe after what had happened on the Autobahn. She
wasn't sure where to go. It was a beautiful winter night. Mounds of
snow lined the dry roadway. Isabelle rode past the Brandenburg
gate. On the other side of the city's iconic landmark laid a
different part of Berlin, once separated by the
death-strip
with its automated machine guns and electrified fences. The
division once cut through the heart of the city as much as it cut
through the hearts of its people. The wall that had divided the
city was long gone. The land and factories that had been taken from
the people by the communist government at the time had gone on the
auction block when the eastern government collapsed. What Apophis
hadn't bought at the end of communism, it absorbed from its
competitors during the thousands of mergers and hostile takeovers
that ensued over the decades that followed. Gene now owned
virtually everything in the world. He had leveled all of the
dilapidated former East Berlin and littered it with high rises,
shopping centers and his latest addition: corporate-owned jails
that he filled within a few months. Running jails had become a very
profitable business move and an increasing number of countries
adopted the Apophis prison chain out of fear of corporate trade
embargoes.