The Mammoth Book of Apocalyptic SF - Mike Ashley [13]
"All right. All right. I'll see you at the site tomorrow."
When he laid the handset down, he was trembling. In a day when there were over a hundred permanent websites on the Antarctic ice shelf, it had taken him five hours to find a digital phone line in a city of five million people. Which, to be fair, fifteen years ago, had been a city of ten million people.
Of course, his search for a phone line compatible with his encryption software would probably be for nothing. If there were this few digital lines in the city, there was probably a retro-tech transistor microphone planted somewhere in the booth he was sitting in, feeding data back to a mainframe at police headquarters. But at least that meant the police would be the only ones who knew. If he'd gone through the baroque network of emergency analogue lines, every housewife in the cite would have known by morning.
He got up from the booth, walked to the desk, and paid the geek - the geek with a submachinegun - who was manning it. There was no secret police car waiting outside - the car would have been unmarked but extremely obvious due to the fact that no one but the government could afford to travel around in cars. The Congolese sun came up like a jack-in-a-box and it was a short walk through the zero tolerance district back to his hotel, which had once been a Hilton. He fell into the mattress, which bludgeoned him compliantly unconscious.
When he opened his hotel room door in the morning to go to the one functioning bathroom, a man was standing outside with a gun.
Neither the man nor the gun was particularly impressive - the gun because it appeared to be a pre-War cased ammunition model that hadn't been cleaned since the Armistice, and the man because his hand was shaking like a masturbator's just before orgasm, and because Mativi knew him to be a paterfamilias with three kids in kindergarten and a passion for N gauge model railways.
However, the gun still fired big, horrid bullets that made holes in stuff, and it was pointing at Mativi.
"I'm sorry, Chet, I can't let you do it." The safety catch, Mativi noted, was off.
"Do what?" said Mativi.
"You're taking away my livelihood. You know you are."
"I'm sorry, Jean, I don't understand any of this. Maybe you should explain a little more?" Jean-Baptiste Ngoyi, an unremarkable functionary in the United Nations Temporary Administration Service (Former People's Democratic Republic of Congo), appeared to have put on his very best work clothes to murder Mativi. The blue UNTASFOR-DEMRECONG logo was embroidered smartly (and widely) on his chest pocket.
"I can't let you take them away." There were actually tears in the little man's eyes.
"Take what away?"
"You know what. Everybody knows. They heard you talking to Grosjean."
Mativi's eyes popped. "No. Ohhh shit. No." He leaned back against crumbling postmodernist plasterwork. "Jean, don't take this personally, but if someone as far down the food chain as you knows, everyone in the city with an e-mail address and a heartbeat knows." He looked up at Ngoyi. "There was a microphone in the comms booth, right?"
"No, the geek who mans the desk is President Lissouba's police chief s half-brother. The police are full of Lissouba men who were exonerated by the General Amnesty after the Armistice."
"Shit. Shit. What are they doing, now they know?"
"'Emergency measures are being put in place to contain the problem'. That's all they'd say. Oh, and there are already orders out for your arrest For Your Own Safety. But they didn't know which hotel you were staying in. One of them was trying to find out when he rang me."
Mativi walked in aimless circles, holding his head to stop his thoughts from wandering. "I'll bet he was. God, god. And you didn't tell them where I was. Does that mean you're, um, not particularly serious about killing me?" He stared at Ngoyi ingratiatingly. But the gun didn't waver - at least, not any more than it had been wavering