Metal Fatigue by Sean Williams Page B

of what would happen if he did.
    The wind grew stronger as the night deepened. Curfew came and the lights went out. This did not bother him; he could see just as well in infra-red as he could in other spectra. If anything, it relieved an ever-present concern. Had anyone looked up from one of the very few positions from which he could be seen, prior to curfew, they would have caught a peculiar sight. What they would not have seen lay beneath his disguise, of course, and was far more disturbing. But that he could have been seen at all made him restless; after so long hiding, it felt strange to be moving of his own will out in the open again.
    The moon, half full, rode silently across the field of stars.
    He waited.
    At some point during his timeless meditation, a timber wolf paced the street below. Its fur shone in the moonlight; its bearing was proud and noble. Unaware that it was being watched, it stalked silently back and forth along the opposite pavement like a restless spirit, a passing visitor to the world of flesh.
    The wolf disappeared before dawn, leaving him to his lonely vigil. Sooner or later, he knew, Roads would emerge, and only then would he have to decide what to do.

CHAPTER SIX
    Sunday, 16 September, 5:45 a.m.
    Roads woke before dawn feeling as though a truck had run over him during the night. Without quite getting up, he fumbled for his coat and found a cigarette. The smoke was acrid and thick, but had the required effect on his circadian rhythms: the various parts of his mind got their act together and allowed him to be him again.
    Still, he waited until the sun had risen before climbing out of bed. The room was stuffy and stale, and the feeble light that ventured through the blinds did little to enliven it. He took a shower, only to be irritated by the water pounding his shoulders. Although pleasantly hot, it felt wrong. Not for the first time, he wished for sonics and a thorough dermal scrub. But he was stuck on the far side of the Dissolution in a shabby remake of the twentieth century. Only a few anachronisms remained to remind him of what had once been.
    Anachronisms like Keith Morrow. And hot dogs. And Sundays. He'd been working a seven-day week for so long he'd quite forgotten that weekends had ever existed.
    He shaved, dressed in a casual jumpsuit and made breakfast. Taking a cup of coffee with him, he succumbed to a nagging sense of duty and checked the computer.
    There were two messages waiting. One was from Barney, asking him to call. He tried her home, but she didn't answer. The other was a short, encrypted file from Chappel. He opened it and scanned its contents.
    The Mole had struck again during the night. Shortly before one, the thief had availed himself of data from the Kennedy Prototype Fusion Reactor; he now knew the design tolerances of the facility, plus a few relatively irrelevant details concerning the facility's chief administrators. Officer Jamieson's preliminary report had already been filed: no new evidence and no eyewitness accounts.
    The latter alone was noteworthy. KPFR was staffed twenty-four hours a day by in excess of three hundred people. Quite apart from an extensive array of anti-intrusion devices — including pressure-sensitive pads in major hallways and a video camera network that was constantly monitored — the open spaces themselves must have been difficult to navigate without being seen.
    Difficult, but obviously not impossible. Not one alarm had been triggered, and no-one had seen the Mole enter or leave. That the Mole had actually entered the grounds, and not accessed the data from elsewhere, was beyond doubt; the address the stolen data had been routed to lay within the main complex building.
    Roads could see DeKurzak's point: it smacked of collusion somewhere along the security chain. The possibility could hardly be ignored that someone had prepared the thief's path by deactivating certain alarms or turning off cameras at prearranged times, or by erasing