((This chapter heading is from a Subway to Sally song called Versteckt (Hidden). It means Covered by shadows. I cannot for the life of me figure out anything else.))
Chapter 5
Mit Schatten bedeckt
It wasn't the first time Adam broke into a police station, but it was certainly the most rural one. He had taken a bus back to Aberdeen and walked to the largest of the three police stations that remained in the city. The abduction had happened in Westhill, which did actually have a small station itself, but he doubted anything as major as an abduction would be handled there.
He had told the young man at the reception that he wanted to report a theft. The item he had then reported in a back room didn't exist. It was a briefcase he described well enough. On his way out, he ducked into a toilet and from there into a vent.
He was barely in the cramped space when his infolink came alive. 'Got anything, Jensen?'
He felt the urge to bang his head against the wall of the vent. 'No, Pritchard. I have been here for all of ten minutes.'
'Get a move on, then. I don't want you arrested on the first day here.'
'Thanks for your concern, Wendy.'
'Yes. Of course you'd be juvenile enough to jump on that. Pritchard out.'
Adam shook his head. He should have asked how the hell Pritchard could contact him when the infolink had been dead before. But the answer was too obvious to ask. Pritchard had hacked his own augmentation and changed the base information so no-one could reach him. He kept the data of his contacts, however. Adam wondered who exactly that was. Him, obviously. Why, though? Had he already planned to lure him here when he'd fiddled with his own head? Or had the hacker had another reason not to erase his contact information?
'This isn't helping,' he muttered into the silence and kept crawling on, wondering why he was even doing it. Francis had never said he'd pay him, and he'd told him before that they were even. Now the hacker was many things, but he wasn't dishonest, so he wouldn't decide that in fact Adam did still owe him. So what was it that had Adam crawl though this hole? Curiosity, probably. If he were a cat, he'd be dead already.
Adam came out a floor below from where he had started. He opened the vent carefully and glanced out. He was in a forsaken corridor. Nothing indicated any cameras here. Chances were, there weren't any. He moved along slowly. The disadvantage of a small place was there were no signs telling him what was where. An office to his left was half open. He pushed the door inwards by another inch to get a look inside. It was as empty as the entire floor seemed to be. A pocket secretary was on a desk. He took it and cowered behind the desk to read it.
'Pritchard,' he subvocalized.
'Got something?'
'Maybe. There's an archive, but apparently it's not here. Can you find out where that archive would be?'
'Unlikely. But maybe I can tell you where you can. Give me a moment.'
Adam sighed and returned to his vent. He was barely there when the link came back alive. 'Jensen! I've got something. On your level there should be the office of one Ronald Dessent. He's the commander of this station and unless I overestimate the local police, you'll find what you need on his computer.'
'Thanks.' Adam left his vent again and moved on, a little more boldly than so far. There was no-one there. He ended up before the unlocked door he had searched for. Pressing himself against the wall, he pushed down the handle and nudged it with his foot. 'How do you know where I am, even?' he muttered into the infolink.
'Because I can practically see through your eyes. Thank God you don't have a tendency towards bloodshed.'
Francis couldn't stomach gore. Adam had learned that on a couple of occasions where the hacker had witnessed it. 'I'll try not to rip any guts out.' If no-one had reacted to a door opening all by itself, no-one would. 'I'll try and hack his computer.'
'You don't hack,' Francis scoffed at him. 'That's like exploding a door and saying you picked the lock.'
'I get results, don't I?'
'We'll see. Get a move on. Pritchard out.'
Jensen rolled his eyes and stepped inside. The computer was turned off and took its sweet time to boot. Jensen looked for an escape should he need one but there was only one entrance to the room. 'Come on,' he told the device. It didn't help. He took the time to close the door.
The computer, thank God, had little internal security except for a password he could easily bypass. And like Francis had predicted, the information was all there. Various links to external websites and a database of the police archive, including the address. He memorised it and was about to leave when the door opened.
For a split second the man who was entering – probably Dessent – must have seen Adam even though he had reacted fast and turned on his glass-shield cloaking. The officer's eyes narrowed, he closed the door and drew a gun. 'Anyone there?' he asked in a low, deep voice.
Adam hardly allowed himself to breathe. The last thing he needed was to be seen. He crept to the wall next to the door, hoping the man would leave, but he didn't seem to want to. He left him no choice. Adam inched closer and stood upright. In one fluid motion he grabbed the officer's chin and crashed his head into the wall. He lowered the unconscious form gently to the ground and made sure he couldn't to choke to death before he left.
He hadn't been seen, but it had been a close call. The man at the front desk looked at Adam askance as he came out of the toilet a good half hour after he'd entered it. 'Upset stomach,' he muttered as he walked out. It was getting dark. He needed to get back to Peterculter. He needed to be mobile, because he wasn't going to walk to the archive. And maybe he shouldn't do any of this to begin with.
