The Last Horizon by Anthony Hartig Read Free Book Online Page B

with Scott, the town folk were no help either; they rarely saw him around—“Quiet fella, he seems like a nice guy...always waved and said hello when he drove by...” was the way they described him. Their opinions would be different if they had seen what he did to my men.
       Then last night, Tommy came to my bar and he was scared out of his wits. He looked visibly shaken, kept looking around, and his eyes were bloodshot.
       “Boss, you’ve gotta help me.”
       “You look like hell, Tommy. When’s the last time you slept?”
       “I haven’t. I think I’m being followed.”
       “Calm down. Do you think anyone followed you here?”
       “May be. I dunno.”
    “So what’s got you so edgy?”
    “This Scott guy that you’ve got me tracing...”
    “What about him? What’d you find out?”
    “I searched the C-net for anything on a Fenmore Scott; past schools, parents, siblings, military service, criminal history, you name it, and I found his personal profile. Nothing special about him, zero dirt. On the surface he seems like a citizen; pays his bills, taxes, no big deal.
    He has a SCNet account like everyone else in the system, so I loaded a trackware to run a history on his SCP number so I could hack his account to see the sites he’s visited along with any business transactions.
    My screen went black and I couldn’t get commands to work on my pad the moment I started the scan. Next thing I know, the lights in my apartment dimmed and a series of numbers started typing by themselves on the VDT.
    I hit the scram switch, but my processors wouldn’t turn off so I unplugged from the wall. The second I did this, my power totally blinked-out. I went out to the patio to see if may be there was a black-out in the city, but it was just my place.
    I drove over to Vince’s and we tried to run the scan on Scott’s profile there. The same thing happened; the power went out for a few seconds and those numbers typed out on the screen again.”
    “So what are you getting at, Tommy?”
    “Someone’s watching him. I don’t know who Scott is, and who ever is watching him is now watching us. Scagged our systems and did a fandango on the cores. Neither of our systems are operable.”
    “Can you find out who it is?”
    “Vince is helping me with that right now, he’s using Larron’s system, but we keep hitting a firewall of some sort. We haven’t been able to script it. Boss, we’re up against something big here. This is some serious Network d-star  system assaults.”
    “I thought you, Vince, and Larron were the best in the business, Tommy.”
    “We’re good, Boss,” Tommy frowned, “but I’ve never seen anything like this.”
    Tommy’s sat-phone rang and he almost jumped out of his seat as he fumbled it out of his pocket. He looked at the i.d. on the screen and exhaled with a relieved expression as he looked back at me.
    “It’s Vince.” He smiled weakly as he pressed the answer button and brought the phone up to his ear. “Vince...”
    A bright flash of white light flared from the phone in Tommy’s hand with a loud pop that made his head jerk violently to the side and sent him sprawling to the floor. I was sprayed instantly with his blood.
    “Tommy!” I shouted as I sprang from my chair to see if he was okay. I kneeled next to his crumpled body; his face was covered with blood and the side of his head had been blown away when his phone detonated.
    My bodyguards ran over, grabbed me, and pulled me away from Tommy. By then, customers began screaming as they realized that someone was killed, and pandemonium cut through the music as people jumped up and started running out of the tavern.
    “Let’s get’cha outta here, Kurlie!” One of them bellowed as he grabbed my arm and hustled me through the backdoors of the bar where my driver screeched my sedan to a halt in the alley.
    “Tommy.”
    “He’s dead, Kurlie!” The guard puffed as he shoved me into the backseat, slid in next to me,