Читать книгу 2089 - Группа авторов - Страница 12

After grandmother Ellie’s death, there was no one who knew Jack well enough that they would have been able to spot his strange behaviour in the build-up to his act of terrorism.

However, with the audiopt feeds recording everything he saw and heard, his preparations had been difficult and disjointed. He had travelled the escape route to the Leckhampton Hill bunker virtually, through his armulet — there had been no opportunity to check the escape plan in the real world.

He had practised making the bombs with random alternate ingredients, under the guise of trying to make cement for the cobbles in his little garden. And in collecting the actual incendiary ingredients, he had made every effort to gather them by touch out of his own sight.

As the audiopt feeds picked up only the electromagnetic waves generated by signals in the auditory and optic nerves, they could not read thoughts. Things outside the field of vision and hearing – tastes, smells and touch sensations – were not recorded.

Finally, Jack had twelve hours between shifts in which to make the real bombs, set them, and then cycle to Highnam to stash his rucksack and establish his alibi. He was not certain that his one shot at manufacturing bombs from scratch would actually work.

Jack’s fingers traced the outside of the rough hessian sack filled with homemade explosives. His blindfold stopped the audiopt feeds observing what he held. Most of the chemicals had been collected from abandoned warehouses or shops, and one he had dug out of the ground. Gathering them had not triggered any red flags in the pre-sifting algorithms of the surveillance network, as they were all innocent items individually. He smiled at the thought that he had been able to collect some of the electronic parts of the triggering system from the Doughnut’s own stores.

He got up from the wooden kitchen chair and carried the sack to join the others in the rucksack by the door. Jack was very familiar with moving around his house blindfold. Even before working on the plan to blow up his workplace, he had often worn a self-imposed eye covering in order to feel free from the audiopts’ ever-watchful supervision.

As he closed the pack, he felt a twinge in his stomach. He had completed the physical preparation of the bombs — he would soon destroy southwestern Britain’s audiopt network entirely and nobody would need to blindfold themselves to ensure their privacy. He whipped the cloth band off his face with a flourish and observed the apparently innocent domestic situation intently. ‘Ooh, look, there’s my table. And the stove with two pots. What a calm kitchen I live in.’

Jack grinned and scratched his short dark hair where it itched from the removed blindfold. He imagined his grandmother sitting with him for a cup of tea, and pictured her own deep smile. She would have congratulated him on giving people back the chance to have secrets.

After he left home, they spoke pretty much daily using armulet video communications. With his long working hours, these were usually mundane chats about their respective daily activities. Sometimes the seasonal work in Ellie’s fields meant that she was not available much during Jack’s free time. Often their daily time together was shorter than he would have liked. The sometimes difficult nature of this arrangement meant that the life stories Ellie shared with her grandson had essentially stopped when Jack moved to Cheltenham at fifteen years old.