Antenna Syndrome Read Free

up and gave her a receipt.
    She stood and pulled on her helmet. “I’ll be back on
Friday. If you find her before that, let me know immediately.”
    “Wish me luck?” I watched her pull on her
gloves.
    “Do this quickly, Mr. Savage, and you’ll get a
handsome bonus.” She closed her visor and left my office.

Chapter 3
     
    I watched her on camera until she’d left the
building. In the office below me a piece of equipment – possibly a
money counter – rattled with machinegun intensity. Based on the
traffic to and from the second floor, I’d long suspected that Pharma4U sold FDA-unapproved drugs promising relief from
radiation sickness, for which there was a large black market. Thus
far I had no need for their product. But many sufferers did.
    Chinatown, recognizing an opportunity of a lifetime,
had almost overnight created a market for traditional herbal
medicines with a patch-based delivery. City buses carried posters
showing a demographic array of New Yorkers wearing medicinal
patches on their arms. Anxiety, bulimia, depression, diarrhea,
incontinence, indigestion, insomnia, loss of libido, neuralgia,
vertigo, etc, ad nauseam – There’s a patch for that! Unfortunately, there was no patch for chronic insolvency, from
which I did suffer.
    I used my iFocals to plug everything Natalie Jordan
had given me – name, phone numbers, CyberCall coordinates – into a
search engine, then ran a few reverse lookups to fill in some
blanks. After about fifteen minutes of surfing and sifting, I found
something linking her to The Confidant , a national content
provider of dubious repute based in LA. Just as The Huffington
Post had become the aggregator of choice for liberal left-wing
news and opinion, The Confidant apparently aspired to be its
dumpster-diving cousin, feeding the public’s insatiable appetite
for sex, scandal and sensationalism.
    I trolled through their website and discovered a
staff writer named Natalie Dunning who looked just like my client.
I gathered a few facts: Dartmouth graduate, brief stint at the Sacramento Bee , registered Democrat, Sierra Club life
member, stock car driver, yoga enthusiast, NRA member – a girl of
some contradictions. Not to mention, possibly, a liar.
    As for Harris Jordan, I already knew the public
persona that had emerged in the run-up to the New York City
mayoralty campaign. He was divorced, but no one really cared about
that any more. His appeal lay in his simple platform – fight the
tsunami of crime and corruption that had swamped the five boroughs,
especially Brooklyn, in the aftermath of the Blast.
    Law and order were at their nadir. Upstanding
citizens of means had fled the area by the millions, leaving bottom
feeders in their wake. Street gangs ruled whole neighborhoods,
their turf wars fought with automatic weapons. Drugs were sold
openly, prostitution was epidemic. Property crime was through the
roof, houses and buildings being pillaged on an industrial scale by
teams of “day-strippers” who broke into properties and gutted their
plumbing and wiring. Urban copper mining was the gold rush of the
day.
    Bureaucratic corruption was rife. It cost a fortune
in bribes to do anything legal, leaving rational people no choice
but to circumvent laws and ordinances on a routine basis. Harris
Jordan wanted to end all that, to pull New York back from the brink
of a failed Soviet state, crush the criminal gangs that were
bleeding the five boroughs, and give people hope in the form of
honest administration and tough-love justice.
    Harris Jordan was especially vocal about the Russian
mafia, which he’d characterized as “bedbugs of modern society”.
They were sucking the blood out of everyone, and no district or
level of society was immune. There was only one response to
infestation, Jordan warned, and that was total extermination.
    He had my vote. But for the present, what really
gave me hope for the future was cash in hand and the promise of a
matching amount, maybe even a