Saul fired and lightnings shorted to the ground all around the driver as he jerked and grunted into unconsciousness. Saul stared for a long moment, considering what he now knew. The Inspectorate had obviously had him in their cells and then sent him off for disposal. He had been a marked man but was now supposedly a dead one. He walked over to the driver and searched him, finding cash money, a palmtop and little else. No papers, but the man wouldn’t need them, since he’d have an ID implant embedded in his arm. Saul then took off the fellow’s foot coverings and held them towards the nearest cam post.
‘What are these?’
‘They are boots,’ Janus supplied.
‘Boots are the rear compartments in ground cars,’ he argued.
‘Nevertheless, what you are holding are also boots – or perhaps shoes.’
The words just weren’t there in his head and their absence both frightened him and locked inside him a sudden determination. He pulled on the footwear and stood up, then walked round and climbed into the transvan.
‘I need to be free of the Inspectorate,’ he declared.
‘That is not possible. The Inspectorate is everywhere on Earth.’
Saul had no reply to that.
He started the van’s turbine, then realized something significant.He had told the driver he was in the last crate the man had delivered here. This information would eventually reach the driver’s masters, as he tried to explain the loss of his vehicle, and one master, one interrogator, would certainly know who Saul was, would know he was alive and start looking for him. As he reversed the van out onto the road, Saul ran it over the driver’s chest, then stopped the vehicle and searched under the passenger seat for a while before stepping out with a heavy wheel jack to finish the job. As he drove away he noticed some of the indigents cautiously closing in. They would take the driver’s clothing and maybe, just maybe, the body would disappear too – subsequently to turn up in sealed plastic packets on a stall in one of the black markets. It was an all too common occurrence in this new age.