Digital Fortress Chapter 25

Inside the Clinica de Salud Publica, visiting hours were over. The gymnasium lights had been turned out. capital of South Dakota Cloucharde was fast asleep. He did not see the figure hunched over him. The needle of a stolen syringe glinted in the dark. Then it disappeared into the IV piping just above Clouchardes wrist. The hypodermic contained 30 cc of cleaning changeable stolen from a janitors cart. With great force, a strong thumb rammed the plunger bulge out and forced the bluish liquid into the old mans veins.Cloucharde was awake only for a few seconds. He might have screamed in disturb had a strong hand not been clamped across his mouth. He lay detain on his cot, pinned beneath a seemingly immovable weight. He could tonus the pocket of fire searing its way up his arm. There was an excruciating pain traveling through his armpit, his chest, and then, like a million shattering pieces of glass, it piddle his brain. Cloucharde saw a brilliant flash of light and then nothing. The visitant released his grip and peered through the darkness at the name on the medical checkup chart. Then he slipped silently out. On the street, the man in wire-rim render reached to a tiny device attached to his belt. The rectangular pack was to the highest degree the size of a credit card. It was a prototype of the new monocle computer. Developed by the U.S. Navy to help technicians record battery voltages in cramped quarters on submarines, the small computer packed a cellular modem and the newest advances in micro technology. Its visual monitor was a perspicuous liquid crystal display, mounted in the left lens of a pair of eyeglasses. The Monocle reflected a whole new age in personal computing the substance abuser could now look through his entropy and still interact with the world around him.The Monocles real coup, though, was not its miniature display but rather its data entry system. A user entered information via tiny contacts fixed to his fingertips touching the c ontacts together in ecological succession mimicked a shorthand similar to court stenography. The computer would then submit the shorthand into English.The killer pressed a tiny switch, and his glasses flickered to life. His custody inconspicuously at his sides, he began touching different fingertips together in rapid succession. A message appeared before his eyes.SUBJECT P. CLOUCHARDE-TERMINATEDHe smiled. transmit notification of kills was part of his assignment. But including victims names that, to the man in the wire-rim glasses, was elegance. His fingers flashed again, and his cellular modem activated.MESSAGE SENT