"John Twelve Hawks - 4th Realm 02 - The Dark River" - читать интересную книгу автора (Twelve Hawks John)

Also by John Twelve Hawks

THE TRAVELER




1

Michael Corrigan sat in a windowless room at the Evergreen FoundationтАЩs Research Center, north of
New York City. He was watching a young Frenchwoman as she wandered through the Printemps
Department Store in Paris. The surveillance cameras in the store reduced everything to black and white
and shades of gray, but he could see that she was a brunette, fairly tall, and quite attractive. He liked her
short skirt, black leather jacket, and her shoesтАФhigh heels with thin straps tied around her ankles.

The scanner room resembled a private facility for showing movies. It had a large flat-panel video screen
and speakers built into the walls. But there was only one place to sitтАФa butternut-brown leather lounge
chair with a computer monitor and keyboard on a pivoting steel arm. Whoever was using the room could
type directions into the system or slip on a phone headset and talk to the staff at the new computer center
in Berlin. The first time Michael sat in the chair, he had to be guided through the use of scanning programs
and backdoor access channels to surveillance systems. Now he could do simple tracking operations on
his own.

The young brunette was walking through the beauty-care section. Michael had checked out the store a
few days earlier and was hoping that his target would take the escalator upstairs to the Printemps de la
Mode section. Although surveillance cameras werenтАЩt allowed in the individual changing rooms, there
was a hidden camera in the public area at the end of the hallway. Occasionally the Frenchwomen would
come out wearing lingerie so they could study themselves in a full-length mirror.




MICHAELтАЩS PRESENCE INthe scanner room was just another indication of his growing influence
among the Brethren. He was a Traveler like his father, Matthew, and younger brother, Gabriel. In the
past, Travelers had been seen as prophets or mystics, madmen or liberators. They had the power to
break free of their bodies and send their conscious energyтАФtheir тАЬLightтАЭтАФto other realities. When they
returned, they had visions and insights that transformed the world.

Travelers had always encountered resistance from the authorities, but in the modern era a group of men
called the Brethren began to identify Travelers and kill them before they could challenge the established
order. Inspired by the ideas of Jeremy Bentham, an eighteenth-century British philosopher, the Brethren
wanted to establish a Virtual Panopticon, an invisible prison that would contain everyone in the industrial
world. The Brethren believed that once the population assumed they were being watched at all times,
they would automatically follow the rules.

The true symbol of the age was a closed-circuit surveillance camera. Computerized information systems
had formed a Vast Machine that could link images and information to monitor large populations. For
thousands of years, those in power had tried to ensure the permanency of their particular system. Finally,
this dream of social control had become a real possibility.