The Motion Clue: A Future Tech Cyber Thriller

Chapter Two - Part Four

CHAPTER TWO - THE RELUCTANT TEAM

Floating in the western Caribbean Sea, Isla Mujeres was the most expensive tourist destination in Mexico. While the city of Cancun lay across the water with its wall-to-wall hotels, packed to overflowing all year long with Chinese and European party-goers, the offshore island was a tranquil backwater of exclusive low-rise and manicured resorts reserved for the permanently wealthy who hated to mix with drunken teenagers. Isabella Martinez knew that if this was the location where she had been summoned for a private meeting, then an extraordinarily rich or recognized and well-connected individual definitively wanted to speak to her. Sitting on a three-inch cotton cushion covering a teak chaise lounge, she repositioned her body into the sun and lay back to stare at the ocean. The unobstructed view of clean, swimmable, open water was never available at her current home base in Lagos, Nigeria where Martinez was head of Mission at the U.S. Consulate. In a world where hardly enough people took the time and made the effort to train for more than a job of following orders, she was a geologist with an expertise in international relations, who the Foreign Service had desperately recruited as an essential superstar to be catered to and encouraged. Offering her margaritas on a Caribbean beach did not hurt either.

Two days earlier, Isabella had received an invitation from U.N. Special Command to travel to Isla Mujeres. Mexican-American like half the U.S. population, she loved hanging out with her southern neighbors. The Network knew that destination preference, but she was also in pursuit of promotable Foreign Service credentials, and it knew that too. She would take the more challenging posts as a step towards a higher-profile next assignment. After Nigeria, she should be on the list to be an Ambassador. Hoping for an appointment to a Latin American country, she would then add children to her resume. The brilliant and super hot recently appointed U.S. Ambassador to Tunisia was at the top of her considerations for partner prospects, although she did not like the fact that he was ahead of her on the promotion scale. Women dominated the diplomatic corps, but he must be a superb official, even if his appointment was to a smaller but strategically significant country. Isabella considered that she had responsibility for more people in and around Lagos than he had in the entire country that he covered, but then quickly noted that without even meeting him, she was already being competitive. She really had to control that instinct which overwhelmed most men who easily misunderstood the ingrained expectations of a girl with seven siblings. Competitive was the discipline of her upbringing, and all that she knew in the sprawling Los Angeles area where she had been raised.

The generic city name referred to a region that encompassed the entire southern California territory including Santa Barbara and Ojai to the northwest, the eastern deserts to Las Vegas, and south to Tijuana on the Mexican side. The lands were an extended, rolling suburban mesh where near perfect weather had long since collapsed under the crush of its population. Every adjustment in transportation, energy and water conservation had been made, but the compensating cost-of-living increases had only served to widen the wealth gap. While cities like Chicago, exemplified the reconfiguration of large metropolitan areas by encouraging high-rise urban density, and limiting spreading suburbs. With its size, LA had to implement that plan, and manage all of the older suburban layouts that had ceased to fade from projecting a one hundred and seventy year old image of the American dream. An endless line of aspirational people could not constrain growth, and ongoing ingenuity made it possible for millions to continue to survive together in a desert. The megalopolis had all bountiful and wasteful human practices spilling over the edges of its unnamed borders. Despite decades of struggle, migrants continued to arrive. Native Angelinos like Isabella who had grown up in the sprawl, understood urban life more specifically than The Network could process it. Effectively, she understood the daily struggle presented to the majority of human life on earth.