He also figured that by the time he’d found the note, far later than Shawn had intended, things were vastly changed and the people in the State Department and in the Defense Department who were in charge of such things had probably put something lethal on that access, something that would render his computer worse than useless.
He’d no facilities or knowledge to figure out such destructive actions. He’d not dare connect it in again to any computer system for fear of what he might bring with it. He just hoped the contact he was trying wouldn’t destroy the computer’s unconnected usefulness to him, in his translations and the other things he used it for, right down to his personal notes.
But, foreseeing the day, he’d backed up what he could. And he couldn’t avoid the direct contact. It was a reciprocating set of operations that would flow back and forth—if he got in.
He used the keyboard. He entered what he had. He sat, with a human by him who wasa computer tech from a system vastly more advanced than his, who didn’t, Jase said, know as much about what Jase called these early machinesas he knew about atevi. Jago was there. Banichi was. Cenedi was. And at the critical keystroke, the computer telltales lit up, flickered, and kept flickering. He sat and listened for the vocal output, which he didn’t believe would come.
But relays were clicking. It sounded as if relays were clicking. On the State Department lines, if that was how he’d gotten in, there was a robot, not a human operator. If the numbers were good, the call went to another robot.
But if what he feared was true, the second robot would be deactivated, the one that once had been able to get him through to the Foreign Office.
Next relay. He expected a voice. He could hardly believe it.
Then another click dashed his hopes. Click. Pause. Click. Click. Click.
“They must be routing the call to the far side of the island,” he said to Jase, and even as he said it, he suspected the call was doing exactly that: those were repeated long-distance connections, his codes still burrowing through walls and routing itself, please God, to the State Department and the Foreign Office, where if he was very, very lucky, at this late, after-dark hour, he might find the system routed itself withoutan operator, as could happen if your codes were very, very clean, to Shawn, wherever he was.
It rang.
“ You have reached—” It was the damn recording. He punched a manual code. And it rang another number.
“ Foreign Office.”
It was a young voice. Female. Very young. His heart sank.
“Shawn Tyers,” he said. “Code check. This is an emergency.”
“ Sir?”
“The Foreign Secretary.” God, God, they were hiring fools. “Put me through to the Foreign Secretary. You punch code 78. You have to do it from your console.”
“ Is this Mr. Cameron?” There was alarm in the voice. Excitement. And he didn’t want to admit it, but he saw no choice.
“Yes. It is. On diplomatic business. Life and death. Put me through.”
“ He’s gone home. I mean— he’s gone home up to the coast, Mr. Cameron. They shut the office.”
“They shut the office.”
“ Well—” The voice lowered. Sounded shaky. “ Mr. Cameron, the State Department shut it down. They’ve fired everybody in the whole Foreign Office, except I worked for both offices. I’m the night operator.”
“Polly?” He remembered a dark-complexioned young woman with a part down the middle of her head.
“ Yes, sir, Mr. Cameron. And they’re going to fire me, too. They record all the calls. I can’t call out. Is there something you can tell me that I can tell somebody?”
“Good night, Polly.”
“ Yes, sir.” The voice was very faint. Hushed as it was, she sounded like a child. “ Have a good evening, sir.”
Damn, he wanted to say. And wanted to slam the receiver down. But he didn’t. He drew a deep breath and calmed his nerves.
“Nand’ dowager, the State Department has discharged everyone in the Foreign Office. Even the Secretary has gone home. That’s what I’m told, and I believe the young woman who told me. Yolanda-paidhi may well have gone somewhere. But I’m very fearful she hasn’t.”
Jase, leaning on the counter, hung his head and looked utterly downcast.
“So,” the dowager said.
“I know where she’d come,” a young voice said.
And with one accord everyone looked at the boy from Dur.
24
There were maps. Ilisidi’s security had very detailed maps, which they had brought into the small, glass-walled conference room just off the main communications center. Out there beyond the glass, technicians of the Messengers’ Guild kept routine broadcasts going and, being mostly Saduri locals stranded away from their homes by the crisis, gratefully had their suppers off the official buffet. In this room, standing around the conference table with the chairs pushed back to the glass, all of them that had to make the plans were the crowded but willing audience as Rejiri of Dur-wajran ran his hand over a profusion of numbers and topographical lines on the shoreline of Mospheira—including this area, which was not detailed on most atevi maps.
“Most illegal boats come from the Narrows, here,” Rejiri said with his fingers on the narrowest part of the strait, that nearest Aidin. “And there’s a very bad current in the Narrows, so it looks like a real good place to go across but it isn’t. Freighters know, but they come down from Jackson and catch the current and drive hard. They have the big engines, too. But the little boats, they can’t carry that much in their tanks, nand’ dowager, and if they go too hard they’ll run their tanks dry and especially if they don’t have a lot of extra tanks aboard they’ll be in a lot of trouble. If they leave out of Jackson and go with the current and the wind’s not in their faces off Aidin headland they can cut across and the current will just carry the little boats to Dur. But the sneaky thing is if you don’t know anything but boating in safe water and you don’t know you’re in the current and you think you’re going across, and you aren’t, you’re going way, way south. You want to have a lot of cans of fuel, a whole lot of cans. But if you run out or sometimes if you go out of Bretano—if you do that, and some do, they all come in right here.” The boy pointed to a spot on the outer shore, at the place where it turned in to Saduri Harbor—and drew a second breath. “That beach. If you drop a bottle in at Jackson or Bretano it’s got to come here. You can find all sorts of stuff after a storm. Just junk, most times. But if there’s a boat tried to smuggle stuff in, or if they don’t make Dur, they’ll break up on the rocks at the point or they’ll make landfall somewhere right along here. And weather’s been bad. Which could help them along but the seas are going to be awful, too.”
“What does he say?” Jase wanted to know. The boy had a rapid patter, an accent, and he was using words Jase didn’t know. Bren gave him the condensed version in Mosphei’.