“Well,” Sabrina said with fragile good cheer, “your friends always have been rather…exuberant.”
He smiled in spite of himself and put his linen napkin to the side. “Exuberant,” he repeated. “Spot on.”
The car horn honked a second time. “Why doesn’t he use the bloody intercom? My god, you’d think he was raised in a tube.” He stalked to the mullioned window and looked out over the spacious front lawn of the estate. A massive black car, Andrew’s Range Rover, was hunched just outside the wrought iron gate, lights glaring, and engine roaring.
The window swept down, and Andrew thrust his wildly tangled blonde head out. “Hoy!” he shouted, ignoring the electronic device almost at his cheek. “It’s me!”
“Idiot,” Ryan said, grinning. He lifted his head and called into the open air, “Fiona, would you please open the front gate for our guests?”
“Yes, Mr. Ryan,” replied the housekeeper AI. There was a distant grumbling as the iron wings spread wide; a moment later the Range Rover was racing toward the oval driveway. It lurched to a stop right in front of the entrance.
Like many of his closest friends, Ryan was very good-brilliant, in fact-with cybernetics. In his case, he was a near-genius when it came to a nasty little sub-branch of the discipline known as Remote Access Intervention, an almost entirely theoretical field that postulated methods of exerting control over artificial intelligences at a distance-robot mind control, to put it bluntly. Ryan also happened to be the scion of one of the country’s oldest and richest families, and with the recent death of his mother, he now found himself the beneficiary and prisoner to one of England’s larger fortunes.
What he loved most about his friends from university is how they really, truly, didn’t give a shit about his elevated class or his mountain of money. Sometimes, though, they could be a bit much.
Sabrina-neat, quiet, steely Sabrina-hovered in the doorway. “All of them?” she said quite seriously. “At once?”
He smiled apologetically. “I’m afraid so.”
The front door burst open, and Andrew flew in, a skittering mass of beer-fueled energy. Simon came in after him, far more calmly. He had his fists thrust into the pockets of his raincoat, and there was a weight, a grimness, about him that Ryan had never seen before. Samantha was close behind Simon, as beautiful and watchful as ever. Hayden, looking even sour, brought up the rear.
Sabrina looked from face to face and resisted the temptation to shake her head in dismay. Above all things, Sabrina was cordial. Well-bred. Polite to a fault. But she had no education in science, physics or otherwise, and even less interest in them. She recognized that her husband-to-be needed friends of his own, especially those who are accomplished in their own fields, but still…still.
She hadn’t wanted to host this little get-together. She had done her best to quash it before it began, but Ryan had been surprisingly and uncharacteristically insistent. “Simon wants to see me,” he said. “He wants to bring Hayden and Andrew and Sammy along. So that’s what we’re going to do.”
Sabrina resented it. She was not the type who enjoyed surprises. She liked-she required-that every detail of a social event be planned well in advance and executed flawlessly. Just throwing a few crackers onto a plate with some store-bought cheese slices and cracking open a keg was not acceptable. And yet, here they were, dripping dirty rainwater in her alcove and just waiting for her to leave.
The things we do for love, she thought bitterly.
Samantha was the first to speak. “Sabrina,” she said, stepping forward and smiling warmly, “I apologize for us barging in like this. I do hope we’re not causing too much of a problem.”
Sabrina smiled thinly. “Not at all,” she lied.
“Are there snacks?” Andrew asked, peering into the sitting room to one side.
Simon stepped forward and kissed Sabrina briefly on each cheek. “Thanks for the hospitality.”
“It’s nothing. May I ask why you didn’t use the intercom at the gate? If it’s broken…”
“No,” Hayden said. “It’s fine, I’m sure. We just…we didn’t use it, that’s all.”
The truth is, Simon said to himself, you don’t have a super-secret spy-phone that’s safe from eavesdropping, and we don’t want anyone to even know we’re here, so…god, this is getting complicated.
Sabrina slipped away to prepare the sitting room, and the rest of the group followed down the corridor, gradually taking off their topcoats and scarves as they went. It was an imposing place-all polished wood, mullioned windows and ancient, heavy furniture. Simon half-expected a wizened retainer in a tux to step out from behind the array.
The library was almost a parody of the book-lined studies seen in a thousand BBC dramas, stacked floor to ceiling with shelves completely filled with dusty tomes no one had opened in a generation, overcrowded with comfy chairs and discreet reading lamps. As he peeled off his coat, he said, “Ryan, we’re in a bit of a situation here. We need to talk.” He leaned close to his friend and spoke so no one else could hear, “And we don’t want to alarm Sabrina.”
Simon had to give Ryan credit: he didn’t gape at the mere mention of a crisis. He cast a guarded, concerned look at his impeccable bride-to-be, who-to her credit-noticed the expression and read it perfectly.
“Well, all,” she said with a little smile, “I know this is important, and I’m quite sure I won’t understand a word of it. So, I think I will leave you to it for the evening.” She paused briefly, as if searching for words. “Whatever it is…I wish you the best of luck.”
With that, she stepped backwards through the double doors and slid them shut, leaving the rest of them alone.
The silence in the room was deep and deafening. Simon was the first to break it. “Do you have an AI active in here?”
Ryan, who was staring distractedly at the door where his fiancee had disappeared, shook himself awake. “Of course.” Simon looked over to Andrew who was already playing with his gadgets to scramble and confuse the AI in the room. Simon pulled the memory card with Oliver’s message imprinted on it from his breast pocket and laid it on the table.
Andrew cocked an eye at him. “We all good in the big ears department?” he asked obscurely.
Simon tapped the same breast pocket, where he held Andrew’s device. “Never leave home without it,” he said, smiling grimly. A roiling black cube appeared above the end table as the data from the card loaded. “I could try and explain all this to you,” he said. “And I will. But I need to show this to you first. Just…watch.” He tapped the card, muttered, “Play,” and his father’s eerily smiling face appeared.
No one spoke while the message played through, and no one spoke for a long time after.
Samantha, who had heard the story already, was still having a hard time taking it all in. “That…that doesn’t seem like him at all.”
“What was with that laugh?” Andrew said, strangely subdued for the moment. “I never heard Oliver Fitzpatrick laugh like that.”
Ryan had worked with father and son for years. He knew both of them exceedingly well. Now he just shook his head. “He was lying,” he said bitterly. “Clearly. Obviously. Anyone who had ever worked with the man would know that.”
“Absolutely,” Hayden said. He was leaning against the bookcase, arms folded, a look of outrage and deep concern on his lined face.
Simon felt the tension flow from his body. “Then it’s not just me,” he said.
“Not at all,” Sammy said, utterly in shock from what she had witnessed.
Ryan turned and faced his old friend with an unaccustomed intensity. “Simon, listen to me. We have to get to the bottom of this. Whatever you need-connections, media, bribes, I don’t care-it’s yours. All of it. We have to locate Oliver and bring him home.”
Simon looked at the others. “The rest of you?”
“I’m there,” Andrew said, his voice uncharacteristically rough. “Whatever you need.”