“You know what I mean. And still, you hop a flight or a train or a camel from…wherever the hell you were…and come here to see me in person. So, what’s up?” He sipped at the scotch again and raised his eyebrows, waiting.
Jonathan didn’t answer him directly. Instead he paused for a second and then raised his head to face one of the discretely mounted cameras in a dark corner of the room. “Fae,” he said, “do you remember that little trick I taught you last summer?”
“I think I know what you’re referring to, Jonathan,” Fae said in her deeply mellow voice. Simon had programmed her to sound just like Diana Rigg at the age of thirty in her Avengers heyday. The resemblance was uncanny.
“Procedure Kappa Alpha Poindexter, then,” Jonathan said.
Simon heard the oddest sound: a pop and a hummm that came from no direction and all directions at once, then quickly cycled up the audible sound-spectrum until it seemed to fade away…or fill the room. “What the hell?” he heard himself say for the second time that night.
“It’s an anti-eavesdropping widget I installed in Fae last time I was here,” Jonathan said. “Sends out a field of white noise that effectively kills every kind of bug, either live-feed or recording, within twenty meters. All they will hear is a muffled hiss until I tell it to go away.”
“Are you saying my home is bugged?” Simon was astonished. “Someone is listening to me?”
“Don’t be an idiot, Simon. Someone is always listening these days. You know that.”
“It’s that serious?”
Jonathan’s weariness showed through far more clearly now. He put the half-finished scotch on the end table and nodded. “Yeah. That serious.”
He stood up and paced to the fireplace, thinking deeply.
“I have a message for you,” he said.
Simon frowned. “From whom?”
“Your father.”
A long, cold moment passed. Simon felt a gulf opening between them. “My father is dead,” he said shortly, surprised at the anger in his own voice.
Jonathan, uncharacteristically hesitant, looked at a spot on the carpet midway between them. “Yes, that may be, but-”
“May be, Jonathan? May?” He leaned forward, doing his best to hold in his rage. “Oxford told me he was dead. The British Diplomatic Corps told me he was dead. Even your own beloved UNED told me he was dead. None of them will give me one bit of detail-how he died, when he died, even where-but they all agree on that one bloody fact: Oliver Fitzpatrick is dead. Or is that a lie, too?”
Jonathan wouldn’t say. Simon recognized the expression; he’d seen that same mulish, stubborn secretiveness in the man since they had both met in college. It was one of the characteristics that made Jonathan Weiss such an accomplished investigator and operative. And Simon hated his friend for it, if only a little.
“Do you have a screen nearby?” Jonathan said abruptly. “Net ready?”
“Of course,” Fae murmured. It was common for most households to have virtual screens that could appear at will available in nearly every room. Like the AIs, they’d become standard over the past few years.
Bloody technology, Jonathan thought.
A black strip appeared in the rich wood surface of the end table between them; it buzzed very faintly, and a ghostly rectangle opened in the air above it. A beat later it folded out into a box almost as big as the table itself: a holographic display, ready for data. A virtual keyboard glowed into existence in a flat space at the edge of the tabletop, and Jonathan moved to the chair in front of it. His fingers flew.
Simon scowled at the entire display. “What, no secret microdot concealed in your shoe? No handwritten note scrawled on a bit of charred newsprint?”
“Oh, shut up, man. Sometimes you can be so British.” Jonathan reached into the cube and navigated the data by hand, moving to one particular site he had keyed in. “I’m trying to do you a favor here.”
Simon stood over his friend’s shoulder as the hologram blossomed. He nearly dropped his scotch when it revealed a gaudy pink-and-silver fantasy landscape, filled with kittens, dinosaurs, and unicorn ponies.
“What the hell?” he said. It seemed the phrase was becoming his new slogan.
“A little data-espionage tip,” Jonathan said over his shoulder, without looking at him. “These massive multi-player role-playing games, especially the ones for children, are wonderful places to hide data. There are literally millions of children online at any moment, all doing something silly, so many of them with so much content changing all the time that even the spy-nets have a hard time keeping track of it all. And even if one of them stumbles on an encrypted or password-protected file, they don’t bother cracking it-they’re kids. Besides, they can just move on to some other game or character or pinky-blue fairy-thing that’s easier to talk to. There’s just so much.”
He wandered through the over-bright, slightly ridiculous landscape until he came to a cartoon treasure chest with a big blue padlock. “There we go, ItzyBitzyVille,” he said. He tapped the keyboard and gave the hologram a gentle fingertip-shove. The lock popped open. Then, with a single deft stroke, he lifted the lid to reveal a glittering black diamond inside.
“Give me the word,” the diamond said.
“Carmel corn,” Jonathan said.
“Oh, god,” Simon groaned.
“Shh!” Jonathan tapped a five-digit number into the virtual keypad. The diamond turned white and asked for a second password.
“Camembert,” Jonathan said in a strangely hushed voice…
Suddenly, the hologram went black. The fantasy landscape was gone completely, replaced by a flat black cube that swirled for a moment, and then coalesced into the three-dimensional representation of a human head-a particular human head.
A bolt of ice-cold dread cut through Simon. The image was Oliver Fitzpatrick, Simon’s father. And he looked…strange.
Jonathan tapped the PLAY icon at the base of the image and sat back.
“Whoever sees this,” he said, “If anyone does, please get it to my son, Simon Fitzpatrick.” He reeled off Simon’s public e-mail address and his geographical address in the Physics Department, Materials Science Division, at Oxford. “Thank you.”
Always the polite one, Simon thought remotely. I don’t think he can help himself.
The image of his father moved a fraction closer to the camera, nearly filling the screen. He was clean-shaven, smiling; he seemed well-rested and well-fed. At sixty-eight, his father had always been the picture of the twenty-first century English gentleman: impeccably groomed, eternally charming. And that was still true. In fact, he seemed to be doing remarkably well for a man who was supposed to be dead. His eyes were clear and bright, his skin smooth and glowing. He even had a little color…
…A little color in his…
Simon found himself leaning forward and squinting at the image, trying to will it into even greater clarity. “Jon,” he said, half-surprised at the sound of his own voice. “Jon, is he wearing makeup?”
Jonathan frowned at the holo and cocked his head. “Son of a bitch,” he said. “I…I think he is.”
“Hello, Simon,” Oliver said, smiling straight into the camera. “I can’t tell you where I am because I don’t know where I am-not exactly, anyway. They call it Station 135. It is somewhere in Victoria Land, but I’ve never seen it marked on a map, paper or digital. And I probably shouldn’t even be telling you that. Ha. Ha.”
Simon felt an involuntary shudder go through him. That’s not how he laughs, he told himself. In fact, he doesn’t laugh at all. He’s not a grim man, not sour…but he’s not a laugher. And the three or four times I’ve heard him do it, it never, ever, sounded like that.
“You know some of the work I’ve been doing,” Oliver said. “It is still in the field of exotic materials science, just like yours, but…very different. But it’s going very well, very well indeed. Most exciting. And you needn’t worry about me. I’m fine. Really. I’m fine. So please, Simon-no matter what you hear, you needn’t worry about me. You understand? No matter what.”