An hours’ drive shrank to forty minutes as he urged the taxi driver on. The recent rain storms had left the road damp, but that didn’t seem to phase the driver as Sean encouraged him to go faster. With every mile between them and Moscow, Sean relaxed a bit more, and by the time he arrived at David’s farm he was feeling a lot more level-headed.
‘Sean! What are you doing here?’
David flicked his straggly, shoulder-length hair from across his face, a welcoming smile revealing his dirty teeth.
‘I need somewhere to lie low for a bit. I figured you could help.’
The smile waned.
‘Er… sure. Come in.’
David backed up to let Sean in, before looking both ways out the door.
‘Where’s your car?’ he asked.
‘Left it at the hotel and got a taxi here.’ Anticipating David’s next question, Sean added: ‘I was dropped off up the road and I made sure I wasn’t followed.’
That seemed to satisfy David; he shut the door and bolted it twice.
‘Everything alright?’ Sean asked.
‘Yes, I’m fine,’ David said, pushing past and wandering through to the back. Sean followed him. ‘It’s just… I had a couple of police officers here, you know, snooping like they do, asking questions. They didn’t have a warrant or anything, but I locked the door after they left just to be safe. Can I interest you in some cake?’ He had stopped by a rotten workbench that was almost black with mould. There was a cake atop it.
‘No… thanks,’ Sean said, eyeing the scene with a grimace. ‘But I’d really appreciate it if I could use your internet.’
‘Sure,’ David said, helping himself to a slice. ‘The password’s my birth date.’
‘Really? Your birth date?’ Sean said as he watched David push the cake into his mouth in one go. It occurred to him that this man must have the most resistant immune system in the world to live in these conditions and not get sick.
‘I’m just kidding,’ David said through the mouthful. ‘It’s actual a fifty-digit hexadecimal code. But it was my birthday last week, which is why I have cake.’
Sean forced what he hoped was a pleasant smile over his true feeling of revulsion. ‘Happy birthday.’
‘Thanks,’ David said, beaming. ‘Give me whatever device it is you want connecting and I’ll hook it up for you.’
Sean retrieved his laptop and passed it to David, who took it with sticky hands. At least the cake, being a week old, wasn’t too greasy. ‘Is the connection secure?’
David snorted.
‘Don’t be silly,’ he said, ‘of course it is. It doesn’t come any securer… securer…’
‘More secure?’ Sean suggested.
‘Yes, exactly. It doesn’t come any more securer than this.’ He looked pleased with himself, swelling with pride.
‘Very impressive.’
‘Isn’t it just? You’ll need to use a wired connection though, I hope that’s alright?’
‘That’s fine, thank you.’
‘Wireless connections just aren’t secure enough.’
‘I figured.’
David clicked away at Sean’s laptop for a few minutes, sucking crumbs off his fingers as he worked. ‘All done,’ he said, handing the device back. ‘Cable’s pretty long, so you can take it to the workbench if you want.’
‘That’s okay,’ Sean said. He assumed the workbench was the same rotten one with the cake on it. ‘I’ll sit here and use it on my lap.’
‘Okay, but that’s not good for your back.’
‘I’ll be fine, thank you.’
‘Can I get you a drink?’
‘No, thank you.’
‘How long will you be staying?’
‘I’m not sure.’
Sean opened his browser and tapped Major General John Bales into the search bar.
‘What are you looking for?’ David asked.
Sean shut his eyes. He’d forgotten how annoying David could get. ‘Actually, I will have that drink, thank you,’ he said. That seemed to appease David.
‘What would you like?’
‘Some water would be great, I’ve got a bit of a headache.’
‘Would you like some aspirin, too?’
‘Okay, sure.’
David, grinning, left to get Sean’s drink and pills. Sean scrolled through the results, but he couldn’t see anything relevant. He scanned page after page, with nothing catching his eye. It wasn’t a surprise, but he couldn’t help but feel disappointed. He tried a different search: SETI Sally Fisher
After he and Aleks had cracked Lev’s code, they’d spoken more about UV One and Sally Fisher, and of the whole picture, it was Sally Fisher that bugged him most. She was the anomaly in all this, the sore thumb that stuck out from here to the International Space Station. If Bales wanted to destroy UV One — and it was hard to imagine he wanted to do anything else with the explosive on board Progress — then it didn’t make sense to send her. Maybe she was a last resort, a bridge to burn if communications failed. It all seemed very drastic.
He scrolled through the results and found a bio of her on a university page. She was a plain-looking girl, yet Sean found it hard to take his eyes off her. When he finally did, he read through the post, scanning past the details he already knew. He re-read it, and then again. Something twigged in his mind, but he wasn’t quite sure what it was. He searched for: Robert Gardner TMA-08. Again, it was no surprise that nothing came up, save for a mission report that said everything had gone as expected. The report was accompanied by a photo of the crew: Gardner, some other guy, and someone that for some reason he recognised. He opened a new tab, loaded up the mission page for the current Soyuz TMA Ten M expedition, and the same face was there. Captain Evgeny Novitskiy.
Sean’s brain thundered with electricity as he untangled threads at random in the hope that something would come from it. Bales, Novitskiy, Gardner, Fisher, TMA Eight, TMA Ten M — it was all somehow linked, and no matter how close he was to understanding that link, he just couldn’t grasp it.
‘I’ve got your water. And your aspirin.’ David wandered back in, carrying a glass that was brim-full of cloudy water. He handed it over, looking pleased with himself. ‘Didn’t spill a drop.’
Sean nodded his thanks and took a sip. It tasted chalky.
‘And here’s your aspirin.’
He opened a dirty hand to reveal two pills sticking to it. Sean peeled them off, looked at them, figured that he could do worse than to cure his headache, and placed them on his tongue. Taking another long swig of the chalky water, he swallowed them both down. ‘Thanks,’ he said, his tongue tingling in a most unsavoury way.
‘You’re welcome. What are you looking at?’
Sean’s train of thought was well and truly derailed, so he decided he may as well share it with David. It couldn’t hurt. ‘I’m trying to find a link between four people. One guy reckons he found god and nearly killed two others doing it; another guy is one of the guys the first guy nearly killed; there’s a girl that doesn’t seem to fit in at all; and the last guy, he’s in charge, and he’s about to do something big.’ He made an explosion sound, throwing his hands apart to simulate what he meant, but David just looked blank. Never mind.
‘I don’t believe in god,’ David said.
Sean smiled. David may be simple, but he wasn’t stupid. And he was damn handy with a computer. ‘No, me neither. It’s too easy to believe in something so conveniently inexplicable.’
‘They used to kill people who didn’t believe in god. Can you imagine that? It’s madness.’