He wondered what to do next. Climbing over the fence would probably lead to a neighbor calling the police and he hadn’t brought the tools he’d need to open the gate quietly. He had no idea if Lennie even still lived here—the address Abernathy had given him was a month old at least, and there was no way to be certain that Lennie hadn’t moved on.
Joe weighed the alternatives and decided that the vagueness of the information meant that breaking in would be a mistake.
He was about to give up on the house when he spotted movement in an upstairs window, as if a shadow had just passed behind the net curtains.
He made his way around to the front door and knocked again.
A lot harder this time.
Made it sound official.
There was a sound from within.
Someone was coming down the stairs.
Joe got himself ready for whatever it was that was about to greet him.
Abernathy took Joe to a riverside greasy spoon that was light-years away from the boutique cafés that Joe imagined he usually frequented. None of the chairs matched, the tablecloths were paper, and its smell of cooking bacon reminded Joe of a hole-in-the-wall diner near Coney Island that his mom had taken him to whenever she got back from a “business trip.” That made it just about the finest smell in the world.
Abernathy bought Joe what was referred to as a full English breakfast—four strips of bacon, sausages, fried eggs, fried tomatoes, fried mushrooms, fried bread, toast—to which Joe added some hash browns, extra toast, and a stained mug of instant coffee with the curse taken off it with multiple sugars. Abernathy ordered mineral water. It was delivered in a slightly dirty glass, making his lip curl.
Joe ate like he hadn’t had anything for a month and Abernathy just sat and watched him tear through his meal. Joe was pretty sure he didn’t blink the whole time.
When he was finished Joe looked up, wiped his mouth with a napkin, and said, “No.”
“I thought Leonard Palgrave was a friend of yours.”
“Actually, you know he is. And his name’s Lennie. And it’s still no.”
Abernathy studied the tabletop.
“What’s he done, anyway?” Joe asked finally.
There was a slight twitch of Abernathy’s top lip that could have been a smile or a sneer.
“That is the question I was hoping you would try to answer.”
Joe shook his head. “Nice coincidence, isn’t it?”
Abernathy raised an eyebrow. “I’m not sure I know what you mean,” he said gruffly.
“Oh, come on. One of your operatives goes AWOL and suddenly you’ve got a case involving a friend of his?”
“Okay, I understand what you’re saying. But I believe that the universe tends to put people in the places they’re needed, at the times they’re required. I understand your suspicions, but this isn’t a trick to lure you back to duty. I would never be so”—he waved his hand in the air as if fishing for the right word—“transparent.”
Joe tried to look unconvinced.
Failed.
Abernathy might be many things—among them haughty, overbearing, and arrogant—but he certainly wasn’t a liar.
But the big thing was still unspoken between them, the elephant in the room, and Joe couldn’t think about anything else until he’d drawn Abernathy’s attention to it.
“I’ll only let you down. You know I will.”
“You’ve let no one down,” Abernathy said.
“Tell that to Andy.”
Abernathy paused. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“Says you. Not me.”
“Just look into this one thing for me. Go save your friend. Maybe it will balance out …” He left the sentence unfinished.
Joe pushed his plate aside. “So I’ll ask again: what did he do?”
Abernathy handed him a folded piece of paper. “That’s his last known address.” He stood up, pausing to brush a wrinkle from his suit trousers. “Find out how he’s doing. What he’s doing. Report back if you find out anything.”
Abernathy paid the bill on the way out of the door.
He didn’t look back.
While the person took their time answering the door, Joe got himself ready. First he chose the accent to match the situation, immediately disregarding the hybrid US/UK one he’d been gaining since moving here, and going for something a little more Notting Hill friendly. Then he loaded a few personality traits from the many he had stored away inside the chip in his brain.
Immediately, he felt his back straighten, giving himself an extra inch in height; felt his face set itself into just the right mixture of expressions: expressions that would make him seem friendly, concerned, and vaguely—indefinably—official. He reinforced the expressions by manufacturing the precise pheromones to accompany them.
The chip in his head was capable of a whole lot of really cool things, but pheromone control was one of the coolest. Sure, it had taken him months to learn to effectively use pheromones—chemicals produced naturally by the body that had subtle, subliminal effects on other people who encountered them—but they were now an indispensible weapon in his armory. Insects used them for marking territory, warning comrades of danger, attracting mates, calling other insects toward them, even calming distressed pals. Human pheromones were still a disputed topic among scientists, but Abernathy’s Research and Development team were light-years ahead of the private sector, and Joe carried software that gave him complete control of their production.
It wasn’t a miracle mind-control device or anything, but producing the right pheromones at the right time could subtly alter a person’s perceptions. It gave Joe a small edge by chemically reinforcing his deception.
The door was opened by a pretty girl in her mid-to-late teens; she had expensive highlights in her hair and expensive clothes. Artist-precise makeup. Light blue eyes. The hand holding the door had perfectly manicured nails, not the hideous fake ones favored by so many of her peers.
“Hi,” the girl said, sounding bored more than hostile.
Joe thought what the heck? and added attract pheromones into the mix.
“Hi there,” he said. “My name’s Joe. I’m looking for a friend …” He ended the sentence with the rising tone that made it sound like a question. Antipodean rising inflection: an Australian imported intonation that also managed to gently condition the listener to accept questions.
The girl’s expression matched her bored tone.
“How very nice for you,” she said. “I usually make friends the old-fashioned way, but if going door-to-door is working for you, then good luck with that.” She looked ready to slam the door in his face.
Joe smiled, but it was a precise smile requested from, and executed by, the chip inside his head. Most people didn’t even consciously notice the sort of expressions manufactured by his onboard hardware and software. That was because they were micro-expressions, the tiniest changes in the muscles of the human face that viewers analyze without even knowing they are doing so. Everyone’s face makes them, but very few people have complete mental control over them. Reading micro-expressions makes it possible for some people to tell what others are thinking just by looking at their faces. It wasn’t telepathy; just very small facial expressions of the type that Joe’s chip was capable of faking.
This smile had a touch of vulnerability, which he—of course—underlined with the necessary pheromones.
The girl’s face suddenly shifted. She sensed the change in Joe and looked concerned. Joe almost felt guilty manipulating her.
Almost.
“I’m sorry,” he said, acting like he really was sorry. “I didn’t mean to disturb you.”
He emphasized the apology with a slight turn of his body as if he were about to leave.
Which he wasn’t.
“That’s all right,” the girl said, her bored—then teasing—manner disappearing in an instant. “Look, don’t go. How can I help?”
Joe made his face look grateful.
“I’m looking for a friend of mine. This is the address I was given by his parents …”
The girl now looked positively eager to help.
“What’s his name?” she asked, and Joe was surprised to see her actually pout to stress her femininity, until he realized he hadn’t turned off attract.
Still, the mix seemed to be working, and it would have been a shame to spoil a winning recipe.
“Lennie,” Joe said. “That is, Leonard Palgrave. We went to school together. Kind of lost touch… .”
Something flickered in her eyes when he gave her Lennie’s name, but he couldn’t really get a feel for what it was; it was too quick, too vague, and she recovered very well and very quickly.
“I know Lennie. He lives here.” A tiny frown crinkled her brow. “Or he did. I haven’t seen him for a couple of weeks, maybe more.”
“Oh.” Joe tried disappointed as a facial and chemical combination, but retained the smallest trace of attract. “Do you know where he went?”
The girl shook her head.
“I don’t know that he’s moved out, exactly. It’s just that I haven’t seen him around. My folks rent out a couple of rooms,” she explained, “so there’s a fair amount of coming and going. It’s just the last time Lennie went … well, he didn’t come back.”
“But he hasn’t moved out?”
“No. I mean his stuff’s still here… .”
Joe decided to shake her up a little and tried worry and concern. And attract. “I hope he’s all right,” he said, getting the pitch of his voice just right.
The statement seemed to shock the girl.
“Oh. I hadn’t thought …” Joe saw an opportunity for a little indignation, contemplated how it would be mean of him, then used it anyway.
“… that something might have happened to him?” He immediately scaled back on the indignation and went back to concern. “I just hope he’s okay. His parents are worried… .” The shifts in chemicals kept the girl off balance, uncertain.
Once, long ago, Joe had found this sort of deliberate abuse of people’s emotions distasteful, but once he’d started saving lives and putting bad guys away, he’d become more ambivalent toward it. Yes, it was manipulative and a little cruel, but it also got results where anything else would probably fail. But he had made a mental pact with himself that he would only use it for work, never for fun.
He mostly even kept to the pact.
The girl was riding his pheromone waves of concern, and he cut it off entirely in case she actually started crying.
“Should I have called the police?” she asked, her voice shaking.
“No, of course not,” Joe said quickly. “He could be on …” He went to say “vacation” but realized it would ID himself as a nonlocal. “… holiday. Or maybe he’s met up with friends… .”
This seemed to reassure her because her posture visibly relaxed.
“Look, do you want to come in? I mean, standing here on the doorstep …”
She left the end of her sentence suspended in the air for him to finish. It replicated the way he’d left the end of his last sentence hanging, and that was a pretty solid sign that she was starting to trust him. Mirroring, they called it in the courses that Joe had attended. He smiled, but not too much and with a little relief, and she ushered him into an immaculately neat hallway.
There were waxed oak floorboards underfoot, neutral magnolia on the walls, a few tasteful framed pictures and the sweet smell of jasmine in the air. Two of the pictures were of dogs, Joe noted; the other a country landscape.
She led him past the stairs and into a kitchen at the end of the hall. The kitchen revolved around an Aga stove, with a huge oak table and a breakfast bar close enough to take advantage of the heat the Aga was belting out.
“Can I get you anything?” the girl asked.
“I’m fine. And I’m Joe, by the way, Joe Dyson.”
He’d already told her his name when she first answered the door, but she hadn’t offered up hers yet and he liked to put a name to a face.
So did Abernathy.
It made filing reports a whole lot easier if you could list a name rather than refer to your subject as “attractive teenager.”
“Ellie,” the girl said. “Ellie Butcher.”
Joe offered his hand and they shook. “Pleased to meet you, Ellie. You said your parents rent a couple of rooms …?”
She looked a little embarrassed, but Joe eased it with pheromones.
“It’s the economic downturn. It helps pay the bills.”
“A great idea. Very sensible. And how long has Lennie been living here?”
“Not long,” Ellie said, sitting at the table and gesturing toward a seat for Joe. “Two months, give or take. He answered a small ad, seemed nice …”
Joe sat down and nodded encouragingly. “He’s a good guy … At school he … helped me out a few times. I feel like I owe him.”
Sometimes getting information out of someone was as much about telling the truth as it was about lying.
Joe had met Lennie Palgrave during his first disorienting week at Horace Walpole Secondary School, near Windsor.
He’d been moved there midway through the winter term of what the Brits called Year 10. He’d been having trouble at his first English school because his ever-present anger issues had started rearing their ugly head again.
Of course, his feelings had been made stronger by being suddenly uprooted from the bustle of New York to the Hobbiton-like existence of rural England, and had culminated in his punching a bully who just wouldn’t let up about Joe’s accent. His mother had disagreed with the headmaster’s solutions, so she’d called in a favor from a family friend—Abernathy—and Joe had transferred at the same time he became a youth operative for Abernathy’s anticrime youth task force.
It had been a hectic transition from inner city public school to countryside private school—although for some mystifying reason the Brits used “public school” as a euphemism for what was really a private school—and it had carried a very steep learning curve.
So steep it was practically perpendicular.
Abernathy had supplied three private tutors to help speed up Joe’s transition into the UK school system, but coupled with the increased complexity of the intelligence service training, Joe was still feeling out of his depth. At times he wondered if he hadn’t made some hideous, embarrassing mistake.
Walking into his first English lesson Joe had done the look around and watch people avoid eye contact that had greeted him in every other class and was preparing to settle at an empty desk when suddenly one of the kids deliberately caught his eye. Joe had done a double take, and the kid had nodded at the empty seat next to him, smiling. Joe had felt spectacularly grateful for the gesture and ended up sitting down next to Leonard Palgrave.
Lennie was one of those pale kids with skin that seems just opaque enough to be solid, but transparent enough that you can see more than the usual amount of blood vessels through it. He was mousy-haired and quiet, but when he did speak he had a wicked sense of humor. He was a voracious reader and, although he could quote Plato, Feynman, Proust, and Sophocles until the cows came home, he also had a deep and abiding love of science fiction.
Joe learned about all of that later, of course. On that first day Lennie was just a friendly face in the crowd.
“Hi, I’m Lennie,” he’d introduced himself and offered a hand for Joe to shake.
Joe had immediately made the assumption that Lennie was unpopular, and that what Joe perceived as kindness in calling the new kid over had actually been a desperate act of loneliness, but that turned out to be far from the truth. Indeed, Joe would learn later, Lennie was very popular and had just made sure that he was sitting alone so he could invite the new kid over.
He’d done it so that Joe had a friend.
It was an act Joe had never forgotten.
Sitting there in Ellie Butcher’s kitchen, Joe found himself wondering again what kind of trouble Lennie
had managed to get himself into. The simple fact that Abernathy had asked Joe to check up on him set off all kinds of alarm bells, but Lennie didn’t fit the profile of people that Joe was usually ordered to investigate.
He just wasn’t the kind of kid who courted trouble. He was easygoing, bright, and—as far as Joe was aware—he’d never put a foot wrong.
“So what’s Lennie been up to?” Joe asked casually, making it sound like gossip rather than an interrogation.
Ellie shrugged.
“To be honest, he keeps mostly to himself. I’ve had a few conversations with him but he always seems so distant… .”
Distant certainly wasn’t a word that Joe would have used to describe Lennie, which was worrying. Outgoing was more like it. Maybe Abernathy was right and Lennie was mixed up in something.
“Has he ever brought home any friends? Anyone I can get in touch with?”
Ellie frowned. “He brings back some of those X-Core types occasionally,” she said, pronouncing it Cross Core. “But I never got any of their names …”
“X-Core?” Joe asked, dredging through his memory for what that might mean and coming up blank. “What’s that? A videogame? A new extreme sport?”
“It’s a type of music,” Ellie explained. “Apparently, it’s going to be the next big thing.” She paused. “I doubt it. It sounds like a bunch of tone-deaf people throwing fits in a scrap yard.”
“That bad, huh?” Joe said, mildly disappointed. What kind of music Lennie listened to was hardly mission-critical information.
“Terrible. Thank heavens for headphones.”
“Yours? Or his?”
“His.” Ellie smiled. “He played it loud a couple of times, but I can be awfully persuasive.”
“I bet you can.” He stopped.
Lennie playing loud music? And, come to think of it, Lennie playing any music that wasn’t classical?
Joe felt a tingle in his spine. Maybe this was mission critical. It sounded like there had been a distinct change in Lennie’s behavior; there was a connection to some new musical subculture: it wasn’t too much of a leap to imagine that music had led Lennie to more dangerous behavior. It certainly wouldn’t be the first—or last—time that music had caused someone to drop out of society.
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